Sheila Jeffreys Quotes

#1. This condition in which women live is created out of, and defended by, a system of ideas represented by the world's religions, by psychoanalysis, by pornography, by sexology, by science and medicine and the social sciences.

Sheila Jeffreys

#2. Parsons argued that medicine was a social institution that regulated social deviance through the provision of medical diagnoses for nonconforming behavior. Medicine was, in this understanding, engaged in social control.

Sheila Jeffreys

#3. Masculinity cannot exist without femininity. On its own, masculinity has no meaning, because it is but one half of a set of power relations. Masculinity pertains to male dominance as femininity pertains to female subordination.

Sheila Jeffreys

#4. Male supremacy is centered on the act of sexual intercourse, justified by heterosexual practice.

Sheila Jeffreys

#5. Women are prevented by the threat and reality of male violence from entering public space on equal terms with male citizens.

Sheila Jeffreys

#6. Pornography as propaganda, according to feminist analysis, represents women as objects who love to be abused, and teaches men practices of degradation and abuse to carry out upon women.

Sheila Jeffreys

#7. The opposite of heterosexual desire is the eroticising of sameness, a sameness of power, equality and mutuality. It is homosexual desire.

Sheila Jeffreys

#8. Pornography, then, educates the male public. It would be very surprising if it did not.

Sheila Jeffreys

#9. As a feminist, I consider the female pronoun to be an honorific, a term that conveys respect. Respect is due to women as members of a sex caste that have survived subordination and deserve to be addressed with honour. Men who transgender cannot occupy such a position.

Sheila Jeffreys

#10. Girls learn to love and have sexual feelings in a position of low status, and the eroticization of powerlessness is a normal part of the construction of femininity.

Sheila Jeffreys

#11. Masculinity is part of a binary and requires its opposite, since, in the absence of femininity, masculinity would have no meaning.

Sheila Jeffreys