“However, America was colonized by male and white people. All women experience alienation due to the overwhelming male standard based in this history. Women of color experience alienation for the overwhelming white standard, too. I consider it perfectly acceptable to expect men of all ethnicities and classes to educate themselves and take responsibility for their individual role in women’s oppression. I likewise consider it perfectly acceptable to expect white women of all classes to take responsibility for our individual role in the oppression of women of color. Women of color have no call to trust white women until white women take a gander at the world around them, investigate, learn and annihilate ignorance founded in being white in a society where the perspective and voice presented to the general public is white.” — Cunt: A Declaration of Independence by Inga Muscio (via tea-and-misanthropy)
(via feminist77)
“When I think of all the wrongs that have been heaped upon womankind, I am ashamed that I am not forever in a condition of chronic wrath, stark mad, skin and bone, my eyes a fountain of tears, my lips overflowing with curses, and my hand against every man and brother!” — Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815 — 1902), abolitionist and suffragist, author of The Woman’s Bible.
“FAGGOT!” That’s what he called me. The boy on the street with the baseball bat who followed me from Delores Park the week after I moved to San Francisco. He called me a faggot. My hair is long. My hips are wide. I wear a leather jacket and walk with a limp. But I carry a knife. What am I exactly? When he called me a faggot I knew. I knew for sure who I was and who I would not be. From the doorway of the grocery at 18th and Guerrero I yelled it at him. “Dyke! Get it right, you son of a bitch, I’m a dyke.”
Dorothy Allison, from the short story “Her Body, Mine, and His”, in Skin: Talking about Sex, Class, and Literature (1994).
“There’s no being up too late in Whileaway, or up too early, or in the wrong part of town, or unescorted. You cannot fall out of the kinship web and become sexual prey for strangers, for there is no prey and there are no strangers — the web is world-wide. In all of Whileaway there is no one who can keep you from going where you please (though you may risk your life, if that sort of thing appeals to you), no one who will follow you and try to embarrass you by whispering obscenities in your ear, no one who will attempt to rape you, no one who will warn you of the dangers of the street, no one who will stand on street corners, hot-eyed and vicious, jingling loose change in his pants pocket, bitterly bitterly sure that you’re a cheap floozy, hot and wild, who likes it, who can’t say no, who’s making a mint off it, who inspires him with nothing but disgust, and who wants to drive him crazy.” — Joanna Russ, The Female Man (1975)
“The difference between you [white women] being a whore and me being one [as a black woman] is that you can retire. In this world I’m a whore from cradle to casket.” —
all of the awards for summing up my existence in one phrase. black brilliance, ya’ll.
(via bad-dominicana)
(via karnythia)
“
What men mean when they talk about their “crazy” ex-girlfriend is often that she was someone who cried a lot, or texted too often, or had an eating disorder, or wanted too much/too little sex, or generally felt anything beyond the realm of emotionally undemanding agreement. That does not make these women crazy. That makes those women human beings, who have flaws, and emotional weak spots. However, deciding that any behavior that he does not like must be insane– well, that does make a man a jerk.
And when men do this on a regular basis, remember that, if you are a woman, you are not the exception. You are not so cool and fabulous and levelheaded that they will totally get where you are coming from when you show emotions other than “pleasant agreement.”
When men say “most women are crazy, but not you, you’re so cool” the subtext is not, “I love you, be the mother to my children.” The subtext is “do not step out of line, here.” If you get close enough to the men who say things like this, eventually, you will do something that they do not find pleasant. They will decide you are crazy, because this is something they have already decided about women in general.
” — Lady, You Really Aren’t “Crazy” (via crookedindifference)(Source: sparkamovement, via fuckyeahfeminists)
“Being a feminist doesn’t mean suddenly no longer liking problematic things. If you stopped liking everything that was sexist in media and entertainment there would be no media or entertainment left. Being a feminist, to me, is being aware of what it is you’re liking, and of its problematic aspects.” — sabrina_il (via feministsbakecupcakestoo)
(Source: glvalentine.livejournal.com, via anotherfeminist)
“I want to live in a world where little girls are not pinkified, but where little girls who like pink are not punished for it, either. We can certainly talk about the social pressures surrounding gender roles, and the concerns that people have when they see girls and young women who appear to be forced into performances of femininity by the society around them, but let’s stop acting like they have no agency and free will. Let’s stop acting like women who choose to be feminine are somehow colluders, betraying the movement, bamboozled into thinking that they want to be feminine. Let’s stop denying women their own autonomy by telling them that their expressions of femininity are bad and wrong.
