1)       "Not to be sexually active suggests a woman is ugly, old or unfeminine. A focus on appearance or youth keeps women in a constant state of anxiety and distracts them from the main issues in the ongoing struggle against oppression. Mandatory heterosexual consumption as integral to this way of thinking keeps women in line by keeping their attention firmly fixed on men. Compulsory congress has always been a smart move on the divide-and-conquer frontlines of attack. Never more so than now when women have made so many legal gains in legal and social directions." page 6

2)       "The most insidious workings of the genital myth operate within and as an integral part of a culture where the seven billion dollar pornography industry (now the largest media category) trades innocently as erotica, and allows sexual harassment, gang bangs, incest, sexual assault and rape to be disguised as sex so that millions of women feel obliged to acquiesce in the consumption of these terrorist activities too." page 7

3)       "Today it is celibacy rather than assault which is viewed as indecent." page 7

4)       "The fact that today women who choose to be celibate are finding that it may bring them more affection and friendship not less, that it may allow them to relate to men as whole human beings rather than merely as lovers or as enemies, that it offers them more autonomy, and busier, contented lives, is ignored. This interesting series of possibilities is too threatening to be acknowledged openly. Women could gain a certain power, a certain freedom, from such a situation. Men might panic. Their penises might droop. Men depend on women to reflect them at twice their natural size, and part of that reflection is through sex. Thus the fact that women's self-chosen celibacy can be both emotionally fulfilling and spiritually satisfying, is a fact that is diminished, distorted, or invisibilized.
      Yet many women today are choosing to become celibate with a passionate conviction, almost revolutionary fervor. They are women who believe that celibacy offers them the strength, the sense of personal identity and independence, the creative time and energy for their own growth and work, which conventional sexual activity has not allowed them." page 9

5)       On her experiences after becoming celibate the author writes: "All I knew was that I no longer lived partly through someone else, nor did I constantly need the approval of the person with whom I was in a sexual relationship." page 11

6)       "Men find a celibate choice so threatening that they bring in verdicts of mental disturbance." page 19

7)       "Most of us spend large portions of our lives linked to someone else, trusting in others for our validation, our self-worth, our emotional stability. That someone else, those significant others, are very often sexual partners. It is hard for women to throw off the notion that we are completed by being attached to another human being. . . For most women who choose celibacy, it is in some critical sense about feeling single. About being able to make decisions for oneself without reference to somebody else; to travel light without sexual encumbrances; to learn a self-sufficiency and to fact what may sometimes be a frightening aloneness by trusting in oneself to find the path that one needs." page 19

8)       "Passionate Celibacy is a form of female sexuality. It is the choice to be without a sexual partner for positive reasons of personal, political, or spiritual growth, freedom, and independence. Passionate Celibacy is a sexual singlehood which allows women to define themselves autonomously, whilst still retaining a network of connections, rather than in terms of another person and his or her needs. It is a form of sexual practice without the power struggles of a sexually active relationship, which is neither maintained by nor supports the genital myth." page 21

9)       "We appear to live in a sexual society, but it is not genuinely sexual, because a truly sexual society offering free choices for both women and men would be threatening to the power elite. What we live in is a genitally-fixated society which communicates messages to women that change with the times to serve the social order. These are what I call 'genital messages.' Men's prescriptions of what is feminine, what is sexy, dictate women's sexual behavior. At different times women are said to be hot mamas, swinging chicks, or frigid bitches. At no time can a woman freely choose to be celibate as a form of sexual behavior, because at no time has a woman freely been allowed to choose her own mode of sexual activity. Men have always outlined what is proper, decided what is desirable." page 24-25

10)       "Celibacy challenges the manipulative device of intercourse. Through intercourse a woman learns to be a 'girl', to please a man, to be dependent, to want approval, to expect her happiness to come through a sexual relationship with someone else. Through celibacy a woman learns to control her own life, to take risks, to grow up, to make decisions, to live on her own, to value other women, to see men as possible friends and potential equals not as merely lovers or enemies." page 40

11)       "In the late Victorian period almost one in three of all adult women were single and one in four were unlikely to marry." page 47

12)       "Critical to contemporary women's notions of celibacy is something that starts in the mind, something rooted in the oldest historical definitions of celibacy: the idea of autonomy, of not possessing another human being within an emotional-physical relationship and not being possessed by one. Non-possession was seen as more significant than occasional 'sexual flings' within an avowed celibate life." page 89

13)       "While schoolboys (and grown men) still say that female celibacy means 'can't get any', young girls (and grown women) are saying not only 'choose not to', but also more significantly, choose to have a mental and physical life of our own, free from male demands, free from sexual pressures, free to redefine our sexuality i a new way." pages 89 - 90

14)       "A typical study in 1986 by UCLA researcher Neil Malamuth reported that 30 per cent of college men said they would commit rape if they could be sure of getting away with it. When the survey changed the word 'rape' into the phrase 'force a woman into having sex' 58 per cent of the college men said they would do so." page 98

15)       "All the reasons women give for celibacy are in some way related to a central notion of autonomy." page 111

      I stopped reading on page 120 because the book got repetitious.

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