#norms

Equally serious is the complaint that psychoanalysis as a medical practice is a form of oppressive social control, labelling individuals and forcing them to conform to arbitrary definitions of ‘normality’. This charge is in fact more usually aimed against psychiatric medicine as a whole: as far as Freud’s own views on ‘normality’ are concerned, the accusation is largely misdirected. Freud’s work showed, scandalously, just how ‘plastic’ and variable in its choice of objects libido really is, how so-called sexual perversions form part of what passes as normal sexuality, and how heterosexuality is by no means a natural or self-evident fact. It is true that Freudian psychoanalysis does usually work with some concept of a sexual ‘norm’; but this is in no sense given by Nature. ↗

— Terry Eagleton

#heterosexuality #libido #nature #norms #psychiatry

I am anchored on a resolve you cannot shake. My heart, my conscience shall dispose of my hand -- they only. Know this at last. ↗

— Charlotte Brontë

#conscience #courtship #dignity #empowerment #feminism

Do you really believe ... that everything historians tell us about men – or about women – is actually true? You ought to consider the fact that these histories have been written by men, who never tell the truth except by accident. ↗

— Moderata Fonte

#double-standards #feminism #gender #history #hypocrisy

In fact, there is perhaps only one human being in a thousand who is passionately interested in his job for the job's sake. The difference is that if that one person in a thousand is a man, we say, simply, that he is passionately keen on his job; if she is a woman, we say she is a freak. ↗

— Dorothy L. Sayers

#clichés #double-standards #empowerment #feminism #gender

The rule seemed to be that a great woman must either die unwed ... or find a still greater man to marry her. ... The great man, on the other hand, could marry where he liked, not being restricted to great women; indeed, it was often found sweet and commendable in him to choose a woman of no sort of greatness at all. ↗

— Dorothy L. Sayers

#choice #clichés #double-standards #empowerment #feminism

Causing any damage or harm to one party in order to help another party is not justice, and likewise, attacking all feminine conduct [in order to warn men away from individual women who are deceitful] is contrary to the truth, just as I will show you with a hypothetical case. Let us suppose they did this intending to draw fools away from foolishness. It would be as if I attacked fire -- a very good and necessary element nevertheless -- because some people burnt themselves, or water because someone drowned. The same can be said of all good things which can be used well or used badly. But one must not attack them if fools abuse them. ↗

— Christine de Pizan

#argument #clichés #conduct #damage #danger

As long as she thinks of a man, nobody objects to a woman thinking. ↗

— Virginia Woolf

#dignity #double-standards #empowerment #feminism #gender

For the first time, the weird and the stupid and the coarse are becoming our cultural norms, even our cultural ideal. ↗

— Carl Bernstein

#coarse #cultural #even #first #first time

Only weeks after Oslo began, when nearly all the world and most of Israel was drunk with the idea of peace, I argued that a Palestinian society not constrained by democratic norms would be a fear society that would pose a grave threat to Israel. ↗

— Natan Sharansky

#argued #began #constrained #democratic #drunk

In reaction against the age-old slogan, "woman is the weaker vessel," or the still more offensive, "woman is a divine creature," we have, I think, allowed ourselves to drift into asserting that "a woman is as good as a man," without always pausing to think what exactly we mean by that. What, I feel, we ought to mean is something so obvious that it is apt to escape attention altogether, viz: (...) that a woman is just as much an ordinary human being as a man, with the same individual preferences, and with just as much right to the tastes and preferences of an individual. What is repugnant to every human being is to be reckoned always as a member of a class and not as an individual person. ↗

— Dorothy L. Sayers

#clichés #dignity #discrimination #double-standards #empowerment