“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.”
― The Robber Bride
― 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.”
― Ways of Seeing
― Ways of Seeing
“Because that's the thing about change. It's so painfully normal. It's the most basic of all tragedies.”
― The Upside of Unrequited
― 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.”
― A Room of One’s Own
― A Room of One’s Own
“Suppose, for instance, that men were only represented in literature as the lovers of women, and were never the friends of men, soldiers, thinkers, dreamers; how few parts in the plays of Shakespeare could be allotted to them; how literature would suffer! We might perhaps have most of Othello; and a good deal of Antony; but no Caesar, no Brutus, no Hamlet, no Lear, no Jaques--literature would be incredibly impoverished, as indeed literature is impoverished beyond our counting by the doors that have been shut upon women.”
― A Room of One’s Own
― A Room of One’s Own
Vaamika’s 2025 Year in Books
Take a look at Vaamika’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
Favorite Genres
Biography, Fantasy, Fiction, Historical fiction, History, Horror, Mystery, Non-fiction, Poetry, Romance, Thriller, and Young-adult
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