3459977
|
I hate to hear you talk about all women as if they were fine ladies instead of rational creatures. None of us want to be in calm waters all our lives.
|
|
double-standards
empowerment
equality
feminism
flattery
gender
hypocrisy
independence
men
misogyny
rationality
reason
self-determination
social-norms
stereotypes
strength
women
women-s-rights
|
Jane Austen |
da3fed4
|
I hate men who are afraid of women's strength.
|
|
feminism
woman
women-s-strenth
|
Anaïs Nin |
ed5d121
|
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 you are being taught here is an amalgam of current prejudice and the choices of this particular culture. The slightest look at history will show how impermanent these must be. You are being taught by people who have been able to accommodate themselves to a regime of thought laid down by their predecessors. It is a self-perpetuating system. Those of you who are more robust and individual than others will be encouraged to leave and find ways of educating yourself -- educating your own judgements. Those that stay must remember, always, and all the time, that they are being moulded and patterned to fit into the narrow and particular needs of this particular society.
|
|
education
feminism
knowledge-power
quip
school
|
Doris Lessing |
b12d50f
|
Men are from Earth, women are from Earth. Deal with it.
|
|
common-sense
equality
feminism
humanism
humor
inspirational
men-and-women
|
George Carlin |
c44c011
|
I know enough to know that no woman should ever marry a man who hated his mother.
|
|
feminism
hate
love
marriage
married-life
matrimony
men
mothers
psychology
relationships
sons
women
|
Martha Gellhorn |
d87db97
|
As long as she thinks of a man, nobody objects to a woman thinking.
|
|
dignity
double-standards
empowerment
feminism
gender
hypocrisy
intelligence
men
misogyny
self-determination
social-norms
stereotypes
thought
women
|
Virginia Woolf |
c47e01c
|
Equality is not a concept. It's not something we should be striving for. It's a necessity. Equality is like gravity. We need it to stand on this earth as men and women, and the misogyny that is in every culture is not a true part of the human condition. It is life out of balance, and that imbalance is sucking something out of the soul of every man and woman who's confronted with it. We need equality. Kinda now.
|
|
equality
fairness
feminism
freedom-of-choice
inspirational
truth
|
Joss Whedon |
2f57659
|
Responsibility to yourself means refusing to let others do your thinking, talking, and naming for you...it means that you do not treat your body as a commodity with which to purchase superficial intimacy or economic security; for our bodies to be treated as objects, our minds are in mortal danger. It means insisting that those to whom you give your friendship and love are able to respect your mind. It means being able to say, with Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre: "I have an inward treasure born with me, which can keep me alive if all the extraneous delights should be withheld or offered only at a price I cannot afford to give
|
|
feminism
inspirational
|
Adrienne Rich |
6c767ff
|
A woman knows very well that, though a wit sends her his poems, praises her judgment, solicits her criticism, and drinks her tea, this by no means signifies that he respects her opinions, admires her understanding, or will refuse, though the rapier is denied him, to run through the body with his pen.
|
|
dignity
double-standards
empowerment
equality
feminism
gender
hypocrisy
judgment
men
misogyny
poetry
respect
women
writing
|
Virginia Woolf |
7ecaca1
|
The history of men's opposition to women's emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself.
|
|
empowerment
feminism
gender
men
misogyny
women
|
Virginia Woolf |
5c6ebba
|
"I do not think I ever opened a book in my life which had not something to say upon woman's inconstancy. Songs and proverbs, all talk of woman's fickleness. But perhaps you will say, these were all written by men." "Perhaps I shall. Yes, yes, if you please, no reference to examples in books. Men have had every advantage of us in telling their own story. Education has been theirs in so much higher a degree; the pen has been in their hands. I will not allow books to prove anything." --
|
|
clichés
constancy
double-standards
education
feminism
gender
inequality
love
men
misogyny
opportunities
social-norms
stereotypes
women
|
Jane Austen |
56075e6
|
One life is all we have and we live it as we believe in living it. But to sacrifice what you are and to live without belief, that is a fate more terrible than dying.
|
|
feminism
historical
inspirational
legendary
women
|
Joan of Arc |
8f4c56e
|
Women who love themselves are threatening; but men who love real women, more so.
|
|
aging
beauty
body-image
cosmetic-surgery
cosmetics
culture
diet-industry
double-standards
eating-disorders
equality
fashion-industry
feminism
images
magazines
marketing
mass-culture
objectification
plastic-surgery
pornography
self-esteem
sexual-violence
sexuality
society
|
Naomi Wolf |
164a53c
|
Each suburban wife struggles with it alone. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night- she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question-- 'Is this all?
|
|
existentialism
feminism
housekeeping
inspirational
marriage
parenting
purpose
|
Betty Friedan |
5737023
|
If men could see us as we really are, they would be a little amazed; but the cleverest, the acutest men are often under an illusion about women: they do not read them in a true light: they misapprehend them, both for good and evil: their good woman is a queer thing, half doll, half angel; their bad woman almost always a fiend.
|
|
double-standards
empowerment
expectations
false-belief
feminism
gender
hypocrisy
illusions
misconceptions
misogyny
stereotypes
women
|
Charlotte Brontë |
c4a742a
|
Culture does not make people. People make culture. If it is true that the full humanity of women is not our culture, then we can and must make it our culture.
|
|
feminism
gender-equality
humanity
women
|
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie |
134017c
|
A culture fixated on female thinness is not an obsession about female beauty, but an obsession about female obedience. Dieting is the most potent political sedative in women's history; a quietly mad population is a tractable one.
|
|
control
diet
fad
feminism
feminist
food
myth
obedience
|
Naomi Wolf |
111fa2e
|
When, however, one reads of a witch being ducked, of a woman possessed by devils, of a wise woman selling herbs, or even of a very remarkable man who had a mother, then I think we are on the track of a lost novelist, a suppressed poet, of some mute and inglorious Jane Austen, some Emily Bronte who dashed her brains out on the moor or mopped and mowed about the highways crazed with the torture that her gift had put her to. Indeed, I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.
|
|
dignity
empowerment
feminism
gender
history
misogyny
persecution
social-norms
suppression
witches
women
women-writers
writing
|
Virginia Woolf |
e0a42c0
|
Guilt is not a response to anger; it is a response to one's own actions or lack of action. If it leads to change then it can be useful, since it is then no longer guilt but the beginning of knowledge. Yet all too often, guilt is just another name for impotence, for defensiveness destructive of communication; it becomes a device to protect ignorance and the continuation of things the way they are, the ultimate protection for changelessness.
|
|
anger
black-feminism
feminism
guilt
oppression
|
Audre Lorde |
631c7ab
|
By hook or by crook, I hope that you will possess yourselves of money enough to travel and to idle, to contemplate the future or the past of the world, to dream over books and loiter at street corners and let the line of thought dip deep into the stream
|
|
feminism
inspirational
|
Virginia Woolf |
eb8cfe2
|
Anything may happen when womanhood has ceased to be a protected occupation.
|
|
dignity
double-standards
empowerment
feminism
gender
hypocrisy
inequality
misogyny
morality
protectiveness
social-norms
stereotypes
womanhood
women
|
Virginia Woolf |
2c6057e
|
"Sadly, the signals that allow men and women to find the partners who most please them are scrambled by the sexual insecurity initiated by beauty thinking. A woman who is self-conscious can't relax to let her sensuality come into play. If she is hungry she will be tense. If she is "done up" she will be on the alert for her reflection in his eyes. If she is ashamed of her body, its movement will be stilled. If she does not feel entitled to claim attention, she will not demand that airspace to shine in. If his field of vision has been boxed in by "beauty"--a box continually shrinking--he simply will not see her, his real love, standing right before him."
|
|
beauty
body-image
cosmetic-surgery
cosmetics
culture
diet-industry
double-standards
equality
feminism
images
magazines
marketing
mass-culture
objectification
plastic-surgery
self-esteem
sexuality
society
|
Naomi Wolf |
a84e05d
|
I'm not going to limit myself just because people won't accept the fact that I can do something else.
|
|
feminism
inspirational
|
Dolly Parton |
32ce2ff
|
Beauty provokes harassment, the law says, but it looks through men's eyes when deciding what provokes it.
|
|
aging
beauty
body-image
cosmetic-surgery
cosmetics
culture
diet-industry
double-standards
eating-disorders
equality
fashion-industry
feminism
harassment
images
law
magazines
marketing
mass-culture
objectification
plastic-surgery
pornography
rape
self-esteem
sexual-harassment
sexual-violence
sexuality
society
|
Naomi Wolf |
adb17ef
|
"Men are visually aroused by women's bodies and less sensitive to their arousal by women's personalities because they are trained early into that response, while women are less visually aroused and more emotionally aroused because that is their training. This asymmetry in sexual education maintains men's power in the myth: They look at women's bodies, evaluate, move on; their own bodies are not looked at, evaluated, and taken or passed over. But there is no "rock called gender" responsible for that; it can change so that real mutuality--an equal gaze, equal vulnerability, equal desire--brings heterosexual men and women together."
|
|
aging
beauty
body-image
cosmetic-surgery
cosmetics
culture
diet-industry
double-standards
eating-disorders
equality
fashion-industry
feminism
images
magazines
marketing
mass-culture
objectification
plastic-surgery
pornography
self-esteem
sexuality
society
|
Naomi Wolf |
76a638d
|
Felicity ignores us. She walks out to them, an apparition in white and blue velvet, her head held high as they stare in awe at her, the goddess. I don't know yet what power feels like. But this is surely what it looks like, and I think I'm beginning to understand why those ancient women had to hide in caves. Why our parents and suitors want us to behave properly and predictably. It's not that they want to protect us; it's that they fear us.
