Female heterosexuality is not a biological drive or an individual women's erotic attraction or attachment to another human animal which happens to be male. Female heterosexuality is a set of social institutions and practices... Those definitions... are about the oppression and exploitation of women by men.
Interpretation
This quote asserts that female heterosexuality is shaped by societal structures rather than purely biological instincts.
Marilyn Frye's quote challenges the notion that female heterosexuality is solely a natural inclination of women towards men. Instead, she argues that it is a complex interplay of social institutions and practices that contribute to the oppression and exploitation of women by men, suggesting that societal factors play a significant role in shaping sexual orientation.
In practice
In a discussion about gender studies, this quote illustrates how societal norms shape perceptions of female sexuality.
How Americans restore trust may be an existential question for their country, then, but it's ultimately a practical one: What U.S. society needs to answer it in the coming years aren't lamentations but practical measures, especially among the emerging generations that will define America's future.
An armed society is a polite society.
If our free society is to endure, those who govern must recognize human dignity and accept the enforcement of constitutional limitations on their power conceived by the Framers . . . . Such recognition will not come from a technical understanding of the organs of government, or the new forms of wealth they administer. It requires something different, something deeper-a personal confrontation with the wellsprings of our society.
A society that admits misery, a humanity that admits war, seem to me an inferior society and a debased humanity; it is a higher society and a more elevated humanity at which I am aiming - a society without kings, a humanity without barriers.
I have tried to protect myself against men, to react against their madness to discern its source; I have listened and I have seen--and I have been afraid of acting for the same motives or for any motive whatever, of believing in the same ghosts or in any other ghost, of letting myself be engulfed by the same intoxications or by some other... afraid, in short, of raving in common and of expiring in a horde of ecstasies.
An act cannot be defined by the end sought by the actor, for an identical system of behaviour may be adjustable to too many different ends without altering its nature.
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