β
Itβs lovely loving, isnβt it? In fact, I find it almost better, because being loved sometimes embarrasses me, but loving is a gift.
β
β
Sheila Hancock
β
There is something threatening about a woman who is not occupied with children. There is something at-loose-ends feeling about such a woman. What is she going to do instead? What sort of trouble will she make?
β
β
Sheila Heti (Motherhood)
β
We tried not to smile, for smiling only encourages men to bore you and waste your time.
β
β
Sheila Heti (How Should a Person Be?)
β
Who cares if you have a girlfriend, anyway?"
"I care," Simon said gloomily. "Pretty soon the only people left without a girlfriend will be me and Wendell the school janitor. And he smells like Windex."
"At least you know he's still available."
Simon glared. "Not funny, Fray."
"There's always Sheila 'The Thong' Bararino," Clary suggested.
"That is who Eric's been dating for the past three months," Simon said. "His advice, meanwhile, was that I ought to just decide which girl in school has the most rockin' bod and ask her out."
"Eric is a sexist pig," Clary said. "Maybe you should call your band The Sexist Pigs."
"It has a ring to it.
β
β
Cassandra Clare (City of Bones (The Mortal Instruments, #1))
β
She had thought that when someone died, it would be like they went into a different room. She had not known that life itself transformed into a different room and trapped you in it without them.
β
β
Sheila Heti (Pure Colour)
β
boundaries, Sheila. Barriers. We need them. They let you love someone. Otherwise you might kill them.
β
β
Sheila Heti (How Should a Person Be?)
β
Never underestimate the power of stupid.
β
β
Sheila Turnage (Three Times Lucky (Mo & Dale Mysteries, #1))
β
It is only when you get older that everyone makes you feel bad about being alone, or implies that spending time with other people is somehow better, because it proves you to be likeable.
But being unlikeable wasn't the reason she was alone. She was alone so she could hear herself thinking. She was alone so she could hear herself living.
β
β
Sheila Heti (Pure Colour)
β
Masculinity cannot exist without femininity. On its own, masculinity has no meaning, because it is but one half of a set of power relations. Masculinity pertains to male dominance as femininity pertains to female subordination.
β
β
Sheila Jeffreys (Unpacking Queer Politics: A Lesbian Feminist Perspective)
β
Peace is not the absence of trouble, but the presence of Christ.
β
β
Sheila Walsh
β
You have to know where the funny is, and if you know where the funny is, you know everything.
β
β
Sheila Heti (How Should a Person Be?)
β
Her behaviors turn her psychic pain, which she fears is not legitimate, into physical pain, which is indisputably real".
β
β
Sheila M. Reindl (Sensing the Self: Women's Recovery from Bulimia)
β
It has long been known to me that certain objects want you as much as you want them. These are the ones that become important, the objects that you hold dear. The others fade from your life entirely. You wanted them, but they did not want you in return.
β
β
Sheila Heti (How Should a Person Be?)
β
My heart leaped like the cheerleader I will never be.
β
β
Sheila Turnage (Three Times Lucky (Mo & Dale Mysteries, #1))
β
You were upset. I hurt you. Something must have happened to make you stay away from me. Is that right?β His nose was pressed under my ear and I fought back another round of tears because he just didnβt fully grasp it. He could have been repeating Sheilaβs words for all I knew.
βYouβre leaving.
β
β
Amber L. Johnson (Puddle Jumping (Puddle Jumping, #1))
β
The last thing that's needed is to judge your own heart, but then that's the first thing you go and do. A heart rushes to judge itself. A heart should have better things to do. A heart doesn't.
β
β
Sheila Heti (Pure Colour)
β
I asked Granny one time if she thought green might be God's favorite color since he'd made so many shades of it.
β
β
Sheila Kay Adams (My Old True Love)
β
My brokenness is a better bridge for people than my pretend wholeness ever was.
β
β
Sheila Walsh
β
Heβs just another man who wants to teach me something.
β
β
Sheila Heti
β
I never forgive. I like revenge too much.
β
β
Sheila Turnage (Three Times Lucky (Mo & Dale Mysteries, #1))
β
We can't change the past, Soldier. We can only be grateful for the life of a new day, and move on.
β
β
Sheila Turnage (Three Times Lucky (Mo & Dale Mysteries, #1))
β
She doesnβt know why she spent so much of her life thinking about such trivial things, or looking at websites, when just outside her window there was a sky that was not trivial.
