"And why don’t you write? Write! Writing is for you, you are for you; your body is yours, take it. I know why you haven’t written. (And why I didn’t write before the age of twenty-seven.) Because writing is at once too high, too great for you, it’s reserved for the great — that is, for ‘great men’; and it’s ‘silly.’ Besides, you’ve written a little, but in secret. And it wasn’t good, because it was in secret, and because you punished yourself for writing, because you didn’t go all the way; or because you wrote, irresistibly, as when we would masturbate in secret, not to go further, but to attenuate the tension a bit, just enough to take the edge off. And then as soon as we come, we go and make ourselves feel guilty — so as to be forgiven; or to forget, to bury it until the next time.
“Write, let no one hold you back, let nothing stop you: not man; not the imbecilic capitalist machinery, in which publishing houses are the crafty, obsequious relayers of imperatives handed down by an economy that works against us and off our backs, and not yourself. Smug-faced readers, managing editors, and big bosses don’t like the true texts of women — female-sexed texts. That kind scares them."
“Write, let no one hold you back, let nothing stop you: not man; not the imbecilic capitalist machinery, in which publishing houses are the crafty, obsequious relayers of imperatives handed down by an economy that works against us and off our backs, and not yourself. Smug-faced readers, managing editors, and big bosses don’t like the true texts of women — female-sexed texts. That kind scares them."
— Hélène Cixous, from The Laugh of the Medusa (1975) as printed by Pétroleuse Press (via mappingthemoon)
