Female Explorers Quotes

What is a Wanderess? Bound by no boundaries, contained by no countries, tamed by no time, she is the force of nature’s course.

A woman must prefer her liberty over a man. To be happy, she must. A man to be happy, however, must yearn for his woman more than his liberty. This is the rightful order.

When a Wanderess has been caged, or perched with her wings clipped, She lives like a Stoic, She lives most heroic, smiling with ruby, moistened lips once her cup of Death is welcome sipped.

In actual fact, the female function is to explore, discover, invent, solve problems crack jokes, make music -- all with love. In other words, create a magic world.

When no possessions keep us, when no countries contain us, and no time detains us, man becomes a heroic wanderer, and woman, a wanderess.

Ô, the wine of a woman from heaven is sent, more perfect than all that a man can invent.

She will try to find the nice way to exercise intelligence. But intelligence is not ladylike. Intelligence is full of excesses. Rigorous intelligene abhors sentimentality, and women must be sentimental to value the dreadful silliness of the men around them. Morbid intelligence abhors the cheery sunlight of positive thinking and eternal sweetness; and women must be sunlight and cheery and sweet, or the woman could not bribe her way with smiles through a day. Wild intelligence abhors any narrow world; and the world of women must stay narrow, or the woman is an outlaw. No woman could be Nietzsche or Rimbaud without ending up in a whorehouse or lobotomized. Any vital intelligence has passionate questions, aggressive answers; but women cannot be explorers; there can be no Lewis or Clark of the female mind.

Scent is such a powerful tool of attraction, that if a woman has this tool perfectly tuned, she needs no other. I will forgive her a large nose, a cleft lip, even crossed-eyes; and I’ll bathe in the jouissance of her intoxicating odour.

It means ‘female dog,’” I’d explained to my sisters, “but it also means ‘a woman who’s crabby and won’t let you be yourself.

I could feel his whole body trying to claim me, want me, own me in lust, and it made me feel so valuable and wanted. As I was bent over the table, I felt like I was the world to him, and he could think of nothing else, could feel nothing else: he was consumed with my body, dedicated to exploring my female sexual power and energy, and his desperate hitting of me with the belt felt like he would rather die, than be without the chance to connect with me in sex.

There are books written by women. There are books written by men. Somehow, though, it is only books by women, or books about certain topics, that require this special "women's fiction" designation, particularly when those books have the audacity to explore, in some manner, the female experience, which, apparently, includes the topics of marriage, suburban existence, and parenthood, as if women act alone in these endeavors, wedding themselves, immaculately conceiving children, and the like.

I want to set the example my mother set for me: a strong female role model who faces challenges takes risks and conquers fears. I want my children to know that as women they can do whatever they dream as long as they believe in themselves. More than anything it is my responsibility to instill in my daughters the knowledge that they can have a family and everything else too.

I'm going to go out on a limb here. I've thought a lot about this one, as a feminist, and as an author. How should traditional roles be portrayed? In fantasy literature there is a school of thought that holds that women must be treated precisely like men. Only the traditional male sphere of power and means of wielding power count. If a woman is shown in a traditionally female role, then she must be being shown as inferior. After a lot of thought, and some real-life stabs at those traditional roles, I've come to firmly disagree with this idea. For an author to show that only traditional male power and place matter is to discount and belittle the hard and complex lives of our peers and our ancestresses.

The male, for all his bravado and exploration, is the loyal one, the one who generally feels love. The female is skilled at betrayal and torture and damnation.

Simon laughed heartily. “I’m afraid the rest of us have to find talents to get our women into bed. Of course once they’re there, I have other talents that keep them right where they are.” “Handcuffs hardly count,” Christian said offhandedly. “If you mean the ladies cuffing me to the bed so they can explore Hunt Island,” he said, rubbing his chest, “…then point taken. These hands are capable of making any female climax by the mere brush of a pinky across her bare breast.” “I must have gone to the wrong island,” I said with a private laugh.

To make your life a work of wonder go into the night and wander; penetrate the world asunder, to find your fate in someplace fonder.

I’d loved women who were old and who were young; those extra kilos and large rumps, and others so thin there was barely even skin to pinch, and every time I held them, I worried I would snap them in two. But for all of these: where they had merited my love was in their delicious smell. Scent is such a powerful tool of attraction, that if a woman has this tool perfectly tuned, she needs no other. I will forgive her a large nose, a cleft lip, even crossed-eyes; and I’ll bathe in the jouissance of her intoxicating odour.

She’s looking right at you,” Scott says. As I hold her glittering gaze, I instinctively reach to touch her head. “As supple as leather, as tough as steel, as cold as night,” Hugo wrote of the octopus’s flesh; but to my surprise, her head is silky and softer than custard. Her skin is flecked with ruby and silver, a night sky reflected on the wine-dark sea. As I stroke her with my fingertips, her skin goes white beneath my touch. White is the color of a relaxed octopus; in cuttlefish, close relatives of octopus, females turn white when they encounter a fellow female, someone whom they need not fight or flee.

The systems we will be exploring in order are: ● Breeding Targets: Arousal patterns tied to systems meant to get our ancestors to have sex with things that might bear offspring (e.g., arousal from things like penises, the female form, etc.). ● Inverse Systems: Arousal patterns that arise from a neural mix-up, causing something that disgusts the majority of the population to arouse a small portion of it (e.g., arousal from things like being farted on, dead bodies, having insects poured on one’s face, etc.). ● Emotional States and Concepts / Dominance and Submission: Arousal patterns that stem from either emotional concepts (such as betrayal, transformation, being eaten, etc.) or dominance and submission pathways. ● Emotional Connections to People: While emotional connections do not cause arousal in and of themselves, they do lower the threshold for arousal (i.e., you may become more aroused by a moderately attractive person you love than a very attractive stranger). ● Trope Attraction: Arousal patterns that are enhanced through a target’s adherence to a specific trope (a nurse, a goth person, a cheerleader, etc.). ● Novelty: Arousal patterns tied to the novelty of a particular stimulus. ● Pain and Asphyxiation: Arousal patterns associated with or enhanced by pain and oxygen deprivation. ● Basic Instincts: Remnants of our pre-cognitive mating instincts running off of a “deeper” autopilot-like neurological system (dry humping, etc.) that compel mating behavior without necessarily generating a traditional feeling of arousal. ● Physical Stimuli: Arousal patterns derived from physical interaction (kissing, touching an erogenous zone, etc.). ● Conditioned Responses: Arousal patterns resulting from conditioning (arousal from shoes, doorknobs, etc.).

Solitude takes time, and caregivers to children have no time. Our children demand attention and need care. They ask questions and parents must answer. The number of decisions that go into a week of parenting astonishes me. Women have known for centuries what I have just discovered: going to work every day is far easier than staying home raising children...thoughtful parenting requires time to think, and parents of young children do not have time to think...One middle-aged female writing student spoke to me of feeling she lacked the freedom to "play hooky in nature"; it is an act of leisure men indulge in while women stay at home, keeping domestic life in order. Men often can justify poking around in the woods as a part of their profession, or as part of an acceptably manly activity like hunting or fishing. Women, for generations circumscribed by conventional values, must purposefully create opportunities for solitude, for exploration of nature or ideas, for writing.

female i hope the future really is you not soft, but softer, alternative mainstreamed left sided divinely feminine. a woman is a man with a whoa. exponentially deeper internal seas, wish i had a submarine to explore your ocean floors. smarter because she has to be vulnerable empathy with force, taught remorseful but she has nothing to apologize for, she deserves the sorriest. everything comes first from you every single one born from them by me she is love, loved, loving in the origin of power, you are who i try to be, feminist. you wondered woman, wonderful you.

It is not just men who do not take their pain seriously. Most women do not want to deal with male pain if it interferes with the satisfaction of female desire. When feminist movement led to men’s liberation, including male exploration of “feelings,” some women mocked male emotional expression with the same disgust and contempt as sexist men. Despite all the expressed feminist longing for men of feeling, when men worked to get in touch with feelings, no one really wanted to reward them.

Sex differences in the brain are irresistible to those looking to explain stereotypic differences between men and women,” she told reporters when her paper came out. “They often make a big splash, in spite of being based on small samples. But as we explore multiple data sets and are able to coalesce very large samples of males and females, we find these differences often disappear or are trivial.

