43 Quotes by Antonella Gambotto-Burke

Sometimes I hear the world discussed as the realm of men. This is not my experience. I have watched men fall to the ground like leaves. They were swept up as memories, and burned. History owns them. These men were petrified in both senses of the word: paralyzed and turned to stone. Their refusal to express feeling killed them. Anachronistic men. Those poor, poor boys.

As a culture, we perceive men not as sacred or sensitive, but as things to be hurt, repeatedly and violently, in order to test their mettle. Manhood is a prize awarded to the most scarred.

Suicide has overtaken car accidents, heart disease and cancer as the biggest killer of British men under the age of 45, and male rates of substance abuse, violence and imprisonment are eye-watering. And yet dysfunctional emotional regulation continues to be aligned with alpha masculinity.

My brother was philosophically impaired, emotionally paralysed and stubborn, but he was not mentally ill. Mental illness suggests some kind of biological maladjustment such as that caused by injury or drug-induced chemical imbalances, whereas my brother, like many male suicides I have known, reacted normally to an abnormal situation. My brother felt he could not show the suffering that revealed him as sensitive; to do so would have threatened his gender status. It was easier for him to die.

Secret elisions within families are suddenly revealed by self-execution, and just as quickly sheeted with excuses, blame, and counter-blame. But sense is made of the world only through relationship between action and reaction, symptom and cause. No change is possible without analysis of accountability.

Does any man have the right to dispose of his own life? This is the ultimate question of moral entitlement, and relevant only if right is relevant in this context, and it is not. A suicidal man cannot be concerned - and nor should he be - with questions of moral entitlement. (And how absurd.) His one concern should be whether self-execution will most expediently relieve his suffering.

Women deformed by the pornographic sexual templateperceive other women as masturbatory objects.

I refuse to have my vagina photographed because I have nointerest in being desired on the basis of its appearance. It hastaken me decades to appreciate its power and beauty, and notmerely because it birthed a child. Responsive to tenderness andthe source of a luminous ecstasy, my vagina has enabled me totranscend an otherwise limited sense of self. I feel no need tomake it conform to another’s aesthetic or have it applauded bystrangers.

This, the “Vagina Effect”, is one of the saddest byproducts of pornography: to attract the attention of jaded males, female performers now feel they have to flash their vaginas – not too obviously, lest more orthodox fans be alienated, but 'accidentally' so as to sidestep disquieting accusations of vulgarity.