Feminism Quotes - Page 12

The greatest form of abortion is not letting the man put it there in the first place!

Young women are not putting themselves in danger. The people around them are doing the real damage. Who? you might wonder. The abstinence teacher who tells her students that they'll go to jail if they have premarital sex. The well-founded organizarion that tells girls on college campuses that they should be looking for a husband, not taking women's studies classes. The judge who rules against a rape survivor because she didn't meet whatevel standard for a victim he had in mind. The legislator who pushes a bill to limit young women's access to abortion because he doesn't think they're smart enough to make their own decisions. These are the people who are making the world a worse place, and a more dangerous one, at that, for girls and young women. We're just doing our best to live in it.

Jessica Valenti

Antifeminists are the only ones who benefit from their version of working on women's behalf; in reality, they put other women at risk and fail to solce any larger problems.

Jessica Valenti

What other movement has ensured that young women have the rights that they have today? Feminism is responsable not only for the decline in violence against women over the last decade, but also for equal pay and rights legislation, reproductive justice, and the list goes on. So I'm more than a little suspicious of those who see women's advancement as a bad thing.

Jessica Valenti

Number 23 had plenty of redeeming qualities that made falling for him a justifiable accident. But our connection had nothing to do with our similarities, our differences, our aesthetic attractions, or our emotional and physical needs. When we spoke, he was truly with me. Our egos, our personas, expected social cues, the facades that everyone builds around them that are supposed to sculpt the way the world sees us, were stripped with Number 23 and I. He was immediately my best friend, familiar and safe - an epiphany that I had been spending my life alone in crowded rooms. tOur souls were naked. We initially curled into the warmth of that connection. But once we knew how real it was, we felt exposed, vulnerable, and raw. While his defense was his fearful recoil, mine was dictation.

Maggie Georgiana Young

[The Yellow Wallpaper] was not intended to drive people crazy, but to save people from being driven crazy, and it worked.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Consider another abstinence product: a gold rose pin handed out in schools or at Christian youth events. The pin is attached to a small card that reads, "You are like a beautiful rose. Each time you engage is pre-marital sex a previous petal is stripped away. Don't leave your future husband holding a bare stem. Abstain."Do we really want to teach our daughters that without their virginity they're nothing but a "bare stem"?

Jessica Valenti

Children are often like hostages under the care of authority, with spankings and groundings nudging them like guns pointed at their skulls, threatening to shoot if the wrong words are uttered.

Maggie Georgiana Young

One mustn’t justify day-to-day morality with extraordinary circumstances. Otherwise, we would all feel free to rape and murder at the drop of a cat.

Courtney Milan

What a queer topsy turvy world it was. It used to be the man who went to the wars, the woman who stayed at home. But here the positions were reversed.

Agatha Christie

This is the picture of a woman cast in the role of a learner, a pupil, even a rabbinic student. Quite obviously this is a prohibited role for women in those days and in that culture. Yet Jesus affirms Mary in that role. Martha, however, rebukes her. Martha demands that Jesus order Mary to abandon the pupil role for the more acceptable domestic role of assisting with the dinner preparations. Jesus supports Mary and defends her consciousness-raising act by stating that she has elected a higher choice.

John Shelby Spong

Southerners have mastered picking, choosing, and rationalizing religious texts to fit their social agenda better than their own mother’s fried chicken recipe.

Maggie Georgiana Young

Males were expected to be ready to fuck any hole they could slip their dicks into. Boys weren’t considered men unless they were influenced by their carnal instincts to spread their seed.

Maggie Georgiana Young

I've thought often about why - why?! - anyone, especially other women, would try to disrupt feminist work that combats violence. What in the world could be the point of that? The only reason I've come up with, and I think it makes sense, is fear of becoming that "impure" woman.

Jessica Valenti

It wasn’t really a loud-mouthed, hyperactive little pig-tailed blonde that made Carl cringe. It was what I represented. While his upbringing was battered humiliation, I was spoiled, doted on, and spoon-fed by the world. I don’t think he was even aware of his intentions to reduce that child to his own state of self-loathing, but he was truly brilliant at it.

Maggie Georgiana Young

[Robert] Jensen calls for an end to our current understanding of masculinity. He says, "We men can settle for being men, or we can strive to be human beings." What's funny is that that statement essentially echoes the same hope I have for women: that we can start to see ourselves, and encourage men to see us, as more than just the sum of our sexual parts: not as virgins or whores, as mothers or girlfriends, or as existing only in relation to men, but as people with independent desires, hopes and abilities.

Jessica Valenti

So was it cultural imperialism for Westerners to criticize foot-binding and female infanticide? Perhaps. But it was also the right thing to do. If we believe firmly in certain values, such as the equality of all human beings regardless of color or gender, then we should not be afraid to stand up for them; it would be feckless to defer slavery, torture, foot-binding, honor killings, or genital cutting just because we believe in respecting other faiths or cultures.

Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn

In a world where money, security, children, money, temptation, sex, money, passion and more money is all that women expect of men, that is what men begin to offer. Anyone who has anything different to offer is dismissed, if reluctantly. Men, in their eternal wooing dance, tend to cultivate those qualities which the desired sex expects. What's more, women who gave birth to them and later on rehearse them for their role MAKE them that way, with the help of sisters, mistresses or wives. Those who are too strong or too weak to be thus moulded are cast aside as rejects, socio-sexual-matrimonial drop-outs. The price is paid by humanity as a whole in terms of values. You cannot denigrate a part without diminishing the whole. Women, by relegating man to the status of a working slave, becomes a slave herself. Is diminished morally even if she does remain physically and intellectually superior. Granted that her responsibility for the propagation and survival of the species necessitates her adopting the master role -- she has to have safety, security and comfort, as much as humanly possible, to ensure the continuation of the human race -- it still remains a morally untenable stance.

Adam Zameenzad

When I was young, women were raped on the campus of a great university and the authorities responded by telling all the women students not to go out alone after dark or not to be out at all. Get in the house. (For women, confinement is always waiting to envelope you.) Some pranksters put up a poster announcing another remedy, that all men be excluded from campus after dark. It was an equally logical solution, but men were shocked at being asked to disappear, to lose their freedom to move and participate, all because of the violence of one men.

Rebecca Solnit

Feminist thinking teaches us all, especially, how to love justice and freedom in ways that foster and affirm life.

Bell Hooks

Women were supposed to be strong, but they weren't really, they weren't allowed to be.

Carol Shields

In the studies I have directed, and in my international experience speaking with women in prostitution, the majority of women in prostitution come from marginalized groups with a history of sexual abuse, drug and alcohol dependencies, poverty or financial disadvantage, lack of education, and histories of other vulnerabilities. These factors characterize women in both off and on-street locations. A large number of women in prostitution are pimped or drawn into the sex industry at an early age. These are women whose lives will not change for the better if prostitution is decriminalized. Many have entrenched problems that are best addressed not by keeping women indoors but in establishing programs where women can be provided with an exit strategy and the services that they need to regain their lost lives. There is little evidence that decriminalization or legalization of prostitution improves conditions for women in prostitution, on or off the street. It certainly makes things better for the sex industry, which is provided with legal standing, and the government that enjoys increased revenues from accompanying regulation.

Janice G. Raymond

Lambhood and tigerishness may be found in either gender, and in the same individual at different times.

Margaret Atwood

Lucy could see that love unconfined, love outside convention, might well make a woman an unfit mother; you were one kind of woman or another: you were good or you were bad, as the world saw it, and no stations in between. They allowed you to choose; you could be the maternal or the erotic, but not a bit of both. The latter made you forget the former. Men married the maternal and then longed for the erotic. Or they married the erotic by mistake, and set about making it into the maternal, and then were just as disappointed.

Fay Weldon

Sexism is not confined by border, race, class, sexuality or gender and, to my mind (and Margo Kingston's in Chapter 6), it is inextricably bound up with a mindset of entitlement that also afflicts our relationship with the planet.

Samantha Trenoweth

Those four effects described above—shaping a male-dominant view of sexuality, initiating victims, contributing to difficulty in separating sexual fantasy and reality, and providing a training manual for abusers—are at work just as much with men who have not engaged in activities that meet the legal definition of rape. Here we have to let go of a comforting illusion—that there is some clear line between men who rape and men who don't, between the bad guys and the good guys.

Robert Jensen

Our goal should be not to redefine masculinity, but to abolish it.

Robert Jensen

The feminist girls she knew at Oberlin, her roommate among them, were the kind of people who made you feel bad for liking what you liked. Sometimes when Emily was tired or blue she liked to watch "When Harry Met Sally", or "Love Actually", or old episodes of "Friends", and at Oberlin she'd had to wait until her roommate had gone out or fallen asleep.

Brian Morton

Feminism is not inherently bourgeois, but bourgeois feminism is the only one given voice in our society. That is why women’s issues discuss glass ceilings rather than dirt floors.

James Rozoff

I would like to be like Rome when I am an old lady.

Elizabeth Gilbert

Humanity is mediocre. The majority of women are neither superior nor inferior to the majority ofmen. They are all equal. They all merit the same scorn.

Valentine de Saint-Point

Some women get erased a little at a time, some all at once. Some reappear. Every woman who appears wrestles with the forces that would have her disappear. She struggles with the forces that would tell her story for her, or write her out of the story, the genealogy, the rights of man, the rule of law. The ability to tell your own story, in words or images, is already a victory, already a revolt.