As an observer, I am particularly interested in watching women, married, divorced, single. So many of them trapped in lives they think they must live, in roles they have come to resent, with little job and no laughter. They've "settled." They've compromised. They've learned to adjust. Among the divorced, many are bitter, coloring their lives with resentment; others live only to meet the man who will complete them. I have no intentions of adjusting, and I am not looking to define myself by the man I am with. The new me is feeling rebellious, looking for excitement, bursting with energy to explore. There is no way that I am going to sit around feeling sorry for myself, thinking that the only way I can enjoy life is with a man. With no possessions, no home, and no precedent, I am free to design a life that fits me. Best of all, I have tasted the life I want. My Mexican adventure opened me up. I want more. During my four months away, I met interesting people, I was never bored, and I laughed more than I had in years. I resolve to continue exploring the world, ignoring the THEY who define how people should live.

I wanted to be regarded as an accomplished explorer rather than as an accomplished female explorer. I wanted to encourage other women to fulfill their dreams despite imposed gender barriers. I wanted other women to know that difficult endeavors are possible and success is worth celebrating.

It often horrified the English community that she spent her time with local farmers and horse traders, eccentrics and mystics, but she valued expertise over convention and had long believed if you were going to make discoveries in the world you must first quit your Englishness and open your eyes.

Much of what is written on the craft is biased in one way or another, so weed out what is useful to you and ignore the rest. I see the next few years as being crucial in the transformation of our culture away from the patriarchal death cults and toward the love of life, of nature, of the female principle. The craft is only one path among the many opening up for women, and many of us will blaze new trails as we explore the uncharted country of our own interiors. The heritage, the culture, the knowledge of the ancient priestesses, healers, poets, singers, and seers were nearly lost, but a seed survived the flames that will blossom in a new age into thousands of flowers. The long sleep of Mother Goddess is ended. May She awaken in each of our hearts ~~ Merry meet, merry part, and blessed be.

She teetered to catch her balance, but his arm still held her, kept her from falling. And then his mouth crashed down on hers and her balance went wonky for other reasons. Kate clutched his shoulders and moaned, parting her lips to his fierce kiss. The smell of his familiar, spicy cologne filled her senses. His tongue explored every inch of her mouth, his hands roving over her body. It was deliberate. A man staking his claim. Every female instinct inside of her could sense it.

Cisnormativity is a set of ideas, and the practices which reflect them, that assume 'sex' is binary (male or female), that 'gender' is necessarily and always the same as 'sex', and that people live in the gender they were assigned at birth. Moreover, it assumes that genders, bodies, and personal identities match each other.

[D]on’t wait for the good woman. She doesn’t exist. There are women who can make you feel more with their bodies and their souls but these are the exact women who will turn the knife into you right in front of the crowd. Of course, I expect this, but the knife still cuts. The female loves to play man against man, and if she is in a position to do it there is not one who will not resist. The male, for all his bravado and exploration, is the loyal one, the one who generally feels love. The female is skilled at betrayal. and torture and damnation.

Across ideological differences, the femjnists have realized that a hierarchical ranking of human faculties and the identification of women with a degraded conception of corporeal reality has been instrumental, historically, to the consolidation of patriarchal power and the male exploration of female labor. Thus, analyses of sexuality, procreation, and mothering have been at the center of feminist theory and women's history. In particular, feminists have uncovered and denounced the strategies and the violence by means of which male-centered systems of exploitation have attempted to discipline and appropriate the female body, demonstrating that women's bodies have been the main targets, the privileged sites, for the deployment of power techniques and power relations. and power-relations

Merrill Hartweiss scales a rocky incline toward Renna. The noon sun bakes the hillside as Merrill's boots dig into the broiling sands. Yet another gypsy tune enters his head. It starts off slowly. A lone guitar, its strings strummed with the lustful passion of a young man brushing his fingertips softly against the breasts of his lover. Another guitar joins, like a second hand, exploring her hot flesh, stroking the side of her bare abdomen, and gradually moving upward toward her chest. Then, a female voice joins the guitars; it is slightly raspy, yet sultry; filled with a fiery allure. The guitars pick up in intensity and tempo. There is a rhythmic clapping now, in synchronization with the strumming. The man has entered his lover. Sweat begins to form on Merrill's forehead, then quickly turns to vapor, dissipating into the blistering heat from the sunlight reflecting off the sands. Steady clapping, louder still. The tempo quickens, progressively and with a vigorous intensity. The man arches his back, cresting then falling; cresting, arching, rising and falling deeper again and again into his lover. The clapping, now faster, still rhythmic, but so much more intense. The guitars keep pace with increasing ferocity. In the woman's voice, short, quick breaths form words as she cries out her lover's name from deep within the throes of a forbidden love

Alas, it was in vain that I implored the dungeon-keep of Roussainville, that I begged it to send out to meet me some daughter of its village, appealing to it as to the sole confidant to whom I had disclosed my earliest desire when, from the top floor of our house at Combray, from the little room that smelt of orris-root, I had peered out and seen nothing but its tower, framed in the square of the half-opened window, while, with the heroic scruples of a traveller setting forth for unknown climes, or of a desperate wretch hesitating on the verge of self-destruction, faint with emotion, I explored, across the bounds of my own experience, an untrodden path which, I believed, might lead me to my death, even—until passion spent itself and left me shuddering among the sprays of flowering currant which, creeping in through the window, tumbled all about my body. In vain I called upon it now. In vain I compressed the whole landscape into my field of vision, draining it with an exhaustive gaze which sought to extract from it a female creature.

Biological, phenotypic, and chromosomal sex differences of 'male' and 'female' are considered as having a biological (organic) basis, in contrast to the role meanings afforded to these sexes in the form of 'masculine' and 'feminine' genders, which may be considered as social constructs.

I took quite an interest in polar expeditions. And I've been familiar with explorers who were still investigating polar zones, especially Greenland, with dog sleighs. What matters with dog sleighs is the guide. The guide is often a female dog, who is particularly subtle, and knows there's a crevice 25 or 30 meters ahead. Yet we can't see it under the snow. So we shall say she is violent because she warns the dog sleighs they're going to fall into the crevice, a 60 to 70 meter drop into a hole, and that will be it, death. Well, maybe I have the astuteness of a female dog leading dog sleighs, nothing more than that.

In times of colonial expansion, when support for the slave trade was required, the historian fed readers tales of explorers and conquerors. When soldiers were needed, ready to die for king and country, the historian gave them heroes and warriors. When society favored male dominance and female subservience, the historian provided male oriented history What about writing history now, at a time when so many are striving for greater equality? Can looking backward impact how we look forward? Finding empowered women with agency from the medieval period is my way of shifting gear, providing new narratives for readers today.

Her character inverts the traditional model of hero in which the male lead is the rescuer and the female lead is helper or victim. It is Olivia who protects and defends the world, not with intimidating martial arts moves or seduction, but rather by using her professional training and intellect to rescue those who are in danger.

She was a romantic, and as I had never met a female romantic before it was a delight to me to explore her emotions. She wanted to know all about me, and I told her as honestly as I could; but as I was barely twenty, and a romantic myself, I know now that I lied in every word I uttered—lied not in fact but in emphasis, in colour, and in intention.

She’s not a mere duplicate of the male version, as many female heroes tend to be characterized, simply adopting the masculine narrative, nor is she a hyper-sexualized object using seduction as the source of her strength. Olivia is not overly emotional, but she’s sensitive when the occasion arises. Because she plays such an even-keeled, reasonable character (one long-criticized for being “wooden”), her moments of vulnerability, anger, or lust are that much more compelling. Though she is “haunted” as Peter says (“Over There, Part 2”), she is not vengeful or hateful. In fact this may be a key reason why fans were so completely underwhelmed by her character in season 1: Olivia’s no drama queen. She tries her best to be impartial, honest, and painstakingly reasonable.

In the midst of what appears to be a traditional male-power fantasy about war and politics, he serves up a grim, realistic, and harrowing depiction of what happens when women aren’t fully empowered in a society. In doing so, by creating such diverse and fully rendered female characters and thrusting them into this grim and bitter world, Martin has created a subversively feminist tale.

Traveling together into what the poet Adrienne Rich has called ‘the cratered night of female memory,’ they undertook a shared process of self-discovery, working together to probe the possibility of woman’s creative power. Through their exploration of hermetic and magical paths, they developed a common pictorial language, derived from the realms of domestic life, the fairy tale and the dream.

Now, when I can bring myself to think of that time at all—another blackout, by beauty, of the cities of memory—my sadness can’t shake off the rage that follows it close behind. To whom do I petition for that lost year? How many inches in height did I lose from having calcium withheld from my bones, their osteoblasts struggling without nourishment to multiply? How many years sooner will a brittle spine bend my neck down? In the Kafkaesque departments of this bureau of hunger, which charged me guilty for a crime no more specific than inhabiting a female body, what door do I knock upon? Who is obliged to make reparations to me for the thought abandoned, the energy never found, the explorations never considered? Who owes me for the yearlong occupation of a mind at the time of its most urgent growth?

