Quotes About Feminism

Treating feminism like it's a personal accessory that just isn't appropriate anymore obscures the places where feminism hasn't made strides for people who still need it.

The rise of feminist underpants is a weird twist on Karl Marx's theory of commodity fetishism, wherein consumer products once divorced from inherent use value are imbued with all sorts of meaning. To brand something as feminist doesn't involve ideology, or labor, or policy, or specific actions or processes. It's just a matter of saying, 'This is feminist because we say it is.

The diversity of voices, issues, approaches, and processes required to make feminism work as an inclusive social movement is precisely the kind of knotty, unruly insurrection that just can't be smoothed into a neat brand.

A big tent is great and all, but there has to be a line in the sand, and I'm pretty sure the desire to legislate other women's bodies is it.

Empowertising not only builds on the idea that any choice is a feminist choice if a self-labeled feminist deems it so, but takes it a little bit further to suggest that being female is in itself something that deserves celebration.

Surely the freedom of women must mean more to us than the freedom of pimps.

All this talk, for and against and about babies, " wrote Charlotte Perkins Gilman, "is by men. One would think the men bore the babies, nursed the babies, reared the babies.. . . The women bear and rear the children. The men kill them. Then they say: 'We are running short of children—make some more.

Critiques of rape, pornography, and prostitution are "sex-negative" without qualification or examination, perhaps because so many men use these ignoble routes of access and domination to get laid, and without them the number of fucks would so significantly decrease that men might nearly be chaste.

Women, it is said, have a bad attitude toward sex. Women, it not said often enough, have a long-lived resentment against forced-sex and a longing for freedom.

Women have been taught that, for us, the earth is flat, and that if we venture out, we will fall off the edge.

Women intend to save themselves when sacrificing some women, but only the freedom of all women protects any woman.

Because feminism is a movement for liberation of the powerless by the powerless in a closed system based on their powerlessness, right-wing women judge it a futile movement. Frequently they also judge it a malicious movement in that it jeopardizes the bargains with power that they can make; feminism calls into question for the men confronted by it the sincerity of women who conform without political resistance.

Women are objects, commodities, some deemed more expensive than others. But it is only by asserting one's humanness every time, in all situations, that one becomes someone as opposed to something. That, after all is the core of our struggle.

Men hate intelligence in women. It cannot flame; it cannot burn; it cannot burn out and end up in ashes, having been consumed in adventure. It cannot be cold, rational, ice; no warm womb would tolerate a cold, icy, splendid mind. It cannot be ebullient and it cannot be morbid; it cannot be anything that does not end in reproduction or whoring. It cannot be what intelligence is: a vitality of mind that acts directly in and on the world, without mediation.

The new pornography is left-wing; and the new pornography is a vast graveyard where the Left has gone to die. The Left cannot have its whores and its politics too

I am one of those serious women.

It was the pornographers, not feminists, who punished women in the public square, as puritans had, for being sexual.

Men on Women For men, their right to control and abuse the bodies of women is the one comforting constant in a world rigged to blow up but they do not know when." "Coitus as punishment for the happiness of being together" which is profound and moving.

RIDDLE: Q: Why haven't women made great works of art? A: Because they are great works of art.

Sitting with Ricki [Abrams], talking with Ricki, I made a vow to her: that I would use everything I knew, including from prostitution, to make the women`s movement stronger and better; that I`d give my life to the movement and for the movement. I promised to honour-bound to the well-being of women, to do anything necessary for that well-being. I promised to live and to die if need be for women. I made that vow some thirty years ago, and I have not betrayed it yet.

Rape is no excess, no aberration, no accident, no mistake--it embodies sexuality as the the culture defines it.

With the possible exception of the Shakers, it is difficult to think of an American movement that has failed more spectacularly than antipornography feminism.

Only the toughest among women will make the necessary next moves, the revolutionary moves, and among prostituted women one finds the toughest if not always the best. If prostituted women worked together to end male supremacy, it would end. Surviving degradation is an ongoing process that gives you rights, honor and knowledge, because you earn them.

Jeder richtige Gedanke ist eine wahrhafte Eroberung für Frauen unter der Herrschaft von Männern. Sie wissen nicht, wie schwer es ist, freundlich zu sein. Unser Unterdrücker verbreitet seine Version von uns überall, auf Wänden, in den Zeitungen, auf der Kinoleinwand. Wie Giftgas sickert sie ein. Jedes Wort, das wir äußern, ist eine Erklärung unserer Rechte. Jede Geste ist ein Bekenntnis. Ich mache Gesten.