Beginning to feel these desires is an essential first step. But power is inviting others to participate in the creation of your envisioned reality. Before we can go after these desires and invite others to participate in collaborating with us to make them come true, we have to refine them, separating them from the fears and expectations that often

On a cosmic scale, the harm caused by women not speaking is so colossal, so massive, and so out of proportion to the harm that might be caused by a woman stepping out and asking for something, it almost doesn’t matter if you go too far. If the next two thousand years were spent with women riding slipshod over men and their desires and their rights

Influence is the opposite of control. If you are able to powerfully influence someone, then you gain access to all of their inner resources: their smarts, their creativity, their passion. This kind of cooperation often creates a third possibility, a solution even better than either person involved could possibly have imagined by themselves. So the

But the beautiful thing about strengthening your legitimacy is that it becomes very easy to see that a no is not a no to you, but simply a no to your request. There’s no need to personalize it, or to feel catastrophic about the no.

Billy is rewarded and punished for what he does when his attention is out. “Look what Billy did! Look what Billy made! Do you believe what Billy said?” Whereas Mary is rewarded when the attention—hers and others’—is placed on her. “Look at Mary’s pretty dress! Doesn’t she have lovely manners? Isn’t she sweet?” From the very start, then, boys are

Our culture is obsessed with what men do, and who women are.

But there’s absolutely no reason that asking for the wrong thing should be where the asking ends. That’s just information: you use what you’ve learned about yourself and the shape of your desire to make another Ask.

One of the most insidious by-products of the patriarchy is the isolation that makes it feel like every woman’s problem is personal and psychological—as opposed to systemic and sociological.

The primary superpower of the submissive is her ability to connect to a deep inner signal and to communicate the truth of that signal to others.