Phyllis Chesler Quotes

For most women, being seen, having others pay attention to you, is imagined and experienced as more desirable and more powerful than commanding an army or seizing control of the means of production and reproduction.

Before I began research for this book I was not consciously aware that women were aggressive in indirect ways, that they gossiped and ostracized each other incessantly, and did not acknowledge their own envious and competitive feelings. I now understand that, in order to survive as a woman, among women, one must speak carefully, cautiously, neutrally, indirectly; one must pay careful attention to what more socially powerful women have to say before one speaks; one must learn how to flatter, manipulate, aree with, and appease them. And, if one is hurt or offended by another woman, one does not say so outright; one expresses it indirectly, by turning others against her. Of course, I refuse to learn these "girlish" lessons.

Ideal mental health, like freedom, exists for one person only if it exists for all people.

Women must convert their love for and reliance on strength and skill in others to a love for all manner of strength and skill in themselves

The idea that women's strong attachments to each other are what make them so vulnerable is horrifying. I count my close friendships with a few girls that I know as one of the best things I have going for me right now. My love for them leaves me open to hurt, but ... all love does, or at least that's the cliche. Perhaps girls and women do come to love each other too quickly, or once they are trapped into appearing as though they love one another, they don't want to back out of it. That is probably true. But a fear of confrontation in relationships is the downside. The ability to love easily is a positive.

That these girls avoid use of physical violence in resolving conflict, does not mean that these conflicts are resolved in meaningful and enduring ways. Girls might smile, give in, give up - and then continue the conflict behind their opponents' backs. Girls might also smile, give in, make fatal compromises, because their need to belong (or not to be excluded) is more important to them than sticking to their principles.

Submission and humility will not protect you from the injustices of this war. Nothing can. But clarity, and solidarity in action, will allow you to fight back - and to keep sane, no matter what happens.

For women not to fear rape because we can successfully defend ourselves against it is not anachronistic but revolutionary. For women to be considered as potential warriors (in every sense of the word, including its physical representation) is not anachronistic but revolutionary. If realized, it might imply a radical change in modern life.

The chowdry, or burqa -- the Saudi, North African, and Central Asian version of the head, face, and body shroud -- is a sensory deprivation isolation chamber. It is claustrophobic, may lead to anxiety and depression, and reinforces a woman's already low self-esteem. It may also lead to vitamin D deficiency diseases such as osteoporosis and heart disease. Sensory deprivation officially constitutes torture and is practiced as such in the world's prisons.

women all over the world envy what they perceive as the “prettier” girl—the prom queen, cheerleader, movie star—whom they view as capable of stealing away male interest and therefore frustrating their own chances for well-funded reproductive success.

Men are taught that it is normal, even desirable, to compete and disagree with each other; when they do so, they do not personalize the argument nor do they think that a friendship or working relationship will be jeopardized by a strong difference of opinion.

A harem is not a brothel, as so many Westerners erroneously believe. It is merely the women's living quarters. Male relatives can join them -- but no male nonrelatives may do so. It is hardly a den of eroticism.

Psychologically, enviers wish to be the one God loves most, the Chosen One, the one whose being radiates excellence. Many women wish to star in this role, and many do. The male universe has room for many more stars; the female universe is therefore much smaller, and the competition quite fierce for the limited number of starring roles.

It is impossible for a Westerner to imagine the deadening torpor of a protected life under house arrest. Eventually, one is grateful for the smallest outing outdoors -- a lovely picnic in a burqa, being allowed to watch the men and boys fly kites or swim.

There is a great sadness in knowing that men of genius are not able to transcend the limits of patriarchy. Had I but known that the works I so cherished had been done by human beings, not gods, and that great women, including feminists, had also once lived and worked, I suspect I might have been able to break free sooner from a whole host of fatally misguided notions. What we don't know can hurt us.

Encountering gender apartheid and waged slavery shook me to my roots more than half a century ago in Afghanistan. Oh, the women of Afghanistan, the women of the Muslim world. I was no feminist -- but now, thinking back, I see how much I learned there, how clearly their condition taught me to see gender discrimination anywhere and, above all, taught me to see how cruel oppressed women could be to each other. They taught me about women everywhere.

