Unconscious assumptions or opinions are the worst enemy of woman; they can even grow into a positively demonic passion that exasperates and disgusts men, and does the woman herself the greatest injury by gradually smothering the charm and meaning of her femininity and driving it into the background. Such a development naturally ends in profound psychological disunion, in short, in a neurosis.

All too frequently in the women’s movement it was assumed one could be free of sexist thinking by simply adopting the appropriate feminist rhetoric; it was further assumed that identifying oneself as oppressed freed one from being an oppressor. To a very grave extent such thinking prevented white feminists from understanding and overcoming their own sexist-racist attitudes toward black women. They could pay lip-service to the idea of sisterhood and solidarity between women but at the same time dismiss black women.

Ambitious young women today are taught to ignore or suppress every natural instinct, if it conflicts with the feminist agenda posed on them. All literary and artistic works, no matter how great, that document the ambivalence of female sexuality they are trained to dismiss as “misogynous.” In other words, their minds are being programmed to secede from their bodies … there is a huge gap between feminist rhetoric and women’s actual sex lives, where feminism is of little help except with a certain stratum of deferential, malleable, white middle-class men.

Men are not the enemy, but the fellow victims. The real enemy is women's denigration of themselves.

[the] idea that sexuality is only okay if it ends in reproduction oppresses women—whose health de-pends on separating sexuality from reproduction—as well as gay men and lesbians.

Full sexual consciousness and a natural
regulation of sexual life mean the end of
mystical feelings of any kind. In other words,
natural sexuality is the deadly enemy of
mystical religion. The church, by making
the fight over sexuality the center of its
dogmas and of its influence over the masses,
confirms this concept.

Man is not the enemy here, but the fellow victim. The real enemy is women's denigration of themselves.

As all advocates of feminist politics know most people do not understand sexism or if they do they think it is not a problem. Masses of people think that feminism is always and only about women seeking to be equal to men. And a huge majority of these folks think feminism is anti-male. Their misunderstanding of feminist politics reflects the reality that most folks learn about feminism from patriarchal mass media.

As long as females take up the banner of feminist politics
without addressing and transforming their own sexism, ultimately
the movement will be undermined.

Woman's sexual problems are, in this sense, by-products of the suppression of her basic need to grow and fulfill her potentialities as a human being, potentialities which the mystique of feminine fulfillment ignores.

Woman's sexuality is disruptive of the dully mechanical workaday world, in which efficiency means uniformity. The problems of woman's entrance into the career system spring from more than male chauvinism. She brings nature into the social realm, which may be too small to contain it.

Whether tentative or conclusively pessimistic, the invented, all-female worlds, with their consequent lesbianism, have another function: that of expressing the joys of female bonding, which-like freedom and access to the public world-are in short supply for many women in the real world. Sexually, this amounts to the insistence that women are erotic integers and not fractions waiting for completion. Female sexuality is seen as native and initiatory, not (as in our traditionally sexist view) reactive, passive, or potential. ("Recent Feminist Utopias")

When a woman has scholarly inclinations there is usually something wrong with her sexuality.

Being female in this world is having been robbed of he potential for human choice by men who love to hate s. One does not make choices in freedom. Instead, one conforms in body type and behavior and values to become an object of male sexual desire, which requires an abandonment of a wide-ranging capacity for choice Objectification may well be the most singly destructive aspect of gender hierarchy, specially as it exists in relation to intercourse.