Rebecca Solnit

We have an abundance of rape and violence against women in this country and on this Earth, though it's almost never treated as a civil rights or human rights issue, or a crisis, or even a pattern. Violence doesn't have a race, a class, a religion, or a nationality, but it does have a gender.

Rebecca Solnit

Women in the online gaming community have been harassed, threatened, and driven out. Anita Sarkeesian, a feminist media critic who documented such incidents, received support for her work, but also, in the words of a journalist, 'another wave of really aggressive, you know, violent personal threats, her accounts attempted to be hacked. And one man in Ontario took the step of making an online video game where you could punch Anita's image on the screen. And if you punched it multiple times, bruises and cuts would appear on her image.' The difference between these online gamers and the Taliban men who, last October, tried to murder fourteen-year-old Malala Yousafzai for speaking out about the right of Pakistani women to education is one of degree. Both are trying to silence and punish women for claiming voice, power, and the right to participate. Welcome to Manistan.

Rebecca Solnit

That is why Napoleon and Mussolini both insist so emphatically upon the inferiority of women, for if they were not inferior, they would cease to enlarge. That serves to explain in part the necessity that women so often are to men. And it serves to explain how restless they are under her criticism; how impossible it is for her to say to them this book is bad, this picture is feeble, or whatever it may be, without giving far more pain and rousing far more anger than a man would do who gave the same criticism. For if she begins to tell the truth, the figure in the looking-glass shrinks; his fitness for life is diminished. How is he to go on giving judgement, civilising natives, making laws, writing books, dressing up and speechifying at banquets, unless he can see himself at breakfast and at dinner at least twice the size he really is?. . . they say to themselves as they go into the room, I am the superior of half the people here, and it is thus that they speak with that self-confidence, that self-assurance, which have such profound consequences in public life and lead to such curious notes in the margin of the private mind.

Virginia Woolf

They’ve been lying from the start. From the first time we read the words ‘once upon a time,’ we’re fed the idea that these girls—these gorgeous, demure, singing-with-the-wildlife girls—get a happy ending. And I get it. Poor thing had to do some chores around the house, fine. But the idea that she needs a magic old lady to come down and skim off the dirt so the prince will see her beauty? That’s ridiculous. Maybe she should have been working on her lockpicking skills instead of serenading squirrels. She could have busted out, hitched a ride to the castle, and impressed the prince with her safe-cracking prowess. Sorry, magic-fairy lady. She didn’t need your help.

Kelsey Macke

Women are an eternal subject, which is a lot like being subjected, or subjugated, or a subject nation, even. There are comparatively few articles about whether men are happy or why their marriages also fail or how nice or not their bodies are, even the movie-star bodies. They are the gender that commits the great majority of crime, particularly violent crime, and they are the majority of suicides as well. American men are falling behind women in attending college, and have fallen farther in the current economic depression than women, which you'd think would make them interesting subjects of inquiry.

Rebecca Solnit

What I am or am not wearing does not correlate with my competency as a professional, a mother, or a feminist role model. My clothes don't define me and neither does my nakedness. I define me.

Miya Yamanouchi

Mother, what is a Feminist?""A feminist, my daughter,Is any woman now who caresTo think about her own affairsAs men don't think she oughter.

Alice Duer Miller

When men in Congress come to blows at somemthing someone said,I always notice that it shows their blood is quick and red;But if two women disagree, with very little noise,It proves, and this seems strange to me, that women have no poise.

Alice Duer Miller

Is it true that the English government is calling on women to do work abandoned by men?Yes, it is true.Is not a woman's place the home?No, not when men need her services outside the home.Will she never be told again that her place is the home?Oh, yes, indeed.When?As soon as men want their jobs back again.

Alice Duer Miller

The Mommy Wars, as they stand today, serve as an effective check on the ambitions of the American mother. The phenomenon keeps women in a perpetual state of guilt, shame and inadequacy, and does so without involving anyone but wealthy white women.

Shannon Drury

There is a need for promoting women's sexual agency in today's society, because if it wasn't an issue, terms such as 'female sexual empowerment' would be made redundant. The fact that we merely have this vocabulary is indicative of that.

Miya Yamanouchi

I am everything what u see and I can be anything what I want to be.

Nandini Sharma

What had she been thinking, suggesting to Alicia, of all people, that a time-travel app was the solution to the problems of women in poverty? 'Are you talking about my community? You didn't even think highly enough of me to let me in on your little scheme, and now you think it will be God's gift to throw a bunch of poor women through a wormhole every day so they can take care of their children and collect their welfare checks at the same time? That's your solution? Time travel is easier than passing affordable child care?tJennifer said nothing. Alicia, of course, was right. Years ago she had chosen to name the center It Takes a Village because, from the beginning, she had hated the every-person-for-herself attitude that isolated and blame so many of the residents the agency worked with. Yet she had just suggested that the answer to the multiplying burdens face by single mothers, in particular, was not for the village to gather around them, but for these women to multiply themselves instead.tThe same answer, she thought, that she had applied to herself when her own burdens had seemed too much to bear.

