“
When animals make a stupid mistake, you laugh at them. A cat misjudges a leap. A dog looks overly quizzical about a simple object. These are funny things. But when a person doesn’t understand something, if they miscalculate and hit the brakes too late, blame is assigned. They are stupid. They are wrong. Teachers and cops are there to sort it out, with a trail of paperwork to illustrate the stupidity. The faults. The evidence and incidents of these things. We have entire systems in place to help decide who is what.
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Mindy McGinnis (The Female of the Species)
“
To illustrate from the case of all females:—the female always overcomes the male by her stillness.
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Lao Tzu (Tao Te Ching)
“
Namangha rin kami sa illustration ng female reproductive system. Korteng sungay! At doon ang pabrika ng mga bata? Whoa! Information overload!
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Bob Ong (ABNKKBSNPLAKo?! (Mga Kwentong Chalk ni Bob Ong))
“
One of the most astounding and telling features of the Women's March and the #MeToo movement is that they both illustrate how many angry women it takes to generate public response.
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Soraya Chemaly (Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women's Anger)
“
Thus the young ladies are as much ashamed of being cowards and fools as the men, and despise all personal ornaments, beyond decency and cleanliness: neither did I perceive any difference in their education made by their difference of sex, only that the exercises of the females were not altogether so robust; and
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Jonathan Swift (Gulliver’s Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World: with original color illustrations by Arthur Rackham)
“
In the case of Michel Angelo we have an artist who with brush and chisel portrayed literally thousands of human forms; but with this peculiarity, that while scores and scores of his male figures are obviously suffused and inspired by a romantic sentiment, there is hardly one of his female figures that is so,—the latter being mostly representative of woman in her part as mother, or sufferer, or prophetess or poetess, or in old age, or in any aspect of strength or tenderness, except that which associates itself especially with romantic love. Yet the cleanliness and dignity of Michel Angelo's male figures are incontestable, and bear striking witness to that nobility of the sentiment in him, which we have already seen illustrated in his sonnets.
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Edward Carpenter (The Intermediate Sex: A Study Of Some Transitional Types Of Men And Women)
“
When animals make a stupid mistake, you laugh at them. A cat misjudges a leap. A dog looks overly quizzical about a simple object. These are funny things. But when a person doesn’t understand something, if they miscalculate and hit the brakes too late, blame is assigned. They are stupid. They are wrong. Teachers and cops are there to sort it out, with a trail of paperwork to illustrate the stupidity. The faults. The evidence and incidents of these things. We have entire systems in place to help decide who is what. Sometimes the systems don’t work. Families spend their weekend afternoons at animal shelters, even when they’re not looking for a pet. They come to see the unwanted and unloved. The cats and dogs who don’t understand why they are these things. They are petted and combed, walked and fed, cooed over and kissed. Then they go back in their cages and sometimes tears are shed. Fuzzy faces peering through bars can be unbearable for many. Change the face to a human one and the reaction changes. The reason why is because people should know better. But our logic is skewed in this respect. A dog that bites is a dead dog. First day at the shelter and I already saw one put to sleep, which in itself is a misleading phrase. Sleep implies that you have the option of waking up. Once their bodies pass unconsciousness to something deeper where systems start to fail, they revolt a little bit, put up a fight on a molecular level. They kick. They cry. They don’t want to go. And this happens because their jaws closed over a human hand, ever so briefly. Maybe even just the once. But people, they get chances. They get the benefit of the doubt. Even though they have the higher logic functioning and they knew when they did it THEY KNEW it was a bad thing.
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Mindy McGinnis (The Female of the Species)
“
We don’t know much about the culture of Mohenjo-Daro—there are some findings that suggest that they may have been fairly egalitarian in some interesting ways. But despite the lack of context, the archeologists who unearthed them called the soapstone head illustrated here “Priest King,” while they named the bronze female figure here “Dancing Girl.” They’re still called by those names. Sometimes I think the whole of this book could be communicated with just this set of facts and illustrations.
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Naomi Alderman (The Power)
“
and he denieth none that come unto him, black and white, bond and free, male and female; and he remembereth the heathen; and all are alike unto God, both Jew and Gentile.
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Joseph Smith Jr. (The Illustrated LDS Scriptures)
“
Some of the speed and secrecy of our victory, and its regularity, might perhaps be ascribed to this double endowment's offsetting and emphasizing the rare feature that from end to end of it there was nothing female in the Arab movement, but the camels.
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T.E. Lawrence (Seven Pillars of Wisdom: With Maps, Photographs, Illustrations & Compendium Of Military Articles)
“
A winged angel, with the sign of the sun upon his forehead and on his breast the square and triangle of the septenary. I speak of him in the masculine sense, but the figure is neither male nor female. It is held to be pouring the essences of life from chalice to chalice. It has one foot upon the earth and one upon waters, thus illustrating the nature of the essences. A direct path goes up to certain heights on the verge of the horizon, and above there is a great light, through which a crown is seen vaguely. Hereof is some part of the Secret of Eternal Life, as it is possible to man in his incarnation. All the conventional emblems are renounced herein.
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Arthur Edward Waite (The Pictorial Key to the Tarot)
“
He said the difference between the male and female modes of thought were easily illustrated by the thoughts of a boy and girl, sitting on a park bench, looking at the full moon. The boy thinks of the universe, its immensity and mystery; the girl thinks, "I must wash my hair." When I read this I was frantically upset; I had to put the magazine down. It was clear to me at once that I was not thinking as a girl thought; the full moon would never as long as I lived remind me to wash my hair. I knew if I showed it to my mother she would say, "Oh it is just that maddening male nonsense, women have no brains." That would not convince me; surely a New York psychiatrist must know. And women like my mother were in the minority, I could see that. Moreover I did not want to be like my mother, with her virginal brusqueness, her innocence. I wanted men to love me, and I wanted to think of the universe when I looked at the moon. I felt trapped, stranded; it seemed there had to be a choice where there couldn't be a choice.
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Alice Munro (Lives of Girls and Women)
“
This book isn’t about Shah Rukh Khan. Rather, I hope to reveal how female fans use his icon to talk about themselves. Their stories will illustrate how his films, songs and interviews are invoked to frame a feminine conversation on inequality within families, workplaces and contemporary romances.
