Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I feel that man-hating is an honorable and viable political act, that the oppressed have a right to class-hatred against the class that is oppressing them.
The Roman Catholic church... carries the immense power of very directly affecting women's lives everywhere by its stand against birth control and abortion.
I feel that 'man-hating' is an honourable and viable political act, that the oppressed have a right to class-hatred against the class that is oppressing them.
Oppression is something that one group of people commits against another group specifically because of a threatening characteristic shared by the latter group.
In the long run, Women's Liberation will of course free men-but in the short run it's going to COST men a lot of privilege, which no one gives up willingly or easily.
It isn't until you begin to fight in your own cause that you become really committed to winning and become a genuine ally of other people struggling for their freedom.
The subtlest and most vicious aspect of women's oppression is that we have been conditioned to believe we are not oppressed, blinded so as not to see our own condition.
Legitimate revolution must be led by, made by those who have been most oppressed: black, brown, yellow, red, and white women-with men relating to that the best they can.
It isn't until you begin to fight in your own cause that you (a) become really committed to winning, and (b) become a genuine ally of other people struggling for their freedom.
I still gasp at the revealing lingo for weapons: erector launchers, thrust ratios; my teeth grind reflexively when Dubya sputters Eye-Rack and Eye-Ran have 'nookyular capabacity.
people are capable of profound metamorphosis, though unfortunately they rarely avail themselves of this genius, force of habit being an even greater enemy of change than cowardice.
Listen - life is really going on, right now, around us. Do you see it? Sometimes I lose it but if I sit still and listen, it comes back, and then I think, How funny, this is what being alive is.
Feminism is experiential; it's comparing notes. And when those stories get told, and you realize it's not just you - it's bigger - there's just a huge sigh of relief. Otherwise, you think you're crazy.
I do believe deeply that all human beings, male and female, are sexual beings, most likely bisexual beings channeled this way and that by cultures terrified of boundary crossings without passports stamped gay or straight.
Should we tolerate debate within feminism's ranks? Undebatable! But it's not so simple: women are socialised to avoid conflict; when we do differ, especially on politics and in public, it's still tediously labelled a 'catfight.'
... a phallocentric culture is more likely to begin its censorship purges with books on pelvic self-examination for women or bookscontaining lyrical paeans to lesbianism than with See Him Tear and Kill Her or similar Mickey-Spillanesque titles.
My white skin disgusts me. My passport disgusts me. They are the marks of an insufferable privilege bought at the price of others' agony. If I could peel myself inside out I would be glad. If I could become part of the oppressed I would be free.
The young women waking up to feminism now already wake up to more consciousness than my generation had. Even just simple things like equal pay - before you went, in my generation, and asked for a raise, you went through nausea and your palms sweating.
Any single path truly taken leads to all the others. What matters is choosing a starting place - where to stand and begin spinning outward. Even then, you will find that outward and inward become the same direction. The center of the wheel is everywhere.
A genuine Left doesn't consider anyone's suffering irrelevant or titillating; nor does it function as a microcosm of capitalist economy, with men competing for power and status at the top, and women doing all the work at the bottom.... Goodbye to all that.
Children, together with women, constitute 90 percent of all refugee populations on the planet as well as the vast majority of those living in absolute poverty: the 'feminization of poverty' means that children are poor, too, since most parenting is done by mothers.
We Americans forget or rewrite even our recent history, and accomplishments of any group not pale and male have tended to get downplayed or erased - one reason why Gloria Steinem, Jane Fonda and I founded the Women's Media Center: to make women visible and powerful in media.
When table utensils were invented in the 1100s, the Catholic Church condemned them as obscene and heretical, claiming, 'God gave us fingers with which to eat.' And we're supposed to get politically discouraged? Oh please. We're being opposed by people who denounced the fork.
Your life is the one place you have to spend yourself fully--wild, generous, drastic--in an unrationed profligacy of self ... And in that split second when you understand that you finally are about to die-to uncreate the world no time to do it over no more chances--that instant when you realize your conscious existence is truly flaring nova, won't you want to have used up all-all-the splendor that you are?
I haven't the faintest notion what possible revolutionary role white hetero- sexual men could fulfill, since they are the very embodiment of reactionary- vested-interest-power. But then, I have great difficulty examining what men in general could possibly do about all this. In addition to doing the shitwork that women have been doing for generations, possibly not exist? No, I really don't mean that. Yes, I really do.
Although every organized religion works overtime to contribute its own brand of misogyny to the myth of woman-hate, woman-fear, and woman-evil, the Roman Catholic church also carries the immense power of very directly affecting women's lives everywhere by its stand against birth control and abortion, and by its use of skillful and wealthy lobbies to prevent legislative change. It is an obscenity-an all-male hierarchy, celibate or not, that presumes to rule on the lives and bodies of millions of women.