|
|
feminism
|
Libba Bray |
930c8fd
|
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 infinite. And in fact, any man who has known real loves, real revolts, real desires, and real will knows quite well that he has no need of any outside guarantee to be sure of his goals; their certitude comes from his own drive.
|
|
feminism
philosophy
|
Simone de Beauvoir |
c97fcae
|
"What becomes of a man who acquires a beautiful woman, with her "beauty" his sole target? He sabotages himself. He has gained no friend, no ally, no mutual trust: She knows quite well why she has been chosen. He has succeeded in buying something: the esteem of other men who find such an acquisition impressive."
|
|
beauty
body-image
cosmetic-surgery
cosmetics
culture
diet-industry
double-standards
equality
feminism
images
magazines
marketing
mass-culture
objectification
plastic-surgery
self-esteem
sexuality
society
|
Naomi Wolf |
fa74a55
|
Right. I look fine. Except I don't,' said Zora, tugging sadly at her man's nightshirt. This was why Kiki had dreaded having girls: she knew she wouldn't be able to protect them from self-disgust. To that end she had tried banning television in the early years, and never had a lipstick or a woman's magazine crossed the threshold of the Belsey home to Kiki's knowledge, but these and other precautionary measures had made no difference. It was in the air, or so it seemed to Kiki, this hatred of women and their bodies-- it seeped in with every draught in the house; people brought it home on their shoes, they breathed it in off their newspapers. There was no way to control it.
|
|
body-image
feminism
women
|
Zadie Smith |
f5e65bd
|
The emerging woman ... will be strong-minded, strong-hearted, strong-souled, and strong-bodied...strength and beauty must go together.
|
|
feminism
louisa-may-alcott
women
|
Louisa May Alcott |
866e7cf
|
My silences had not protected me. Your silence will not protect you. But for every real word spoken, for every attempt I had ever made to speak those truths for which I am still seeking, I had made contact with other women while we examined the words to fit a world in which we all believed, bridging our differences.
|
|
differences
feminism
illness
silence
speaking-out
truth
women
words
|
Audre Lorde |
5b24af7
|
A consequence of female self-love is that the woman grows convinced of social worth. Her love for her body will be unqualified, which is the basis of female identification. If a woman loves her own body, she doesn't grudge what other women do with theirs; if she loves femaleness, she champions its rights. It's true what they say about women: Women insatiable. We greedy. Our appetites do need to be controlled if things are to stay in place. If the world were ours too, if we believed we could get away with it, we ask for more love, more sex, more money, more commitment to children, more food, more care. These sexual, emotional, and physical demands begin to extend to social demands: payment for care of the elderly, parental leave, childcare, etc. The force of female desire would be so great that society would truly have to reckon with what women want, in bed and in the world.
|
|
aging
beauty
body-image
cosmetic-surgery
cosmetics
culture
diet-industry
double-standards
eating-disorders
equality
fashion-industry
feminism
images
magazines
marketing
mass-culture
objectification
plastic-surgery
pornography
self-esteem
self-love
sexual-violence
sexuality
society
|
Naomi Wolf |
772d400
|
I am satisfied that if a book is a good one, it is so whatever the sex of the author may be. All novels are or should be written for both men and women to read, and I am at a loss to conceive how a man should permit himself to write anything that would be really disgraceful to a woman, or why a woman should be censured for writing anything that would be proper and becoming for a man.
|
|
feminism
writing
|
Anne Brontë |
87c29cd
|
The women of Afghanistan, Iraq, and Iran who risk their lives and their beauty to defy the foulness of theocracy. Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Azar Nafisi as their ideal feminine model.
|
|
ayaan-hirsi-ali
azar-nafisi
feminism
heroes
heroines
iran
iraq
islam
religion
role-models
taliban-treatment-of-women
theocracy
women
women-and-religion
women-in-afghanistan
women-in-iran
women-in-iraq
women-in-islam
women-s-rights-in-iran
women-s-rights-movement-in-iran
|
Christopher Hitchens |
7809186
|
Being born a woman is my awful tragedy. From the moment I was conceived I was doomed to sprout breasts and ovaries rather than penis and scrotum; to have my whole circle of action, thought and feeling rigidly circumscribed by my inescapable feminity. Yes, my consuming desire to mingle with road crews, sailors and soldiers, bar room regulars--to be a part of a scene, anonymous, listening, recording--all is spoiled by the fact that I am a girl, a female always in danger of assault and battery. My consuming interest in men and their lives is often misconstrued as a desire to seduce them, or as an invitation to intimacy. Yet, God, I want to talk to everybody I can as deeply as I can. I want to be able to sleep in an open field, to travel west, to walk freely at night...
|
|
feminism
feminism-woman-submission
|
Sylvia Plath |
388d829
|
"It took me 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 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."
|
|
feminism
insecurity
thoughts
writing
|
Erica Jong |
4309f45
|
Our men think earning money and ordering around others is where power lies. They don't think power is in the hands of the woman who takes care of everyone all day long, and gives birth to their children.
|
|
feminism
inspirational
|
Malala Yousafzai |
42483df
|
Teach her that the idea of 'gender roles' is absolute nonsense. Do not ever tell her that she should or should not do something because she is a girl
|
|
equality
feminism
gender-roles
inspirational
|
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie |
abefe7a
|
Though we tremble before uncertain future
|
|
feminism
inspirational
mestiza
poetry
|
Gloria Anzaldúa |
25924f2
|
Teach her that the idea of 'gender roles' is absolute nonsense. Do not ever tell her that she should or should not do something because she is a girl. 'Because you are a girl' is never reason for anything. Ever.
|
|
feminism
gender-roles
inspirational
|
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie |
1914666
|
To live in a culture in which women are routinely naked where men aren't is to learn inequality in little ways all day long. So even if we agree that sexual imagery is in fact a language, it is clearly one that is already heavily edited to protect men's sexual--and hence social--confidence while undermining that of women.
|
|
beauty
eating-disorders
feminism
self-esteem
society
|
Naomi Wolf |
c2cdfc0
|
The beauty myth is always actually prescribing behaviour and not appearance.
|
|
aging
beauty
body-image
cosmetic-surgery
cosmetics
culture
diet-industry
double-standards
eating-disorders
equality
fashion-industry
feminism
images
magazines
marketing
mass-culture
objectification
plastic-surgery
pornography
self-esteem
sexual-violence
sexuality
society
|
Naomi Wolf |
38de18d
|
And I knew in my bones that Emily Dickinson wouldn't have written even one poem if she'd had two howling babies, a husband bent on jamming another one into her, a house to run, a garden to tend, three cows to milk, twenty chickens to feed, and four hired hands to cook for. I knew then why they didn't marry. Emily and Jane and Louisa. I knew and it scared me. I also knew what being lonely was and I didn't want to be lonely my whole life. I didn't want to give up on my words. I didn't want to choose one over the other. Mark Twain didn't have to. Charles Dickens didn't.
|
|
feminism
gender-roles
loneliness
writing
|
Jennifer Donnelly |
b380f52
|
"Whatever is deeply, essentially female--the life in a woman's expression, the feel of her flesh, the shape of her breasts, the transformations after childbirth of her skin--is being reclassified as ugly, and ugliness as disease. These qualities are about an intensification of female power, which explains why they are being recast as a diminution of power. At least a third of a woman's life is marked with aging; about a third of her body is made of fat. Both symbols are being transformed into operable condition-- women will only feel healthy if we are two thirds of the women we could be. How can an "ideal" be about women if it is defined as how much of a female sexual characteristic exist on the woman's body, and how much of a female life show on her face?"
|
|
aging
beauty
body-image
cosmetic-surgery
cosmetics
culture
diet-industry
double-standards
equality
fashion-industry
feminism
images
magazines
marketing
mass-culture
objectification
plastic-surgery
self-esteem
sexuality
society
|
Naomi Wolf |
4d2da05
|
There will be no mass-based feminist movement as long as feminist ideas are understood only by a well-educated few.
|
|
education
feminism
|
bell hooks |
319c5c6
|
"Women could probably be trained quite easily to see men first as sexual things. If girls never experienced sexual violence; if a girl's only window on male sexuality were a stream of easily available, well-lit, cheap images of boys slightly older than herself, in their late teens, smiling encouragingly and revealing cuddly erect penises the color of roses or mocha, she might well look at, masturbate to, and, as an adult, "need" beauty pornography based on the bodies of men. And if those initiating penises were represented to the girl as pneumatically erectible, swerving neither left nor right, tasting of cinnamon or forest berries, innocent of random hairs, and ever ready; if they were presented alongside their measurements, length, and circumference to the quarter inch; if they seemed to be available to her with no troublesome personality attached; if her sweet pleasure seemed to be the only reason for them to exist--then a real young man would probably approach the young woman's bed with, to say the least, a failing heart."
|
|
aging
beauty
body-image
cosmetic-surgery
cosmetics
culture
diet-industry
double-standards
eating-disorders
equality
fashion-industry
feminism
images
magazines
marketing
mass-culture
objectification
plastic-surgery
pornography
self-esteem
sexual-violence
sexuality
society
|
Naomi Wolf |
b9cb5e7
|
"The Victorian woman became her ovaries, as today's woman has become her "beauty."
