Apple Quotes

“Privileged women continue the tradition of compensating for their authority to men through affectations of disablement – from dieting and other disorders to substance abuse, institutionalised detachment from their children, and so on.”
― Antonella Gambotto-Burke, Apple: Sex, Drugs, Motherhood and the Recovery of the Feminine

“The feminine continues to be a form of currency, to be traded for money or gender status: undeserving of emotional investment in itself.”
― Antonella Gambotto-Burke, Apple: Sex, Drugs, Motherhood and the Recovery of the Feminine

“The mythicised inhumanity of this attack remains unforgettable not only because it was performed by one mother on another mother – one dark and distorted, the other fair and privileged – but because it encoded the relationship between patriarchal masculinity, drugs, and the resulting – and accelerating – cultural denigration of the feminine and maternal.”
― Antonella Gambotto-Burke, Apple: Sex, Drugs, Motherhood and the Recovery of the Feminine

“To fully grasp the extent and peerless importance of the sensory intelligence, sensitivity and vulnerability of the newborn is to change not only our understanding of birth, but of humanity itself.”
― Antonella Gambotto-Burke, Apple: Sex, Drugs, Motherhood and the Recovery of the Feminine

“The likelihood of my baby being injured during co-sleeping was, in reality, significantly lower than it would have been had I left her in the hospital cot. In the UK, 90 percent more babies die alone in baskets or cots – Sudden Infant Death Syndrome – than they do when they securely, rather than hazardously, co-sleep with their mothers.”
― Antonella Gambotto-Burke, Apple: Sex, Drugs, Motherhood and the Recovery of the Feminine

“In the 21st century, the pornographic vogue of ‘ass to mouth’, in which the feminine, after being sodomised by the masculine, is expected to orally clean the penis, is an eroticised example of the same impulse. Women, who for centuries have metaphorically eaten shit, are now expected to literally do so, like swine.”
― Antonella Gambotto-Burke, Apple: Sex, Drugs, Motherhood and the Recovery of the Feminine

“During the Psychedelic Revolution, eroticised violence towards
the feminine not only became normalised, but was also presented
as the ideal.”
― Antonella Gambotto-Burke, Apple: Sex, Drugs, Motherhood and the Recovery of the Feminine

“During the Psychedelic Revolution, eroticised violence towards the feminine not only became normalized, but was also presented as the ideal.”
― Antonella Gambotto-Burke, Apple: Sex, Drugs, Motherhood and the Recovery of the Feminine

“The culturally facilitated association of femininity with masochism was celebrated during the Psychedelic Revolution.”
― Antonella Gambotto-Burke, Apple: Sex, Drugs, Motherhood and the Recovery of the Feminine

“As Baba Ram Dass (his ‘spiritual name’), Richard Alpert explained human attachment as a ‘clue that there’s work to be done’ – meaning that territoriality was remastered by him as dysfunctional and primitive, and as requiring the curative attentions of a guru, ordinarily an older man.”
― Antonella Gambotto-Burke, Apple: Sex, Drugs, Motherhood and the Recovery of the Feminine

“The intensity of this cultural shame demanded a poster boy who would deter ‘bestial’ human behaviours and presentation, and so to the genesis of Satan, ‘the beast’ – a carnal, hairy, lascivious, malevolent, stinking satyr capable of taking sexually suggestive serpentine form: the humanising of the mammalian self.”
― Antonella Gambotto-Burke, Apple: Sex, Drugs, Motherhood and the Recovery of the Feminine

“In a patriarchal culture, to be human is to be at war with the animal self.”
― Antonella Gambotto-Burke, Apple: Sex, Drugs, Motherhood and the Recovery of the Feminine

“Feminists, in vivid essays praising Shulamith Firestone’s legacy, fail to mention this emphatic celebration of incest and paedophilia; had she been male, she would not only have been dismissed by the same women on these very grounds, but her legacy would have been cancelled”
― Antonella Gambotto-Burke, Apple: Sex, Drugs, Motherhood and the Recovery of the Feminine

“The inferiority of the feminine has always been predicated on its overtly mammalian nature.”
― Antonella Gambotto-Burke, Apple: Sex, Drugs, Motherhood and the Recovery of the Feminine

“These associations, between childbirth and feminine effacement, and between feminine silencing and violence, would, for the first time, become imprinted on the subconscious in relation to birth, creating, in place of passionate and proud attachment, a terror-based antipathy between mother and child, and between the feminine and its biology.”
― Antonella Gambotto-Burke, Apple: Sex, Drugs, Motherhood and the Recovery of the Feminine

“Patriarchal status has always been contingent on the display of property.”
― Antonella Gambotto-Burke, Apple: Sex, Drugs, Motherhood and the Recovery of the Feminine

“The artist, in making victims of his muses, remasters himself as a hero, saving them from their otherwise inconsequential lives.”
― Antonella Gambotto-Burke, Apple: Sex, Drugs, Motherhood and the Recovery of the Feminine

