Sexual Repression Quotes

The American girl is well acquainted with her body's seductive capacity. She knows it lies in the face, and in expressive eyes, and thirsty lips. She knows seductiveness lies in the round breasts, the full buttocks, and in the shapely thighs, sleek legs — and she shows all this and does not hide it.

Anti-Catholicism has always been the pornography of the Puritan.

Sex was a great no-no for Americans, so that was obviously an attraction to the writers, and since sex is a great part of most people's lives, it's a great subject.

We're warriors, this culture, and we're very puritanical about sex and very embracing about violence and I don't know why that is.

Maybe Elvis was inhibited by inbred religious prohibitions or an Oedipal complex, or maybe he simply preferred the thrill of a denied release. Whatever put the brakes on the famous pelvis, it ground to a halt at a certain point, and that was it.

I had a Christian upbringing - it was all about sin and guilt. I was very happy just kissing people. I was like the make-out queen - not even second base.

At the heart of pornography is sexuality haunted by its own disappearance.

Witch-hunts are always spooked by women's horrifying sexuality awakened by the superstud Devil.

Chastity is a monkish and evangelical superstition, a greater foe to natural temperance even than unintellectual sensuality; it strikes at the root of all domestic happiness, and consigns more than half the human race to misery.

The unity and congruity of culture and nature, work and love, morality and sexuality, longed for from time immemorial, will remain a dream as long as man continues to condemn the biological demand for natural sexual gratification.

I do like the idea of the novel of repressed college students being a contemporary novel of courtship! I guess what I would say to that is, we tend to think of historical periods and historical mores as ending a lot more concretely than they do. Like, in an Austen novel, there are lots of reasons - cultural, moral, religious - why the characters don't have sex during courtship. Maybe, even though those reasons have kind of expired, historically, they're still around in some sense.

The missionary is no longer a man, a conscience. He is a corpse, in the hands of a confraternity, without family, without love, without any of the sentiments that are dear to us. Emasculated, in a sense, by his vow of chastity, he offers us the distressing spectacle of a man deformed and impotent or engaged in a stupid and useless struggle with the sacred needs of the flesh, a struggle which, seven times out of ten, leads him to sodomy, the gallows, or prison.

If anti-gay stuff is always coming out of your mouth, something very gay is probably going in.

Protestant parents still keep a Bible handy in the house, so that the children can study it, and one of the first things the little boys and girls learn is to be righteous and holy and not piss against the wall. They study those passages more than they study any others, except those which incite to masturbation. Those they hunt out and study in private.

There were theoretical elements in the subjection of women and it is not possible to avoid the conclusion that a large contribution was made to them by the Church. In part this was a matter of its hostile stance towards sexuality.

Nowhere on Earth was sex so vigorously suppressed as in America--and nowhere else was there such a deep interest in it.

There's an underlying puritanicalness in America that is not that different to the prudishness of Britain - it just manifests itself in different ways.

Behind every erotic condemnation there's a burning hypocrite.

The Englishman can get along with sex quite perfectly so long as he can pretend that it isn't sex but something else.

When you are raised to believe that anything having to do with sex is forbidden and taboo, then of course that's all you want to know about. That becomes your complete and utter fascination. That is the surest way to interest a child.

Homosexuality was invented by a straight world dealing with its own bisexuality. But finding this difficult, and preferring not toadmit it, it invented a pariah state, a leper colony for the incorrigible whose very existence, when tolerated openly, was admonition to all. We queers keep everyone straight as whores keep matrons virtuous.

You know, women are as promiscuous as men and yet, of course, people are inhibited from having an affair or a relationship because the real-world consequences are a drag.

Men sometimes do not understand the sexual desires and processes of women.

That's what I mean about Catholicism - your sexual life is supposed to be dead if you're a good Catholic. That's wrong. It's human nature to be sexual, so why would God want you to deny your human nature?

Fear of sexuality is the new, disease-sponsored register of the universe of fear in which everyone now lives.