Dominant Wife Quotes

We've searched our database for all the quotes and captions related to Dominant Wife. Here they are! All 100 of them:

It was all Mrs. Bumble. She would do it," urged Mr. Bumble; first looking round, to ascertain that his partner had left the room. That is no excuse," returned Mr. Brownlow. "You were present on the occasion of the destruction of these trinkets, and, indeed, are the more guilty of the two, in the eye of the law; for the law supposes that your wife acts under your direction." If the law supposes that," said Mr. Bumble, squeezing his hat emphatically in both hands, "the law is a ass — a idiot. If that's the eye of the law, the law is a bachelor; and the worst I wish the law is, that his eye may be opened by experience — by experience.
Charles Dickens (Oliver Twist)
For years, I have allowed fear to dominate me. But as I sit in the cab, I realize another emotion is rising to the surface: anger. It felt cathartic to unleash my rage at Richard after absorbing his for so long.
Greer Hendricks (The Wife Between Us)
Maybe it's just not the right time for us to be married. I don't want to be a bounty hunter for the rest of my life, but I certainly don't want to be a housewife right now. And I really don't want to be married to someone who gives me ultimatums. And maybe Joe needs to examine what he wants from a wife. He was raised in a traditional Italian household with a stay-at-home mother and domineering father. If he wants a wife who will fit into that mold, I'm not for him. I might be a stay-at-home mother someday, but I'll always be trying to fly off the garage roof. That's just who I am.
Janet Evanovich (Seven Up (Stephanie Plum, #7))
most cherished desires of present-day Westerners are shaped by romantic, nationalist, capitalist and humanist myths that have been around for centuries. Friends giving advice often tell each other, ‘Follow your heart.’ But the heart is a double agent that usually takes its instructions from the dominant myths of the day, and the very recommendation to ‘follow your heart’ was implanted in our minds by a combination of nineteenth-century Romantic myths and twentieth-century consumerist myths. The Coca-Cola Company, for example, has marketed Diet Coke around the world under the slogan ‘Diet Coke. Do what feels good.’ Even what people take to be their most personal desires are usually programmed by the imagined order. Let’s consider, for example, the popular desire to take a holiday abroad. There is nothing natural or obvious about this. A chimpanzee alpha male would never think of using his power in order to go on holiday into the territory of a neighbouring chimpanzee band. The elite of ancient Egypt spent their fortunes building pyramids and having their corpses mummified, but none of them thought of going shopping in Babylon or taking a skiing holiday in Phoenicia. People today spend a great deal of money on holidays abroad because they are true believers in the myths of romantic consumerism. Romanticism tells us that in order to make the most of our human potential we must have as many different experiences as we can. We must open ourselves to a wide spectrum of emotions; we must sample various kinds of relationships; we must try different cuisines; we must learn to appreciate different styles of music. One of the best ways to do all that is to break free from our daily routine, leave behind our familiar setting, and go travelling in distant lands, where we can ‘experience’ the culture, the smells, the tastes and the norms of other people. We hear again and again the romantic myths about ‘how a new experience opened my eyes and changed my life’. Consumerism tells us that in order to be happy we must consume as many products and services as possible. If we feel that something is missing or not quite right, then we probably need to buy a product (a car, new clothes, organic food) or a service (housekeeping, relationship therapy, yoga classes). Every television commercial is another little legend about how consuming some product or service will make life better. 18. The Great Pyramid of Giza. The kind of thing rich people in ancient Egypt did with their money. Romanticism, which encourages variety, meshes perfectly with consumerism. Their marriage has given birth to the infinite ‘market of experiences’, on which the modern tourism industry is founded. The tourism industry does not sell flight tickets and hotel bedrooms. It sells experiences. Paris is not a city, nor India a country – they are both experiences, the consumption of which is supposed to widen our horizons, fulfil our human potential, and make us happier. Consequently, when the relationship between a millionaire and his wife is going through a rocky patch, he takes her on an expensive trip to Paris. The trip is not a reflection of some independent desire, but rather of an ardent belief in the myths of romantic consumerism. A wealthy man in ancient Egypt would never have dreamed of solving a relationship crisis by taking his wife on holiday to Babylon. Instead, he might have built for her the sumptuous tomb she had always wanted. Like the elite of ancient Egypt, most people in most cultures dedicate their lives to building pyramids. Only the names, shapes and sizes of these pyramids change from one culture to the other. They may take the form, for example, of a suburban cottage with a swimming pool and an evergreen lawn, or a gleaming penthouse with an enviable view. Few question the myths that cause us to desire the pyramid in the first place.
Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind)
She’s my wife. My son’s mother. Fucking mine. And I’ll go through hell itself if it means keeping her there.
Rina Kent (Consumed by Deception (Deception Trilogy, #3))
within the capitalist system all methods for raising the social productiveness of labour are brought about at the cost of the individual labourer; all means for the development of production transform themselves into means of domination over, and exploitation of, the producers; they mutilate the labourer into a fragment of a man, degrade him to the level of an appendage of a machine, destroy every remnant of charm in his work and turn it into a hated toil; they estrange from him the intellectual potentialities of the labour process in the same proportion as science is incorporated in it as an independent power; they distort the conditions under which he works, subject him during the labour process to a despotism the more hateful for its meanness; they transform his life-time into working-time, and drag his wife and child beneath the wheels of the Juggernaut of capital. But all methods for the production of surplus-value are at the same time methods of accumulation; and every extension of accumulation becomes again a means for the development of those methods. It follows therefore that in proportion as capital accumulates, the lot of the labourer, be his payment high or low, must grow worse. The law, finally, that always equilibrates the relative surplus population, or industrial reserve army, to the extent and energy of accumulation, this law rivets the labourer to capital more firmly than the wedges of Vulcan did Prometheus to the rock. It establishes an accumulation of misery, corresponding with accumulation of capital. Accumulation of wealth at one pole is, therefore, at the same time accumulation of misery, agony of toil slavery, ignorance, brutality, mental degradation, at the opposite pole, i.e., on the side of the class that produces its own product in the form of capital.
Karl Marx (Capital: A Critique of Political Economy Volume 1)
Certainly we’ve made important innovations, chief among them the systematic use of the scientific method,” he said at one point, “but the primitive groundwork is still there, dominating the pattern of our lives. We’re modified anthropoid apes inhabiting night clubs and battleships. What else could you expect us to be?
Fritz Leiber (Conjure Wife)
The pattern glitters with cruelty. The blue beads are colored with fish blood, the reds with powdered heart. The beads collect in borders of mercy. The yellows are dyed with the ocher of silence. There is no telling which twin will fall asleep first, allowing the other's colors to dominate, for how long. The design grows, the overlay deepens. The beaders have no other order at the heart of their being. Do you know that the beads are sewn onto the fabric of the earth with endless strands of human muscle, human sinew, human hair? We are as crucial to this making as other animals. No more and no less important than the deer.
Louise Erdrich (The Antelope Wife)
Everybody is trying to dominate. That is the nature of the ego: to make every effort to dominate the other – whether the other is husband, wife, or children, or friends, makes no difference – to dominate, to find ways and means to dominate. And if everybody is trying to dominate and you are also trying to dominate there will be struggle. The struggle is not because others are trying to dominate; the struggle is because you are not trying to understand how the ego functions. You drop out of it! The others cannot be changed, and you will be unnecessarily wasting your life if you try to change the others. That is THEIR problem. They will suffer if they are not understanding, why should you suffer? You simply understand that everybody is trying to dominate, "I drop out of it, I will not try to dominate"... your struggle disappears. And a very beautiful thing happens.
Osho (Hsin Hsin Ming: The Book of Nothing)
You outlive your wife, then your colleagues and friends, then your accountant and the building doorman. ou no longer attend the opera, because the human bladder can only endure so much. Social engagements require strategy and hearing aid calibrations.
Dominic Smith (The Last Painting of Sara de Vos)
in a male-dominated world, Reich suggested, there was an “economic interest” in the continued role of women as “the provider of children for the state” and the performer of household chores without pay.
Gay Talese (Thy Neighbor's Wife: A Chronicle of American Permissiveness Before the Age of AIDS)
In this martial world dominated by men, women had little place. The Church's teachings might underpin feudal morality, yet when it came to the practicalities of life, a ruthless pragmatism often came into play. Kings and noblemen married for political advantage, and women rarely had any say in how they or their wealth were to be disposed in marriage. Kings would sell off heiresses and rich widows to the highest bidder, for political or territorial advantage, and those who resisted were heavily fined. Young girls of good birth were strictly reared, often in convents, and married off at fourteen or even earlier to suit their parents' or overlord's purposes. The betrothal of infants was not uncommon, despite the church's disapproval. It was a father's duty to bestow his daughters in marriage; if he was dead, his overlord or the King himself would act for him. Personal choice was rarely and issue. Upon marriage, a girl's property and rights became invested in her husband, to whom she owed absolute obedience. Every husband had the right to enforce this duty in whichever way he thought fit--as Eleanor was to find out to her cost. Wife-beating was common, although the Church did at this time attempt to restrict the length of the rod that a husband might use.
Alison Weir (Eleanor of Aquitaine: A Life (World Leaders Past & Present))
Take them off," I order and without hesitation she removes them and drops them on the floor. She lifts her cami so I can see her, then rubs her hand over her tummy and over the top of her mound while she watches me. When I look into her eyes she's licking her lips. "Do you like what you see?" she asks playfully. "You know I do." "Good. When you apologize, you can have some." Oh, hell no. "Let me remind you, as your husband and your Master, I don't need your permission. I'll have some with or without an apology, but because I love you and because it was a shitty thing for me to accuse you of, I'll apologize anyway. So for what's worth - I'm sorry for accusing you of hitting on Sawyer. I love you. Now open your legs like a good wife and let me fuck you.
Ella Dominguez (The Art of Domination (The Art of D/s, #2))
Native nations were often matrilineal: that is, clan identity passed through the mother, and a husband joined a wife’s household, not vice versa. Matrilineal does not mean matriarchal, which, like patriarchal, assumes that some group has to dominate—a failure of the imagination.
Gloria Steinem (Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions)
Yet some would say, why women's history at all? Surely men and women have always shared a world, and suffered together all its rights and wrongs? It is a common belief that whatever the situation, both sexes faced it alike. But the male peasant, however cruelly oppressed, always had the right to beat his wife. The black slave had to labor for the white master by day, but he did not have to service him by night as well. This grim pattern continues to this day, with women bearing an extra ration of pain and misery whatever the circumstances, as the sufferings of the women of war-torn Eastern Europe will testify. While their men fought and died, wholesale and systematic rape—often accompanied by the same torture and death that the men suffered— was a fate only women had to endure. Women's history springs from moments of recognition such as this, and the awareness of the difference is still very new. Only in our time have historians begun to look at the historical experience of men and women separately, and to acknowledge that for most of our human past, women's interests have been opposed to those of men. Women's interests have been opposed by them, too: men have not willingly extended to women the rights and freedoms they have claimed for themselves. As a result, historical advances have tended to be "men only" affairs. When history concentrates solely on one half of the human race, any alternative truth or reality is lost. Men dominate history because they write it, and their accounts of active, brave, clever or aggressive females constantly tend to sentimentalize, to mythologize or to pull women back to some perceived "norm." As a result, much of the so-called historical record is simply untrue.