Antifemininity is misogynist. What you are saying when you engage in this type of rhetoric is that you think things traditionally associated with women are wrong. Which is misogynist. By telling feminine women that they don’t belong in the feminist movement, you are reinforcing the idea that to be feminine and a woman is wrong, that women who want to be taken seriously need to be more masculine, because most people view gender presentation in binary ways. This rewards the ‘one of the boys’ type rhetoric I encounter all over the place from self-avowed feminists who seem to think that bashing on women is a good way to prove how serious they are when it comes to caring about women and bringing men into the feminist movement.”
— Get Your Anti-Femininity Out Of My Feminism by s.e. smith (via albinwonderland)
(Source: thechocolatebrigade, via thepersonalispolitic)
(Source: oklahoma-sky, via feministradical)
“When a man is homophobic or effemiphobic he is reminding us, in no uncertain terms, where he places women on the spectrum of power.” — Son of Baldwin (via sonofbaldwin)
(via disabledbyculture)
“If you are a white woman and you want to call yourself a feminist, you must acknowledge that your whiteness affords you a privilege that shields you from a lot. You must also acknowledge that you are afforded privileges that some men in this country do not have. Racism and sexism are tightly intertwined. You cannot fight one while ignoring the other.” — ladyatheist (via mamaatheist)
(via fuckyeahfeminists)
“
I mean, imagine opening The Sun every day and finding page three adorned with a photo of a pouting specimen of masculinity clad only in his Y-fronts. Imagine naked men sprawling sensuously on the bonnets of new model cars at the motor show. Imagine having to listen to some sweaty and repugnant female version of Bernard Manning telling an endless string of Father-in-Law jokes. Sure, it’s funny once. Maybe it would be funny twice. But three times? Four times? Five thousand times? Can you imagine having to live with something as insulting as that every day of your life? No wonder so many feminists are cranky.
And comics are, in their way, every bit as guilty as other media in presenting a distorted vision of women to their readers. Maybe more guilty in some respects. After all, comics tend to be aimed predominantly at a young audience, an audience that may very well be going through an impressionable stage of their lives and desperately trying to make sense of the world in which they find themselves.
” —Alan Moore, Invisible Girls and Phantom Ladies, 1983
It’s pretty amazing how you could apply this just as readily to the comics industry of today as you could 30 years ago.
(via digitalsocrates)
(via disabledbyculture)
“The man who is horrified at a woman’s “overly exposed” breasts will likely never have to worry about wearing one shirt—one shirt out of a lifetime of shirts—that happens to accidentally set off some random person’s slut meter, because of the way his body just is. And because my breasts are smaller, less visible, less imposing than other women’s breasts—because there’s less boob there—I can feel free to wear the more revealing top without attracting claims of public obscenity. It seems that some women’s bodies are just naturally sluttier than other women’s bodies—and all women’s bodies are naturally sluttier than men’s bodies.” — With Great Cleavage Comes Great Responsibility | washingtoncitypaper.com (via curvesahead: fuckyeahchubbygirls: feelthemonster: nuditynotprudity) (via sexisnottheenemy, rawwomen) (via thechocolatebrigade) (via feministwarriorprincess) (via wristsandvines) (via thepersonalispolitic)
“She hated the namelessness of women in stories, as if they lived and died so that men could have metaphysical insights.” — Chad Harbach, The Art of Fielding (via fissionaccomplished)
(via disabledbyculture)
“Reproductive control of women has taken many forms. On plantations, slave owners and overseers wielded tremendous power over female slaves and their families by raping women and deciding whether to sell off their children. In the nineteenth century, all states passed laws making abortion a crime. Around the time criminalization was consolidated, campaigns against “vice” successfully restricted women’s access to birth control devices and information that might have reduced the need for abortion. The eugenics movement succeeded in institutionalizing and sterilizing masses of “unfit” persons, ranging from developmentally disabled individuals to sexually promiscuous women. The legacy of sterilization abuse continued throughout the twentieth century, shifting primarily to African American, Native American, and Puerto Rican women.” — Rachel Roth, “Backlash and Continuity” (via wretchedoftheearth)
(via newwavefeminism)