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Shrayana Bhattacharya (Desperately Seeking Shah Rukh: India's Lonely Young Women and the Search for Intimacy and Independence)
“
Some literary recommendations: James Salter’s erotic masterpiece, A Sport and a Pastime; Anais Nin’s collections of short stories Delta of Venus and Little Birds; the erotic novels Emanuelle by Emanuelle Arsan and Story of O by Pauline Réage; Harold Brodkey’s sexual saga “Innocence”—perhaps the greatest depiction of a session of cunnilingus ever penned; novels by Jerzy Kosinski such as Passion Play and Cockpit; Henry Miller’s Under the Roofs of Paris and Quiet Days in Clichy; My Secret Life by Anonymous and The Pure and the Impure by Colette; Nancy Friday’s anthology of fantasies, Secret Garden (filled with the correspondence of real people’s fantasies); stories from The Mammoth Book of Erotica or one of the many erotic anthologies edited by Susie Bright. For those with a taste for poetry, try Les Fleurs du Mal (Flowers of Evil) by Charles Baudelaire or Flesh Unlimited by Guillaume Apollinaire. And for those who like comic books (kinky ones, that is), try the extra-hot works of writer/illustrator Eric Stanton, who specializes in female-domination fantasies.
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Ian Kerner (She Comes First: The Thinking Man's Guide to Pleasuring a Woman (Kerner))
“
Naomi Wolfe, journalist and author of The Beauty Myth, writes, “A culture fixated on female thinness is not an obsession about female beauty but an obsession about female obedience. Dieting is the most potent political sedative in history. A quietly mad population is a tractable one.”31 Wolfe strategically illustrates how body-shame social messaging is used as a means of controlling and centralizing political power. We need look no further than the 2016 U.S. presidential election to see Wolfe’s thesis in action. Candidate Hillary Clinton was exhaustingly scrutinized about her aesthetic presentation. Outfits, makeup, hairstyles were all fodder for the twenty-four-hour news cycle. Even the pro-Hillary, hundred-thousand-plus-member Facebook group Pantsuit Nation chose her penchant for eschewing skirts and dresses as the name of their collective, inadvertently directing public focus to her physical appearance rather than her decades of political experience.
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Sonya Renee Taylor (The Body Is Not an Apology: The Power of Radical Self-Love)
“
Jo examined the work of art nearest her, idly wondering what fortuitous concatenation of circumstances needed the melodramatic illustration of an Indian in full war costume, tumbling over a precipice with a wolf at his throat, while two infuriated young gentlemen, with unnaturally small feet and big eyes, were stabbing each other close by, and a disheveled female was flying away in the background
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Louisa May Alcott (Little Women (Little Women #1))
“
People spoke to foreigners with an averted gaze, and everybody seemed to know somebody who had just vanished. The rumors of what had happened to them were fantastic and bizarre though, as it turned out, they were only an understatement of the real thing. Before going to see General Videla […], I went to […] check in with Los Madres: the black-draped mothers who paraded, every week, with pictures of their missing loved ones in the Plaza Mayo. (‘Todo mi familia!’ as one elderly lady kept telling me imploringly, as she flourished their photographs. ‘Todo mi familia!’) From these and from other relatives and friends I got a line of questioning to put to the general. I would be told by him, they forewarned me, that people ‘disappeared’ all the time, either because of traffic accidents and family quarrels or, in the dire civil-war circumstances of Argentina, because of the wish to drop out of a gang and the need to avoid one’s former associates. But this was a cover story. Most of those who disappeared were openly taken away in the unmarked Ford Falcon cars of the Buenos Aires military police. I should inquire of the general what precisely had happened to Claudia Inez Grumberg, a paraplegic who was unable to move on her own but who had last been seen in the hands of his ever-vigilant armed forces [….]
I possess a picture of the encounter that still makes me want to spew: there stands the killer and torturer and rape-profiteer, as if to illustrate some seminar on the banality of evil. Bony-thin and mediocre in appearance, with a scrubby moustache, he looks for all the world like a cretin impersonating a toothbrush. I am gripping his hand in a much too unctuous manner and smiling as if genuinely delighted at the introduction. Aching to expunge this humiliation, I waited while he went almost pedantically through the predicted script, waving away the rumored but doubtless regrettable dematerializations that were said to be afflicting his fellow Argentines. And then I asked him about Senorita Grumberg. He replied that if what I had said was true, then I should remember that ‘terrorism is not just killing with a bomb, but activating ideas. Maybe that’s why she’s detained.’ I expressed astonishment at this reply and, evidently thinking that I hadn’t understood him the first time, Videla enlarged on the theme. ‘We consider it a great crime to work against the Western and Christian style of life: it is not just the bomber but the ideologist who is the danger.’ Behind him, I could see one or two of his brighter staff officers looking at me with stark hostility as they realized that the general—El Presidente—had made a mistake by speaking so candidly. […] In response to a follow-up question, Videla crassly denied—‘rotondamente’: ‘roundly’ denied—holding Jacobo Timerman ‘as either a journalist or a Jew.’ While we were having this surreal exchange, here is what Timerman was being told by his taunting tormentors:
Argentina has three main enemies: Karl Marx, because he tried to destroy the Christian concept of society; Sigmund Freud, because he tried to destroy the Christian concept of the family; and Albert Einstein, because he tried to destroy the Christian concept of time and space.
[…] We later discovered what happened to the majority of those who had been held and tortured in the secret prisons of the regime. According to a Navy captain named Adolfo Scilingo, who published a book of confessions, these broken victims were often destroyed as ‘evidence’ by being flown out way over the wastes of the South Atlantic and flung from airplanes into the freezing water below. Imagine the fun element when there’s the surprise bonus of a Jewish female prisoner in a wheelchair to be disposed of… we slide open the door and get ready to roll her and then it’s one, two, three… go!
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Christopher Hitchens (Hitch 22: A Memoir)
“
Two monks were once travelling together down a wet and muddy road. The rain was torrential, making it almost impossible to walk along the path. As the two men were trudging along, a beautiful girl dressed in silk appeared. She was unable to cross the path and looked distressed.
“Let me help you”, said the older monk. He picked her up and carried her over the mud. His younger male companion did not utter a word that night until they reached their lodging temple. Then after hours of restrained conversation, the younger monk exclaimed: “We monks do not touch females; it is too tempting for us and can create a bad outcome”. The older monk looked into the younger monks eyes and said, “I left the girl on the road. Are you still carrying her?”
This ancient Zen story illustrates beautifully how so many of us are trapped in the habit of constantly “re-living” the past in our minds, thus dishonouring the present moment. The young monk wasted hours distressing himself with judgment, speculation, anxiety, resentment and ultimately self-perpetuated unhappiness as a direct result of not being mindful.