Rosalind Miles (Who Cooked the Last Supper: The Women's History of the World)
Merciless—to me Merciless means to be relentless in your pursuit, whether it’s for the love of your wife and kids, or for your passions and goals. You never give up on what’s important to you. If you want your band to be successful, or if you want to open the best fucking ham sandwich deli in town, you need to be Merciless in that quest. Just make sure you don’t go in heavy with the mustard—words of wisdom from the Sandwich Tao of Oz.
Zakk Wylde (Bringing Metal to the Children: The Complete Berserker's Guide to World Tour Domination)
We are slaves of Time. So we have inherent tendency to become master of others. Even in a family, a power play goes on in the name of love and duty (between parents-children, husband-wife). We must thank the pet dogs for absorbing this tendency of human beings and making home environment healthier.
Shunya
He was harassed, but still he spoke with authority. He was, in fact, characteristic of the best type of dominant male in the world at this time. He was fifty-five years old, tough, shrewd, unburdened by the complicated ethical ambiguities which puzzle intellectuals, and had long ago decided that the world was a mean son-of-a-bitch in which only the most cunning and ruthless can survive. He was also as kind as was possible for one holding that ultra-Darwinian philosophy; and he genuinely loved children and dogs, unless they were on the site of something that had to be bombed in the National Interest. He still retained some sense of humor, despite the burdens of his almost godly office, and, although he had been impotent with his wife for nearly ten years now, he generally achieved orgasm in the mouth of a skilled prostitute within 1.5 minutes. He took amphetamine pep pills to keep going on his grueling twenty-hour day, with the result that his vision of the world was somewhat skewed in a paranoid direction, and he took tranquilizers to keep from worrying too much, with the result that his detachment sometimes bordered on the schizophrenic; but most of the time his innate shrewdness gave him a fingernail grip on reality.
Robert Anton Wilson
The survivor movements were also challenging the notion of a dysfunctional family as the cause and culture of abuse, rather than being one of the many places where abuse nested. This notion, which in the 1990s and early 1980s was the dominant understanding of professionals characterised the sex abuser as a pathetic person who had been denied sex and warmth by his wife, who in turn denied warmth to her daughters. Out of this dysfunctional triad grew the far-too-cosy incest dyad. Simply diagnosed, relying on the signs: alcoholic father, cold distant mother, provocative daughter. Simply resolved, because everyone would want to stop, to return to the functioning family where mum and dad had sex and daughter concentrated on her exams. Professionals really believed for a while that sex offenders would want to stop what they were doing. They thought if abuse were decriminalised, abusers would seek help. The survivors knew different. P5
Beatrix Campbell (Stolen Voices: The People and Politics Behind the Campaign to Discredit Childhood Testimony)
He was too smitten by his second wife and the sons she produced easily and regularly at eighteen-month intervals to bother too much about a daughter.
Anita Nair (Ladies Coupé)
Charlie, baby, it was awful. I’m talking bugs on the floor and water torture and a big dude looking for his prison wife.
Lexi Blake (Dominance Never Dies (Masters and Mercenaries, #11))
Lucky Harris was getting to him. His sexy little captive had gotten under his skin. He wanted her, and yet he could not bring himself to discipline and dominate her as he knew she secretly desired. For the first time since the death of his traitor wife, Sebastian was afraid, afraid of his own feelings. The bright-eyed blonde affected him as no woman ever had. It wasn't just her responsive cries or her tempting body; it was her strong opinions, her outrageous attitude, that irreverent sense of humor. Lucky made him laugh, but it was more than that. She made him feel alive.
Carol Storm (DeMarco's Captive)
He though continually about the apartment building, a Pandora’s Box whose thousand lids were one by one, inwardly opening. The dominant tenants of the high-rise, those who had adapted most successfully to life there, were not the unruly airline pilots and film technicians of the lower floors, nor the bad-tempered and aggressive wives of the tax specialists on the upper levels. Although at first sight these people appeared to provoke all the tension and hostility, the people really responsible were the quiet and self-contained residents, like the dental surgeons Steele and his wife.
J.G. Ballard
He was supposed to be indestructible. He was supposed to be humble despite being brilliant, affable despite his sheer domination on the court. He was not supposed to be out in the early rounds and pitied by his wife.
Taylor Jenkins Reid (Malibu Rising)
Many feminists have a serious blind spot. We’re ready to criticize patriarchy, and men’s misuse of power in a flash, but we ignore our own abuses of power. We see matriarchal control as gentle and kind, but the role of wife and mother can be just as authoritarian as a marine drill sergeant. We seldom acknowledge the power that women have over children and we almost never speak about wives who dominate their husbands. In many homes, the authoritarian mother is a force to be reckoned with. Her rigid standards of sexual morality and her righteous indignation when her rules are broken make her a formidable adversary who is unbending, unyielding, and sometimes even violent.
Betty Dodson (Sex for One: The Joy of Selfloving)
I had no money to start, For Jack decreed in his pride: The Caveman's wife didn't work - It was his job to provide. A brief reminder right here: Let men believe they are shrewd, But even women of old Embroidered mittens for food.
Joyce Rachelle (Sewing Figs)
Oh, there had been divorced Presidents, even, late in the twentieth century, one who had survived a White House divorce to the extent of being re-elected. Of course old Gus Time hadn't made any mistake in the marital department. Sixty years of wedded bliss. The grin came and went. Old fox! They said when he was in his early twenties and so new in Washington he still smacked of the boondocks, he had cast his eyes around all the Washington wives: he picked Senator Black's wife Olive for her beauty, her brains, her organizational genius and her relish of public life, then simply stole her from the Senator. It worked, though she was thirteen years older than he. She was the greatest First Lady the country had ever known. But behind the scenes - Oh man, what a tartar! Not that he had ever heard old Gus complain. The public lion was perfectly content to be a private mouse. Gus do this, Gus don't do that - and he was so lost when she died that he abandoned Washington the moment her funeral was over, went to live in his home state of Iowa and died himself not two months later.
Colleen McCullough (A Creed for the Third Millennium)
One thing should be clear, but apparently it is not: if this were indeed our nature, we would be living in paradise. If pain, humiliation, and physical injury made us happy, we would be ecstatic. If being sold on street corners were a good time, women would jam street corners the way men jam football matches. If forced sex were what we craved, even we would be satisfied already. If being dominated by men made us happy, we would smile all the time. Women resist male domination because we do not like it. Political women resist male domination through overt, rude, unmistakable rebellion. They are called unnatural, because they do not have a nature that delights in being debased. Apolitical women resist male domination through a host of bitter subversions, ranging from the famous headache to the clinical depression epidemic among women to suicide to prescription-drug tranquilization to taking it out on the children; sometimes a battered wife kills her husband. Apolitical women are also called unnatural, the charge hurled at them as nasty or sullen or embittered individuals, since that is how they fight back. They too are not made happy by being hurt or dominated. In fact, a natural woman is hard to find. We are domesticated, tamed, made compliant on the surface, through male force, not through nature. We sometimes do what men say we are, either because we believe them or because we hope to placate them. We sometimes try to become what men say we should be, because men have power over our lives.
Andrea Dworkin (Life and Death)
It took me years to grapple with the concept that most of my wife’s bizarre actions were beyond her control. She was not able to make any other decision at the time other than the one that was usually the most counterintuitive and destructive. At her worst, the BPD was in a position of absolute dominance over her.
Robert Page (BPD from the Husband's POV: The Roses and Rage of My Wife’s Borderline Personality Disorder (Roses and Rage BPD))
There is a quaint old theory that man may have two souls—a peripheral one which serves ordinarily, and a central one which is stirred only at certain times, but then with activity and vigour. While under the domination of the former a man will shave, vote, pay taxes, give money to his family, buy subscription books and comport himself on the average plan. But let the central soul suddenly become dominant, and he may, in the twinkling of an eye, turn upon the partner of his joys with furious execration; he may change his politics while you could snap your fingers; he may deal out deadly insult to his dearest friend; he may get him, instanter, to a monastery or a dance hall; he may elope, or hang himself—or he may write a song or poem, or kiss his wife unasked, or give his funds to the search of a microbe. Then the peripheral soul will return; and we have our safe, sane citizen again. It is but the revolt of the Ego against Order; and its effect is to shake up the atoms only that they may settle where they belong.
O. Henry (Cabbages and Kings)
Our dynamic worked: She was quietly assertive but unargumentative, happy to let me lead the way in our relationship—the opposite of my parents’ relationship: dominated by my mother despite being financed by my father. My wife and I complemented each other perfectly, grew to understand what the other needed, and provided it willingly, without request.
Ore Agbaje-Williams (The Three of Us)
I want you, Isla," he told her, showing no signs of restraint. "I want to take you right now against this car." She was about to agree, but he straightened her shirt and placed her on her feet. Yanking open the door, he practically shoved her onto the seat. "But too many people here are coming and going, and I don't want them seeing parts of you, that only belong to me.
H.S. Howe (The Billionaire's Willed Wife)
What other half-buried things did I know about my own grief and wife that, if asked about directly, I could surrender? That for several years I kept Clare’s mobile phone active because I didn’t want anyone else to take her phone number. That during the time before I released the number, I sent her texts from work, only to come home and read them on the phone that was always charging by her side of the bed.
Dominic Smith (Return to Valetto)
The judicious words of Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855), the first existentialist philosopher, are apropos to end this lumbering manuscript. 1. “One must learn to know oneself before knowing anything else.” 2. “Life always expresses the results of our dominate thoughts.” 3. “Face the facts of being what you are, for that is what changes what you are.” 4. “Personality is only ripe when a man has made the truth his own.” 5. “Love is all, it gives all, and it takes all.” 6. “Don’t forget to love yourself.” 7. “Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.” 8. “Life has its own hidden forces, which you can only discover by living.” 9. “The highest and most beautiful things in life are not to be heard about, or read about, nor seen, but if one will, are to be lived.” 10. “Patience is necessary, and one cannot reap immediately where one has sown.” 11. “It seems essential, in relationships and all tasks, that we concentrate on only what is most significant and important.” 12. “To dare is to lose one’s footing momentarily. Not to dare is to lose oneself.” 13. “Since my earliest childhood, a barb of sorrow has lodged in my heart. As long as it stays I am ironic, if it is pulled out I shall die.” 14. “A man who as a physical being is always turned to the outside, thinking that his happiness lies outside of him, finally turns inward and discovers that the source is within him.” 15. “Just as in earthly life lovers long for the moment when they are able to breathe forth their love for each other, to let their souls blend into a soft whisper, so the mystic longs for the moment in prayer he can, as it were, creep into God.” Kierkegaard warned, “The greatest hazard of all, losing the self, can occur very quietly in the world, as if it were nothing at all. No other loss can occur so quietly; any other loss – an arm, a leg, five dollars, a wife, etc. – is sure to be noticed.” Kierkegaard said that the one method to avoid losing oneself is to live joyfully in the moment, which he described as “to be present in oneself in truth,” which in turn requires “to be today, in truth be today.