|
|
aging
beauty
body-image
cosmetic-surgery
cosmetics
culture
diet-industry
double-standards
eating-disorders
equality
fashion-industry
feminism
images
magazines
marketing
mass-culture
objectification
plastic-surgery
pornography
self-esteem
sexuality
society
|
Naomi Wolf |
31dbc37
|
For too many centuries women have been being muses to artists. I wanted to be the muse, I wanted to be the wife of the artist, but I was really trying to avoid the final issue -- that I had to do the job myself.
|
|
fearless
feminism
independent
inspirational
muse
|
Anaïs Nin |
33e2dfe
|
In a culture which holds the two-parent patriarchal family in higher esteem than any other arrangement, all children feel emotionally insecure when their family does not measure up to the standard. A utopian vision of the patriarchal family remains intact despite all the evidence which proves that the well-being of children is no more secure in the dysfunctional male-headed household than in the dysfunctional female-headed household. Children need to be raised in loving environments. Whenever domination is present love is lacking. Loving parents, be they single or coupled, gay or straight, headed by females or males, are more likely to raise healthy, happy children with sound self-esteem. In future feminist movement we need to work harder to show parents the ways ending sexism positively changes family life. Feminist movement is pro-family. Ending patriarchal domination of children, by men or women, is the only way to make the family a place where children can be safe, where they can be free, where they can know love
|
|
feminism
parenting
|
bell hooks |
1cca91a
|
"...Whenever someone says to me, 'Jerry Lewis says women aren't funny,' or 'Christopher Hitchens says women aren't funny,' or 'Rick Fenderman says women aren't funny... Do you have anything to say to that?'
|
|
feminism
humor
women
|
Tina Fey |
bfd2431
|
When we were only acquaintances, you let me be myself, but now you're always protecting me... I won't be protected. I will choose for myself what is ladylike and right. To shield me is an insult. Can't I be trusted to face the truth but I must get it second-hand through you? A woman's place!
|
|
female
feminism
|
E. M. Forster |
b1c4733
|
How can I tell a story we already know too well? Her name was Africa. His was France. He colonized her, exploited her, silenced her, and even decades after it was supposed to have ended, still acted with a high hand in resolving her affairs in places like Cote d'Ivoire, a name she had been given because of her export products, not her own identity. Her name was Asia. His was Europe. Her name was silence. His was power. Her name was poverty. His was wealth. Her name was Her, but what was hers? His name was His, and he presumed everything was his, including her, and he thought be could take her without asking and without consequences. It was a very old story, though its outcome had been changing a little in recent decades. And this time around the consequences are shaking a lot of foundations, all of which clearly needed shaking. Who would ever write a fable as obvious, as heavy-handed as the story we've been given? ... His name was privilege, but hers was possibility. His was the same old story, but hers was a new one about the possibility of changing a story that remains unfinished, that includes all of us, that matters so much, that we will watch but also make and tell in the weeks, months, years, decades to come.
|
|
fables
feminism
possibilities
|
Rebecca Solnit |
155cc2e
|
"A man is unlikely to be brought within earshot of women as they judge men's appearance, height, muscle tone, sexual technique, penis size, personal grooming, or taste in clothes--all of which we do. The fact is that women are able to view men just as men view women, as objects for sexual and aesthetic evaluation; we too are effortlessly able to choose the male "ideal" from a lineup and if we could have male beauty as well as everything else, most of us would not say no. But so what? Given all that, women make the choice, by and large, to take men as human beings first."
|
|
aging
beauty
body-image
cosmetic-surgery
cosmetics
culture
diet-industry
double-standards
equality
fashion-industry
feminism
images
magazines
marketing
mass-culture
objectification
plastic-surgery
pornography
self-esteem
sexual-violence
sexuality
society
|
Naomi Wolf |
a844d2e
|
Because when there is true equality, resentment does not exist.
|
|
feminism
resentment
|
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie |
65017e1
|
Teach her about difference. Make difference ordinary. Make difference normal. Teach her not to attach value to difference. And the reason for this is not to be fair or to be nice but merely to be human and practical. Because difference is the reality of our world. And by teaching her about difference, you are equipping her to survive in a diverse world. She must know and understand that people walk different paths in the world and that as long as those paths do no harm to others, they are valid paths that she must respect. Teach her that we do not know - we cannot know - everything about life. Both religion and science have spaces for the things we do not know, and it is enough to make peace with that. Teach her never to universalise her own standards or experiences. Teach her that her standards are for her alone, and not for other people. This is the only necessary form of humility: the realisation that difference is normal.
|
|
equality
feminism
inspirational
|
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie |
6f37aec
|
"Their [girls] sexual energy, their evaluation of adolescent boys and other girls goes thwarted, deflected back upon the girls, unspoken, and their searching hungry gazed returned to their own bodies. The questions, Whom do I desire? Why? What will I do about it? are turned around: Would I desire myself? Why?...Why ? What can I do about it? The books and films they see survey from the young boy's point of view his first touch of a girl's thighs, his first glimpse of her breasts. The girls sit listening, absorbing, their familiar breasts estranged as if they were not part of their bodies, their thighs crossed self-consciously, learning how to leave their bodies and watch them from the outside. Since their bodies are seen from the point of view of strangeness and desire, it is no wonder that what should be familiar, felt to be whole, become estranged and divided into parts. What little girls learn is not the desire for the other, but the desire to be desired. Girls learn to watch their sex along with the boys; that takes up the space that should be devoted to finding out about what they are wanting, and reading and writing about it, seeking it and getting it. Sex is held hostage by beauty and its ransom terms are engraved in girls' minds early and deeply with instruments more beautiful that those which advertisers or pornographers know how to use: literature, poetry, painting, and film. This outside-in perspective on their own sexuality leads to the confusion that is at the heart of the myth. Women come to confuse sexual looking with being looked at sexually ("Clairol...it's the look you want"); many confuse sexually feeling with being sexually felt ("Gillete razors...the way a woman wants to feel"); many confuse desiring with being desirable. "My first sexual memory," a woman tells me, "was when I first shaved my legs, and when I ran my hand down the smooth skin I felt how it would feel to someone else's hand." Women say that when they lost weight they "feel sexier" but the nerve endings in the clitoris and nipples don't multiply with weight loss. Women tell me they're jealous of the men who get so much pleasure out of the female body that they imagine being inside the male body that is inside their own so that they can vicariously experience desire. Could it be then that women's famous slowness of arousal to men's, complex fantasy life, the lack of pleasure many experience in intercourse, is related to this cultural negation of sexual imagery that affirms the female point of view, the culture prohibition against seeing men's bodies as instruments of pleasure? Could it be related to the taboo against representing intercourse as an opportunity for a straight woman actively to pursue, grasp, savor, and consume the male body for her satisfaction, as much as she is pursued, grasped, savored, and consumed for his?"
|
|
beauty
body-image
cosmetic-surgery
cosmetics
culture
diet-industry
double-standards
equality
fashion-industry
feminism
images
magazines
marketing
mass-culture
objectification
plastic-surgery
self-esteem
sexuality
society
|
Naomi Wolf |
4ac3445
|
We do not have to spend money and go hungry and struggle and study to become sensual; we always were. We need not believe we must somehow earn good erotic care; we always deserved it. Femaleness and its sexuality are beautiful. Women have long secretly suspected as much. In that sexuality, women are physically beautiful already; superb; breathtaking. Many, many men see this way too. A man who wants to define himself as a real lover of women admires what shows of her past on a woman's face, before she ever saw him, and the adventures and stresses that her body has undergone, the scars of trauma, the changes of childbirth, her distinguishing characteristics, the light is her expression. The number of men who already see in this way is far greater than the arbiters of mass culture would lead us to believe, since the story they need to tell ends with the opposite moral.
|
|
aging
beauty
body-image
cosmetic-surgery
cosmetics
culture
diet-industry
double-standards
eating-disorders
equality
fashion-industry
feminism
images
magazines
marketing
mass-culture
objectification
plastic-surgery
pornography
self-esteem
sexuality
society
|
Naomi Wolf |
dc6c4b5
|
Cosmetic surgery processes the bodies of woman-made women, who make up the vast majority of its patient pool, into man-made women.
|
|
aging
beauty
body-image
cosmetic-surgery
cosmetics
culture
diet-industry
double-standards
eating-disorders
equality
fashion-industry
feminism
images
magazines
marketing
mass-culture
objectification
plastic-surgery
pornography
self-esteem
sexuality
society
|
Naomi Wolf |
9e66fd9
|
I think one of the primary goals of a feminist landscape architecture would be to work toward a public landscape in which we can roam the streets at midnight, in which every square is available for Virginia Woolf to make up her novels
|
|
architecture
feminism
landscape
|
Rebecca Solnit |
cfdc3bb
|
And sometimes drunk women aren't raped; they just make stupid choices--and to say we deserve special treatment when we're drunk because we're women, to say we need to be , I find offensive.
|
|
feminism
offense
sexual-discrimination
|
Gillian Flynn |
3b5cdcb
|
I am anchored on a resolve you cannot shake. My heart, my conscience shall dispose of my hand -- . Know this at last.
