s.penkevich > Books: feminism‎ (25)

‘Hysterical women. I seriously wanted to lecture him about all the diseases women have had that have been misdiagnosed over the years—and how medication (not to mention everything else in the world) is designed for the male body-but I just didn’t have the energy for it. Or maybe I was chicken. Or maybe that’s the same thing because it’s a lot easier to gather your courage when you’re not dead tired.’

‘Centuries of socialization have conditioned us into believing that it’s our responsibility to create a cozy atmosphere and ensure that no one is embarrassed about anything. THat’s why we laugh at jokes that offend us. That’s why we smile at people who pat us on the butt. THat’s why we pretend that it’s just a coincidence when the boss repeatedly brushes against our breasts at work. Because anything else would be just so embarrassing. For everybody.’

‘Honestly, if you were to ask ten feminists to define feminism you'd probably get eleven different answers. There are a few core things that we do agree about, though. First, feminists agree that women have been, and continue to be, disadvantaged relative to men...Second, feminists agree that these disadvantages are bad things that can and should be changed. And third, we agree that these disadvantages are interrelated, that they're the result of mutually supporting systems of privilege and deprivation that are structurally embedded in virtually every aspect of society and that systematically function to screw women over.’

‘spins women’s well-founded anger over legitimate grievances into the age-old spector of the irrational hag whose wailings needn’t be taken seriously.’

‘In contemporary patriarchal culture, a panoptical male connoisseur resides within the consciousness of most women: They stand perpetually before his gaze and under his judgement. Woman lives her body as seen by another, by an anonymous patriarchal Other.’

‘What we do need is men who are willing to fight patriarchy; men who are willing to consider giving up privileges they’ve received strictly because of their gender; men who don’t think that relinquishing this unearned privilege is an injustice.’

‘We need to be careful which stories we tell. Think of all the fairy tales where the heroes are handsome and the villains are ugly. So much misery comes from clinging to something as flimsy and subjective as beauty, but that’s often our shorthand for good and evil.’

‘It constrains those who identify as women against their will…it can never be fully satisfied. It is not useful for human flourishing. Beauty is, like all capital, merely valuable.'

‘I’m not trying to snitch on my community because I’m not talking to anyone except for my community! Everyone else is welcome to eavesdrop, or to listen in, but I’m not really positioning myself to make an outward facing dispatch about violence in my community. I’m trying to have a conversation from—yes a place of grief and mourning—but also from a place of love to my community, to the femmes in my community, and to the people who have experienced this harm.’

‘The threat of death and the fear of death – those are so often used to govern and to control. So if the girls never die, if the girls won’t die, maybe they’re free from that governance and from that control. And then what could that look like?’

‘I now view some of my “empowering” experiences as violating, exploitative, and manipulative. I noticed that “gray” and “complicated” were words I used to stop questioning whatever had happened, rather than to understand it. “Formative” revealed itself to mean “traumatic.” “Creep” or “bad guy” or “pervy but not Harvey Weinstein” now strike me as wildly nonspecific euphemisms for a danger that was too uncomfortable to grapple with at the time and that, again, prioritizes men’s identities over their actions. This slow-motion aftershock has been its own traumatic event.’

‘In my early twenties, it had never occurred to me that the women who gained their power from beauty were indebted to the men whose desire granted them that power in the first place. Those men were the ones in control, not the women the world fawned over. Facing the reality of the dynamics at play would have meant admitting how limited my power really was—how limited any woman’s power is when she survives and even succeeds in the world as a thing to be looked at.’

‘“Some people got religion or killed themselves after losing someone, whether that person died or just left them. Dora Rosario, however, didn’t blame anyone else for her misfortune. Only herself. She loathed herself, but not enough to seek relief in death. No, she simply disliked herself, a more modest sentiment.’

‘Mortals have a word for this kind of arrogance…the word is hubris. And while I am al in favour of using precision to describe something, might I suggest that you would be better off not doing something so dangerous so often that you need a specific wordfor it? Perhaps develop your self-control, rather than your vocabulary.’

‘Perseus…has no interest in the well being of any creature if it impedes his desire to do whatever he wants. He is a vicious little thug and the sooner you grasp that, and stop thinking of him as a brave boy hero, the closer you’ll be to understanding what actually happened.’

‘I was resolutely determined to continue to eat, read, speak, and dream in whatever way I pleased. “I don’t believe in God!” I thought. How was it possible to believe in God and deliberately choose to disobey Him? I sat stunned for a moment by this revelation: I did not believe.’