Barcelona is the type of city where you can leave your accommodation in the morning and explore all day. On a typical day, you may be taking the subway, waiting in lines at busy tourist attractions, wandering through museums and romantic neighbourhoods, and sitting down for food and drinks at one of the many tapas bars before heading out to an upscale restaurant. Your outfits will work best if they can take you from day to night.

Victorian novelists such as George Eliot could write about female vocation as at least a meaningful ambition, but in the claustrophobic world of Sense and Sensibility, marriage is the only eligible destiny. In this respect, the courtship plot that structures all six of Austen’s published novels, though sometimes held to imply her endorsement of a patriarchal status quo, is equally a means of exploring themes of female disempowerment.

The experience of sexual love is therefore no longer to be sought as the repetition of a familiar ecstasy, prejudiced by the expectation of what we already know. It will be the exploration of our relationship with an ever-changing, ever unknown, partner, unknown because he or she is not in truth the abstract role or person, the set of conditioned reflexes which society has imposed, the stereotyped male or female which education has led us to expect.

Woman lost (skin deep) like a damn fine thread in the fire Woman of the world caught up in your black machinations I was a woman who cried alone at night, who gave it all away when she saw the good heart of the man inside Woman caught standing up; her open parts are broken - Someone's armour broke right through, it was you, you For some reason I've been thinking about you, your light Today, you poured out all the tension, the ego underground Hibernating inside my heart. I was so close to it, to the flicker Of love in a lonely street and I turned my head and walked Away from the flame in your arms. As I put away the fun in A house of fight I came across you and a mechanism in My brain shifted chemically, walls caved in like the cadence In your words and I was lost in the darkness. Even now in Middle age I remember when desire was a popular drug And everyone was selling it but I don't live to explore to be Able to illuminate the proof of my existence, live to burn Vicariously though the diamond mouth of sleeping stars. From so much love, pictures of death arrived in black and White photographs and you're perfect, you always were - Illusions have no flaws; they're dangerous beings, smoke. Could I take the moon back and still live with my great Expectations of nostalgia, laughter, tears and suffering - But they are all a part of me not the people of the stars, Long dead videotape, the past has stained the symphony Of my soul (like the wind through the trees) throughout Me finding myself, my two left feet as a female poet The warning was there of the noise of eternity, signs That said, don't anger the sea, you have an ally in her. When men grow cold listen to their stories and bask in The glory of their genuine deaths, their winters, put Them away so you can read them like the newspaper. Once in a while you can go back to where you stood In youth with your afternoon tea, the sun of God in our Eyes - I am that kind of woman who lives in the past

Are the religious individuals in a society more moral than the secular ones? Many researchers have looked into this, and the main finding is that there are few interesting findings. There are subtle effects here and there: some studies find, for instance, that the religious are slightly more prejudiced, but this effect is weak when one factors out other considerations, such as age and political attitudes, and exists only when religious belief is measured in certain ways. The only large effect is that religious Americans give more to charity (including nonreligious charities) than atheists do. This holds even when one controls for demographics (religious Americans are more likely than average to be older, female, southern, and African American). To explore why this relationship exists, the political scientists Robert Putnam and David Campbell asked people about life after death, the importance of God to morality, and various other facets of religious belief. It turns out that none of their answers to such questions were related to behaviors having to do with volunteering and charitable giving. Rather, participation in the religious community was everything. As Putnam and Campbell put it, “Once we know how observant a person is in terms of church attendance, nothing that we can discover about the content of her religious faith adds anything to our understanding or prediction of her good neighborliness.… In fact, the statistics suggest that even an atheist who happened to become involved in the social life of the congregation (perhaps through a spouse) is much more likely to volunteer in a soup kitchen than the most fervent believer who prays alone. It is religious belongingness that matters for neighborliness, not religious believing.” This importance of community, and the irrelevance of belief, extends as well to the nastier effects of religion. The psychologist Jeremy Ginges and his colleagues found a strong relationship between religiosity and support for suicide bombing among Palestinian Muslims, and, again, the key factor was religious community, not religious belief: mosque attendance predicted support for suicide attacks; frequency of prayer did not. Among Indonesian Muslims, Mexican Catholics, British Protestants, Russian Orthodox in Russia, Israeli Jews, and Indian Hindus, frequency of religious attendance (but again, not frequency of prayer) predicts responses to questions such as “I blame people of other religions for much of the trouble in this world.

Note: I won’t be considering any theologically based Judeo-Christian views about these subjects beyond this broad summary here. As far as I can tell, most of the theological discussions center around omniscience—if God’s all-knowingness includes knowing the future, how can we ever freely, willingly choose between two options (let alone be judged for our choice)? Amid the numerous takes on this, one answer is that God is outside of time, such that past, present, and future are meaningless concepts (implying, among other things, that God could never relax by going to a movie and being pleasantly surprised by a plot turn—He always knows that the butler didn’t do it). Another answer is one of the limited God, something explored by Aquinas—God cannot sin, cannot make a boulder too heavy for Him to lift, cannot make a square circle (or, as another example that I’ve seen offered by a surprising number of male but not female theologians, even God cannot make a married bachelor). In other words, God cannot do everything, He can just do whatever is possible, and foreseeing whether someone will choose good or evil is not knowable, even for Him. Related to this all, Sam Harris mordantly notes that even if we each have a soul, we sure didn’t get to pick it.

Against this catalog of social difficulties, we must keep in mind that AS involves a different kind of intelligence. The strong drive to systemize means that the person with AS becomes a specialist in something, or even in everything they delve into. One man with AS in Denmark who I met put it this way: “You people [without AS] are generalists, content to know a little bit about a lot of subjects. We people [with AS] are specialists. Once we start to explore a subject, we do not leave it until we have gathered as much information as we can.” In effect, the systemizing drive in AS is often a drive to identify the underlying structure in the world.

There is no one way of seeing. Nor is there a right way of seeing. Yet simply to accept the notion that both the male and the female gaze are equally valid and equally to be valued in cinema (and in life) is to welcome with relief the rise of women directors. Needless to say, there are whole aspects of human experience that women are much better positioned to explore, including friendship between women, anxieties about women’s careers, women’s parenting and aging, women’s social concerns and, as in the work of Kathryn Bigelow, men as seen through women’s eyes. Likewise, though romance may be of equal concern to both sexes, a woman’s perspective will inevitably be different.

Now, if female fat is sexuality and reproductive power; if food is honor; if dieting is semistarvation; if women have to lose 23 percent of their body weight to fit the Iron Maiden and chronic psychological disruption sets in at a body weight loss of 25 percent; if semistarvation is physically and psychologically debilitating, and female strength, sexuality, and self-respect pose the threats explored earlier against the vested interests of society; if women’s journalism is sponsored by a $33- billion industry whose capital is made out of the political fear of women; then we can understand why the Iron Maiden is so thin. The thin “ideal” is not beautiful aesthetically; she is beautiful as a political solution.

She leant back while the more earnest members of the club began to misconstrue her. The female mind, though cruelly practical in daily life, cannot bear to hear ideals belittled in conversation, and Miss Schlegel was asked however she could say such dreadful things, and what it would profit Mr. Bast if he gained the whole world and lost his own soul. She answered: “Nothing, but he would not gain his soul until he had gained a little of the world.” Then they said no they did not believe it, and she admitted that an overworked clerk may save his soul in the superterrestrial sense, where the effort will be taken for the deed, but she denied that he will ever explore the spiritual resources of this world, will ever know the rarer joys of the body, or attain to clear and passionate intercourse with his fellows.

Nothing could have been more childish than her snubbed nose, freckled face or the purplish spot on her naked neck where a fairytale vampire had feasted, or the unconscious movement of her tongue exploring a touch of rosy rash around her swollen lips; nothing could be more harmless than to read about Jill, an energetic starlet who made her own clothes and was a student of serious literature; nothing could be more innocent than the part in that glossy brown hair with that silky sheen on the temple; nothing could be more naive—But what sickening envy the lecherous fellow whoever he was—come to think of it, he resembled a little my Swiss uncle Gustave, also a great admirer of le découvert—would have experienced had he known that every nerve in me was still anointed and ringed with the feel of her body—the body of some immortal demon disguised as a female child.