|
|
conscience
courtship
dignity
empowerment
feminism
gender
independence
integrity
love
marriage
matrimony
self-determination
social-norms
women
wooing
|
Charlotte Brontë |
acc3482
|
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 should his reply have such exaggerated power? And it does. He does not know that what he says will affect the way she feels when they next make love. She is angry for a number of good reasons that may have nothing to do with this particular man's intentions. The exchange reminds her that, in spite of a whole fabric of carefully woven equalities, they are not equal in this way that is so crucial that its snagged thread unravels the rest.
|
|
beauty
body-image
cosmetic-surgery
cosmetics
culture
diet-industry
double-standards
equality
feminism
images
magazines
marketing
mass-culture
objectification
plastic-surgery
self-esteem
sexuality
society
|
Naomi Wolf |
2c8b53a
|
What are other women really thinking, feeling, experiencing, when they slip away from the gaze and culture of men?
|
|
aging
beauty
body-image
cosmetic-surgery
cosmetics
culture
diet-industry
double-standards
eating-disorders
equality
fashion-industry
feminism
images
magazines
marketing
mass-culture
objectification
plastic-surgery
pornography
self-esteem
sexual-violence
sexuality
society
|
Naomi Wolf |
aef238b
|
"Our society reward beauty on the outside over health on the inside. Women must not be blamed for choosing short-term beauty "fixes" that harm our long-term health, since our life spans are inverted under the beauty myth, and there is no great social or economic incentive for women to live a long time. A thin young woman with precancerous lungs [who smokes to stay thin] is more highly rewarded socially that a hearty old crone. Spokespeople sell women the Iron Maiden [an intrinsically unattainable standard of beauty used to punish women for their failure to achieve and conform to it]and name her "Health": if public discourse were really concerned with women's health, it would turn angrily upon this aspect of the beauty myth."
|
|
aging
beauty
body-image
cosmetic-surgery
cosmetics
culture
diet-industry
double-standards
eating-disorders
equality
fashion-industry
feminism
images
magazines
marketing
mass-culture
objectification
plastic-surgery
pornography
self-esteem
sexuality
society
|
Naomi Wolf |
88856fd
|
Men who read it [beauty pornography] don't do so because they want who look like that. The attraction of what they are holding is that it is a woman, but a two-dimensional woman-shaped blank. The appeal of the material is not the fantasy that the model will come to life; it is precisely that she will not, ever. Her coming to life would ruin the vision. It is not about life. Ideal beauty is ideal because it does not exist; The action lies in the gap between desire and gratification. Women are not perfect beauties without distance. That space, in a consumer culture, is a lucrative one. The beauty myth moves for men as a mirage, its power lies in its ever-receding nature. When the gap is closed, the lover embraces only his own disillusion.
|
|
beauty
body-image
consumer
cosmetic-surgery
cosmetics
culture
diet-industry
double-standards
equality
feminism
images
magazines
marketing
mass-culture
objectification
plastic-surgery
pornography
self-esteem
sexuality
society
|
Naomi Wolf |
63bdec2
|
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 the history of our species; it dislodges Freud. Today's children and young men and women have sexual identities that spiral around paper and celluloid phantoms: from to music videos to the blank females torsos in women's magazines, features obscured and eyes extinguished, they are being imprinted with a sexuality that is mass-produced, deliberately dehumanizing and inhuman.
|
|
aging
beauty
body-image
cosmetic-surgery
cosmetics
culture
diet-industry
double-standards
eating-disorders
equality
fashion-industry
feminism
images
magazines
marketing
mass-culture
objectification
plastic-surgery
pornography
self-esteem
sexuality
society
|
Naomi Wolf |
f3454e2
|
Feminism is an endeavor to change something very old, widespread, and deeply rooted in many, perhaps most, cultures around the world, innumerable institutions, and most households on Earth--and in our minds, where it all begins and ends. That so much change has been made in four or five decades is amazing; that everything is not permanantly, definitively, irrevocably changed is not a sign of failure. A woman goes walking down a thousand-mile road. Twenty minutes after she steps forth, they proclaim that she still has nine hundred ninety-nine miles to go and will never get anywhere.
|
|
feminism
|
Rebecca Solnit |
5e7de1b
|
These days, I strive to be a bitch, because not being one sucks. Not being a bitch means not having your voice heard. Not being a bitch means you agree with all the bullshit. Not being a bitch means you don't appreciate all the other bitches who have come before you. Not being a bitch means since Eve ate that apple, we will forever have to pay for her bitchiness with complacence, obedience, acceptance, closed eyes, and opened legs.
|
|
feminism
inspirational
|
Margaret Cho |
450bfe8
|
What editors are obliged to appear to say that want from women is actually what their want from women.
|
|
aging
beauty
body-image
conformity
cosmetic-surgery
cosmetics
culture
diet-industry
double-standards
eating-disorders
equality
fashion-industry
feminism
images
magazines
marketing
mass-culture
objectification
plastic-surgery
pornography
self-esteem
sexual-violence
sexuality
society
|
Naomi Wolf |
845cbfd
|
"The beauty myth sets it up this way: A high rating as an art object is the most valuable tribute a woman can exact from her lover. If he appreciates her face and body because it is hers, that is next to worthless. It is very neat: The myth contrives to make women offend men by scrutinizing honest appreciation when they give it; it can make men offend women merely by giving them honest appreciation. It can manage to contaminate the sentence "You're beautiful," which is next to "I love you" in expressing a bond of regard between a woman and a man. A man cannot tell a woman that he loves to look at her without risking making her unhappy. If he never tells her, she is to be unhappy. And the "luckiest" woman of all, told she is loved because she's "beautiful," is often tormented because she lacks the security of being desired because she looks like who she lovably is."
|
|
aging
beauty
body-image
cosmetic-surgery
cosmetics
culture
diet-industry
double-standards
eating-disorders
equality
fashion-industry
feminism
images
magazines
marketing
mass-culture
objectification
plastic-surgery
pornography
self-esteem
sexuality
society
|
Naomi Wolf |
2428b8f
|
"No: I shall not marry Samuel Fawthrop Wynne." "I ask why? I must have a reason. In all respects he is more than worthy of you." She stood on the hearth; she was pale as the white marble slab and cornice behind her; her eyes flashed large, dilated, unsmiling. "And ask in what sense that young man is worthy of ?"
|
|
courtship
dignity
empowerment
equality
feminism
gender
independence
inferiority
integrity
marriage
marriage-proposal
matrimony
men
self-awareness
self-determination
social-norms
suitability
women
wooing
worthiness
|
Charlotte Brontë |
244b604
|
The last thing the consumer index wants men and women to do is to figure out how to love one another: The $1.5 trillion retail-sales industry depends on sexual estrangement between men and women, and is fueled by sexual dissatisfaction. Ads do not sell sex--that would be counterproductive, if it meant that heterosexual women and men turned to one another and were gratified. What they sell is sexual discontent.
|
|
eating-disorders
feminism
self-esteem
society
|
Naomi Wolf |
91344ff
|
Men write more books. Men give more lectures. Men ask more questions after lectures. Men post more e-mail to Internet discussion groups. To say this is due to patriarchy is to beg the question of the behavior's origin. If men control society, why don't they just shut up and enjoy their supposed prerogatives? The answer is obvious when you consider sexual competition: men can't be quiet because that would give other men a chance to show off verbally. Men often bully women into silence, but this is usually to make room for their own verbal display. If men were dominating public language just to maintain patriarchy, that would qualify as a puzzling example of evolutionary altruism--a costly, risky individual act that helps all of one's sexual competitors (other males) as much as oneself. The ocean of male language that confronts modern women in bookstores, television, newspapers, classrooms, parliaments, and businesses does not necessarily come from a male conspiracy to deny women their voice. It may come from an evolutionary history of sexual selection in which the male motivation to talk was vital to their reproduction.
|
|
feminism
psychology
|
Geoffrey Miller |
c61f258
|
Health makes good propaganda.
|
|
aging
beauty
body-image
cosmetic-surgery
cosmetics
culture
diet-industry
double-standards
equality
fashion-industry
feminism
health
images
magazines
marketing
mass-culture
objectification
plastic-surgery
propaganda
self-esteem
sexuality
society
|
Naomi Wolf |
4b4bfa3
|
The ability to tell your own story, in words or images, is already a victory, already a revolt.
|
|
feminism
tell-your-own-story
writing
|
Rebecca Solnit |
5129dbc
|
"Cosmetic surgery is not "cosmetic," and human flesh is not "plastic." Even the names trivialize what it is. It's not like ironing wrinkles in fabric, or tuning up a car, or altering outmoded clothes, the current metaphors. Trivialization and infantilization pervade the surgeons' language when they speak to women: "a nip," a "tummy tuck."...Surgery changes one forever, the mind as well as the body. If we don't start to speak of it as serious, the millennium of the man-made woman will be upon us, and we will have had no choice."
|
|
beauty
body-image
cosmetic-surgery
cosmetics
culture
diet-industry
double-standards
eating-disorders
equality
fashion-industry
feminism
images
magazines
marketing
mass-culture
objectification
plastic-surgery
self-esteem
sexuality
society
|
Naomi Wolf |
6739281
|
Sometimes we have to prove to others we're strong even where we're not.
|
|
feminism
|
Simone Elkeles |
9775c3e
|
When [beauty pornography is] aimed at men, its effect is to keep them from finding peace in sexual love. The fleeting chimera of the airbrushed centerfold, always receding before him, keeps the man destabilized in pursuit, unable to focus on the beauty of the woman--known, marked, lined, familiar---who hands him the paper every morning.