β
β
Sheila Heti (Pure Colour)
β
If you find the truth within you, it will save you. If you ignore it, it will destroy you.
β
β
Sheila Kohler (Cracks)
β
Both making life and making art are pouring spirit into form.
β
β
Sheila Heti (Pure Colour)
β
There are certain people who do not feel like they were raised by wolves, and they are the ones who make the world tick. They are the ones who keep everything functioning so the rest of us can worry about what sort of person we should be.
β
β
Sheila Heti (How Should a Person Be?)
β
The midwife considers the miracle of childbirth as normal, and leaves it alone unless there's trouble. The obstetrician normally sees childbirth as trouble; if he leaves it alone, it's a miracle.
β
β
Sheila Stubbs
β
Radical feminist theorists do not seek to make gender a bit more flexible, but to eliminate it. They are gender abolitionists, and understand gender to provide the framework and rationale for male dominance. In the radical feminist approach, masculinity is the behaviour of the male ruling class and femininity is the behaviour of the subordinate class of women. Thus gender can have no place in the egalitarian future that feminism aims to create.
β
β
Sheila Jeffreys (Gender Hurts: A Feminist Analysis of the Politics of Transgenderism)
β
I know that character exists from the outside alone. I know that inside the body there's just temperature.
β
β
Sheila Heti (How Should a Person Be?)
β
Except for that, everything's going great. Well....there's been a murder and we're out of soup.
β
β
Sheila Turnage (Three Times Lucky (Mo & Dale Mysteries, #1))
β
You what?" Dale yelped, looking like I'd handed him something dead. "You ain't writing during summer vacation, are you? I'm pretty sure that's against the rules.
β
β
Sheila Turnage (Three Times Lucky (Mo & Dale Mysteries, #1))
β
For me, it was a Gold Star day. I'd identified an enemy, and I'd made a life decision: I might come home tore up from fighting or late from being punished, but I'd never come home crying. So far, I ain't.
β
β
Sheila Turnage (Three Times Lucky (Mo & Dale Mysteries, #1))
β
So many gifts her father gave her, so she should not be surprised they continued to be given, even in the moment of his dying.
...The gifts of patience, perspective, and detachment.
The gifts of silence, irrelevance, and joy.
β
β
Sheila Heti (Pure Colour)
β
Aside from blow jobs, though, I'm through with being the perfect girlfriend, just through with it. Then if he's sore with me, let him dump my ass. That will just give me more time to be a genius.
β
β
Sheila Heti (How Should a Person Be?)
β
One of the things I am very aware of not having in my life is the love of my father. ...but I know now that it is hard to make up that loss in the life of a daughter.
It's your dad who tells you that you are beautiful.
Its your dad who picks you up over his head and carries you on his shoulders.
It's your did who will fight the monsters under your bed.
It's your dad who tells you that you are worth a lot, so don't settle for the first guy who tells you you're pretty.
β
β
Sheila Walsh (Let Go: Live Free of the Burdens All Women Know)
β
Thereβs a reason humans peg-out around eighty: prose fatigue. It looks like organ failure or cancer or stroke but itβs really just the inability to carry on clambering through the assault course of mundane cause and effect. If we ask Sheila then we canβt ask Ron. If I have the kippers now then itβs quiche for tea. Four score years is about all the ifs and thens you can take. Dementiaβs the sane realisation you just canβt be doing with all that anymore.
β
β
Glen Duncan (The Last Werewolf (The Last Werewolf, #1))
β
Better to have your failure right in front of you than the fantasy in your head.
β
β
Sheila Heti (How Should a Person Be?)
β
It's stupid to ban books that tell you the truth about life.
β
β
Sheila Kohler (Cracks)
β
The conversation went on for another half hour, before this man's girlfriend, who had not said much of anything until then, remarked, Being a woman, you can't just say you don't want a child. You have to have some big plan or idea of what you're going to do instead. And it better be something great. And you had better be able to tell it convincingly - before it even happens - what the arc of your life will be.
β
β
Sheila Heti (Motherhood)
β
As I was watching, I thought about how unfair it was that she and I had to think about having kids - that we had to sit here talking about it, feeling like if we didn't have children, we would always regret it. It suddenly seemed like a huge conspiracy to keep women in their thirties - when you finally have some brains and some skills and experience - from doing anything useful with them at all. It is hard to when such a large portion of your mind, at any given time, is preoccupied with the possibility - a question that didn't seem to preoccupy the drunken men at all.
