Michelle P

“No one is going to tell you who to marry, or what career to pursue, or how to cut your hair, and so you're thrown back on yourself. The freedom to chose, in other words, means the freedom to make mistakes, to falter and fail, to come face-to-face with your own flaws and limitations and fears and secrets, to live with the terrible uncertainty that necessarily attends to the construction of the self. This, I think, is the steady pulse of agitation behind an unsettled appetite, this wobbling, reaching anxiety, which craves relief, stalks it, hunts it down in tangible forms: Eat the cake, which will assuage some internal emptiness; buy that jacket, which will cloak you in an identity; call that man, who will define and give shape to your life.”
― Caroline Knapp (Author)

“Jean Kilbourne, one of the more thoughtful critics of the impact of advertising on women, writes quite eloquently about the way imagery - particularly sexual imagery, which is so coolly passionless and so unequivocally appearance-based- can tamper with a woman's gut-level feelings about what it means to be sexual, numbing thinking about sex, skewing expectations about it , confusing real sexuality with narcissism, fostering a plastic and superficial view that's all about arousing others, never about the emotions that might underlie arousal, like intimacy or connection or trust.”
― Caroline Knapp (Author)

“Peckinpah gives the final shoot-out in which they all die a kind of orgasmic rush that releases all of us from the cinematic or, more accurately, the American fantasy that we will survive no matter what.”
― Claudia Rankine, Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric

“The whole mechanism of guilt as a deterrent to right action is just as much a linguistic fault.”
― Samuel R. Delany, Babel-17