Go gently into the day. Honor your idealism, resist cynicism. Keep your heart open to the world, try and make the world better. Don't give up.

A woman needs to be economically independent more than she needs a lover or a child.

If you need to be rescued by someone, become that someone yourself. Become Princess Charming. She is you.

If we are not strong, our offers of help are minimally useful.

You have a responsibility to see that your wounded selves do not get in the way of your warrior selves.

similarity in experience does not necessarily make a juror sympathetic . . . [but] may lead to less objective and more harsh responses.

According to Brown and Gilligan, by the third grade, expressing a "different" view among girls has already become "too dangerous and risky." A pre-adolescent girl is sometimes willing to speak more directly when only one other girl is present; this changes when a third girl joins them. However, even as girls are learning how to be indirect and nice, they continue to judge one another. Girls are concerned about who is a true friend and who is only faking it. A girl risks losing her entire social world if she dares to think for herself or if she refuses to back her best friend or her clique even when she thinks they are in the wrong.

Mary, mother of Jesus, pays for her maternity by giving up her body, almost entirely: she foregoes both (hetero) sexual pleasure (Christ's birth is a virgin and "spiritual" birth) and physical prowess. She has no direct worldly power but, like her crucified son, is easily identified with by many people, especially women, as a powerless figure. Mary symbolizes power achieved through receptivity, compassion, and a uterus. (There's nothing intrinsically wrong with a consciously willed "receptivity" to the universe; on the contrary, it is highly desirable, and should certainly include "receptivity" to many things other than holy sperm and suffering.)

Even if a psychoanalytic understanding of one’s life is potentially liberating—and I think it may be—psychoanalytic therapy, by itself, cannot overcome trauma, or human nature. Nor can psychological healing take place in isolation.

Contemporary adult women, in urban public places, also behave in physically aggressive ways. Like men, women sometimes push and shove each other. However, while doing so, unlike men, women tend not to make eye contact with each other.

Once Lola Pierotti earned $24,000 a year and worked long hours as an administrative assistant on Capitol Hill. Now she works longer hours and has even more responsibility- but no pay. What happened? Was she demoted? No, she just married the boss. Her bridegroom, of four years this month, was the senior Republican Senator from Vermont- George D. Aiken. "All he expects of me is that I drive his car, cook his meals, do his laundry and run his office," she enumerated, with a grin.

In Women and Madness, Phyllis Chesler writes of what she calls “psychiatric imperialism,” whereby normal responses to trauma are methodically pathologized in science and medicine. At the time of the book’s publication in 1972, few women were coming forward about gender biases in the study and practice of psychology. Chesler felt compelled to bring forward a conversation around gender, race, class, and medical ethics because “modern female psychology reflects a relatively powerless and deprived condition.” Of sensitivity she writes: “Many intrinsically valuable female traits, such as intuitiveness or compassion, have probably been developed through default or patriarchal-imposed necessity, rather than through either biological predisposition or free choice. Female emotional ‘talents’ must be viewed in terms of the overall price exacted by sexism.” Regardless of causation, of note here is that women’s internal lives were barely acknowledged or considered.

Feminism is a way of understanding reality, not just a series of things to do. Feminism challenges our predilection for one right answer, one right God, one size fits all. As a feminist, one can be spiritual or secular. One can lead an outwardly conservative life and yet, in feminist terms, be profoundly radical. So too, feminist leaders (like everyone else) can be sexist, or racist, or class-blind, in either their professional or personal lives. Or in both. Feminist of my generation told the truth about women's condition. We were messengers from the past, or from the future. As ever, some people thought that killing, or at least defaming, the messengers was a way of making us and our truths disappear. I'm counting on you not to do that.

Female-female aggression (starving, abusing) causes spontaneous abortions. Hrdy notes that dominant, higher-ranking female primates overtly harass subordinate females. Such behaviors are “implicated in delays in maturation, inhibition of ovulation, or in extreme cases, spontaneous abortion by subordinates.