Miss Boyd’s voyages to Greenland were conducted during a transitional period in polar exploration between “the Golden Age,” in which conquering the poles was accomplished by overland routes and by sea, and the modern technological era heralded by early polar flights by Amundsen, Ellsworth, and Byrd. Gillis wrote that Louise Arner Boyd “represented one of the last revivals of a Victorian phenomenon the wealthy explorer who poured a personal fortune into expeditions aimed at advancing science and satisfying profound personal curiosity.” [3] In rejecting a sedate and sheltered life as a wealthy wife and mother, she defied societal expectations. But she also challenged the ideal of a polar explorer as defined by manliness, stoicism, and heroism. Her seven daring expeditions to northern Norway and Greenland between 1926 and 1955 paved the way for later female polar explorers,

All at once, something wonderful happened, although at first, it seemed perfectly ordinary. A female goldfinch suddenly hove into view. She lighted weightlessly on the head of a bankside purple thistle and began emptying the seedcase, sowing the air with down. The lighted frame of my window filled. The down rose and spread in all directions, wafting over the dam’s waterfall and wavering between the tulip trunks and into the meadow. It vaulted towards the orchard in a puff; it hovered over the ripening pawpaw fruit and staggered up the steep faced terrace. It jerked, floated, rolled, veered, swayed. The thistle down faltered down toward the cottage and gusted clear to the woods; it rose and entered the shaggy arms of pecans. At last it strayed like snow, blind and sweet, into the pool of the creek upstream, and into the race of the creek over rocks down. It shuddered onto the tips of growing grasses, where it poised, light, still wracked by errant quivers. I was holding my breath. Is this where we live, I thought, in this place in this moment, with the air so light and wild? The same fixity that collapses stars and drives the mantis to devour her mate eased these creatures together before my eyes: the thick adept bill of the goldfinch, and the feathery coded down. How could anything be amiss? If I myself were lighter and frayed, I could ride these small winds, too, taking my chances, for the pleasure of being so purely played. The thistle is part of Adam’s curse. “Cursed is the ground for thy sake, in sorrow shalt thou eat of it; thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee.” A terrible curse: But does the goldfinch eat thorny sorrow with the thistle or do I? If this furling air is fallen, then the fall was happy indeed. If this creekside garden is sorrow, then I seek martyrdom. I was weightless; my bones were taut skins blown with buoyant gas; it seemed that if I inhaled too deeply, my shoulders and head would waft off. Alleluia.

Our exploration into advertising and media is at its root a critique of the exploitative nature of capitalism and consumerism. Our economic systems shape how we see our bodies and the bodies of others, and they ultimately inform what we are compelled to do and buy based on that reflection. Profit-greedy industries work with media outlets to offer us a distorted perception of ourselves and then use that distorted self-image to sell us remedies for the distortion. Consider that the female body type portrayed in advertising as the “ideal” is possessed naturally by only 5 percent of American women. Whereas the average U.S. woman is five feet four inches tall and weighs 140 pounds, the average U.S. model is five feet eleven and weighs 117. Now consider a People magazine survey which reported that 80 percent of women respondents said images of women on television and in the movies made them feel insecure. Together, those statistics and those survey results illustrate a regenerative market of people who feel deficient based on the images they encounter every day, seemingly perfectly matched with advertisers and manufacturers who have just the products to sell them (us) to fix those imagined deficiencies.18

Male power and patriarchy are clearly part of the picture. Men historically created the workplace rules and influenced social norms that overlooked sexual harassment. An evolutionary perspective highlights an underlying sexual psychology that influences these male-biased practices. Studies by psychologist John Bargh and his colleagues, for example, explored the unconscious links between power and sex.25 One study found that men experienced an unconscious association between the concepts of power and sex, but this occurred only for men who scored high on a “likelihood to sexually harass” scale. In these men’s minds, concepts like “authority” and “boss” were automatically linked with concepts like “foreplay,” “bed,” and “date.” Their second study primed men to think about power and subsequently asked them to rate the attractiveness of a female confederate in the room who the men believed was just another study participant. Again, only men scoring high in likelihood to sexually harass viewed the woman as especially attractive and expressed a desire to get to know her. In short, power and sex are linked, but primarily in the minds of a subset of men. This may explain why only a minority of men in positions of power over women sexually harass them; many men with power do not.

Her delicate, nimble fingers stroked across his stomach muscles. He sucked in a breath, words deserting him. She pushed his shirt up his chest, her hands immediately going back to sweeping across his stomach, sending heat streaking through him. "Ooh, someone's been working out. You feel so good," she murmured. "I bet you taste even better." "Sloane." Instead of the semi-warning tone he was going for, his voice broke off in a quiver as she lowered her mouth. The first touch of her lips on his abdomen sent his pulse skyrocketing. "I was right. You taste so good." She lifted her glittering eyes. "Let me play." This was her party. She was feeling good. He wanted to flip their bodies and taste every inch of her body, but she wanted this. And he wanted whatever she wanted. He nodded, since talking was beyond him at the moment. He sat up to whip his shirt over his head, then returned to his prone position. He was immediately rewarded with her mouth on his neck. "You have the best Adam's apple," she murmured. "I've lusted after it for over a decade." His laughter turned into a moan when her lips and hands continued exploring. "The veins in your forearms turn me on," she whispered. "I command you to wear dress shirts every day and then as soon as you see me, roll up your sleeves very slowly, so I can lust after them in public." "Got it.

Hungrily, Nick pulled her with him into the hot rain of the shower-bath. Turning her face out of the stream of water, Lottie rested her head on his shoulder, standing passively as his hands slid over her body. Her breasts were small but plump in his hands, the nipples turning hard in the clasp of his fingers. He shaped his hands over her unrestricted waist, the swell of her hips, her round backside... caressing her everywhere, moving her against the engorged length of his sex. Moaning, she parted her thighs in compliance with his exploring hand, pushing her delicate flesh against his stroking thumb. As he entered her with his fingers, she gasped and instinctively relaxed at the gentle penetration. He caressed her, stroking in deep, secret places that brought her to the brink of climax. When she was ready to come, he lifted her against the tiled wall, one arm beneath her hips, the other behind her back. She made a sound of surprise and clung to him, her eyes widening as he pushed his cock inside her. Her flesh closed tightly around him, swallowing every inch of his shaft as he let her settle against him. "I've got you," he murmured, her slippery body locked securely in his arms. "Don't be afraid." Breathing fast, she rested her head back against his arm. With the hot water falling against his back, and the lush female body impaled on his, every lucid thought promptly evaporated. He filled her in heavy upward surges, again and again, until she cried out and clamped around him in luxurious contractions. Nick held still, feeling her quiver around him, the depths of her body becoming almost unbearably snug. Her spasms seemed to pull him deeper, drawing waves of pleasure from his groin, and he shuddered as he spent inside her.

The reality is that men are hurting and that the whole culture responds to them by saying, “Please do not tell us what you feel.” I have always been a fan of the Sylvia cartoon where two women sit, one looking into a crystal ball as the other woman says, “He never talks about his feelings.” And the woman who can see the future says, “At two P.M. all over the world men will begin to talk about their feelings—and women all over the world will be sorry.” If we cannot heal what we cannot feel, by supporting patriarchal culture that socializes men to deny feelings, we doom them to live in states of emotional numbness. We construct a culture where male pain can have no voice, where male hurt cannot be named or healed. It is not just men who do not take their pain seriously. Most women do not want to deal with male pain if it interferes with the satisfaction of female desire. When feminist movement led to men’s liberation, including male exploration of “feelings,” some women mocked male emotional expression with the same disgust and contempt as sexist men. Despite all the expressed feminist longing for men of feeling, when men worked to get in touch with feelings, no one really wanted to reward them. In feminist circles men who wanted to change were often labeled narcissistic or needy. Individual men who expressed feelings were often seen as attention seekers, patriarchal manipulators trying to steal the stage with their drama. When I was in my twenties, I would go to couples therapy, and my partner of more than ten years would explain how I asked him to talk about his feelings and when he did, I would freak out. He was right. It was hard for me to face that I did not want to hear about his feelings when they were painful or negative, that I did not want my image of the strong man truly challenged by learning of his weaknesses and vulnerabilities. Here I was, an enlightened feminist woman who did not want to hear my man speak his pain because it revealed his emotional vulnerability. It stands to reason, then, that the masses of women committed to the sexist principle that men who express their feelings are weak really do not want to hear men speak, especially if what they say is that they hurt, that they feel unloved. Many women cannot hear male pain about love because it sounds like an indictment of female failure. Since sexist norms have taught us that loving is our task whether in our role as mothers or lovers or friends, if men say they are not loved, then we are at fault; we are to blame.