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Christopher Dines (Mindfulness Meditation: Bringing Mindfulness into Everyday Life)
“
The naked body of the female consort illustrates freedom from the obscuration of conceptual symbols. As an illustration of unchanging great bliss endowed with the sixteen joys, she appears in the form of a youthful, sixteen-year-old girl. Her hair hangs loose, showing the unlimited way that wisdom expands impartially out of basic space. She is adorned with five bone ornaments. Of these, the ring at the top of her head symbolizes the wisdom of the basic space of phenomena [dharmadhātu], while her bone necklace represents the wisdom of equality. Her earrings stand for discerning wisdom, her bracelets for mirrorlike wisdom, and her belt for all-accomplishing wisdom. Illustrating the unity of calm abiding and insight, her secret space is joined in union.
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Getse Mahapandita (Deity Mantra and Wisdom: Development Stage Meditation in Tibetan Buddhist Tantra)
“
A 2008 analysis of a range of textbooks recommended by twenty of the ‘most prestigious universities in Europe, the United States and Canada’ revealed that across 16,329 images, male bodies were used three times as often as female bodies to illustrate ‘neutral body parts’.
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Caroline Criado Pérez (Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men)
“
him to turn out and find a dry twig; and if he can't do it, go and borrow one. In fact, the Leather Stocking Series ought to have been called the Broken Twig Series. I am sorry there is not room to put in a few dozen instances of the delicate art of the forest, as practised by Natty Bumppo and some of the other Cooperian experts. Perhaps we may venture two or three samples. Cooper was a sailor — a naval officer; yet he gravely tells us how a vessel, driving towards a lee shore in a gale, is steered for a particular spot by her skipper because he knows of an undertow there which will hold her back against the gale and save her. For just pure woodcraft, or sailorcraft, or whatever it is, isn't that neat? For several years Cooper was daily in the society of artillery, and he ought to have noticed that when a cannon-ball strikes the ground it either buries itself or skips a hundred feet or so; skips again a hundred feet or so — and so on, till finally it gets tired and rolls. Now in one place he loses some "females" — as he always calls women — in the edge of a wood near a plain at night in a fog, on purpose to give Bumppo a chance to show off the delicate art of the forest before the
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Mark Twain (Mark Twain: Collection of 51 Classic Works with analysis and historical background (Annotated and Illustrated) (Annotated Classics))
“
University of Otago social historian Hera Cook provides a beautiful illustration of exactly this point in her rich account of the sexual revolution.49 Cook notes that in eighteenth-century England, women were assumed to be sexually passionate. But drawing on economic and social changes, fertility-rate patterns, personal accounts, and sex surveys and manuals, Cook charts the path toward the sexual repression of the Victorian era. This was a time of reduced female economic power, thanks to a shift from production in the home to wage earning, and there was less community pressure on men to financially support children fathered out of wedlock. And so, in the absence of well-known, reliable birth control techniques, “women could not afford to enjoy sex. The risk made it too expensive a pleasure.”50
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Cordelia Fine (Testosterone Rex: Myths of Sex, Science, and Society)
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As patient narrative, research, and history will illustrate, gender remains an incredibly important variable in the chronic illness experience. Partly, this is because more females than males manifest chronic and autoimmune conditions. However, throughout history, deeply ingrained ideas about women as unreliable narrators of their pain and symptoms, as weaker than men, and as histrionic or otherwise “emotional” have had a profound impact on their ability to receive accurate diagnoses and appropriate care. On
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Laurie Edwards (In the Kingdom of the Sick: A Social History of Chronic Illness in America)
“
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
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Sonya Renee Taylor (The Body Is Not an Apology: The Power of Radical Self-Love)
“
and no illustration of the disastrous effects of reckless indulgence in intoxicating liquors appeals to an audience with such telling force as that of the once sober and well-conducted female yielding by degrees to the terrible temptation until she at length sinks to the condition of a gin-soddened poor wretch, lost to every glimmer of self-respect, and capable even of starving herself and her children rather than forego her only remaining enjoyment in life ... It
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Gilda O'Neill (The Good Old Days: Poverty, Crime and Terror in Victorian London)
“
[P]assing expresses a form of agency as well as a promise of restoration, which is to say that passing—as a limited durational performance—signals a “return” to a natural-cum-biological mode of being. This narratological strategy shaped how passing would be deployed as an interpretive frame for all manners of trans-identificatory practices—both contemporaneously and reiteratively into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
No less performative but lacking a clear biologized semiotic referent, fungibility in this chapter expresses how ungendered blackness provided the grounds for (trans) performances for freedom. By describing their acts as performances for rather than of freedom, I am suggesting that the figures under review here illustrate how the inhabitation of the un-gender-specific and fungible also mapped the affective grounds for imagining other qualities of life and being for those marked by and for captivity. Brent/Jacobs referred to this vexed affective geography as “some- thing akin to freedom” that, perhaps paradoxically, required a “deliberate calculation” of one’s fungible status. Rather than regarding Jones, Waters, Jacobs, and the Crafts as recoverable trans figures in the archive, this chapter examines how the ungendering of blackness became a site of fugitive maneuvers wherein the dichotomized and collapsed designations of male-man-masculine and female-woman-feminine remained open—that is fungible—and the black’s figurative capacity to change form as a commoditized being engendered flow.
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C. Riley Snorton
“
You took them home in a plain brown wrapper. You really didn’t want your mother, children, or respectable wife to find you reading them. The ladies in such stories lost their clothes with surprising frequency. Covers and story situations involved lots of bondage, torture, and violence, much of it a tease. Close analysis of the texts will reveal what parts of the female anatomy had to be described in each story with prescribed euphemisms and what parts could not be described at all. The illustrations, even in a medium noted for luridness, are astonishingly explicit, pushing the boundaries of what could be sent through the mails or displayed in public to the absolute limit at the time—and indeed these magazines were often sold under the counter.
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E. Hoffmann Price (The E. Hoffmann Price Spicy Adventure MEGAPACK ®: 14 Tales from the "Spicy" Pulp Magazines!)
“
All the great cat goddesses such as Isis, Bast, Diana and Hecate, with their eternal Moon link, combine woman with Cat. Emphasising this empathy, the mysterious feline has always been construed as woman and vice versa. Since time immemorial, women have been thought to possess an ability as mediums, with a talent for soothsaying and clairvoyance. Second sight, too, is deemed to be a natural female attribute. Cats, silently wise and 'knowing', with eyes reflecting the
secrets of time itself, arc said to be 'old souls', and the attraction of woman to Cat could be seen to represent a look back to an ancient part of the human soul. And what woman deep within her Moon-centred self doesn't nurture a fascination with the past — the 'unknown'; ancient, forbidden secrets; and the mystical world of the occult?
