Quotes from Hanne Blank

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.

The Virgin Mary is both a major medieval legacy and a complicated, messy mixed bag.

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.

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.

Not for nothing did phrases like 'he who marries for love has good nights and bad days' and insults like 'cunt-struck,' the eighteenth-century equivalent of saying that someone was thinking with his dick, survive into the Victorian age.