THE DANGER OF OVERPLAYING DIFFERENCE

'People say to me, "Men are different from women." Yes, but I have never met any differences so great as the differences between some men and other men.'

Theodore Roosevelt in Edmund Morris, Colonel Roosevelt, p.237.

TRUE COMPLEMENTARIANISM?

'Any human endeavor done without the input, support, and cooperation of both sexes is not a fully human endeavor.'

Zachary Wagner, Non-Toxic Masculinity: recovering healthy male sexuality, p.180.

WOMEN SEE MORE

'"Eventualities. A good woman can look far down the line and smell what's coming before a man even gets a sniff of it."'

Claire Keegan, Foster, p.66.

THE LIMITS TO CONSENT

'I don't believe that we can ever leave power behind in sex, that we can enter a zone blissfully free of inequality. I don't believe that consent miraculously displaces the imbalances of power that operate on our every interaction. 'Tomorrow sex will be good again,' says Foucault, wryly, playfully; that's the ideal, and that's the delusion. The negotiation of imbalances in power between men and women, between all of us, occurs minute by minute, second by second. And there is no realm, whether sexual or otherwise, in which that act of negotiation is no longer necessary. Whatever we do, in sex and elsewhere, we calibrate our desires with those of the the other, and try to understand what it is that we want. But we don't simply work out what we want and then act on that knowledge. Working out what we want is a life's work, and it has to be done over and over and over. The joy may lie in it never being done.'

Katherine Angel, Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again: Women and desire in the age of consent, p.114.

THE NEW SEXUAL TECHNOLOGY WE NEED

'The task for practically minded feminists, then, is to deter men from the cad mode. Our current sexual culture does not do that, but it could. In order to change the incentive structure, we would need a technology that discourages short-termism in male sexual behavior, protects the economic interests of mothers, and creates a stable environment for the raising of children. And we do already have such a technology, even if it is old, clunky and prone to periodic failure. It's called monogamous marriage.'

Louise Perry, The Case Against the Sexual Revolution, p.181.

THE CENTRAL FEMINIST QUESTION WHEN IT COMES TO SEXUALITY

'...the central feminist question ought not to be "How can we all be free?" but, rather, "How can we best promote the wellbeing of both men and women, given that these two groups have different sets of interests, which are sometimes in tension?"'

Louise Perry, The Case Against the Sexual Revolution, p.35.

THE DOWNSIDES OF THE SEXUAL REVOLUTION

'We have smoothly transitioned from one form of feminine subservience to another, but we pretend that this one is liberation.'

Louise Perry, The Case Against the Sexual Revolution: A New Guide to Sex in the 21st Century, p.20.

HOW THE "SEXUAL REVOLUTION" HAS FAILED WOMEN

'Women are learning to have sex like men. But peel back the layers, and it becomes obvious that this transition is not a reflection of their power but of their subjugation to men's interests. If women were more in charge of how their relationships transpired - more in charge of the "pricing" negotiations around sex - we would be seeing, on average, more impressive wooing efforts by men, fewer hookups, fewer pre-marital sexual partners, shorter cohabitations, and more marrying going on (and perhaps even at a slightly earlier age too). In other words the "price" of sex would be higher: it would cost men more to access it. Instead, none of these things are occurring.'

Mark Regnerus, Cheap Sex, p.214.

HOW GENDER EFFECTS SAME-SEX SEXUAL RELATIONSHIPS

'Men and women tend to conduct their relationships differently and exhibit different preferences in their relationships. When the partnership diverges from sexual complementarity - that is, a man and a woman in relationship - decidedly sex-typed preferences are consolidated, not moderated. It means that same-sex couple are ironically more subject to deep-rooted gendered patterns and habits, their stated egalitarian attitudes aside. There is nothing political about this; it is just the empirical reality, one that sexual economics make ready sense of. If the sexes were a simple social construction, utterly malleable, we should see very little distinction in how men and women pursue relationships, how they act within them, how they act apart from them, what they prioritize about them and how they conclude them. But we see all of that.'

Mark Regnerus, Cheap Sex, p.158. 

THE LIMITS TO LEGAL PROTECTION

'The belief that as sex worker will be helped by the criminalisation of her trade rests on the assumption that she has other choices available to her - that it is prostitution, rather than, say, poverty or immigration law, that is her fundamental problem.. Likewise the, the belief that incarceration is the way to deal with domestic violence does not take into account the women whose fates are bound up with the men who perpetrate it: the women who are financially dependent on the men who beat them, and who have a large stake in how the men in their communities are treated by the police, courts or prison.'

Amia Srinivasan, The Right to Sex, p.162.

