Hanne Blank Quotes
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While the women just want to have consequence-free sex anti-contraceptive argument is often trotted out by latter-day social conservatives, such a view is a cruel and misogynist oversimplification. A more realistic assessment of the struggle for effective contraception would be to see it as the struggle to achieve some level of control over the single most dangerous, resource-intensive, and biologically crucial activity in which human beings regularly engage.
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The opposite of slut is someone who has not been labeled a slut, someone who has never been charged with violating doxa.
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We don't just want what we want because we want it; we want what we want because that's what we've learned to want.
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Opinions are like assholes. Everyone’s got one. Most people are quite fond of their own, especially in private. Yet they’re not really something that should be waved around too much in public. When they are, it’s okay to ignore them, because showing them off, unsolicited, is actually kind of rude.
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Heterosexuals and homosexuals are considered different because they can be divided into two groups on the basis of the belief that they can be divided into two groups.
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The models we have, and the standards we are expected to maintain, come to us via heterosexuality as a normative state. Heterosexuality--whatever the current version of that concept happens to be--is unremarkable because it is the standard by which everything else is measured. That is heterosexual privilege.
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My favorite Viagra ad, a Spanish-language print ad I saw some years ago, simply shows an image of the distinctive blue pill with the text “Un divorcio menos. Gracias, Pfizer.
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The more you behave like you have the right to exist in the world without interference, the less others will question it. The power of a fait accompli is astonishing. The more people see fat bodies moving and being physical and doing whatever makes them happy in the world, without apology and without shame, the more they get used to seeing that and thinking of it as normal.
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Defining virginity means directly affecting the lives of nearly all women, and many men as well. Despite what some people appear to think, defining virginity is not merely a philosophical exercise. It is an exercise in controlling how people behave, feel, and think, and in some cases, whether they live or die.
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Our culture often expects women in general, and fat women in particular, to confine and limit themselves. We are often discouraged, in many different ways, from moving freely, playfully, and happily in the world. We’re not supposed to take up space and be visible and spontaneous and dynamic, colorful or loud or boisterous or rambunctious. Heaven knows we’re not supposed to be fierce, physically unafraid, and fully aware of our own physical power.
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For most of recorded history, the treatment of women's sexual and reproductive health was the almost exclusive bailiwick of women, including the juries of matrons who performed the genital examinations required in the evaluation of rape and annulment cases and who were among the rare women considered qualified to give testimony in medieval courts of law.
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Not every human culture places a particular value on virginity, and not every culture that does value it values it the same way or to the same degree. Indeed, a given culture's treatment of virginity can change over time.
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Concern trolling is when someone appears to be concerned for your health or welfare, but only until they can catch you with your guard down so they can go after you about your weight, size, or whatever they presume is true about your fitness levels and general health.
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Sex acts don't drive erotica, the people who engage in them do.
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Virginity had come to carry the symbolic weight of not just a husband's desire to control the ancestry of the children born under his roof but of male desire to control the behavior of women and children. It had become a symbol of successful patriarchy as a whole.
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You have the right to not have to constantly manage how you look for other people’s sake. You aren’t here to decorate the world for other people. You’re here to live in it for yourself, no matter what that looks like.
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The Virgin Mary is both a major medieval legacy and a complicated, messy mixed bag.
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Sylvester Graham, he of the eponymous health-food cracker, claimed that a man who could make it to the age of thirty without giving in to the temptations of his sexual urges would be a veritable god.
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Hell is other people, said the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, and he wasn’t even a fat guy.
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Women's issues, and particularly issues pertaining to women's sexual and reproductive lives, are routinely pushed to the bottom of international political and social agendas...
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Swiftly I learned that regardless of the source or when it was written, information relating to virginity is rarely presented in such a way that it is free of bias, superstition, or simply the kind of inaccuracies that often sneak into even academic books under the guise of things everybody knows.
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Real women are fat. And thin. And neither. And both. And otherwise.
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Some readers were aware that the novels they loved amounted to a propaganda campaign, that the love stories had a particular agenda that might or might not have anything at all to do with reality. But then as now, being a canny and independent-minded consumer of popular media did not bar one from also enjoying being manipulated by it.
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As one of the large-scale background conditions of human life and human sexuality, our ideals in regard to virginity, like those in regard to gender and class and race, have always depended on historical circumstance.