“The impact of obstetric drugs on the human race cannot be overemphasised. Globally, 500,000 deaths result from illegal drug use, and over 70 percent of these deaths are opioid-related. In 2018, some 58 million people around the world were known to use illegal opioids; the unknown number would be significantly higher. Between 2010 and 2018, the number of fatal opioid overdoses in America increased by 120 percent. Fentanyl and other drugs used in an obstetric context were involved in two-thirds of these deaths; in 2018, there were over 31,335 deaths involving fentanyl and other synthetic narcotics alone.”
― Antonella Gambotto-Burke, Apple: Sex, Drugs, Motherhood and the Recovery of the Feminine

“All this was in contrast to the idea that a newborn, on the basis of cortical immaturity, is a being who remembers and understands nothing: a person only within the context of the mother’s acknowledgment, blank, a species of human cabbage.”
― Antonella Gambotto-Burke, Apple: Sex, Drugs, Motherhood and the Recovery of the Feminine

“Mother: a humanoid thing blinded by bandages, nurturing breasts hidden, limbs restrained, tongue lolling from its slack mouth, and with no recognisable sweat signature.”
― Antonella Gambotto-Burke, Apple: Sex, Drugs, Motherhood and the Recovery of the Feminine

“Fetishism, then, is a nondeclarative narrative – a means of sharing pain, of being heard.”
― Antonella Gambotto-Burke, Apple: Sex, Drugs, Motherhood and the Recovery of the Feminine

“Critically, what if the ‘resurfacing’ of birth trauma is homeostatic in essence, a story told to be heard and not ignored as it was at birth, so that emotional stability may be restored to the psyche? How would such an understanding change the way we treat those who suffer from anxiety and depression? How would it change the way we treat all mental illness?”
― Antonella Gambotto-Burke, Apple: Sex, Drugs, Motherhood and the Recovery of the Feminine

“In sharing his vision of the ‘black light’ – significantly, Brady wanted the phrase to be the title of his autobiography – he was again calling attention to the genesis of his sociopathy.”
― Antonella Gambotto-Burke, Apple: Sex, Drugs, Motherhood and the Recovery of the Feminine

“Only those who have not experienced maternal validation at birth question their meaning; those whose mothers exerted tender territoriality over them instinctively understand their existence as precious, as part of the evolutionary continuum. Through love, they are contextualised.”
― Antonella Gambotto-Burke, Apple: Sex, Drugs, Motherhood and the Recovery of the Feminine

“This was the first experience of billions of First World babies of their mothers for decades; at worst, the mothers – or their babies – experienced respiratory distress, were stupefied, unconscious, or in a delirium.”
― Antonella Gambotto-Burke, Apple: Sex, Drugs, Motherhood and the Recovery of the Feminine

“The newborn’s preference for a mutual, rather than unilateral, gaze shows that babies are designed for reciprocity.”
― Antonella Gambotto-Burke, Apple: Sex, Drugs, Motherhood and the Recovery of the Feminine

“Given that observable neurobehavioural characteristics in adulthood are determined in part by GABA-A receptors in early life, and the impact of GABA-acting drugs during pregnancy – in particular, on the construction of the brain – have been said to lead to ‘a cascade of pathogenic consequences’, it’s clear that the long-term effects of phenobarbital regularly administered during infancy would be severe.”
― Antonella Gambotto-Burke, Apple: Sex, Drugs, Motherhood and the Recovery of the Feminine

“What this suggests is that ‘widely used’ obstetric and infant drugs such as phenobarbital dysregulate the infant’s dopaminergic (dopamine-activating) system, permanently reducing his potential for pleasure and creating an imbalance he later seeks to redress through dopaminergic compulsions – substance-use disorders involving drugs such as cannabis, heroin, or LSD, say. Or sexual addiction. And, while the nature of pornography is determined by the culturally sanctioned birth abuses of mothers and babies, the impact of pornography is determined by the susceptibility created by drugs given to mothers and children.”
― Antonella Gambotto-Burke, Apple: Sex, Drugs, Motherhood and the Recovery of the Feminine

“What amounts to a plague of mental illness is now addressed as ‘normal’ rather than as an indication that there is something terrifyingly wrong with our culture. The fact that we no longer understand mental illness as a message – that is, as a nondeclarative communication of an imbalance that requires rectification – not only demonstrates the degree of our emotional illiteracy, but our failure to understand the principle of balance as the axis of all existence.”
― Antonella Gambotto-Burke, Apple: Sex, Drugs, Motherhood and the Recovery of the Feminine

“We have reached a point in history where intellectual incapacitation feels like wholeness, and where forgetting trumps remembering.”
― Antonella Gambotto-Burke, Apple: Sex, Drugs, Motherhood and the Recovery of the Feminine