Ariel Levy > Quotes

“I wanted what we all want: everything. We want a mate who feels like family and a lover who is exotic, surprising. We want to be youthful adventurers and middle-aged mothers. We want intimacy and autonomy, safety and stimulation, reassurance and novelty, coziness and thrills. But we can’t have it all.”
― Ariel Levy, The Rules Do Not Apply

“The truth is that the new conception of raunch culture as a path to liberation rather than oppression is a convenient (and lucrative) fantasy with nothing to back it up.

Or, as Susan Brownmiller put it when I asked her what she made of all this, “You think you’re being brave, you think you’re being sexy, you think you’re transcending feminism. But that’s bullshit.”
― Ariel Levy, Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture

“Women's liberation and empowerment are terms feminists started using to talk about casting off the limitations imposed upon women and demanding equality. We have perverted these words. The freedom to be sexually provocative or promiscuous is not enough freedom; it is not the only 'women's issue' worth paying attention to. And we are not even free in the sexual arena. We have simply adopted a new norm, a new role to play: lusty, busty exhibitionist. There are other choices. If we are really going to be sexually liberated, we need to make room for a range of options as wide as the variety of human desire. We need to allow ourselves the freedom to figure out what we internally want from sex instead of mimicking whatever popular culture holds up to us as sexy. That would be liberation.”
― Ariel Levy

“Daring to think that the rules do not apply is the mark of a visionary. It’s also a symptom of narcissism. —”
― Ariel Levy, The Rules Do Not Apply

“Sex is one of the most interesting things we as humans have to play with, and we've reduced it to polyester underpants and implants. We are selling ourselves unbelievably short.”
― Ariel Levy, Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture

“There is nothing I love more than traveling to a place where I know nobody, and where everything will be a surprise, and then writing about it. It’s like having a new lover—even the parts you aren’t crazy about have the crackling fascination of the unfamiliar.”
― Ariel Levy, The Rules Do Not Apply

“When I was young. When I had no idea that all over the city, all over the world, there were people walking around sealed in their own universes of loss, independent solar systems of suffering closed off from the regular world, where things make sense and language is all you need to tell the truth. —”
― Ariel Levy, The Rules Do Not Apply

“I asked her if she'd ever wanted children. She told me, "Everybody doesn't get everything." It sounded depressing to me at the time, a statement of defeat. Now admitting it seems like the obvious and essential work of growing up. Everybody doesn't get everything: as natural and unavoidable as mortality.”
― Ariel Levy, The Rules Do Not Apply

“We are still so uneasy with the vicissitudes of sex we need to surround ourselves with caricatures of female hotness to safely conjure up the concept 'sexy'.”
― Ariel Levy, Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture

“But I would be happier if my daughter and her friends were crashing through the glass ceiling instead of the sexual ceiling,' Jong continued. 'Being able to have an orgasm with a man you don't love or having Sex and the City on television, that is not liberation. If you start to think about women as if we're all Carrie on Sex and the City, well, the problem is: You're not going to elect Carrie to the Senate or to run your company. Let's see the Senate fifty percent female; let's see women in decision-making positions--that's power. Sexual freedom can be a smokescreen for how far we haven't come.”
― Ariel Levy, Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture

“In 2004 our forty-second president, George W. Bush, the leader of the free world, proposed an amendment to the U.S. Constitution to forever ban gay marriage--which was already illegal. In opinion polls, about 50 percent of this country said they thought Bush had the right idea. If half this country feels so threatened by two people of the same gender being in love and having sex (and, incidentally, enjoying equal protection under the law), that they turn their attention--during wartime--to blocking rights already denied to homosexuals, then all the cardio striptease classes in the world aren't going to render us sexually liberated.”
― Ariel Levy

“There are some women who are probably genuinely aroused by the idea of being photographed naked. But I think we can safely assume that many more women appear in Playboy for the simple reason that they are paid to. Which is fine. But 'because I was paid to' is not the same thing as 'I'm taking control of my sexuality.”
― Ariel Levy

“Why is this the "new feminism" and not what it looks like: the old objectification?”
― Ariel Levy, Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture

“There were shadows I saw out of the corner of my eye that looked like problems waiting to become real, but you never know with shadows.”
― Ariel Levy, The Rules Do Not Apply

