feminism

Worse than that, however, was the CFO, a dapper-suited, neat-haired new age carapace containing an uninhibited misogynistic bogan, whose actual words to me, in concert with my boss in the same room were: 'To be successful you have to accept that weekends are for families.

Feminist thinking teaches us all, especially, how to love justice and freedom in ways that foster and affirm life.

What would one do if one were forced to choose between saving an innocent child__ life or engaging in unchaste behavior? This is, after all, the choice that some unfortunate women are put to__ell their bodies, or see their children starve.

The lie [of compulsory female heterosexuality] is many-layered. In Western tradition, one layer__he romantic__sserts that women are inevitably, even if rashly and tragically, drawn to men; that even when that attraction is suicidal (e. g, Tristan and Isolde, Kate Chopin__ __he Awakening_) it is still an organic imperative. In the tradition of the social sciences it asserts that primary love between the sexes is __ormal,_ that women need men as social and economic protectors, for adult sexuality, and for psychological completion; that the heterosexually constituted family is the basic social unit; that women who do not attach their primary intensity to men must be, in functional terms, condemned to an even more devastating outsiderhood than their outsiderhood as women.

Women are seen as imperfect or unclean, because of a myth of a tempting apple, because they bleed monthly, because they lack equivalent upper body strength.

What a queer topsy turvy world it was. It used to be the man who went to the wars, the woman who stayed at home. But here the positions were reversed.

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__nd 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.

People say to me, 'Has being a woman helped or hindered your career?' And the answer is yes.

You__e going to have people who are going to say __h, you know like, she just writes songs about her ex-boyfriends_ and I think frankly that__ a very sexist angle to take. No one says that about Ed Sheeran. No one says it about Bruno Mars. They__e all writing songs about their exes, their current girlfriends, their love-life, and no one raises a red flag there.

Some women get erased a little at a time, some all at once. Some reappear. Every woman who appears wrestles with the forces that would have her disappear. She struggles with the forces that would tell her story for her, or write her out of the story, the genealogy, the rights of man, the rule of law. The ability to tell your own story, in words or images, is already a victory, already a revolt.

Young women are not putting themselves in danger. The people around them are doing the real damage. Who? you might wonder. The abstinence teacher who tells her students that they'll go to jail if they have premarital sex. The well-founded organizarion that tells girls on college campuses that they should be looking for a husband, not taking women's studies classes. The judge who rules against a rape survivor because she didn't meet whatever standard for a victim he had in mind. The legislator who pushes a bill to limit young women's access to abortion because he doesn't think they're smart enough to make their own decisions. These are the people who are making the world a worse place, and a more dangerous one, at that, for girls and young women. We're just doing our best to live in it.

In seeking to understand this gendered difference in the perception of prisoners, it should be kept in mind that as the prison emerged and evolved as the major form of public punishment, women continued to be routinely subjected to forms of punishment that have not been acknowledged as such. For example, women have been incarcerated in psychiatric institutions in greater proportions than in prisons. 79 Studies indicating that women have been even more likely to end up in mental facilities than men suggest that while jails and prisons have been dominant institutions for the control of men, mental institutions have served a similar purpose for women. That deviant men have been constructed as criminal, while deviant women have been constructed as insane. Regimes that reflect this assumption continue to inform the women__ prison. Psychiatric drugs continue to be distributed far more extensively to imprisoned women than to their male counterparts.

Among the beliefs I held about the world was that being beautiful should not matter to a woman, because it was one of those things that would go away--your beauty would go away, and there wouldn't be anything you could do to bring it back.

When we combine very real workplace inequalities with these romantic opt-out stories, the idea that "having it all" is a laughable goal becomes enshrined as immutable truth. And when we portray opting out as a simple matter of "choice," we ignore the systematic problems that make combining work and motherhood so difficult.

The answers would come to her. No need to rush them. Ten years ago, but so well remember it was as if it had happened yesterday, she had suffered the repercussions brought on by thoughtless rushing. This time, she would wait. Not wait for him to act, like she had been doing these past months. She would wait to see how she would act.

The way I saw it, I was fully capable of being treated with indifference that bordered on disdain while maintaining a strong sense of self-respect. I obeyed his commands, sure that I could fulfill this role while still protecting the sacred place inside of me that I knew deserved more. Different. Better.But that isn't how it works.

You can be any sex you like provided you act male. There's no men and women in the Watch, just a bunch of lads.

Number 23 had plenty of redeeming qualities that made falling for him a justifiable accident. But our connection had nothing to do with our similarities, our differences, our aesthetic attractions, or our emotional and physical needs. When we spoke, he was truly with me. Our egos, our personas, expected social cues, the facades that everyone builds around them that are supposed to sculpt the way the world sees us, were stripped with Number 23 and I. He was immediately my best friend, familiar and safe - an epiphany that I had been spending my life alone in crowded rooms. Our souls were naked. We initially curled into the warmth of that connection. But once we knew how real it was, we felt exposed, vulnerable, and raw. While his defense was his fearful recoil, mine was dictation.