‘faith was not, as it was for so many others, a complaisant dependence on God, a means of being right, of self-justification or fleeing responsibilities but the painful questioning of a silent, obscure, hidden God.’

‘what could have once gotten a woman killed is now available for purchase at Urban Outfitters (within limits, of course. You can sell her crystals but refuse to pay her fair wages).’

‘the members of the Old Religon never worshipped Satan. They were followers of a tripartite Goddess: it was the Christian church who invented Satan and then claimed that witches were Satanists. We had bitten the patriarchal bait on that one…’

‘the branch of patriarchal ideology that justifies and rationalizes a patriarchal social order, and misogyny as the system that polices and enforces its governing norms and expectations.’

’Born during a time when ‘checking the sex of the foetus and aborting females was common practice, as if ‘daughter’ was a medical problem’ Jiyoung grew up being told to be cautious, to dress conservatively, to be “ladylike.” That it’s your job to avoid dangerous places, times of day and people. It’s your fault for not noticing and not avoiding.’

’I've noticed this about new employees over the years. The women take on all the cumbersome, minor tasks without being asked, while guys never do. Doesn´t matter if they're new or the youngest - they never do anything they're not told to do. But why do women simply take things upon themselves?’

‘First-time parenthood increased a man’s workload at home by about ten hours per week, [for women] about twenty hours...much of the new work that fathers did take on was comparatively ‘fun’ work of engagement with their children...Fathers did this for four hours per week, on average, while dropping their number of housework y five horse per week...Mothers decreased their hours of housework by only one hour per week--while adding about twenty-one hours of child-rearing labor...and mothers stilldid more by way of infant engagement: about six hours per week, on average.’

It is an important part of European and American national identities and to the construction of ‘the West’ that they are the heirs to (an idealized version of) ancient Greece and Rome.

‘The video criticizes the exclusion of black people and culture from the Lourve, but it also goes beyond that, by reimagining the space and its collections in ways that create new icons, perspectives, and priorities. It acts as a kind of restorative mythmaking…[and]underscores the themes of cultural ownership and protest.’

This trend is a response to an increase in violence towards girls and women: “New myths of Artemis figures defending their own virtue from violence all around them can be interpreted as compensatory fantasies for girls and women subjected to violence, especially sexual violence, in their everyday lives.

‘When you’re pretty, everybody wants to look at you, they want to touch you. I wanted that for myself. Prettiness means value. But some people never experience that personally.’

'Beauty is not good capital. It compounds the oppression of gender. It constrains those who identify as women against their will. It costs money and demands money. It colonizes. It hurts. It is painful. It can never be fully satisfied. It is not useful for human flourishing. Beauty is, like all capital, merely valuable.'

People are willing to accept the pain and suffering of others, limitless amounts of it, as long as it helps them to keep on believing in whatever it is that they want to believe. Love, meaning, doesn’t matter.’

‘I don’t know exactly what it is, but I do know that somewhere in this town there is something bad, and that those long shadows creeping up in the dark have come to tell me about it.’

‘Those Grandmas and this Grandma. The Grandmas I have in my head or the Grandma lying here with her eyes closed, quietly sleeping. Which is the real Grandma?’

’misogyny may be a purely structural phenomenon, perpetuated by social institutions, policies, and broader cultural mores.’

‘Boys will be boys, but women who get pregnant have behaved irresponsibly. We are so comfortable with regulating women’s sexual behavior, but we’re shocked by the idea of doing it to men.’

’[T]he anti-abortion movenent’s supposed pre-occupation with life belies the fact that it undermines the health and lives of cis girls and women, along with other people who may also become pregnant. Similarly, the anti-trans movement’s supposed preoccupation with sexual safety and lives of a particularly vulnerable class of people: namely, tans girls and women, who are disproportionately liable to be attacked, assaulted, and murdered, at rates that recently prompted the American Medical Association to declare this an epidemic.’

taking sexism to be the branch of patriarchal ideology that justifies and rationalizes a patriarchal social order, and misogyny as the system that polices and enforces its governing norms and expectations. So sexism is scientific; misogyny is moralistic. And a patriarchal order has a hegemonic quality.

Her humanity may hence be held to be owed to other human beings, and her value contingent on her giving moral goods to them: life, love, pleasure, nurture, sustenance, and comfort, being some

‘every girl learns, in varying degrees, to filter herself through messages of women's relative cultural irrelevance, powerlessness, and comparative worthlessness.’