Quotes from Shulamith Firestone

the development of "female" art is not to viewed as reactionary, like its counterpart, the male School of Virility. Rather it is progressive: an exploration of the strictly female reality is a necessary step to correct the warp in a sexually biased culture. It is only after we have integrated the dark side of the moon into our world view that we can begin to talk seriously of universal culture.

two issues of the new ecology that particularly pertain to the new feminism: reproduction and its control, including the seriousness of the population explosion and new methods of fertility control, and cybernation, the future takeover by machines of increasingly complex functions, altering man's age-old relation to work and wages.

So when we talk about romantic love we mean love corrupted by its power context - the sex class system - into a diseased form of love that then in turn reinforces this sex class system.

Romanticism is a cultural tool of male power to keep women from knowing their condition.

On the one hand, they had most of the legal freedoms, the literal assurance that they were considered full political citizens of society - and yet they had no power. They had educational opportunities - and yet were unable, and not expected, to employ them. They had freedoms of clothing and sex mores that they had demanded - and yet they were still sexually exploited.

When a man believes all women are alike, but wants women from guessing, what does he do? He keeps his beliefs to himself, and pretends, to allay her suspicions, that what she has in common with other women is precisely what makes her different. Thus her sexuality eventually became synonymous with her individuality. The sex privatization of women is the process whereby women are blinded to their generality as a class which renders them invisible as individuals to the male eye.

Us-Against-Them chauvinism (blood is thicker); the division between the abstract and the concrete, the public and the private (what could be more abstract and public than a demographic statistic?) what could be more private and concrete than one's own reproduction?); the privatization of the sex experience; […]

Marriage is in the same state as the Church: Both are becoming functionally defunct, as their preachers go about heralding a revival, eagerly chalking up converts in a day of dread. And just as God has been pronounced dead quite often but has this sneaky way of resurrecting himself, so everyone debunks marriage, yet ends up married.

The Beauty Ideal: What that ideal is unimportant, for any ideal leaves the majority out; ideals, by definition, are modeled on rare qualities. [...] If and when, by artificial methods, the majority can squeeze into the ideal, the ideal changes. If it were attainable, what good it would be? For the exclusivity of the beauty ideal serves a clear political function. Someone - most women - will be left out.

Thus the privatization process functions to keep people blaming themselves, rather than the institution, for its failure: Though the institution consistently proves itself unsatisfactory, even rotten, it encourages them to believe that somehow their own case will be different.

In a world out of control, the only institutions that grant him an illusion of control, that seem to offer any safety, shelter or warmth, are the "private" institutions: religion, marriage/ family, and, most recently, psychoanalytic therapy. But, as we have seen, the family is neither private nor a refuge, but is directly connected to — is even the cause of — the ills of the larger society which the individual is no longer able to confront.

...love is essentially a much simpler phenomenon--it becomes complicated, corrupted or obstructed by an unequal balance of power.

Women were the slave class that maintained the species in order to free the other half for the business of the world.

Romanticism is a cultural tool of male power to keep women from knowing their conditions.

Men are thinking, writing, and creating, because women were pouring their energy into those men; women are not creating culture because they are occupied with love.

If women are differentiated only by superficial physical attributes, men appear more individual and irreplaceable than they really are.

(Male) culture was (and is) parasitical, feeding on the emotional strength of women without reciprocity.

Women and love are underpinnings. Examine them and you threaten the very structure of culture.

The bar is the male kingdom. For centuries it was the bastion of male privilege, the gathering place for men away from their women, a place where men could go to freely indulge in The Bull Session.

The best way to raise a child is to LAY OFF!

He has let her in not because he genuinely loved her, but only because she played so well into his preconceived fantasies.