“Lavin’s thread distilled the ridiculousness that ensues when bookish men perform interest in women’s inner lives out of a misbegotten sense of nobility.”— Katy Waldman, newyorker.com
“The canon is lousy with authors who yearn to be admired for their sensitivity to the full range of female personhood, be that personhood luscious, pert, or swelling coyly against a sheer camisole. These are writerly men confident that they’ve nailed women’s psyches, all because of how single-mindedl…”— Katy Waldman, newyorker.com
“Women sexually attracted to socks are not impervious to the male gaze. The difference today is, we have to say that we are. Feminism doesn't emancipate us, it makes us bad liars.”— Jessica Knoll, amazon.com
“She wins who calls herself beautiful and challenges the world to change to truly see her.”— Naomi Wolf, amazon.com
“At every turn, women are taught that how someone reacts to them does more to establish their goodness and worth than anything they themselves might feel.”— Lili Loofbourow, theweek.com
“One side effect of teaching one gender to outsource its pleasure to a third party (and endure a lot of discomfort in the process) is that they're going to be poor analysts of their own discomfort, which they have been persistently taught to ignore.”— Lili Loofbourow, theweek.com
“This is also how women are taught to be good hosts. To subordinate their desires to those of others. To avoid confrontation.”— Lili Loofbourow, theweek.com
“There was potential with Grace’s story: the conversations that followed could have given us a real shot at cracking away at the imbalanced sexual power structures that plague us—the power structures that tell us a man’s desires are more significant than a woman’s, and that conditioned Grace not to “…”— Julianne Escobedo Shepherd, jezebel.com
“Could it be then that women's famous slowness of arousal to men's, complex fantasy life, the lack of pleasure many experience in intercourse, is related to this cultural negation of sexual imagery that affirms the female point of view, the culture prohibition against seeing men's bodies as instrumen…”— Naomi Wolf, amazon.com
“Since their bodies are seen from the point of view of strangeness and desire, it is no wonder that what should be familiar, felt to be whole, become estranged and divided into parts. What little girls learn is not the desire for the other, but the desire to be desired.”— Naomi Wolf, amazon.com