“Writing is communicating with an unknown intimate who is always available, the way the faithful turn to God.”
― Ariel Levy, The Rules Do Not Apply

“Even if you are a woman who achieves the ultimate and becomes like a man, you will still always be like a woman. And as long as womanhood is thought of as something to escape from, something less than manhood, you will be thought less of, too.”
― Ariel Levy

“We have to ask ourselves why we are so focused on silent girly-girls in G-strings faking lust. This is not a sign of progress, it's a testament to what's still missing from our understanding of human sexuality with all its complexity and power. We are still so uneasy with the vicissitudes of sex we need to surround ourselves with caricatures of female hotness to safely conjure up the concept of 'sexy.' When you think about it, it's kind of pathetic.”
― Ariel Levy

“It is not a good feeling being right about something you have suspected when you finally gain undeniable confirmation that it's true. It is not the satisfying sensation of everything slipping into place for which you have yearned. It's more like, 'Oh, right.' The man who has been staying over your whole life long is your mother's lover. The reason Lucy seems off sometimes is that she's still drinking. You have always known this. The only thing that's mysterious is how you managed to think it mysterious.”
― Ariel Levy, The Rules Do Not Apply

“Without a doubt there are some women who feel their most sexual with their vaginas waxed, their labia trimmed, their breasts enlarged, and their garments flossy and scant. I am happy for them. I wish them many blissful and lubricious loops around the pole. But there are many other women (and, yes, men) who feel constrained in this environment, who would be happier and feel hotter--more empowered, more sexually liberated, and all the rest of it--if they explored other avenues of expression and entertainment.”
― Ariel Levy

“People sometimes tells me that they're baffled by bisexuality. They are convinced that having sex with women is totally different from having sex with men. But it isn't. No more than having sex with anyone is totally different from having sex with anyone else.”
― Ariel Levy, The Rules Do Not Apply

“You have an affair because you are not getting what you want from your loved one. You want more: more love, more sex, more attention, more fun. You want someone to look at you with lust - after years of laundry - transforming you into something radiant. You want it, you need it, you owe it yourself to get it. To live any other way is to be muffled and gray and marching meaninglessly toward death. You want what she gave you at the start (but what you had hoped would expand and intensify instead of shrinking until you find yourself so sad, so resentful, you can barely stand to be you).

You have an affair to get for yourself what you wish would come from the person you love the most. And then you have broken her heart and she can never give you any of it ever again.”
― Ariel Levy, The Rules Do Not Apply

“We skipped over the part where we just accept and respect that some women like to seem exhibitionistic and lickerish, and decided instead that everyone who is sexually liberated ought to be imitating strippers and porn stars.”
― Ariel Levy

“...if you are the exception that proves the rule, and the rule is that woman are inferior, you haven't made any progress.”
― Ariel Levy

“Death comes for us. You may get ten minutes on this earth or you may get eighty years but nobody gets out alive.”
― Ariel Levy, The Rules Do Not Apply

“Women of my generation were given the lavish gift of our own agency by feminism—a belief that we could decide for ourselves how we would live, what would become of us.”
― Ariel Levy, The Rules Do Not Apply

“Until recently, I lived in a world where lost things could always be replaced. But it has been made overwhelmingly clear to me now that anything you think is yours by right can vanish, and what you can do about that is nothing at all.”
― Ariel Levy, The Rules Do Not Apply

“These are not stories about girls getting what they want sexually, they are stories about girls gaining acclaim socially, for which their sexuality is a tool.”
― Ariel Levy, Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture

“Writing was the solution to every problem—financial, emotional, intellectual. It had kept me company when I was a lonely child. It gave me an excuse to go places I would otherwise be unlikely to venture. It satisfied the edict my mother had issued many times throughout my life: “You have to make your own living; you never want to be dependent on a man.”
― Ariel Levy, The Rules Do Not Apply

“if you are the exception that proves the rule, and the rule is that women are inferior, you haven't made any progress”
― Ariel Levy, Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture

“And the truth is, the ten or twenty minutes I was somebody's mother were black magic. There is nothing I would trade them for. There is no place I would rather have seen.”
― Ariel Levy, The Rules Do Not Apply