Quotes About Awareness

I coined a term a while ago, privelobliviousness, to try to describe the way that being the advantaged one, the represented one, often means being the one who doesn't need to be aware and, often, isn't.

Women are afraid of being raped and murdered all the time and sometimes that's more important to talk about than protecting male comfort levels. Or

But ignorance is one form of tolerance, whether it's pretending we live in a colorblind society or one in which misogyny is some quaint old thing we've gotten over.

In my room, the world is beyond my understanding; / But when I walk I see that it consists of three or four hills and a cloud.—WALLACE STEVENS, "OF THE SURFACE OF THINGS

Walking allows us to be in our bodies and in the world without being made busy by them. It leaves us free to think without being wholly lost in our thoughts

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.

Some men told me they wished someone would sexually harass them, because they seemed to be unable to imagine it as anything but pleasant invitations from attractive people. No one was offering the help of recognizing what I was experiencing or agreeing that I had the right to be safe and free. It was a kind of collective gaslighting.

Comfort is often a code word for the right to be unaware.

Many of the great humanitarian and environmental campaigns of our time have been to make the unknown real, the invisible visible, to bring the faraway near, so that the suffering of sweatshop workers, torture victims, beaten children, even the destruction of other species and remote places, impinges on the imagination and perhaps prompts you to act.

Walking is a state in which the mind, body, and the world are aligned… it produces thoughts, experiences, arrivals.

Finding ways to appreciate advances without embracing complacency is a delicate task. It involves being hopeful and motivated and keeping eyes on the prize ahead. Saying that everything is fine or that it will never get any better are ways of going nowhere or of making it impossible to go anywhere. Either approach implies that there is no road out or that, if there is, you don't need to or can't go down it. You can. We have.

We have far more than eighty-seven thousand rapes in this country every year, but each of them is invariably portrayed as an isolated incident.

the students were asked what they do to stay safe from rape. The young women described the intricate ways they stayed alert, limited their access to the world, took precautions, and essentially thought about rape all the time (while the young men in the class, he added, gaped in astonishment). The chasm between their worlds had briefly and suddenly become visible.

So many men murder their partners and former partners that we have well over a thousand homicides of that kind a year—meaning that every three years the death toll tops 9/11's casualties, though no one declares a war on this particular kind of terror.

Even if we can't completely comprehend, we might care.

Women are afraid of being raped and murdered all the time and sometimes that's more important to talk about than protecting male comfort levels.

Finding ways to appreciate advances without embracing complacency is a delicate task.

A lone walker is both present and detached from the world around, more than an audience but less than a participant.

Political awareness without activism means looking at the devastation, your face turned toward the center of things. Activism can generate hope because in itself it constitutes an alternative and turns away from the corruption at the center to face the wild possibilities and the heroes at the edges or at your side.

About three women a day are murdered by spouses or ex-spouses in this country.

Las mujeres entre los quince y los cuarenta y cuatro años tienen más posibilidades de morir o de ser lesionadas o desfiguradas debido a la violencia masculina que debido al cáncer, la malaria y los accidentes de tráfico juntos»

because though a rape is reported only every 6.2 minutes in this country, the estimated total is perhaps five times as high. Which means that there may be very nearly a rape a minute in the United States. It all adds up to tens of millions of rape victims. A significant portion of the women you know are survivors.

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.

When you don't hear others, you don't imagine them, they become unreal, and you are left in the wasteland of a world with only yourself in it, and that surely makes you starving, though you know not for what, if you have ceased to imagine others exist in any true deep way that matters.