I also was persuaded that the woman most in need of liberation was the woman in every man just as the man most in need of liberation was the man in every woman.

Ideally, what should be said to every child, repeatedly, throughout his or her school life is something like this: ‘You are in the process of being indoctrinated. We have not yet evolved a system of education that is not a system of indoctrination. We are sorry, but it is the best we can do. What...

Having it all is just too much hassle. I’m not every-woman. I’m a working woman. And I’m not entirely sure I see the oint of being as dexterous in the kitchen as I am at my desk. If Mr. Y is perfectly satisfied with pre-packaged sushi every night, then far be it from me to...

In a world dominated by violent and passive-aggressive men, and by male institutions dispensing violence, it is extraordinary to note how often women are represented as the perpetrators of violence, most of all when we are simply fighting in self-defense or for our children, or when we collectively attempt to change the institutions that are...

Magistrate: What do you propose to do then, pray?Lysistrata: You ask me that! Why, we propose to administer the treasury ourselvesMagistrate: You do?Lysistrata: What is there in that a surprise to you? Do we not administer the budget of household expenses?Magistrate: But that is not the same thing.Lysistrata: How so – not the same thing?Magistrate:...

Edward genially enough did not disagree with what I said, but he didn’t seem to admit my point, either. I wanted to press him harder so I veered close enough to the ad hominem to point out that his life—the life of the mind, the life of the book collector and music lover and indeed...

[W]hen I see men callously and cheerfully denying women the full use of their bodies, while insisting with sobs and howls on the satisfaction of their own, I simply can’t find it heroic, or kind, or anything but pretty rotten and feeble.

Abandonment of slavery is also the banishment of the chimera of security. The world will not change overnight, and liberation will not happen unless individual women agree to be outcasts, eccentrics, perverts, and whatever the powers-that-be choose to call them.

Any regulated dress code from bikinis to burqas assumes that men are weak, impulsive, and untrustworthy.Yet, we know men can be strong, disciplined and trustworthy. Dressing for success is dressing without this sexism.

I think now that this is the great division between people. There are people who find life hard and those who find it easy. There are those who have a natural, in-built, expectation of happiness, and there are those who feel that happiness is not to be expected: that it is not, in fact, one...

He said, ‘They’re only whores,’ as though their very availability rendered them worthless.

In the old days feminists would mock women who depended so much on a man. Today if the man is the government, not so much. A man who opens the door for you is a Neanderthal; a bureaucrat who pays for your pills? A hero.

I’m a feminist. That’s why I own a dishwasher.

So now you are a woman. Do you have the least idea of what that means?It means that I am now fit to be wedded and bedded (…) and to bear children for the king.

Why are women so ungenerous to other women? Is it because we have been tokens for so long? Or is there a deeper animosity we owe it to ourselves to explore?A publisher…couldn’t understand why women were so loath to help each other…. The notion flitted through my mind that somehow, by helping…, I might be...

[In case of zombie uprising] Marxists and Feminists would likely sympathize more with zombies. To Marxists, the undead symbolize the oppressed proletariat. Unless the zombies were all undead white males, feminists would likely welcome the posthuman smashing of existing patriarchal structures.

Linda Williams dice algo muy interesante en su libro Hard Core. Afirma que una de las fantasías más tradicionales de la pornografía masculina es la violación que se convierte en éxtasis, y en que la mujer acaba disfrutando. Los hombres siempre fantasean sobre la débil frontera entre el ‘no’ y el ‘sí’ de una mujer....

Most women are all too familiar with men like Calvin Smith. Men whose sense of prerogative renders them deaf when women say, “No thanks,” “Not interested,” or even “Fuck off, creep.

I realize that violence is not more prevalent today than in previous periods of human history, but there is a difference. We have seen visionary standards adopted by the global community that espouse peace and human rights, and the globalization of information ensures that the violation of these principles of nonviolence by a powerful and...

Reason, you’ll always be half-blind.

That place I’m talking about ain’t nothing but a bloody slit in this world of His. But everybody wants to rule over it. It ain’t for the white man to rule. Ain’t for any man to rule.

…a woman, silent, voiceless, a mere woman who didn’t bear on her shoulders the enormous responsibility of building the conquest with her words. A woman, who, contrary to what would be expected, felt relief in reclaiming her condition of submission, for it was a much more familiar sensation to be an object at the service...

