Charu Pragya

“A woman must continually watch herself. She is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself. Whilst she is walking across a room or whilst she is weeping at the death of her father, she can scarcely avoid envisaging herself walking or weeping. From earliest childhood she has been taught and persuaded to survey herself continually.
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Every woman's presence regulates what is and is not 'permissible' within her presence. Every one of her actions - whatever its direct purpose or motivation - is also read as an indication of how she would like to be treated. If a woman throws a glass on the floor, this is an example of how she treats her own emotion of anger and so of how she would wish it to be treated by others. If a man does the same, his action is only read as an expression of his anger. If a woman makes a good joke this is an example of how she treats the joker in herself and accordingly of how she as a joker-woman would like to be treated by others. Only a man can make a good joke for its own sake.
One might simplify this by saying: 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 female. Thus she turns herself into an object - and most particularly an object of vision : a sight.”
― John Berger, Ways of Seeing

“Science tells us what we can know, but what we can know is little, and if we forget how much we cannot know, we become insensitive to many things of great importance.”
― Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy

“When in love, the sight of the beloved has a completeness which no words and no embrace can match: a completeness which only the act of making love can temporarily accommodate”
― John Berger, Ways of Seeing

“The fact is, no man can ever know whether a child is his. A woman knows a child is hers, but a man can never know whether it is his, not even with a DNA test. A DNA test can only tell you if the child is not yours, but if your DNA matches, it only indicates ‘a high statistical probability’ that it is your child. As they say, ‘Motherhood is a biological fact, fatherhood is a sociological fiction.’ It is this knowledge that creates permanent anxiety for patriarchy, an anxiety that requires women’s sexuality to be strictly policed.”
― Nivedita Menon, Seeing Like a Feminist