Molly Haskell > Quotes

“For a woman, there is nothing more erotic than being understood.”
― Molly Haskell

“Women couldn’t identify with her and didn’t support her.”
― Molly Haskell, From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies

“Depending on your point of view, Ashley (or Leslie Howard) was sensitive, poetic, and enigmatic-- or wan and a wimp. Rhett/Clark Gable was sexy, virile, and funny or just crude and unmannerly. The outcome was a crucial barometer of taste that would reveal a great deal, possibly too much, about a girl's temperament and predilections.”
― Molly Haskell

“It was a split [between the way I was saw myself…and the way I was expected to behave] that brought up to date the age-old dualism between body and soul, virgin and whore. (Haskell xiii)”
― Molly Haskell

“We lied and manipulated and pretended to be helpless and were guilty of conspiring in our own idealization – and our own oppression. For whatever else may have been our goals, we still assumed that the need men and women had for each other, and its satisfaction, was indissolubly linked to their roles as conqueror and conquered, and we accepted all the implications that followed from that first parsing of human nature into active and passive…. The yins and yangs of heterosexual romance, the power differential between the ‘stronger’ and the ‘weaker’ sex… (xv).”
― Molly Haskell, From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies

“In the dark melodramas of the forties, woman came down from her pedestal and she didn’t stop when she reached the ground. She kept going – down, down, like Eurydice, to the depths of the criminal world, the enfer of the film noir – and then compelled her lover to glance back and betray himself…. But for all her guts and valor, and for all her unredeemable venality…she hadn’t a soul she could call her own. She was, in fact, a male fantasy. She was playing a man’s game in a man’s world of crime and carnal innuendo, where her long hair was the equivalent of a gun, where sex was the equivalent of evil. And where her power to destroy was projection of man’s feeling of impotence. Only this could never be spelled out; hence the subterfuge and melodrama. She is to her thirties’ counterpart as night – or dusk – is to day. And the difference between their worlds, between the drawing room of romantic comedy and the underground of melodrama, is the difference between flirtation and fornication … or rape” (Haskell 191).”
― Molly Haskell, From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies

“We are a rotating cast of aspects of self that are shown to one person, or in one setting, and hidden in another. Memorial services are often jarring in this regard: friends and relatives eulogize the deceased in such conflicting terms they might be talking of different people.”
― Molly Haskell, My Brother My Sister: Story of a Transformation

“So my generation fell into the trap, internalizing the either/or as we thought of ourselves as ‘hot’ or ‘cold’ and falling victim, once again, to the terms by which our sex had been conveniently divided for so many years. To the degree that sex was the equivalent of the self, surrender to sex was to lose oneself, whereas abstinence would insure its safeguarding, if not its salvation (viv).”
― Molly Haskell