Kilroy J. Oldster (Dead Toad Scrolls)
He settled in his beautiful Georgian house in Lymington surrounded by beautiful things. He knew how to live well, perhaps without regard for his health. He hated exercise, smoked, drank and wrote. Today he would have been bullied by wife and children and friends into giving up these habits and changing his lifestyle, but I’m not sure he would have given in. Maybe like me, he would simply find a quiet place. Dominic Wheatley, 2013
Dennis Wheatley (The Forbidden Territory (Duke De Richleau Book 5))
Sevro, swarmed by his daughters, makes faces at them as they eat. But when the air cracks with a sonic boom, he bolts upright, looks at the sky, and runs off into the house, urging his children to stay put. He returns a whole half an hour later arm in arm with his wife, hair a mess, two jacket buttons missing, touching a white napkin to a bloodied, split lip. My old friend Victra, immaculate in a high-collared green jacket threaded with gemstones, beams devilishly across the patio at me. She’s seven months pregnant with their fourth daughter. “Well, if it isn’t the Reaper in the leathery flesh. Apologies, my goodman. I’m dreadfully late.” Her long legs cover the distance in three strides. I greet her with a hug. She squeezes my butt hard enough to make me jump. She kisses Mustang on the head and slides into a chair, dominating the table. “Hello, gloomy one,” she says to Electra.
Pierce Brown (Iron Gold (Red Rising Saga, #4))
About the time that I reentered the Bruce family, an event occurred of disastrous import to the colored people. The slave Hamlin, the first fugitive that came under the new law, was given up by the blood-hounds of the north to the bloodhounds of the south. It was the beginning of a reign of terror to the colored population. The great city rushed on its whirl of excitement, taking no note of the "short and simple annals of the Poor." But while fashionables were listening to the thrilling voice of Jenny Lind in Metropolitan Hall, the thrilling voices of poor hunted colored people went up, in an agony of supplication, to the Lord, from Zion's church. Many families, who had lived in the city for twenty years, fled from it now. Many a poor washerwoman, who, by hard labor, had made herself a comfortable home, was obliged to sacrifice her furniture, bid a hurried farewell to friends, and seek her fortune among strangers in Canada. Many a wife discovered a secret she had never known before—that her husband was a fugitive, and must leave her to insure his own safety. Worse still, many a husband discovered that his wife had fled from slavery years ago, and as "the child follows the condition of its mother," the children of his love were liable to be seized and carried into slavery. Every where, in those humble homes, there was consternation and anguish. But what cared the legislators of the "dominant race" for the blood they were crushing out of trampled hearts?
Harriet Ann Jacobs (Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl)
Justin stared at the empty doorway, then dropped his head and cursed viciously. He had to leave. His instincts told him that a silken net was closing around him. If he didn’t escape soon, he would be entangled forever in its soft, tenacious bonds. But he couldn’t leave—he didn’t yet have the strength or the resources to evade Dominic Legare. This fragile masquerade was his only protection. The only question was, which threat was greater? The one posed by Dominic Legare…or the one posed by his own brother’s wife.
Lisa Kleypas (Only With Your Love (Vallerands, #2))
Finnish women are dominant,' Roman Schatz enthused. 'Traditionally, on Finnish farms the woman was chief of everything under the roof, including the males, and the men were there to take care of everything outside. No Finnish man would ever decide anything without consulting his wife. Men do the dishes. We don't have housewives in Finland - no one can afford to live from one salary. Women don't stay at home and breast-feed, they have their own careers and bank accounts. It's great - my divorce only cost me a hundred euro.
Michael Booth (The Almost Nearly Perfect People: Behind the Myth of the Scandinavian Utopia)
And anger is not just damaging in the moment; for days afterward, venters have repair work to do with their partners. Despite the popular fantasy of fabulous sex after fighting, many couples say that it takes time to feel loving again. What can Greg do to calm down when he feels his fury mounting? He can take a deep breath. He can take a ten-minute break. And he can ask himself whether the thing that’s making him so angry is really that important. If not, he might let it go. But if it is, then he’ll want to phrase his needs not as personal attacks but as neutral discussion items. “You’re so antisocial!” can become “Can we figure out a way to organize our weekends that works for us both?” This advice would hold even if Emily weren’t a sensitive introvert (no one likes to feel dominated or disrespected), but it so happens that Greg’s married to a woman who is especially put off by anger. So he needs to respond to the conflict-avoidant wife he has, not the confrontational one that he wishes, at least in the heat of the moment, he were married to.
Susan Cain (Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking)
Male domination—where a husband forcefully asserts dominance in physically, emotionally, or spiritually abusive ways and treats his wife harshly without godly love—is a sinful distortion of male headship. A wife becoming slave-like is also a sinful distortion that undermines the value, dignity, beauty, and worth of a wife and warps the picture of what godly femininity is supposed to be. Male passivity is a sinful distortion of biblical masculinity that abandons God-given responsibility and accountability and endangers a man’s wife and family.
April Cassidy (The Peaceful Wife: Living in Submission to Christ as Lord)
Piombo and his wife, persons without education, had allowed Ginevra to study as she pleased. Following her caprices as a young girl, she had studied all things for a time, and then abandoned them, — taking up and leaving each train of thought at will, until, at last, painting had proved to be her dominant passion. Ginevra would have made a noble woman had her mother been capable of guiding her studies, of enlightening her mind, and bringing into harmony her gifts of nature; her defects came from the fatal education which the old Corsican had found delight in giving her.
Honoré de Balzac (Works of Honore de Balzac)
It is not my intention to abuse myself as a woman, mother, wife and at the same time associate myself as a prostitute. The notion, which may be painful, a woman in one way or another is a prostitute. However, it's not that I doubt my integrity and honor for my existence as a woman. The main problem is, we live in a male-dominated world. They are the ones who make up this world in which we live in the form and appearance they fully desire. These are people who are always in control. Starting from social life to domestic life. They cram ideas into us about how a woman should be valued. That for some reason, women have to sell their bodies for a certain price. And ironically, the body that is least valued is that of a wife.
Titon Rahmawan
I do not know if you have ever examined how you listen, it doesn't matter to what, whether to a bird, to the wind in the leaves, to the rushing waters, or how you listen to a dialogue with yourself, to your conversation in various relationships with your intimate friends, your wife or husband. If we try to listen we find it extraordinarily difficult, because we are always projecting our opinions and ideas, our prejudices, our background, our inclinations, our impulses; when they dominate we hardly listen to what is being said. In that state there is no value at all. One listens and therefore learns, only in a state of attention, a state of silence in which this whole background is in abeyance, is quiet; then, it seems to me, it is possible to communicate.
J. Krishnamurti
Witness modern marriage. All rationality has clearly vanished from modern marriage; yet that is no objection to marriage, but to modernity. The rationality of marriage — that lay in the husband's sole juridical responsibility, which gave marriage a center of gravity, while today it limps on both legs. The rationality of marriage — that lay in its indissolubility in principle, which lent it an accent that could be heard above the accident of feeling, passion, and what is merely momentary. It also lay in the family's responsibility for the choice of a spouse. With the growing indulgence of love matches, the very foundation of marriage has been eliminated, that which alone makes an institution of it. Never, absolutely never, can an institution be founded on an idiosyncrasy; one cannot, as I have said, found marriage on "love" — it can be founded on the sex drive, on the property drive (wife and child as property), on the drive to dominate, which continually organizes for itself the smallest structure of domination, the family, and which needs children and heirs to hold fast — physiologically too — to an attained measure of power, influence, and wealth, in order to prepare for long-range tasks, for a solidarity of instinct between the centuries. Marriage as an institution involves the affirmation of the largest and most enduring form of organization: when society cannot affirm itself as a whole, down to the most distant generations, then marriage has altogether no meaning. Modern marriage has lost its meaning — consequently one abolishes it.
Friedrich Nietzsche (Twilight of the Idols)
WASN’T POLYGNY AN EXAMPLE OF WOMEN AS MEN’S PROPERTY? In no country at no period of time, were women safe from . . . the insistence that their bodies existed only in relation to man, for his pleasure and progeny. —The Women’s History of the World46 Academic feminism often equates mistresses, concubines, and polygyny* (a man having more than one wife) with male dominance. Once we understand the Immortality Rule, though, we can move to a deeper understanding of why God blessed the many wives and concubines of David—as in David and Goliath. As a king, David had enough wealth and power to support more than one woman—so why should other women miss out? Polygyny did not mean any man could have many wives—it meant a poor man would be deprived of a wife so a woman could have a rich man. No one took pity on the man who was poor for being deprived of love.
Warren Farrell (The Myth of Male Power)
He perceived too in these still hours how little he had understood her hitherto. He had been blinded, — obsessed. He had been seeing her and himself and the whole world far too much as a display of the eternal dualism of sex, the incessant pursuit. Now with his sexual imaginings newly humbled and hopeless, with a realization of her own tremendous minimization of that fundamental of romance, he began to see all that there was in her personality and their possible relations outside that. He saw how gravely and deeply serious was her fine philanthropy, how honest and simple and impersonal her desire for knowledge and understandings. There is the brain of her at least, he thought, far out of Sir Isaac's reach. She wasn't abased by her surrenders, their simplicity exalted her, showed her innocent and himself a flushed and congested soul. He perceived now with the astonishment of a man newly awakened just how the great obsession of sex had dominated him — for how many years? Since his early undergraduate days. Had he anything to put beside her own fine detachment? Had he ever since his manhood touched philosophy, touched a social question, thought of anything human, thought of art, or literature or belief, without a glancing reference of the whole question to the uses of this eternal hunt? During that time had he ever talked to a girl or woman with an unembarrassed sincerity? He stripped his pretences bare; the answer was no. His very refinements had been no more than indicative fig-leaves. His conservatism and morality had been a mere dalliance with interests that too brutal a simplicity might have exhausted prematurely. And indeed hadn't the whole period of literature that had produced him been, in its straining purity and refinement, as it were one glowing, one illuminated fig-leaf, a vast conspiracy to keep certain matters always in mind by conspicuously covering them away? But this wonderful woman — it seemed — she hadn't them in mind! She shamed him if only by her trustful unsuspiciousness of the ancient selfish game of Him and Her that he had been so ardently playing.... He idealized and worshipped this clean blindness. He abased himself before it.