Perhaps, at some distant point in time, Cat and woman with their beguiling ways and inbuilt urge to procreate underwent a transmigration of souls, each now sharing the ' complex psyche of the other. Both are symbols of fertility; both project innate feminine traits of intuitive sensuality and nurture and cherish their young. The female cat, both domestic and in the wild, is known to be a caring, efficient mother and the old French proverb, Jamais chatte qui a des petits n'a de bans morceaux, (a cat with little ones has never a good mouthful) illustrates the devotion and selflessness of the maternal feline.
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Joan Moore
“
When Donald Trump's crude comments about women surfaced during his presidential campaign, these progressive university folk were among the first to criticize him. The same people who tell their students anything goes when it comes to sex acted offended in order to score political points. I'm not defending his comments--not at all--but since when did they care about the adverse [e]ffects of objectifying women? Why should Trump's comments come as a surprise when many of those same professors champion "sex weeks" on their respective campuses, replete with seminars that include porn stars and even prostitutes as guest speakers? Doesn't the feigned shock expressed by the progressive Left seem just a bit disingenuous when we know as empirical fact this same faculty has no compunction at all about using similar vulgar language in their classes and would quickly belittle and shout down any "prudish" conservative such as me who tried to say otherwise?
Everything, from their celebration of The Vagina Monologues to the cover of Cosmo to the swimsuit edition of Sports Illustrated and nearly every beer commercial known to man, unapologetically portrays females as literal objects of sport to be enjoyed first and foremost for their body parts. So why the feigned outrage over Trump's comments?
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Everett Piper (Not a Day Care: The Devastating Consequences of Abandoning Truth)
“
it’s claimed that they can tell us most things about life. This trend isn’t just found in popular science books. At universities, economists analyse ever greater parts of existence as if it were a market. From suicide (the value of a life can be calculated like the value of a company, and now it’s time to shut the doors) to faked orgasms (he doesn’t have to study how her eyes roll back, her mouth opens, her neck reddens and her back arches – he can calculate whether she really means it). The question is what Keynes would think about an American economist like David Galenson. Galenson has developed a statistical method to calculate which works of art are meaningful. If you ask him what the most renowned work of the last century is, he’ll say ‘Les Demoiselles d’Avignon’. He has calculated it. Things put into numbers immediately become certainties. Five naked female prostitutes on Carrer d’Avinyó in Barcelona. Threatening, square, disconnected bodies, two with faces like African masks. The large oil painting that Picasso completed in 1907 is, according to Galenson, the most important artwork of the twentieth century, because it appears most often as an illustration in books. That’s the measure he uses. The same type of economic analysis that explains the price of leeks or green fuel is supposed to be able to explain our experience of art.
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Katrine Marçal (Who Cooked Adam Smith's Dinner? A Story About Women and Economics)
“
Nevertheless, attending Mount Washington Female College likely offered more spacious living than Boyd had enjoyed at home. The circular explained, “All the apartments are provided with registers for ventilation, and the admission of warm air, in the winter season, from large brick furnaces. The Gas arrangements are also complete…Mount Washington College affords to its pupils ample means and appliances, for thorough physical and intellectual training, with all the advantages and surroundings of a Christian family. … The college is furnished with complete apparatus for illustration in the departments of Chemistry and Natural Philosophy; and the public may rest assured that whatever maybe necessary, from time to time, to keep pace with the progress of the age, will be brought into the service of the College.” Boyd
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Charles River Editors (Belle Boyd: The Controversial Life and Legacy of the Civil War’s Most Famous Spy)
“
Under coverture, a wife was required to live where her husband demanded, her earnings belonged to her husband and her children were the property of her husband, just as the children of the female slave belonged to her master. But perhaps the most graphic illustration of the continuity between slavery and marriage was that in England – as Thomas Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge reminds us – wives could be sold at public auctions.
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Carole Pateman (The Sexual Contract)
“
You might think Cult Girls would have a rather limited readership (ex-Jehovah's Witnesses) but I, who never bothered to learn anything about those strange people who rang my doorbell with "good news" loved it. Jehovah's Witnesses aside, this beautifully illustrated graphic novel pertains to any cult. Nicely and clearly written, it's a good harrowing story.
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Trina Robbins (Women And The Comics)
“
It’s easier to like animals than people, and there’s a reason for that. When animals make a stupid mistake, you laugh at them. A cat misjudges a leap. A dog looks overly quizzical about a simple object. These are funny things. But when a person doesn’t understand something, if they miscalculate and hit the brakes too late, blame is assigned. They are stupid. They are wrong. Teachers and cops are there to sort it out, with a trail of paperwork to illustrate the stupidity. The faults. The evidence and incidents of these things. We have entire systems in place to help decide who is what. Sometimes the systems don’t work. Families spend their weekend afternoons at animal shelters, even when they’re not looking for a pet. They come to see the unwanted and unloved. The cats and dogs who don’t understand why they are these things. They are petted and combed, walked and fed, cooed over and kissed. Then they go back in their cages and sometimes tears are shed. Fuzzy faces peering through bars can be unbearable for many. Change the face to a human one and the reaction changes. The reason why is because people should know better. But our logic is skewed in this respect. A dog that bites is a dead dog. First day at the shelter and I already saw one put to sleep, which in itself is a misleading phrase. Sleep implies that you have the option of waking up. Once their bodies pass unconsciousness to something deeper where systems start to fail, they revolt a little bit, put up a fight on a molecular level. They kick. They cry. They don’t want to go. And this happens because their jaws closed over a human hand, ever so briefly. Maybe even just the once. But people, they get chances. They get the benefit of the doubt. Even though they have the higher logic functioning and they knew when they did it THEY KNEW it was a bad thing.
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Mindy McGinnis (The Female of the Species)
“
Śiva is both the creator and destroyer of the universe, movement and tranquility, light and darkness, male and female, celibate and promiscuous. These paradoxes serve to symbolize the limitlessness and freedom of the divine and suggest that what we might ordinarily consider oppositions are, in fact, closer than we think. These divine dimensions are illustrated in the images of Śiva as Mahāyogi, the Lord of the Dance (Natarāja), and Half- Woman Lord. The image of Śiva as the Great Yogi accents Śiva’s tranquil, ascetic aspect, providing a model for many Śaivites who seek to practice asceticism. The Natarāja image depicts Śiva’s cosmic dance during the auspicious occasion of the Mahashivaratri, the great night of Śiva, when he dances to dispel the ignorance of the night. He holds a drum and a flame; with the drum, he sounds the world into existence, and with the flame, he destroys it in order to create another. [...] The Hindu images of divine, both anthropomorphic and aniconic, function symbolically to point beyond themselves to ultimate, infinite reality.