According to Schafran, many women, including women judges and jurors, “avoid acknowledging their own vulnerability by blaming the victim. This distancing mechanism operates particularly in non-stranger rape cases, because it is in acknowledging the likelihood of these crimes that women jurors feel most at risk.

when women tell stories about other women who are not their friends, whom they envy, with whom they cannot identify, they seek to destroy. As all women know, gossip can be destructive and terrible. Because we have been forced to separate our aggressive and our erotic drives in relation to men, we locate our aggression in our relations with other women.

Toward that end, you must move beyond words. You must act. Do not hesitate because your actions may not be perfect, or beyond criticism. "Action" is how you put your principles into practice. Not just publicly, or toward those more powerful than you, but also privately, toward those less fortunate than you. Not just toward those who are (safely) far away, but toward those with whom you live and work. If you're on the right track, you can expect some pretty savage criticism. Trust it. Revel in it. It is the truest measure of your success.

It is in light of such overwhelming (and interesting) research that Anne Campbell questions the myth of the “coy female” and the myth of the “nonaggressive woman.” Campbell writes: It is ironic that some of these myths have been supported by the feminist movement, which has tried to insist that women’s aggression is exclusively a response to male violence. The idea that females could have survived without the motivation and ability to compete for scarce resources is, from an evolutionary viewpoint, untenable. Nonetheless, it is a viewpoint that is congenial to the continuance of male protection and control over women.

Love is not love if it forces you to compromise who you are. Love is a process and a discipline. It is not only what you feel for someone else. Like freedom, it is a path, a practice, which no legal contract can guarantee or enforce. . . Loving freely means first 'seeing' yourself and then your beloved for who she or he uniquely is, not who you need them to be. You cannot love someone and expect them to compromise some core part of their identity because you need them by your side at every major event in your life. Loving involves letting go - and going on, sometimes alone, to those places to which your soul is drawn.

Human beings tend to forget what is painful or dangerous. Like sons, daughters were once completely dependent on a female caretaker. Perhaps remembering any conflict with another woman might remind a woman of a primary dependence so total that to have even once contemplated losing it was to contemplate death. Perhaps an infant or a child imagines—or has actually experienced—terror and deprivation at female hands. Perhaps one’s mother or female caregiver was largely absent or malevolently present, over-critical, subject to rages. According to some psychoanalytic theorists, daughters, perhaps even more than sons, respond to perceived and real maternal anger with “guilt.

Indirect aggression is characterized by a clique of relatively powerless (compared with their male counterparts) girls or women who exert power “indirectly” by bullying, gossiping about, slandering, and shaming one girl or woman so that she will be shunned by her female intimates, thrown out of her college sorority, perhaps fired from her job, divorced by her husband, and definitely dropped from the A-list of partygoers. Gossip is a chief weapon of indirect aggression. Slandering another girl or woman (“she’s a slut,” “she’s … different,” “she really thinks she’s something”) leads to her being ostracized by her female friends and peers, a punishment that girls and women experience as being put into solitary confinement or as a social death.

Primates – and young humans who lack verbal skills – will use physical aggression to express themselves or to get their way. They will hit, push, shove, spit, kick, punch, and bite. As children grow, they add verbal aggression to their repertoire. They will shout and threaten. As children develop further and gain more social intelligence, they begin to employ indirect and nonphysical forms of aggression. From an evolutionary and anatomical point of view, girls and women are less inclined to attack anyone directly, or physically, than man and boys are – unless, as mothers, their offspring are in immediate physical danger. In addition, girls and women are culturally trained to employ indirect methods of aggression, as a low-risk, low-injury, approach. Girls learn that a safe way to attack someone else is behind her back, so that she will not know who is responsible. This tracks girls and women into lives of chronic gossip and rumor mongering, but it also allows girls and women to fight without physically killing each other outright.

