Quotes from Sheila Jeffreys

When women and girls experienced throughout life such systematic sexual aggression from men it was realistic and reasonable for women to be resistant to and suspicious of male sexuality. The focus moved away from women as the problem to a critique of male sexual behaviour and an analysis of the ways in which men's sexual violence sustained their power.

the work of sexologists and the development of sex therapy are all instances of how men's power over women was to be supported and managed through the regulation of marital sex. Sex, in this scheme of things, was not a natural and spontaneous seeking after pleasure by men and women, but a regulatory mechanism designed and constructed to enforce male dominance and female submission.

Sexual intercourse is the only purely reproductive sexual practice and if it is engaged in by women only when they wish to procreate then reproduction is under women's control. Once sexual intercourse is established as compulsory then women have recourse only to artificial contraception, abortion, and infanticide, to control reproduction and childbearing.

the effect of decensorship was the burgeoning of mass-market pornography. John Sutherland describes how the pornography industry developed in Britain subsequent to the 1959 Act and the great trials. "Meanwhile, in the shadows behind these spotlighted censorship spectacles, 'pornography' was growing steadily from a hole-in-the-corner specialist supply service to a multi-million pound, efficiently organised industry".

Male and female sexuality are very different, we are told, [...] None the less women are instructed to try to develop male sexual responses in order to be the 'ideal lover'. [...] So clearly sexual behaviour is not natural or inevitable. It can be learned where this serves the interests of male-dominant heterosexuality, and is only disconcertingly recalcitrant where such learning might serve women's interests.

When mainstream male gay sexual practice eroticises dominance and submission then male gay s/m has to be explained in the context of the construction of male sexuality.

Feminists want to free all women from the threat of harassment in the street through the reconstruction of male sexuality. [...] men would have to abandon objectifying exploitative sex and redefine altogether what they saw as sexuality.

Hodges does not consider that the social construction of sexuality in the whole of male supremacy might be deformed by 'sexism'. [...] Sexism is a shadowy emanation rather than a form of behaviour carried out by men.

Starting with rape, feminists dragged into the public arena plentiful evidence that sex was not an unproblematic joy for women. The result of uncovering the huge but hidden amount of abuse that women and girl children suffered in the form of sexual harassment, sexual abuse in childhood and marital rape, was that the sexual-liberation agenda had to be submitted to critical scrutiny.

Caputi defines serial sex murder as 'gynocide, sexually political murder, an extreme form of terrorism in the service of the patriarchal state'. The result of this and other acts of sexual terrorism is that 'women are supposed to accept it as a "normal" , unavoidable consequence of modern life that we must conduct our lives in constant vigilance and fear, restricting our movements, staying inside at night'.

Pornography gave the lie to any idea that women were gradually achieving equality. Pornography made it clear that what constituted sex under male supremacy was precisely the eroticised subordination of women.

Pornography is not egalitarian and gender-free. It is predicated upon the inequality of women and is the propaganda that makes that inequality sexy.

The dispute, [Suzanne Kappeler] writes, is not about whether certain literary works degrade women but whether there is anything wrong with the systematic degradation of women, the wholesale cultural objectification of women.

Kappeler demystifies the process of canonisation. She brings into the picture the 'economic infrastructure which underpins the literary establishment'. [...] Either the book must be 'chosen or valued by an authority' who is already accepted by the literary elite, or it must be judged to be 'similar to or like... another literary work' which has already been accepted. [...] At no stage in this process does anyone seek to define what literary quality is, except in the vaguest terms.

Aunque las lesbianas tratan de imitar con servilismo las costumbres del heteropatriarcado para no parecer peligrosas, no pueden redimir su deslealtad fundamental.

The opposite of heterosexual desire is the eroticising of sameness, a sameness of power, equality and mutuality. It is homosexual desire.