"Women's bodies . . . are objectified and treated as potential trophies--living testaments to a man's prowess as a financial success, skillful sexual performer, or fearless warrior. This male competition for access to women's bodies begins in adolescence when boys compete to be the first to score, to achieve the most sexual conquests, to make it with the sexiest teenage girl. The women's-bodies-as-trophies mentality, damaging enough in adolescence, becomes even more destructive in adulthood . . . "
--Brooks, The Centerfold Syndrome, 7-8.
"Power, masculinity, and sexual performance provide the building blocks of the masculine persona in the dating game . . . The game confuses sexual megalomania with manhood . . . he needed sexual conquests to confirm his masculinity . . . he adopted the practice of setting quotas for himself . . . [as one male explains the sexual mentality,] 'hitting [is] a game where the goal is to score with as many women as possible. Women are just dolls in this game, they have no kind of brain, no kind of decision, and we have all the power. We're up at bat and we're scoring. Women are like the playing field and men are the players'. . .
[an educator] sees as his job to try and open new ways of thinking...to unshackle them from the chains of the '17-dude' mentality, where a guy's got to have seventeen girls to feel any self-worth."
--Peggy Reeves Sanday, "Naming and Studying Acquaintance Rape," in A Woman Scorned: Acquaintance Rape on Trial (New York: Doubleday, 1996), 200, 271, 272.
"We are trained from childhood to believe that real men get sex from women, that if we do not get sex from women we are not men." 6