British ecologist Josephine Andrews, now affiliated with the anthropology department at Washington University, reports a case of primate infanticide by a female black lemur in Madagascar. She found that, after an attack by dogs and the subsequent death of the leading female, a fight ensued between two adult females neither of whom was “dominant.” As they fought, one female suddenly picked up the other female’s infant and “ran back up the mango tree with the screaming infant, shaking it violently from side to side in her mouth, smashing the rib cage, and then held the body while eating some of the entrails.” The mother of the dead infant became silent and, although she sat watching the body, she did not ascend the tree to investigate. For the next few days, the female who had lost her infant sat apart from the rest of the group. She did not eat with the others, but waited until they had moved away before feeding. From then on, the killer of the baby lemur and her infant led the troop. The mother of the dead baby trailed some distance behind them.

According to Finnish psychologist Kaj Björkqvist, by the time a girl is eight years old she is unlikely to express frustration and anger toward others physically. Girls are, on the other hand, as verbally aggressive as boys. Instead of hitting or shoving, girls will use verbal, nonverbal, and socially manipulative skills to hurt others—mainly other girls. Girls will insult and denigrate each other; they will also hold grudges for a very long time. Björkqvist and others have shown that girls are “significantly more likely than boys to become friendly with someone else as revenge”; and that girls will gossip and suggest the “shunning” of another girl. According to Björkqvist, indirect aggression is a type of “hostile behavior [that] is carried out in order to harm the opponent, while avoiding being identified as aggressive.” Björkqvist and others developed a scale, known as the Direct and Indirect Aggression Scale, which measures physical aggression (hitting, kicking, tripping, shoving, pushing, pulling), and verbal aggression (yelling, insulting, teasing, threatening to hurt the other, calling the other names), on the one hand, and on the other hand, indirect aggression (shutting the other out of the group, becoming friends with another as revenge, ignoring, gossiping, telling bad stories, planning secretly to bother the other, saying bad things behind the back, saying to others: “let’s not be with him/her,” telling the other’s secrets to a third person, writing notes in which the other is criticized, criticizing the other’s hair or clothing, trying to get others to dislike the person).

most girls and boys continue to experience childhood in father-dominated, father-absent, and/or mother-blaming families.

cumulative effect of being forced to lead circumscribed lives is toxic. The psychic toll is measured in anxiety, depression, phobias, suicide attempts, eating disorders, and such stress-related illnesses as addictions, alcoholism, high blood pressure, and heart disease

still behave as if they’ve been “colonized.

They do not pathologize women who have full-time careers, are lesbians, refuse to marry, commit adultery, want divorces, choose to be celibate, have abortions, use birth control, choose to have a child out of wedlock, choose to breast-feed against expert advice, or expect men to be responsible for 50 percent of the child care and housework.

Women have lost custody of their children for these very reasons—pronounced unfit by courtroom psychiatrists, psychologists, or social workers.

trauma suffered by women at home in violent “domestic captivity.

sister-victims of the patriarchy.

subjection of the wife to the husband’s will.” Her “therapy” consisted of imprisonment and domestic servitude

Most women are trained to put their own needs second, the needs of any man—including a violent man—first.

are psychopaths. They form cults around themselves, isolate cult members from their friends and family, teach that “sexual encounters” with the leader are both an honor and an occasion for spiritual enlightenment.

given how insurance and drug companies, managed care and government spending cuts have made quality psychotherapy totally out of reach for most people. This means that just when we know what to do for the victims of trauma, there are very few teaching hospitals and clinics that treat poor women in feminist ways.

Medication by itself is never enough. Women who are clinically depressed or anxious also need access to feminist information and support.

We now understand that women and men are not “crazy” or “defective” when, in response to trauma, they develop post-traumatic symptoms, including insomnia, flashbacks, phobias, panic attacks, anxiety, depression, dissociation, a numbed toughness, amnesia, shame, guilt, self-loathing, self-mutilation, and social withdrawal.

When fathers contested custody, even of infants, “good enough” mothers would consistently lose children due to (false) allegations of mental illness or sexual promiscuity.

Colonization” exists when the colonized has valuable natural resources that are used to enrich the colonizer, but not the colonized: when the colonized does the colonizer’s work, but earns little of the colonizer’s money; when the colonized try to imitate or please the colonizer, and truly believe that the colonizer is, by nature, superior/inferior, and that the colonized cannot exist without her colonizer.