The archaeologist attached to the Bayard Dominick’s Marquesan team had reported in 1925 that the Marquesas offered “few opportunities for archaeological research.” But in 1956, a new expedition set out to reexamine the possibilities in these islands at the eastern edge of the Polynesian Triangle. An energetic Columbia University graduate student named Robert Suggs was sent ahead to reconnoiter, and he quickly discovered that the previous generation had gotten it all wrong. Everywhere he looked, he saw archaeological potential. “We were seldom out of sight of some relic of the ancient Marquesan culture,” he writes. “Through all the valleys were scattered clusters of ruined house platforms. . . . Overgrown with weeds, half tumbled down beneath the weight of toppled trees and the pressure of the inexorable palm roots, these ancient village sites were sources of stone axes, carved stone pestles, skulls, and other sundry curios.” There were ceremonial plazas “hundreds of feet long” and, high on the cliffs above the deep valleys, “burial caves containing the remains of the population of centuries past.” The coup de grâce came when Suggs and his guide followed up on a report of a large number of “pig bones” in the dunes at a place called Ha‘atuatua. This windswept expanse of scrub and sand lies on the exposed eastern corner of Nuku Hiva. A decade earlier, in 1946, a tidal wave had cut away part of the beach, and since then bones and other artifacts had been washing out of the dunes. Not knowing quite what to expect, Suggs and his guide rode over on horseback. When they came out of the “hibiscus tangle” at the back of the beach and “caught sight of the debris washing down the slope,” he writes, “I nearly fell out of the saddle.” The bones that were scattered all along the slope and on the beach below were not pig bones but human bones! Ribs, vertebrae, thigh bones, bits of skull vault, and innumerable hand and foot bones were everywhere. At the edge of the bank a bleached female skull rested upside down, almost entirely exposed. Where the bank had been cut away, a dark horizontal band about two feet thick could be seen between layers of clean white sand. Embedded in this band were bits of charcoal and saucers of ash, fragments of pearl shell, stone and coral tools, and large fitted stones that appeared to be part of a buried pavement. They had discovered the remains of an entire village, complete with postholes, cooking pits, courtyards, and burials. The time was too short to explore the site fully, but the very next year, Suggs and his wife returned to examine it. There

Most disconcerting of all were those experiences in which the patient's consciousness appeared to expand beyond the usual boundaries of the ego and explore what it was like to be other living things and even other objects. For example, Grof had one female patient who suddenly became convinced she had assumed the identity of a female prehistoric reptile. She not only gave a richly detailed description of what it felt like to be encapsuled in such a form, but noted that the portion of the male of the species' anatomy she found most sexually arousing was a patch of colored scales on the side of its head. Although the woman had no prior knowledge of such things, a conversation Grof had with a zoologist later confirmed that in certain species of reptiles, colored areas on the head do indeed play an important role as triggers of sexual arousal. Patients were also able to tap into the consciousness of their relatives and ancestors. One woman experienced what it was like to be her mother at the age of three and accurately described a frightening event that had befallen her mother at the time. The woman also gave a precise description of the house her mother had lived in as well as the white pinafore she had been wearing—all details her mother later confirmed and admitted she had never talked about before. Other patients gave equally accurate descriptions of events that had befallen ancestors who had lived decades and even centuries before. Other experiences included the accessing of racial and collective memories. Individuals of Slavic origin experienced what it was like to participate in the conquests of Genghis Khan's Mongolian hordes, to dance in trance with the Kalahari bushmen, to undergo the initiation rites of the Australian aborigines, and to die as sacrificial victims of the Aztecs. And again the descriptions frequently contained obscure historical facts and a degree of knowledge that was often completely at odds with the patient's education, race, and previous exposure to the subject. For instance, one uneducated patient gave a richly detailed account of the techniques involved in the Egyptian practice of embalming and mummification, including the form and meaning of various amulets and sepulchral boxes, a list of the materials used in the fixing of the mummy cloth, the size and shape of the mummy bandages, and other esoteric facets of Egyptian funeral services. Other individuals tuned into the cultures of the Far East and not only gave impressive descriptions of what it was like to have a Japanese, Chinese, or Tibetan psyche, but also related various Taoist or Buddhist teachings.

Herbenick invited me to sit in on the Human Sexuality class she was about to teach, one of the most popular courses on Indiana’s campus. She was, on that day, delivering a lecture on gender disparities in sexual satisfaction. More than one hundred fifty students were already seated in the classroom when we arrived, nearly all of them female, most dressed in sweats, their hair pulled into haphazard ponytails. They listened raptly as Herbenick explained the vastly different language young men and young women use when describing “good sex.” “Men are more likely to talk about pleasure, about orgasm,” Herbenick said. “Women talk more about absence of pain. Thirty percent of female college students say they experience pain during their sexual encounters as opposed to five percent of men.” The rates of pain among women, she added, shoot up to 70 percent when anal sex is included. Until recently, anal sex was a relatively rare practice among young adults. But as it’s become disproportionately common in porn—and the big payoff in R-rated fare such as Kingsman and The To Do List—it’s also on the rise in real life. In 1992 only 16 percent of women aged eighteen to twenty-four said they had tried anal sex. Today 20 percent of women eighteen to nineteen have, and by ages twenty to twenty-four it’s up to 40 percent. A 2014 study of heterosexuals sixteen to eighteen years old—and can we pause for a moment to consider just how young that is?—found that it was mainly boys who pushed for “fifth base,” approaching it less as a form of intimacy with a partner (who they assumed would both need to be and could be coerced into it) than a competition with other boys. Girls were expected to endure the act, which they consistently reported as painful. Both sexes blamed that discomfort on the girls themselves, for being “naïve or flawed,” unable to “relax.” Deborah Tolman has bluntly called anal “the new oral.” “Since all girls are now presumed to have oral sex in their repertoire,” she said, “anal sex is becoming the new ‘Will she do it or not?’ behavior, the new ‘Prove you love me.’” And still, she added, “girls’ sexual pleasure is not part of the equation.” According to Herbenick, the rise of anal sex places new pressures on young women to perform or else be labeled a prude. “It’s a metaphor, a symbol in one concrete behavior for the lack of education about sex, the normalization of female pain, and the way what had once been stigmatized has, over the course of a decade, become expected. If you don’t want to do it you’re suddenly not good enough, you’re frigid, you’re missing out, you’re not exploring your sexuality, you’re not adventurous.

He gripped the sides of her body carefully, keeping her in place as he parted her with his tongue and stroked the sides of the soft furrow. Entranced by the vulnerable shaper of her, he lapped at the edges of softly unfurled lips and tickled them lightly. The delicate flesh was unbelievably hot, almost steaming. He blew a stream of cooling air over it, and relished the sound of her moan. Gently he licked up through the center, a long glide through silk and salty female dampness. She squirmed, her thighs spreading as he explored her with flicks and soft jabs. The slower he went, the more agitated she became. He paused to rest the flat of his tongue on the little pearl of her clitoris to feel its frantic throbbing, and she jerked and struggled to a half-sitting position. Pausing, Keir lifted his head. "What is it, muirninn?" Red-faced, gasping, she tried to pull him over her. "Make love to me." "'Tis what I'm doing," he said, and dove back down. "No- Keir- I meant now, right now-" She quivered as he chuckled into the dark patch of curls. "What are you laughing at?" she asked. "At you, my wee impatient bully." She looked torn between indignation and begging. "But I'm ready," she said plaintively. Keir tried to enter her with two fingers, but the tight, tender muscle resisted. "You're no' ready," he mocked gently. "Weesht now, and lie back. 'Tis one time you won't be having your way." He nuzzled between her thighs and sank his tongue deep into the heat and honey of her. She jerked at the feel of it, but he made a soothing sound and took more of the intimate flavor he needed, had to have, would never stop wanting. Moving back up to the little bud where all sensation centered, he sucked at it lightly until she was gasping and shaking all over. He tried to work two fingers inside her again, and this time they were accepted, her depths clenching and relaxing repeatedly. As he stroked her with his tongue, he found a rhythm that sent a hard quiver through her. He kept the pace steady and unhurried, making her work for it, making her writhe and arch and beg, and it was even better than he'd imagined, having her so wild beneath him, hearing her sweet little wanton noises. There was a suspended moment as it all caught up to her... she arched as taut as a drawn bow... caught her breath... and began to shudder endlessly. A deep and primal satisfaction filled him at the sounds of her pleasure, and the sweet pulsing around his fingers. He drew out the feeling, patiently licking every twitch and tremor until at last she subsided and went limp beneath him. Even then, he couldn't stop. It felt too good. He kept lapping gently, loving the salty, silky wetness of her. Her weak voice floated down to him... "Oh, God... I don't think... Keir, I can't..." He nibbled and teased, breathing hotly against the tender core. "Put your legs over my shoulders," he whispered. In a moment, she obeyed. He could feel the trembling in her thighs. A satisfied smile flicked across his mouth, and he pressed her hips upward to a new angle. Soon he'd have her begging again, he thought, and lowered his head with a soft growl of enjoyment.