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Mark W. Muesse (Great World Religions: Hinduism)
“
Celia’s case demonstrates how difficult an undertaking this was, as long as southerners continued to insist that slaves possessed legal rights. The female slave’s lack of a legal protection against rape illustrates the society’s preference for sentiment rather than law, but only for women. The sexual activities of black men were not left to sentiment, but rigidly controlled by law, since sexual relations between black men and white women challenged the power of the white man. The law was also used to create the illusion that slaves possessed certain human rights, and thus to assuage the conscience of white society.
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Melton A. McLaurin (Celia, a Slave (Gender and Slavery Ser. Book 5))
“
In November 2011, San Francisco magazine ran a story on female entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley and illustrated it by superimposing the featured women's heads onto male bodies. The only body type they could imagine for successful entrepreneurship was wearing a tie or a hoodie. Our culture needs to find a robust image of female success that is first, not male, and second, not a white woman on the phone, holding a crying baby.
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Sheryl Sandberg
“
TOO NAIVE
Just 15 and caught up in powerful love that existed for her but was illusive to him.
An older man seeking his way through her undeveloped body, her inexperienced mind and her desperate heart.
So he took advantage, making her promises, deceiving her with words only to reel her in then destroy her.
shes in the middle of his game unable to escape, crying,pleading , begging for someone's help to overcome this aching pain.
just another worthless man who was only concerned with his dick and not that a young girl's life was at risk.
His unfaithful dick,sharing it with many women and having multiple offspring.
Pressuring her to have sex with him even though he knew the consequences.
A dog, a bastard is what he is, running around humping women without the care of how many females he impregnated.
A little boy in a mans frame is all that he illustrated, only the worse he showed and reflected.
I say she was just 15 and foolish, unable to make wise choices, unable to help herself, seeking love from an older guy whom she meant nothing to.
Just a piece of trash used and thrown away without any hesitance.
I say she was just 15 and naive, with her heart held hostage by a little boy in a man's frame.
No precaution he took all rush he would choose it didn't even matter if she was too young and not ready for what he expected.
Though I'm left to say too naive is what i call it.
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kyla wright
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In 2012, the conservancy managed to outrage many of its female staffers by partnering with the online luxury goods retailer Gilt to promote the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition (the magazine explained that “whether you decide to buy a bikini, surfboards or tickets to celebrate at our parties, any money you spend … will help The Nature Conservancy ensure we have beaches to shoot Swimsuit on for another half-century”). * Interestingly, before Nilsson got into the carbon
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Naomi Klein (This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate)
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The Parthenon was 228 feet long by 101 broad, and 64 feet high; the porticoes at each end had a double row of eight columns; the sculptures in the pediments were in full relief, representing in the eastern the Birth of Athene, and in the western the Struggle between that goddess and Poseidon, whilst those on the metopes, some of which are supposed to be from the hand of Alcamenes, the contemporary and rival of Phidias, rendered scenes from battles between the Gods and Giants, the Greeks and the Amazons, and the Centaurs and Lapithæ. Of somewhat later date than the Parthenon and resembling it in general style, though it is very considerably smaller, is the Theseum or Temple of Theseus on the plain on the north-west of the Acropolis, and at Bassæ in Arcadia is a Doric building, dedicated to Apollo Epicurius and designed by Ictinus, that has the peculiarity of facing north and south instead of, as was usual, east and west. Scarcely less beautiful than the Parthenon itself is the grand triple portico known as the Propylæa that gives access to it on the western side. It was designed about 430 by Mnesicles, and in it the Doric and Ionic styles are admirably combined, whilst in the Erectheum, sacred to the memory of Erechtheus, a hero of Attica, the Ionic order is seen at its best, so delicate is the carving of the capitals of its columns. It has moreover the rare and distinctive feature of what is known as a caryatid porch, that is to say, one in which the entablature is upheld by caryatides or statues representing female figures. Other good examples of the Ionic style are the small Temple of Niké Apteros, or the Wingless Victory, situated not far from the Propylæa and the Parthenon of Athens, the more important Temple of Apollo at Branchidæ near Miletus, originally of most imposing dimensions, and that of Artemis at Ephesus, of which however only a few fragments remain in situ. Of the sacred buildings of Greece in which the Corinthian order was employed there exist, with the exception of the Temple of Jupiter at Athens already referred to, but a few scattered remains, such as the columns from Epidaurus now in the Athens Museum, that formed part of a circlet of Corinthian pillars within a Doric colonnade. In the Temple of Athena Alea at Tegea, designed by Scopas in 394, however, the transition from the Ionic to the Corinthian style is very clearly illustrated, and in the circular Monument of Lysicrates, erected in 334 B.C. to commemorate the triumph of that hero's troop in the choric dances in honour of Dionysos, and the Tower of the Winds, both at Athens, the Corinthian style is seen at its best. In addition to the temples described above, some remains of tombs, notably that of the huge Mausoleum at Halicarnassus in memory of King Mausolus, who died in 353 B.C., and several theatres, including that of Dionysos at Athens, with a well-preserved one of larger size at Epidaurus, bear witness to the general prevalence of Doric features in funereal monuments and secular buildings, but of the palaces and humbler dwelling-houses in the three Greek styles, of which there must have been many fine examples, no trace remains. There is however no doubt that the Corinthian style was very constantly employed after the power of the great republics had been broken, and the Oriental taste for lavish decoration replaced the love for austere simplicity of the virile people of Greece and its dependencies. CHAPTER III
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Nancy R.E. Meugens Bell (Architecture)
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So anyway, I don’t think we have to worry about the cyborg bloodhounds now,” she said, wanting to steer the conversation away from beadle larva paste. “Oh?” Sylvan raised an eyebrow at her. “And why is that?” “Can’t you tell?” She leaned a little closer to him. “Smell me.” His eyes seemed to glow in the firelight. “Are you inviting me to scent you?” “Uh…I guess so.” Sophie shrugged. “I just…” But the words died in her mouth. Sylvan was on his hands and knees before her and his nose was pressed to her inner ankle. As she watched, her heart pounding, he traced a path up, following her leg to the back of her knee and then straight to her inner thigh. For a moment Sophie thought he was going to press his face right between her legs. But to her intense relief, after a long pause, he continued up her body, ending at her neck. “You smell delicious.” His deep voice in her ear and his warm breath against the sensitive side of her neck sent a shiver through her. For some reason her nipples were tight under the silky shirt and she felt uncomfortably sensitive between her legs. “Um…thanks.” She wished her voice wouldn’t come out sounding so squeaky. “I, uh, didn’t mean for you to do…do that. What I meant to say was that I used some really strong soap when I took a shower. So there’s no way the uh, sniffers can find me now.” “I’m afraid you’re wrong.” Sylvan sat back, looking at her. “What do you mean? You can’t seriously tell me you could smell any of my personal, uh, scent past all that soap I used. I mean, I lathered up three times.” Sylvan gave her an intent look. “The scent they’re following can’t be eradicated with soap, no matter how much you use. They search for the overlying fragrance—your skin, your hair—but the underlying note is what draws them to you. And it is what will keep them coming if they find us.” “But what…where…?” Sophie shook her head. “It’s the scent of your sex.” One large hand drifted between her legs and he brushed her inner thigh lightly with his fingertips, as though illustrating his point. Sophie gasped at the gentle touch. “Your female essence,” he murmured. “The sweet, warm scent that is completely and utterly you, Sophia.” “They…they
