Kate Lister > Quotes

“If you shake any book by Sade, a cunt will fall out; Sade is a cunt piñata.”
― Kate Lister, A Curious History of Sex

“While we are on the subject of cunt monikers, in his study of humorous names, Russell Ash found a whole family of Cunts living in England in the nineteenth century: Fanny Cunt (born 1839), also her son, Richard ‘Dick’ Cunt, and her daughters, Ella Cunt and Violet Cunt.”
― Kate Lister, A Curious History of Sex

“But Kellogg was obsessed with ‘diddling’ (1938), and the cornflake was designed to suppress lust and cure serial masturbators. Kellogg and his brother William Kellogg designed bland foods to treat the patients at their sanatorium.”
― Kate Lister, A Curious History of Sex

“Sparse diets were recommended to subdue lust, and purity crusaders such as John Harvey Kellogg (1852–1943) manufactured plain cereals to suppress urges. Kellogg argued that masturbation could cause all manner of illnesses, from cancer of the womb to epilepsy, insanity and impotency.”
― Kate Lister, A Curious History of Sex

“Language is an important battleground in the fight for social equality. As the linguist Daniel Chandler succinctly put it, ‘language constitutes our world, it doesn’t just record it or label it’.1 Language is fluid and malleable; it drives social attitudes, rather than simply expressing them.”
― Kate Lister, A Curious History of Sex

“by the 1920s Lysol was being aggressively marketed as a vaginal douching agent.”
― Kate Lister, A Curious History of Sex

“I’ll say this only once: if the hair on your head doesn’t make your scalp stink, pubic hair will not make your vulva ‘dirty’.”
― Kate Lister, A Curious History of Sex

“He was the poster boy of debauchery and sexual excess and simply dripped with ‘fuck you’.”
― Kate Lister, A Curious History of Sex