Mothers are often psychiatrically accused of alienating a child from the child’s father if that child does not resent or hate the mother, or prefer the father.

The clinical distrust of mothers, simply because they are women, the eagerness to bend over backwards to like fathers, simply because they are men is mind-numbing.

Women who have been repeatedly raped in childhood—often by authority figures in their own families—are traumatized human beings; as such, they are often diagnosed as borderline personalities.

rarely treated as the torture victims they really are.

feminist therapist believes that a woman needs to be told that she’s not crazy; that it’s normal to feel sad or angry about being overworked, underpaid, underloved; that it’s healthy to harbor fantasies of running away when the needs of others (aging parents, needy husbands, demanding children) threaten to overwhelm her.

What matters is that you gain more and more control of the institutions that serve us all so poorly.

Your body and your mind are, together, your primary country of allegiance. As a feminist, you must know - and know how to defend - your country and its boundaries.

Nini Herman believes that the unresolved issues “which are active at the core of the mother-daughter dyad” are, to some extent, what psychologically holds women back and accounts for women’s unconscious collusion with patriarchal edicts. I agree. Nini Herman believes that the unexamined mother-daughter relationship is precisely where women are “obstinately marking time” rather than moving toward freedom.

In 1931 Freud admitted that he did not really understand the mother-daughter relationship. He wrote that a daughter’s “pre-Oedipal attachment” to her mother is “so difficult to grasp in analysis—[it is] grey with age and shadowy and almost impossible to revivify—that it was as if it had succumbed to an especially inexorable repression.” This insight “came to [him] as a surprise, like the discovery, in another field, of the Minoan-Mycenaean civilization behind the civilization of Greece.” Actually, Freud understood quite a lot, namely, that girls are as attached to their mothers as they are to their fathers and that, in certain circumstances, they might even “retire from the field of heterosexuality” in order to placate or please their mothers. Freud made this admission in a case history published in 1920.

Battering, drunken husbands had their wives psychiatrically imprisoned as a way of continuing to batter them; husbands also had their wives imprisoned in order to live or marry with other women.

Although an increasing number of girls have begun to participate in team (not individual) sports, most girls still do not compete as a group against another group of girls. Many girls still demand an egalitarian, dyadic reciprocity and are, therefore, more threatened by the slightest change in status. The dyad is the female equivalent of the hierarchically structured boys club. A change in status of one member of the dyad may mean that the entire club is endangered. According to Benenson and Bennaroch, “If a friend is succeeding in school, then the friend might be spending more time studying, or if the friend has a boyfriend, then she might be abandoning other friends to spend time with her boyfriend.” By contrast, boys who are members of the same group feel enhanced by the achievement of any other group member, even if he is a close friend.

In addition to such mother-in-law violence toward a daughter-in-law, Burbank notes that “women aggress against their co-wives verbally in twenty-nine percent of the societies and physically in eighteen percent of the societies. Sisters-in-law also “aggress against one another in fourteen percent of the societies; mothers-in law and daughters-in-law are an aggressive dyad in twelve percent of the societies

For years, female-female aggression among primates was ignored or minimized. According to the anthropologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, this occurred partly because male-male competition was even more “startling and overt,” but also because “persistent conflicts between females are often more subtle . . . [the] competition is indirect. Two animals who are not even touching or looking at one another may nevertheless be in competition if one of them occupies a place or consumes a resource that would benefit the other.

Some believe that the bonobo is the “closest living representative of our earliest known ape-hominid ancestor.” In Jahme’s words, the bonobo is also known as the “make love not war” ape because sex is used by bonobos as a substitute for aggression. When things get tense between males, they stop themselves before things get really nasty and they rub their penises together . . . the females have lesbian sex, known as genito-genital rubbing, or GG rubbing . . . When an adolescent female bonobo tries to ingratiate herself into a new group of bonobos, she looks for a senior female and tries to become her friend. She sits on the periphery of things for a while and sizes up who is who in the hierarchy. The young female bonobo then tries to cement a bond with a high-status older female by engaging in homo-erotic acts with her.

since infant care is quite labor-intensive, biological mothers also try to enlist other subordinate females in caring for their infants by destroying the subordinate’s capacity to mate or to bear infants of her own. Thus, some female primates will sometimes fight for each other, but, more often, females fight against each other: mother against daughter, higher-ranking female against lower-ranking female, one troop of females against another troop of females. They fight over food, infants, sex, and position in the hierarchy.