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Evangeline Anderson (Hunted (Brides of the Kindred, #2))
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Being able at last to see the ‘adult’ Gina Lollobrigida or Marilyn Monroe films did little to calm the raging need males of that age—or of any age—feel for female companionship. Those were the days before prudery became fashionable and much before the moral police had begun flexing their biceps in India. Playboy magazine could be found in bookstores, nestling between copies of the Illustrated Weekly of India and Woman & Home. While
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Anonymous
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The battle of the sexes has existed for a very long time, illustrated by three quotes separated by centuries: “The female is an impotent male, incapable of making semen because of the coldness of her nature. We therefore should look upon the female state as if it were a deformity, though one that occurs in the ordinary course of nature.” Aristotle (384–332 BC) “Girls begin to talk and to stand on their feet sooner than boys because weeds always grow up more quickly than good crops.” Martin Luther (1483–1546) “If they can put a man on the moon … why can’t they put them all there?” Jill (graffiti I saw on a bathroom wall in 1985, in response to Luther’s quote scribbled there)
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John Medina (Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School)
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Such a mind is called manas, which is why humans are called manavas. You are a manava with male flesh and I am a manava with female flesh. We both see the world differently, not because we have different bodies, but because we have different minds. You see the world from one point of view and I see the world from another point of view. But our minds can expand. I can see the world from your point of view and you can see it from mine.
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Devdutt Pattanaik (Sita: An Illustrated Retelling of the Ramayana)
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They had just released the third edition of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, an illustrated, 450-page book more lavish than any they had undertaken before, and their coffers were empty. Thayer and Eldridge defaulted on all their contracts and hauled in their sidewalk shingle. Unfortunately, the debut of the Calamus poems, one of the most explicit gay works to be published in the United States for the next half century, had prevented the appearance of the country’s first self-authored female slave narrative.
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Kyla Schuller (The Trouble with White Women: A Counterhistory of Feminism)
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This theory is nicely illustrated by Yeroen’s choice of partner after he lost his position. For a brief while, Luit was alpha. Since Luit was physically the strongest male, he could handle most situations by himself. Furthermore, soon after his rise, the females one by one switched over to his side, most important, Mama. Mama was pregnant at the time, and it’s natural that females under such circumstances do everything to stabilize the hierarchy. Despite his cushy position, Luit was keen on disrupting get-togethers among other males, especially between Yeroen and the only male who could pose a threat, Nikkie. Sometimes these scenes escalated into fighting. Noticing that both other males wanted to be his buddy, Yeroen grew in importance by the day.
At this point, Yeroen had two choices: He could attach himself to the most powerful player, Luit, and derive a few benefits in return - what kind of benefits would be up to Luit. Or, he could help Nikkie challenge Luit and in effect create a new alpha male who would owe his position to him. We have seen that Yeroen took the second route. This is consistent with the “strength is weakness” paradox, which says that the most powerful player is often the least attractive political ally. Luit was too strong for his own good. Joining him, Yeroen would add little. As the colony’s superpower, Luit really did not need more than the old male’s neutrality. Throwing his weight behind Nikkie was a logical choice for Yeroen. He would be the puppet master, having far more leverage than he could ever have dreamt of having under Luit. His choice also translated into increased prestige and access to females. So if Luit demonstrated the “strength is weakness” principle, Yeroen illustrated the corresponding “weakness is strength” principle according to which minor players can position themselves at an intersection that offers great advantage.
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Frans de Waal (Our Inner Ape: A Leading Primatologist Explains Why We Are Who We Are)
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Perspective can be hard to come by, when you spend most of your time licking your own wounds.
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Erin Williams (Commute: An Illustrated Memoir of Female Shame)
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Meanwhile, my willingness to admit that somebody writing in a language I don’t know may have surpassed Shakespeare does not compel me to rush in haste to join Prof. Taylor and the School of Resentment (as Bloom calls them) in their effort to promote any writer over Shakespeare if that writer happens to lack white skin and male genitalia. Such a nonwhite female super-genius may exist, I stipulate; but I will not assume her existence until I discover her works and personally find them superior. Meanwhile, I think the attempt to dump Shakespeare because of his skin-color and gender illustrates the kind of blatant racism and sexism that once marked “the ragged and the golden rabble”; and I do not see why such racism and sexism, reversed but still foolish, have become the Dogma of our totally-indoctrinated and half-educated neo-Left Wing.
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Robert Anton Wilson (Cosmic Trigger III: My Life After Death)
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A few miles to the east, we find the earliest example of another charm – the Venus of Hohle Fels (see illustration on here). There are many examples of prehistoric sculpted female bodies. They are generically called Venus figurines, after the first one discovered in the Dordogne in the 1860s by Paul Hurault, the eighth Marquis de Vibraye, who, noting the pronounced incision representing the vulva, called it Vénus Impudique – the ‘immodest Venus’. The Venus of Hohle Fels is the most ancient of these figures, probably again around 40,000 years old.
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Adam Rutherford (The Book of Humans: A Brief History of Culture, Sex, War and the Evolution of Us)
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There was a silence, and then Tuppence burst out:
‘Money, money, money! I think about money morning, noon and night! I dare say it’s mercenary of me, but there it is!’
‘Same here,’ agreed Tommy with feeling.
