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Quotes About Gender

Being treated nicely felt wrong somehow, as if we were acting out what a relationship should be rather than being in it. For men who hate women, an admission like this one is proof that see, women want a guy who treats them like shit but that's not true either. What is closer to the truth is that when confronted with the love you deserve, it is easier to mock it than accept it.
~ Jessica Valenti
In addition to shaming sexual-assault victims, positioning abstinence as women's domain further promotes the notion that it's women's morality that's on the line when it comes to sex, men just can't help themselves, so their ethics are safe from criticism.
~ Jessica Valenti
No matter the content, the message is clear: we are here for their enjoyment and little else. We have to walk through the rest of our day knowing that our discomfort gave someone a hard-on.
~ Jessica Valenti
According to the virginity movement, men have no self-control when it comes to anything sexual.
~ Jessica Valenti
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.
~ Jessica Valenti
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.
~ Jessica Valenti
Because while my daughter lives in a world that knows what happens to women is wrong, it has also accepted this wrongness as inevitable.
~ Jessica Valenti
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"?
~ Jessica Valenti
All women live in objectification the way fish live in water. —Catharine A. MacKinnon WHEN
~ Jessica Valenti
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.
~ Jessica Valenti
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.
~ Jessica Valenti
By fetishizing youth and virginity, we're supporting a disturbing message: that really sexy women aren't women at all- they're girls.
~ Jessica Valenti
There's nothing revolutionary about reinforcing the virgin/whore dichotomy.
~ Jessica Valenti
Still, somehow, inexplicably, "man-hater" is a word tossed around with insouciance as if this was a real thing that did harm. Meanwhile we have no word for men who kill women. Is the word just "men"?
~ Jessica Valenti
What is crazy about killing a woman in a culture that tells you that women's lives are worth nothing?
~ Jessica Valenti
Men's pain and existential angst are the stuff of myth and legend and narratives that shape everything we do, but women's pain is a backdrop - a plot development to push the story along for the real protagonists. Disrupting that story means we're needy or selfish, or worst of all, man-haters - as if after all men have done to women over the ages the mere act of not liking them for it is most offensive.
~ Jessica Valenti
Sometimes we call these men domestic abusers when the victim is someone they know, but when they kill strangers to them, we just call these men crazy. Lone wolves. Unbalanced. But here's the thing - what is crazy about killing a woman in a culture that tells you women's lives are worth nothing?
~ Jessica Valenti
As Robert Jensen wrote in 'Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity,' 'Pornography as a mirror shows us how men see women. Not all men, of course--but the ways in which many men who accept the conventional conception of masculinity see women. It's an unsettling look in that mirror.
~ Jessica Valenti
The thing is, naked women aren't the problem--a woman believing her only value is sexual is what's dangerous. It's not only women's sexuality that we have to watch out for, it's the way men construct it.
~ Jessica Valenti
Whether you're wearing your baby or not, whether you're using cloth diapers or teaching your four-week-old to use the toilet: it's still women who are doing the bulk of child care, no matter what the parenting philosophy
~ Jessica Valenti
The idea is that women are supposed to do all they can to limit men's access to female sexuality (and women themselves, really), and men are meant to do all they can to convince women otherwise. This sets up a sexual dynamic that assumes women don't want to have sex and therefore need to be convinced to do so--and that this "convincing" is a natural paer of seduction. But too often, underlying this model, what is called "seduction" is actually coercion.
~ Jessica Valenti
The idea is that women are supposed to do all they can to limit men's access to female sexuality (and women themselves, really), and men are meant to do all they can to convince women otherwise. This sets up a sexual dynamic that assumes women don't want to have sex and therefore need to be convinced to do so--and that this "convincing" is a natural part of seduction. But too often, underlying this model, what is called "seduction" is actually coercion.
~ Jessica Valenti
Men's pain and existential angst are the stuff of myth and legends and narratives that shape everything that we do, but women's pain is a backdrop - a plot development to push the story along for the real protagonists. Disrupting the story means we're needy or selfish, or worst of all, man-haters - as if after all men have done to women over the ages the mere act of not liking them for it is most offensive.
~ Jessica Valenti
Abstinence-only education seeks to create a world where everyone is straight, women are relegated to the home, the only appropriate family is a nuclear one, reproductive choices are negated, and the only sex people have is for procreation.
~ Jessica Valenti