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Quote by Tarana Burke

“Never let anyone touch your private parts, they’d say. But I wasn’t told why I had to protect my private parts, just that it was imperative that I did. Because of this, when I thought of my experience, I didn’t hold my abusers accountable—I held myself to blame. In my mind, they didn’t abuse me. I broke the rules. I was the one who did something wrong.”

Quote by Tarana Burke

Work

Unbound: My Story of Liberation and the Birth of the Me Too Movement

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Author

Tarana Burke

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“And despite the punishments for boundary crossing, we continue to live, daily, with all our contradictory differences. Here I still stand, unmistakably "feminine" in style, and "womanly" in personal experience - and unacceptably "masculine" in political interests and in my dedication to writing poetry that stretches beyond the woman's domain of home. Here I am, assigned a "female" sex on my birth certificate, but not considered womanly enough - because I am a lesbian - to retain custody of the children I delivered from my woman's body. As a white girl raised in a segregated culture, I was expected to be "ladylike" - sexually repressed but acquiescent to white men of my class - while other, darker women were damned as "promiscuous" so their bodies could be seized and exploited. I've worked outside the home for at least part of my living since I was a teenager - a fact deemed masculine by some. But my occupation is now that of teacher, work suitably feminine for a woman as long as I don't tell my students I'm a lesbian - a sexuality thought too aggressive and "masculine" to fit with my "feminity.”