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“[...] she was able to combine women's extreme ego suppression and ancient female shamanism, showing both in opposition to men.
In our own day, shamanism seems to have withered and died. Yet does it not, on second thought, offer a partial explanation of the power women still have over men? Perhaps it is true, as Buddhism teaches us, that this power constitutes woman's greatest burden and delusion -- and ultimately her greatest sin. But the sin is inseparable from a woman's being. It is a stream of blood flowing on and on, unbroken, from generation to generation.
Just as there is an archetype of woman as the object of man's eternal love, so there must be an archetype of her as the object of his eternal fear, representing, perhaps, the shadow of his own evil actions. The Rokujō lady is an embodiment of this archetype.”
― Fumiko Enchi, Masks

“No hysterical fits, no tantrums, just meditation, absorption, relaxation. This was playfulness in the company of his very own appreciative person. So I left them to it, not wanting to shame chef out of his imagination, for there was an awful lot of shaming for playing, shaming for letting your guard down that went on in this place.”
― Anna Burns, Milkman

“There is no pure sensation of anything, not in feeling pain, not in tasting wine, and not in looking at art. All of our perceptions are contextually coded, and that contextual coding does not remain outside us in the environment but becomes a psycho-physiological reality within us”
― Siri Hustvedt, A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women: Essays on Art, Sex, and the Mind

“Art-making, the very creation of beauty itself, was equated with the representation of the female nude. Here, the very notion of the originary power of the artist, his status as creator of unique and valuable objects, is founded on the discourse of gender difference as power.”
― Linda Nochlin, Women, Art, and Power and Other Essays