I’m not beholden to the confirmation of your prejudices; to be perfectly frank, the prospect of confining the female characters in my story to placid, helpless secondary places in the narrative is so goddamn boring...

We are now dealing with a bizarre new morality where a woman cannot simply say, in one way or another, “I’m on the pill because I like dick.

women aren’t funny.” Using that same math, I can state: Male comedy writers piss in cups.

You can have it all, just not all at the same time.

When I discarded the idea that God was not a man (as I had been raised to think and believe without question), I grew distant, and the flame that once lit my path began to...

Fame is fun, money is useful, celebrity can be exciting, but finally life is about optimal well-being and how we achieve that in dominator culture, in a greedy culture, in a culture that uses so...

I want a Zero Tolerance policy on All The Patriarchal Bullshit.

A girl is nothing to herself; only to her husband can she become something. What can she become? I asked. Why, she said, the mother of his children. But I am not the mother of...

I’m not sure how we got to this place, where a girl’s only value is in what kind of marriage she has, how capable she is of keeping a man happy.

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...

Women, it is said, possess corresponding power. Through consciousness-raising, women found that women’s so-called power was the other side of female powerlessness. A women’s supposed power to deny sex is the underside of her actual...

I am not free while any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very different from my own.

The real desire [of feminism] is to break away from rationalism, androcentrisim and all forms of philosophy and practices that discriminate against women. The objective is to recover the use of senses, desire, taste, pleasure,...

Every wife who slaves to keep herself pretty, to cook her husband’s favourite meals, to build up his pride and confidence in himself at the expense of his sense of reality, to be his closest...

In order to approximate those shapes and attitudes which are considered normal and desirable, both sexes deform themselves, justifying the process by referring to the primary, genetic difference between the sexes. But of forty-eight chromosomes...

What do you have to forget or overlook in order to desire that this dysfunctional clan once more occupies the White House and is again in a position to rent the Lincoln Bedroom to campaign...

He – and if there is a God, I am convinced he is a he, because no woman could or would ever fuck things up this badly.

Women are already born so far ahead ability-wise. The day men can give birth, that’s when we can start talking about equal rights.

(…) Qual sera o destino de Helène? O meu, certamente. Que meios têm as mães de assegurar às suas filhas que o homem ao qual elas serão entregues será o esposo de seus corações? As...

Whisky, gambling and Ferraris are better than housework.

Did I not feel that the time has come for the questions of women’s wrongs to be laid before the public? Did I not believe that women herself must do this work, for women alone...

Feminism has never been about getting a job for one woman. It’s about making life more fair for women everywhere. It’s not about a piece of the existing pie; there are too many of us...

And that’s the point; not even girls want to be girls so long as our feminine archetype lacks force, strength and power. Not wanting to be girls, they don’t want to be tender, submissive, peace-loving...

And those women were sneaky. They understood that including fantastical elements in their tales- golden eggs, signing harps, talking frogs- worked to mask a deeper purpose….it made the stories look on the surface like ‘a...

My attitude toward men who mess around is simple: If you find ’em, kill ’em.

I think that men ought to treat women like something other than weaker men with breasts.

walking the walk.” She doesn’t have to wear her feminism on her sleeve; she exudes it from every pore and typically demonstrates it in practically everything she does. No, the issue – when it comes...

vicarious consumption” was the happy lot of all women. The efficacy of this maneuver depends on dividing women by class and persuading the privileged that they live in an indulgence they scarcely deserve… To succeed,...

The word ‘sin’ is derived from the Indo-European root ‘es-,’ meaning ‘to be.’ When I discovered this etymology, I intuitively understood that for a [person] trapped in patriarchy, which is the religion of the entire...

People think I’m selling feminism in my books, but what I’m really doing is writing advertising copy for expensive private colleges that most women can’t afford anyway. Oh, and try to find a job with...

Your true passion in life is what you’d be doing if somebody handed you 100 million dollars.

The Black female is assaulted in her tender years by all those common forces of nature at the same time she is caught in the tripartite crossfire of masculine prejudice, white illogical hate and Black...

Be as pissed off as you want to be. Don’t hold back because you think it’s unladylike or some such nonsense. We shouldn’t be shamed out of our anger. We should be using it. Using...

Dear Men Everywhere,Please don’t think that being a feminist means we hate you or don’t need you. -We absolutely love you and couldn’t live without you! …We are just on a mission to be treated...

Sorry,” she said, heading for the bow, where a spot of sun looked inviting. ”Oh, also, about that blog? Just so you know, my dads know a lot of gay lawyers. Bitches will take your...

A lot of people call you a feminist painter.””What indeed,” I say. “I hate party lines, I hate ghettos. Anyway. I’m too old to have invented it and you’re too young to understand it, so...

Why should her lover, just because he is male, be in a position to judge her against other women? Why must she need to know her position and hate needing to, and hate knowing? Why...

By the 1980s beauty had come to play in women’s status-seeking the same role as money plays in that of men: a defensive proof to aggressive competitors of womanhood or manhood. Since both value systems...

I believe beauty is action. If my action can bring smiles in the innocent faces of people then my act is beautiful.

Does rejecting feminism mean rejecting women’s equality? No, because that’s not what feminism is about. Rejecting feminism means recognizing that women don’t need feminism to make them equal to men because they already are equal–just...

Mais de toute façon, engendrer, allaiter ne sont pas des activités, ce sont des fonctions naturelles; aucun projet n’y est engagé; c’est pourquoi la femme n’y trouve pas le motif d’une affirmation hautaine de son...

They were from different generations, culture, nations. But even these things did not divide them so much as their separate conceptions of what it meant to be a woman.

Masculinity cannot exist without femininity. On its own, masculinity has no meaning, because it is but one half of a set of power relations. Masculinity pertains to male dominance as femininity pertains to female subordination.

Rather than freedom from traditional constraints, then, girls were free to “choose” them. Yet, the line between “get to” and “have to” blurs awfully fast.

She explained that many people, but especially women, feel fraudulent when they are praised for their accomplishments. Instead of feeling worthy of recognition, they feel undeserving and guilty, as if a mistake has been made....

Though now we think of fairy tales as stories intended for very young children, this is a relatively modern idea. In the oral tradition, magical stories were enjoyed by listeners young and old alike, while...

Her womb from her body. Separation. Her clitoris from her vulva. Cleaving. Desire from her body. We were told that bodies rising to heaven lose their vulvas, their ovaries, wombs, that her body in resurrection...

It appears that ordinary men take wives because possession is not possible without marriage, and that ordinary women accept husbands because marriage is not possible without possession; with totally differing aims the method is the...

I can’t remember the moment I was labeled bitch for the first time, but it sure wasn’t in the blogosphere of 2008. It was well before the blogosphere, let alone the World Wide Web, existed....

Encountering gender apartheid and waged slavery shook me to my roots more than half a century ago in Afghanistan. Oh, the women of Afghanistan, the women of the Muslim world. I was no feminist —...