womanhood

_I wanted to remove,my diamond earrings,for I felt they were,weighing a little heavy.I wanted to remove my heels,for I felt they were,taking me a little,above the ground,than I needed to be.I wanted to,throw away my blazer,for it was too much,of a thick layer,to what I am deep inside._ (Poem- Unambitious, Book- Ginger and Honey)

I__ believed I needed to be steady in myself before I could function with others__ut surviving alone no longer felt like a good way either.

For a man, the optimal evolutionary strategy is to disseminate his genes as widely as possible, given his few minutes (or, alas, seconds) of investment in each encounter. It all makes simple evolutionary sense, since a woman invests a good deal of time and effort -a nine month long, risky, strenuous pregnancy, in each offspring. Naturally she has to be very discerning in her choice of sexual partners.

It__ so unrewarding, being a woman.

Women piece together their lives from the scraps left over for them.

For my relationships with men to change, I needed to change my relationship to myself as a woman.

A woman brings so much more to the world than birth, for she can birth discovery, intelligence, invention, art, just as well as any man.

And yet, because I am without a doubt mortal, I have the troubling desire to do good, to please, to communicate my warmth, to still be very beautiful sometimes to inspire a taste for beauty. I know that these times are not fertile in grace...I am afraid tomorrow the grace of woman...may be recognized as a public utility & be socialized to the point of becoming a banal article, a bazaar object like in '93 & that one will find types of tender or amusing women with millions of copies like the creations of the big...fashion stores where it is always the same thing. I want to affirm the superiority of the god over that of the organizer of concerts for the poor.

...a woman, silent, voiceless, a mere woman who didn't bear on her shoulders the enormous responsibility of building the conquest with her words. A woman, who, contrary to what would be expected, felt relief in reclaiming her condition of submission, for it was a much more familiar sensation to be an object at the service of men than to be a creator of destiny

When they (the men, the scavengers)come for you, do not give yourselfto them so easily.Wear your strength like armour,fight like a beast.Do not let them tell you thatyou belong to them.Be fearless.Be a lion.Be like lava.Rip them apart,and burn their bones.And when you are done,tell the world that you belong to no man.That you are a lady,a warrior,a tsunami, and you belong only to yourself.

The start of empowering women comes with acknowledgment of thought that every born child is equal irrespective of its sex._

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.

Lucy could see that love unconfined, love outside convention, might well make a woman an unfit mother; you were one kind of woman or another: you were good or you were bad, as the world saw it, and no stations in between. They allowed you to choose; you could be the maternal or the erotic, but not a bit of both. The latter made you forget the former. Men married the maternal and then longed for the erotic. Or they married the erotic by mistake, and set about making it into the maternal, and then were just as disappointed.

According to the Talmud, loshon hara kills three people: the one who speaks it, the one who hears it, and the one about whom it is told. 'Kill' may strike the modern reader as a bit hyperbolic, but when you think of all the friendships lost, careers stunted, and opportunities thwarted as a result of gossip among women, violent language seems appropriate. We cause serious collateral damage to the advancement of our sex each time we perpetuate the stereotype that women can't get along.

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.

Oh really?__ Megan said while waggling her eyebrows._ __hat skills are we talking about and which room are they useful in?_ __ Ella rolled her eyes at her little sister._ __egan, you just single handedly set the women__ movement back twenty years._ __ __h, Ella, on the contrary._ The women__ movement involves many theories of women taking back their sexual prowess in the bedroom as a way to challenge the dominant alpha male in the relationship._ Seeing women as sexual equals is a very relevant and useful tool for the advancement of the equality for women in all realms of society.

What sort of world might it have been if Eve had refused the Serpents offer and had said to him instead, "Let me not be like God. Let me be what I was made to be -- let me be a woman?

We view men__ gifts as vital to the church. In contrast, we caution women to exercise their gifts discreetly to avoid causing problems or trespassing some invisible line _ which changes location from church to church, sometimes even within the same denomination.