H.G. Wells (The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman)
And she loved you with all her heart." He sprang to his feet and walked up and down the small room. "I don't want love. I haven't time for it. It's weakness. I am a man, and sometimes I want a woman. When I’ve satisfied my passion I'm ready for other things.I can't overcome my desire, but I hate it; it imprisons my spirit; I look forward to the time when I shall be free from all desire and can give myself without hindrance to my work. Because women can do nothing except love, they've given it a ridiculous importance. They want to persuade us that it's the whole of life. It's an insignificant part. I know lust. That's normal and healthy. Love is a disease. Women are the instruments of my pleasure; I have no patience with their claim to be helpmates, partners, companions. “ I had never heard Strickland speak so much at one time. He spoke with a passion of indignation. But neither here nor elsewhere do I pretend to give his exact words; his vocabulary was small, and he had no gift for framing sentences, so that one had to piece his meaning together out of interjections, the expression of his face, gestures and hackneyed phrases. "You should have lived at a time when women were chattels and men the masters of slaves, “ I said. "It just happens that I am a completely normal man." I could not help laughing at this remark, made in all seriousness; but he went on, walking up and down the room like a caged beast, intent on expressing what he felt, but found such difficulty in putting coherently. "When a woman loves you she's not satisfied until she possesses your soul. Because she's weak, she has a rage for domination, and nothing less will satisfy her.She has a small mind and she resents the abstract which she is unable to grasp. She is occupied with material things, and she is jealous of the ideal. The soul of man wanders through the uttermost regions of the universe, and she seeks to imprison it in the circle of her account-book. Do you remember my wife? I saw Blanche little by little trying all her tricks. With infinite patience she prepared to snare me and bind me. She wanted to bring me down to her level; she cared nothing for me, she only wanted me to be hers. She was willing to do everything in the world for me except the one thing I wanted: to leave me alone.
W. Somerset Maugham
In Woolrich's crime fiction there is a gradual development from pulp to noir. The earlier a story, the more likely it stresses pulp elements: one-dimensional macho protagonists, preposterous methods of murder, hordes of cardboard gangsters, dialogue full of whiny insults, blistering fast action. But even in some of his earliest crime stories one finds aspects of noir, and over time the stream works itself pure. In mature Woolrich the world is an incomprehensible place where beams happen to fall, and are predestined to fall, and are toppled over by malevolent powers; a world ruled by chance, fate and God the malign thug. But the everyday life he portrays is just as terrifying and treacherous. The dominant economic reality is the Depression, which for Woolrich usually means a frightened little guy in a rundown apartment with a hungry wife and children, no money, no job, and desperation eating him like a cancer. The dominant political reality is a police force made up of a few decent cops and a horde of sociopaths licensed to torture and kill, whose outrages are casually accepted by all concerned, not least by the victims. The prevailing emotional states are loneliness and fear. Events take place in darkness, menace breathes out of every corner of the night, the bleak cityscape comes alive on the page and in our hearts. ("Introduction")
Francis M. Nevins Jr. (Night and Fear: A Centenary Collection of Stories by Cornell Woolrich (Otto Penzler Book))
Cohen continued to struggle with his own well-being. Even though he had achieved his life’s dream of running his own firm, he was still unhappy, and he had become dependent on a psychiatrist named Ari Kiev to help him manage his moods. In addition to treating depression, Kiev’s other area of expertise was success and how to achieve it. He had worked as a psychiatrist and coach with Olympic basketball players and rowers trying to improve their performance and overcome their fear of failure. His background building athletic champions appealed to Cohen’s unrelenting need to dominate in every transaction he entered into, and he started asking Kiev to spend entire days at SAC’s offices, tending to his staff. Kiev was tall, with a bushy mustache and a portly midsection, and he would often appear silently at a trader’s side and ask him how he was feeling. Sometimes the trader would be so startled to see Kiev there he’d practically jump out of his seat. Cohen asked Kiev to give motivational speeches to his employees, to help them get over their anxieties about losing money. Basically, Kiev was there to teach them to be ruthless. Once a week, after the market closed, Cohen’s traders would gather in a conference room and Kiev would lead them through group therapy sessions focused on how to make them more comfortable with risk. Kiev had them talk about their trades and try to understand why some had gone well and others hadn’t. “Are you really motivated to make as much money as you can? This guy’s going to help you become a real killer at it,” was how one skeptical staff member remembered Kiev being pitched to them. Kiev’s work with Olympians had led him to believe that the thing that blocked most people was fear. You might have two investors with the same amount of money: One was prepared to buy 250,000 shares of a stock they liked, while the other wasn’t. Why? Kiev believed that the reluctance was a form of anxiety—and that it could be overcome with proper treatment. Kiev would ask the traders to close their eyes and visualize themselves making trades and generating profits. “Surrendering to the moment” and “speaking the truth” were some of his favorite phrases. “Why weren’t you bigger in the trades that worked? What did you do right?” he’d ask. “Being preoccupied with not losing interferes with winning,” he would say. “Trading not to lose is not a good strategy. You need to trade to win.” Many of the traders hated the group therapy sessions. Some considered Kiev a fraud. “Ari was very aggressive,” said one. “He liked money.” Patricia, Cohen’s first wife, was suspicious of Kiev’s motives and believed that he was using his sessions with Cohen to find stock tips. From Kiev’s perspective, he found the perfect client in Cohen, a patient with unlimited resources who could pay enormous fees and whose reputation as one of the best traders on Wall Street could help Kiev realize his own goal of becoming a bestselling author. Being able to say that you were the
Sheelah Kolhatkar (Black Edge: Inside Information, Dirty Money, and the Quest to Bring Down the Most Wanted Man on Wall Street)
with his daughter.” “Incest?” Rainie looked at Quincy incredulously. “Jesus, SupSpAg, how do you sleep with that mind?” “I can’t be sure,” Quincy said modestly, “but it has all the classic signs. Domineering father alone with his young daughter for the first thirteen years of her life. Seems very doting on the outside. I’m sure if you conducted further interviews you’d find plenty of neighbors and teachers telling you how ‘close’ Mr. Avalon and his daughter were. How ‘involved’ he was in her life. But then she hits puberty and the jig is up. To continue risks pregnancy, plus she’s starting to get a woman’s body, and many of these men aren’t interested in that. So Mr. Avalon goes ahead and takes a wife, some poor, passive woman to serve as window dressing and help him appear suitable to the outside world. Now he clings to the fantasy of what he once had. And protects it jealously.” “Does Mr. Avalon have access to a computer?” Rainie asked Luke. “In his office.” She turned to Quincy. “If Mr. Avalon was involved with his daughter, would he have problems with her relationship with VanderZanden?” “He’ll have problems with any of her relationships. In his mind, she’s his.” “That’s it then. He found out, got angry—” “And got an alibi,” Luke interrupted flatly. They looked at him sharply. He was nearly apologetic. “I tried, Rainie. I stayed in town till eleven last night trying to break this guy’s story. I’ve probably pissed off every blue blood in the city and it still holds. Mr. Avalon was in a business meeting all day Tuesday. His secretary swears
Lisa Gardner (The Third Victim (Quincy & Rainie, #2))
He carries the past around like a bottle of antacids in his pocket. You outlive your wife, then your colleagues and friends, then your accountant and building doorman. You no longer attend the opera, because the human bladder can only endure so much. Social engagements require strategy and hearing-aid calibrations. Every sports coat you own is too big because you continue to shrink, your shoulders like a rumor behind all that fabric. You are waiting to die without ever thinking about death itself. It's a face at the window, peering in. You live in three rooms of your twenty-room triplex, whole areas cordoned off like cholera wards. You live among the ruins of the past, carry them in your pockets, wishing you'd been decent and loving and talented and brave. Instead you were vain and selfish, capable of love but always giving less than everything you had. You held back. You hoarded. You lived among beautiful things. The paintings on your walls, the Dutch rivers and kitchens, the Flemish peasant frolics, they give off fumes and dull with age, but connect you to a bloodline of want, to shipbuilders and bankers who stared up at them as their own lives tapered off. Like trees, they have breathed in the air around them and now they exhales some of their previous owners' atoms and molecules. They could last for a thousand years, these paintings, and that buoys you as you drift off, a layer just above sleep. Skimming the pond, Rachel used to call it, or was that something you once said to her? You should turn everything off in the room, but you don't. You let the lamps burn all night.
Dominic Smith (The Last Painting of Sara de Vos)
The people like me, finally, after years and years of agitation, made deeply moving and eloquent speeches against the wrongness of your domination over us, and then finally, after the mutilated bodies of you, your wife, and your children were found in your beautiful and spacious bungalow at the edge of your rubber plantation—found by one of your many house servants (none of it was ever yours; it was never, ever yours)—you say to me, “Well, I wash my hands of all of you, I am leaving now,” and you leave, and from afar you watch as we do to ourselves the very things you used to do to us. And you might feel that there was more to you than that, you might feel that you had understood the meaning of the Age of Enlightenment (though, as far as I can see, it had done you very little good); you loved knowledge, and wherever you went you made sure to build a school, a library (yes, and in both of these places you distorted or erased my history and glorified your own). But then again, perhaps as you observe the debacle in which I now exist, the utter ruin that I say is my life, perhaps you are remembering that you had always felt people like me cannot run things, people like me will never grasp the idea of Gross National Product, people like me will never be able to take command of the thing the most simpleminded among you can master, people like me will never understand the notion of rule by law, people like me cannot really think in abstractions, people like me cannot be objective, we make everything so personal. You will forget your part in the whole setup, that bureaucracy is one of your inventions, that Gross National Product is one of your inventions, and all the laws that you know mysteriously favour you.
Jamiaca Kincaid
in Banjo on My Knee (December 11, 1936). He plays Joel McCrea’s father, a wizened old river denizen and musician who goes off in search of his son, who is himself looking for his estranged wife (Barbara Stanwyck). Brennan dominates scene after scene. He becomes iconic, the very spirit of the fiercely independent and rugged river people. William Faulkner was assigned this picture, and though he was taken off it early, the spirit of the novelist’s country people seems to suffuse Brennan’s performance. He plays a character thirty years older than his actual age—not through makeup or mannerisms, so much as with his reedy voice, semi-toothless grin, and adroitly mussed and thinning hair, all of which projects an age-old and indomitable presence. When Brennan gets to Memphis, just north of Faulkner’s Jefferson, Mississippi, he becomes a hit performer after a club owner discovers him. Brennan’s performance on banjo, harmonica, drums, and various other instruments—while also singing the “Saint Louis Blues”—is pure vaudeville, which is to say, pure Walter Brennan. And it’s worth noting that the scene is also a ruse, since Brennan played no instruments; six musicians actually produced the sound that seems to be coming out of his nimble fingers.
