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You learn the world from your mother's face. You learn about God from the way she moves, how she loves or doesn't love, how she smells, what she says in words and silence. You learn about creation from the way your parents love each other, the story they tell you about how they came together to make you. These details create your idea of who you are and where you came from, the color, texture, depth, or shallowness of your universe, the particular tangle of roots that brought you out of the ground.
-- Mark Matousek, Sex, Death, Enlightenment
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Hierarchy is not a simple matter of victims and oppressors. We all hold it up in one way or another, and women get certain things for their position in the society that they are not usually prepared to give up. So women are, in fact, a lot of times the people who control children's sexuality, who make them afraid of their own bodies -- especially little boys. I think the abuse directed at little boys is drastically underestimated. I think a lot of it comes from their mothers. I think, in fact, a lot of homophobia and fear of others boys' and men's sexuality does come from female caretakers who don't like the idea that there might be any competition for a male's attention from another male.
-- Pat Califia, interviewed by Michael Rowe in Writing Below the Belt
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