|
|
aging
beauty
body-image
cosmetic-surgery
cosmetics
culture
diet-industry
double-standards
equality
fashion-industry
feminism
images
magazines
marketing
mass-culture
objectification
plastic-surgery
pornography
self-esteem
sexuality
society
|
Naomi Wolf |
2fffa35
|
The maturing of a woman who has continued to grow is a beautiful thing to behold. Or, if your ad revenue or your seven-figure salary or your privileged sexual status depend on it, it is an operable condition.
|
|
aging
beauty
body-image
cosmetic-surgery
cosmetics
culture
diet-industry
double-standards
equality
fashion-industry
feminism
images
magazines
marketing
mass-culture
objectification
plastic-surgery
pornography
self-esteem
sexual-violence
sexuality
society
|
Naomi Wolf |
257dcb4
|
It is not in giving life but in risking life that man is raised above the animal; that is why superiority has been accorded in humanity no to the sex that brings forth but to that which kills.
|
|
feminism
|
Simone de Beauvoir |
85bd190
|
Feminism and femininity are not mutually exclusive. It is misogynistic to suggest that they are. Sadly, women have learned to be ashamed and apologetic about pursuits that are seen as traditionally female, such as fashion and makeup. But our society does not expect men to feel ashamed of pursuits considered generally male - sports cars, certain professional sports. In the same way, men's grooming is never suspect in the way women's grooming is - a well-dressed man does not worry that, because he is dressed well, certain assumptions might be made about his intelligence, his ability, or his seriousness. A woman, on the other hand, is always aware of how a bright lipstick or a carefully-put-together outfit might very well make others assume her to be frivolous.
|
|
femininity
feminism
makeup
misogyny
women
|
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie |
20f423e
|
Today a woman must ignore her reflection in the eyes of her lover, since he might admire her, and seek it in the gaze of the God of Beauty, in whose perception she is never complete.
|
|
aging
beauty
body-image
cosmetic-surgery
cosmetics
culture
diet-industry
double-standards
eating-disorders
equality
fashion-industry
feminism
images
magazines
marketing
mass-culture
objectification
plastic-surgery
pornography
self-esteem
sexuality
society
|
Naomi Wolf |
e98426b
|
"The surgeons are playing on the myth's double standard for the function of the body. A man's thigh is for walking, but a woman's is for walking and looking "beautiful." If women can walk but believe our limbs look wrong, we feel that our bodies cannot do what they are meant to do; we feel as genuinely deformed and disabled as the unwilling Victorian hypochondriac felt ill."
|
|
aging
beauty
body-image
cosmetic-surgery
cosmetics
culture
diet-industry
double-standards
eating-disorders
equality
fashion-industry
feminism
images
magazines
marketing
mass-culture
objectification
plastic-surgery
pornography
self-esteem
sexual-violence
sexuality
society
|
Naomi Wolf |
6dea3fd
|
The younger and healthier a woman is and the more her new and glossy body seems destined for eternal freshness, the less useful is artifice; but the carnal weakness of this prey that man takes and its ominous deterioration always have to be hidden from him...In any case, the more traits and proportions of a woman seem contrived, the more she delighted the heart of man because she seemed to escape the metamorphosis of natural things. The result is this strange paradox that by desiring to grasp nature, but transfigured, in woman, man destines her to artifice.
|
|
feminism
|
Simone de Beauvoir |
5f1d622
|
The surgeons' market is imaginary, since there is nothing wrong with women's faces or bodies that social change won't cure; so the surgeons depend for their income on warping female self-perception and multiplying female self-hatred.
|
|
aging
beauty
body-image
cosmetic-surgery
cosmetics
culture
diet-industry
double-standards
eating-disorders
equality
fashion-industry
feminism
images
magazines
marketing
mass-culture
objectification
plastic-surgery
pornography
self-esteem
sexual-violence
sexuality
society
|
Naomi Wolf |
af1d004
|
Chastity ... has, even now, a religious importance in a woman's life, and has so wrapped itself round with nerves and instincts that to cut it free and bring it to the light of day demands courage of the rarest.
|
|
dignity
double-standards
empowerment
encroachment
feminism
gender
hypocrisy
liberty
misogyny
morality
self-determination
sexuality
social-norms
suppression
women
|
Virginia Woolf |
2acec2b
|
Does rough weather choose men over women? Does the sun beat on men, leaving women nice and cool?' Nyawira asked rather sharply. 'Women bear the brunt of poverty. What choices does a woman have in life, especially in times of misery? She can marry or live with a man. She can bear children and bring them up, and be abused by her man. Have you read Buchi Emecheta of Nigeria, Joys of Motherhood? Tsitsi Dangarembga of Zimbabwe, say, Nervous Conditions? Miriama Ba of Senegal, So Long A Letter? Three women from different parts of Africa, giving words to similar thoughts about the condition of women in Africa.' 'I am not much of a reader of fiction,' Kamiti said. 'Especially novels by African women. In India such books are hard to find.' 'Surely even in India there are women writers? Indian women writers?' Nyawira pressed. 'Arundhati Roy, for instance, The God of Small Things? Meena Alexander, Fault Lines? Susie Tharu. Read Women Writing in India. Or her other book, We Were Making History, about women in the struggle!' 'I have sampled the epics of Indian literature,' Kamiti said, trying to redeem himself. 'Mahabharata, Ramayana, and mostly Bhagavad Gita. There are a few others, what they call Purana, Rig-Veda, Upanishads ... Not that I read everything, but ...' 'I am sure that those epics and Puranas, even the Gita, were all written by men,' Nyawira said. 'The same men who invented the caste system. When will you learn to listen to the voices of women?
|
|
arundhati-roy
buchi-emecheta
feminism
gender-equality
indian-literature
meena-alexander
miriama-ba
novels
poverty
suffering
susie-tharu
tsitsi-dangarembga
women
women-s-fiction
women-writers
|
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o |
50860f4
|
What woman here is so enamored of her own oppression that she cannot see her heelprint upon another woman's face? What woman's terms of oppression have become precious and necessary to her as a ticket into the fold of the righteous, away from the cold winds of self-scrutiny?
|
|
compassion
empathy
feminism
intersectionality
oppression
self-reflection
|
Audre Lorde |
016e226
|
... Remember that forgiveness too is a power. To beg for it is a power, and to withold or bestow it is a power, perhaps the greatest.
|
|
feminism
|
Margaret Atwood |
6a7d81f
|
The curious are always in some danger. If you are curious you might never come home, like all the men who now live with mermaids at the bottom of the sea. Or the people who found Atlantis.
|
|
courage
feminism
|
Jeanette Winterson |
d0ecf42
|
I told you in the course of this paper that Shakespeare had a sister; but do not look for her in 's of the poet. She died young--alas, she never wrote a word. She lies buried where the omnibuses now stop, opposite the Elephant and Castle. Now my belief is that this poet who never wrote a word and was buried at the crossroads still lives. She lives in you and in me, and in many other women who are not here tonight, for they are washing up the dishes and putting the children to bed. But she lives; for great poets do not die; they are continuing presences; they need only the opportunity to walk among us in the flesh.
|
|
dignity
dreams
empowerment
equality
feminism
fiction
gender
opportunities
poetry
self-determination
social-norms
women
women-writers
|
Virginia Woolf |
bc346df
|
Feminism is the theory. Lesbianism is the practice.
|
|
feminism
lesbianism
practice
theory
|
Alison Bechdel |
a762a0e
|
If we don't place the straitjacket of gender roles on young children, we give them space to reach their full potential.
|
|
feminism
gender-roles
gender-stereotypes
|
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie |
c2a1320
|
The people around you are mirrors, I think. You see yourself reflected in their eyes. If the mirror is true, and smooth, you see your true self. That's how you learn who you are.
|
|
feminism
how-to-be-a-woman
life
person
self
|
Caitlin Moran |
27b42b0
|
Even if it has not been your habit throughout your life so far, I recommend that you learn to think positively about your body.
|
|
feminism
sex-positive
|
Ina May Gaskin |
f21dbf5
|
"Why does the social order feel the need to defend itself by evading the fact of real women, our faces and voices and bodies, and reducing the meaning of women to these formulaic and endlessly reproduced "beautiful" images? Though unconscious personal anxieties can be a powerful force in the creation of a vital lie, economic necessity practically guarantees it. An economy that depends on slavery needs to promote images of slaves that "justify" the institution of slavery. Western economies are absolutely dependent now on the continued underpayment of women. An idealogy that makes women feel "worth less" was urgently needed to counteract the way feminism had begun to make us feel worth more. This does not require a conspiracy; merely an atmosphere. The contemporary economy depends right now on the representation of women within the beauty myth."
|
|
aging
beauty
body-image
cosmetic-surgery
cosmetics
culture
diet-industry
double-standards
eating-disorders
equality
fashion-industry
feminism
images
magazines
marketing
mass-culture
objectification
plastic-surgery
pornography
self-esteem
sexuality
society
|
Naomi Wolf |
f2e0593
|
[In 16th century European society] Marriage was the triumphal arch through which women, almost without exception, had to pass in order to reach the public eye. And after marriage followed, in theory, the total self-abnegation of the woman.
|
|
empowerment
feminism
gender
history
independence
inequality
marriage
married-life
matrimony
men
misogyny
perception
self-abnegation
self-determination
social-norms
subjugation
wedlock
women
women-s-rights
|
Antonia Fraser |
ff59144
|
Sofia the kind of woman no matter what she have in her hand she make it look like a weapon.
