“I was raised for this--"
"No woman is raised for man to use," said Sogolon.”
Source: Black Leopard, Red Wolf
“What a band of fellows this turn into. Bunshi and her fellowship of men, which is why it fail before it even begin. Cannot make fellowship with men. A man alive is just a man in the way.”
Source: Black Leopard, Red Wolf
“All four Gospel writers specifically cite Jesus rejecting the accepted cultural norms and treating women with respect. Not only did he break rabbinic laws of his day by teaching and talking to women, but he allowed women to touch him—including those considered “unclean” by the culture at large.”
Source: Separation of Church and Hate: A Sane Person's Guide to Taking Back the Bible from Fundamentalists, Fascists, and Flock-Fleecing Frauds
“Jesus’s admonition to not look on women lustfully is not anti-sex—it’s anti–sexual harassment.”
Source: Separation of Church and Hate: A Sane Person's Guide to Taking Back the Bible from Fundamentalists, Fascists, and Flock-Fleecing Frauds
“Women? Certain women? We are more than we think we are. There was always more.”
Source: Of Women and Salt
“What is objectification? From Simone de Beauvoir to Martha Nussbaum to Catharine MacKinnon, feminist philosophers have long been interested in analysing the concept. Broadly speaking, to objectify a woman is to treat or represent her as a partly or wholly dehumanised, de-mentalised object. There are various ways to do that. Fashion and advertising offer several possibilities for doing so visually. You can represent her as a dazed, passive thing to be fucked, with a vacant expression and glazed eyes, as in many high-end fashion advertising campaigns. Extending this, you can represent her as sexually dominated, with her personal autonomy diminished or removed: bound or gagged, for instance. You can dress her up in animal skins or leopard print and represent her as a kind of wild, highly sexualised animal, something the fashion industry has been particularly fond of doing to black women over the years. You can dress and pose her as a stereotype: the Capable Housewife (in domestic setting, comfortable clothes, tolerant rueful smile), the Brainy Scientist (white coat, stern expression, glasses on end of nose), the Little Girl (kneesocks, pigtails, blowing bubblegum), the Sexy Vamp (cleavage, tongue on front teeth, wink). You can place her in a row with other similarly shaped, similarly adorned women, visually emphasising what they all have in common in looks and dress, so that individuality is rhetorically diminished, and one woman looks replaceable with any other. You can make her just a pair of legs, or breasts, or an arse, focusing the camera on body parts and even omitting the head and face. In all such cases, the thinking mind, personality, autonomy or particular individuality of the woman in the image is downplayed, diminished and ignored, to a greater or lesser extent. She’s ‘objectified’ in the sense she’s made more like an object and less like a fully individuated human being: less rational, less individual, less present, less important for who she actually is. In extreme cases, she can even be used as if or pictured as an inanimate object: a ‘table’ for men’s feet, or as a ‘plate’ for food– as in the Japanese practice of Nyotaimori, using a woman’s naked body as a receptacle for sushi in restaurants.”
Source: Material Girls: Why Reality Matters for Feminism
“Control isn’t given. It’s taken.”
Saskia Montclair.
Every Silence Has a Price”
“Every time Iraq began to unravel, it was women who worked the hardest to stitch it back together.”
Source: Our Women on the Ground: Essays by Arab Women Reporting from the Arab World
“I never chose the rose because it was soft. Men mistake it for a symbol of fragility, of perfume and petals, of dainty femininity wrapped in velvet and silk. They forget the thorns. They always do. That’s why it’s perfect and that’s why it’s mine. The rose doesn’t beg to be touched. It dares, and if you reach for it without reverence, it bleeds you.”
Source: The Heir of Ash and Thunder
“Why are women always taught to tolerate, but men are never taught to control?
Why is it my fault when they cross the line? Why is it always me who has to bite my tongue? Why is it always a woman’s job to stay calm when a man misbehaves? Why do I have to be the one to smile, to forgive?”
Source: To Hell With You