You do not win by struggling to the top of a caste system, you win by refusing to be trapped within one at… — Naomi Wolf

Pain is real when you get other people to believe in it. If no one believes in it but you, your pain is madness or hysteria.

The books and films they see survey from the young boy's point of view his first touch of a girl's thighs, his first glimpse of her breasts. The girls sit listening, absorbing, their familiar breasts estranged as if they were not part of their bodies, their thighs crossed self-consciously, learning how to leave their bodies and watch them from the outside. Since their bodies are seen from the point of view of strangeness and desire, it is no wonder that what should be familiar, felt to be whole, becomes estranged and divided into parts. What little girls learn is not the desire for the other, but the desire to be desired. Girls learn to watch their sex along with the boys; that takes up the space that should be devoted to finding out about what they are wanting, and reading and writing about it, seeking it and getting it.

Beauty provokes harassment, the law says, but it looks through men's eyes when deciding what provokes it.