x

x"It’s easy to be against rape and abuse, you see, as long as it’s in the abstract, as long as the abusers are some nebulous other, as long as the proposed solution does not require any tough choices to be made, expose anyone […] to actual accountability or threaten to actually change the way things are. Everybody’s against rape as long as we’re not proposing to do anything about it."
— https://yesmeansyesblog.wordpress.com/2012/03/23/theres-a-war-on-part-1-troubles-been-brewing/

x"No one who understands the feminist movement, or who knows the soul of a real woman, would make the mistake of supposing that the modern woman is fighting because she wants to be a man. That idea is the invention of masculine intelligence. Woman is fighting today, as she has all the way through the ages, for the freedom to be a woman."
— Anne B. Hamman

x"A man can be a hero if he is a scientist, or a soldier, or a drug addict, or a disc jockey, or a crummy mediocre politician. A man can be a hero because he suffers and despairs; or because he thinks logically and analytically; or because he is ‘sensitive’; or because he is cruel. Wealth establishes a man as a hero, and so does poverty. Virtually any circumstance in a man’s life will make him a hero to some group of people and has a mythic rendering in the culture — in literature, art, theater, or the daily newspapers."
— Andrea Dworkin

A man, not a woman.

x"Now, what peculiarly signalizes the situation of woman is that she – a free and autonomous being like all human creatures – nevertheless finds herself living in a world where men compel her to assume the status of the Other. They propose to stabilize her as object and to doom her to immanence since her transcendence is to be overshadowed and for ever transcended by another ego (conscience) which is essential and sovereign. The drama of woman lies in this conflict between the fundamental aspirations of every subject (ego) – who always regards the self as the essential and the compulsions of a situation in which she is the inessential. How can a human being in woman’s situation attain fulfillment? What roads are open to her? Which are blocked? How can independence be recovered in a state of dependency? What circumstances limit woman’s liberty and how can they be overcome? […] I am interested in the fortunes of the individual as defined not in terms of happiness but in terms of liberty."
— Simone de Beauvoir, from The Second Sex

x

x"Slut-shaming collapses the complexity of another person onto a single dimension. But even more so, given how slut-shaming is used to control and shame all women regardless of their sexual practices or desires, it conflicts directly with respecting them. If you say that you respect women, then you need to respect all women, no matter how many sexual partners she has, her relationship choices, or how she enjoys sex. Otherwise, you’re saying that your respect is something that someone has to buy. I don’t think that that’s really respect at all."
— Charlie Glickman

x"Why is there so much self-denigration and envy [among women]? Because every woman somehow finds herself, without her consent, entered into a beauty contest with every other woman. No matter how irrelevant to her goals, how inappropriate to her talents and endowments, or how ridiculous the comparison, women are always compared one to another and found wanting. [It’s a word where] Hillary Clinton’s haircuts…get as much press coverage as [her] words and actions."
— Nancy Etcoff, from Survival of the Prettiest

x"What I don’t understand, or rather, I do understand all too well, and don’t like, is why […] it is almost always the girl branded as the criminal for the ‘confessional’ and asked to feel bad, to feel guilt or shame for writing the truths of their experiences, are sometimes even diagnosed as being borderline, inappropriate, toxic, etc., while men have written of their affairs and sexual relationships always and their ethics are rarely questioned. This to me is a form of discipline and punishment that we internalize, which is why so many women writers self-censor. You know what it’s called when male writers write of their sexual exploits? Literature."
— Kate Zambreno

x"The belief that female sexual expression is uniquely dehumanizing is a double standard, no matter how much you dress it up in feminist language. Instead of condemning young women for the length of their skirts, why not use that energy for condemning anyone who would think that a woman is lesser-than because she wears a miniskirt?"
— Amanda Marcotte

x"The claim that sex workers ‘sell our bodies’ is not only logically absurd (I was a prostitute for years, but my body is still right here with me), but totally sexist because it is based on the notion that a woman’s sexuality is her entire worth. The belief behind this expression is that since a woman has nothing of value to offer except her sexuality, if she ‘sells’ that she has ‘sold herself’ and there is nothing left. The fact that anti-sex worker activists use this expression so often says a lot about them."
— Maggie McNeal

x"As Gloria Steinem once said, gender is a prison for both women and men. The difference, she said, is that for men it’s a prison with wall-to-wall carpeting and someone to bring you coffee."
— Susan M. Shaw and Janet Lee, from Women’s Voices, Feminist Visions: Classic and Contemporary Readings