Sexualization Quotes

“Any violation of a woman's body can become sex for men; this is the essential truth of pornography.”
― Andrea Dworkin

“It is illegal for women to go topless in most cities, yet you can buy a magazine of a woman without her top on at any 7-11 store. So, you can sell breasts, but you cannot wear breasts, in America.”
― Violet Rose

“I don't see how being handsome can possibly harm a man. It's just another cheap privilege that took zero effort to attain.”
― Jamie Le Fay, Gravitational Pull

“If being premenstrual is “innocence,” does that make those of us with periods guilty? And this really gets to the heart of the matter: These concerns aren't about lost innocence; they're about lost girlhood. The virginity movement doesn't want women to be adults.

Despite the movement's protestations about how this focus on innocence or preserving virginity is just a way of protecting girls, the truth is, it isn't a way to desexualize them. It simply positions their sexuality as “good”— worth talking about, protecting, and valuing—and women's sexuality, adult sexuality, as bad and wrong. The (perhaps) unintended consequences of this focus is that girl's sexuality is sexualized and fetishized even further.”
― Jessica Valenti, The Purity Myth: How America's Obsession with Virginity is Hurting Young Women

“The summer my daughters were six and four, we were at the beach one day and went for a long walk. It was astonishingly hot, and the sun, bouncing off a clear sea and blinding sand, was relentless. Wearing bikini bottoms but no tops, my children alternated between making sandpiles and running into the sea to cool off. The beach was empty. Eventually a woman and her son appeared in the distance, moving lazily in our direction. The boy seemed to be around the same age. Eventually the children came together, playing in the water with on another but not talking. His mother and I, farther back in each direction, waved and smiled.
I thought we would just keep walking, but when we got close to the children, she said loudly, 'You really should put tops on them.' At first, I didn't understand her.
'Thanks,' I replied. 'They're covered in sunscreen.'
'They're girls,' she said. It wasn't until she was near my daughters that she'd realized this.
I was dumbfounded. She might have been equally dumbfounded if I had taken the time to explain that her statement was an overtly sexist sexualization. The four children were physically indistinguishable, physically active on a hot beach. When I made no move toward shielding her son from the girls' scary, tempting, and corrupting bodies, she pulled him out of the water by the arm. They rushed down the beach before it crossed my mind to whip off my own top. Aggression takes many forms.”
― Soraya Chemaly, Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women's Anger

“I was not a little mother or a hot mama. I was an eleven-year-old girl. Now, it seems to me a startlingly efficient way to age a child in a single word. Sometimes the word itself matters less than the authority with which it is spoken. It is the act of naming that claims you.”
― Melissa Febos, Girlhood

“Sulla parete, un'icona di San Nicola convive senza problemi con le tette di una bionda da calendario per camionisti.”
― Paolo Rumiz, The Fault Line: Traveling the Other Europe, From Finland to Ukraine

“Leap Beyond Libido (The Sonnet)

Brotherhood won't do,
Nor will sisterhood.
What the world really needs,
Is a sense of humanhood.
So long as gender lingers,
In the behavior of human.
We'll not have a society,
Free from sexualization.
Genitalia have no role in society,
Other than in bed.
When you leap beyond libido,
Even a naked body seems sacred.
The body has evolved to crave for release,
But a well-built character is hard to please.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Hometown Human: To Live for Soil and Society

“In other words, sexualization is a more general tactic to delegitimize and dehumanize people. This helps to explain why there is often so much shame, reluctance, and secrecy surrounding discussions of sexuality, as even broaching the subject can lead a person to become stigmatized.”
― Julia Serano, Sexed Up: How Society Sexualizes Us, and How We Can Fight Back