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)

“The Butcher's egoless brutality, hammered linear by what she could not know, less than primitive, was for all its horror, still human. Though bloody handed, he was safer than the precision of the world linguistically corrected...Jebel's cruelties, kindnesses, existed in the articulate limits of civilization. But this red bestiality - fascinated her!”
― Samuel R. Delany, Babel-17

“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)

“At that point on the continuum of cultural history, several degrees from active or meaningful talk about what beauty and power and confidence actually meant, I thought I should know, intuitively, how to be that woman, how to combine sexuality and ambition, how to navigate all those fuzzy lines between femininity and authority, relationships and autonomy. And not knowing these things intuitively, I thought I was missing something, or had missed something, or (more hopefully) might acquire something if only I looked in the right place...if only, if only. This is what's insidious about consumerism: It's not that it encourages us to shop but that it encourages us to forget, not that it sparks need but that it dilutes it, shrink-wraps it and flings it into the handiest and most tangible containers.”
― Caroline Knapp (Author)