One can take the ape out of the jungle, but not the jungle out of the ape. This also applies to us, bipedal apes. Ever since our ancestors swung from tree to tree, life in small groups has been an obsession of ours. We can’t get enough of politicians thumping their chests on television, soap opera stars who swing from tryst to tryst, and reality shows about who’s in and who’s out. It would be easy to make fun of all this primate behavior if not for the fact that our fellow simians take the pursuit of power and sex just as seriously as we do. We share more with them than power and sex, though. Fellow-feeling and empathy are equally important, but they’re rarely mentioned as part of our biological heritage. We would much rather blame nature for what we don’t like in ourselves than credit it for what we do like. As Katharine Hepburn famously put it in The African Queen, ”Nature, Mr. Allnut, is what we are put in this world to rise above.” This opinion is still very much with us. Of the millions of pages written over the centuries about human nature, none are as bleak as those of the last three decades, and none as wrong. We hear that we have selfish genes, that human goodness is a sham, and that we act morally only to impress others. But if all that people care about is their own good, why does a day-old baby cry when it hears another baby cry? This is how empathy starts. Not very sophisticated perhaps, but we can be sure that a newborn doesn’t try to impress. We are born with impulses that draw us to others and that later in life make us care about them. The possibility that empathy is part of our primate heritage ought to make us happy, but we’re not in the habit of embracing our nature. When people commit genocide, we call them ”animals”. But when they give to the poor, we praise them for being ”humane”. We like to claim the latter behavior for ourselves. It wasn’t until an ape saved a member of our own species that there was a public awakening to the possibility of nonhuman humaneness. This happened on August 16, 1996, when an eight-year-old female gorilla named Binti Jua helped a three-year-old boy who had fallen eighteen feet into the primate exhibit at Chicago’s Brookfield Zoo. Reacting immediately, Binti scooped up the boy and carried him to safety. She sat down on a log in a stream, cradling the boy in her lap, giving him a few gentle back pats before taking him to the waiting zoo staff. This simple act of sympathy, captured on video and shown around the world, touched many hearts, and Binti was hailed as a heroine. It was the first time in U.S. history that an ape figured in the speeches of leading politicians, who held her up as a model of compassion. That Binti’s behavior caused such surprise among humans says a lot about the way animals are depicted in the media. She really did nothing unusual, or at least nothing an ape wouldn’t do for any juvenile of her own species. While recent nature documentaries focus on ferocious beasts (or the macho men who wrestle them to the ground), I think it’s vital to convey the true breadth and depth of our connection with nature. This book explores the fascinating and frightening parallels between primate behavior and our own, with equal regard for the good, the bad, and the ugly.

Mountains cry out to be climbed. Dirt says to us, “Dig.” The ocean’s fathomless waters invite us to go on a deep-sea treasure hunt. The heavens declare not only the glory of God; they also declare that we were made to test their bounds and marvel at their beauty. This is true for every sphere of creation and of human culture: God made all of us, male and female, to explore the world he created, to know it, care for it, and have dominion over it for his glory and others’ benefit. God’s original creation was good yet latent with potential. It was pristine yet incomplete. Missing were the work, curiosity, and energy of humans, the only part of the creation bearing the image of God. Human ambition wasn’t something that crept in after the Fall. It was—is—an aspect of bearing the image of God, of filling his world with beauty and industry and delight.

Here’s one useful hypothesis: when female fetuses and babies are exposed to higher levels of testosterone, their brains are partially masculinized, and this increases the chance that, later in life, they will become sexually attracted to women. Similarly, when male fetuses and babies are exposed to lower levels of testosterone, their brains become partially feminized, thereby increasing the chance that they will eventually become sexually attracted to men. There are several lines of evidence in support of this idea.

Reindeer and caribou are the only species of Cervidae in which antlers grow on females. According to the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, both male and female reindeer grow antlers each summer. Male reindeer drop their antlers at the beginning of winter, usually late November to mid-December, while female reindeer retain their antlers until after they give birth in spring. (According to historical renditions depicting Santa’s reindeer, every one of them had to be female.)

God had no form or name. But God existed—conscious, sentient. Humans refer to God in the masculine, but that reveals the inadequacy of human language. God is neither male nor female, neither human nor animal, neither plant nor mineral, neither wave nor particle. He is beyond it all, an entity uncontained by measurement or word.

People who don’t read it, and even some of those who write it, like to assume or pretend that the ideas used in science fiction all rise from intimate familiarity with celestial mechanics and quantum theory, and are comprehensible only to readers who work for NASA and know how to program their VCR. This fantasy, while making the writers feel superior, gives the non-readers an excuse. I just don’t understand it, they whimper, taking refuge in the deep, comfortable, anaerobic caves of technophobia. It is of no use to tell them that very few science fiction writers understand “it” either. We, too, generally find we have twenty minutes of I Love Lucy and half a wrestling match on our videocassettes when we meant to record Masterpiece Theater. Most of the scientific ideas in science fiction are totally accessible and indeed familiar to anybody who got through sixth grade, and in any case you aren’t going to be tested on them at the end of the book. The stuff isn’t disguised engineering lectures, after all. It isn’t that invention of a mathematical Satan, “story problems.” It’s stories. It’s fiction that plays with certain subjects for their inherent interest, beauty, relevance to the human condition. Even in its ungainly and inaccurate name, the “science” modifies, is in the service of, the “fiction.” For example, the main “idea” in my book The Left Hand of Darkness isn’t scientific and has nothing to do with technology. It’s a bit of physiological imagination—a body change. For the people of the invented world Gethen, individual gender doesn’t exist. They’re sexually neuter most of the time, coming into heat once a month, sometimes as a male, sometimes as a female. A Getheian can both sire and bear children. Now, whether this invention strikes one as peculiar, or perverse, or fascinating, it certainly doesn’t require a great scientific intellect to grasp it, or to follow its implications as they’re played out in the novel. Another element in the same book is the climate of the planet, which is deep in an ice age. A simple idea: It’s cold; it’s very cold; it’s always cold. Ramifications, complexities, and resonance come with the detail of imagining. The Left Hand of Darkness differs from a realistic novel only in asking the reader to accept, pro tem, certain limited and specific changes in narrative reality. Instead of being on Earth during an interglacial period among two-sexed people, (as in, say, Pride and Prejudice, or any realistic novel you like), we’re on Gethen during a period of glaciation among androgynes. It’s useful to remember that both worlds are imaginary. Science-fictional changes of parameter, though they may be both playful and decorative, are essential to the book’s nature and structure; whether they are pursued and explored chiefly for their own interest, or serve predominantly as metaphor or symbol, they’re worked out and embodied novelistically in terms of the society and the characters’ psychology, in description, action, emotion, implication, and imagery. The description in science fiction is likely to be somewhat “thicker,” to use Clifford Geertz’s term, than in realistic fiction, which calls on an assumed common experience. The description in science fiction is likely to be somewhat “thicker,” to use Clifford Geertz’s term, than in realistic fiction, which calls on an assumed common experience. All fiction offers us a world we can’t otherwise reach, whether because it’s in the past, or in far or imaginary places, or describes experiences we haven’t had, or leads us into minds different from our own. To some people this change of worlds, this unfamiliarity, is an insurmountable barrier; to others, an adventure and a pleasure.

Awakening humanity one person at a time seems like a tall order. Balancing your masculine and feminine aspects is one specific guidance for how to do this. First, you acknowledge that you have both a feminine and masculine aspect, regardless of your gender or gender identity. We are all both. You just wear different outfits. Until you as individuals have the balance within you to love and honor and cherish each part of you, you will not reach the love and peace that humanity needs to achieve. Then, you can do a practice to balance your masculine and feminine energies. I experienced this reconciliation process for myself before hearing that message. It was an incredible process that left me in a state of profound peace and bliss. You can explore balancing your masculine and feminine aspects if it is right for you with this channeled practice. Practice knowing yourself through meditation if you wish. Sit quietly and ask for the masculine and feminine parts of you to come forth. They will come forth. Let them introduce themselves to you. Become familiar with the male part of you and the female part of you. Make peace with both parts because through time with your own experience, one is stronger than the other, or the human part of you fears one or the other. Practice becoming aware of those parts. And if you bring those parts forth, let them talk to each other while you observe. Journal about your experience with this exercise. The synthesis of different parts of us is not a new concept. Robert Assagioli created a process to integrate various aspects of ourselves, called psychosynthesis.38 This work aims to integrate the different aspects of ourselves into a purposeful personality, connect to our higher self, and realize the spiritual self, moving from self-identity to a transpersonal understanding of oneself (Hastings 1991, 89). Because this is the most common channeled content category, you will likely receive specific or general guidance and personal messages for living your life through your own channeling or from others. Awakening humanity, our true nature not being limited by our physical bodies, and balancing our masculine and feminine aspects are just a few topics in this channeled content category.