What did we talk about?I don’t remember. We talked so hard and sat so still that I got cramps in my knee. We had too many cups of tea and then didn’t want to leave the table to go to the bathroom because we didn’t want to stop talking. You will think we talked of...

Although drinking to the point of becoming incapacitated is unwise and risky for anyone, the blame for rape must be put on the rapist who preys on a drunk woman, not a drunk woman who becomes prey. If my car is stolen after I’ve parked it with the door unlocked in a neighborhood known for...

But penetration was a big deal. They protected their anuses the way girls protected their hymen in high school, believing that allowing anything beyond their holy gates would permanently corrupt them.

While boys are taught that the things that make them men–good men–are universally accepted ethical ideals, women are led to believe that our moral compass lies somewhere between our legs. Literally.

Of course, because the only way I could possibly like men is if I bowed down at their feet?

Whenever one comes to the the table for interreligous dialogue, there is what I would call an _ecumenical taboo_ that one has to comply with. The ecumenical taboo_ does not exist in a written document, but people tend to practice it around the dialogue table. One should not raise, for instance, such questions as gender...

When women tell me that Skinny Bitch made them go vegan, my appreciation of the book’s purpose is tainted by a sadness that their self-worth had to be bartered to make that choice.

Women who love themselves are threatening; but men who love real women, more so.

For the first time in history, children are growing up whose earliest sexual imprinting derives not from a living human being, or fantasies of their own; since the 1960s pornographic upsurge, the sexuality of children has begun to be shaped in response to cues that are no longer human. Nothing comparable has ever happened in...

I’d seen entire constellations of possibility I’d never previously been aware of, so blinded had I been by the bright, glaring stars of expectation. Freedom, I was beginning to think, had less to do with where you were, and was more about who you were trying to be.

I believe that the rape-is-not-about-sex doctrine will go down in history as an example of extraordinary popular delusions and the madness of crowds. It is preposterous on the face of it, does not deserve its sanctity, is contradicted by a mass of evidence, and is getting in the way of the only morally relevant goal...

Regardless of the staggering dimensions of the world about us, the density of our ignorance, the risks of catastrophes to come, and our individual weakness within the immense collectivity, the fact remains that we are absolutely free today if we choose to will our existence in its finiteness, a finiteness which is open on the...

And I reminded myself that a woman should be able to dress as she liked without a man hurting her…

Shane met him owing to the storybooks she studied to discover what attributes made one princessly—this wasn’t technically a word, but she felt there should be equity in adjectives if not in life.

The Queen is most anxious to enlist everyone who can speak or write to join in checking this mad, wicked folly of ”Woman’s Rights” with all its attendant horrors on which her poor, feeble sex is bent, forgetting every sense of womanly feeling and propriety.

In any East Asian culture, you will find that women have a very tangible power within the household. This is often rejcted by non-Asian feminists who argue that it is not real power, but.. Japanese women look at the low status attributed to the domestic labor of housewives in North America and feel that this...

Men’s greatest weakness is their facade of strength, and women’s greatest strength is their facade of weakness.

If the goal of feminism is to end patriarchy and gender-based oppression, then transgender politics supplies us one of the most important perspectives from which to view – and challenge – binary gender and gender-based oppression. As mentioned in previous chapters, if no clear distinction exists between “male” and “female,” it becomes impossible to oppress...

I should never be able to fulfill what is,I understand, the first duty of a lecturer-to hand you after an hour’s discourse a nugget of pure truth to wrap up between the pages of your notebooks and keep on the mantelpiece forever”.

And although we adore men individually, we agree that as a group they’re rather stupid.

Rest in your God-breathed worth. Stop holding your breath, hiding your gifts, ducking your head, dulling your roar, distracting your soul, stilling your hands, quieting your voice, and satiating your hunger with the lesser things of this world.

The problem lay buried, unspoken, for many years in the minds of American women. It was a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning that women suffered in the middle of the twentieth century in the United States. Each suburban wife struggled wit it alone. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched...

I’ve read Hamlet, I know men suffer.

The one person who will never leave us, whom we will never lose, is ourself. Learning to love our female selves is where our search for love must begin.

Feminism needs Zero Tolerance over baby angst. In the 21st century, it can’t be about who we might make, and what they might do, anymore. It has to be about who we are, and what we’re going to do.

The bar is masculine, and women must adopt traditionally masculine characteristics – cultivated insensitivity, goal-orientated thinking, the prioritising of the material – to compete.

So tell me gentleman, tell me the time and place where it was easy to be a woman.

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...