Sexual Repression Quotes

As the many male victims of rape in the regime's disgusting jails can testify, this state-run pathology of sexual repression and sexual sadism is not content to degrade women only. ~ Christopher Hitchens

Feminism is as old as sexual repression. In this country, women's liberation flowered best in the soil prepared by black liberation the mid-19th century abolitionist movement yielded suffragettes. The mid-20th century civil rights movement yielded women's liberation. Both movements were loudly championed by black men no white men so distinguished themselves. But both abandoned Black Civil Rights and regarded the shift away from the race problem as an inevitable and necessary development. An opportunity to concentrate on exclusively sexist issues. Each time that shift took place, it marked the first stage of divisiveness and heralded a future of splinter groups and self-sabotage. ~ Toni Morrison

In the past few years, more and more passionate debates about the nature of SFF and YA have bubbled to the surface. Conversations about race, imperialism, gender, sexuality, romance, bias, originality, feminism and cultural appropriation are getting louder and louder and, consequently, harder to ignore. Similarly, this current tension about negative reviews is just another fissure in the same bedrock: the consequence of built-up pressure beneath. Literary authors feud with each other, and famously; yet genre authors do not, because we fear being cast as turncoats. For decades, literary writers have also worked publicly as literary reviewers; yet SFF and YA authors fear to do the same, lest it be seen as backstabbing when they dislike a book. (Small wonder, then, that so few SFF and YA titles are reviewed by mainstream journals.) Just as a culture of sexual repression leads to feelings of guilt and outbursts of sexual moralising by those most afflicted, so have we, by denying and decrying all criticism that doesn't suit our purposes, turned those selfsame critical impulses towards censorship.

Blog post: Criticism in SFF and YA ~ Foz Meadows

Finally, we arrive at the question of the so-called nonpolitical man. Hitler not only established his power from the very beginning with masses of people who were until then essentially nonpolitical; he also accomplished his last step to victory in March of 1933 in a "legal" manner, by mobilizing no less than five million nonvoters, that is to say, nonpolitical people. The Left parties had made every effort to win over the indifferent masses, without posing the question as to what it means "to be indifferent or nonpolitical."

If an industrialist and large estate owner champions a rightist party, this is easily understood in terms of his immediate economic interests. In his case a leftist orientation would be at variance with his social situation and would, for that reason, point to irrational motives. If an industrial worker has a leftist orientation, this too is by all mean rationally consistent - it derives from his economic and social position in industry. If, however, a worker, an employee, or an official has a rightist orientation, this must be ascribed to a lack of political clarity, i.e., he is ignorant of his social position. The more a man who belongs to the broad working masses is nonpolitical, the more susceptible he is to the ideology of political reaction. To be nonpolitical is not, as one might suppose, evidence of a passive psychic condition, but of a highly active attitude, a defense against the awareness of social responsibility. The analysis of th ~ Wilhelm Reich

From its inception patriarchy has relied on salvation narrative to underwrite its program of genocide, ecocide, sexual repression, child abuse, social domination, and spiritual control. This script works beautifully for the dominator agenda because it was deliberately written for it. How can a story about love, forgiveness and divine benevolence endorse the perpetration of evil? This seems impossible and against all reason, until we realize that the story is not what it appears to be. The salvation narrative of the Bible is a story of perpetration, conceived to support and legitimate the dominator agenda.
History shows that the religious ideals attached to salvation narrative have consistently been used to legitimate violence, rape, genocide, and destruction of the natural world…In the final balance the people who commit and promote violence and murder in the expression of religious beliefs may be a minute fraction of the faithful, but they are the ones who determine the course of events, shape history, affect society, and threaten the biosphere…To dissociate from the salvation narrative would be the most effective way for peace-loving people to end their complicity in the dominator agenda. ~ John Lamb Lash

Sexual repression is conduct unbecoming a Celt." I shrugged. "Better that than having to deal with guilt ferrets. ~ Kevin Hearne

I felt like swooning - women swooned so much in the old days because of all the sexual repression - well, I know how they felt. I felt like swooning. ~ Amy Jenkins

No wonder the summer solstice had been such a fun day in northern Europe before Christian missionaries arrived from the sunny south. If priests had not driven sex underground, what would the north have been like? Would art have flourished in the absence of sexual repression? What about artillery and fortification? The Reformation? The Thirty Years War? The French Revolution? The final perfection of murder as blood sport at Verdun and Dresden and in the Gulag?