|
|
defence
feminism
humour
independence
strong-woman
weapon
|
Alice Walker |
c08f235
|
A distinction must be made between that writing which enables us to hold on to life even as we are clinging to old hurts and wounds and that writing which offers to us a space where we are able to confront reality in such a way that we live more fully. Such writing is not an anchor that we mistakenly cling to so as not to drown. It is writing that truly rescues, that enables us to reach the shore, to recover.
|
|
feminism
memoir
writing
|
bell hooks |
f9090c3
|
"Self-denial can lock women into a smug and critical condescension to other, less devout women. According to Appel, cult members develop..."an attitude of moral superiority, a contempt for secular laws, rigidity of thought, and the diminution of regard for the individual." A premium is placed on conformity to the cult group; deviation is penalized. "Beauty" is derivative; conforming to the Iron Maiden [an intrinsically unattainable standard of beauty that is then used to punish women physically and psychologically for failure to achieve and conform to it] is "beautiful." The aim of beauty thinking, about weight or age, is rigid female thought. Cult members are urged to sever all ties with the past: "I destroyed all my fat photographs!"; "It's a new me!"
|
|
aging
beauty
body-image
cosmetic-surgery
cosmetics
culture
diet-industry
dieting
double-standards
eating-disorders
equality
fashion-industry
feminism
images
magazines
marketing
mass-culture
objectification
plastic-surgery
pornography
self-esteem
sexual-violence
sexuality
society
|
Naomi Wolf |
544bdf3
|
"She may resent because she resents feeling ugly in sex--or, if "beautiful," her body defined and diminished by pornography. It inhibits in her something she needs to live, and gives her the ultimate anaphrodisiac: the self-critical sexual gaze. Alice Walker's essay "Coming Apart" investigates the damage done: Comparing herself to her lover's pornography, her heroine "foolishly" decides that she is not beautiful."
|
|
aging
beauty
body-image
cosmetic-surgery
cosmetics
culture
diet-industry
double-standards
eating-disorders
equality
fashion-industry
feminism
images
magazines
marketing
mass-culture
objectification
plastic-surgery
pornography
self-esteem
sexual-violence
sexuality
society
|
Naomi Wolf |
dbba160
|
"Healthy" and "diseased," as Susan Sontag points out...are often subjective judgments that society makes for its own purposes. Women have long been defined as sick as a means of subjecting them to social control."
|
|
aging
beauty
body-image
cosmetic-surgery
cosmetics
culture
diet-industry
double-standards
equality
fashion-industry
feminism
images
magazines
marketing
mass-culture
objectification
plastic-surgery
self-esteem
sexuality
society
|
Naomi Wolf |
4546eec
|
Feminism is the struggle to end sexist oppression. Therefore, it is necessarily a struggle to eradicate the ideology of domination that permeates Western culture on various levels, as well as a commitment to reorganizing society so that the self-development of people can take precedence over imperialism, economic expansion, and material desires.
|
|
domination
feminism
ideology
imperialism
oppression
politics
radical-feminism
society
|
Bell Hooks |
f1632f7
|
"At least a third of a woman's life is marked with aging; about a third of her body is made of fat. Both symbols are being transformed into operable condition-- women will only feel healthy if we are two thirds of the women we could be. How can an "ideal" be about women if it is defined as how much of a female sexual characteristic show on her body, and how much of a female life show on her face?"
|
|
aging
beauty
body-image
cosmetic-surgery
cosmetics
culture
diet-industry
double-standards
equality
fashion-industry
feminism
images
magazines
marketing
mass-culture
objectification
plastic-surgery
self-esteem
sexuality
society
|
Naomi Wolf |
0020224
|
Young women today feel vulnerable to judgment; if a harsh sentence is passed (or even suspected or projected), it is not her reputation that suffers so much as the stability of her moral universe. They did not have long to explore the sexual revolution and make it their own. Before the old chains had grown cold, while young women were still rubbing the circulation back into their ankles and taking tentative steps forward, the beauty industries levied a heavy toll on further investigations, and beauty pornography offered them designer bondage.
|
|
aging
beauty
body-image
cosmetic-surgery
cosmetics
culture
diet-industry
double-standards
eating-disorders
equality
fashion-industry
feminism
images
magazines
marketing
mass-culture
objectification
plastic-surgery
pornography
self-esteem
sexuality
society
|
Naomi Wolf |
2f45c1b
|
"Beauty" and sexuality are both commonly misunderstood as some transcendent inevitable fact; falsely interlocking the two makes it seem doubly true that a woman must be "beautiful" to be sexual. That of course is not true at all. The definitions of both "beautiful" and "sexual" constantly change to serve the social order, and the connection between the two is a recent invention."
|
|
aging
beauty
body-image
cosmetic-surgery
cosmetics
culture
diet-industry
double-standards
eating-disorders
equality
fashion-industry
feminism
images
magazines
marketing
mass-culture
objectification
plastic-surgery
pornography
self-esteem
sexual-violence
sexuality
society
|
Naomi Wolf |
766e7b6
|
"Miss Dearheart gave him a very brief look, and shook her head. There was movement under the table, a small fleshy kind of noise and the drunk suddenly bent forward, colour draining from his face. Probably only he and Moist heard Miss Dearheart purr: 'What is sticking in your foot is a Mitzy "Pretty Lucretia" four-inch heel, the most dangerous footwear in the world. Considered as pounds per square inch, it's like being trodden on by a very pointy elephant. Now, I know what you're thinking: you're thinking, "Could she press it all the way through to the floor?" And, you know, I'm not sure about that myself. The sole of your boot might give me a bit of trouble, but nothing else will. But that's not the worrying part. The worrying part is that I was forced practically at knifepoint to take ballet lessons as a child, which means I can kick like a mule; you are sitting in front of me; and I have another shoe . Good, I can see you have worked that out. I'm going to withdraw the heel now.' There was a small 'pop' from under the table. With great care the man stood up, turned and, without a backward glance, lurched unsteadily away. 'Can I bother you?' said Moist. Miss Dearheart nodded, and he sat down, with his legs crossed. 'He was only a drunk,' he ventured. 'Yes, men say that sort of thing,' said Miss Dearheart."
|
|
drunkenness
feminism
high-heels
humor
|
Terry Pratchett |
02709cb
|
"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."
|
|
feminism
gender
rebecca-solnit
violence
|
Rebecca Solnit |
c75fe9e
|
"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 donors and to employ the Oval Office as a massage parlor? You have to be able to forget, first, what happened to those who complained, or who told the truth, last time. It's often said, by people trying to show how grown-up and unshocked they are, that all Clinton did to get himself impeached was lie about sex. That's not really true. What he actually lied about, in the perjury that also got him , was the
|
|
bill-clinton
corruption
feminism
gennifer-flowers
hillary-clinton
juanita-broaddrick
kathleen-willey
lies
lincoln-bedroom
monica-lewinsky
oval-office
perjury
politics
rape
sex
sleaze
smear-campaign
united-states
united-states-elections-2008
white-house
|
Christopher Hitchens |
e895589
|
"The questions that we have to ask and to answer about that procession during this moment of transition are so important that they may well change the lives of men and women forever. For we have to ask ourselves, here and now, do we wish to join that procession, or don't we? On what terms shall we join that procession? Above all, where is it leading us, the procession of educated men?...Let us never cease from thinking--what is this "civilisation" in which we find ourselves? What are these ceremonies and why should we take part in them? What are these professions and why should we make money out of them? Where in short is it leading us, the procession of the sons of educated men?"
|
|
feminism
women
|
Virginia Woolf |
4fb4ce7
|
In this martial world dominated by men, women had little place. The Church's teachings might underpin feudal morality, yet when it came to the practicalities of life, a ruthless pragmatism often came into play. Kings and noblemen married for political advantage, and women rarely had any say in how they or their wealth were to be disposed in marriage. Kings would sell off heiresses and rich widows to the highest bidder, for political or territorial advantage, and those who resisted were heavily fined. Young girls of good birth were strictly reared, often in convents, and married off at fourteen or even earlier to suit their parents' or overlord's purposes. The betrothal of infants was not uncommon, despite the church's disapproval. It was a father's duty to bestow his daughters in marriage; if he was dead, his overlord or the King himself would act for him. Personal choice was rarely and issue. Upon marriage, a girl's property and rights became invested in her husband, to whom she owed absolute obedience. Every husband had the right to enforce this duty in whichever way he thought fit--as Eleanor was to find out to her cost. Wife-beating was common, although the Church did at this time attempt to restrict the length of the rod that a husband might use.
|
|
eleanor-of-aquitaine
feminism
history
life
marriage
medieval
medieval-history
oppression
politics
royalty
serfdom
slavery
|
Alison Weir |
1795576
|
"Where woman do not fit the Iron Maiden [societal expectations/assumptions about women's bodies], we are now being called monstrous, and the Iron Maiden is exactly that which no woman fits, or fits forever. A woman is being asked to feel like a monster now though she is whole and fully physically functional. The surgeons are playing on the myth's double standard for the function of the body. A man's thigh is for walking, but a woman's is for walking and looking "beautiful." If women can walk but believe our limbs look wrong, we feel that our bodies cannot do what they are meant to do; we feel as genuinely deformed and disabled as the unwilling Victorian hypochondriac felt ill."
