Best 57 quotes of Soraya Chemaly on MyQuotes

Soraya Chemaly

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    Soraya Chemaly

    According to system justification and what is called just-world theory, when evidence suggests that the world is not a just place, people with this orientation seek to reassert fairness either by ignoring dissonant information or by blaming people for the ills that befall them. Poor people are lazy and don't work enough. Black people are more likely to be criminals. Women who go out , drink, and have sex are culpable for their rapes.

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    Soraya Chemaly

    Anger is a forward-looking emotion, rooted in the idea that there should be change. Resentment, on the other hand, is locked in the past and usually generates no meaningful difference in the situation.

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    Soraya Chemaly

    Anger is an assertion of rights and worth. It is communication, equality, and knowledge. It is intimacy, acceptance, fearlessness, embodiment, revolt, and reconciliation. Anger is memory and rage. It is rational thought and irrational pain. Anger is freedom, independence, expansiveness, and entitlement. It is justice, passion, clarity, and motivation. Anger is instrumental, thoughtful, complicated, and resolved. In anger, whether you like it or not, there is truth. Anger is the demand of accountability. It is evaluation, judgment, and refutation. It is reflective, visionary, and participatory. It's a speech act, a social statement, an intention, and a purpose. It's a risk and a threat. A confirmation and a wish. It is both powerlessness and power, palliative and a provocation. In anger, you will find both ferocity and comfort, vulnerability and hurt. Anger is the expression of hope.

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    Soraya Chemaly

    Ask a man what his greatest fear is about serving jail time, and he will almost inevitably say he fears being raped. What can we deduce from the fact that jail is to men what life is to so many women?

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    Soraya Chemaly

    Ask a woman if she has been harassed, or if she thinks about rape regularly, and she will almost always say "no" initially. Who wants to think about rape? Ask her, however, if she makes eye contact when she walks down the street, where and when she loiters for pleasure on a warm day, if she runs by herself at night, or if she pays for cabs instead of peacefully strolling home. Then ask her why. We are taught to fear rape but not to question its pervasive threat or doubt how "natural" it is or isn't.

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    Soraya Chemaly

    A society that does not respect women's anger is one that does not respect women; not as human beings, thinkers, knowers, active participants, or citizens.

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    Soraya Chemaly

    As women, we are continuously told to live in the cracks of a world shaped by and for men, without complaining or demanding. Without being angry. So we adapt, and when we do, we use familiar minimizing expressions to describe what we feel: 'It was annoying.' 'I was so frustrated.' 'I can’t believe he said that.' 'I’m so disappointed.

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    Soraya Chemaly

    Becoming a parent is the riskiest financial decision a woman can make.

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    Soraya Chemaly

    Black children in the United States... are much more likely to report high self-esteem and have the smallest gender gap. By twelfth grade, African American students are the only subgroup in which girls have higher self-esteem than boys do... What matters appears to be parental support for a girl's staying true, first and foremost, to herself, and community honesty about discrimination and building resilience to that discrimination.

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    Soraya Chemaly

    Black children in the United States exhibit a different pattern. They are much more likely to report high self-esteem and have the smallest gender gap. By twelfth grade, African American students are the only subgroup in which girls have higher self-esteem than boys do. The difference extends to adulthood, where fewer than 50 percent of white women strongly agree with the statement, 'I see myself as someone who has high self-esteem,' compared with 66 percent of black women. What matters appears to be parental support for a girl's staying true, first and foremost, to herself, and community honesty about discrimination and building resilience to that discrimination.

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    Soraya Chemaly

    Contrary to the idea that anger clouds thinking, properly understood, it is an astoundingly clarifying emotion.

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    Soraya Chemaly

    Cursing numbs pain. The relationship between pain and cursing is not one-way (for example, stubbing your toe and letting out a stream of expletives in rage). Those expletives, in turn, affect our perceptions of pain. Through a series of creative experiments, scientists have found that the stronger the curse words people use while experiencing pain the higher their tolerance for that pain. Byrne notes, depressingly, that women who curse when in pain, however, are less well cared for by those around them.

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    Soraya Chemaly

    Even in school, children get subtle messages about whose stories matter. Literature classes routinely feature literature written by women and men of color as exceptional (one among many white male writers) or available for study in some schools as elective classes only. A recent global review found that gender bias is also "rife in textbooks." The result of pedagogical choices like these shape self-esteem, empathy, and understanding. They also shape resentment, confusion, and anger.

