“[T]he social relationship of young women to young men … now seemed to Kitty like ignominious exposure of merchandise to be taken by the highest bidder.”

“Combat and rape, the public and private forms of organized social violence, are primarily experiences of adolescent and early adult life. The United States Army enlists young men at seventeen; the average age of the Vietnam combat soldier was nineteen. In many other countries boys are conscripted for military service while barely in their teens. Similarly, the period of highest risk for rape is in late adolescence. Half of all victims are aged twenty or younger at the time they are raped; three-quarters are between the ages of thirteen and twenty-six. The period of greatest psychological vulnerability is also in reality the period of greatest traumatic exposure, for both young men and young women. Rape and combat might thus be considered complementary social rites of initiation into the coercive violence at the foundation of adult society. They are the paradigmatic forms of trauma for women and men.”

“Few men have virtue to withstand the highest bidder. ”

“If any young men come for Mary or Kitty, send them in, for I am quite as leisure.”

“There are only three kinds of Irishmen who can't understand women. Young men, old men and men of middle age.”

“He sells his loyalties to the highest bidder. Shouldn’t even a mercenary have morals? That’s the textbook definition of a whore!”