β
β
Sheila Heti (Motherhood)
β
Identity politics replaced structural political analysis, and meant that people could claim identities that were seen to arrive from the heavens rather than from the power structures of sex, race and class.
β
β
Sheila Jeffreys (Gender Hurts: A Feminist Analysis of the Politics of Transgenderism)
β
The world we live in might not be free from pain, but you have the ability to create for yourself a world free from struggle.
β
β
Sheila Applegate (Enchanted One: The Portal to Love)
β
Dale can't tolerate other people throwing up. He gets what's known as the Synchronized Heaves.
β
β
Sheila Turnage (Three Times Lucky (Mo & Dale Mysteries, #1))
β
I'm Baptist. So far, Fast or Never is the only speeds I got with forgiving.
β
β
Sheila Turnage (Three Times Lucky (Mo & Dale Mysteries, #1))
β
It's never too late to make a better decision
β
β
Sheila Turnage (The Ghosts of Tupelo Landing (Mo & Dale Mysteries, #2))
β
There's so much beauty in this world that it's hard to begin. There are no words with which to express my gratitude at having been given this one chance to live - if not Live. Let other people frequent the nightclubs in their tight-ass skirts and Live. I'm just sitting here, vibrating in my apartment, at having been given this one chance to live.
β
β
Sheila Heti (How Should a Person Be?)
β
There is a kind of sadness in not wanting the things that give so many other people their life's meaning. There can be sadness at not living out a more universal story - the suppose life cycle - how out of one life cycle another cycle is supposed to come. But when out of your life, no new cycle comes, what does that feel like? It feels like nothing. Yet there is a bit of a let-down feeling when the great things that happen in the lives of others - you don't actually want those things for yourself.
β
β
Sheila Heti (Motherhood)
β
As a feminist, I consider the female pronoun to be an honorific, a term that conveys respect. Respect is due to women as members of a sex caste that have survived subordination and deserve to be addressed with honour. Men who transgender cannot occupy such a position.
β
β
Sheila Jeffreys (Gender Hurts: A Feminist Analysis of the Politics of Transgenderism)
β
A bulimic person's shame may lead her to try to hide not only her eating-disorder behaviors but also her basic needs and yearnings. She may wish that her needs and desires did not exist and may try to act as if she does not need or want anything or anyone. When that attempt inevitably fails, she may wish that others could magically read her mind and respond to her needs and wants without her having to ask for anything. To avoid the shame of expressing her needs and desires, she turns to food, rather than relationships, for comfort".
β
β
Sheila M. Reindl (Sensing the Self: Women's Recovery from Bulimia)
β
Sex is not about genitalia. Itβs about relationship. When God said βthe two shall become one flesh,β he didnβt mean it only physically.
β
β
Sheila Wray Gregoire (The Good Girl's Guide to Great Sex: And You Thought Bad Girls Have All the Fun)
β
There were other stories and other names. Second Base Stace, who had breasts in fourth grade and let some of the boys feel them. Vincent, who took acid and tried to flush a sofa down the toilet. Sheila, who allegedly masturbated with a hot dog and had to go to the emergency room. The list went on and on.
β
β
Stephen Chbosky (The Perks of Being a Wallflower)
β
There are two kinds of family. There's the family of your flesh, and the one of your heart. One builds character, the other rewards it.
β
β
Sheila Roberts (The Snow Globe)
β
Whether I want kids is a secret I keep from myselfβit is the greatest secret I keep from myself.
β
β
Sheila Heti (Motherhood)
β
The word is a flame burning in a dark glass.
β
β
Sheila Watson (Deep Hollow Creek)
β
When you change the way you feel, it changes the way you think. When you change the way you think, you change the way you deal with everything in life.
β
β
Sheila Burke
β
For there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it
β
β
Sheila Heti (Pure Colour)
β
Most people live their entire lives with their clothes on, and even if they wanted to, couldn't take them off. Then there are those who cannot put them on. They are the ones who live their lives not just as people but as examples of people. They are destined to expose every part of themselves, so the rest of us can know what it means to be a human.
Most people lead their private lives. They have been given a natural modesty that feels to them like morality, but it's not -- it's luck. They shake their heads at the people with their clothes off rather than learning about human life from their example, but they are wrong to act so superior. Some of us have to be naked, so the rest can be exempted by fate.
β
β
Sheila Heti (How Should a Person Be?)