|
|
aging
beauty
body-image
cosmetic-surgery
cosmetics
culture
diet-industry
double-standards
eating-disorders
equality
fashion-industry
feminism
images
magazines
marketing
mass-culture
objectification
plastic-surgery
pornography
self-esteem
sexual-violence
sexuality
society
|
Naomi Wolf |
70e73c5
|
Women and our right to choose were going to be challenged with Ashcroft around. When Bush appointed Ashcroft, I went out and got me four abortions. I stocked up. The doctor was like, 'Listen, you're not pregnant.' I said, 'Hey, just shut up and do your job. I'm exercising my right while I can, dammit.
|
|
feminism
humor
|
Wanda Sykes |
be0c072
|
"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."
|
|
assault
assaults
behavior
catcalling
communication
culture
disrespect
feminism
gender
gender-roles
harassment
men-and-women
men-s-behavior
misogynist
misogyny
not-listening
personal-autonomy
personal-experience
personal-experiences
personal-space
predators
predatory-behavior
problems-in-the-world
problems-of-today
problems-with-men
problems-with-society
rape
rape-culture
rapists
saying-no
sexism
sexual-abuse
sexual-assault
sexual-violence
sexuality
street-harassment
survivors
verbal-abuse
victims
women
women-and-men
women-s-experiences
women-s-issues
women-s-rights
|
Jon Krakauer |
4d7bb1b
|
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 becomes a male body. The Divine Image from woman, severing, immortality from the garden, exile, the golden calf split, birth, sorrow, suffering. We were told that the blood of a woman after childbirth conveys uncleanness. That if a woman's uterus is detached and falls to the ground, that she is unclean. Her body from the sacred. Spirit from flesh. We were told that if a woman has an issue and that issue in her flesh be blood, she shall be impure for seven days. The impure from the pure. The defiled from the holy. And whoever touches her, we heard, was also impure. Spirit from matter. And we were told that if our garments are stained we are unclean back to the time we can remember seeing our garments unstained, that we must rub seven substances over these stains, and immerse our soiled garments. Separation. The clean from the unclean. The decaying, the putrid, the polluted, the fetid, the eroded, waste, defecation, from the unchanging. The changing from the sacred. We heard it spoken that if a grave is plowed up in a field so that the bones of the dead are lost in the soil of the field, this soil conveys uncleanness. That if a member is severed from a corpse, this too conveys uncleanness, even an olive pit's bulk of flesh. That if marrow is left in a bone there is uncleanness. And of the place where we gathered to weep near the graveyard, we heard that planting and sowing were forbidden since our grieving may have tempted unclean flesh to the soil. And we learned that the dead body must be separated from the city. Death from the city. Wilderness from the city. Wildness from the city. The Cemetery. The Garden. The Zoological Garden. We were told that a wolf circled the walls of the city. That he ate little children. That he ate women. That he lured us away from the city with his tricks. That he was a seducer and he feasted on the flesh of the foolish, and the blood of the errant and sinful stained the snow under his jaws. The errant from the city. The ghetto. The ghetto of Jews. The ghetto of Moors. The quarter of prostitutes. The ghetto of blacks. The neighborhood of lesbians. The prison. The witch house. The underworld. The underground. The sewer. Space Divided. The inch. The foot. The mile. The boundary. The border. The nation. The promised land. The chosen ones.
|
|
feminism
separation
|
Susan Griffin |
dc3c50f
|
Of course, women are capable of all sorts of major unpleasantness, and there are violent crimes by women, but the so-called war of the sexes is extraordinarily lopsided when it comes to actual violence. Unlike the last (male) head of the International Monetary Fund, the current (female) head is not going to assault an employee at a luxury hotel; top-ranking female officers in the US military, unlike their male counterparts, are not accused of any sexual assaults; and young female athletes, unlike those male football players in Steubenville, aren't likely to urinate on unconscious boys, let alone violate them and boast about it in YouTube videos and Twitter feeds. No female bus riders in India have ganged up to sexually assault a man so badly he dies of his injuries, nor are marauding packs of women terrorizing men in Cairo's Tahrir Square, and there's no maternal equivalent to the 11 percent of rapes that are by fathers or stepfathers.
|
|
feminism
gender
human-rights
rebecca-solnit
|
Rebecca Solnit |
54e3c7f
|
Recently, a lot of Americans have swapped the awkward phrase 'same-sex marriage' for the term 'marriage equality'. This phrase is ordinarily implied to mean that same-sex couples will have the rights different-sexed couples do. But it could also mean that marriage is between equals. That's not what traditional marriage was. Throughout much of history in the west, the laws defining marriage made the husband essentially an owner and the wife a possession. Or the man a boss and the woman a slave.
|
|
feminism
heterosexuality
homosexuality
marriage
marriage-equality
same-sex-marriage
the-west
|
Rebecca Solnit |
56979f4
|
The validity of the cook's work is to be found only in the mouths of those at her table; she needs their approbation, demands that they appreciate her dishes and call for second helpings; she is upset if they are not hungry, to the point that one wonders whether the fried potatoes are for her husband or her husband for the fried potatoes.
|
|
feminism
second-sex
women
|
Simone de Beauvoir |
76fae72
|
They wanted their girls to be safe. To do what they had to do to conform, to defer, to survive, to grow up. They wanted their girls never to grow up. Never to stop burning. They wanted their girls to say fuck it, to see through the lies, to know their own strength. They wanted their girls to believe the things could be different this time, and they wanted it to be true. They wondered, sometimes, if they'd made a mistake. If it was dangerous, taming the wild, stealing away the words a girl might use to name her secret self. They wondered at the consequences of teaching a girl she was weak instead of warning her she was strong. They wondered, if knowing was power, what happened to power that refused to know itself; they wondered what happened that couldn't be satisfied, to pain that couldn't be felt, a rage that couldn't be spoken.
|
|
feminine-power
feminism
gender-deivide
girl
power
sexuality
woman
women
|
Robin Wasserman |
cca5332
|
Teach her to question men who can have empathy for women only if they seem them as relational rather than as individual equal humans. Men who, when discussing rape, will always say something like 'if it were my daughter or wife or sister.' Yet such men do not need to imagine a male victim of crime as a brother or son in order to feel empathy.
|
|
equality
feminism
humanity
rape-culture
sexism
|
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie |
22646c6
|
Young girls often feel strong, courageous, highly creative, and powerful until they begin to receive undermining sexist messages that encourage them to conform to conventional notions of femininity. To conform they have to give up power.
|
|
feminism
literature
love
patriarchy
relationships
|
bell hooks |
d93f3ad
|
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.
|
|
feminism
feminism-gender
gender
gender-roles
relationships
|
Lorrie Moore |
12e277f
|
Edward genially enough did not agree 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 to point out that his life--the life of the mind, the life of the book collector and music lover and indeed of the gallery-goer, appreciator of the feminine and occasional --would become simply unlivable and unthinkable in an Islamic republic. Again, he could accede politely to my point but carry on somehow as if nothing had been conceded. I came slowly to realize that with Edward, too, I was keeping two sets of books. We agreed on things like the first Palestinian , another event that took the Western press completely off guard, and we collaborated on a book of essays that asserted and defended Palestinian rights. This was in the now hard-to-remember time when all official recognition was withheld from the PLO. Together we debated Professor Bernard Lewis and Leon Wieseltier at a once-celebrated conference of the Middle East Studies Association in Cambridge in 1986, tossing and goring them somewhat in a duel over academic 'objectivity' in the wider discipline. But even then I was indistinctly aware that Edward didn't feel himself quite at liberty to say certain things, while at the same time feeling rather too much obliged to say certain other things. A low point was an almost uncritical profile of Yasser Arafat that he contributed to magazine in the late 1980s.
|
|
1986
ad-hominem
arafat
art
bernard-lewis
books
cambridge
debate
edward-said
feminism
first-intifada
intellectualism
interview-magazine
intifada
islamic-republic
israeli-palestinian-conflict
leon-wieseltier
middle-east
middle-eastern-studies
music
palestine
palestinians
theocracy
|
Christopher Hitchens |
0361b57
|
"And she answered: 'All your words are but to say: you are a woman, and your part is in the house. But when the men have died in battle and honour, you leave to be burned in the house, for the men will need it no more. But I am of the House of Eorl and not a serving-woman. I can ride and wield blade, and I do not fear either pain or death.'
|
|
Éowyn
fear
feminism
lord-of-the-rings
return-of-the-king
|
J.R.R. Tolkien |
ef24e83
|
What do you know about somebody not being good enough for somebody else? And since when did you care whether Corinthians stood up or fell down? You've been laughing at us all your life. Corinthians. Mama. Me. Using us, ordering us, and judging us: how we cook your food; how we keep your house. But now, all of a sudden, you have Corinthians' welfare at heart and break her up from a man you don't approve of. Who are you to approve or disapprove anybody or anything? I was breathing air in the world thirteen years before your lungs were even formed. Corinthians, twelve. . . . but now you know what's best for the very woman who wiped the dribble from your chin because you were too young to know how to spit. Our girlhood was spent like a found nickel on you. When you slept, we were quiet; when you were hungry, we cooked; when you wanted to play, we entertained you; and when you got grown enough to know the difference between a woman and a two-toned Ford, everything in this house stopped for you. You have yet to . . . move a fleck of your dirt from one place to another. And to this day, you have never asked one of us if we were tired, or sad, or wanted a cup of coffee. . . . Where do you get the RIGHT to decide our lives? . . . I'll tell you where. From that hog's gut that hangs down between your legs. . . . I didn't go to college because of him. Because I was afraid of what he might do to Mama. You think because you hit him once that we all believe you were protecting her. Taking her side. It's a lie. You were taking over, letting us know you had the right to tell her and all of us what to do. . . . I don't make roses anymore, and you have pissed your last in this house.
