Best 3209 quotes in «feminism quotes» category

It's important to realize that sometimes the information you need is hidden behind the information available.

It's like I tell people at my stand-up shows: by making me a bitch, you have given me my freedom, the freedom to say and do things I couldn't do if I was "a nice girl" with some sort of stupid, goody-two-shoes image to keep up. Things that require courage. Things that require balls. Things that need to be done. By making me a bitch, you have freed me from the trite, sexist, bourgeois prison of "likeability." Any idiot can be liked. It takes talent to scare the crap out of people.

It's my choice to be beautiful. It's my choice to be ugly. And it's my choice to decided what those words actually mean.

It’s not a matter of Dad sitting down with his preadolescent son and incorporating 'Don’t be a criminal!' into the 'birds and the bees' talk. (I mean, that couldn’t hurt, probably. But it’s not the point.) It’s about teaching our boys to actively oppose sexual violence. It’s all well and good to say you’re against rape and would never rape anyone, end of story. But somewhere in that crowd of guys laughing about an unconscious girl getting 'a wang in the butthole, dude'—and the one listening to Daniel Tosh say, 'Wouldn’t it be funny if she got gang-raped right now?' and the one reading an op-ed in the Washington Post that puts 'sexual assault' in quotation marks, as though it exists only in the eye of the beholder—somewhere in all of those crowds is the guy who would rape someone. The guy who will rape someone. The guy who has raped someone. And could you blame any of those guys for thinking that rape is not a serious crime, or even something to be particularly ashamed of, when so many 'good' guys around them are laughing at the same jokes?

It’s no surprise that a generation of women who were brought up being told that they were equal to men, that sexism, and therefore feminism, was dead, are starting to see through this. And while they’re pissed off, they’re also positive, bubbling with hope. One obvious outcome of being brought up to believe you’re equal is that you’re both very angry when you encounter misogyny, but also confident in your ability to tackle it.

It's not always easy to convince someone a need exists, if they don't have that need themselves.

It's not easy to diagnose because depending where the endometrial deposits are, the symptoms can be quite different. It's an unrecognized problem among teenage girls, and it's something that every young woman who has painful menstruation should be aware of ... it's a condition that is curable if it's caught early. If not, if it's allowed to run on, it can cause infertility, and it can really mess up your life. [Author Hilary Mantel on being asked about being a writer with endometriosis, Nov 2012 NPR interview]

It's not being a woman I mind so much," she said slowly. "'Tis the way men seem to always order my life." She leaned earnestly toward him. "Your hand, Papa, has wielded a sword and cradled a child and held power over hundreds of men." She held up her own hand. "This one has far fewer adventures before it.

It's not new, our valuation of young female people for how they can serve, satisfy, and satiate. Our girls are both the platter and the meal, and we eat them up--we eat their meat, we lap up their sweetness, we covet and control and consume.

It's not that the authors are unskilled, but we must frequently venture outside our areas of original training. Either the work lies outside anybody's area of original training, or orthodox criticism (in Ellen Moers' words) averts its refined and weary eyes from what only feminists consider important or see as problematic. Much anti-feminist criticism of feminist writing can best be answered with, 'Yeah? And where were you at the time, twinkletoes? Writing your ten-thousandth essay on King Lear?

It's not that there are no challenges to becoming a vegetarian or vegan, but in the media, including authors of popular books on food and food politics, contribute to the 'enfreakment' of what is so often patronizingly referred to as the vegan or vegetarian 'lifestyle.' But again, the marginalization of those who care about animals is nothing new. Diane Beers writes in her book For the Prevention of Cruelty: The History and Legacy of Animal Rights Activism in the United States that 'several late nineteenth-century physicians concocted a diagnosable for of mental illness to explain such bizarre behavior. Sadly, they pronounced these misguided souls suffered from "zoophilpsychosis."' As Beers describes, zoophilpsychosis (an excessive concern for animals) was more likely to be diagnosed in women, who were understood to be 'particularly susceptible to the malady.' As the early animal advocacy movement in Britain and the United States was largely made up of women, such charges worked to uphold the subjugation both of women and of nonhuman animals.

It’s no wonder we have such mixed feelings about these women: they’re constant reminders of the chasm between what we think we believe and how we actually behave.

It’s primarily the chain of economics, as control of money lies with men; we are forced to obey them

It's rare that anyone says what this medical study does, even if in the driest way possible "Being male has been identified as a risk factor for violent criminal behavior in several studies, as have exposure to tobacco smoke before birth, having antisocial parents, and belonging to a poor family". It's not that I want to pick on men. I just think that if we noticed that women are, on the whole, radically less violent, we might be able to theorize where violence come from and what we can do about it a lot more productively. Clearly the ready availability of guns is a huge problem for United States, but despite this availability to everyone, murder is still a crime committed by men 90 percent of the time.

It’s one thing to deconstruct and analyze and condemn the institutions of patriarchy and their flaws. It’s another one to feel their bruises on your skin, and their grasping hands pulling your hair and covering your mouth as you scream.