In short, where would we be without Jesus? ~ Charles McCarry

We've all heard that women tolerate sex to get relationships, while men tolerate relationships to get sex. That is simply not true - but there is something truly chilling about the fact that most Americans believe it's true and use this formula as a guide for behavior. ~ Israel Morrow

It was strange that a society which hid the facts of sex from children made no effort to shield them from death. ~ Corrie Ten Boom

In the sexual-liberation movement of the sixties, its ideology and practice, neither force nor the subordinate status of women was an issue. It was assumed that - unrepressed - everyone wanted intercourse all the time (men, of course, had other important things to do; women had no legitimate reason not to want to be fucked); and it was assumed that in women an aversion to intercourse, or not climaxing from intercourse, or not wanting intercourse at a particular time or with a particular man, or wanting fewer partners than were available, or getting tired, or being cross, were all signs of and proof of sexual repression. Fucking per se was freedom per se. ~ Andrea Dworkin

There still remain four irreducible objections to religious faith: that it wholly misrepresents the origins of man and the cosmos, that because of this original error it manages to combine the maximum of servility with the maximum of solipsism, that it is both the result and the cause of dangerous sexual repression, and that it is ultimately grounded on wish-thinking. ~ Christopher Hitchens

This idealization of motherhood is essentially a means of keeping women from developing a sexual consciousness and from breaking through the barriers of sexual repression, of keeping alive their sexual anxieties and guilt feelings. The very existence of woman as a sexual being would threaten authoritarian ideology; her recognition and social affirmation would mean its collapse. ~ Wilhelm Reich

You smell like tequila and sexual repression, Caroline. ~ Alice Clayton

Advocating sexual repression as a solution to violence against women ends up mobilizing women around their fears rather than their visions. ~ Alice Echols

People get sick from 'not wanting to see'. ~ Wilhelm Stekel

I believe that singing is the key to long life, a good figure, a stable temperament, increased intelligence, new friends, super self-confidence, heightened sexual attractiveness, and a better sense of humor. ~ Brian Eno

Assigning degrees of blame to betrayal is a difficult project, much like deciding which of two murderers has the more wicked heart. With murder, there are tangible distinctions. First degree is intentional; second degree, irresponsible; third degree, accidental. But with crimes of the heart, the distinctions are more subtle. Who is it to say when a secret turns into a sin? With a daydream, a kiss, a confession? Who is to say which transgression is worse: sexual or emotional, coveting or caressing? ~ Galt Niederhoffer

There is a crucial difference between a one-state solution and a binational state. In general, nation-states have been imposed with substantial violence and repression for one reason - because they seek to force varied and complex populations into a single mold. ~ Noam Chomsky

Reality Check
His lying is not contigent on who you are or what you do. His lying is not your fault. Lying is his choice and his problem, and if he makes that choice with you, he will make it with any other woman he's with. That doesn't mean you're an angel and he's the devil. It does mean that if he doesn't like certain things about you, he has many ways to address them besides lying. If there are sexual problems between you, there are many resources available to help you. Nothing can change until you hold him responsible and accountable for lying and stop blaming yourself.

The lies we tell ourselves to keep from seeing the truth about our lovers don't feel like lies. They feel comfortable, familiar, and true. We repeat them like a mantra and cling to them like security blankets, hoping to calm ourselves and regain our sense that the world works the way we believe it ought to.
Self-lies are false friends we look to for comfort and protection - and for a short time they may make us feel better. But we can only keep the truth at bay for so long. Our self-lies can't erase his lies, and as we'll see, the longer we try to pretend they can, the more we deepen the hurt. ~ Susan Forward

While some male "admirers" of trans women tend to fetishize us for our femininity or our imagined sexual submissiveness, I find trans women hot because we are anything but docile or demure. In order to survive as a trans woman, you must be, by definition, impervious, unflinching, and tenacious. In a culture in which femaleness and femininity are on the receiving end of a seemingly endless smear campaign, there is no act more brave - especially for someone assigned a male sex at birth - than embracing one's femme self.