Carl Rollyson (A Real American Character: The Life of Walter Brennan (Hollywood Legends))
I think it’s time for me to completely surrender myself to you. Your father explained some things to me while we spent time together, and he told me that in order for me to be true and righteous towards you, I must give you my secret treasure to willfully submit to you. I want you to have complete domination over me, because I don’t want to love anyone else but you,” she replied. “I want to satisfy all of your needs and desires, so I am willfully being submissive to you,” she explained, as she rubbed lubricant between her creases.
Vivian Blue (Rise of the Kingpin's Wife 3)
One really has to ask oneself how Socrates managed to maneuver himself into such conjugal misery, and this question can be posed in several variations. If Xantippe really was from the start the kind of woman the legend says she was, we would show very little understanding for our great philosopher because then it was his own carelessness that led him to choose precisely her and no other woman. Or is he supposed to have thought, ironic as he was, that a surly woman is just what a thinker needs? If, from the beginning, he recognized her "true nature" and put up with it, then this indicates deplorable marital behavior on his part because he thus unreasonably expected a women to spend her whole life with a man who obviously at best endured her but did not appreciate her. Conversely, if Xantippe had become as she is described only during her marriage to Socrates, then the philosopher would really come into a questionable light because then indisputably he himself must have caused his wife's vexation without having interested himself in it. No matter how the story is turned, Xantippe's moods fall back on Socrates. This is a genuine philosophical problem: How did the thinker and questioner manage not to solve the puzzle of Xantippe's bad temper? This great midwife of truth was obviously unable to let his wife's rage express itself or to help her find a language in which she would have been able to express the grounds and justifications for her behavior. The failure of a philosopher often consists not in false answers but in neglecting to pose the right questions —and in denying some experiences the right to become "problems." His experiences with Xantippe must have been of this kind—a misery that is not given the dignity of obtruding into the male problem-monopoly. Philosphers fail when they endure as a naturally given evil that for which they are to blame; indeed, their capacity for "wisely" enduring it is itself an intellectual scandal, a misuse of wisdom in favor of blindness. With Socrates, it seems, this misuse immediately avenged itself. When a thinker cannot refrain from equating humanity with masculinity, reality will strike back in the philosopher's marital hell. The stories about this thus have, I think, also a kynical meaning. They reveal the real reason for philosophicalclerical celibacy in our civilization. A definite dominating kind of idealism, philosophy, and grand theory becomes possible only when a certain "other kind" of experience is systematically avoided
Anonymous
Lucian was no longer just a Dom. He was the man that dominated every-fucking-thing—especially himself—for the woman he loved, his wife. His child. His family. He’d become what he’d always dreamed of. A righteous warrior, an alpha hero. A White Knight Dom. And that… was game fucking on.
Lucian Bane (1st Semester (White Knight Dom Academy, #2))
My wife and I, we learn later in the afternoon, are both Explorer-Negotiators. (Each person gets a dominant and a secondary label.) This sounds promising enough. "You tend to be focused and resourceful, and you are able to juggle a lot of projects at the same time," I read. As a result, we're both "sometimes a whirlwind of activity." But a pairing of Explorers, Fisher warns me, can be risky. "Explorers fly off in different directions the minute they get bored," she says. "They get into relationships fast, wonder how they got there, and then try to weasel their way out.
Stephen Baker (The Numerati)
Lilith, the guardian mistress of Mother Earth, had enchanted all her followers with the story that she was the original wife of Adam, spurned by her abusive, controlling husband because of her independence, forced to flee his oppressive domination to protect her two hellions, Lili and Lilitu. That patriarchal dictator Adam then took a second wife, Eve, who was deluded into accepting her subordinate position as barefoot slave and breeder. Freed from her demons, Mary now knew it was all a malicious lie, and inversion of the truth. She had worshipped a self-serving idol, deluded by her own willing lust for power. She thought she had been pursuing equality with man, to be just like them. But she now realized she had merely been defying her Creator. She broke down into tears and fell to her knees in the dirt.
Brian Godawa (Jesus Triumphant (Chronicles of the Nephilim, #8))
In the only picture Brennan ever did for the legendary director John Ford, the character actor worked well beside Ford stalwarts such as Ward Bond, playing one of Earp’s brothers. Indeed, what is most remarkable about this film is the contrast between Clanton and his boys and Earp and his congenial brothers, the youngest of whom is killed when the Clanton gang rustles cattle the Earps have been driving to California. Brennan personifies the authority of evil, as he does in Brimstone (August 15, 1949), where he again bullies his boys into driving out homesteaders. It is almost as if in each subsequent film—especially in Westerns—Brennan is building a persona that is like a suit subjected to constant alteration without ever losing its basic contours. He would essay yet another version of the dominating father with sons in tow in Shoot Out at Big Sag (June 1, 1962), an independent production organized by his son Andy, in which Walter plays a pusillanimous preacher who has let down his wife and family by not defending them. But he ultimately redeems himself when he realizes he has lost the respect of everyone, including his daughter, who in the end proves to be his salvation owing to her unwillingness to accept her family’s defeatist mentality.
Carl Rollyson (A Real American Character: The Life of Walter Brennan (Hollywood Legends))
January 26: Journalist George Carpozi Jr. interviews Marilyn at the Gladstone Hotel. He is accompanied by photographer George Miller, who accompanies Marilyn, dressed in a dark fur coat, on a walk through Central Park. She drives with DiMaggio to Cooperstown, New York, to see his induction into the Baseball Hall of Fame. They also visit his brother Dominic and Dominic’s wife Emily, who are living near Boston.
Carl Rollyson (Marilyn Monroe Day by Day: A Timeline of People, Places, and Events)
Reacting to Jesus’ pronouncement that remarriage after divorce is adultery, his disciples said to him, “If such is the case of a man with his wife, it is better not to marry” (Mt 19:10). From the first moment of its declaration, the teaching Jesus propounded as the will of God was deeply distressing, even to men of good will. Subsequent centuries have shown no slackening in the energy and ingenuity devoted to weakening or nullifying the force of this teaching, and as long as it is expedient to circumvent the doctrine, there will be attempts to explain away its scriptural anchoring. But the doctrine is given as absolute in Matthew, Mark, and Luke, and even Paul goes out of his way to insist that, as a messenger of the teaching and not its author, he is not to blame for its rigor: “To the married I give charge, not I but the Lord” (1 Cor 7:10). There can be no serious doubt that the teaching is dominical.
Robert Dodaro (Remaining in the Truth of Christ: Marriage and Communion in the Catholic Church)
A regulator cannot easily challenge the fundamental strategy of a badly run financial services business, such as Lehman or Royal Bank of Scotland. No one within the businesses themselves was willing to challenge Dick Fuld or Fred Goodwin—including the genuinely distinguished figures who sat on the RBS board (that of Lehman was decorated by friends of Fuld). Even the head of an agency may enjoy less access to the powerful than the senior executives of large corporations—if for no other reason than that the latter have considerably more largesse to dispense. Recall Gordon Brown’s fulsome tribute to Fuld and Lehman (see Chapter 1), and note that Goodwin and his (then) wife enjoyed weekend hospitality at Chequers, Prime Minister Brown’s official residence, even as the bank was sliding towards bankruptcy. It is not an accident that both Lehman and RBS were run by unpleasant, domineering individuals with good political connections: these characteristics are common pointers to the combination of personal success and corporate failure. Now
John Kay (Other People's Money: The Real Business of Finance)
He spent the autumn of 1929 commuting back and forth between Berlin and Frankfurt. He met up with Adorno and his wife, Gretel Karplus, and Max Horkheimer and Lacis several times in a vacation home at the spa resort of Königstein. There Benjamin read to the group from the current sketches for the Arcades Project. Those weekends devoted to discussion in Königstein are now seen as the actual founding events of the so-called Frankfurt School, which would dominate German intellectual life for fifty years after the war.
Wolfram Eilenberger (Time of the Magicians: Wittgenstein, Benjamin, Cassirer, Heidegger, and the Decade That Reinvented Philosophy)
They perceive artistic elegance in the form of the land and living things, much the same as in our Western tradition. This sensitivity toward natural design is quite outside the pragmatism that might dominate the lives of people subsisting directly from wild resources. Koyukon people often comment that a day or a scene is particularly beautiful, and they are attentive to fleeting moments mountains outlined against the sky, reflections on still water, a bird's song in the quietness. In their language, words like nizoonh ("pretty") or hutaadla'o ("beautiful) communicate these feelings. This is not a new way of seeing, as the ancient riddles and the statements of elders indicate. A man spent several minutes describing a particular midwinter sunset, its color glowing on the frozen river and the snow-covered mountainside, snow on the trees reflecting amber, and long shadows cast by timber on the slopes. He said his wife had called him out so he could see it, and he stood a long time watching. Both he and his wife are old, and he says that the oldest people during his childhood had this same admiration for beauty.
Richard K. Nelson (Make Prayers to the Raven: A Koyukon View of the Northern Forest)
The word sahib, which Sikhs use when they speak of the scripture, may become contentious in future. It was used respectfully in addressing, in particular, white men in the days of the Raj. The wife was known as the mem sahib, which indicated that her status derived from her husband. Sahib is used to acknowledge the status of the scripture in the same way, but some women writers may dispense with it, claiming that it reinforces the strong but unwarranted male dominance in the Sikh Panth.
W. Owen Cole (Sikhism - An Introduction: Teach Yourself)
The Ephesians 5 text isn’t about a husband dominating, fixing, or saving his wife, nor is it about wives blindly submitting to their husbands or keeping their bellies and sexual appetites satisfied; it’s about an outward-focused, radical sort of mutual love that is like healing waters washing over the trauma and wounds of our past, leading us into more and more health and wholeness.