It’s ridiculous. Why should girls be responsible for what boys think and do? Like the boys aren’t able to control themselves?

It’s such a shame that you will finally have to learn that there are consequences to treating women like they’re nothing. You may have gotten to walk away, but a piece of me will follow you forever. Now, isn’t that romantic?

It's the way some med say, "I'm not the problem" or that they shifted the conversation from actual corpses and victims as well as perpetrators to protecting the comfort level of bystander males. An exasperated woman remarked to me, "What do they want--a cookie for not hitting, raping, or threatening women?

it's telling yourself that you want the things that society tells you you should want. women thikn that survival depends on conformity. but for some women, conformity is death. it's a death to the soul. the soul, "she said, "is a precious thing. when you live a lie, you damage the soul.

It’s the process of being minimized, invalidated, silenced. It’s the process of being subjected to whatever someone else thinks I owe them. It’s the process of being used, examined, explored, and thrown away. It’s the process of being convinced to comply with the orders of someone who does not see me as their equal, someone who sees nothing wrong with the notion that I’m somehow lesser than they are. Rape isn’t about sex; it’s about all those other things. It’s about power.

It's the way some men say, 'I'm not the problem' or that they shifted the conversation from actual corpses and victims as well as perpetrators to protecting the comfort level of bystander males. An exasperated woman remarked to me, 'What do they want--a cookie for not hitting, raping, or threatening women?

It's time to leave. There is so much out there to do and say and listen to. I can go on the road, because I can come home. I come home, because I am free to leave.

It takes a lot of time, focus and energy to realize the enormity of being the ocean with your very own tide every month. However, by honoring the demands of bleeding, our blood gives something in return. The crazed bitch from irritation hell recedes. In her place arises a side of ourselves with whom we may not—at first—be comfortable. She is a vulnerable, highly perceptive genius who can ponder a given issue and take her world by storm. When we’re quiet and bleeding, we stumble upon the solutions to dilemmas that’ve been bugging us all month. Inspiration hits and moments of epiphany rumba ‘across de tundra of our senses. In this mode of existence one does not feel antipathy towards a bodily ritual so profoundly and routinely reinforces our cuntpower.

It takes a great woman to respect the little man in her child, and the little child in her man.

It takes a near act of rebellion for even a four-year-old to break away from society's expectations.

It's your world, but I make my way in it. At fifteen, no, I couldn't stand up to you. The age of illusions, when we know nothing, we hope for everything; we're wandering in a mist ... And the half of the world that's never had any use for us, suddenly is besieging us. You need us, you adore us, you're suffering for us. You want everything--except to know what we think. You look deep in our eyes--and put your hand up our dress. You call us, "Pretty thing." That confuses us. The most beautiful woman, the highest ranked, lives half dazzled by constant attention, half stifled by obvious contempt. We think all we're good for is pleasing you--till one day, long acquaintance with you dispels the last mist. In a clear light, we suddenly see you as you are--and generally we start preferring ourselves. At thirty, I could finally say no--or really say yes. That's when you begin backing away from us. Now I'm full-grown. I pursue my happiness the same as any man.

It took me years to learn to sit at my desk for more than two minutes at a time, to put up with the solitude and the terror of failure, and the godawful silence and the white paper. And now that I can take it . . . now that I can finally do it . . . I'm really raring to go. I was in my study writing. I was learning how to go down into myself and salvage bits and pieces of the past. I was learning how to sneak up on the unconscious and how to catch my seemingly random thoughts and fantasies. By closing me out of his world, Bennett had opened all sorts of worlds inside my own head. Gradually I began to realize that none of the subjects I wrote poems about engaged my deepest feelings, that there was a great chasm between what I cared about and what I wrote about. Why? What was I afraid of? Myself, most of all, it seemed. "Freedom is an illusion," Bennett would have said and, in a way, I too would have agreed. Sanity, moderation, hard work, stability . . . I believed in them too. But what was that other voice inside of me which kept urging me on toward zipless fucks, and speeding cars and endless wet kisses and guts full of danger? What was that other voice which kept calling me coward! and egging me on to burn my bridges, to swallow the poison in one gulp instead of drop by drop, to go down into the bottom of my fear and see if I could pull myself up? Was it a voice? Or was it a thump? Something even more primitive than speech. A kind of pounding in my gut which I had nicknamed my "hunger-thump." It was as if my stomach thought of itself as a heart. And no matter how I filled it—with men, with books, with food—it refused to be still. Unfillable—that's what I was. Nymphomania of the brain. Starvation of the heart.

It was a fact generally acknowledged by all but the most contumacious spirits at the beginning of the seventeenth century that woman was the weaker vessel; weaker than man, that is. ... That was the way God had arranged Creation, sanctified in the words of the Apostle. ... Under the common law of England at the accession of King James I, no female had any rights at all (if some were allowed by custom). As an unmarried woman her rights were swallowed up in her father's, and she was his to dispose of in marriage at will. Once she was married her property became absolutely that of her husband. What of those who did not marry? Common law met that problem blandly by not recognizing it. In the words of The Lawes Resolutions [the leading 17th century compendium on women's legal status]: 'All of them are understood either married or to be married.' In 1603 England, in short, still lived in a world governed by feudal law, where a wife passed from the guardianship of her father to her husband; her husband also stood in relation to her as a feudal lord.

