Quotes About Oppression

the revolt against brutality begins with a revolt against the language that hides that brutality.

The pandemic of violence always gets explained as anything but gender, anything but what would seem to be the broadest explanatory pattern of all.

So much of feminism has been women speaking up about hitherto unacknowledged experiences, and so much of antifeminism has been men telling them these things didn't happen. You were not just raped, your rapist may say, and then if you persist there may be death threats, because killing people is the easy way to be the only voice in the room.

Mostly when people write about the trauma of gender violence, it's described as one awful, exceptional event or relationship, as though you suddnly fell into the water, but what if you're swimming through it your whole life, and there is no dry land in sight?

I just think some books are instructions on why women are dirt or hardly exist at all except as accessories or are inherently evil and empty.

Violence is one way to silence people, to deny their voice and their credibility, to assert your right to control over their right to exist. About

This should remind us that violence is first of all authoritarian. It begins with this premise: I have the right to control you.

Domestic violence, mansplaining, rape culture, and sexual entitlement are among the linguistic tools that redefine the world many women encounter daily and open the way to begin to change it.

We often say silenced, which presumes someone attempted to speak. In my case, it wasn't a silencing because no speech was stopped; it never started, or it had been stopped so far back I don't remember how it happened. It never occurred to me to speak to the men who pressured me then, because it didn't occur to me that I had the authority to assert myself thus or that they had any obligation or inclination to respect my assertions, or that my words would do anything but make things worse.

rights are more reliable than the kindness of someone who has absolute power over you.

Every woman knows what I'm talking about. It's the presumption that makes it hard, at times, for any woman in any field; that keeps women from speaking up and from being heard when they dare; that crushes young women into silence by indicating, the way harassment on the street does, that this is not their world.

There are other things I'd rather write about, but this affects everything else. The lives of half of humanity are still dogged by, drained by, and sometimes ended by this pervasive variety of violence. Think of how much more time and energy we would have to focus on other things that matter if we weren't so busy surviving.

the task of finding one's own way must be immeasurably harder when all the heroes, all the protagonists, are not only another gender but another race, or another sexual orientation, and when you find that you yourself are described as savages or the servants or the people who don't matter. There are so many forms of annihilation.

Not uncommonly, when a woman says something that impugns a man, particularly one at the heart of the status quo, especially if it has to do with sex, the response will question not just the facts of her assertion but her capacity to speak and her right to do so. Generations of women have been told they are delusional, confused, manipulative, malicious, conspiratorial, congenitally dishonest, often all at once.

We have an abundance of rape and violence against women in this country and on this Earth, though it's almost never treated as a civil rights or human rights issue, or a crisis, or even a pattern.

I felt hemmed in, hunted. Over and over women and girls were attacked, not for what they'd done, but because they were at hand when a man wished to. To punish is the word that comes to mind but for what might linger as a question. Not for who, but for what they were, we were. But really for who he was, a man who had the desire and believed he had the right to harm women. To demonstrate that his power was as boundless as her powerlessness.

Until the lion learns how to write, every story will glorify the hunter

Surely the mindset of those who think they need to win, to dominate, to punish, to reign supreme must be terrible and far from free, and giving up this unachievable pursuit would be liberatory.

You read enough books in which people like you are disposable, or are dirt, or are silent, absent, or worthless, and it makes an impact on you. Because art makes the world, because it matters, because it makes us. Or breaks us.

Like racism, misogyny can never be adequately addressed by its victims alone. The men who get it also understand that feminism is not a scheme to deprive men but a campaign to liberate us all.

Imperialism [...] also meant that the conquerors themselves regarded and instructed their imperial subjects to regard the colonized countries as the outskirts rather than the center of the world.

Only one gender at a time could be free and powerful. But we are free together or slaves together

On two occasions around that time, I objected to the behavior of a man, only to be told that the incidents hadn't happened at all as I said, that I was subjective, delusional, overwrought, dishonest—in a nutshell, female.

Pero los hombres que explican cosas aún asumen que soy, en una obscena metáfora fecundadora, un recipiente vacío que debe ser rellenado con su sabiduría y conocimiento.