93 Percent Of Straight Men In This Study Said They've Cuddled With Another Guy. Bookpickings.brainpickings.org. Why Is It So Hard for Women to Write About Sex? - Claire Dederer. Because it's easier to titillate, shock, and lie than to get at the messy truth about female desire. Noma Bar/Dutch Uncle Maybe you remember the old joke: “Why do dogs lick their balls? Because they can.” Here’s a new one I just made up: “Why do women lie about sex? Because they can.” It’s not really funny, I admit, but it does have the benefit of being true. Women are anatomically secretive. Men are all evidence. By now, of course, it’s difficult to think of female desire as in any way hidden. There it is. At least that’s how it’s always been for me, and I experienced a sense of relief and recognition while reading a recent crop of memoirs whose authors go to great lengths to get at this double- and triple-think thrumming in female desire—only to discover, as I have, just how hard the quest is.
It’s not that I was ever forced. What Hugo liked was to get me to lie on the bed with my clothes on, and to raise my legs so that he could look. The hunky Peruvian Gonzalo Moré wanted more: Why Women Aren't Funny. From the John Springer Collection/Corbis. Be your gender what it may, you will certainly have heard the following from a female friend who is enumerating the charms of a new (male) squeeze: "He's really quite cute, and he's kind to my friends, and he knows all kinds of stuff, and he's so funny … " (If you yourself are a guy, and you know the man in question, you will often have said to yourself, "Funny?
He wouldn't know a joke if it came served on a bed of lettuce with sauce béarnaise. ") However, there is something that you absolutely never hear from a male friend who is hymning his latest (female) love interest: "She's a real honey, has a life of her own … [interlude for attributes that are none of your business] … and, man, does she ever make 'em laugh. " Now, why is this? Why is it the case? , I mean. Why are women, who have the whole male world at their mercy, not funny? All right—try it the other way (as the bishop said to the barmaid). Feminism isn’t ruining your love life. In 1970, an Australian university student scribbled A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle on two bathroom walls—one at a bar, the other at her university.
She was paraphrasing a line from one of her philosophy texts—“a man needs God like a fish needs a bicycle”—and having a bit of fun. “My inspiration arose from being involved in the renascent women’s movement at the time, and from being a bit of a smart-arse,” wrote Irina Dunn, who later became a member of the Australian Senate. Ever since then, Dunn’s moment of cheeky rebellion has been Exhibit A in countless attempts to explain why smart, independent women are so hopeless at relationships. (The phrase is often falsely attributed to Gloria Steinem, who has corrected the error several times.) Like “Free to Be You and Me” and bra burning (which never actually happened, but whatever), the bicycle-riding fish makes a handy cultural shorthand to explain how feminism has messed up women’s love lives.
You know how it goes. Dangers of traveling while female. When I was younger, I wanted to travel like Patrick Leigh Fermor, who famously spent 1934 walking from the Hook of Holland to Istanbul. I envisioned myself sporting leather satchels and lace-up boots, doffing Panama hats, spouting demotic Greek. I fantasized about riding horses through the Caucasus and letting falcons loose upon the Black Sea, about “living up in the mountains, dressed as a shepherd,” as Fermor had done. It was a fantasy cobbled together from all the books of all the travel writers I loved — the great writer-scholars of a certain generation, who saw the whole world as raw material: shifting, uncertain geography for them to shape and create anew in their words. Then I turned 15, and traveled alone for the first time to Paris, a city I had once lived in, and which I knew well.
I laid out maps. I made plans. I never had an adventure. But it’s the reason, too, for more subtle variations in behavior. “Can’t you just get over it?” He considered. Nor did it occur to Fermor. Simone de Beauvoir: 10 key quotes. Not born a woman … Simone de Beauvoir. Photograph: Sipa Press/Rex Features "Man is defined as a human being and woman as a female – whenever she behaves as a human being she is said to imitate the male. " "One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman. " "Few tasks are more like the torture of Sisyphus than housework, with its endless repetition: the clean becomes soiled, the soiled is made clean, over and over, day after day.
"All oppression creates a state of war; this is no exception. " "One's life has value so long as one attributes value to the life of others, by means of love, friendship, indignation, compassion. " "In itself, homosexuality is as limiting as heterosexuality: the ideal should be to be capable of loving a woman or a man; either, a human being, without feeling fear, restraint, or obligation. " "Self-knowledge is no guarantee of happiness, but it is on the side of happiness and can supply the courage to fight for it. "
Simone de Beauvoir Quotes. New Tab.