Hanne Blank Quotes & Sayings

There is no wrong way to have a body. — Hanne Blank

I want to get one thing straight right from the start: I am not a natural-born jock. I am about as intrinsically athletic as an oyster, with the innate grace and sporty prowess of a brick - a very cute oyster and a very intelligent brick, if I do say so myself, but oysterly and bricklike nevertheless. — Hanne Blank

You have the right to not have to constantly manage how you look for other people's sake. You aren't here to decorate the world for other people. You're here to live in it for yourself, no matter what that looks like. — Hanne Blank

Defining virginity means directly affecting the lives of nearly all women, and many men as well. Despite what some people appear to think, defining virginity is not merely a philosophical exercise. It is an exercise in controlling how people behave, feel, and think, and in some cases, whether they live or die. — Hanne Blank

Sex acts don't drive erotica, the people who engage in them do. — Hanne Blank

For Hitschmann and Bergler, 'frigidity' had a single criterion: 'absence of the vaginal orgasm.' The standard was unqualified and absolute. A woman who did not enjoy intercourse: frigid. Women who derived sexual pleasure from acts other than intecourse were frigid too. Nothing else mattered, only whether a woman had an orgasm because a man's penis was inside her vagina. Sexually agressive women were labeled 'frigid' because of the association between masculinity and aggressiveness. Womanhood that was not passive was not properly womanly. "Frigidity," as Jane Gerhardt points out, "thus became a label and a diagnosis that defined how much sexual desire a woman must have and in what kinds of sexual behavior she must engage to be 'healthy'. — Hanne Blank

Some readers were aware that the novels they loved amounted to a propaganda campaign, that the love stories had a particular agenda that might or might not have anything at all to do with reality. But then as now, being a canny and independent-minded consumer of popular media did not bar one from also enjoying being manipulated by it. — Hanne Blank

Locker rooms are not, in actual fact, the secret clubhouses of the Effortlessly Thin Women's Fat-Lady Harassment Society. — Hanne Blank

The opposite of "slut" is someone who has not been labeled a slut, someone who has never been charged with violating doxa. — Hanne Blank

Real women are fat. And thin. And neither. And both. And otherwise. — Hanne Blank

Most of all, it teaches you that your body is not just a sort of jar made out of meat that you lug around because it's what you keep your brain in, but an equal and in fact quite opinionated and demonstrative partner in the joint production that is you. — Hanne Blank

57. Kiss. If this is not a whole-body exercise, keep trying. — Hanne Blank

The models we have, and the standards we are expected to maintain, come to us via heterosexuality as a normative state. Heterosexuality
whatever the current version of that concept happens to be
is unremarkable because it is the standard by which everything else is measured. That is heterosexual privilege. — Hanne Blank

We don't just want what we want because we want it; we want what we want because that's what we've learned to want. — Hanne Blank

Personally, I have learned to welcome the sensation of boredom when I'm working out because boredom can actually provide opportunities that are relaxing and, dare I say it, even useful. — Hanne Blank

My favorite Viagra ad, a Spanish-language print ad I saw some years ago, simply shows an image of the distinctive blue pill with the text "Un divorcio menos. Gracias, Pfizer." ("One less divorce. Thanks, Pfizer.") — Hanne Blank

(In actuality there are no such things as "male" or "female" hormones. Hormones have no sex of their own, and all types of sex hormones are present in all human beings in varying amounts.) — Hanne Blank

Sylvester Graham, he of the eponymous health-food cracker, claimed that a man who could make it to the age of thirty without giving in to the temptations of his sexual urges would be a veritable god. — Hanne Blank

The more you behave like you have the right to exist in the world without interference, the less others will question it. The power of a fait accompli is astonishing. The more people see fat bodies moving and being physical and doing whatever makes them happy in the world, without apology and without shame, the more they get used to seeing that and thinking of it as normal. — Hanne Blank

Heterosexuals and homosexuals are considered different because they can be divided into two groups on the basis of the belief that they can be divided into two groups. — Hanne Blank

[Masters and Johnson found] the so-called vaginal orgasm was actually not vaginal. When it happened at all, it was the result of friction between clitoral hood and clitoris that some women experienced when the thrusts of the penis tugged at connected flesh. — Hanne Blank