Quotes About Oppression

Too, the elite often believe that if they themselves are not in control, the situation is out of control, and in their fear take repressive measures that become secondary disasters.

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.

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. It trains us in self-doubt and self-limitation just as it exercises men's unsupported overconfidence.

A woman is beaten every nine seconds in this country. Just to be clear: not nine minutes, but nine seconds.

The battle with Men Who Explain Things has trampled down many women—of my generation, of the up-and-coming generation we need so badly, here and in Pakistan and Bolivia and Java, not to speak of the countless women who came before me and were not allowed into the laboratory, or the library, or the conversation, or the revolution, or even the category called human.

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.

The point of the essay was never to suggest that I think I am notably oppressed. It was to take these conversations as the narrow end of the wedge that opens up space for men and closes it off for women, space to speak, to be heard, to have rights, to participate, to be respected, to be a full and free human being.

Both are trying to silence and punish women for claiming voice, power, and the right to participate.

Como el racismo, la misoginia nunca será abordada adecuadamente si se hace solo desde las víctimas. Los hombres que lo asumen también entienden que el feminismo no es un intento de despojar a los hombres de sus derechos, sino una campaña para liberarnos a todos.

Speaking of epidemics, one of three Native American women will be raped, and on the reservations 88 percent of those rapes are by non-Native men who know tribal governments can't prosecute them. So much for rape as a crime of passion—these are crimes of calculation and opportunism.)

That made clear to me the continuum that stretches from minor social misery to violent silencing and violent death

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. Violence doesn't have a race, a class, a religion, or a nationality, but it does have a gender

We are still in an era of battles over who will be granted the right to speak and the right to be believed

Told from the man's point of view, Vertigo is awash with romantic fog, but from the woman's perspective, it's about being forced to disappear— not from the top of a tower, but in everyday life as two successive lovers make her into someone else for their own ends, a common enough tragedy.

Her name was Africa. His name was IMF. He set her up to be pillaged, to go without health care, to starve.

The Pygmalion myth, whereby a woman is turned from insensate sculpture into a living being, happens much more frequently in reverse, as a story of women who don't need help being fully alive and aware confronted with the people who want to reduce them to something less.

No mundo todo, as mulheres entre 15 e 44 anos de idade têm mais probabilidade de morrer ou de serem mutiladas pela violência masculina do que por câncer, malária, guerras e acidentes de trânsito, tudo somado", escreve Nicholas D. Kristof, colunista do The New York Times, uma das poucas figuras de renome que trata dessa questão regularmente.

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

Women are an eternal subject, which is a lot like being subjected, or subjugated, or a subject nation, even.

Women's liberation has often been portrayed as a movement intent on encroaching upon or taking power and privilege away from men, as though in some dismal zero-sum game, only one gender at a time could be free and powerful. But we are free together or slaves together

reimposed or a new one, perhaps more oppressive or perhaps more just and free, like the disaster utopia, will arise.

It's not just public, or private, or online either. It's also embedded in our political system, and our legal system, which before feminists fought for us didn't recognize most domestic violence, or sexual harassment and stalking, or date rape, or acquaintance rape, or marital rape, and in cases of rape still often tries the victim rather than the rapist, as though only perfect maidens could be assaulted—or believed

Generations of women have been told they are delusional, confused, manipulative, malicious, conspiratorial, congenitally dishonest, often all at once.

Of course, women are capable of all sorts of major unpleasantness, and there are violent crimes by women, but the so-called war of the sexes is extraordinarily lopsided when it comes to actual violence.