β
Her gaze traveled across the western sky that was dotted with clouds and was held by the wintry looking sun, so pure, so lovely, and so impossible to touch. Sheila felt that that was how her love was - Out of reach, unquestionably warm, and as certain as the celestial ball.
β
β
Shampa Sharma
β
A bulimic person may be so disconnected from her experience that she does not even know what she needs or wants. If she does not know, needing something or someone only confirms her sense that she is weak and inadequate. She believes her needs are not legitimate, and therefore finds it difficult to seek care or engage with any care she does manage to seek. In fact, she is likely to greet others' expressions of concern with contempt, the very contempt with which she views herself".
β
β
Sheila M. Reindl (Sensing the Self: Women's Recovery from Bulimia)
β
When I was younger, thinking about whether I wanted children, I always came back to this formula: if no one had told me anything about the world, I would have invented boyfriends. I would have invented sex, friendship, art. I would not have invented child-rearing.
β
β
Sheila Heti (Motherhood)
β
Yet because her needs and yearnings are real and pressing, she must find some way to express them: she puts into body what she cannot yet put into words. Her eating disorder serves as her voice, her attempt to express and meet her needs and desires without directly asking for anything".
β
β
Sheila M. Reindl (Sensing the Self: Women's Recovery from Bulimia)
β
I love the people who exist already, and there are so many books to read, and so much silence to inhabit.
β
β
Sheila Heti (Motherhood)
β
What do humans go to art for, but to locate within themselves that inward-turning eye, which breathes significance into all of existence-for what is art but the act of infusing matter with the breath of God?
β
β
Sheila Heti (Pure Colour)
β
Most people either love or hate old libraries. To some, a room like this--dim, high-ceilinged, dusty, smelling of old paper and crumbling leather--would be oppressive, a place to flee from in search of sun and air. To others, like me, it was a wonderful cave filled with unimaginable treasures and unexpected treats. I always found myself inhaling deeply when I entered the stacks, as if trying to absorb part of them into my bloodstream.
β
β
Sheila Connolly (Fundraising the Dead (Museum, #1))
β
As I watched them together, my earth found its axis and my stars found their sky.
β
β
Sheila Turnage (Three Times Lucky (Mo & Dale Mysteries, #1))
β
I like the jellyfish because it has no brain or heart. Itβs just a thing that takes in the ocean through its mouth. I like that kind of ambition and simplicity.
β
β
Sheila Heti (Women in Clothes)
β
There is a kind of sadness in not wanting the things that give so many other people their lifeβs meaning.
β
β
Sheila Heti (Motherhood)
β
Itβs like the story my religious cousin told me when we were at her home for Shabbat dinner- of the girl who made chicken the way her mother did, which was the way her mother did: always tying the chicken legs together before putting it in the pot. When the girl asked her mother why she tied the legs together, her mother said, Thatβs the way my mother did it. When the girl asked her grandmother why she did it that way, her grandmother said, Thatβs how my mother did it. When she asked her great-grandmother why it was important to tie the chicken legs together, the woman replied, Thatβs the only way it would fit in my pot.
I think that is how childbearing feels to me: a once-necessary, now sentimental gesture (42).
β
β
Sheila Heti (Motherhood)
β
As she continually disregards and overrides her body's signals of hunger, fullness, and fatigue, a bulimic woman becomes increasingly disconnected from her subjective experience. Because she does not heed her own needs, desires, preferences, and limits, she grows ever more reliant upon external gauges to guide her life".
β
β
Sheila M. Reindl (Sensing the Self: Women's Recovery from Bulimia)
β
Male domination, and the low and stigmatised status of women, cause teenage girls to engage in punishment of their bodies through eating disorders and self-mutilation. There is increasing evidence that woman-hating Western cultures are toxic to girls and very harmful to their mental health. It is, perhaps, not surprising, therefore, that there seem to be some girls baling out and seeking to upgrade their status.
β
β
Sheila Jeffreys (Gender Hurts: A Feminist Analysis of the Politics of Transgenderism)
β
It is their everlasting switching that is the dangerous thing, not what they choose
β
β
Sheila Heti (How Should a Person Be?)
β
That was the problem with having a real job: no time to do all the other interesting things in the world.
β
β
Sheila Connolly (Relatively Dead)
β
Dwelling on the past is like dragging a boat over dry land.
β
β
Sheila Burke
β
Why did it seem like the only way to live-was to disobey?
