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Quote by Adrienne Maree Brown

“People try to shame me for being fat. When I am walking down the street, men lean out of their car windows and shout vulgar things at me about my body, how they see it and how it upsets them that I am not catering to their gaze and their preferences and desires. I try not to take these men seriously because what they are really saying is, ‘I am not attracted to you. I do not want to fuck you and this confuses my understanding of masculinity, entitlement, and place in this world.’ It is not my job to please them with my body.”

Quote by Adrienne Maree Brown

Work

Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good

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Adrienne Maree Brown

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“His comments are not compliments, or even propositions. They are declarations of ownership. They are threats. They are the intrusive thumb of male privilege and patriarchal violence, reminding me of my place as I move around within public space. They are the put-down, the screw-you, the worthless-slur, the great derision that is a constant, omnipresent reminder that society allows male sexual violence to function commonly as a social norm. It is the constant reminder that I should always be scared. That I am never safe. That someone always wants to hurt me, and that society will always, always turn its face the other way, as seen by the normalcy with which men can publicly deride me with confidence and gusto in their threats.”

“Deconstructed, I find its bits and pieces everywhere around me in the architecture of my social world. I find components of its violence in the sexism of your comments. I find it in the way you touch me without asking. I find it in the way you call that girl a whore. I find its bits and pieces of violence, the building blocks of sexual assault, in the psyches and vocabularies of my boyfriend, my professors, and my friends.”

“For it is the silent men, far more than the loud mouthy men on Warwick Boulevard, who make this possible. It is the silent men at 711, the silent men at the YMCA, the silent men next to us in cars, the silent men lying next to us in our bedrooms, the silent men we call our best friends, our boyfriends, and our fathers. It is the silent men, not the loud ones- who permit foulmouthed men to chew me up and spit me out as I walk down the street. It is the silent men who could have stopped this, but who didn’t care to, because they were busy. It is the silent men who said 'Yes' to violence, and who, in their complicit silence, insisted that my world would be impenetrably loud.”

“Of course, my mother is her own person. Of course, she contains multitudes. She reacts in ways that surprise me, in part, simply because she isn't me. I forget this and relearn it anew because it's a lesson that doesn't, that can't, stick. I know her only as she is defined against me, so when I see her as herself, like when she gets catcalled on the street, there's dissonance…”

“A Martial Artist may become A professional fighter but not every Fighter is capable of becoming A martial artist. Martial Arts are about restoration of physical and spiritual balance and fluidity; they are about observing restraints and 'setting example'. Every practice session is A reminder of the play of opposites (yin and yang), . . . .”

“To see Snow Flower's mother eat that meat was something I'll never forget. She had been raised to be a fine lady and, as hungry as she was, she did not tear into the food as someone in my family might. She used her chopsticks to pull apart slivers of the pork and lift them delicately to her lips. Her restraint and control taught me a lesson I have not strayed from to this day. You may be desperate, but never let anyone see you as anything less that a cultivated woman.”