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Femininity QUOTES

Femininity QUOTES

1 " The tyranny of Venus is felt whenever a woman thinks—or whenever a man thinks and tells a woman—that her hips are too wide, her thighs are too large, her breasts are too small, her waist is too high, her legs are too short to meet the current erotic standard. "

― Susan Brownmiller , Femininity

2 " As Beauvoir remarked, “It is not easy to play the idol, the fairy, the faraway princess, when one feels a bloody cloth between one’s legs; and, more generally, when one is conscious of the primitive misery of being a body. "

― Susan Brownmiller , Femininity

3 " Since femininity in all respects is a matter of containment, a woman whose hair exceeds the esthetic limits of her culture probably will employ some depilatory procedure to bring her body into line. "

― Susan Brownmiller , Femininity

4 " Depending on what was available in a given climate, a variety of porous fibers were used (and still are used in most countries) to stanch the monthly blood: makeshift paddings of roots and husks, homemade tampons of wadded paper, cotton or wool, and reusable diapers fashioned from folded lengths of heavy cloth, the shameful, bulky menstrual rags of my grandmother’s generation that were furtively scrubbed in cold water and left to dry in a secret place. "

― Susan Brownmiller , Femininity

5 " In A Tale of Two Cities Madame Defarge makes sinister use of a nurturant task, her knitting, to implement her vengeance. Childless and driven, she embodies the terrifying excesses of the French Revolution. "

― Susan Brownmiller , Femininity

6 " Warner records that the one female biological function permitted the Virgin in Christian faith was the act of nursing, yet by the sixteenth century contemporary prudishness and the upper-class custom of employing a wet nurse led to the virtual disappearance from art of the suckling Madonna "

― Susan Brownmiller , Femininity

7 " The animal-like aspect of body hair, to a very refined sensibility, and the fact that women under detention were denied their razors, undoubtedly led a pioneer criminologist of the nineteenth century named Cesare Lombroso to propose that the body type of the female offender was characteristically hirsute. "

― Susan Brownmiller , Femininity

8 " According to the classical Greeks, in the perfect female torso the distance between the nipples of the breasts, the distance from the lower edge of the breast to the navel, and the distance from the navel to the crotch were units of equal length. "

― Susan Brownmiller , Femininity

9 " Leg hair was not a problem to American women before the 1920s because the legs of most women were never on public view. When a change in attitude toward recreation, fashion and female emancipation during the prosperous, post-war Jazz Age made it socially acceptable for women of all ages and classes to expose their limbs, modesty regarding the propriety of showing legs was transformed with astonishing rapidity into a dainty self-consciousness regarding “unsightly” hair. "

― Susan Brownmiller , Femininity

10 " Biologically a woman has fewer functional sweat glands than a man and she also has a slightly higher sweating threshold except when pregnant. So women as a rule do perspire less than men, but this minor difference has not been deemed large enough to distinguish the sexes. A lady is not supposed to sweat at all. "

― Susan Brownmiller , Femininity