Quotes by Caroline Knapp

“Barry Schwartz, a professor of psychology at Swarthmore College, has written about what he calls “the tyranny of freedom,” arguing that the sheer volume of choices in American life has come to feel oppressive and overwhelming: the proliferation ratchets up expectations and anxieties (there’s always something better around the corner) and overloads the psyche..
…The mathematics of desire mitigates precisely that anxiety. A woman-particularly a woman who feels fundamentally disempowered and uncertain-makes up new rules, replaces external constraints with internal ones, installs systems of mastery that operate from the inside out, the tyranny of freedom reconfigured as the tyranny of self.”

“Barry Schwartz, a professor of psychology at Swarthmore College, has written about what he calls “the tyranny of freedom,” arguing that the sheer volume of choices in American life has come to feel oppressive and overwhelming: the proliferation ratchets up expectations and anxieties (there’s always something better around the corner) and overloads the psyche..

…The mathematics of desire mitigates precisely that anxiety. A woman-particularly a woman who feels fundamentally disempowered and uncertain-makes up new rules, replaces external constraints with internal ones, installs systems of mastery that operate from the inside out, the tyranny of freedom reconfigured as the tyranny of self.”

... I was struck by the use, by all three, of the word it.  Suzanne is "entitled to have it."  Janet is compelled to "get rid of it."  Kathleen needs to "get it out."  It is no doubt shorthand; the word may refer generally to the galaxy of feeling that surrounds female appetite, to the blend of longing and constraint that underlies it, but I suspect it also refers to that ocean of sorrow, to a woman's awereness of its depth and her horror at the volume of need it inspires.

I steered the boat into the dock and sat for a moment looking out at the water, a wide ribbon of blue, glassy as a mirror in patches, rippled and glinting with diamonds of sunlight in others.  I thought about that young woman with her cat and her pile of blankets, and I thought about how sculling had served a similar purpose, reintroducing me to beauty and grace, reframing the body as a source of pleasure.  Defining desire in new ways is achingly complicated, painstaking work; it requires developing a vision that runs counter to consumerism, counter to a corporate an political culture that's still tightly structured to meet male needs, perhaps even counter one's own deeply-ingrained assumptions...But new visions do get forged, and if they're not political in a large social sense, they certainly involve shifts in personal politics, in defining what works, what fits, what matters...The public battlefields may be private ones today, but the dynamics are largely the same.  Anything that connects you--to the body, to the self, to other women--can free.  Anything that frees may also feed.