ᴇᴢᴇ

“She could be a siren; I painted her on the water in my mind, her hair splayed across the surface, eyes daring the viewer to jump in. Would she save them? Save me? Did I want her to?”
― Deanna Grey, Outdrawn

“In 1957, the then-emperor, Qianlong, who ruled China for sixty years (1736-95) and is often referred to as 'Qianlong the Magnificent' for his achievements, closed the door of the country, leaving only one port open for trade, Canton.”
― Jung Chang, Empress Dowager Cixi: The Concubine Who Launched Modern China

“We had a sort of perfunctory supper together, and I think it cheered us all up somewhat. It was, perhaps, the mere animal heat of food to hungry people—for none of us had eaten anything since breakfast—or the sense of companionship may have helped us; but anyhow we were all less miserable, and saw the morrow as not altogether without hope.”
― Bram Stoker

“For some, measuring porn’s real-world effects boils down to one extreme and ultimately misleading question: “Does it lead to rape?” What is overlooked here is the more subtle question of how porn shapes the culture and the men who use it. No anti-porn feminist I know has suggested that there is one image, or even a few, that could lead a nonrapist to rape; the argument, rather, is that taken together, pornographic images create a world that is at best inhospitable to women, and at worst dangerous to their physical and emotional well-being. In an unfair and inaccurate article that is emblematic of how anti-porn feminist work is misrepresented, Daniel Bernardi claims that Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon believed that “watching pornography leads men to rape women.”³ Neither Dworkin nor MacKinnon, pioneers in developing a radical feminist critique of pornography, saw porn in such simplistic terms. Rather, both argued that porn has a complicated and multilayered effect on male sexuality, and that rape, rather than simply being caused by porn, is a cultural practice that has been woven into the fabric of a male-dominated society. Pornography, they argued, is one important agent of such a society since it so perfectly encodes woman-hating ideology, but to see it as simplistically and unquestionably leading to rape is to ignore how porn operates within the wider context of a society that is brimming with sexist imagery and ideology.”
― Gail Dines, Pornland: How Porn Has Hijacked Our Sexuality