For women as a class, the ability to transform sexual practice, to achieve respect from men as equal human beings and thus break out of their subordinate status, is undermined by the ability of men to escape from the responsibility of acknowledging women's equality. Men's use of women in prostitution stands directly in the way of women's efforts to improve their status.

— Sheila Jeffreys

Fundamental to a radical and lesbian feminist politics is the understanding that 'the personal is political'. This phrase has two interrelated meanings. It means that the political power structures of the 'public' world are reflected in the private world. Thus, for women in particular, the 'private' world of heterosexuality is not a realm of personal security, a haven from a heartless world, but an intimate realm in which their work is extracted and their bodies, sexuality and emotions are constrained and exploited for the benefits of individual men and the male supremacist political system. The very concept of 'privacy' as Catharine MacKinnon so cogently expresses it, 'has shielded the place of battery, marital rape, and women's exploited labor'. But the phrase has a complementary meaning, which is that the 'public' world of male power, the world of corporations, militaries and parliaments is founded upon this private subordination. The edifice of masculine power relations, from aggressive nuclear posturing to take-over bids, is constructed on the basis of its distinctiveness from the 'feminine' sphere and based upon the world of women which nurtures and services that male power. Transformation of the public world of masculine aggression, therefore, requires transformation of the relations that take place in 'private'. Public equality cannot derive from private slavery.

— Sheila Jeffreys

However, as Bordeaux herself notes, the problem with the adoption of postmodern ideas in general is that they have led some writers to disregard the materiality of power relations.

— Sheila Jeffreys

It should not be a surprise to find that s/m fantasy is significant in women's sex lives. Women may be born free, but they are born into a system of subordination. We are not born into equality and do not have equality to eroticize. We are not born into power and do not have power to eroticize. Furthermore, we are born into subordination, and it is in subordination that we learn our sexual and emotional responses. It would be surprising indeed if any woman reared under male supremacy was able to escape the forces constructing her into a member of an inferior slave class.

— Sheila Jeffreys

Male domination, and the low and stigmatized status of women, cause teenage girls to engage in punishment of their bodies through eating disorders and self-mutilation. There is increasing evidence that woman-hating Western cultures are toxic to girls and very harmful to their mental health. It is, perhaps, not surprising, therefore, that there seem to be some girls baling out and seeking to upgrade their status.

— Sheila Jeffreys

Masculinity cannot exist without femininity. On its own, masculinity has no meaning, because it is but one half of a set of power relations. Masculinity pertains to male dominance as femininity pertains to female subordination.

— Sheila Jeffreys

Masculinity is part of a binary and requires its opposite, since, in the absence of femininity, masculinity would have no meaning.

— Sheila Jeffreys

Pornography as propaganda, according to feminist analysis, represents women as objects who love to be abused, and teaches men practices of degradation and abuse to carry out upon women.

— Sheila Jeffreys

Radical feminist theorists do not seek to make gender a bit more flexible, but to eliminate it. They are gender abolitionists, and understand gender to provide the framework and rationale for male dominance. In the radical feminist approach, masculinity is the behavior of the male ruling class and femininity is the behavior of the subordinate class of women. Thus gender can have no place in the egalitarian future that feminism aims to create.

— Sheila Jeffreys

The bonding of women that is woman-loving, or Gun/affection, is very different from male bonding. Male bonding has been the glue of male dominance. It has been based upon recognition of the difference men see between themselves and women, and is a form of the behavior, masculinity, that creates and maintains male power… Male comradeship/bonding depends upon energy drained from women.

— Sheila Jeffreys