‘I’ve thought over every imaginable way of getting it too,’ continued Tuppence. ‘There are only three! To be left it, to marry it, or to make it. First is ruled out. I haven’t got any rich elderly relatives. Any relatives I have are in homes for decayed gentlewomen! I always help old ladies over crossings, and pick up parcels for old gentlemen, in case they should turn out to be eccentric millionaires. But not one of them has ever asked me my name—and quite a lot never said “Thank you.”’
There was a pause.
‘Of course,’ resumed Tuppence, ‘marriage is my best chance. I made up my mind to marry money when I was quite young. Any thinking girl would! I’m not sentimental, you know.’ She paused. ‘Come now, you can’t say I’m sentimental,’ she added sharply.
‘Certainly not,’ agreed Tommy hastily. ‘No one would ever think of sentiment in connection with you.’
‘That’s not very polite,’ replied Tuppence. ‘But I dare say you mean it all right. Well, there it is! I’m ready and willing—but I never meet any rich men! All the boys I know are about as hard up as I am.’
‘What about the general?’ inquired Tommy.
‘I fancy he keeps a bicycle shop in time of peace,’ explained Tuppence. ‘No, there it is! Now you could marry a rich girl.’
‘I’m like you. I don’t know any.’
‘That doesn’t matter. You can always get to know one. Now, if I see a man in a fur coat come out of the Ritz I can’t rush up to him and say: “Look here, you’re rich. I’d like to know you.”’
‘Do you suggest that I should do that to a similarly garbed female?’
‘Don’t be silly. You tread on her foot, or pick up her handkerchief, or something like that. If she thinks you want to know her she’s flattered, and will manage it for you somehow.’
‘You overrate my manly charms,’ murmured Tommy.
‘On the other hand,’ proceeded Tuppence, ‘my millionaire would probably run for his life! No—marriage is fraught with difficulties. Remains—to make money!’
‘We’ve tried that, and failed,’ Tommy reminded her.
‘We’ve tried all the orthodox ways, yes. But suppose we try the unorthodox. Tommy, let’s be adventurers!’
‘Certainly,’ replied Tommy cheerfully. ‘How do we begin?’
‘That’s the difficulty. If we could make ourselves known, people might hire us to commit crimes for them.’
‘Delightful,’ commented Tommy. ‘Especially coming from a clergyman’s daughter!’
‘The moral guilt,’ Tuppence pointed out, ‘would be theirs—not mine. You must admit that there’s a difference between stealing a diamond necklace for yourself and being hired to steal it.’
‘There wouldn’t be the least difference if you were caught!’
‘Perhaps not. But I shouldn’t be caught. I’m so clever.’
‘Modesty always was your besetting sin,’ remarked Tommy.
‘Don’t rag. Look here, Tommy, shall we really? Shall we form a business partnership?’
‘Form a company for the stealing of diamond necklaces?’
‘That was only an illustration. Let’s have a—what do you call it in book-keeping?’
‘Don’t know. Never did any.’
‘I have—but I always got mixed up, and used to put credit entries on the debit side, and vice versa—so they fired me out. Oh, I know—a joint venture! It struck me as such a romantic phrase to come across in the middle of musty old figures. It’s got an Elizabethan flavour about it—makes one think of galleons and doubloons. A joint venture!’
‘Trading under the name of the Young Adventurers, Ltd.? Is that your idea, Tuppence?’
‘It’s all very well to laugh, but I feel there might be something in it.
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Agatha Christie (The Secret Adversary (Tommy and Tuppence Mysteries, #1))
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The gymnasium was an essential element of the Hellenistic city, where males exercised in the nude in order to develop the Greek ideal of a beautiful body. Two things are of interest. First, all readers, male and female, are invited to enter into a masculine mentality when Paul uses athletic competition to illustrate spiritual reality.
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Cynthia Long Westfall (Paul and Gender: Reclaiming the Apostle's Vision for Men and Women in Christ)
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As in the Yale University experimentation, most subjects in the Sheridan-King research illustrated high levels of distress during the ordeal, yet 50 percent of the male subjects and 100 percent of the females obeyed the authority figure and continued to “electrocute” the puppy
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Thomas Horn (Blood on the Altar: The Coming War Between Christian vs. Christian)
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Ojih Odutola’s radical visual reversals function like thought experiments that take us beyond the merely hierarchical. By positioning the unexpected figure of the black woman as master, as oppressor, she suspends, for a moment, our focus on the individual sins of people—the Mississippi overseer, the British slave merchant, the West African slave raider—and turns it back upon enabling systems. It was a racist global system of capital and exploitation—coupled with a perverse and asymmetric understanding of human resource and value—that allowed the trade in humans to occur, and although that trade no longer exists in its previous form, many of its habits of mind persist. In “A Countervailing Theory,” the habit of thought that recognizes some beings and ignores others is presented to us as an element of a physical landscape, the better to emphasize its all-encompassing nature. That system is the air Akanke and Aldo breathe, the bodies they’re in, the land they walk on. For Ojih Odutola, it is expressed by one unending, unfurling charcoal line:
The purpose of beginning the story from the perspective of Aldo, one who is subjugated, is intentional: to show how easily one can be indoctrinated into a systemic predicament. Between Aldo and Akanke, there isn’t a clear demarcation of good or bad with regard to their respective worlds and who they are. The system in which they coexist is illustrated through the striated systems in place—with literal motifs of lines throughout the pictures—representing how the system is ever present and felt, but not explicitly stated. The system is fact.
How can such systems be dismantled? Surely, as Audre Lorde knew, it is not by using the master’s tools. “A Countervailing Theory” offers some alternative possibilities. Here love is radical—between women, between men, between women and men, between human and nonhuman—because it forces us into a fuller recognition of the other. And cunnilingus is radical, and seeing is radical, and listening is radical, for the same reason. We know we don’t want to be victims of history. We know we refuse to be slaves. But do we want to be masters—to behave like masters? To expect as they expect? To be as tranquil and entitled as they are? To claim as righteous our decision not to include them in our human considerations? Are we content that all our attacks on them be ad hominem, as they once spoke of us? If our first response to these portraits of black, female masters is some variation on #bowdownbitches or #girlboss, well, no one can deny the profound pleasures of role reversal, of the flipped script, but when we speak thus we must acknowledge that we can make no simultaneous claim to having put down the master’s tools. Akanke is in these images—but so is Aldo. He must be recognized. The dream of Frantz Fanon was not the replacement of one unjust power with another unjust power; it was a revolutionary humanism, neither assimilationist nor supremacist, in which the Manichaean logic of dominant/submissive as it applies to people is finally and completely dismantled, and the right of every being to its dignity is recognized. That is decolonization. - from "Toyin Ojih Odutola’s Visions of Power
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Zadie Smith
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SIR OLIVER. Aye — I know — there are a set of malicious prating prudent Gossips both male and Female, who murder characters to kill time, and will rob a young Fellow of his good name before He has years to know the value of it.