PRO-CHOICE IS NOT PRO-WOMEN

'Throughout history the vast majority of babies who have died by abortion (before birth) or infanticide (after birth) have been girls. This is still true globally today. The idea that being "pro-choice" (in favor of abortion means) being pro-women does not fit with this reality.'

Rebecca McLaughlin, 10 Questions Every Teen Should Ask (and Answer) about Christianity, p.141.

CHRISTIAN LEADERSHIP IS MORE FEMALE THAN MALE?

'Paul notably finds that women provide a better model for apostolic leadership than the typical male model of leadership in the Greco-Roman culture, which he indicates is characterized by flattery, greed, people-pleasing, and a lack of gentleness.'

Cynthia Long Westfall, Paul and Gender: Reclaiming the Apostle's Vision for Men and Women in Christ, p.222.

THE ROLE OF WOMEN IN THE HISTORY OF CHRISTIANITY

'I have written so much in this book about churches, and monasteries, and universities; but these were never where the mass of the Christian people were most influentially shaped. It was always in the home that children were likeliest to absorb the revolutionary teachings that, over the course of two thousand years, have come to be so taken for granted as almost to seem human nature. The Christian revolution was wrought above all at the knees of women.' 

Tom Holland, Dominion, p.519.

JESUS VALUES WOMEN

'Jesus values women. Women will travel with him, provide for him and his ministry, be healed by him, turn a whole town of enemies to him, and witness the gospel accounts of the crucifixion, burial, and resurrection. Women will be the first to share the gospel to the apostles and enter the upper room with them to pray. They will prophecy, plant the first churches with the apostles, help correct evangelists, co labor with the men in gospel work, host churches, and hand-deliver Scripture.'

Aimee Byrd, Recovering from Biblical Manhood & Womanhood, p.187.

ARE WE ALL TRANSGENDER?

'To the question, 'is gender binary?' the answer is, biologically, yes. The minute percentage of intersex conditions are errors in the generic code. But psychosocially, the answer is an emphatic no. We all share stereotypically male and female qualities, that's a fact. It might just turn out that we are all transgender, if that means a mismatch between social script and biological body. It's just that some of us take gender more seriously than others, and decide to do something about it.'

Olivia Fane, Why Sex Doesn't Matter, p.62. 

THE DAMAGE WE'VE CAUSED

'...we caused transgenderism, we as a society set up the circumstances which made it inevitable. We gave the genders these absurd roles, because our appetite for sex demanded super-male men and super-female women. But human beings don't fit snugly into the binary categories we have set up for them. Our genders have been artificially exaggerated, and the contrary reactions - both transgenderism and the refusal to acknowledge as more than a social construct - are both the consequence of that. Yet the truth of the matter is surely this: we have significantly more in common with a person who shares our background in interests and outlook, than with a person who happens to share the same XX/XY chromosome. Men and women really aren't that different from each other.' 

Olivia Fane, Why Sex Doesn't Matter, p.xiii.

THE LIMITS OF CHANGE

'Nobody in the history of human kind has changed from a true man to a true woman, if we class a man or woman purely by physical concepts.' 

Jan Morris, Conundrum, p.90. 

BAD FOUNDATIONS

'...while racial equality, minority rights and women's rights are among the best products of liberalism, they make the most destabilizing foundations. Attempting to make them the foundation is like turning a bar stool upside down and then trying to balance on top of it. The products of the system cannot reproduce the stability of the system that produced them.'

Douglas Murray, The Madness of Crowds, p.8.

CHRISTIAN FRIENDSHIPS BETWEEN THE SEXES

'Our call to Christian love and fellowship as brothers and sisters doesn't call us to the "false modesty of the prude" but to a "humble sincerity." Of course we promote one another's holiness, take sin seriously, and realise that we can easily fall into it. We don't think of a bunch of reasons to be alone with the other sex, we don't naively assume that everyone is safe, and we don't overestimate our own virtue. But, rather than creating extrabiblical rules, we are to do the hard work of rightly orientating our affections and exercising wisdom and discernment with others. We live before God in every situation. And in this manner, we will be able to perform ordinary acts of kindness and business without scandal.' 

Aimee Byrd, Why Can't We Be Friends? p.77. 

HOW HOLLYWOOD HAS TAUGHT THE CHURCH

'...over time I learned that much of the conservative church believes the "Billy Crystal rule" taught by Burns. In a complete contradiction of our fight to uphold a biblical standard of sexuality, Hollywood became our teacher on relationships and gender after all. The church sent messages that a woman's attractiveness serves the purpose of landing a husband, then becomes a threat to all other men. My sexuality became a barrier to friendship. This has been quite a challenge in my adult years.' 

Aimee Byrd, Why Can't We Be Friends: Aviodance is not purity, p.23.