Sheila Jeffreys

“Women incorporate the values of the male sexual objectifiers within themselves. Catharine MacKinnon calls this being "thingified" in the head (MacKinnon, 1989).…

— Sheila Jeffreys

Men have been adjudicating on what women are, and how they should behave, for millennia through the institutions of social control such…

— Sheila Jeffreys

Girls learn to love and have sexual feelings in a position of low status, and the eroticization of powerlessness is a normal…

— Sheila Jeffreys

As a feminist, I consider the female pronoun to be an honorific, a term that conveys respect. Respect is due to women…

— Sheila Jeffreys

“The main problem for women trying to emulate male sexuality is that as a ruling-class sexuality, it is constructed around the fact…

— Sheila Jeffreys

“Both the veil and makeup are often seen as voluntary behaviours by women, taken up by choice and to express agency. But…

— Sheila Jeffreys

“Men's sexual freedom has depended, and still does to a large extent, upon their ownership of women's bodies. Men have bought, sold…

— Sheila Jeffreys

Men's ideas about what women are have been formed from their ruling caste position, and have assigned women characteristics that would most…

— Sheila Jeffreys

Pornography is not egalitarian and gender-free. It is predicated upon the inequality of women and is the propaganda that makes that inequality…

— Sheila Jeffreys

Masculinity cannot exist without femininity. On its own, masculinity has no meaning, because it is but one half of a set of…

— Sheila Jeffreys

Male supremacy is centered on the act of sexual intercourse, justified by heterosexual practice.

— Sheila Jeffreys

Masculinity is part of a binary and requires its opposite, since, in the absence of femininity, masculinity would have no meaning.

— Sheila Jeffreys

The opposite of heterosexual desire is the eroticising of sameness, a sameness of power, equality and mutuality. It is homosexual desire.

— Sheila Jeffreys

“The effect of legalised prostitution on women outside prostitution is to lower the status of all women. Women are recognised by the…

— Sheila Jeffreys

Male domination, and the low and stigmatised status of women, cause teenage girls to engage in punishment of their bodies through eating…

— Sheila Jeffreys

“For women as a class, the ability to transform sexual practice, to achieve respect from men as equal human beings and thus…

— Sheila Jeffreys

It should not be a surprise to find that s/m fantasy is significant in women's sex lives. Women may be born free…

— Sheila Jeffreys

Radical feminist theorists do not seek to make gender a bit more flexible, but to eliminate it. They are gender abolitionists, and…

— Sheila Jeffreys

“Parsons argued that medicine was a social institution that regulated social deviance through the provision of medical diagnoses for nonconforming behavior. Medicine…

— Sheila Jeffreys

Pornography, then, educates the male public. It would be very surprising if it did not.

— Sheila Jeffreys

[Transsexual surgery] could be likened to political psychiatry in the Soviet Union. I suggest that transsexualism should best be seen in this…

— Sheila Jeffreys

“...women's bodies are "inferiorised, stigmatized . . . within an overarching patriarchal ideology. For example, biologically and physiologically, women's bodies are seen…

— Sheila Jeffreys

Pornography as propaganda, according to feminist analysis, represents women as objects who love to be abused, and teaches men practices of degradation…

— Sheila Jeffreys

“However, as Bordo herself notes, the problem with the adoption of postmodern ideas in general is that they have led some writers…

— Sheila Jeffreys

“Patriarchy is itself the prevailing religion of the entire planet, and its essential message is necrophilia. All of the so-called religions legitimating…

— Sheila Jeffreys