Female primates and female humans may both be genetically predisposed to compete against and dominate other females in order to suppress, severely, the next female’s desirability, fertility, live-birth rate. We have seen how primates accomplish this. In a sense, humans do likewise. Advantages of class, caste, race, and geography function in similar ways. For example, I have seen women fight over the same mate or for the same child in truly primal or primate-like ways.

According to Finnish psychologist Kaj Björkqvist, there is no logical reason to assume “that females should be less hostile and less prone to get into conflicts than males.” Depending on age, economic class, stress, and tribal custom, girls and women will physically and verbally assault each other. In fact, according to Björkqvist, “with respect to interpersonal aggression, same-sex encounters are more frequent than between-sex encounters.” We may remember that anthropologist Victoria Burbank found female “acts of physical aggression, [which ranged] from slaps to murder, in sixty-one percent of the societies.

Hines and Fry describe a street scene in Buenos Aires—the likes of which I have personally observed (and experienced), in bus and airport terminals all over the world. In the Hines study, “women pushed and shoved each other as they boarded crowded buses, but without making verbal or eye contact with each other.” I have seen Caucasian women “accidentally” bumping into each other in airport bathrooms, as if they were off balance or unclear about personal space boundaries. They act as if they do not know where they end and where some other woman starts.

Things do not have to last forever to be good, and when they end, it is not always proof that one's principles were wrong.

I have found women’s hostility toward women to be related also to lower self-efficacy, lower optimism, lower sense of internal control, higher belief in external control, higher objectification of body, higher loss of self, less intimate relationships with women and with their male partners, less willingness to work with women, more competition with women, and on the violence end: more acceptance of rape myths, acceptance of interpersonal violence, and sexual harassment myths (that women ask for harassment).

A feminist therapist believes that women need to hear that men “don’t love enough” before they’re told that women “love too much”; that fathers are equally responsible for their children’s problems; that no one—not even self-appointed feminist saviors—can rescue a woman but herself; that self-love is the basis for love of others; that it’s hard to break free of patriarchy; that the struggle to do so is both miraculous and life-long; that very few of us know how to support women in flight from—or at war with—internalized self-hatred.

hate.

Western atheists who view religion, especially Judaism and Christianity, as reactionary and anti-woman, hesitate to criticize Islam for its barbaric misogyny.

The professoriate, the media, and world leaders do not realize that the West is not the first among sinners—Islam has a long history of colonialism, imperialism, conversion by the sword, gender and religious apartheid, unending Muslim-on-Muslim religious wars, and slavery. Westerners have been carefully taught to believe that such sins or crimes are mainly or solely true of the West—and therefore Westerners must atone for having impoverished and exploited others.

Today's new anti-Semite hides behind the smokescreen of anti-Zionism. He or she knows that it’s immoral, unfair, and inaccurate to hate and blame the Jews, but since they really do hate and blame the Jews, they have found that anti-Zionism is a popular and politically respectable way to do so.

Perhaps most important, we need to support women who have fought back against their batterers and rapists and are wasting away in jail for daring to save their own lives. They are political prisoners and should be honored as such—not seen as pathological masochists who “chose” to stay until they “chose” to kill.

I expected so much of other feminists - we all did- the most ordinary disappointments were often experienced as major betrayals. We expected less of men and forgave them, more than once, when they failed us. We expected far more of other women, who, paradoxically, had less (power) to share than men did. We held grudges against other women in ways we dared not to do against men. We were not always aware of this. Be aware of such unspoken double standards. Try and behave more evenhandedly than we did.