β
β
Sheila Heti (Pure Colour)
β
When you're not used to normal, it pinches like new shoes.
β
β
Sheila Turnage (The Ghosts of Tupelo Landing (Mo & Dale Mysteries, #2))
β
When I strip away my dreams, what I imagine to be my potential, all the things I haven't said, what I imagine I feel for other people in the absence of my expressing it, all the rules I've made for myself that I don't follow--I see that I've done as little as anyone else in this world to deserve the grand moniker I.
β
β
Sheila Heti (How Should a Person Be?)
β
Pornography as propaganda, according to feminist analysis, represents women as objects who love to be abused, and teaches men practices of degradation and abuse to carry out upon women.
β
β
Sheila Jeffreys (Unpacking Queer Politics: A Lesbian Feminist Perspective)
β
The human spirit is tremendously resilient. It can withstand the most horrific of circumstances, whether of human or divine creation... It is not these larger-than-life situations that beat us. It's the little things.
β
β
Sheila Williams (The Shade of My Own Tree: A Novel)
β
Living one way is not a criticism of every other way of living. Is that the threat of the woman without kids? Yet the woman without kids is not saying that no woman should have kids, or that you-woman with a stroller- have made the wrong choice. Her decision about her life is no statement about yours. One person's life is not a political or general statement about how all lives should be. Other lives should be able to exist alongside our own without any threat or judgment at all.
β
β
Sheila Heti (Motherhood)
β
Yes ma'am," I said, "Anna Celeste's party is Saturday, but I don't need a ride.... No ma'am. It's because Anna Celeste is my Sworn Enemy for Life and I'd rather go face-down in a plate of raw chicken entrails than go to her party. Plus I'm not invited....
β
β
Sheila Turnage (Three Times Lucky (Mo & Dale Mysteries, #1))
β
Dale's family is like that. Let the Law come within twenty yards of them, and every male over the age of six--uncles, brother, father, cousins--starts lying his fool head off. Dale says it's genetic. Miss Lana says that's poppycock.
β
β
Sheila Turnage (Three Times Lucky (Mo & Dale Mysteries, #1))
β
Men have been adjudicating on what women are, and how they should behave, for millennia through the institutions of social control such as religion, the medical profession, psychoanalysis, the sex industry. Feminists have fought to remove the definition of what a woman is from these masculine institutions and develop their own understandings.
β
β
Sheila Jeffreys (Gender Hurts: A Feminist Analysis of the Politics of Transgenderism)
β
Both the veil and makeup are often seen as voluntary behaviours by women, taken up by choice and to express agency. But in both cases there is considerable evidence of the pressures arising from male dominance that cause the behaviours. For instance, the historian of commerce Kathy Peiss suggests that the beauty products industry took off in the USA in the 1920s/1930s because this was a time when women were entering the public world of offices and other workplaces (Peiss, 1998). She sees women as having made themselves up as a sign of their new freedom. But there is another explanation. Feminist commentators on the readoption of the veil by women in Muslim countries in the late twentieth century have suggested that women feel safer and freer to engage in occupations and movement in the public world through covering up (Abu-Odeh, 1995). It could be that the wearing of makeup signifies that women have no automatic right to venture out in public in the west on equal grounds with men. Makeup, like the veil, ensures that they are masked and not having the effrontery to show themselves as the real and equal citizens that they should be in theory. Makeup and the veil may both reveal womenβs lack of entitlement.
β
β
Sheila Jeffreys (Beauty and Misogyny: Harmful Cultural Practices in the West)
β
I looked at her. Sheila was my girl--the girl I wanted--and wanted for keeps. But it wasn't any use having illusions about her. Sheila was a liar and probably always would be a liar. It was her way of fighting for survival--the quick easy glib denial. It was a child's weapon--and she'd probably never got out of using it. If I wanted Sheila, I must accept her as she was--be at hand to prop up the weak places. We've all got our weak places. Mine were different from Sheila's, but they were there.
β
β
Agatha Christie (The Clocks (Hercule Poirot, #39))
β
If you find yourself right now in a place where you are heartbroken, I want to remind you that Christ is very close to the broken. Our culture throws broken things away, but our Savior never does. He gently gathers all the pieces, and with His love and in His time, He puts us back together.