Sabism is an art and theatric movement of 21st century occupied with the philotipes, mythologic forms, schematism and chromatic scales, dual art, logism of color, cult art, conglomeration. As an art movement it tries to explore word act, group performance, collective structure, fruitfulness and aesthetics of multitude through philotipes as implicit connotation of colors or schemes in their general use (honeysuckle yellow, female, courtly, savage, dionysiaque).

Since the 1970s, feminist academics have revisited the story in their explorations of women-in-captivity literature and examinations of the female body in nineteenth-century writing.

To be a Black woman, therefore, is not just to be a Black who happens to be a woman, for one discovers one’s sex sometime before one discovers one’s racial classification. For it is immediately within the bosom of one’s family that one learns to be a female and all that the term implies. Although our families may have taken a somewhat different form from that of whites, the socialization that was necessary to maintain the state was carried out. Our family life may be said to parallel our educational opportunities, in that we only need to finish elementary school or high school to get the kinds of jobs which are open to us, and we need only about twelve years of living within some kind of family situation to learn our sexual roles completely. Our first perception of ourselves is of our physical bodies, which we are then forced to compare with the bodies of those with whom we live, mothers, fathers, grandmothers, aunts, uncles, and whomever. Our clothing and the kinds of play activity we engage in are reflections of the lives of those with whom we live. Treatment at school reinforces our sexuality, so that by the time we reach adolescence, we as Black women have perceived our role, all too clearly. One discovers what it means to be Black, and all that term implies, usually outside the family, although this is probably less so than it was as the need to politicize all Blacks, including children, has become so obvious. But until recently, the child had only dim revelations about her color within the family and it was only when she moved out into the community and the opposition and reaction of whites to her gave her insight into her place, racially. The oppression of Blacks by whites is not softened by the same kind of rationale that the female encounters with the male, and if she has not been taught by her family that to be Black is to be political, she experiences extreme frustration and anger as she wades through the racial experience in an attempt to learn what is going on. Most women, shackled by the limitations imposed on their behavior because of their sex, are afraid to explore their condition much beyond their school years and go on to fulfill their biological destiny as determined by male.

There are many reasons for this, which we’ll explore throughout the book. But one is that it isn’t just men who misunderstand their female audiences. Women executives have been schooled in the same conventional wisdom of business that men have. And many find themselves going against their better instincts at work or refraining from putting forth their ideas because they don’t want to cast themselves in the soft pink light of femininity, in case it’s used against them. There is no doubt: the companies who invest in understanding their primary consumer are winning. In the pages ahead, you’ll learn how these companies are changing the rules, dominating their markets, and reinventing their categories. From upstarts such as method and lululemon athletica to titans like Procter & Gamble and MasterCard Worldwide, these mavericks

They say when you put language to something, it creates meaning. Language creates the ability for someone to communicate and explore an idea more fully in a way that is not possible without language.

I don’t care if you dress in trousers every day, and never, ever put on a lick of makeup. I don’t care if you love high heels and vintage perfume bottles. I don’t care if you are attracted to boys, girls, both or nobody in particular. What we wear isn’t what makes us women. Who we want to kiss isn’t what makes us women. Tell me this, if you’d tell me what kind of woman you are: Are you being kind to other? To yourself? Are you thinking new ideas? Are you exploring? Are trying new things? Are you showing courage, curiosity and generosity? Good. Because those are the things real women do, no matter what shoes you wear.

Unable to come up with a new idea, King revisited a short story he had started the previous year. The tale of a bullied teenage girl with telekinetic powers was a response to a friend’s challenge to write from a female perspective.

Yes, ‘Rhys is the greatest lover a female can hope for’ is undoubtedly how I learned to read.” “I was only trying to tell you what you now know.” My blood heated a bit. “Hmmm,” was all I said, pulling a book toward me. “I’ll take that hmmm as a challenge.” His hand slid down my thigh, then cupped my knee, his thumb brushing along its side. Even through my leathers, the heat of him seeped to my very bones. “Maybe I’ll haul you between the stacks and see how quiet you can be.” “Hmmm.” I flipped through the pages, not seeing any of the text. His hand began a lethal, taunting exploration up my thigh, his fingers grazing along the sensitive inside. Higher, higher. He leaned in to drag a book toward himself, but whispered in my ear, “Or maybe I’ll spread you out on this desk and lick you until you scream loud enough to wake whatever is at the bottom of the library.” I whipped my head toward him. His eyes were glazed—almost sleepy.

The visionary author’s masterpiece pulls us—along with her Black female hero—through time to face the horrors of slavery and explore the impacts of racism, sexism, and white supremacy then and now.

great qualities that allow young athletes to discover their bodies and explore the limits of their movements. They need to have room to grow and discover through movement. Bring in the play element early and keep it there! A positive trend is the continued opportunities for women to compete in sport. Unfortunately the training and preparation have not kept pace with the opportunities to compete. Biologically and socioculturally, women are different from men. These differences must be accounted for in training and preparation. Women are certainly more susceptible to certain injuries, specifically ACL tears; this demands that prevention programs be incorporated in daily training. To do otherwise would be remiss. There is still much misunderstanding about the role of strength training with female athletes. Some athletes and coaches just do not recognize its importance. Culturally in many circles it is not acceptable for women to be muscular and fit. For female athletes to receive proper training, these barriers need to be broken down. There is no doubt about the need for more qualified women in coaching. The time commitment and lifestyle dissuade

According to the Welsh Triads, the first of the Three Awful Events in the Isle of Britain was the bursting of the Lake of Floods and a resulting rushing of water and a flood over all lands until the people were utterly destroyed except Dwyvan and his wife Dwyvack, who escaped in an open vessel, and from whom the isle was re-populated. Their ark was named Nwydd Nav Neivion, and took with it a male and female of all living things. It bears close resemblance to the Noah account, but it places the venue of the event in Britain – Comyns Beaumont (The Riddle of Prehistoric Britain) Like Professor Thomas L. Thompson,

He groped about for several minutes, growling like a bear and stamping his feet at anyone who ventured too close. Isabella rushed at him and retreated several times, giggling each time he missed. Then before Adelaide quite knew what had happened, the little mischief-maker shoved her from behind and launched her directly into Gideon’s path. Adelaide trod on his foot and banged into his chest, but Gideon wrapped his arms about her and somehow kept them upright. “Well, who do I have here?” His voice remained jovial, but she could feel his heartbeat accelerate under her palm. Did he know? Gideon’s hand moved up her back and lingered at the base of her neck. “Definitely feels like a member of the female persuasion.” His fingers toyed with the loose tendrils at her nape. Adelaide closed her eyes against the sensations assaulting her. His touch traveled to her shoulder, and she forced her eyes open. If he knew it was her, why was he taking so long to claim his victory? “Let me see …” He traced one of the rosettes on the edge of her sleeve. “I don’t recall Mrs. Chalmers wearing a flower like this.” Warmth from his hand shocked her momentarily as he quickly passed over the small section of her arm covered by neither gown nor glove. Calluses grazed her skin, leaving tingles in their wake. “Too tall to be Bella.” He explored her elbow, her wrist, and finally clasped her hand where it lay pressed against his shirtfront. “Mrs. Garrett’s dress had long sleeves, I believe, so this gloved arm must belong to …” His thumb drew a small circle against her palm. “Miss Proctor.” He’d known all along, the scoundrel.

When he was an adolescent—although he was heterosexual—the worst possible thing Isaac could think of was being gay, which could cause relentless teasing by his classmates in school. So this is where the imp began his torment of Isaac. Perhaps he would stare at an attractive female classmate and feel pleasantly aroused; but the imp would lead him to think that perhaps it was really the boy sitting next to her that he was really attracted to. Soon, whenever he saw an attractive boy in school or on the street or in the gym, he would find himself scanning his body to try to feel certain that he wasn’t sexually aroused.4 “Was that the first tingling of an erection?” he’d ask himself. Of course, simply thinking about the area would sensitize it, which might be enough to convince him that he really was homosexual. He might then go home and lie in bed, depressed and thinking about suicide, certain that his classmates would soon discover the truth and begin teasing him mercilessly.

