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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| bdf27e1 | I do not understand the unspoken rules of trigger warnings. I cannot write the way I want to write and consider using trigger warnings. I would second-guess myself, temper the intensity of what I have to say. I don't want to do that. I don't intend to ever do that. | Roxane Gay | ||
| 23f5087 | Nemeses aren't born. They are made. | Roxane Gay | ||
| 801d0be | Their suggestions are, on one level, reasonable, mostly grounded in common sense, but these leaders traffic in respectability politics--the idea that if black (or other marginalized) people simply behave in "culturally approved" ways, if we mimic the dominant culture, it will be more difficult to suffer the effects of racism. Respectability politics completely overlook institutional racism and the ways in which the education system, the soc.. | Roxane Gay | ||
| 499d06f | There are many ways we have surrendered privacy in the information age. We willingly disclose what we've eaten for breakfast, where we spent last night and with whom, and all manner of trivial information. We submit personal information when registering for social media accounts and when making purchases online. We often surrender this information without question or reflection. These disclosures come so freely because we've long been condi.. | Roxane Gay | ||
| 2002640 | In July 2013, while in Zurich to attend Tina Turner's wedding, Winfrey was informed by a store clerk at the Trois Pommes boutique that the purse she was interested in was too expensive for her. We don't need to cry for Oprah, prevented from buying an obscenely overpriced purse, but we can recognize the incident as one more reminder that racism is so pervasive and pernicious that we will never be respectable enough to outrun racism, not here.. | Roxane Gay | ||
| 1d235e5 | As he so often does, Tyler Perry wants to have it every which way but right, and a high cost is being exacted so this man can get exactly what he wants. | Roxane Gay | ||
| 76a29a6 | I am a bad feminist because I never want to be placed on a Feminist Pedestal. People who are placed on pedestals are expected to pose, perfectly. Then they get knocked off when they fuck it up. I regularly fuck it up. Consider me already knocked off. When | Roxane Gay | ||
| e3e6ad0 | How helpless are willing to be for the greater good? That question interests me most. | Roxane Gay | ||
| 1f77361 | We are having an ongoing and critical conversation about race in America. The question on many minds, the question that is certainly on my mind, is how do we prevent racial injustices from happening? How do we protect young black children? How do we overcome so many of the institutional barriers that exacerbate racism and poverty? It's a nice idea that we could simply follow a prescribed set of rules and make the world a better place for al.. | Roxane Gay | ||
| 524782c | we don't carefully talk about rape. We live in a strange and terrible time for women. There are days when I think it has always been a strange and terrible time to be a woman. | Roxane Gay | ||
| 7ebb05c | Gender Trouble, Judith Butler asserts that gender is a performance, an unstable identity that forms through how it is performed over and over. She writes, Gender ought not to be construed as a stable identity or locus of agency from which various acts follow; rather, gender is an identity tenuously constituted in time, instituted in an exterior space through a stylized repetition of acts. The effect of gender is produced through the styliza.. | Roxane Gay | ||
| dff2801 | When we were together, he'd tell me what he wanted to do to me. He wasn't asking permission. I was not an unwilling participant. I was not a willing participant. I felt nothing one way or the other. I wanted him to love me. I wanted to make him happy.... The more I gave, the more he took. At school, he continued to look right through me. I was dying but I was happy. | Roxane Gay | ||
| 36df910 | The way we talk about gender makes it easy to forget Mars and Venus are part of the same solar system, divided by only one planet, held in the thrall of the same sun. | Roxane Gay | ||
| 49bfcd3 | I try to keep my feminism simple. I know feminism is complex and evolving and flawed. I know feminism will not and cannot fix everything. I believe in equal opportunities for women and men. I believe in women having reproductive freedom and affordable and unfettered access to the health care they need. I believe women should be paid as much as men for doing the same work. Feminism is a choice, and if a woman does not want to be a feminist, .. | Roxane Gay | ||
| d7a111a | This is no way to live but this is how I live. | Roxane Gay | ||
| 74f8888 | Privilege is a right or immunity granted as a peculiar benefit, advantage, or favor. There is racial privilege, gender (and identity) privilege, heterosexual privilege, economic privilege, able-bodied privilege, educational privilege, religious privilege, and the list goes on and on. At some point, you have to surrender to the kinds of privilege you hold. Nearly everyone, particularly in the developed world, has something someone else doesn.. | Roxane Gay | ||
| 8430feb | Stories have given me a place in which to lose myself. They have allowed me to remember. They have allowed me to forget. They have allowed me to imagine different endings and better possible worlds. | Roxane Gay | ||
| df5ef95 | Too many women are afraid to be labeled feminists, afraid to stand up and say, "Yes, I am a feminist," for fear of what that label means, for fear of how to live up to it, for fear of feminism as something essential, for fear of the punishments--both obvious and indirect--that come with openly owning feminism or doing feminism wrong." | Roxane Gay | ||
| 80b97ba | When it comes to fat, there has to be a reason. We need to be able to trace the genealogy of obesity. Without that genealogy, we are simply mystified. People need an explanation for how a person can lose such control over her body. They want to know if you come from a fat family or if you have some kind of medical condition or if you are simply weak and really love food that much. | obesity | Roxane Gay | |
| fce6ff2 | There are many instances in which an unlikable man is billed as an antihero, earning a special term to explain those ways in which he deviates from the norm, the traditionally likable. | Roxane Gay | ||