β
β
Sheila Walsh (The Storm Inside: Trade the Chaos of How You Feel for the Truth of Who You Are)
β
It seemed to me like all my worrying about not being a mother came down to this history - this implication that a woman is not an end in herself. She is a means to a man, who will grow up to be an end in himself, and do something in the world. While a woman is a passageway through which a man might come. I have always felt like an end in myself - doesn't everyone? - but perhaps my doubt that being an end-in-myself is enough comes from this deep lineage of women not being seen as ends, but as passageways through which a man might come. If you refuse to be a passageway, there is something wrong. You must at least try. But I don't want to be a passageway through which a man might come, then manifest himself in the world however he likes, without anyone doubting his right.
β
β
Sheila Heti (Motherhood)
β
Do you ever think about the ocean?" Nick asked me.
"What about it?" I said.
"Like what could live down there? Like how there's as much life down there as up here? Maybe more?"
"God Lives Underwater," said someone. "That's the name of a band. They're awesome."
"But seriously," Nick said, "it's like an alternate universe. Right here on our own planet."
"Right here, a hundred feet from us," said Sheila.
"Right here in my hair," said one of the girls who had swum, pulling some sea gunk out of her wet hair.
Everyone laughed quietly at that. Nick drank his beer. The wood crackled as it burned. We all stared at the black ocean.
β
β
Blake Nelson (They Came from Below)
β
And I donβt want βnot a motherβ to be part of who I am- for my identity to be the negative of someone elseβs positive identity. Then maybe instead of being βnot a motherβ I could be not βnot a mother.β I could be not not.
If I am not not, then I am what I am. The negative cancels out the negative and I simply am. I am what I positively am, for the not before the not shields me from being simply not a mother. And to those who would say, Youβre not a mother, I would reply, βIn fact, I am not not a mother.β By which I mean I am not βnot a mother.β Yet someone who is called a mother could also say, βIn fact, I am not not a mother.β Which means she is a mother, for the not cancels our the not. To be not not is what the mothers can be, and what the women who are not mothers can be. This is the term we can share. In this way, we can be the same (157-58).
β
β
Sheila Heti (Motherhood)
β
Because people who live their lives this way can look forward to a single destiny, shared with others of this type - though such people do not believe they represent a type, but feel themselves distinguished from the common run of man, who they see as held down by the banal anchors of the world. But while others actually build a life in which things gain meaning and significance, this is not true of the puer. Such a person inevitably looks back on life as it nears its end with a feeling of emptiness and sadness, aware of what they have built: nothing. In their quest for a life without failure, suffer, or doubt, that is what they achieve: a life empty of all those things that make a human life meaningful. And yet they started off believing themselves too special for this world!
But - and here is the hope - there is a solution for people of this type, and it's perhaps not the solution that could have been predicted. The answer for them is to build on what they have begun and not abandon their plans as soon as things start getting difficult. They must work - without escaping into fantasies about being the person who worked. And I don't mean work for its own sake, but they must choose work that begins and ends in a passion, a question that is gnawing at their guts, which is not to be avoided but must be realized and live through the hard work and suffering that inevitably comes with the process.
They must reinforce and build on what is in their life already rather than always starting anew, hoping to find a situation without danger. Puers don't need to check themselves into analysis. If they can just remember this - It is their everlasting switching that is the dangerous thing, and not what they choose - they might discover themselves saved. The problem is the puer ever anticipates loss, disappointment, and suffering - which they foresee at the very beginning of every experience, so they cut themselves off at the beginning, retreating almost at once in order to protect themselves. In this way, they never give themselves to life - living in constant dread of the end. Reason, in this case, has taken too much from life.
They must give themselves completely to the experience! One things sometimes how much more alive such people would be if they suffered! If they can't be happy, let them at least be unhappy - really, really unhappy for once, and then the might become truly human!
β
β
Sheila Heti (How Should a Person Be?)
β
But two years into our parties, I surveyed the scene from the corner and wondered, Why are we having these parties? What were we making, coming together like that? We were trying to prove that we had everything because we had parties, but I began to feel like we had nothing but parties. If anyone from the future could look back on what we were building, I was sure they would say, That could only have been built by slaves.
β
β
Sheila Heti (How Should a Person Be?)
β
Women do not decide at some time in adulthood that they would like other people to understand them to be women, because being a woman is not an βidentityβ. Womenβs experience does not resemble that of men who adopt the βgender identityβ of being female or being women in any respect. The idea of βgender identityβ disappears biology and all the experiences that those with female biology have of being reared in a caste system based on sex.
