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Quote by Ruth Barrett

“Some nouns: glass, scissors, razors, acid. Some verbs: cut, scrape, cauterize, burn. These nouns and verbs create unspeakable sentences when the object is a seven year old girl with her legs forced open. The clitoris, with it's 8000 nerve endings, is always sliced up. In the most extreme forms of female genital mutilation (FGM), the labia are cut off and the vagina is sewn shut. On her wedding night, the girl's husband will penetrate her with a knife before his penis.”

Quote by Ruth Barrett

Book:Female Erasure: What You Need to Know About Gender Politics' War on Women, the Female Sex and Human Rights
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Female Erasure: What You Need to Know About Gender Politics' War on Women, the Female Sex and Human Rights

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Ruth Barrett

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FeminismMisogynyWomen S RightsWomen S Liberation
Book:Who Cooked the Last Supper? The Women's History of the World
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“Women Ain't Hood Ornament (The Sonnet) Why should women have to give up, Their name when they get married, As if they are not real people, But hood ornament to their husband! Why should a child be identified only, By their father's name, not mother's, Who by the way is the root of creation, Who is the actual almighty creator! It is a sad state of affairs when, Morons peddle moronity as tradition. Shame on us for sustaining such savagery, As we do not put our backbone to action! Each couple must determine the parameters of their relationship, not some ragged tradition. Only norm that matters is love, for in love lies emancipation.”

FeminismMotherhoodWomens RightsPatriarchyViolence Against WomenToxic MasculinityFeminist PoetryPatriarchal CultureInternational Womens DayGender Equity
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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.”

SexFearFeminism
Book:The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century
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“In terms of understanding the patriarchal struggle for control of women's bodies, the issue of blood is a major preoccupation. For not only did women bleed every month, from girlhood for all over their adult lives; every stage of their journey as women, every passage from one state to the next (menarche, defloration, childbirth) was also marked by the flow of blood with its frighteningly ambivalent signal of both life and death. The greater the danger the stronger the taboo. All these "courses" of women's lives have triggered an intricate and often savage set of myths, beliefs and customs in which the containment of cultural fears overrode any personal concern for the female who was ostensibly the cause and center of it all.”

FeminismMisogynyWomen S RightsWomen S Liberation
Book:Who Cooked the Last Supper? The Women's History of the World
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“Domination was not absolute, systems were imperfect, there was still too much room to maneuver - control could not be based on an organ that men could not control. There had to be more - an idea of imminent, eternal maleness that was not physical, visible, fallible; one that was greater than all women because greater than man; whose power was omnipotent and unquestionable - one god, God the father, who man now invented in his own image.”

FeminismMisogynyWomen S RightsWomen S Liberation
Book:Who Cooked the Last Supper? The Women's History of the World
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