| f38941c | The world changes faster than we can fathom in ways that are complicated. These bewildering changes often leave us raw. The cultural climate is shifting, particularly for women as we contend with the retrenchment of reproductive freedom, the persistence of rape culture, and the flawed if not damaging representations of women we're consuming in music, movies, and literature. | Roxane Gay | ||
| 2ff9f28 | Damn The Man. | Roxane Gay | ||
| ed7593b | We are having inexplicable conversations about birth control, conversations where women must justify why they are taking birth control, conversations where a congressional hearing on birth control includes no women because the men in power are well aware that women don't need to be included in the conversation. We don't have inalienable rights the way men do. | Roxane Gay | ||
| b4350bd | When people wield the word "privilege," it tends to fall on deaf ears because we hear that word so damn much it has become white noise." | Roxane Gay | ||
| 1b916f9 | Ten minutes before my first class, I run to the bathroom and vomit. I'm afraid of public speaking, which makes teaching complicated. | Roxane Gay | ||
| 07b350e | We need to stop playing Privilege or Oppression Olympics because we'll never get anywhere until we find more effective ways of talking through difference. We should be able to say, "This is my truth," and have that truth stand without a hundred clamoring voices shouting, giving the impression that multiple truths cannot coexist. Because at some point, doesn't privilege become beside the point?" | Roxane Gay | ||
| 252ebee | No matter what issues I have with feminism, I am a feminist. I cannot and will not deny the importance and absolute necessity of feminism. Like most people, I am full of contradictions, but I also don't want to be treated like shit for being a woman. I am a bad feminist. I would rather be a bad feminist than no feminist at all. | Roxane Gay | ||
| 7583fc0 | When I drive to work, I listen to thuggish rap at a very loud volume even though the lyrics are degrading to women and offend me to my core. The classic Ying Yang Twins song 'Salt Shaker'? It's amazing. | rap salt-shaker women | Roxane Gay | |
| 26f545c | Sorrow allows us a freedom that happiness does not. | Roxane Gay | ||
| e936ed0 | Some experiences are universal. A girl is a girl whether she lives in West Omaha or Sweet Valley. Books are often far more than books. | humanity meaning-of-books universal-experiences universal-human-condition | Roxane Gay | |
| cb0611c | One of my biggest weaknesses, one that has always shamed me, is that I have always been lonely. I've struggled to make friends because I can be socially awkward, because I'm weird, because I live in my head. When I was young, we moved around a lot, so there was rarely any time to get to know a new place, let alone new people. Loneliness was the one familiar thing, making me this bottomless pit of need, open and gaping and desperate for anyt.. | Roxane Gay | ||
| f595bd5 | College and kindergarten aren't as different as you'd think. | Roxane Gay | ||
| 01542ed | Perhaps, then, unlikable characters, the ones who are the most human, are also the ones who are the most alive. Perhaps this intimacy makes us uncomfortable because we don't dare be so alive. | Roxane Gay | ||
| 712ab3e | When I drive to work, I listen to thuggish rap at a very loud volume even though the lyrics are degrading to women and offend me to my core. | Roxane Gay | ||
| 4dceb1d | I have my own printer. The luxury of this cannot be overstated. I randomly print out a document; I sigh happily as the printer spits it out, warm. | Roxane Gay | ||
| dfa502d | Rather than solve the real problems the United States is facing, some politicians, mostly conservative, have decided to try to solve the "female problem" by creating a smoke screen, reintroducing abortion and, more inexplicably, birth control into a national debate. Women have been forced underground for contraception and pregnancy termination before, and we will go underground again if we have to. We will risk our lives if these politician.. | Roxane Gay | ||
| 4a7b602 | There was an incident with some boys in the woods, and suddenly, I was stuffing my face with Twinkies or ordering a pizza late at night, trying to fill this ragged, ugly thing inside me that couldn't be filled or quieted. I ignored my parents and their worry entirely. All I wanted to do was eat. My body grew, became more significant, more noticeable and more invisible at the same time. Most important, though, the bigger I made my body, the .. | Roxane Gay | ||
| da209ed | My favorite definition of "feminist" is one offered by Su, an Australian woman who, when interviewed for Kathy Bail's 1996 anthology DIY Feminism, said feminists are "just women who don't want to be treated like shit." This definition is pointed and succinct, but I run into trouble when I try to expand that definition." | Roxane Gay | ||
| ec84374 | The unspeakable will be televised. | Roxane Gay | ||
| c754059 | Racial profiling is nothing more than a delusion born of our belief that we can profile danger. We want to believe we can predict who will do the next terrible thing. We want to believe we can keep ourselves safe. | Roxane Gay | ||
| f925883 | This is fiction, and if people cannot be flawed in fiction there's no place left for us to be human. | Roxane Gay | ||
| a362f5c | Privilege is a right or immunity granted as a peculiar benefit, advantage, or favor. There is racial privilege, gender (and identity) privilege, heterosexual privilege, economic privilege, ablebodied privilege, educational privilege, religious privilege, and the list goes on and on. At some point, you have to surrender to the kinds of privilege you hold. Nearly everyone, particularly in the developed world, has something someone else doesn'.. | Roxane Gay | ||
| 5723831 | I wondered why she thought she could reveal that casual racism in mixed company. I wondered, as I often do about people, what she truly thinks about me. | Roxane Gay | ||
| 5e245b1 | It's good that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is on the cover of Rolling Stone, tousled hair and all. We need a reminder that we must stop projecting our fears onto profiles built from stereotypes. We need a reminder that we will never truly know whom we need to fear. | Roxane Gay |