β
β
Sheila Jeffreys (Gender Hurts: A Feminist Analysis of the Politics of Transgenderism)
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Women incorporate the values of the male sexual objectifiers within themselves. Catharine MacKinnon calls this being "thingified" in the head (MacKinnon, 1989). They learn to treat their own bodies as objects separate from themselves. Bartky explains how this works: the wolf whistle sexually objectifies a woman from without with the result that, ``"The body which only a moment before I inhabited with such ease now floods my consciousness. I have been made into an object'' (Bartky, 1990, p. 27). She explains that it is not sufficient for a man simply to look at the woman secretly, he must make her aware of his looking with the whistle.
She must, "be made to know that I am a 'nice piece of ass': I must be made to see myself as they see me'' (p. 27). The effect of such male policing behaviour is that, "Subject to the evaluating eye of the male connoisseur, women learn to evaluate themselves first and best'" (Bartky, 1990, p. 28).
Women thus become alienated from their own bodies.
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Sheila Jeffreys (Beauty and Misogyny: Harmful Cultural Practices in the West)
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I wonder where we are going," I said.
"Wherever the way is going," Exi replied calmly.
"But where do you suppose the way is going?"
"Wherever we go."
"That doesn't really make sense, does it?"
"Oh, yes. Quite good sense."
"Why?"
"Do you know any method by which you can go way and your path another? Not the path, but your path?"
"Well-" I hesitated. "Well, if you put it that way, I guess not. But what about crossroads? Couldn't you choose the wrong one?"
"I suppose you could. However, if it was the wrong way you chose, it would still be your way, wouldn't it?"
"Yes," I answered, "yes, it probably would.
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Sheila Moon (Knee-Deep in Thunder)
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People complained of being tired, exhaustion, not realizing that this was put in them so they wouldn't do as many things. Such people railed against their fatigue-the ones who were determined to fix things. In order to stop them, the gods tired them out. The weariest people are being the most prevented. They are the most dangerous ones, who would change the world if they could. We know which people are threatening to the gods by how exhausted they feel all the time. Those who would not make as many fixes are not given as much fatigue. You know the gods consider you dangerous if you are tired all the time.
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Sheila Heti (Pure Colour)
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The huge difficulty that so many women and men have in seeing femininity and masculinity as socially constructed rather than natural, attests to the strength and force of culture. Women are, of course, understood to be ``different'' from men in many ways, ``delicate, pretty, intuitive, unreasonable, maternal, non-muscular, lacking an organizing character''. Feminist theorists have shown that what is understood as ``feminine'' behaviour is not simply socially constructed, but politically constructed, as the behaviour of a subordinate social group. Feminist social constructionists understand the task of feminism to be the destruction and elimination of what have been called ``sex roles'' and are now more usually called ``gender''.
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Sheila Jeffreys (Beauty and Misogyny: Harmful Cultural Practices in the West)
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perhaps thatβs what itβs for β self-confidence and courage and energy and peace β perhaps itβs to be used in the world. Perhaps thereβs only one thing to do with it: spend it.
Iβm always super-conscious of how whenever I go out into the world, whenever I get involved in a relationship, my idea of who I think I am utterly collides with the reality of who I actually am. And I continue to go out even though who I am always comes up short. I always prove myself to be less generous, less charming, less considerate, not as bold or energetic or intelligent or courageous as I imagined in my solitude. And Iβm always being insulted, or snubbed, or disappointed. And Iβm never in my pyjamas.
And yet, in some way, maybe this is better. Each of us in this room could suffer the pangs of withdrawal and gain the serenity of the non-smoker. We could be demi-gods in our little castles, all alone, but perhaps, at heart, none of us here wants that. Maybe the only cure for self-confidence and courage is humility. Maybe we go out in order to fall short... because we want to learn how to be good at being people... and moreover, because we want to be people.
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Sheila Heti
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But you will be back, and you will always be here. Donβt think that in death you go far from the earth; you remain down here with everythingβthe part of you that loved, which is the most important part. That part of you will patiently be here as the earth changes colour, exhausts itself, breathes in fresh life again, and revives. That part of you will be here all along, through that whole entire time, while the slugs make their sluggish art, beautiful little swirls in the mud, and whatever will populate the sea, and the greatest beasts that will ever be; slippery with green gills and lots of scales, feathers and fur. Even the swimming creatures will have their own ways of moving which will be radically new. And you will be here for that, too! Why am I so stuck in the art of the past? Because you are stuck in this situation, thinking it is the only one. There will be a second draft, and the part of you that loves, which is the best part of you, and the most eternal part, will be in the bears, the lizards, the mammoths, and the birds, there in the second draft of life.
