Vaamika

“Male fantasies, male fantasies, is everything run by male fantasies? Up on a pedestal or down on your knees, it's all a male fantasy: that you're strong enough to take what they dish out, or else too weak to do anything about it. Even pretending you aren't catering to male fantasies is a male fantasy: pretending you're unseen, pretending you have a life of your own, that you can wash your feet and comb your hair unconscious of the ever-present watcher peering through the keyhole, peering through the keyhole in your own head, if nowhere else. You are a woman with a man inside watching a woman. You are your own voyeur.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Robber Bride

“Men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves. The surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed is female. Thus she turns herself into an object of vision: a sight.”
― John Berger, Ways of Seeing

“Because that's the thing about change. It's so painfully normal. It's the most basic of all tragedies.”
― Becky Albertalli, The Upside of Unrequited

“Why does Samuel Butler say, 'Wise men never say what they think of women'? Wise men never say anything else apparently.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own