feminism

I no longer want to believe these problems are too complex for us to make sense of them.

When they play MARRY/FUCK/KILL, you'll never be KILL again!

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__y old friends__ith 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.

Before she leaves, my new friend tells me to look out of the big picture window at the parking lot."See that purple Harley out there__hat big gorgeous one? That's mine. I used to ride behind my husband, and never took the road on my own. Then after the kids were grown, I put my foot down. It was hard, but we finally got to be partners. Now he says he likes it better this way. He doesn't have to worry about his bike breaking down or getting a heart attach and totaling us both. I even put 'Ms.' on my license plate__nd you should see my grandkids' faces when Grandma rides up on her purple Harley!"On my own again, I look out at the barren sand and tortured rocks of the Badlands, stretching for miles. I've walked there, and I know that, close up, the barren sand reveals layers of pale rose and beige and cream, and the rocks turn out to have intricate womblike openings. Even in the distant cliffs, caves of rescue appear.What seems to be one thing from a distance is very different close up.I tell you this story because it's the kind of lesson that can be learned only on the road. And also because I've come to believe that, inside, each of us has a purple motorcycle.We have only to discover it__nd ride.

I don't want anyone, especially a man, telling me what I can or cannot do with my money, job, or body.

Practically every mental health care practitioner, from the most erudite psychoanalysts to untrained self-help gurus, tell us that it is infinitely more fulfilling and we are all saner if we tell the truth, yet most of us are not rushing to stand up and be counted among the truth tellers. Indeed, as someone committed to being honest in daily life I experience the constant drag of being seen as a 'freak,' for telling the truth, even when I speak truthfully about simple matters. If a friend gives me a gift and asks me to tell him or her whether I like it, I will respond honestly and judiciously; that is to say I will speak the truth in a positive, caring manner. Yet even in this situation, the person who asks for honesty will often express annoyance when given a truthful response.

It's time to leave. There is so much out there to do and say and listen to. I can go on the road, because I can come home. I come home, because I am free to leave.

You see, they were Mothers, not in our sense of helpless involuntary fecundity, forced to fill and overfill the land, every land, and then see their children suffer, sin, and die, fighting horribly with one another; but in the sense of Conscious Makers of People.

If you go door to door in our nation and talk to citizens about domestic violence, almost everyone will insist that they do not support male violence against women, that they believe it to be morally and ethically wrong. However, if you then explain that we cannot end male violence against women by challenging patriarchy, and that means no longer accepting the notion that men should have more rights and privileges than women because of biological difference or that men should have the power to rule over women, that is when the agreement stops. There is a gap between the values they claim to hold and their willingness to do the work of connecting thought and action, theory and practice to realize these values and thus create a more just society.

Being a woman, in this world, ultimately makes you crazy.

Why should she have to feel unsafe? Didn't this world belong to her as much as it belonged to any man? Yes it did. McKenna refused to let them make her feel unsafe, either by cornering her, or by making her feel like she needed one to protect her

The "new" Anglo-American feminist theory argues that too little mothering, and, in particular, the absence of mother-son connection, is what engenders both sexism and traditional masculinity in men. (...) This perspective positions mothering as central to feminist politics in its insistence that true and lasting gender equality will occur only when boys are raised as the sons of mothers. As the early feminist script of mother-son connection required the denial of the mother's power and the displacement of her identity as mother, the new perspective affirms the maternal and celebrates mother-son connection. In this, it rewrites the patriarchal and early feminist narrative to give (...) voice and presence to the mother and make mother-son connection central to the redesign of both traditional masculinity and the larger patriarchal culture.

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.

The girl's face hollowed with resignation; it had been a long time, but Sonja remembered what it was to have that face, what it was to feel you were no brighter than the dumbest man, no stronger than the weakest boy, and with those ideas crowding your head no wonder subordination was the only inevitable outcome.

Too many women are afraid to be labeled feminists, afraid to stand up and say, __es, 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__oth obvious and indirect__hat come with openly owning feminism or doing feminism wrong.

My self-respect is my biggest cock block.

Some people will bring up evolutionary biology and apes, how female apes bow to male apes - that sort of thing. But the point is this: we are not apes. Apes also live in trees and eat earthworms. We do not.

How was she not the quintessential woman in our culture, compulsively pleasing others in order to achieve some degree of perfection and power that's forever just around the corner, out of reach? It was easier for her to disappear, to free herself finally from that body, to find a perfection in dying.