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    Soraya Chemaly

    Finding communities that validate and share your anger creates powerful opportunities for collective social action.

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    Soraya Chemaly

    Forgiveness is valuable and important to relationships, but if your instinct is to withhold forgiveness, it is probably a good one.

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    Soraya Chemaly

    Forgive nothing until you are good and ready to, especially if there has been no indication that the behavior causing you distress has changed.

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    Soraya Chemaly

    Gender schemas... simplify the world around us, but they also reproduce problematic discrimination.

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    Soraya Chemaly

    Harassment and the ever-present suggestions of violence at this scale constantly reminds women and girls of their place. For the most part, girls' and women's experiences with harassment are still cloaked in silence, and we continue, as a global society, to peddle dangerous advice to girls about "staying safe." This isn't about safety. If it were, we'd teach boys, who are also subject to childhood molestation and risk, the same lessons, but we don't. It's about social control.

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    Soraya Chemaly

    Her anger was essential to her survival. Where my father and uncles saw a penny-pincher, I saw a smart and pragmatic woman who understood her financial situation and was trying to plan for the future. Where they saw unreasonable, I saw a woman who knew she was playing a long game and would do what she had to, even if others failed to understand. Where they saw selfishness, I saw her insistence that she mattered as an individual, not as an eternal handmaiden.

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    Soraya Chemaly

    If #MeToo has made men feel vulnerable, panicked, unsure, and fearful as a result of women finally, collectively, saying "Enough!" so be it. If they wonder how their every word and action will be judged and used against them, Welcome to our world. If they feel that everything they do will reflect on other men and be misrepresented and misunderstood, take a seat. You are now honorary women.

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    Soraya Chemaly

    If there is a word that should be retired from use in the service of women's expression, health, well-being, and equality, it is appropriate - a sloppy, mushy word that purports to convey some important moral essence but in reality is just a policing term used to regulate our language, appearance and demands. It's a control word. We are done with control.

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    Soraya Chemaly

    If we say we are scared, it is understandable and easy for others who can focus on what we, as individuals, can do to avoid feeling fear, instead of what they, communally, can do to stem threats.

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    Soraya Chemaly

    I have since learned that my rage is a critical part of my self, and it is a part of myself that I have grown to respect and love instead of suppress.

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    Soraya Chemaly

    In anger, I have lived more fully, freely, intensely, sensitively, and politically.

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    Soraya Chemaly

    In a study of children's toy and television preferences, researchers Isabelle Cherney and Kamala London found that, when left alone, half of boys ages five through thirteen picked "girl" and "boy" toys equally - until they thought they were being watched. They were especially concerned about what their fathers would think if they saw them. Over time, boys' interests in toys and media become more rigidly masculinized and codified, whereas girls' stay relatively open ended and flexible.

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    Soraya Chemaly

    Insults are the most common provocation for anger because, whether we think about this or not, they generate social imbalances.

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    Soraya Chemaly

    In the classroom, it was almost certainly the case that the women were managing a double bind that we face constantly: conform to traditional gender expectations, stay quiet and be liked, or violate those expectations and risk the penalties, including the penalty of being called puritanical, aggressive, and"humorless.

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    Soraya Chemaly

    In the coming years, we will hear, again, that anger is a destructive force, to be controlled. Watch carefully, because not everyone is asked to do this in equal measure.

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    Soraya Chemaly

    In their 2001 study 'The Girl Who Cried Pain: A Bias Against Women in the Treatment of Pain,' Diane E Hoffmann and Anita J. Tarzian pointed out that women are 'more likely to have their pain reports discounted as 'emotional' or 'psychogenic' and, therefore, 'not real.' This invalidation parallels the invalidation of women's anger, which is similarly often reduced to proof of women's mental weakness. One study of postoperative pain relief for patients who had undergone coronary artery bypass surgery revealed that men in pain were given pain relief medication, but women were given sedatives. Sedatives aren't pain relievers, or analgesics. They're calming and dulling agents that 'take the edge off.' But for whom, exactly?

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    Soraya Chemaly

    It is absurd that every day women have to contend with the possibility that they will be attached verbally or physically. When women leave their homes, they consider the possibility, however remote, of being mutilated, terrorized, or killed for not acceding to the demands of aggressive men. As women, we can lose our dignity and any sense of safety or feelings of rights to public space that we might have - all on someone else’s whim. This is how we come to accept the harsh fact of our violability. We bit our tongues, sometimes until they bleed.

