“[Feminism] asks that women be free to define themselves -- instead of having their identity defined for them, time and again, by their culture and their men.”
“The 'feminine' woman is forever static and childlike. She is like the ballerina in an old-fashioned music box, her unchanging features tiny and girlish, her voice tinkly, her body stuck on a pin, rotating in a spiral that will never grow.”
“The modern fairy tale ending is the reverse of the traditional one: A woman does not wait for Prince Charming to bring her happiness; she lives happily ever after only by refusing to wait for him -- or by actually rejecting him. It is those who persist in hoping for a Prince Charming who are setting themselves up for disillusionment and unhappiness.”
“The demand that women "return to femininity" is a demand that the cultural gears shift into reverse, that we back up to a fabled time when everyone was richer, younger, more powerful.”
“One thing that has struck me so far about the presidential election is how much it's a father-son story, which I think is very telling, because so much of the men's crisis is that they feel there's nothing being handed down, that there's no patrimony,”
“And you look at the candidates, and particularly George W. Bush's, just imagery-wise, allows people to feel that -- particularly men, to feel that something was handed down from father to son, that there is a legacy. And similarly with Gore, who's father was senator, and similarly with someone like John McCain, who just wrote a book on his father. ”