Kamy Wicoff

That she was now more tired and forgetful, while able to do three times what she had been able to do when she was somewhat less tired and forgetful but also stressed, guilty, grouchy, and overwhelmed, seemed a small price to pay.

Kamy Wicoff

It is an extravagant gesture,' she said, turning to the torpedo, 'which is just the sort of gesture I like.

Kamy Wicoff

People are kinder to the unborn than they are to the women themselves, and soon I had my ticket.

Emily Schultz

I am a woman with thoughts and questions and shit to say. I say if I'm beautiful. I say if I'm strong. You will not determine my story — I will. I will speak and share and fuck and love, and I will never apologize to the frightened millions who resent that they never had it in them to do it. I stand here and I am amazing, for you. Not because of you. I am not who I sleep with. I am not my weight. I am not my mother. I am myself. (2014 Gloria Awards and Gala)

Amy Schumer

I can feel like a hag some days if I want! And I can tell everybody how insecure I am if I want! Or I can be pretty and pretend to think I'm a hag out of fake modesty –- I can do that if I want, too. Because you, Livingston, are not the boss of me and what kind of girl I become.

E. Lockhart

If women really choose prostitution, why is it mostly marginalized and disadvantaged women who do? If we want to discuss the issue of choice, let’s look at who is doing the actual choosing in the context of prostitution. Surely the issue is not why women allegedly choose to be in prostitution, but why men choose to buy the bodies of millions of women and children worldwide and call it sex.Philosophically, the response to the choice debate is ‘not’ to deny that women are capable of choosing within contexts of powerlessness, but to question how much real value, worth, and power these so-called choices confer.Politically, the question becomes, should the state sanction the sex industry based on the claim that some women choose prostitution when most women’s choice is actually 'compliance’ to the only options available?When governments idealize women’s alleged choice to be in prostitution by legalizing, decriminalizing, or regulating the sex industry, they endorse a new range of 'conformity’ for women.Increasingly, what is defended as a choice is not a triumph over oppression but another name for it.

Janice G. Raymond

A woman who gives any advantage to a man may expect a lover -- but will sooner or later find a tyrant.

George Gordon Byron

The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house. They may allow us to temporarily beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change.

Audre Lorde

But women have lust, too. Why should they be relegated to the position of custodian of emotions, watcher of the infants, feeder of the soul, body and pride of man?

Sylvia Plath

For her next birthday she'd asked for a telescope. Her mother had been alive then, and had suggested a pony, but her father had laughed and bought her a beautiful telescope, saying: "Of course she should watch the stars! Any girl who cannot identify the constellation of Orion just isn't paying attention!" And when she started asking him complicated questions, he took her along to lectures at the Royal Society, where it turned out that a nine-year-old girl who had blond hair and knew what the precession of the equinoxes was could ask hugely bearded famous scientists anything she liked. Who'd want a pony when you could have the whole universe?

Terry Pratchett

I didn't appear to need anyone: I could do it all myself. I could do everything. I was both halves: did that mean I was whole?

Rachel Cusk

In a world where positive expressions of sexual longing connect us we will all be free to choose those sexual practices which affirm and nurture our growth. Those practices may range from choosing promiscuity or celibacy, from embracing one specific sexual identity and preference or choosing a roaming uncharted desire that is kindled only by interaction and engagement with specific individuals with whom we feel the spark of erotic recognition no matter their sex, race, class, or even their sexual preference. Radical feminist dialogues about sexuality must surface so that the movement towards sexual freedom can begin again.

Bell Hooks

Centuries of social conditioning has created a generational fear among women of being perceived as masculine.This is where all the shaming and labels come into play, which perpetuate the oppression of girls and women. As a society we shame girls with deep voices or masculine features and we shame boys with soft voices or effeminate gestures. Girls get called "too manly" and boys get called "too girly". The only solution I can think of is to be unashamedly "you". If that means challenging stereotypes and gender norms, go right ahead!

Miya Yamanouchi

I spent a lot of time vacillating between wanting to be seen as attractive, being terrified by too much attention, and wanting to succeed and fit in without anyone's noticing me.

Kim Gordon

I often look to men to model behavior," she goes on after a pause. "Not because I want to squelch what’s feminine about me, but because sometimes I want a little more action, a little less feeling in my interactions. I’ve been doing this thing lately where I try to talk slower at meetings. I take a lot of meetings with women and we all talk really fast. But every guy talks so much slower. Maybe there’s a scientist who could tell me why, but I think men are just a little bit more comfortable taking up conversational real estate. So I’ve been seeing how slow I can tolerate talking. I’m doing it now. Let me tell you, it’s really hard for me.

Amy Poehler

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Feminism Quotes - Page 12

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