Kat Harris (Sexless in the City: A Sometimes Sassy, Sometimes Painful, Always Honest Look at Dating, Desire, and Sex)
I like most of my fellow Republicans and conservatives was a victim of the progressive paradigm, embedded in all our institutions of culture, from academia to Hollywood to the media. In this case, the story that we had accepted, like suckers, was the idea that fascism and Nazism are inherently “right wing.” The Left is really good at inventing and disseminating these paradigms. When one of them falls, they simply reach for another. In my previous book and film, Hillary’s America, I challenged another powerful leftist paradigm. This is the paradigm that the progressives and the Democrats are the party of emancipation, equality, and civil rights. I showed instead that they are the party of slavery and Indian removal, of segregation and Jim Crow, of racial terrorism and the Ku Klux Klan, and of opposition to the civil rights movement of the 1960s. My goal was to strip away the race card from the Democrats—a card they had been successfully playing against Republicans for a generation. Incredibly the Democrats had taken full credit for the civil rights movement, even though Republicans are the ones who got it passed, and even though the opposition to it came almost entirely from the Democratic Party. Democrats accused Republicans—the party of emancipation and opposition to segregation, bigotry, and white supremacy—of being the party of bigotry and white supremacy. Talk about transference. This was my introduction to the Left’s political strategy of shifting the blame for racism onto the party that had historically opposed racism in all its forms. So successful were the Democrats in this con that in 2005 a head of the Republican National Committee, Ken Mehlman, went around apologizing to black groups for sins that had actually been committed, not by the Republicans, but by the Democrats. 5 Equally astonishing, the Democrats have never admitted their racist history, never taken responsibility for what they did, never apologized for it, never paid one penny of restitution for their crimes. What intrigued me most was how one can get away with such a big lie. The answer is you have to dominate all the large megaphones of the culture, from academia to the movies to the major media. With this cultural arsenal at their disposal, big liars can spin out falsehoods with the confidence that no one else has a large enough megaphone to challenge them. They can have their lies taught in classrooms, made into movies and TV shows, and reported in the everyday media as the unvarnished truth. This is how big lies come to be widely believed, sometimes even by the people who are being lied about. Hillary’s America was met with outrage on the Left, but no one could rebut a single fact in the book or movie. Even my most incriminating allegations proved invulnerable. I noted that, in 1860, the year before the Civil War, no Republican owned a slave; all the four million slaves at the time were owned by Democrats. Now this generalization could easily be refuted by someone providing a list of Republicans who owned slaves. The Left couldn’t do it. One assiduous researcher finally sought to dispute me with a single counterexample. Ulysses S. Grant, he pointed out, once inherited a slave from his wife’s family. I conceded the point but reminded him that, at the time, Ulysses S. Grant was not a Republican. Fearful that they had no substantive answer to Hillary’s America, the mainstream media went into complete denial. If you watched the major networks or public television, or listened to National Public Radio, you would have no idea that Hillary’s America even existed. The book was Number One on the New York Times bestseller list and the movie was the top-grossing documentary of the year. Both were dense with material directly relevant to the ongoing election debate. Yet they were completely ignored by a press that was squarely in the Hillary camp.
Dinesh D'Souza (The Big Lie: Exposing the Nazi Roots of the American Left)
The gradual change, from her [Victoria] dominance to his [Albert], was taking place not just in ballrooms but more widely in British society. The genders became more clearly and hierarchically distinguished as the 1830s gave way to the 1840s. A successful marriage, thought Sarah Ellis, writing in 1843, was founded on one important truth. "It is," she counselled her female readers, "the superiority of your husband as a man." "You may have more talent, with higher attainments," she advised them, "but this has nothing whatever to do with your position as a woman, which is, and must be, inferior to his as a man.
Lucy Worsley (Queen Victoria: Daughter, Wife, Mother, Widow)
Well, yes, he knew how much I love you-" Isla slumped in his arms and wept. "That's not love, Alex. Please leave," she whispered against him. "No," he softly replied. She jerked in his arms and pounded her fists into his chest. "Get out!" "No!" He threw her over his shoulder and carted her inside.
H.S. Howe (The Billionaire's Willed Wife)
campaign. But there was a nervous, unformed quality about him, as if he were a student who’d done the coursework and was eager to impress the teacher but deep down lacked either the aptitude or the passion to master the subject. As it was getting late, I noticed Singh fighting off sleep, lifting his glass every so often to wake himself up with a sip of water. I signaled to Michelle that it was time to say our goodbyes. The prime minister and his wife walked us to our car. In the dim light, he looked frail, older than his seventy-eight years, and as we drove off I wondered what would happen when he left office. Would the baton be successfully passed to Rahul, fulfilling the destiny laid out by his mother and preserving the Congress Party’s dominance over the divisive nationalism touted by the BJP?
Barack Obama (A Promised Land)
The pragmatic mood is already visible in the Odyssey. The poem opens with Odysseus living on a remote island ruled by a nymph who offers him immortality if he will remain as her consort. A bit surprisingly to anyone steeped in the orthodox Western religio-philosophical-scientific tradition, he refuses, preferring mortality and a dangerous struggle to regain his position as the king of a small, rocky island and be reunited with his son, aging wife, and old father. He turns down what the orthodox tradition says we should desire above all else, the peace that comes from overcoming the transience and vicissitudes of mortality, whether that peace takes the form of personal immortality or of communing with eternal verities, moral or scientific—in either case ushering us to the still point of the turning world. Odysseus prefers going to arriving, struggle to rest, exploring to achieving—curiosity is one of his most marked traits—and risk to certainty. The Odyssey situates Calypso’s enchanted isle in the far west, the land of the setting sun, and describes the isle in images redolent of death. In contrast, Odysseus’s arrival at his own island, far to the east, a land of the rising sun, is depicted in imagery suggestive of rebirth. Another thing that is odd about the protagonist, and the implicit values, of the Odyssey from the orthodox standpoint is that Odysseus is not a conventional hero, the kind depicted in the Iliad. He is strong, brave, and skillful in fighting, but he is no Achilles (who had a divine mother) or even Ajax; and he relies on guile, trickery, and outright deception to a degree inconsistent with what we have come to think of as heroism or with its depiction in the Iliad. His dominant trait is skill in coping with his environment rather than ability to impose himself upon it by brute force. He is the most intelligent person in the Odyssey but his intelligence is thoroughly practical, adaptive. Unlike Achilles in the Iliad, who is given to reflection, notably about the heroic ethic itself, Odysseus is pragmatic. He is an instrumental reasoner rather than a speculative one. He is also, it is true, distinctly pious, a trait that the Odyssey harps on and modern readers tend to overlook. But piety in Homeric religion is a coping mechanism. Homeric religion is proto-scientific; it is an attempt to understand and control the natural world. The gods personify nature and men manipulate it by “using” the gods in the proper way. One sacrifices to them in order to purchase their intervention in one’s affairs—this is religion as magic, the ancestor of modern technology—and also to obtain clues to what is going to happen next; this is the predictive use of religion and corresponds to modern science. The gods’ own rivalries, mirroring (in Homeric thought, personifying or causing) the violent clash of the forces of nature, prevent human beings from perfecting their control over the environment. By the same token, these rivalries underscore the dynamic and competitive character of human existence and the unrealism of supposing that peace and permanence, a safe and static life, are man’s lot. Odysseus’s piety has nothing to do with loving God as creator or redeemer, or as the name, site, metaphysical underwriter, or repository of the eternal or the unchanging, or of absolutes (such as omniscience and omnipotence) and universals (numbers, words, concepts). Odysseus’s piety is pragmatic because his religion is naturalistic—is simply the most efficacious means known to his society for controlling the environment, just as science and technology are the most efficacious means by which modern people control their environment.
Richard A. Posner (Law, Pragmatism, and Democracy)
It is this superiority, this contemptuous but absolutely normal and unremarkable arrogance, that he now sees as the essence of sexual depravity, and also as a first step toward killing his wife. Having actually killed, he sees the sex he took for granted as murderous in its diminution of human life-how it made women's humanity invisible, meaningless; but the prerogatives of both sex and class made the exploitation as invisible as gravity, as certain.
Andrea Dworkin (Intercourse)
In art, [Tolstoy] articulates with almost prophetic brilliance the elements that combine to make and keep women inferior, all of them originating, in his view, in sexual intercourse, because sexual intercourse requires objectification and therefore is exploitation. In life, he blamed and hated Sophie [his wife], feeling antagonism and repulsion, because he wanted to fuck her and did fuck her.
Andrea Dworkin (Intercourse)
The modern individual family is based on the open or disguised domestic enslavement of the woman; and modern society is a mass composed solely of individual families as its molecules. Today, in the great majority of cases, the man has to be the earner, the breadwinner of the family, at least among the propertied classes, and this gives him a dominating position which requires no special legal privileges. In the family, he is the bourgeois; the wife represents the proletariat.
Rius (Introducing Marx: A Graphic Guide (Graphic Guides))
Edward IV’s policy of ‘Regional Governance’ (1461–71): During Edward IV’s first reign, Somerset politics was still influenced by the Stourton and Hungerford affinities which may have sought the patronage of Edward’s courtier, Humphrey Stafford. He was the only son of the Beaufort-Stourton client William Stafford by Katherine Chideock, and it was because of his Chideock inheritance (principally focussed in Somerset, Dorset, and Wiltshire) that he was destined to be a leading member of the Somerset gentry. In the later 1450s, Stafford may have been associated with the earl of Wiltshire whose first wife was his cousin (pp. 192–3). The Bonville-FitzWaryn alliance had dominated Devon politics throughout the 1440s and 1450s (see Chapter 5) but on Bonville’s death in 1461, his sole heir was his infant great-granddaughter, Cecily. Naturally, a child could not provide adequate leadership to the Bonville-FitzWaryn connection. Moreover, Bonville’s allies, Lord FitzWaryn and Sir Philip Courtenay, were also both entering their sixties (both were deceased before 1470), and similarly could not provide the dynamic direction that was required. Into this leadership void, stepped Lord Stafford (p. 207). …[Humphrey, Lord] Stafford [of Southwick] became a crucial national–regional power-broker–one of the pillars upon which rested the pediment of Yorkist government (p. 210). It seems clear that Lord Stafford’s land-holding, office-holding, and clientele suggest that he acted as a political core for the south-west region. Stafford’s inheritances already made him a significant figure in Somerset and Dorset but, favoured by Edward IV, he was granted extensive lands forfeited by Lancastrians throughout the south-west, such as the estates of the earldom of Devon. In addition to his own properties, Stafford was showered with many offices in Somerset and Dorset, as well as other positions of immense significance in the region–in particular, his endowment with the most important duchy of Cornwall offices ensured that he dominated Cornwall (p. 221). It seems quite understandable to find that, as a figure of local, regional, and national importance, Lord Stafford’s associations were regional in nature: he was connected to major figures from each county… (pp. 221–2).
Robert E. Stansfield-Cudworth (Political Elites in South-West England, 1450–1500: Politics, Governance, and the Wars of the Roses)
Giving 'freedom' to women — an impossibility. With the liberation of women in the 19th century, the West has given itself an infection from which it can’t recover without the most terrible convulsions and the most thorough purgative measures. What the 'freedom' of women means in practice is the domination of mankind by the demagogues who can rally the lower orders of the spirit. Because there is no world in which 'the women' can act as a political unit. Liberation of women means freedom and power for financiers, lawyers, purveyors of comforts in and outside government, employers who whore out your wife and daughters. It has been the greatest weakening and self-own a civilization has ever visited on itself. But in the end is this so different from democracy as such? Yes…because the 'liberation' of women makes democracy into a terminal disease…one that doesn’t just end a particular government, but the civilization.
