“Femininity is depicted as weakness, the sapping of strength, yet masculinity is so fragile that apparently even the slightest brush with the feminine destroys it.”

“The french language is emotive. The verbs are strong and definite. The nouns are masculine or french. I could never understand why the farm would be feminine yet the farmhouse masculine; the pear and apple trees masculine yet the fruit feminine.”

“There is no wholly masculine man, no purely feminine woman.”

“[U]ntil feminists work to empower femininity and pry it away from the insipid, inferior meanings that plague it - weakness, helplessness, fragility, passivity, frivolity, and artificiality - those meanings will continue to haunt every person who is female and/or feminine.”

“One hand continued to hold her hands overhead, ensuring the deepening sensation of feminine weakness built inside her. That sense of feminine hunger to be sensually dominated, to lay aside the demand for strength, and in this part of her life, to just belong to a man whose inner strength exceeded hers, whose physical strength overwhelmed hers.”

“We speak of the masculine and the feminine, but they are the wrong labels. It is really more a matter of poetry versus intellectualization.”