Erica Jong

Naomi Wolf dares to explode the myth of 'victim feminism' and pleads for allowing women to be as full of good and bad desires as men, as avid for sexual fulfilment and power as men, but held back by the twin myths of good-girlism and sentimental sisterhood. Though she is perhaps too sanguine about women quickly overcoming their fear of power, Wolf fills me with hope because I see her analysis as having shattered the false categories that imprisoned my generation. Women do not have to agree about everything to join in alliance with each other to promote female power. Women do not have to cast out their inner bad girl to assert their right to power. Women do not have to cast out their sexuality to be 'good sisters'.

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Why are women so ungenerous to other women? Is it because we have been tokens for so long? Or is there a deeper animosity we owe it to ourselves to ex

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When women have so absorbed the disease of sexism that they themselves can inflict it on each other, we clearly have a perfect, self-replenishing machine for the continuation of sexism. Unable to turn our assertiveness against men, we turn it against each other. Thus we remain stuck in the troubles we always had. It is imperative we renovate the machine -- no, not renovate it, but smash it entirely, so that we allow women to be all they need to be.

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What all the ads and whoreoscopes seemed to imply was that if only you were narcissistic enough, if only you took proper care of your smells, your har, your boobs, your eyelashes, your armpits, your crotch, your stars, your scars, and your choice of Scotch in bars - you would meet a beautiful, powerful, potent, and rich man who would satisfy every longing, fill every hole, make your heart skip a beat (or stand still), make you misty, and fly you to the moon (preferably on gossamer wings), where you would live totally satisfied forever.

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I don't believe what you believe, I yelled, and I don't respect your beliefs and I don't respect you for holding them. If you can honestly make a statement like that about the power behind the throne, how can you possibly understand anything about me or the things I'm struggling with? I don't want to live by the things you live by, I don't want that kind of life and I don't see why I should be judged by its standards.

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I had forgotten how awful it was to be a woman alone--the leering glances, the catcalls, the offers of help which you dared not accept for fear of incurring a sexual debt. The awful sense of vulnerability. No wonder I had gone from man to man and always wound up married. How could I have left Bennett? How could I have forgotten?

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We're programmed for suffering, not joy. The masochism is built in at a very early age. You're supposed to work and suffer - and the trouble is: you believe it.

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Many people today believe that cynicism requires courage. Actually, cynicism is the height of cowardice. It is innocence and open-heartedness that requires the true courage-however often we are hurt as a result of it.

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Everyone has talent. What's rare is the courage to follow it to the dark places where it leads.

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We came to realize how little married couples see of each other once they crawl in the bourgeois box.

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Husband and wife have no time left to spend together. Marriage took away our one reason for getting married.

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Maybe marriages are best in middle age. When all the nonsense falls away and you realize you have to love one another because you're going to die anyway.

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The virtues about marriage were mostly negative virtues. Being unmarried in a man's world was such a hassle that anything had to be better. Marriage was better. But not much. Damned clever, I thought, how men had made life so intolerable for single women that most would gladly embrace even bad marriages instead.

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Beware of books. They are more than innocent assemblages of paper and ink and string and glue. If they are any good, they have the spirit of the author within. Authors are rogues and ruffians and easy lays. They are gluttons for sweets and savories. They devour life and always want more. They have sap, spirit, sex. Books are panderers. The Jews are not wrong to worship books. A real book has pheromones and sprouts grass through its cover.

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You don't have to beat a woman if you can make her feel guilty.

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The greatest feminists have also been the greatest lovers. I'm thinking not only of Mary Wollstonecraft and her daughter Mary Shelley, but of Anais Nin, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and of course Sappho. You cannot divide creative juices from human juices. And as long as juicy women are equated with bad women, we will err on the side of being bad.

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Someday every woman will have orgasms- like every family has color TV- and we can all get on with the business of life.

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Any system was a straightjacket if you insisted on adhering to it so totally and humorlessly.

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Sometimes it was worth all the disadvantages of marriage just to have that: one friend in an indifferent world.

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We are so scared of being judged that we look for every excuse to procrastinate.

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Quotes by Erica Jong