Leara

“Fleabag: I have a horrible feeling I'm a greedy, perverted, selfish, apathetic, cynical, depraved, mannish-looking, morally bankrupt woman who can't even call herself a feminist.
Dad: Well... You get all that from your mother.”
― Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Fleabag: The Original Play

“Women have another option. They can aspire to be wise, not merely nice; to be competent, not merely helpful; to be strong, not merely graceful; to be ambitious for themselves, not merely for themselves in relation to men and children. They can let themselves age naturally and without embarrassment, actively protesting and disobeying the conventions that stem from this society's double standard about aging. Instead of being girls, girls as long as possible who then age humiliatingly into middle-aged women and then obscenely into old women, they can become women much earlier -- and remain active adults, enjoying the long, erotic career of which women are capable, far longer. Women should allow their faces to show the lives they have lived. Women should tell the truth.”
― Susan Sontag

“We would rather see girls stopped dead—stuck in a constant childhood that never decays—than let them grow into women who can pursue their desires.”
― Sady Doyle, Dead Blondes and Bad Mothers

“But whatever its origins, when we look hard and clearly at the extent and elaboration of
measures designed to keep women within a male sexual purlieu, it becomes an inescapable question whether the issue we have to address as feminists is not simple "gender inequality," nor the domination of culture by males, nor mere "taboos against homosexuality," but the enforcement of heterosexuality for women as a means of assuring male right of physical, economical, and emotional access.”
― Adrienne Rich, Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence