Erica Jong Men Quotations

Men and women, women and men. It will never work.

I know so many women in their fifties, sixties and seventies who delight in being on their own. It's amazing. They don't see any stigma attached to it. We don't need a man to prove our identity anymore.

I'm not classically pretty; I've always been too heavy; I've had thyroid disease and it's very hard for me to lose weight - but I've always had men pursue me. I've always had that 'it' thing. God knows why. Maybe it's pheromones, I don't know.

You have to enjoy being a woman. Why should being a woman be such a negative thing where you always have to improve yourself? I have never in my entire life met a man who didn't want to go to bed with me because I was too fat.

We've shown again and again, in every UN report on the status of women, that wherever women control their own bodies and have access to education, societies prosper. Men's fortunes go up, children's fortunes go up. This is not news - it's been proven repeatedly. Anywhere those things are threatened, we have to defend them.

I think men have always been afraid of women's sexuality, and the restrictions they put on women testify to that.

Women are their own worst enemies. And guilt is the main weapon of self-torture . . . Show me a woman who doesn't feel guilty and I'll show you a man.

A man assumes that a woman's refusal is just part of a game. Or, at any rate, a lot of men assume that. When a man says no, it's no. When a woman says no, it's yes, or at least maybe. There is even a joke to that effect. And little by little, women begin to believe in this view of themselves.

We've lost more men to homosexuality than we ever did in two world wars.

beware the Lure of a handsome Face, the all too ready Assumption that the lovely Façade must needs have lovely Chambers within; for as 'tis with Great Houses, so, too, with Great Men.

What makes a Man love Death, Fanny? Is it because he hopes to avert his own by watchin' the Deaths of others? Doth he hope to devour Death by devourin' Executions with his Eyes? I'll ne'er understand it, if I live to be eight hundred Years. The Human Beast is more Beast than Human, 'tis true ...

Women really must have equal pay for equal work, equality in work at home, and reproductive choices. Men must press for these things also. They must cease to see them as "women's issues" and learn that they are everyone's issues - essential to survival on planet Earth.

Back in the days when men were hunters and chest beaters and women spent their whole lives worrying about pregnancy or dying in childbirth, they often had to be taken against their will. Men complained that women were cold, unresponsive, frigid. They wanted their women wanton. They wanted their women wild. Now women were finally learning to be wanton and wild - and what happened? The men wilted.

There is simply no dignified way for a woman to live alone. Oh, she can get along financially perhaps (though not nearly as well as a man), but emotionally she is never left in peace. Her friends, her family, her fellow workers never let her forget that her husbandlessness, her childlessness - her selfishness, in short - is a reproach to the American way of life.

Beware of the man who denounces psychiatrists; / he is afraid.

the Lives of Great Men are more oft' at variance with their profess'd Phillosophies than consistent with 'em ...

in freeing myself from the romantic dream of finding another man to come along and rescue me, I learned that no one can rescue me except myself.

The only difference between men and women is that women are able to create new little human beings in their bodies while simultaneously writing books, driving tractors, working in offices, planting crops - in general, doing everything men do.

As women got little crumbs of power, men began to act paranoid - as if we'd disabled them utterly. Do all women have to keep silent for men to speak? Do all women have to be legless for men to walk?

Men must be stripped of arrogance and women must become independent for any mutually nurturing alliance to endure between the sexes.

Young people never believe in the possibility of their own deaths. That's one reason old men can send them to war.

I thought of the nameless inventor of the bathtub. I was somehow sure it was a woman. And was the inventor of the bathtub plug a man?

The perfect man is the true partner. Not a bed partner nor a fun partner, but a man who will shoulder burdens equally with you and possess that quality of joy.