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    Soraya Chemaly

    It is hard to overstate how problematic the transfer of anger, as a resource, from girls to boys and from women to men is - not only to us as individuals but to our society. This transfer is critical to maintaining white supremacy and patriarchy. Anger remains the emotion that is least acceptable for girls and women because it is the first line of defense against injustice.

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    Soraya Chemaly

    It is not only that we have the right to claim anger. It is that our anger is a moral obligation.

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    Soraya Chemaly

    It's the sting of knowing that exactly as the world starts expanding for most boys, it begins to shrink for [girls].

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    Soraya Chemaly

    It was also an important marker in my life, one I distinctly remember as a building block in the self-limiting wall I constructed around my freedom of speech and movement.

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    Soraya Chemaly

    I wanted to own my anger, because it brought me back to myself. It gave me clarity and purpose.

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    Soraya Chemaly

    Men learn to regard rape as a moment in time; a discreet episode with a beginning, middle, and end. But for women, rape is thousands of moments that we fold into ourselves over a lifetime. Its' the day that you realize you can't walk to a friend's house anymore or the time when your aunt tells you to be nice because the boy was just 'stealing a kiss.' It's the evening you stop going to the corner store because, the night before, a stranger followed you home. It's the late hour that a father or stepfather or brother or uncle climbs into your bed. It's the time it takes you to write an email explaining that you're changing your major, even though you don't really want to, in order to avoid a particular professor. It's when you're racing to catch a bus, hear a person demand a blow job, and turn to see that it's a police officer. It's the second your teacher tells you to cover your shoulders because you'll 'distract the boys, and what will your male teachers do?' It's the minute you decide not to travel to a place you've always dreamed about visiting and are accused of being 'unadventurous.' It's the sting of knowing that exactly as the world starts expanding for most boys, it begins to shrink for you. All of this goes on all day, every day, without anyone really uttering the word rape in a way that grandfathers, fathers, brothers, uncles, teachers, and friends will hear it, let alone seriously reflect on what it means.

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    Soraya Chemaly

    Nice is something you do to please others, even if you have no interest, desire, or reason to. Kindness, on the other hand, assumes that you are true to yourself first.

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    Soraya Chemaly

    One of the most astounding and telling features of the Women's March and the #MeToo movement is that they both illustrate how many angry women it takes to generate public response.

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    Soraya Chemaly

    ... people who allow themselves to feel the fullest range of emotions, including the unpleasant ones, are happier and lead more fulfilling lives...

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    Soraya Chemaly

    Rage became a layer of my skin.

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    Soraya Chemaly

    Reenvisioned, anger can be the most feminine of virtues: compassionate, fierce, wise, and powerful. The women I admire most... have all found ways to transform their anger into meaningful change. In them, anger has moved from deliberation to liberation.

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    Soraya Chemaly

    Single, childless women are the only women who report that they have the time and freedom to pursue interests, ambitions, and hobbies at the same rate as married heterosexual men do.

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    Soraya Chemaly

    Studies show that differences between men's and women's experiences of feeling angry are virtually nonexistent. Where there is a difference, they defy stereotypes of men being the so-called angry sex... women report feeling anger more frequently, more intensely, and for longer periods of time than men do.

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    Soraya Chemaly

    The first women we know are our mothers, and yet we sometimes treat them, especially when they are angry, with the least compassion. That becomes a model for how we treat other women.

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    Soraya Chemaly

    The importance and visibility of women's collective anger can't be overstated. This anger takes determination, thoughtfulness, and work. It means respecting our own anger and being willing to respect the anger of other women.

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    Soraya Chemaly

    ... the reality and threat of male-perpetrated sexual violence is normalized in the lives of girls and women as a restrictive force.

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    Soraya Chemaly

    There is nothing constitutionally or biologically barring men from being nurturers as a primary social function... Biology, here, is clearly adapting to social norms, not the other way around.

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    Soraya Chemaly

    The ugly truth is that more people are still motivated by the desire to prioritize men's income generating and reputations than they are by the desire to ensure women's rights and safety.

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    Soraya Chemaly

    We minimize our anger, calling it frustration, impatience, exasperation, or irritation, words that don't convey the intrinsic social and public demand that 'anger' does. We learn to contain our selves: our voices, hair, clothes, and, most importantly, speech. Anger is usually about saying "no" in a world where women are conditioned to say almost anything but "no.

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    Soraya Chemaly

    When a woman shows anger in institutional, political, and professional settings, she automatically violates gender norms.