Quotes from Hanne Blank

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.

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.

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.

I want to get one thing straight right from the start: I am not a natural-born jock. I am about as intrinsically athletic as an oyster, with the innate grace and sporty prowess of a brick—a very cute oyster and a very intelligent brick, if I do say so myself, but oysterly and bricklike nevertheless.

In actuality there are no such things as male or female hormones. Hormones have no sex of their own, and all types of sex hormones are present in all human beings in varying amounts.)

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." ("One less divorce. Thanks, Pfizer.")

Masters and Johnson found] the so-called vaginal orgasm was actually not vaginal. When it happened at all, it was the result of friction between clitoral hood and clitoris that some women experienced when the thrusts of the penis tugged at connected flesh.

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.

Personally, I have learned to welcome the sensation of boredom when I'm working out because boredom can actually provide opportunities that are relaxing and, dare I say it, even useful.

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.

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.

Locker rooms are not, in actual fact, the secret clubhouses of the Effortlessly Thin Women's Fat-Lady Harassment Society.

Most of all, it teaches you that your body is not just a sort of jar made out of meat that you lug around because it's what you keep your brain in, but an equal and in fact quite opinionated and demonstrative partner in the joint production that is you.

The opposite of "slut" is someone who has not been labeled a slut, someone who has never been charged with violating doxa.

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.

Hell is other people," said the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, and he wasn't even a fat guy.

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.

57. Kiss. If this is not a whole-body exercise, keep trying.

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.

Sometimes "concern" is the foot someone jams in the door so you can't close it against condescension, presumption, invasiveness, and, at times, outright abuse.

Kertbeny coined 'heterosexual' and 'homosexual' as a pair on purpose: having two marked categories instead of only one generates a certain amount of equality, which was precisely his point. The paired words suggest that both 'homo' and 'hetero' are marked categories whose specialization sets them off from the unmarked human universal, the undifferentiated 'sexual'.

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.

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.

Real women are fat. And thin. And neither. And both. And otherwise.