Quotes from Jessica Valenti

Women who are harassed, at work, on the street, or even online, are subject to the same rigid purity standards as women who are sexually assaulted, Just by virtue of being out in public, we're overstepping certain boundaries.

I simply don't think that putting every bit of energy I have into parenting-at the expense of my career, marriage and social life-will be the difference between Layla becoming homeless or the president. But too many women are made to believe that every tiny decision they make-from pacifiers to flash cards-will have a lasting impact on their child. It's a recipe for madness. It also reveals an overblown sense of self-importance.

According to the virginity movement, men have no self-control when it comes to anything sexual.

Idolizing virginity as a stand-in for women's morality means that nothing else matters- not what we accomplish, not what we think, not what we care about and work for. Just if/how/whom we have sex with. That's all.

We say "misogynist"; I've written that "misogyny kills," but the world falls flat on your tongue - it's too academic sounding, not raw or horrifying enough to relay the truth of what it means.

Antifeminists are the only ones who benefit from their version of working on women's behalf; in reality, they put other women at risk and fail to solve any larger problems.

Edgar Allan Poe once called the death of a beautiful woman "the most poetical topic in the world" and I've often found myself wondering how many woman writers who have killed themselves or let themselves be otherwise obliterated were trying, somehow, to fulfill this most popular of narratives. We're most valuable when we're smiling, dead, posing, our words hanging on the page with no real body behind them. I'm

So remember, this is definitely a screwed-if-you-do, screwed-if-you-don't situation. You just remember to say, "Screw them.

Yes, we love the good men in our lives and sometimes, oftentimes, the bad ones too- but that we're not in full revolution against the lot of them is pretty amazing when you consider this truth: men get to rape and kill women and still come home to a dinner cooked by one.

Because while my daughter lives in a world that knows what happens to women is wrong, it has also accepted this wrongness as inevitable.

Yet despite all these things we know to be true- despite the preponderance of evidence showing the mental and emotional distress people demonstrate in violent and harassing environments- we still have no name for what happens to women living in a culture that hates them.

Beautiful' is bullshit, a standard created to make women into good consumers, too busy wallowing in self-loathing to notice that we're second-class citizens.

The less obvious hurdle is that of preparing parents emotionally and putting forward realistic images of parenthood and motherhood. There also needs to be some sort of acknowledgement that not everyone should parent - when parenting is a given, it's not fully considered or thought out, and it gives way too easily to parental ambivalence and unhappiness.

If you want what's best for your kids, one surefire way to provide them with a healthy, happy home is to make sure they have lesbian parents. In the longest-running study of lesbian families to date,2 zero percent of children reported physical or sexual abuse—not a one. In the general population, 26 percent of children report physical abuse and 8.3 percent report sexual abuse.

My father took me aside one day soon after and told me this: The things you do in your twenties are just things you do. But as you approach thirty what you do starts to become who you are. And there are some things you do not want to be forever.

When you look hard enough and long enough at your own face, everything about it starts to seem hideous.

Women politicians have definitely been known to fuck over other women. Democratic Louisiana

Consider another abstinence product: a gold rose pin handed out in schools or at Christian youth events. The pin is attached to a small card that reads, "You are like a beautiful rose. Each time you engage is pre-marital sex a previous petal is stripped away. Don't leave your future husband holding a bare stem. Abstain."Do we really want to teach our daughters that without their virginity they're nothing but a "bare stem"?

All women live in objectification the way fish live in water. —Catharine A. MacKinnon WHEN

but there is a difference between loving someone and having the ability to feel that love.

What is closer to the truth is that when confronted with the love you deserve, it is easier to mock it than accept it. Especially when everything else you have experienced of love and connection is based on something more like control or disdain.

just the word "feminist" pisses you off. How dare we. Still, no name for the men who kill women because we have the audacity not to do what we're supposed to do: fuck you, accept you, want you, let you hurt us, be blank slates for your desires. You are entitled to us but we're not even allowed to call you what you are.

There's a reason why the assumed goal for women in virginity-movement screeds is marriage and motherhood only: The movement only believes that's the only thing women are meant for.

Another abstinence book claims, "A woman is far more attracted by a man's personality, while a man is stimulated by sight. A man is usually less discriminating about those to whom he is physically attracted.