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61 " Women who are personally complimented by compliments to their sex [...] There are only some of the reactions to the sex privatization process, the confusion of one's sexuality with one's individuality. [...] Thus sex privatization stereotypes women; it encourages men to see women as "dolls" differentiated only by superficial attributes - not of the same species as themselves - and it blinds women to their sexploitation as a class, keeping them from uniting against it, thus effectively segregating the two classes. A side-effect is the converse: if women are differentiated only by superficial physical attributes, men appear more individual and irreplaceable than they really are. Women, because social recognition is granted only for a false individuality, are kept from developing the tough individuality, that would enable breaking through such a ruse. If one's experience in its generality is the only thing acknowledged, why go to the trouble to develop real character? "
― Shulamith Firestone , The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution
62 " Marriage is in the same state as the Church: Both are becoming functionally defunct, as their preachers go about heralding a revival, eagerly chalking up converts in a day of dread. And just as God has been pronounced dead quite often but has this sneaky way of resurrecting himself, so everyone debunks marriage, yet ends up married. "
63 " The Beauty Ideal: What that ideal is unimportant, for any ideal leaves the majority out; ideals, by definition, are modeled on rare qualities. [...] If and when, by artificial methods, the majority can squeeze into the ideal, the ideal changes. If it were attainable, what good it would be? For the exclusivity of the beauty ideal serves a clear political function. Someone - most women - will be left out. "
64 " Cybernation, like birth control, can be a double-edged sword. Like artificial reproduction, to envision it in the hands of the hands of the present powers is to envision a nightmare. We need not elaborate. Everyone is familiar with Technocracy, 1984: the increased alienation of the masses, baby factories, increased government efficiency (Big-Brother), and so on. In the hands of the present society there is no doubt that the machine could be used — is being used — to intensify the apparatus of repression and to increase established power. "
65 " Thus the privatization process functions to keep people blaming themselves, rather than the institution, for its failure: Though the institution consistently proves itself unsatisfactory, even rotten, it encourages them to believe that somehow their own case will be different. "
66 " The two issues, population control and cybernation, produce the same nervous superficial response because in both cases the underlying problem is one for which there is no precedent: qualitative change in humanity's basic relationships to both its production and its reproduction. We will need almost overnight, in order to deal with the profound effects of fertility control and cybernation, a new culture based on a radical redefinition of human relationships and leisure for the masses. To so radically redefine our relationship to production and reproduction requires the destruction at once of the class system as well as the family. We will be beyond arguments about who is “bringing home the bacon” — no one will be bringing it home, because no one will be “working”. Job discrimination would no longer have any basis in a society where machines do the work better than human beings of any size or skill could. Machines thus could act as the perfect equalizer, obliterating the class system based on exploitation of labor. "
67 " In a world out of control, the only institutions that grant him an illusion of control, that seem to offer any safety, shelter or warmth, are the “private” institutions: religion, marriage/ family, and, most recently, psychoanalytic therapy. But, as we have seen, the family is neither private nor a refuge, but is directly connected to — is even the cause of — the ills of the larger society which the individual is no longer able to confront. "
68 " With the cultural portrayal of the smallest details of existence, the distance between one's experience and one's perceptions of it becomes enlarged by a vast interpretive network by this ubiquitous cultural network, the experience must be denied. This process, of course, does not apply only to women. The pervasion of image has so deeply altered our very relationships to ourselves that even men have become objects - if never erotic objects. Images become extensions of oneself; it gets hard to distinguish the real person from his latest image, if indeed, the Person Underneath hasn't evaporated altogheter. [...] each image hitting new highs of sophistication until the person himself doesn't know who he is. Moreover, he deals with others through this image-extension. (Boy-Image meets Girl-Image and consumattes Image-Romance). Even if a woman could get beneath this intricate image facade - and it would take months, even years, of a painful, almost therapeutic relationship - she would be met not with gratitude that she had (painfully) loved the man for his real self, but with shocked repulsion and terror that she had found him out. "
69 " A feminist revolution could be the decisive factor in establishing a new ecological balance: attention drawn to the population explosion, a shifting of emphasis from reproduction to contraception, and demands for the full development of artificial reproduction would provide an alternative to the oppressions of the biological family; cybernation, by changing man's relationship to work and wages, by transforming activity from “work” to “play” (activity done for its own sake), would allow for a total redefinition of the economy, including the family unit in its economic capacity. The double curse that man should till the soil by the sweat of his brow and that woman should bear in pain and travail would be lifted through technology to make humane living for the first time a possibility. The feminist movement has the essential mission of creating cultural acceptance of the new ecological balance necessary for the survival of the human race in the twentieth century. "