|
|
brother
father
feminism
feminist
male-privilege
mother
son
song-of-solomon
women
|
Toni Morrison |
f67b906
|
Sexual satisfaction eases the stranglehold of materialism, since status symbols no longer look sexual, but irrelevant. Product lust weakens where emotional and sexual lust intensifies. The price we pay for artificially buoying up this market is our heart's desire. The beauty myth keeps a gap of fantasy between men and women. That gap is made with mirrors; no law of nature supports it. It keeps us spending vast sums of money and looking distractedly around us, but its smoke and reflection interfere with our freedom to be sexually ourselves.
|
|
aging
beauty
body-image
cosmetic-surgery
cosmetics
culture
diet-industry
double-standards
eating-disorders
equality
fashion-industry
feminism
images
magazines
marketing
mass-culture
objectification
plastic-surgery
pornography
self-esteem
sexual-violence
sexuality
society
|
Naomi Wolf |
06886c8
|
"More than anything, I began to hate women writers. Frances Burney, Jane Austen, Elizabeth Browning, Mary Shelley, George Eliot, Virginia Woolf. Bronte, Bronte, and Bronte. I began to resent Emily, Anne, and Charlotte--my old friends--with a terrifying passion. They were not only talented; they were brave, a trait I admired more than anything but couldn't seem to possess. The world that raised these women hadn't allowed them to write, yet they had spun fiery novels in spite of all the odds. Meanwhile, I was failing with all the odds tipped in my favor. Here I was, living out Virginia Woolf's wildest feminist fantasy. I was in a room of my own. The world was no longer saying, "Write? What's the good of your writing?" but was instead saying "Write if you choose; it makes no difference to me."
|
|
elizabeth-browning
female-authors
female-empowerment
female-writers
feminism
george-eliot
jane-austen
mary-shelley
virginia-woolf
|
Catherine Lowell |
d444f0a
|
Usually adult males who are unable to make emotional connections with the women they chose to be intimate with are frozen in time, unable to allow themselves to love for fear that the loved one will abandon them.
|
|
fear-of-love
feminism
feminist
intimacy
love
manhood
masculinity
men
motherhood
|
bell hooks |
43566df
|
In the past, only some of the males, but all of the females, were able to procreate. Equality is more natural for females.
|
|
equity
femininity
feminism
history
past
|
Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
ef76878
|
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.
|
|
feminism
intersectionality
racism
|
Audre Lorde |
1bc531c
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"In a sexual double standard as to who receives consumer protection, it seems that if what you do is done to women in the name of beauty, you may do what you like. It is illegal to claim that something grows hair, or makes you taller, or restores virility, if it does not. It is difficult to imagine that the baldness remedy Minoxidil would be on the market if it had killed nine French and at least eleven American men. In contrast, the long-term effects of Retin-A are still unknown--Dr. Stuart Yusps of the National Cancer Institute refers to its prescription as "a human experiment"--and the Food and Drug Administration has not approved it yet dermatologists are prescribing it to women at a revenue of over $150 million a year." --
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aging
beauty
body-image
cosmetic-surgery
cosmetics
culture
diet-industry
double-standards
eating-disorders
equality
fashion-industry
feminism
images
magazines
marketing
mass-culture
objectification
plastic-surgery
pornography
self-esteem
sexual-violence
sexuality
society
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Naomi Wolf |
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"Never," enjoins a women's magazine, "mention the size of his [penis] in public...and never, ever let him know that anyone else knows or you may find it shrivels up and disappears, serving you right." That quotation acknowledges that critical sexual comparison is a direct anaphrodisiac when applied to men; either we do not yet recognize that it has exactly the same effect on women, or we do not care, or . A man is unlikely to be brought within earshot of women as they judge men's appearance, height, muscle tone, sexual technique, penis size, personal grooming, or taste in clothes--all of which we do. The fact is that women are able to view men just as men view women, as objects for sexual and aesthetic evaluation; we too are effortlessly able to choose the male "ideal" from a lineup and if we could have male beauty as well as everything else, most of us would not say no. But so what? Given all that, women make the choice, by and large, to take men as human beings first."
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aging
beauty
body-image
cosmetic-surgery
cosmetics
culture
diet-industry
double-standards
equality
fashion-industry
feminism
images
magazines
marketing
mass-culture
objectification
plastic-surgery
pornography
self-esteem
sexuality
society
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Naomi Wolf |
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Until recently the locus of sexual fantasy was peopled with images actually glimpsed or were sensations actually felt, or private imaginings taken from suggestions in the real world, a dream well where weightless images from it floated, transformed by imagination. It prepared children, with these hints and traces of other people's bodies, to become adults and enter the landscape of adult sexuality and meet the lover face to face. Lucky men and women are able to keep a pathway clear to that dream well, peopling it with scenes and images that meet them as they get older, created with their own bodies mingling with other bodies; they choose a lover because of a smell from a coat, a way of walking, the shape of a lip, belong in their imagined interior and resonate back in time deep into the bones that recall childhood and early adolescent imagination.
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fantasy
feminism
sex
sexuality
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Naomi Wolf |
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for frail but surprisingly strong fairies who had lost their way above ground for burned mermaids and sick vampire girls for wild wolfish women with sharp teeth and leaves in their hair
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feminism
girls
mermaids
strength
vampires
wild-women
wolves
women
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Francesca Lia Block |
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"But Grandmere is just like all those other women who go around wanting the same rights as men, but don't want to call themselves feminists. Because that isn't "feminine." --
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feminism
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Meg Cabot |
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[Our] struggle for liberation has significance only if it takes place within a feminist movement that has as its fundamental goal the liberation of all people.
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feminism
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Bell Hooks |
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When we understand love as the will to nurture our own and another's spiritual growth, it becomes clear that we cannot claim to love if we are hurtful and abusive. Love and abusive cannot coexist. Abuse and neglect are, by definition, the opposites of nurturance and care.
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bell-hooks
feminism
feminist
love
love-quotes
men
nurturance
nurturing
quotes-about-love
spiritual
spiritual-growth
women
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bell hooks |
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Fairy tales for adult readers remained popular throughout Europe well into the 19th century -- particularly in Germany, where the Brothers Grimm published their massive collection of German fairy tales (revised and edited to reflect the Brothers' patriotic and patriarchal ideals), providing inpiration for novelists, poets, and playrights among the German Romantics. Recently, fairy tale scholars have re-discovered the enormous body of work produced by women writers associated with the German Romantics: Grisela von Arnim, Sophie Tieck Bernhardi, Karoline von Gunderrode, Julie Berger, and Sophie Albrecht, to name just a few.
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fairy-tales-for-adults
feminism
germany
magical-stories
stories
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Terri Windling |
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Another kind of transcendence myth has been dramatization of human life in terms of conflict and vindication. This focuses upon the situation of oppression and the struggle for liberation. It is a short-circuited transcendence when the struggle against oppression becomes an end in itself, the focal point of all meaning. There is an inherent contradiction in the idea that those devoted to a cause have found their whole meaning in the struggle, so that the desired victory becomes implicitly an undesirable meaninglessness. Such a truncated vision is one of the pitfalls of theologies of the oppressed. Sometimes black theology, for example that of James Cone, resounds with a cry for vengeance and is fiercely biblical and patriarchal. It transcends religion as a crutch (the separation and return of much old-fashioned Negro spirituality) but tends to settle for being religion as a gun. Tailored to fit only the situation of racial oppression, it inspires a will to vindication but leaves unexplored other dimensions of liberation. It does not get beyond the sexist models internalized by the self and controlling society -- models that are at the root of racism and that perpetuate it. The Black God and the Black Messiah apparently are merely the same patriarchs after a pigmentation operation -- their behavior unaltered.
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bigotry
feminism
mary-daly
misogyny
sexism
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Mary Daly |
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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 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.
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common-law
empowerment
fathers
feminism
feudalism
gender
guardianship
history
husbands
independence
inequality
marriage
married-life
matrimony
men
misogyny
property
self-determination
social-norms
subjugation
wedlock
women
women-s-rights
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Antonia Fraser |
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Women will only be truly sexually liberated when we arrive at a place where we can see ourselves as having sexual value and agency irrespective of whether of not we are the objects of male desire.
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feminism
sexuality
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bell hooks |
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The part of the tradition that I knew best was mostly written (or rewritten for children) in England and northern Europe. The principal characters were men. If the story was heroic, the hero was a white man; most dark-skinned people were inferior or evil. If there was a woman in the story, she was a passive object of desire and rescue (a beautiful blond princess); active women (dark, witches) usually caused destruction or tragedy. Anyway, the stories weren't about the women. They were about men, what men did, and what was important to men.
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bigotry
fantasy
feminism
tradition
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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Saddest of all are the woman who were brought up to believe that self-sacrifice is the highest female virtue.
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feminism
jeanette-winterson
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Jeanette Winterson |
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Where women are honored, the divinities are pleased. Where they are despised, it is useless to pray to God.
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feminism
prayer
women
women-respect
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Victor Hugo |