#v

I stopped typing and started having a conversation about the blog post with my boyfriend. He said he’d liked the part where the narrator had explained that, while she was disturbed by the revelation that the Internet writer had a girlfriend – because that meant he wasn’t the pure ethical person she’d perceived him to be via reading his literary criticism (which, !) –she was flattered and aroused that he was overcoming his principles in order to be with her. Keith said, “It’s like he can do no wrong. I thought that was nice.” I surprised myself by turning to him and shouting. “It’s a SLAVE MENTALITY. IT’S A SLAVE MENTALITY!!!” I tried to explain what I meant. I talked about how Ellen Willis had a theory that women didn’t know what their true sexuality was like, because they’d been conditioned to develop fantasies that enable them to act in a way that conforms to what men want from them, or what they think men want from them. And I thought about how Eileen Myles described the difference between having sex with men and having sex with women, how having sex with men was more about forcing yourself into what their idea of what sex was supposed to be. I told him that in my experience men do not often become suddenly charmed or intrigued by aspects of women that they have also perceived as off-putting or scary. Men, heterosexual men, don’t tend to make excuses for women and find reasons to admire them despite and even slightly because of their faults, unless their faults are cute little hole-in-the-stocking faults. Whereas women, heterosexual women, are capable of finding being ignored, being alternately worshiped and insulted, not to mention male pattern baldness, not just tolerable but erotic. ↗

— Emily Gould

#misogyny #relationships #sexism #experience

The skit was very successful based on the applause. After that show, the three of us decided to get together and try and come up with some songs that we could all participate in. ↗

— Phil Harris

#applause #based #come #could #decided

We were not given any statistics as to how many records were pressed on the blue label. I used to ask Bob Shad how we were going to get paid from record sales and what I got for an answer was not to worry about the business end of the deal. ↗

— Phil Harris

#answer #any #ask #blue #bob

Almost no one is foolish enough to imagine that he automatically deserves great success in any field of activity; yet almost everyone believes that he automatically deserves success in marriage. ↗

— Sydney J. Harris

#activity #almost #any #automatically #believes

Nothing makes us more vulnerable than loneliness, except greed. ↗

— Thomas Harris

#greed #loneliness #makes #more #nothing

The songs are my lexicon. I believe the songs. ↗

— Bob Dylan

#i #i believe #i believe the #songs

Kindness and intelligence don't always deliver us from the pitfalls and traps: there are always failures of love, of will, of imagination. There is no way to take the danger out of human relationships. ↗

— Barbara Grizzuti Harrison

#danger #deliver #failures #human #human relationships

No other people have a government more worthy of their respect and love or a land so magnificent in extent, so pleasant to look upon, and so full of generous suggestion to enterprise and labor. ↗

— Benjamin Harrison

#extent #full #generous #government #labor

where does creativity come from? Creativity comes from the Universe itself. “There is music and poetry in the Universe itself — surely we hear it on planet earth.” And Creativity comes from our joys and sorrows, our deep-hearted experiences. It also comes “from and in the heart of God. All our spiritual traditions the world over agree that creativity follows through the human heart and that it flows from the Divine Heart.” Creativity is seen as a spiritual, inwardly-driven activity, directly influenced by a Higher Power, or God. That is the ultimate in inspiration for me: to know I have “permission” to be creative and to be a creator too. ↗

— Matthew Fox

#creativity #inspirational #life #music #poetry

Individuality is founded in feeling; and the recesses of feeling, the darker, blinder strata of character, are the only places in the world in which we catch real fact in the making, and directly perceive how events happen, and how work is actually done. ↗

— William James

#catch #character #darker #directly #done