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Famous Amia Srinivasan Quotes

“For many women of color, the mainstream feminist injunction, "Believe women," and its online correlate, "#Ibelieveher", raise more questions than they settle. Whom are we to believe, the white woman who says she was raped or the black or brown woman who insists that her son is being set up? Carolyn Bryant or Mamie Till?”

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Book:The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century
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“Yet, Black women, in particular, suffer from the stigmatization of Black male sexuality, to which the injunction, "Believe women," too readily gives cover, just as Dalit women suffer specifically from the sexual stigmatization of Dalit men. When we are too quick to believe a white woman's accusation against a Black man, or a Brahmin woman's accusation against a Dalit man, it is Black and Dalit women who are rendered more vulnerable to sexual violence. Their ability to speak out against the violence they face from men of their race or caste is stifled, and their status as counterpart to the oversexed Black or Dalit male is entrenched. In that paradox of female sexuality, such women are rendered "unrapable" and thus "more rapeable". Ida B. Wells patiently documented the lynchings of Black men on trumped-up claims of raping white women. But she also recorded the many rapes of Black women that inspired no lynch mobs and at which little notice was taken. One such case was that of Maggie Reese, an 8-year-old girl raped by a white man in Nashville, Tennessee. The outrage upon helpless childhood needed no avenging in this case: she was Black.”

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Book:The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century
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“The rules that have really changed, and are still changing, do not so much concern what is right or wrong in sex: women have been telling men the truth about that, one way or another, for a very long time. The rules that have really changed for men like Louis C.K., Charlie Rose, John Hockenberry and many others like them is that they can no longer be confident that when they ignore the shouts and silences of the women they demean, no consequences will follow.”

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Book:The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century
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“We have been raised to fear the yes within ourselves, our deepest cravings. But, once recognized, those which do not enhance our future lose their power and can be altered. The fear of our desires keeps them suspect and indiscriminately powerful, for to suppress any truth is to give it strength beyond endurance. The fear that we cannot grow beyond whatever distortions we may find within ourselves keeps us docile and loyal and obedient, externally defined.”

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Book:The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century
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