feminism

I would like to have been born a man, so I could leave too.

Now I know I am done. Now I know She is done. ~ Aarush Kashyap

I am not a Damsel In Distress who needs a Prince Charming. I am more of Rani Laxmi Bai who rides a Sturdy Horse.

If you grow up the type of woman men want to look at,You can let them look at you.But do not mistake eyes for hands,Or windows for mirrors.Let them see what a woman looks like.They may not have ever seen one before.If you grow up the type of woman men want to touch,You can let them touch you.Sometimes it is not you they are reaching for.Sometimes it is a bottle, a door, a sandwich, a Pulitzer, another woman __ut their hands found you first.Do not mistake yourself for a guardian, or a muse, or a promise, or a victim or a snack.You are a woman __kin and bones, veins and nerves, hair and sweatYou are not made of metaphors,Not apologies, not excuses.If you grow up the type of woman men want to hold,You can let them hold you.All day they practice keeping their bodies upright.Even after all this evolving it still feels unnatural,Still strains the muscles, holds firm the arms and spine.Only some men will want to learn what it feels like to curl themselves into a question mark around you,Admit they don__ have the answers they thought they would by now.Some men will want to hold you like the answer.You are not the answer.You are not the problem.You are not the poem, or the punchline, or the riddle, or the joke.Woman, if you grow up the type of woman men want to love,You can let them love you.Being loved is not the same thing as loving.When you fall in love,It is discovering the ocean after years of puddle jumping.It is realising you have hands.It is reaching for the tightrope after the crowds have all gone home.Do not spend time wondering if you are the type of woman men will hurt.If he leaves you with a car alarm heart.You learn to sing along.It is hard to stop loving the ocean,Even after it__ left you gasping, salty.So forgive yourself for the decisions you__e made,The ones you still call mistakes when you tuck them in at night,And know this.Know you are the type of woman who is searching for a place to call yours.Let the statues crumble.You have always been the place.You are a woman who can build it yourself.You are born to build.

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.

Girls are weighed down by restrictions, boys with demands - two equally harmful disciplines.

Radical feminism is working for the eradication of domination and elitsim in all human relationships. This would make self-determination the ultimate good and require the downfall of society as we know it today.

In Arachnia as it is spoken on Nepiy, __he_ is the pronoun for all sentient individuals of whatever species who have achieved the legal status of __oman_. The ancient, dimorphic form __e_, once used exclusively for the genderal indication of males (cf. the archaic term man, pl. men), for more than a hundred-twenty years now, has been reserved for the general sexual object of __he_, during the period of excitation, regardless of the gender of the woman speaking or the gender of the woman referred to.

Feminism will be just as oppressive to women as the media if it compels us to change who we are. The ends will not justify the means. It is like a corset that, although originally intended to make us feel good, about ourselves, has been pulled so tight that we are not left with enough room to breathe. Feminism often seems to be looking down its nose at us these days, as it militantly tells us how to behave- focusing on appearances according to a male dominated society. Have they forgotten that it is the societal viewpoint which needs to be changed? Somewhere along the line this movement got off track. After all, we are constantly being told how to look, how to age, how to eat, how to act. Can't we at least think what we want?

So, what you're saying is, just because a warrior is a woman doesn't mean they yhave to wear a chain mail bikini? Like, they could wear...real armor?

And woman should stand beside man as the comrade of his soul, not the servant of his body.

Do not settle for people who do not appreciate you, who do not know how lucky they are. Remember it is a privilege to be loved by you or even just to be touched by you. And the warmth of another body does not define your worth.

We teach our girls how not to get raped with a sense of doom, a sense that we are fighting a losing battle. When I was writing this novel, friend after friend came to me telling me of something that had happened to them. A hand up their skirt, a boy who wouldn__ take no for an answer, a night where they were too drunk to give consent but they think it was taken from them anyway. We shared these stories with one another and it was as if we were discussing some essential part of being a woman, like period cramps or contraceptives. Every woman or girl who told me these stories had one thing in common: shame. __ was drunk . . . I brought him back to my house . . . I fell asleep at that party . . . I froze and I didn__ tell him to stop . . ._ My fault. My fault. My fault. When I asked these women if they had reported what had happened to the police, only one out of twenty women said yes. The others looked at me and said, __o. How could I have proved it? Who would have believed me?_ And I didn__ have any answer for that.

Misogyny has not been completely wiped out anywhere. Rather, it resides on a spectrum, and our best hope for eradicating it globally is for each of us to expose and to fight against local versions of it, in the understanding that by doing so we advance the global struggle.

This is why we all fight so hard. Not just for the vote, but for an equal opportunity in the world.

Be a little puppet on their strings. That was what Reyn wanted from her, also. She recognized that even if he did not. He was attracted to her not just for her beauty and charm, but because she was young. He thought he could control all her actions and even her thoughts.

I'd become an uncertain creature in her mind, and I found I liked it; she couldn't fathom what else I might be doing when her eyes weren't on me.

Tell me, who is behind a great woman? That's right. No one. She has to get there herself.