All Quotes By Tag: Feminism

“I’ve seen the way she comes on to him—I just can’t stand it. You know—what really shits me is how you spend years working on yourself to get rid of all that stupid eyelash-fluttering and giggling, and then just when you think you’re getting somewhere, you find out that guys still like women who do that sort of thing. I watch ‘em fall for it, every time.”

“It’s your world, but I make my way in it. At fifteen, no, I couldn’t stand up to you. The age of illusions, when we know nothing, we hope for everything; we’re wandering in a mist … And the half of the world that’s never had any use for us, suddenly is besieging us. You need us, you adore us, you’re suffering for us. You want everything–except to know what we think. You look deep in our eyes–and put your hand up our dress. You call us, “Pretty thing.” That confuses us. The most beautiful woman, the highest ranked, lives half dazzled by constant attention, half stifled by obvious contempt. We think all we’re good for is pleasing you–till one day, long acquaintance with you dispels the last mist. In a clear light, we suddenly see you as you are–and generally we start preferring ourselves. At thirty, I could finally say no–or really say yes. That’s when you begin backing away from us. Now I’m full-grown. I pursue my happiness the same as any man.”

“But nearly every woman I know has a roughly similar story – in fact, dozens of them: stories about being obsessed with a celebrity, work colleague or someone they vaguely knew for years; living in a parallel world in their head; conjuring up endless plots and scenarios for this thing that never actually happened.”

“Making someone feel obligated, pressured or forced into doing something of a sexual nature that they don’t want to is sexual coercion. This includes persistent attempts at sexual contact when the person has already refused you. Nobody owes you sex, ever; and no means no, always.”

“… the effort to discover an authentic self, to strip away layers of alienation and culturally imposed identity and find a soul in a clear, unimpeded communion with the sacred is consonant with spiritual quests throughout the ages. Spiritual feminists, no less than medieval mystics, are searching in the ways made available to them through their culture to separate themselves from everything in their hearts and minds that puts them at odds with the divine plan (and therefore with their own best interests), and to find a true harmony between themselves and the universe.”

“The symbol of Goddess gives us permission. She teaches us to embrace the holiness of every natural, ordinary, sensual dying moment. Patriarchy may try to negate body and flee earth with its constant heartbeat of death, but Goddess forces us back to embrace them, to take our human life in our arms and clasp it for the divine life it is – the nice, sanitary, harmonious moment as well as the painful, dark, splintered ones.If such a consciousness truly is set loose in the world, nothing will be the same. It will free us to be in a sacred body, on a sacred planet, in sacred communion with all of it. It will infect the universe with holiness. We will discover the Divine deep within the earth and the cells of our bodies, and we will lover her there with all our hearts and all our souls and all our minds.”

“There will be great reason to suspect the Men of jealousy; and it cannot be rash to say, that their only reason for locking up from us all the avenues of knowledge, is the fear of our excelling them in it. (…) Had we the same advantages of study allowed us which the Men have, there is no room to doubt but we should at least keep pace with them in the sciences, and every useful knowledge. It can only then be a mean dastardly jealousy in them to exclude us from those advantages, in which we have so natural a right to emulate them.”

“Haunted by the ‘male’ in femaleAs if we can’t stand on our ownAs if we need a tail”

“My aunt says, she is a very bad wife to her husband, because she is busy serving orphan kids and physically challenged people of our society. Everyone praises her work that she is doing really good for society. But yes! She is only a very bad wife. She says proudly and laugh.”

“Stepping into a brand new path is difficult, but not much difficult than remaining in a situation, where the rooted mindsets such as traditions, culture, lifestyle and society are not helping you to improve your life in the way you really want.”

“Religious literacy is one way out from under the thumb of fundamentalism; constructing new literacies is another.”

“What do you do, as a leftist feminist, in any church? You stay in a shitty place where you’ll never win because the systems by which it operates are so fundamentally patriarchal that there is no way out, save a revolution…So what do women do? They break away and make their own church. That happens. Or they stay and wait for eternity in faith that things will change, but things really don’t change, not much. Or they become secular.”

“As long as women are denied the priesthood, we will try to make our own rituals at our own kitchen altars and we will sew our own magical capes at our own sewing machines”

“Jews: look to Miriam, not Moses … Muslims: look to Fatimah, not Muhammad. Buddhists: remember Tara, the mother of liberation. Christians: pray to Mary for your salvation.”

“The most revolutionary change that hit the world in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries was the liberation of women. The Bible and the Qur’an came from societies controlled by men. No surprise there. That’s how the world everywhere was run until fairly recently. And there is something worth noting before we go deeper into the issue. History shows that the men in charge never volunteer to give up their privileges. They don’t wake up one day and say, ‘I’ve suddenly realised that the way I control and dominate others is wrong. I must change my ways. So I’ll share my power with them. I’ll give them the vote!’ That’s never how it works. History shows that power always has to be wrested from those who have it. The suffragettes who fought for the vote or suffrage for women learned that lesson. Men didn’t volunteer to give women the vote. Women had to fight them for it.”