Marilyn Frye Quotes & Sayings

Female heterosexuality is not a biological drive or an individual women's erotic attraction or attachment to another human animal which happens to be male. Female heterosexuality is a set of social institutions and practices ... Those definitions ... are about the oppression and exploitation of women by men. — Marilyn Frye

Differences of power are always manifested in asymmetrical access. — Marilyn Frye

I wish you would notice that you are heterosexual. — Marilyn Frye

What is it about separation, in any or all of its many forms and degrees, that makes it so basic and so sinister, so exciting and so repellent? — Marilyn Frye

The experience of oppressed people is that the living of one's life is confined and shaped by forces and barriers which are not accidental or occasional and hence avoidable, but are systematically related to each other in such a way as to catch one between and among them and restrict or penalize motion in any direction. It is the experience of being caged in: all avenues, in every direction, are blocked or booby trapped. — Marilyn Frye

I wish you would stop and seriously consider, as a broad and long-term feminist political strategy, the conversion of women to a woman-identified and woman-directed sexuality and eroticism, as a way of breaking the grip of men on women's minds and women's bodies, of removing women from the chronic attachment to the primary situations of sexual and physical violence that is rained upon women by men, and as a way of promoting women's firm and reliable bonding against oppression ... — Marilyn Frye

I would like you to rise each morning and know that you are heterosexual and that you choose to be heterosexual - that you are and choose to be a member of a privileged and dominant class, one of your privileges being not to notice. — Marilyn Frye

I want to ask heterosexual academic feminists to do some hard analytical and reflective work. To begin, I want to say to them: — Marilyn Frye

It seems sometimes that people take a deliberately myopic and fill their eyes with things seen microscopically in order not to see macrosopically. — Marilyn Frye

I wish you would grow to the understanding that you choose heterosexuality. — Marilyn Frye

There is so much pressure on women to be heterosexual, and this pressure is both so pervasive and so completely denied, that I think heterosexuality cannot come naturally to many women: I think that widespread heterosexuality among women is a highly artificial product of the patriarchy ... I think that most women have to be coerced into heterosexuality. — Marilyn Frye