OUR SOCIETAL SELF-HARM

'Language is only language; we need, rather, to hear the cries of those who don't feel happy in their skins, to dare to find out the source of their misery. We, as a society, need to be brave enough to hear the truth: 'It's you we don't like, the society which nurtured us, or forgot to nurture us. You haven't made a good home for us here. We hate our stupid gender scripts you foisted on us, we don't feel beautiful, we don't feel successful, and we don't feel we matter.' 

And aren't they right? Isn't it time to do away with the male tribe and the female tribe and become people again? Hasn't the time come to unravel our uber-sexualisation? To put the spotlight on what joins us, and not what divides us?' 

Olivia Fane, Why Sex Doesn't Matter, p.270. 

REAL LOVE

'Real love is the very opposite of idealisation. Rather, it has to do with knowledge, a deep, real, sensitive knowledge of the other people in your life and the care you give them. Love is a kind of knowing. 

The real lover is neither Rossetti or Picasso. The real lover is the man who broke down on Women's Hour this morning. He spent three years looking after his dying wife, tending her each day, doing her teeth, washing her hair, putting a new necklace around her neck each morning, something she had done for herself before she got dementia.  

'Why don't you put her in a home and get a life?' his friends would ask him. 

'Because she is my life,' he told them.' 

Olivia Fane, Why Sex Doesn't Matter, p.222. 

IN RELINQUISHING JUDGEMENTALISM WE'VE RELINQUISHED IDEALS

'Nowadays, there are few greater character defects than being judgmental. But in relinquishing judgement, we also relinquish ideals. The ideal of fidelity, the ideal of a family life, with a mother and a father; the ideals of honour, self-control and reverence. The old establishment, the clergy, schools, family and community life were by no means perfect and squeaky clean, but they offered a backdrop that was safe in this tricky business of being human. Sometimes, perhaps, it's better, easier, not to have too much choice. There's a word in German, angst, which perfectly describes the mental anxiety we experience when too many options are presented to us. This hyper-individualism is not good for us, this obsessive introspection isn't making us happy. Sometimes our young don't even know they are boys or girls, men or women, and nobody bothers to point out to them that bodies are just bodies, they can't be blamed. It's only societies which make mistakes.'

Olivia Fane, Why Sex Doesn't Matter, p.190  

SEXUAL ABUSE BY IDEOLOGY

'When I told a friend that I was going to write this book - a close friend who has known me for twenty years - she said to me, 'Olivia, I have never seen you so angry Where has your anger come from?' I told her that I had been abused, not by another without my permission, neither by Jimmy Saville, nor a film producer, nor a priest. Rather, I have been abused by the dominant ideology of the day: that sex is important and profound and you are obliged to join in.' 

Olivia Fane, Why Sex Doesn't Matter, p.160. 

REAL INTIMACY

'The real business of being human, I would like to argue, has little to with sex. Sex is rightly listed alongside the pleasures of eating and drinking. The same pleasure centre of the brain is lit up. But it's not intimate. Intimacy is about a spiritual, not a physical closeness. 

Real intimacy is singularly unerotic. When my mother died, when my husband's parents died, when we listened to each other and held each other - that was intimate. Being with someone who is grieving and being allowed in, being trusted to that extent - that is true intimacy, in a way that showing off our new negligee is not.' 

Olivia Fane, Why Sex Doesn't Matter, p.95. 

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.