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Sheila Heti (Pure Colour)
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Sholem [a painter] was saying that freedom, for him, is having the technical facility to be able to execute whatever he wants, just whatever image he has in his mind. But that's not freedom! That's control, or power. Whereas I think Margaux understands freedom to be the freedom to take risks, the freedom to do something bad or appear foolish. To not recognize that difference is a pretty big thing. [...]
"It's like with improv," Misha said. "True improv is about surprising yourself--but most people won't improvise truthfully. They're afraid. What they do is pull from their bag of tricks. They take what they already know how to do and apply it to the present situation. But that's cheating! And cheating's bad for an artist. It's bad in life--but it's really bad in art." -p.20-1, How Should A Person Be
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Sheila Heti
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For my number-one favorite kill, I almost went with Johnny Depp being eaten alive and then regurgitated by his own bed in A Nightmare on Elm Street, but the winner, by a finger bladeβs width, has to be the death of that feisty Tina (Amanda Wyss), who put up such a fight while I thrashed her about on the ceiling of her bedroom. Freddy loves a worthy adversary, especially if itβs a nubile teenaged girl.
A close second goes to my hearing-impaired victim Carlos (Ricky Dean Logan) in Nightmare 6. In these uber-politically-correct times, itβs refreshing to remember what an equal opportunity killer Freddy always was. Not only does he pump up the volume on the hearing aid from hell, but he also adds a nice Latino kid to his body count. Today they probably wouldnβt even let Freddy force-feed a fat kid junk food.
Dream death number three is found in a sequence from Nightmare 3. Freddy plays puppet master with victim Phillip (Bradley Gregg), converting his arm and leg tendons into marionette strings, then cutting them in a Freddy meets Verigo moment.
The kiss of death Profressor Freddy gives Sheila (Toy Newkirk) is great, but not as good as Al Pacinoβs in The Godfather, so my fourth pick is Freddy turning Debbie (Brooke Theiss) into her worst nightmare, a cockroach, and crushing her in a Roach Motel. A classic Kafka/Krueger kill.
For my final fave, you will have to check out Freddy vs. Jason playing at a Hellβs Octoplex near you. Hereβs a hint: the hockey-puck guy and I double team a member of Destinyβs Child. Yummy! Now whereβs that Beyonceβ¦
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Robert Englund (Hollywood Monster: A Walk Down Elm Street with the Man of Your Dreams)
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Men's sexual freedom has depended, and still does to a large extent, upon their ownership of women's bodies. Men have bought, sold and traded women as things to be used. Women are still regularly raped in marriage, even though most Western countries have now changed their laws to recognize that wives have a right not to be raped. Women are still bought and sold in marriage in many countries, and in the vast majority of countries of the world their bodies are still legally owned by their husbands. In prostitution and pornography, the mail-order bride business and reproductive surrogacy, the international trade in women is a burgeoning industry. Men's ownership of women's bodies has been the substrate on which their idea of sexual freedom was born and given its meaning. This is why it includes the right to buy access to women, men, and children as an important way of demonstrating that freedom. At the base of men's sexual freedom agenda is the concept of the rights of the male individual. Pateman points out that women cannot gain recognition as individuals, since the very concept of the 'individual' is male.
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Sheila Jeffreys (Unpacking Queer Politics: A Lesbian Feminist Perspective)
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The main problem for women trying to emulate male sexuality is that as a ruling-class sexuality, it is constructed around the fact that they have a subordinate class on whom to act sexually. Women are that subordinate class. The elements that constitute male sexuality depend upon the possession of ruling-class status such as objectification, aggression, and the separation of sex from loving emotion. Women are bound to be unsuccessful in seeking to acquire a form of sexuality which depends upon the possession of ruling-class power. It might be possible for some lesbians to seek a close emulation of ruling-class sexuality because they are able to practise on other women. Heterosexual women cannot practise ruling-class sexuality on men because they are not the ruling class. All that heterosexual women are in a position to do is to accommodate male sexual interests... In male supremacy men's sexual access to women gives them power and status. It does not make much difference who initiates the act, the men still gain the advantage.
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Sheila Jeffreys (Anticlimax: A Feminist Perspective on the Sexual Revolution)