How we cite our quotes: (Part.Chapter.Paragraph), with the exception of Part V, which runs (Part#. "Short Title". Paragraph). Part V has no numbered chapters—only title headings.
Quote #1
Eva is a cheerful man-chaser. But she doesn't chase them to marry them. Not love but only friendship and sensuality exist for her. So she has many friends: men are not afraid she wants to marry them, and women have no fear she is seeking to deprive them of a husband. (II.3.4)
Eva sounds like a pretty liberated lady, though our admiration for her is tarnished a bit by Kundera's tone—which makes her sound a little too determined in her radical ideology. Eva, however, sticks to her guns and lives her life the way she wants to: like a man in a Kundera novel.
Quote #2
Eva arrived, tall, thin, and badly dressed. She looked like an oversized adolescent who had put on her grandmother's clothes. Seated across from him, she explained that social conventions meant nothing to her when she was attracted to a man. That she only allowed friendship and sensuality. Signs of embarrassment and effort showed on her face, and Karel felt a kind of fraternal compassion for her rather than desire. (II.5.2)
We can only ever see women through the eyes of men who want them for something. In this case, it's Eva standing up under the scrutiny of Karel's eyes. When they meet for the first time, Eva has a well-developed philosophy about sex and love but little experience to back it up. Karel's gaze is devastating in this respect, making her feel more awkward than she looks.
Quote #3
...and suddenly I felt a wild desire to make love to her. More exactly: a wild desire to rape her. To throw myself on her and seize her in a single embrace along with all her unbearably exciting contradictions, with her perfect clothes and her rebellious intestines, with her reason and her fear, with her pride and her shame. (III.9.2)
Kundera's inexplicable desire to rape his vulnerable friend—the one who risked her life and career to give him a job—has something to do with getting at the core of her identity. Of course, when he gets to that "diamond," he plans to rip it out. In most cases in this novel, sexual violence against women has everything to do with controlling something in a world gone mad.
Quote #4
The impression Kristyna created against the backdrop of a small town, with its butchers, mechanics, and pensioners, was entirely different in Prague, the city of pretty students and hairdressers. With her ridiculous beads and her discreet gold tooth...she seemed to personify the negation of that youthful feminine beauty in jeans who had been cruelly rejecting him for months. (V. "Compromise". 2)
Kristyna's desirability drops several notches when she's taken out of her context—from the student's point of view, anyway. Back home, her version of femininity is charming, but in Prague, where the student can view her in comparison to other Prague women, she looks like a country bumpkin. The issue is never really with Kristyna's beauty or manners; it's with the student's state of mind.
Quote #5
"Misogynists don't despise women. Misogynists don't like femininity. Men have always been divided into two categories. Worshipers of women, otherwise known as poets, and misogynists, or, more accurately, gynophobes. Worshipers revere traditional feminine values such as feelings, the home, motherhood, fertility, sacred flashes of hysteria, and the divine voice of nature within us, while in misogynists or gynophobes these values inspire a touch of terror." (V. "Boccaccio". 5)
Boccaccio wants the other poets to understand that he's not hating on women; he's just fed up with conventional ideas of femininity. In his mind, to be a misogynist is to be a champion and true lover of women; he wants to free femininity from the stupid stereotypical traits that go along with it. His comment also has a lot to do with poetry and the language of female worship, which goes along with love verses. Boccaccio isn't into that. At all.
Quote #6
"She said to me, and it was like a prayer, like a litany, 'I'm a simple girl, I'm quite an ordinary girl, I have nothing to offer you, but I came here because I was sent by love, I came'—and now she squeezed my hand very hard—'so that you'll know what real love is, so that you'll experience it once in your life.'" (V. "Insults". 6)
Petrarch proves himself the total opposite of Boccaccio with his ridiculous and pretty appalling story of the female student who appears at his home to declare her love for him—in front of his beautiful wife. Boccaccio calls Petrarch out on this romanticized version of a bungled love affair, accusing Petrarch of being a "worshiper": one of those men who idolize stereotypically feminine behavior and traits.
Quote #7
She had the smile of a woman who knows that on her, even a red nose is charming. She lived in exemplary harmony with herself. She loved her nose, and she also loved the audacity with which she called a cold a cold and a nose a cauliflower. The unconventional beauty of her red nose thus complemented her intellectual audacity, and the circular course of her thumb...expressed the indivisible unity of her personality. (VII.3.4)
Kundera describes Hanna the actress, a woman who is secure in her beauty and her effect on everyone in the world. She's clearly used to having the focus of attention on her, even when she's not looking or feeling her best. (Her missing son doesn't really seem to affect her ability to attend parties or to entertain friends.) Hanna is pretty much a star in her own orbit—she doesn't get pulled into any of the messy relationships that populate Kundera's novel.
Quote #8
Encouraged by her parents' applause, the girl went on: "Do you think we take off our tops to give you pleasure? We do it for ourselves, because we like it, because it feels better, because it brings our bodies nearer the sun! You're only capable of seeing us as sex objects!" (VII.4.11)
The Clevises' precocious daughter has a lot to say on the subject of the female body. She's just weighed in with her opinion on whether or not women should be allowed to sunbathe topless on public beaches, and she continues a bit further than Mama or Papa think she should.
Kundera says that this kind of talk out of the young lady's mouth makes everyone uncomfortable because she's so extremely young—why should she even know about "sex objects"? The answer is pretty obvious—sex, not to mention talk about women's bodies, is everywhere.
Quote #9
Less well known is that a woman is not entirely defenseless against that gaze. If she is turned into a thing, then she watches the man with the gaze of a thing. It is as if a hammer suddenly had eyes and watched the carpenter grip it to drive in a nail. Seeing the hammer's malicious gaze, the carpenter loses his self-confidence and hits his thumb. (VII.8.2)
Kundera wants to take on the academic discussion about the male gaze (that objectifying stare employed by men against women) and turn it to the subject of the female gaze. In his opinion, the gaze of a woman who's not interested in succumbing to the power of the male gaze is absolutely devastating to men. We're not entirely sure if Kundera is serious in his hammer/carpenter analogy, or about the power of the female gaze, but we give him full points for originality on this one.
Quote #10
She was in fact much more natural naked than dressed, as if in rejecting her clothes she was also rejecting the difficult condition of womanhood in order to become simply a human being, without sexual characteristics. As if sex resided in clothes and nakedness were a state of sexual neutrality. (VII.14.8)
There's a lot that Jan doesn't understand about Edwige, but this is perhaps the thing that makes him most uncomfortable. Just like her silence during lovemaking, Edwige's nakedness shows a desire to defy expectations. She wants to abandon the usual signs of femininity to take on a more androgynous identity. There's no desire to be he or she in Edwige's mind: she just wants to be. Jan is pretty attached to his masculinity and really can't follow the logic.