It was a rotten time to try to be a man in America. Until Blue came along I’d never even spent time around a man. Hell, I’d never even seen one. Where were all the men in this once great land?

It was getting late in the year, the sky had been low and overcast for days, and I was drinking tea in a glassy room with a woman without children, a gate through which no one had entered the world. She was turning the pages of an expensive book on a coffee table, even though we were drinking tea, a book of colorful paintings— a landscape, a portrait, a still life, a field, a face, a pear and a knife, all turning on the table. Men had entered there but no girl or boy had come out, I was thinking oddly as she stopped at a page of clouds aloft in a pale sky, tinged with red and gold. This one is my favorite, she said, even though it was only a detail, a corner of a larger painting which she had never seen. Nor did she want to see the countryside below or the portrayal of some myth in order for the billowing clouds to seem complete. This was enough, this fraction of the whole, just as the leafy scene in the windows was enough now that the light was growing dim, as was she enough, perfectly by herself somewhere in the enormous mural of the world.

It was common for my father to sit my sisters down and tell them things like, "I saw a girl working in the bank in town, and she was a girl just like you." My parents had never completed primary school. They couldn't speak English or even read that well. My parents only knew the language of numbers, buying and selling, but they wanted more for their kids. That's why my father had scraped the money together and kept Annie in school, despite the famine and other troubles.

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.

It was hard to love a woman that always made you feel so wishful.

It wasn't until I got into the workplace that I realized gender equality was not a given; it was something to claim.

It wasn't until the 1920s that a bare majority of children grew up in families where the father's labor purchased the family's provisions, while their mother did unpaid child care, elder care, and housework. The Great Depression and World War II disrupted this family form, but it roared back in the 1950s, when the percentage of wives and mothers who were supported entirely by their husbands' wages reached a high that has never been equaled, before or since.

It wasn't just him in the same way it wasn't just me. It was because I was sick of men like him. Because I'd seen them all, each as unoriginal in their selfishness as the next.

It was not all quite so simple, that real equality between women and men was still a thing of the future, and that there were causes for anger as well as for celebration.

It was the 'Are the boys doing it?' basis on which I finally decided I was against women wearing burkas. Yes, the idea is that it protects your modesty, and ensures that people regard you as a human being, rather than just a sexual object (...) But who are you being protected from? Men. And who - so long as you play by the rules, and wear the correct clothes - is protecting you from the men? Men. And who is it that is regarding you as a sexual object, instead of another human being, in the first place? Men. Well. This all seems like quite a man-based problem, really. (...) I don't know why we're suddenly having to put things on our heads to make it better.

It was then I understood that the days of Colonel García and all those like him are numbered, because they have not been able to destroy the spirit of these women.

It was the kind of story everybody likes, about a tough girl who becomes a truer version of herself by uncovering her vulnerability. It was the kind of story people like because its universe is played out in the story of one person. It was the kind of story (dare I say it?) that women are supposed to write because all its truths are grounded in a single lie: denying chaos.

It was true. Men could be with whomever they pleased. But women had to date better, kinder, richer, and bright, bright, bright, or else people got embarrassed.

It went back to my wishes for them to grow up strong and centered and I accommodating to any form of old-school patriarchy: I didn't want them to ever believe that life began when the man of the house arrived home. We didn't wait for Dad. It was his job now to catch up with us.

I understand feminism to be a social savior because it liberates everyone without exclusion, whereas masculinism damns itself by measuring a man's health by the amount of sexual gratification he receives.

It will take you long, lonely years, but one day you will grow tired. Tired of boys, tired of contempt, and then where will you be? All these girls around you with their stories and their lives, the solace of one another, and you will be as far away from them as an anthropologist among a foreign people, curious but unable to make contact. Have faith: you will learn.

I twist and pin my hair at the nape of my neck, and then stand with legs wide. It’s what Nash told me to do before speaking because men, no matter how many times they profess women are equal, prefer to take direction from bodies like theirs.

I used to be the queen of domesticity, a Good Housekeeping cover model in the making. I was also an ambitious professional. These two identities had always been on a collision course. But I was oblivious to that fact until after the crash.

I un-gritted my teeth to speak. "I need no more proof of tyranny.""Our only desire is the wellbeing of the common man.""I am not a man.

It was the women of afghanistan,my mother believed,who-once they’d been granted access to books and education- would be the salvation of the country

It would be a mistake to suppose that all Urnings must be woman-haters. Quite the contrary. They are not seldom the faithfulest friends, the truest allies, and most convinced defenders of women.

I understood and agreed that from a feminist perspective working in a strip club was extremely problematic, but I was saving money to travel and making more in one night than most of my friends made in a week. Plus, it was interesting.