The uncomfortable truth seems to be that the amount of talk by women has been measured less against the amount of men’s talk than against the expectation of female silence.

Obviously, untangling sex from aggression and violence or the threat of it is going to take a very long time. And the process is going to be greatly resisted as a challenge to the very heart of male dominance and male centrality.

I’m still the same person who grew up mostly in a Midwestern, factory-working neighborhood where talk about “self-esteem” would have seemed like a luxury.

1 began to understand that self-esteem isn’t everything; it’s just that there’s nothing without it.

Perhaps well-to-do women and unemployed ghetto teenagers have something in common. Neither group has been allowed to develop the self-confidence that comes from knowing you can support yourselves.

[0]ur children are the only people on whom we can safely take revenge for what was done to us.

Paradoxically, only journeying backward in time and reentering the home we once knew allows us to go forward to the home we’ve always wanted.

Though both erotica and pornography refer to verbal or pictorial representations of sexual behavior, they are as different as a room with doors open and one with doors locked. The first might be a home, but the second could only be a prison.

[Wjomen are never again going to be mindless coffee-makers or mindless policy-makers in politics.

If you let Barnum & Bailey interpret a plot by Stendahl, it might come out to be something like the 1972 Democratic convention.