Jasmine Wilson

“This natural division of labor was continued only at great cultural sacrifice: men and women developed only half of themselves, at the expense of the other half. The division of the psyche into male and female to better reinforce the reproductive division was tragic: the hypertrophy in men of rationalism, aggressive drive, the atrophy of their emotional sensitivity was a physical (war) as well as a cultural disaster. The emotionalism and passivity of women increased their suffering (we cannot speak of them in a symmetrical way, since they were victimized as a class by the division.) Sexually men and women were channeled into a highly ordered — time, place, procedure even dialogue — heterosexuality restricted to the genitals, rather than diffused over the entire physical being.”
― Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution

“It is terrible to be alone.
I don't mean to live alone---
to be alone, where no one hears you.”
― Louise Glück, Averno

“Thus women become more and more look-alike. But at the same time they are expected to express their individuality through their physical appearance. Thus they are kept coming and going, at one and the same time trying to express their similarity and their uniqueness. The demands of Sex Privatization contradict the demands of the Beauty Ideal, cause the severe feminine neurosis about personal appearance. [...] When women begin to look more and more alike, distinguished only by the degree to which they differ from a paper ideal, they can be more easily stereotyped as a class: they look alike, they think alike, and even worse, they are so stupid they believe they are not alike.”
― Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution

“We have seen how women, biologically distinguished from men, are culturally distinguished from “human.” Nature produced the fundamental inequality — half the human race must bear and rear the children of all of them — which was later consolidated, institutionalized, in the interests of men. Reproduction of the species cost women dearly, not only emotionally, psychologically, culturally but even in strictly material (physical) terms: before recent methods of contraception, continuous childbirth led to constant “female trouble,” early aging, and death. Women were slaves class that maintained the species in order to free the other half for the business of the world — admittedly often its drudge aspects, but certainly all its creative aspects as well.”
― Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution