Ariel Levy Quotes & Sayings
Enjoy the top 52 famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Ariel Levy.
Famous Quotes By Ariel Levy
Proving that you are hot, worthy of lust, and - necessarily - that you seek to provoke lust is still exclusively women's work. — Ariel Levy
There were shadows I saw out of the corner of my eye that looked like problems waiting to become real, but you never know with shadows. — Ariel Levy
In 2004 our forty-second president, George W. Bush, the leader of the free world, proposed an amendment to the U.S. Constitution to forever ban gay marriage
which was already illegal. In opinion polls, about 50 percent of this country said they thought Bush had the right idea. If half this country feels so threatened by two people of the same gender being in love and having sex (and, incidentally, enjoying equal protection under the law), that they turn their attention
during wartime
to blocking rights already denied to homosexuals, then all the cardio striptease classes in the world aren't going to render us sexually liberated. — Ariel Levy
What peace it must be to know that someone is yours, no matter what - it is ordained, can never be otherwise. — Ariel Levy
There is a widespread assumption that simply because my generation of women has the good fortune to live in a world touched by the feminist movement, that means everything we do is magically imbued with its agenda, but it doesn't work that way. — Ariel Levy
Women of my generation were given the lavish gift of our own agency by feminism - a belief that we could decide for ourselves how we would live, what would become of us. — Ariel Levy
If you are the exception that proves the rule, and the rule is that women are inferior, you haven't made any progress — Ariel Levy
The counselor says that we are "at the beginning of a long, uphill journey." She says, "Relapse is a part of recovery."
I think, You have got to be fucking kidding me.
I say, "Do I look like someone who's ready for a long, uphill journey?" Lucy snickers for a second, and I love her. I lover her much more than I want to.
But I am worn down and out. The thought of another trip crushes me. I tell Lucy, You are my family. But I'm not coming with you. — Ariel Levy
Sex is one of the most interesting things we as humans have to play with, and we've reduced it to polyester underpants and implants. We are selling ourselves unbelievably short. — Ariel Levy
I was also domineering, impatient, relentlessly verbal, and, as an only child, often baffled by the mores of other kids. I was not a popular little girl. — Ariel Levy
This may seem confusing considering the "swing to the right" this country has taken, but raunch culture transcends elections. The values people vote for are not necessarily the same values they live by. No region of the United States has a higher divorce rate than the Bible Belt. — Ariel Levy
New York Times help-wanted ads, which were once arranged by gender to distinguish "women's work" from real careers. — Ariel Levy
Writing is communicating with an unknown intimate who is always available, the way the faithful turn to God. — Ariel Levy
The Supreme Court could have said, You're just these fringe women in combat boots. But they didn't. — Ariel Levy
We have to ask ourselves why we are so focused on silent girly-girls in G-strings faking lust. This is not a sign of progress, it's a testament to what's still missing from our understanding of human sexuality with all its complexity and power. We are still so uneasy with the vicissitudes of sex we need to surround ourselves with caricatures of female hotness to safely conjure up the concept of 'sexy.' When you think about it, it's kind of pathetic. — Ariel Levy
I cried only once during the twenty-one-hour flight. I was looking out the window at the moon and thinking of the last long trip I took across the sky, and of the person who went with me and didn't come back. For a while, it was as poisonous and wrenching as it had been since the day it happened, as intolerable: a crime against nature. Then the grief went back to sleep in my body. And it was again nature herself.
Nature. Mother Nature. She is free to do whatever she chooses. — Ariel Levy
But the truth is, the ten or twenty minutes I was somebody's mother were black magic. There is no adventure I would trade them for; there is no place I would rather have seen.
-Thanksgiving in Mongolia, The New Yorker, November 18, 2013 Issue — Ariel Levy
All of my conjuring had led only to ruin and death. Now I was a wounded witch, waiting in the forest, undone. — Ariel Levy
It didn't help when Black Power activist Stokely Carmichael made his notorious comment to the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee: "The position of women in SNCC is prone. — Ariel Levy
To become a mother, I feared, was to relinquish your status as the protagonist of your own life. Your questions were answered, your freedom was gone, your path would calcify in front of you. And yet it still pulled at me. Being a professional explorer would become largely impossible if I had a child, but having a kid seemed in many ways like the wildest possible trip. — Ariel Levy
Female Chauvinist Pigs don't bother to question the criteria on which women are judged, they are too busy judging other women themselves — Ariel Levy
We skipped over the part where we just accept and respect that some women like to seem exhibitionistic and lickerish, and decided instead that everyone who is sexually liberated ought to be imitating strippers and porn stars. — Ariel Levy
You have an affair to get for yourself what you wish would come from the person you love the most. And then you have broken her heart and she can never give you any of it ever again. — Ariel Levy
Without a doubt there are some women who feel their most sexual with their vaginas waxed, their labia trimmed, their breasts enlarged, and their garments flossy and scant. I am happy for them. I wish them many blissful and lubricious loops around the pole. But there are many other women (and, yes, men) who feel constrained in this environment, who would be happier and feel hotter
more empowered, more sexually liberated, and all the rest of it
if they explored other avenues of expression and entertainment. — Ariel Levy
I asked her if she'd ever wanted children. She told me, "Everybody doesn't get everything." It sounded depressing to me at the time, a statement of defeat. Now admitting it seems like the obvious and essential work of growing up. Everybody doesn't get everything: as natural and unavoidable as mortality. — Ariel Levy
But you can never tell with shadows. You have to be vigilant, always, because maybe you're crazy, but maybe you're right. I — Ariel Levy
Or maybe it was too late, and I had already chosen, inadvertently and incrementally, to be something else. — Ariel Levy
chest - I could hear him denigrating Obama at the top of his lungs, which seemed to make Mary only slightly less uncomfortable than it made me. A few weeks before the trip, she said, when she was in the shower, seething about something he'd done, the words I chose him for you came up on the holy computer screen in her mind. What — Ariel Levy
I haven't really rebelled. I just think my parents were right. I never disagreed with anything that I was brought up with, in terms of their values or politics. — Ariel Levy
You think you're being brave, you think you're being sexy, you think you're transcending feminism. But that's bullshit. - Susan Brownmiller — Ariel Levy
Women's liberation and empowerment are terms feminists started using to talk about casting off the limitations imposed upon women and demanding equality. We have perverted these words. The freedom to be sexually provocative or promiscuous is not enough freedom; it is not the only 'women's issue' worth paying attention to. And we are not even free in the sexual arena. We have simply adopted a new norm, a new role to play: lusty, busty exhibitionist. There are other choices. If we are really going to be sexually liberated, we need to make room for a range of options as wide as the variety of human desire. We need to allow ourselves the freedom to figure out what we internally want from sex instead of mimicking whatever popular culture holds up to us as sexy. That would be liberation. — Ariel Levy
I'm a writer, not an activist. My job is to analyse things, to think them through and examine them. — Ariel Levy
Writing was the solution to every problem - financial, emotional, intellectual. It had kept me company when I was a lonely child. It gave me an excuse to go places I would otherwise be unlikely to venture. It satisfied the edict my mother had issued many times throughout my life: "You have to make your own living; you never want to be dependent on a man. — Ariel Levy
Even if you are a woman who achieves the ultimate and becomes like a man, you will still always be like a woman. And as long as womanhood is thought of as something to escape from, something less than manhood, you will be thought less of, too. — Ariel Levy
It is not a good feeling being right about something you have suspected when you finally gain undeniable confirmation that it's true. It is not the satisfying sensation of everything slipping into place for which you have yearned. It's more like, 'Oh, right.' The man who has been staying over your whole life long is your mother's lover. The reason Lucy seems off sometimes is that she's still drinking. You have always known this. The only thing that's mysterious is how you managed to think it mysterious. — Ariel Levy
Instead of trying to reform other people's - or her own - perception of feminist, the FCP likes to position herself as something outside the normal bounds of womanhood. — Ariel Levy
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
These are not stories about girls getting what they want sexually, they are stories about girls gaining acclaim socially, for which their sexuality is a tool. — Ariel Levy
And the truth is, the ten or twenty minutes I was somebody's mother were black magic. There is nothing I would trade them for. There is no place I would rather have seen. — Ariel Levy
But the danger that we invite into our lives can come in the most unthreatening shape, the — Ariel Levy
I wanted what we all want: everything. We want a mate who feels like family and a lover who is exotic, surprising. We want to be youthful adventurers and middle-aged mothers. We want intimacy and autonomy, safety and stimulation, reassurance and novelty, coziness and thrills. But we can't have it all. — Ariel Levy
Daring to think that the rules do not apply is the mark of a visionary. It's also a symptom of narcissism. - — Ariel Levy
People sometimes tells me that they're baffled by bisexuality. They are convinced that having sex with women is totally different from having sex with men. But it isn't. No more than having sex with anyone is totally different from having sex with anyone else. — Ariel Levy
But I would be happier if my daughter and her friends were crashing through the glass ceiling instead of the sexual ceiling,' Jong continued. 'Being able to have an orgasm with a man you don't love or having Sex and the City on television, that is not liberation. If you start to think about women as if we're all Carrie on Sex and the City, well, the problem is: You're not going to elect Carrie to the Senate or to run your company. Let's see the Senate fifty percent female; let's see women in decision-making positions
that's power. Sexual freedom can be a smokescreen for how far we haven't come. — Ariel Levy
We are still so uneasy with the vicissitudes of sex we need to surround ourselves with caricatures of female hotness to safely conjure up the concept 'sexy'. — Ariel Levy
There is nothing I love more than traveling to a place where I know nobody, and where everything will be a surprise, and then writing about it. It's like having a new lover - even the parts you aren't crazy about have the crackling fascination of the unfamiliar. — Ariel Levy
A tawdry, cartoonlike version of female sexuality has become so ubiquitous, it no longer seems particular. What we once regarded as a *kind* of sexual expression we now regard *as* sexuality. — Ariel Levy
There are some women who are probably genuinely aroused by the idea of being photographed naked. But I think we can safely assume that many more women appear in Playboy for the simple reason that they are paid to. Which is fine. But 'because I was paid to' is not the same thing as 'I'm taking control of my sexuality. — Ariel Levy