I'll never understand the kind of writer who genuinely advances the proposition that life is a dream or a fiction. To me that's the voice of privileg… - Joanna Russ

After a while you tame your interior monsters, it's only natural. I don't mean that it ever stops; but it stops mattering. (p8)

The "old dykes" who boast of their friendships with gay men, the women who cluster round pro-feminist men (real or otherwise) radiating gratitude and praise, the Lesbians who talk endlessly about their attraction to men and their "bisexuality," when the psychology of genuinely bisexual women is quite different, all who allow fear to impress them morally or make them lie to themselves, who keep in their hearts not affection, not even concern, but adulation of the heroic, normative, central sex-all these are betraying themselves and other women. To lose the connection to fundamental theory and to evaluate discrete bits of personal behavior as feminist or non-feminist (whether they're male or female), is self-destructive and dreadfully confusing. Feminism isn't a grab bag of all the good and nice things in the world (as some, albeit a very few, feminists sometimes seem to think) and patriarchy isn't a collection of personally nasty behavior and all the bad things in the world. Nor is feminism a set of rules for virtuous living. To believe the former leads to helplessness in the face of institutionalized patriarchy and believing the latter leads to otherwise intelligent women boggling about absurdities

Although the aesthetic satisfaction of the syllogistic form still attracts me, I'm no longer sure that it can handle much more complexity than that of a shopping list, let alone social criticism or the reconceptualization (or "breaking set") feminists have been calling the click! phenomenon for some two decades now.