Bronze Age Pervert (Bronze Age Mindset)
She is always ready to bring to life feminine characters who are active, enterprising, and courageous, in contrast to the traditional concept of the Sicilian woman as a passive and withdrawn creature. (This strikes me as a personal, conscious choice.) She passes completely over what I should say was the dominant element in the majority of Sicilian tales: amorous longing, a predilection for the theme of love as exemplified in the lost husband or wife motif, so widespread in Mediterranean folklore and dating back to the oldest written example, the Hellenistic tale of Amor and Psyche told in Apuleius’ Metamorphosis (second century A.D.) and repeated through the ages in hundreds and hundreds of stories about encounters and separations, mysterious bridegrooms from the nether regions, invisible brides, and horse- or serpent-kings who turn into handsome young men at night.
Italo Calvino (Italian Folktales)
We want submissive wives and dominant daughters without realizing that every wife is someone's daughter.
Anupam S. Shlok
[On subjugation]: Submission is the second form of the Subjugation lifetrap. You submit to the subjugation process involuntarily. Whether you actually have a choice or not, you feel as though you have no choice. As a child, you subjugated yourself in order to avoid punishment or abandonment, probably by a parent. Your parent threatened to hurt you or to withdraw love or attention. There was coercion in the subjugation process. You are almost always angry, even if you do not recognize your anger. If you have this type of subjugation, you have a false belief: you attribute more power to the people who currently subjugate you than they actually have. Whoever subjugates you now - a husband, a wife, or parent - in truth has little power over you. You have the power to end your subjugation. There may be exceptions, such as your boss, but even there you have more control than you think. You may have to be willing to leave the person, but, one way or another, your subjugation can end. You do not have to stay with someone who is dominating or abusing you.
Jeffrey Young (Reinventing Your Life: The Breakthrough Program to End Negative Behavior...and Feel Great Again)
The point of a dehumanization campaign was the forced surrender of the target's own humanity, a karmic theft beyond accounting. Whatever was considered a natural human reaction was disallowed for the subordinate caste. During the era of enslavement, they were forbidden to cry as their children were carried off, forced to sing as a wife or husband was sold away, never again to look into their eyes or hear their voice for as long as the two might live. They were punished for the very responses a human being would be expected to have in the circumstances forced upon them. Whatever humanity shone through them was an affront to what the dominant caste kept telling itself. They were punished for being the humans that they could not help but be.
Isabel Wilkerson (Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents)
The reason why my internet history is dominated by searches about the scientific evidence behind burning sage. Those rooms have been contaminated by my wife’s friend’s activities
Ore Agbaje-Williams (The Three of Us)
Muawiya used Roman officials led by Sergios – Sarjun ibn Mansur in Arabic – to run the bureaucracy. His doctor and court poet were Christian, his first governor of Jerusalem was supposedly Jewish and his favourite wife Maysun was a Christian princess. Amr al-As teased him for being bossed around by his wife. ‘The wives of noble men dominate them,’ replied Muawiya. ‘Low men lord it over their women.
Simon Sebag Montefiore (The World: A Family History of Humanity)
For example, in 1965, the family of Josef K.—who, according to the BVA, was an ethnic German born in 1927 to two German parents—was not granted an entry visa because his non-German wife, Djurdja, did not speak any German and the children had “typically Slavic first names.”37 The fact that past applicants from their hometown Sokolovac in Croatia had had a good knowledge of the German language was held against this candidate. In a similar case in 1964, Emil S. and his wife, Jelka, from Slavonian Vukovar were denied entry despite the “typically German” first names of their three children—Josef, Emmerich, and Karl—because Jelka’s Croatian Volkstum was judged to be dominant in the family.38 In contrast, Stefan V., a Hungarian German man from Czerwenka (Crvenka) in Serbia was accepted, even though he had his father’s typically Hungarian surname and was registered as Hungarian in his Yugoslav identification. His son Tibor bore an equally Hungarian first name. Yet Stefan and his children spoke excellent German and, according to the embassy in Belgrade, “made a very good impression.” Therefore, their application was granted without hesitation.39
Jannis Panagiotidis (The Unchosen Ones: Diaspora, Nation, and Migration in Israel and Germany)
Until recently - perhaps mid-2010s - accounts of being a foreigner in Japan were dominated by white, usually male, Anglo-centric perspectives. (Alright, not that much as changed.) They talk about 'doing the gaijin nod when you see another gaijin on the street.' (No one has ever done this to me.) They talk about playing the 'gaijin card' to get out of sticky situations, like, say, pretending not to speak any Japanese when they've forgotten to buy the correct ticket for the express train, so the hapless station attendant decides to let them go. There's a certain group of people (men) who drift through life here with the barest smattering of Japanese for decades relying on their Japanese spouses (wives) to keep the cogs of daily life spinning; this will never be viable for me. I will never experience the minor celebrity of being a white person in rural Japan (on balance, much healthier for one's ego), nor will I ever be someone people approach and fawn over because they want to make foreign friends (eventually, I realised this was also better), nor will local people ever compliment my looks (there was always a small part of me that wished I was noticeably beautiful). I've been perceived as a Japanese woman in unexpected ways. For example, at a musical gathering, an older white man once turned to me and asked: So whose wife are you? It took a great deal of self-restraint not to slap him.
Florentyna Leow (How Kyoto Breaks Your Heart)
All I can think about is how badly I want him to dominate me tonight. My submissive heart thrills at the thought of being completely at his mercy.
Lacey Cross (Hotwife of the Month Club: Vol 1: 4 First Time Wife Sharing Stories (Sexy Short Story Collection))
He’s strikingly handsome when he smiles, but then again, Isaiah Rhodes is always smiling, even when he doesn’t want to. With that, he rounds my body to head towards the exit, but before he goes, he turns, putting his chest to my back. I can sense his domineering height. Can feel his overwhelming body heat.  Isaiah’s breath tickles the back of my neck, and every nerve in my body comes to life, including the ones between my legs that I wasn’t sure worked. “Just think of this as one big game.” His tone is low and deep when he leans down to my ear and whispers, “C’mon wife. Play along.
Liz Tomforde (Play Along (Windy City, #4))
The second his hand slipped trying to cut off the top of the wax, Dominic grumbled, “I can do that.” “No, I couldn’t let you,” the waiter said, terrified. Dominic took the bottle out of his hand anyway. “Not a fan of other people serving my wife.
Rory L. Scott (For the Love of the Gods (Tempt the Gods #1))
Did he just say please?” “I think he did,” I answered through a smile. ​ “I mean it,” Dominic said. “One piece.” "Be careful, Dominic,” Lukas chastised. “You’re sounding quite possessive.” “I damn well should,” Dominic shot back. “Allude to fucking my wife again and I’ll break your nose.” ​“But I like my nose,” Lukas pouted.
Rory L. Scott (For the Love of the Gods (Tempt the Gods #1))
What about you? World domination? Best salesman in the world? Trophy wife who sucks you off every night?” I shook my head. “No. I just want to make my mom proud.” “I wasn’t expecting that.” She finally faced me. “Is she hard on you?
Mateo Askaripour (Black Buck)
Madame Lorraine was a rich French woman who lived in an old mansion, which she inherited from her husband. The family had already had many possessions, however, they were ruined in the Revolution. For defending the monarchy, they lost their titles, lands and servants. Madame Lorraine's husband, the old Earl, died in the Reign of Terror, as did her children. The wife, however, had hidden the jewelry at the beginning of the revolution and had left in secret for Switzerland. After the restoration, she returned to France, but with few resources she had, she bought a house in Paris. She complained of loneliness and adopted a little orphan, named Juliette, who she used as a servant. When the girl complained about being overworked, as she had to take care of the entire house alone, her stepmother told her: “your complaints hurt me, you see, I lost everything and I only have you, your mother didn't want you, but I I adopted you and took care of you and you don’t even appreciate that.” The girl, then, victim of emotional blackmail, got used to serving, without complaining. The problem is that every day more and more was demanded – the girl never reached perfection, said Madame Lorraine: “look at the silverware, look at the floor, look at the walls, you will never be able to get married”. However, Madame Lorraine did not tell the girl that perfection is never achieved: it is just a resource to dominate the poor in spirit, who see in the light of their own craft a hope of transcendence. Another thing that Madame Lorraine had not taught the girl – even if the Revolution had taught humanity: that they were free. The girl then grew older and became an object of exploitation every day, her arms becoming weaker, her mind increasingly taken over by obedience. One day, the girl went to the market in the square, and hardly talked to anyone – Madame Lorraine told her that everyone wanted to abuse her and that she shouldn't trust anyone. That day, however, she was exhausted and stopped at a farmer's stand selling tomatoes and said to her: “young man, what's your name, I always see you running around here and you never talk to anyone”. She decided to talk to him: “I'm the old widow's daughter, she says that everyone wants to exploit me, that I shouldn't trust strangers”. The salesman, already aware of the girl's situation from the stories that were circulating in the village, said to her: “Isn't it just the opposite, girl, maybe you haven't learned a lie all your life and now you're trying harder and harder to keep this lie as if it were the truth – see, God made everyone free.” The girl then quickly returned to the house, but doubt had entered her heart and there she began to take root and grow. Until, one day, the old lady released the drop that would overflow her body and said to her: “Well, Juliette, you don't do anything right, look how my dresses are, you didn't sew them perfectly”. The girl then got up, looked the vixen in the eyes and said: “if it’s not good, do it yourself” and left. It is said that she married the farmer in the sale and, from that day on, she was the best wife in the world. Not because she did everything with great care, with an almost divine perfection, that she was modest or because she had freed herself from the shrew who exploited her, but simply because she recognized the value of freedom itself.
Geverson Ampolini
xxx
Lady Alexa (Feminized and Pretty 1: Feminized by his dominant wife (Femdom and transgender))
I'm going to do whatever it takes to make you mine in every way. My wife, the mother of my children, my everything. I'll be thirty-eight in two months. I've devoted most of my adulthood to my career. Now, I want to devote myself to you.