And unlike those male tranny-chasers who say that they like "T-girls" because we are supposedly "the best of both worlds", I am attracted to trans women because we are all woman! My femaleness is so intense that it has overpowered the trillions of lameass Y chromosomes that sheepishly hide inside the cells of my body. And my femininity is so relentless that it has survived over thirty years of male socialisation and twenty years of testosterone poisoning. Some kinky-identified thrill-seekers may envision trans women as androgyne fuck fantasies, but that's only because they are too self-absorbed to appreciate how completely fucking female we are. ~ Julia Serano

Until we accept that our children have much more of a risk of being sexually abused than drowning in a pool, being struck by a car, stricken with cancer, hurt by a vaccination, or diagnosed with ebola, we contribute to a culture of panic and ignorance. ~ Ann Brasco

Part of the public horror of sexual irregularity so-called is due to the fact that everyone knows himself essentially guilty. ~ Aleister Crowley

In the 1890s, when Freud was in the dawn of his career, he was struck by how many of his female patients were revealing childhood incest victimization to him. Freud concluded that child sexual abuse was one of the major causes of emotional disturbances in adult women and wrote a brilliant and humane paper called "The Aetiology of Hysteria." However, rather than receiving acclaim from his colleagues for his ground-breaking insights, Freud met with scorn. He was ridiculed for believing that men of excellent reputation (most of his patients came from upstanding homes) could be perpetrators of incest.
Within a few years, Freud buckled under this heavy pressure and recanted his conclusions. In their place he proposed the "Oedipus complex," which became the foundation of modern psychology. According to this theory any young girl actually desires sexual contact with her father, because she wants to compete with her mother to be the most special person in his life. Freud used this construct to conclude that the episodes of incestuous abuse his clients had revealed to him had never taken place; they were simply fantasies of events the women had wished for when they were children and that the women had come to believe were real. This construct started a hundred-year history in the mental health field of blaming victims for the abuse perpetrated on them and outright discrediting of women's and children's reports of mistreatment by men.
Once abuse was denied in this way, the st ~ Lundy Bancroft

Proust so titillates my own desire for expression that I can hardly set out the sentence. Oh if I could write like that! I cry. And at the moment such is the astonishing vibration and saturation and intensification that he procures - there's something sexual in it - that I feel I can write like that, and seize my pen and then I can't write like that. Scarcely anyone so stimulates the nerves of language in me: it becomes an obsession. But I must return to Swann.


My great adventure is really Proust. Well - what remains to be written after that? I'm only in the first volume, and there are, I suppose, faults to be found, but I am in a state of amazement; as if a miracle were being done before my eyes. How, at last, has someone solidified what has always escaped - and made it too into this beautiful and perfectly enduring substance? One has to put the book down and gasp. The pleasure becomes physical - like sun and wine and grapes and perfect serenity and intense vitality combined.


Jacques Raverat...sent me a letter about Mrs Dalloway which gave me one of the happiest moments days of my life. I wonder if this time I have achieved something? Well, nothing anyhow compared with Proust, in whom I am embedded now. The thing about Proust is his combination of the utmost sensibility with the utmost tenacity. He searches out these butterfly shades to the last grain. He is as tough as catgut & as evanescent as a butterfly's bloom. And he will I suppose ~ Virginia Woolf

Recently, John and I got to go to Selma and perform it on the same bridge that Martin Luther King walked over. Once a landmark of a divided nation, the spirit of this bridge now for all people regardless of race, gender, sexual orientation or social status. This bridge was built on hope and welded with compassion. Common ~ John Legend

All the material is fictional and develops its own eight and a half private, coelesced journeys, where, perhaps not unexpectedly, the females can run faster than the men and trade their freedoms by exhausting the male sexual fantasies and replacing them by some of their own. ~ Peter Greenaway

Her lips full and inviting, she has an infectious laugh and glassy cackle in her eyes, and a 2000 volt sexual charisma that beckons me like a fluff girl on scuffed knees. ~ Brett Tate

I wonder if being sane means disregarding the chaos that is life, pretending only an infinitesimal segment of it is reality. ~ Rabih Alameddine

Trains running in every direction spit hot ash and cinders. Ministers and moralists feared that the vibrations and jostling of such fast travel would throw weak-minded women into sexual frenzies. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

It isn't intimate or sexual; it's the comfort in finding someone who finally understands. ~ B.N. Toler

the person who did this to you is broken. Not you.
The person who did this to you is out there,
choking on the glass of his chest.
It is a windshield
and his heartbeat is a baseball bat:
regret this, regret this.

