#feminist quotes

ʚ♥︎ɞ

micasaswhat:

Not having a man doesn’t make me less of a woman.

fromayztoyou

IG: nekuratata

We are told, especially if we are women, that the answer to loneliness and frustration is to find that one, ideal partner who will fulfil all our emotional, financial, domestic and sexual needs. We are told this even though we know full well that it doesn’t work out for a lot of people. Almost half of all marriages end in divorce.

- Laurie Penny, ‘Bitch Doctrine: Essays for Dissenting Adults’

It is little girls, and not little boys, who are taught to prepare for marriage, to imagine their future roles as wives and mothers, to fear being ‘left on the shelf’. 'Bachelor’ is a term of respect, but 'spinster’ is a term of abuse, and it is women, not men, to whom the propaganda of romance is directed.

- Laurie Penny, 'Bitch Doctrine: Essays for Dissenting Adults’

The aspects of feminism currently given voice in pop culture are the most media-friendly ones, the ones that center on heterosexual relationships and marriage, on economic success that doesn’t challenge existing capitalist structures, on the right to be desirable yet have bodily autonomy. It doesn’t challenge beliefs or processes or hegemonies so much as it offers nips and tucks.

- Andi Zeisler, ‘We Were Feminists Once’

Feminism is active. It’s not something you are; it’s something you do.

- Laurie Penny, ‘Bitch Doctrine’

Beauty practices show that women are obedient, willing to do their service, and to put effort into that service. They show that women are not simply “different” but, most importantly, “deferential”. In western societies it is expressed in the requirement that women create “beauty” through figure-hugging clothing which should show large areas of their bodies for male excitement, through make-up, hairstyles, depilation, prominent display of secondary sexual characteristics or creation of them by surgery and through “feminine” body language. Women are required to practise femininity in order to create sexual difference/deference. But the difference is one of power, and femininity is the behavior required of the subordinate class of women in order to show their deference to the ruling class of men. 

-  Sheila Jeffreys, Beauty and Misogyny

The refusal to experience the discomfort of real change, and this rejection of the radical feminist position, has led to what is called “choice feminism”. This is the belief that no matter what a woman chooses, from her lifestyle to her family dynamic to her pop culture consumption, she is making a feminist choice, just from the act of choosing anything. The idea is that under the more rigidly patriarchal past, women’s choices were made for them. So simply by choosing anything at all, you are bucking the patriarchy and acting like a feminist. This is what universal feminism, devoid of any real personal internal change, leads to. No debate, no consideration, no discomfort required. 

- Jessa Crispin, Why I Am Not a Feminist: A Feminist Manifesto

Western culture is founded on the notion of sexual difference: the idea that there is an essential difference between men and women, expressed in the behaviors of masculinity and femininity and their attendant practices. It is so dominant and all pervasive, that the idea that women can positively “choose” the practices which express this difference makes little sense. 

-  Sheila Jeffreys, Beauty and Misogyny

If it’s so normal and well-intended, why don’t men tell other men to smile?

- Abbi Crutchfield