Shayla Black (Four Play)
... the following example for this type of neurotic love relation to be found frequently today fleals with men who in their emotional development have remained stuck in an infantile attachment to mother. These are men who have never been weaned as it were from mother. These men still feel like children; they want mother's protection, love, warmth, care, and admiration; they want mother's unconditional love, a love which is given for no other reason than that they need it, that they are mother's child, that they are helpless. Such men frequently are quite affectionate and charming if they try to induce a woman to love them, and even after they have succeeded in this. But their relationship to the woman (as, in fact, to all othe people) remains superficial and irresponsible. Their aim is to be loved, not to love. There is usually a good deal of vanity in this type of man, more or less hidden grandiose ideas. If they have found the right woman, they feel secure, on top of the world, and can display a great deal of affection and charm, and this is the reason why these men are often so deceptive. But when, after a while, the woman does not continue to live up to their phantastic expectations, conflicts and resentment start to develop. If the woman is not always admiring them, if she makes claims for a life of her own, if She wants to be loved and protected herself, and in extreme cases, if she is not willing to condone his love affairs with other women (or even have an admiring interest in them), the man feels deeply hurt and disappointed, and usually rationalizes this feeling with the idea that the woman 'does not love him, is selfish, or is domineering'. Anything short of the attitude of a loving mother toward a charming child is taken as proof of a lack of love. These men usually confuse their affectionate behavior, their wish to please, with genuine love and thus arrive at the conclusion that they are being treated quite unfairly; they imagine themselves to be the great lovers and complain bitterly about the ingratitude of their love partner. In rare cases such a mother-centered person can function without any severe disturbances. If his mother, in fact, 'loved' him in an overprotective manner (perhaps being domineering, but without being destructive), if he finds a wife of the same motherly type, if his special gifts and talents permit him to use his charm and be admired (as is the case sometimes with successful politicians), he is 'well adjusted' in a social sense, without ever reaching a higher level of maturity. But under less favorable conditions -and these are naturally more frequent- his love life, if not his social life, will be a serious disappointment; conflicts, and frequently intense anxiety and depression arise when this type of personality is left alone.
Erich Fromm (The Art of Loving)
At one point when I was in the middle of the first season, I asked myself why I would want to watch a conservative Democrat destroy teachers’ unions and have joyless sex with a woman who looks like a very young teenager. I still had not answered the question when Claire pushed things to the next level in a scene so intensely creepy that it might count as the most revolting thing I have ever witnessed on television. A longtime member of the couple’s Secret Service security detail is dying of cancer, and Claire goes to visit him alone. On his deathbed, he reveals that he was always secretly in love with her and thought that Frank wasn’t good enough for her. Her response is almost incomprehensible in its cruelty—she mocks and taunts him for thinking he could ever attain a woman like her, and then puts her hand down his pants and begins to give him a handjob, all the while saying, in true perverse style, “This is what you wanted, right?” Surely Claire doesn’t have to emotionally destroy a man who is dying of cancer—and yet perhaps in a way she does, because she uses it as a way of convincing herself that Frank really is the right man for her. Not only could an average, hardworking, sentimental man never satisfy her, but she would destroy him. By contrast, Frank not only can take her abuse, but actively thrives on it, as she does on his. Few images of marriage as a true partnership of equals are as convincing as this constant power struggle between two perverse creeps. Claire is not the first wife in the “high-quality TV drama” genre to administer a humiliating handjob. In fact, she is not even the first wife to administer a humiliating handjob to a man who is dying of cancer. That distinction belongs to Skyler White of Breaking Bad, who does the honors in the show’s pilot. It is intended as a birthday treat for her husband Walt, who is presumably sexually deprived due to his wife’s advanced pregnancy, and so in contrast to Claire’s, it would count as a generous gesture if not for the fact that Skyler continues to work on her laptop the entire time, barely even acknowledging Walt’s presence in the room. In her own way, Skyler is performing her dominance just as much as Claire was with her cancer patient, but Skyler’s detachment from the act makes it somehow even creepier than Claire’s.
Adam Kotsko (Creepiness)
It is nothing to me whether I am in Parliament or not,’ he wrote to his wife on 8 March 1935, ‘unless I can defend the cause in which I believe.’ Churchill’s five-year opposition to the Government’s India policy was sincere and passionate, although individual Ministers sought to portray him as an enemy of Indian aspirations, and as a political wrecker. Churchill was in fact concerned throughout with the future welfare and unity of India, and was worried about the social and political difficulties which would be created by the dominance of the Congress Party.
Martin Gilbert (Winston S. Churchill: The Prophet of Truth, 1922–1939 (Volume V) (Churchill Biography Book 5))
Perhaps one of my biggest lessons was learning the healthy difference between passive, aggressive, and assertive characteristics of behavior. I think this is one of the great balances necessary for healthy individuals and cultures, and I have considered it carefully. To be passive means you don’t stand up for your own rights. To be aggressive means that you stand up for your rights while not honoring the rights of others. Both of these patterns of unhealthy behavior were dominant in our society, with men and women in substantial measure and in all of their relationships. What was missing was assertiveness, as it was predominantly programmed right out of us. Assertiveness means that you stand up for your rights while honoring the rights of others. It is difficult to be manipulated or to manipulate others when you are genuinely assertive, so that was why it was a danger in a culture built on manipulation.
Rebecca Musser (The Witness Wore Red: The 19th Wife Who Brought Polygamous Cult Leaders to Justice)
The New Dog I. “I’m intensely afraid of almost everything. Grocery bags, potted poinsettias, bunches of uprooted weeds wilting on a hot sidewalk, clothes hangers, deflated rubber balls, being looked in the eye, crutches, an overcoat tossed across the back of a chair (everybody knows empty overcoats house ghosts), children, doorways, music, human hands and the newspaper rustling as my owner, in striped pajamas, drinks coffee and turns its pages. He wants to find out where there’ll be war in the mid-east this week. Afraid even of eating, if someone burps or clinks a glass with a fork, or if my owner turns the kitchen faucet on to wash his hands during my meal I go rigid with fear, my legs buckle, then I slink from the room. I pee copiously if my food bowl is placed on the floor before the other dogs’. I have to be served last or the natural order of things - in which every moment I am about to be sacrificed - (have my heart ripped from my chest by the priest wielding his stone knife or get run out of the pack by snarling, snapping alphas) - the most sacred hierarchy, that fated arrangement, the glue of the universe, will unstick. The evolution will never itself, and life as we know it will subside entirely, until only the simplest animal form remain - jellyfish headless globs of cells, with only microscopic whips for legs and tails. Great swirling arms of gas will arm wrestle for eons to win cosmic dominance. Starless, undifferentiated chaos will reign. II. I alone of little escaped a hell of beating, neglect, and snuffling dumpsters for sustenance before this gullible man adopted me. Now my new owner would like me to walk nicely by his side on a leash (without cowering or pulling) and to lie down on a towel when he asks, regardless of whether he has a piece of bologna in his pocket or not. I’m growing fond of that optimistic young man in spite of myself. If only he would heed my warnings I’d pour out my thoughts to him: When panic strikes you like a squall wind and disaster falls on you like a gale, when you are hunted and scorned, wisdom shouts aloud in the streets: What is consciousness? What is sensation? What is mind? What is pain? What about the sorrows of unwatered houseplants? What indoor cloudburst will slake their thirst? What of my littler brothers and sisters, dead at the hands of dirty two legged brutes? Who’s the ghost in the universe behind its existence, necessary to everything that happens? Is it the pajama-clad man offering a strip of bacon in his frightening hand (who’ll take me to the park to play ball if he ever gets dressed)? Is it his quiet, wet-eyed, egg-frying wife? Dear Lord, Is it me?
Amy Gerstler (Ghost Girl)
I lied to you,” she said with a belligerent edge. He hid a smile. “I lied to you.” “I’m domineering and used to getting my own way.” “I like a woman who knows her own mind.” “I’m stubborn and opinionated.” “If I’m contemplating a lifetime with a lassie, I want her to show a bit of spirit.” “I have no society polish. A countess should be sophisticated, whereas I’ve never had a season. I’ve never even been to London.” “Aye, you’ll settle into the Highlands well, then. My home is a long journey from the bright lights of Edinburgh—a wee wife who pines for city life would never be happy with me.” She narrowed her eyes. “I kissed you like there’s no tomorrow.” “Are you trying to convince me for or against?” Her lips twisted in self-denigration. “I’m clearly a woman of wayward morals.” He couldn’t contain his laughter. “Is that right?” Her cheeks were fiery now. “You don’t want to marry a flirt.” “If I’m the only laddie my wife flirts with, I have no objection.” Her expression was a mixture of defiance and shame. “How do you know I don’t kiss every gentleman the way I…I kissed you?” He smiled gently. “Have you ever kissed anyone else like that?” “No.” Her long eyelashes, darker honey than her hair, flickered down. “But that doesn’t mean I won’t.” She was bewitching. He’d admitted to being besotted. Every moment in her company only deepened his enchantment. “I’ll take my chances.” “Surely you want a wife you can trust.” “Apart from your…waywardness and propensity for impersonating fairytale characters, I believe you’re an admirable creature.” “Hardly.” The compliment didn’t please her. “I let you take liberties.” “As your future husband, I’d like to place it on record that I intend to take liberties at every opportunity.” He paused. “Scotland’s a gey chilly place, especially in the winter. I don’t want a cold marriage bed.” She stiffened. “There remains one insurmountable obstacle.” “What’s that?” Her delicate jaw set in an obstinate line. “I don’t want to marry you.” With
Anna Campbell (Stranded with the Scottish Earl)
There is a misperception about black women in society. When a black woman presents expectations to a man, she is seen as needy, bossy and a gold digger. When a woman who is not of African American descent expresses the same thing from a man, she is seen as a trophy wife. When a woman of European descent presents the same thing, she is viewed as a classy woman with standards. When a woman of European descent presents the same standards as a black woman, the Caucasian woman is credited for implementing rules of dating when she expects a man to pay for dinner or when she tells a man what she desires out of a relationship. The value of African American women is reduced not only by dominant culture and society, but by men, particularly African American men. The media, radio, music, television, newspapers and movies have devalued African American women when in reality African American women are honorable, respectable, classy, elegant, beautiful, educated and hardworking women. Dark skin women are viewed as angry, unattractive and uneducated within modern society. African American women are seen as loud, irate, insensitive and angry women as a result of labels from some African American men, media, movies and music. Television, magazines, social media, internet, videos and some music present Hispanic, Latino, White and Armenian women as trophy wives, idols and models while presenting African American women as mistresses, one night stands, casual sex, gold diggers and “baby mamas.” Latino and Dominican women are viewed as physically beautiful while Caucasian women are viewed as ideal and classy within media, music, music videos and movies. Media presents black women as bitter, scorned, ghetto, ratchet and promiscuous as if women of other races do not exhibit those characteristics. Women of other races are on television and the internet using profanity, fighting, engaging in sexual acts and cheating, however, there is an emphasis on African American women who exhibit those behaviors” (McEachern 85).
Jessica McEachern (Societal Perceptions)