Nothing was stolen from you.
Your body is not a hand-me-down.
There is nothing that sits inside you holding your worth,
no locket that can be seen or touched,
fucked from your stomach to be left on concrete. ~ Sierra DeMulder

If you are, or someone you know is a victim of domestic violence, please do not wait any longer, get help today. There are people who will help you. Please call. The National Domestic Abuse Hotline: 1-800-799-7233 The National Sexual Assault Hotline: 1-800-656-4673 The National Teen Dating Abuse Hotline: 1-866-331-9474 ~ Darlene Shortridge

even leading revisionists now argue that if sexual complementarity is optional, so are permanence and exclusivity. This is not because the slope from same-sex unions to expressly temporary7 and polyamorous ones is slippery, but because most revisionist arguments level the ground between them: If marriage is primarily about emotional union, why privilege two-person unions, or permanently committed ones? What is it about emotional union, valuable as it can be, that requires these limits? ~ Sherif Girgis

One retired pastor, who felt that he was being called to write a book about homosexuality, interviewed me. He said he wanted his book to be pastorally compassionate toward gay people while exhorting the church to remain firm in holding to a traditional, biblical sexual ethic. He said, "You have to be careful to not love people too much. Loving people changes you." Indeed, loving people does change you. Loving people who are different than you changes you. But it seems to me that such change is consistent with the call of Christ. Allowing your heart to enter the beauty and brokenness of another's life (which really isn't so different from your own), to hear hopes and dreams and disappointments, fears and hurts and joys does change you. One ought not be afraid of that. ~ Wendy Vanderwal-Gritter

If telling men "don't rape" instead of telling women "don't get raped", is like telling thieves "don't steal" instead of home owners to "lock your houses", why don't we hear more victims of home invasion being told "you got what you deserved for having such a beautiful house on display for everyone to see" ??? ~ Miya Yamanouchi

We're raising women to be sexually dysfunctional, with all the 'no' messages we're giving them about diseases and shame and fear. And then as soon as they're eighteen they're supposed to be sexual rock stars, multiorgasmic and totally uninhibited. It doesn't make any sense. None of the things we do in our society prepares women for that. ~ Emily Nagoski

Sadly, the natural world is not short of people who believe that rattling off Latin names incessantly makes them appear clever, whereas most of us know instinctively that this suggests insecurity at best, but possibly social and sexual dysfunction as well. If somebody corrects you sternly by using an obtuse name for something, they probably know neither human nature nor any other kind very profoundly. ~ Tristan Gooley

I love you," she said, speaking clearly so that there might be no confusion. "I love you utterly and completely. I love your elegant hands and the way you smile with only one side of your mouth - when you smile at all - and I love how grave your eyes are. I love that you let me invade your house with nearly my entire family and yours, and never even turned a hair. I love that you made love to me when I asked you, purely for politeness' sake, and I love that you got mad at me later and made me make love to you. I love that you let Her Grace and her puppies construct a nest out of your shirts in your dressing room. I love that you've spent years selflessly saving people in St. Giles - although I want you to stop right now. I love that you killed a man for me, even if I'm still mad at you about it. I love that you saved my letters before we even knew each other well, and I love the curt, overly serious letters you wrote to me in return."

She looked at him very seriously.

"I love you, Godric St. John, and now I'm breaking my word. I will not leave you. You may either come with me to Laurelwood or I'll stay here with you in your musty old house in London and drive you mad with all my talking and relatives and… and exotic sexual positions until you break down and love me back, for I'm warning you that I'm not giving up until you love me and we're a happy family with dozens of children."

