No Woman Needs Intercourse; Few Women Escape

Touch Is The Meaning Of Being Human.

Truth Is Harder To Bear Than Ignorance, And So Ignorance Is Valued More--also Because The Status Quo Depends On It; But Love Depends On Self-knowledge And Self-knowledge Depends On Being Able To Bear The Truth.

Women Have Been Taught That, For Us, The Earth Is Flat, And That If We Venture Out, We Will Fall Off The Edge. Some Of Us Have Ventured Out Nevertheless, And So Far We Have Not Fallen Off. It Is My Faith, My Feminist Faith, That We Will Not.

Every Woman Who Has Had Experience With Sexual Violence Of Any Kind Has Not Just Pain, And Not Just Hurt, But Has Knowledge. Knowledge Of Male Supremacy. Knowledge Of What It Is. Knowledge Of What It Feels Like. And Can Begin To Think Strategically About How To Stop It. We Are Living Under A Reign Of Terror. Now What I Want To Say Is That I Want Us To Stop Accepting That That's Normal. And The Only Way That We Can Stop Accepting That That's Normal Is If We Refuse To Have Amnesia Everyday Of Our Lives.

So You Go Away From Where You Were Afraid. Some Stay; Some Go; It's A Big Difference, Leaving The Humiliations Of Childhood, The Morbid Fear. We Didn't Have Much To Say To Each Other, The Ones That Left And The Ones That Stayed. Children Get Shamed By Fear But You Can't Tell The Adults That; They Don't Care. They Make Children Into Dead Things Like They Are. If There's Something Left Alive In You, You Run. You Run From The Poor Little Child On Her Knees; Fear Burned The Skin Off All Right; She's Still On Her Knees, Dead And Raw And Tender.