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Richard Brinsley Sheridan (Delphi Complete Works of Richard Brinsley Sheridan (Illustrated) (Delphi Series Eight Book 13))
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Graced by those signs which truth delights to own, The timid blush, and mild submitted tone: Whate’er she says, though sense appear throughout, Displays the tender hue of female doubt; Deck’d with that charm, how lovely wit appears,
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Richard Brinsley Sheridan (Delphi Complete Works of Richard Brinsley Sheridan (Illustrated) (Delphi Series Eight Book 13))
“
As the public shaming of the Twihard moms for their display of desire illustrates, one of the sources of shame for women is the culture's containment of and discomfort with female sexuality.
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Lynn S. Zubernis (Fandom At The Crossroads: Celebration, Shame and Fan/Producer Relationships)
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The coming of the problematic of gender, now taking over from that of sex, illustrates this progressive dilution of the sexual function. This is the era of the Transsexual, where the conflicts linked to difference -- and even the biological and anatomical signs of difference -- survive long after the real otherness of the sexes has disappeared.
When the sexes eye each other up, squint out through each other's eyes. The male eyes up the female, the female eyes up the male. This is no longer the seductive gaze but a generalized sexual strabismus, reflecting that of moral and cultural values: the true eyes up the false, the beautiful eyes up the ugly, good eyes up evil, and vice versa. They each `lock on to' the other in an attempt to misappropriate its distinctive signs. But both are in fact in league to short-circuit difference. They function like communicating vessels, according to the new machinic rituals of switching or commutation. The utopia of sexual difference ends in the switching of sexual poles, and in interactive exchange. Instead of a dual relation, sex becomes a reversible function. In place of alterity, an alternating current.
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Jean Baudrillard (The Perfect Crime)
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The illustrations are by Marsh Davies. Two of them—the "Serving Boy" and 'Priestess Queen"—are based on the actual archeological finds from the ancient city of Mohenjo-Daro in the Indus Valley (although obviously without bits of iPad attached). We don't know much about the culture of Mohenjo-Daro—there are some findings that suggest that they may have been fairly egalitarian in some interesting ways. But despite the lack of context, the archeologists who unearthed them called the soapstone head illustrated here "Priest King," while they named the bronze female figure here "Dancing Girl." They're still called by those names. Sometimes I think the whole of this book could be communicated with just this set of facts and illustrations.
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Naomi Alderman, The Power
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The tradition has been to think that aging causes bone weakness (bones lose density, become more brittle), as if there was a one-way relationship possibly brought about by hormones (females start experiencing osteoporosis after menopause). It turns out, as shown by Karsenty and others who have since embarked on the line of research, that the reverse is also largely true: loss of bone density and degradation of the health of the bones also causes aging, diabetes, and, for males, loss of fertility and sexual function. We just cannot isolate any causal relationship in a complex system. Further, the story of the bones and the associated misunderstanding of interconnectedness illustrates how lack of stress (here, bones under a weight-bearing load) can cause aging, and how depriving stress-hungry antifragile systems of stressors brings a great deal of fragility which we will transport to political systems in Book II
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb (Antifragile: Things that Gain from Disorder)
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My greatest writing ambition is to write and publish fiction precisely because it is so incredibly hard for me to really be able to sustain the perspective of multiple characters. This challenge is also part of the reason for using those captions when watching videos. I need as much help as I can to understand what’s going on with the plays if I’m to stick with the plot. And no matter how much illustrative language an author uses, I cannot actually imagine the faces and places she describes. Never do I get to a movie and think, “Oh, that’s not how I imagined it to look.
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Jennifer O'Toole (Autism in Heels: The Untold Story of a Female Life on the Spectrum)
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[F]ollowers of Christ think differently than others. . . .
Where do we look for the premises with which we begin our reasoning on the truth or acceptability of various proposals? We anchor ourselves to the word of God, as contained in the scriptures and in the teachings of modern prophets. Unless we are anchored to these truths as our major premises and assumptions, we cannot be sure that our conclusions are true. Being anchored to eternal truth will not protect us from the tribulation and persecution Jesus predicted (Matthew 13:21), but it will give us the peace that comes from faith in Jesus Christ and the knowledge that we are on the pathway to eternal life. . . .
We oppose moral relativism, and we must help our youth avoid being deceived and persuaded by reasoning and conclusions based on its false premises. . . .
We reject the modern idea that marriage is a relationship that exists primarily for the fulfillment of the individuals who enter into it, with either one of them being able to terminate it at will. We focus on the well-being of children, not just ourselves. . . .
“God has commanded that the sacred powers of procreation are to be employed only between man and woman, lawfully wedded as husband and wife.”
That declaration is not politically correct but it is true, and we are responsible to teach and practice its truth. That obviously sets us against many assumptions and practices in today’s world--the birth of millions of innocent children to unwed mothers being only one illustration. . . .
Of course, we see the need to correct some long-standing deficiencies in legal protections and opportunities for women. But in our private behavior, as President Gordon B. Hinckley taught many years ago about the public sector, we believe that any effort “to create neuter gender of that which God created male and female will bring more problems than benefits.” . . .
When we begin by measuring modern practices and proposals against what we know of God’s Plan and the premises given in the word of God and the teachings of His living prophets, we must anticipate that our conclusions will differ from persons who do not think in that way. But we are firm in this because we know that this puts us on safe ground, eternally. . . .
[Some] persons . . . mistakenly believe that God’s love is so great and so unconditional that it will mercifully excuse them from obeying His laws or the conditions of His Plan. They reason backward from their desired conclusion, and assume that the fundamentals of God’s eternal law must adhere to their concepts. But this thinking is confused. The love of God does not supersede His commandments or His Plan. . . . The kingdom of glory to which we are assigned in the final judgment is not determined by love but by the law that God has given us--because of His love--to qualify us for eternal life, “the greatest of all the gifts of God” (D&C 14:7). Those who know that truth will surely think differently about many things than those who do not. . . .
We cannot escape the conclusions, teachings, and advocacy of modern Pharisees. We must live in the world. But the teaching that we not be “of the world” (John 15:19; 17:14, 16) requires us to identify error and exclude it from our thinking, our desires, and our actions.
[CES Evening with a General Authority, Feb. 8, 2013]
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Dallin H. Oaks