She paused at that point because she'd run out of breath ~ Elizabeth Hoyt

My personal impression is that - Forgiveness is essential for recovery, it loses the power the abuser has over the survivor and allows them to heal. ~ Patricia Dsouza

Your gender identity is who you are. Sexual identity is who you bounce that off of. ~ Andrew Solomon

Knowing European manhood's boundaries to be porous and needing reinforcement, and meeting Indigenous possibilities that threw such boundaries into question, early conquerors invoked berdache as if assigning a failure to differentiate sex to Indigenous people, but they did so to define sexual normativity for them all. Thus, if colonial observers invoked berdache to mark Indigenous difference, the aim was to teach both colonial and Indigenous subjects the relational terms of colonial heteropatriarchy. ~ Scott L. Morgensen

Sexual fantasies say a lot about the emotional places we go to in our minds. When you find out what's so sexy about something to you or your lover, you will both want to do it more and you might start to crave the searching for whatever else you have hidden in that beautiful brain. ~ Roberto Hogue

Virginity, like many things connected to men, was obviously vastly over-rated. And frankly, so was sexual intimacy. No wonder Villiers didn't care if she'd had previous experiences. It was all a matter of a minute at most. ~ Eloisa James

Are there things about yourself which you have never told anyone? Way back upon the creaky floors of your childhood, in your solitude, the shadows of your private mind, the things you've done and said and thought that compound and contain you: shameful things, sexual things, often solitary acts, but sometimes not, sometimes agonizing stabs of cruelty you've inflicted on people you love, or the moments where reality itself seemed to tear as they looked into your eyes and told you 'you are nothing'. And for a moment you stand there adjusting to the pain, the pain that someone could say that to you, and what that must mean about who you are. ~ Russell Brand

Reigns of terror are thus the bastard child of the Enlightenment. Terror in the name of utopian ideals would rise again and again in the coming centuries. The Nazi death camps and the Soviet gulags were spawned by the enlightenment. Fascists and communists were bred on visions of human perfectibility. Tens of millions of people have been murdered in the futile effort to reform human nature and build utopian societies. During these reigns of terror, science and reason served, as they continue to serve, interests purportedly devoted to the common good
and to vast mechanisms of repression and mass killing. The belief in human perfectibility, in history as a march towards a glorious culmination, is a malformed theology. ~ Chris Hedges

Our national love of porn and pole dancing is not the byproduct of a free and easy society with an earthy acceptance of sex. It is a desperate stab at freewheeling eroticism in a time and place characterized by intense anxiety. What are we afraid of? Everything ... which includes sexual freedom and real female power. ~ Ariel Levy

You'd think I would know better than to get involved with someone in my own department. But I'm really crap at resisting sexual tension. Oh, it's entertaining for a few weeks, the fuzzy sting that rushes down your vertebra to your groin when the eyes meet, the banter spiked with innuendo - then it becomes irritating, and you need to get it out of your system. Neutralize it by indulging it, which is fine, assuming you can both keep it tidy. ~ Lauren Beukes

I experience what it is to exist in perpetual fear, afraid, totally controlled, manipulated, ashamed at all times and many more things one can't still think to talk around. ~ Patricia Dsouza

She blew out a sigh and focused her attention on the students in her class taking a test. There was nothing like a teenage boy cleaning his ears with the eraser of his pencil to squelch sexual desire. ~ Robin Alexander

The Light and the Darkness both flow in to Delhi. Gurgaon, where Mr. Ashok lived, is the bright, modern end of the city, and this place. Old Delhi is the other end. Full of things that the modern world forget all about rickshaws, old stone buildings and Muslims. On a Sunday, though, there is something more: if you keep pushing through the crowd that is always there, go past the men clearing the other men's ears by poking rusty metal rods into them, past the men selling small fish trapped in green bottles full of brine, past the cheap shoe market and the cheap shirt market, you come great secondhand book market Darya Ganj.
You may have heard of this market, sir, since it is one of the wonders of the world. Tens of thousands of dirty, rotting, blackened books on every subject- Technology, Medicine, Sexual Pleasure, Philosophy, Education, and Foreign Countries - heaped upon the pavement from Delhi Gate onwards all the way until you get to the market in front of the Red Fort. Some books are so old they crumble when you touch them; some have silverfish feasting on them- some look like they were retrieved from a flood, or from a fire. Most shops on the pavement are shuttered down; but the restaurants are still open, and the smell of fried food mingles with the smell of rotting paper. Rusting exhaust fans turn slowly in the ventilators of the restaurants like the wings of giant moths.
I went amid the books and sucked in the air; it was like oxygen after the stench of th ~ Aravind Adiga

So much for the fruits of love. Love? What's love? Sex, ah, that's another thing. Love has babies: sex has abortions. ~ Fay Weldon