All My Friends Are Fictional’s Reviews > A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women: Essays on Art, Sex, and the Mind > Status Update

„If the mind is a fallible, material thing, then the thoughts it generates will necessarily be limited, and they will change over time. If it is something else, however, if the human mind has access to truths out there in the universe, truths that are unchanging and lodged in the fabric of reality, you will have very different ideas about how to frame experience.“

“What if it were a woman moaning about motherhood and its frustrations, a woman filled with resentment about preparing dinner and doing the laundry, or a woman wishing she could just be alone for a while and write? Isn't this what Knausgaard longs for …, a room of one's own and the freedom to write? If the thousands of pages of My Struggle are testimony to anything, it is that the man did find time to write.”

“The word used to describe comfort fiction in whatever genre is "accessible." Accessibility is now curiously understood to be a good in itself. It is scarcely remembered that what is easily accessible, what is read without any effort, is usually very much like what we've read before. … It is a need to have one's own worldview confirmed, to participate in the lives of characters who drive the cars you drive…”

“But the aggression, the desire for vengeance created by the overbearing, dominating, and condescending ways of patriarchy can be used and refashioned and made into art, into cells, into rooms that summon in the viewer both prisons and biological bodies, bodies that love and rage, but that escape the actual, mortal body of the artist herself and live on after she is dead.”

“In fact, a balloon serves as a nice metaphor for the lessons of history: you blow and you blow and you blow, and the thing gets larger and larger and larger still, and in your excitement you forget the laws of physics, and you begin to believe that your balloon is like no other balloon in the world-there is no limit to its size. And then, it pops.”

„Without a viewer, a reader, a listener, art is dead. Something happens between me and it, an "it" that carries in itself another person's willed act, a thing suffused with another person's subjectivity, and in it I may feel pain, humor, sexual desire, discomfort. And that is why I don't treat artworks as I would treat a chair, but I don't treat them as a real person either.“

„To one degree or another, every person on earth is both a beneficiary and a victim of scientific invention. It does not follow, however, that … looking at works of visual art or listening to music does not also transform people's lives... Although such changes may be less tangible, it does not render them less real or somehow inferior to the effects of technology. We are all also creatures of ideas.“