Radatz described MK12’s first week on the job, ‘We felt like kid astronauts with keys to an actual shuttle, like someone was going to call our bluff at any minute.’139 MK12’s initial creative brief was to explore the element at the heart of the film – water: We learned that we’d been thinking about the film from an opposite perspective than that of Marc and the producers: where we saw water as the central theme, they saw the lack of water as Bond and Greene’s motivation. Our initial concept set Bond in a landscape made of backlit female forms submerged in water. After mulling over random ideas for a few days, it occurred to us that the same technique could be transplanted to a desert scenario, with the female forms instead becoming sand dunes.

sometimes paraphrase our own Scriptures. For example, the verse above is modeled on Galatians 3:28, which says, “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus” (NRSV). This wisdom is almost two thousand years old, yet we still struggle to achieve racial and gender equality. One of the things I wanted to explore in this storyworld is what life would look like if people lived as if they really believed this verse is true. One fact the church has historically used to rationalize the sidelining of women is that Jesus, the Twelve, and the apostle Paul were all men. Meanwhile the first evangelist, Mary Magdalene, is unjustly slandered as a prostitute, and Junia, whom Paul called “prominent among the apostles” (Romans 16:7), is all but forgotten. Many have even tried to recast her as a man.

In her magazine, Sherkat explored these issues and exposed the gross injustices of Iran’s legal system. She wrote about women who were victims of battery, a practice that, according to some interpretations of the Koran, the holy text endorses. Women needed their husbands’ permission to work outside the house or to travel. Without a notarized letter from their husbands, women couldn’t even get a passport. Sherkat began a public conversation about these issues by asking what good female cabinet ministers or members of Parliament were as long as their husbands could subvert the will of the Iranian people by barring their elected officials from leaving the house in the morning. Zanan challenged the government’s stance toward women in other ways, as well. Once, it quoted the conservative Speaker of Parliament, Ali Akbar Nateq-Nouri, as saying that “women’s most important endeavor must be their struggle as homemakers,” right above a quote by an open-minded cleric, Mohammad Khatami: “This must be the year that women will have a dominant presence at universities.” Next to those contrasting comments, the magazine published the news about the appointment of Iran’s first female professor of aircraft engineering. Women were making progress, despite what officials said.

Voyager, man. Remember? The space ships we sent out to explore the Universe back in 1977? They put some gold records in the capsules, in case there’s intelligent life out there. Sound recordings and stuff. And pictures of what we look like, you know, I think they put Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man on it, and some math formulas. Even if they can’t figure out anything else, the math has to be universal.” Daniel had forgotten about this, but now he remembered. There was even more on the phonograph records than Owen was babbling about. As he recalled, they contained information about topics such as our location in the solar system, mathematical definitions, the physical unit definitions we use, our solar system parameters, chemical definitions, our DNA structure, diagrams of male and female human anatomy and cell division, a diagram of conception, a fetus development diagram and much more. And, if he remembered correctly, it was meant not only for intelligent extra-terrestrials, but for future humans as well, should it come back to Earth in the distant future.

Somehow, though, it is only books by women, or books about certain topics, that require this special “women’s fiction” designation, particularly when those books have the audacity to explore, in some manner, the female experience, which, apparently, includes the topics of marriage, suburban existence, and parenthood, as if women act alone in these endeavors, wedding themselves, immaculately conceiving children, and the like. Women’s fiction is often considered a more intimate brand of storytelling that doesn’t tackle the big issues found in men’s fiction.

Today, many of us are trying to understand just what male and female energies are, since we are calling old rigid stereotypes into questions. There is a risk of replacing such stereotypes with even more politically correct rigid stereotypes. The destructive aspect of the masculine has been emphasized in recent years, but both the feminine and the masculine have destructive sides. (The evil witch in fairy tales is an example of the destructive feminine.) Love is the ultimate nature of everything; it is not just the feminine that is loving. We tend to think of female energy as nurturing because it is undirected—it includes everything—but perhaps one could say that the feminine loves and nurtures in a being way, and the masculine does so in a doing way. We are each capable of loving in both ways.

Despite those risks, hypersexualization is ubiquitous, so visible as to be nearly invisible: it is the water in which girls swim, the air they breathe. Whatever else they might be—athletes, artists, scientists, musicians, newscasters, politicians—they learn that they must, as a female, first and foremost project sex appeal. Consider a report released by Princeton University in 2011 exploring the drop over the previous decade in public leadership positions held by female students. Among the reasons these über-elite young women gave for avoiding such roles was that being qualified was not enough. They needed to be “smart, driven, involved in many different activities (as are men), and, in addition, they are supposed to be pretty, sexy, thin, nice, and friendly.” Or, as one alumna put it, women had to “do everything, do it well, and look ‘hot’ while doing it.

White is the color of a relaxed octopus; in cuttlefish, close relatives of octopus, females turn white when they encounter a fellow female, someone whom they need not fight or flee.

[…] the development of “female” art is not to viewed as reactionary, like its counterpart, the male School of Virility. Rather it is progressive: an exploration of the strictly female reality is a necessary step to correct the warp in a sexually biased culture. It is only after we have integrated the dark side of the moon into our world view that we can begin to talk seriously of universal culture.

My dear, we would understand love more fully if we were able to observe, discuss, and explore without prejudice. However, there must always be a human limit to our endeavours and so, like science, our public explorations must focus on those which society deems acceptable. You are quite at liberty to observe and understand yourself and others like you, but you are right that it is not usual and the set that call themselves polite are anything but. They will set upon any difference they can and use it for their own amusement and personal gain. You must think carefully about your future and the path you wish to take.

But there had always been us, bound by invisible golden thread the fifty-one weeks a year we were apart. Tied in a golden bow the week we spent together. On the surface it might have been about fun or feeling glamorous or exploring someplace new, but when the world, including our own families, got us down or turned its back on us, we were our own family. Dysfunctional in our own female-friendship way; but our bonds were unbreakable.

Back in Leiden, Tinbergen continued these explorations, now grounded in Lorenz’s theoretical concepts. He studied butterflies and found that marks on the torso of the female and its vibratory movements were the sole mating releasers—he could construct dummy butterfly torsos with brighter stripes and more regular movements. Males would ignore a live female to mount cardboard cylinders that didn’t even need wings!

Although this change has been labeled "sexual freedom," in fact it has not so far allowed much real freedom for women (or men) to explore their own sexuality; it has merely put pressure on them to have more of the same kind of sex.

Throughout the chase, Cerridwen retains her gender as she becomes a greyhound, an otter, a hawk (the female of which is reputed to be the more effective hunter), and finally a black-crested (or tufted) hen. In each case she initiates the transformative process. Immediately before her claws seize upon the escaping initiate, she forces him to transform, to leave the significance of one element and enter another. The chase is a complex and symbolic process that is controlled by the witch in her various guises. She is forcing the initiate forward, and we can assume that in this liminal state the true meaning of the entire sequence is made clear to her. Previously she was driven by the needs of a mother, but within the chase she is partially liberated from her human component; we are informed that her form is changed but not her nature. Therefore, in the shapes of animals and birds, she maintains aspects of her humanity whilst simultaneously accessing the source. Ultimately her task is to initiate.

Jesus used breh denasha to say: "I am just an ordinary human being; I am nobody." Of course, Jesus was not just an ordinary human being; he was Divine and not a nobody. But this term is also used in another context which is likely the case here. It also means, "You don't know me from Adam." In other words, to use the Son of Man in the third person is like saying, "You think I am just another teacher coming down the pike, that is all you really know about me. There is no chance you are going to get a free ticket to wealth because I am not one of those teachers who will suck up to the elite and rich." Bar is the word for son, but the word used here is breh, which is a word for son or daughter; it is for a child. I am merely a child of Nasha, which is the word for a human being, male or female. So, Jesus was saying: "I am a child of a human being." This was really a true statement, and the scribe did not seek to correct him by saying, "Ah, but you are also Divine." No, the scribe was so interested in locking up a lucrative gig he really didn't care who Jesus was, only that he was popular, and with his expertise, he would surely be a valuable asset to someone like Jesus with His potential.

The work of preserving life that Noah undertakes is done under the direction of God; it requires planning and preparation; and it involves skillful labor, the use of human ingenuity and technology. The construction of the ark is perhaps the preeminent biblical symbol of conservation efforts and the preservation of biodiversity (“the animals going in were male and female of every living thing” [Gen. 7:16]). The ark, then, reminds us that our role of working and taking care of the earth includes the good use and application of technology. A biblical approach to creation care may well necessitate, as we have begun to see, a re-envisioning of what it means to be limited human creatures, and it may require of us a willingness to let go of our endless pursuit of “progress” (at least as our societies have defined it) in order that we might embrace richer and simpler ways of life that give space for and promote the flourishing of all of life. But, however reconfigured it all may need to be, such an approach will not involve a retreat from technology, science, art, innovation, and exploration. We need instead to reconsider the purpose of all these human endeavors, to redefine what progress would look like, and to clarify what constitutes good work.