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Misogyny Quotes

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Misogyny Quotes

“The feminist rejection of the low view of women that Christianity had imposed upon so many nations had an important consequence for another of the key issues of the women's rights campaign: the demands for education. The ignorance of women had been bound in with Christian dogma - Eve's sin consisted of reaching out for the tree of knowledge, so her punishment was to be forever deprived of it. Unchallenged for centuries, this attitude produced generations of women doomed to be brought up in mental darkness and then condemned as stupid: "We are educated to the grossest ignorance, and no art omitted to stifle our natural reason," complained Lady Mary Wortley Montagu bitterly in the eighteenth century.”

“If feminism was reduced to one word, it would be this: No. "No" is a boundary, spoken only by a self who claims one. Objects have neither; subjects begin at "No". Feminists said "No" and we meant it.”

“As this shows, under the topsy-tervy conditions of revolution, women found themselves once again serving as soldiers in the front line. The last known female regular soldier had been abolished in Ireland in the seventh century A.D., but the tradition, stretching all the way back to the old matriarchies, had never entirely disappeared.”

“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.”

“Since women are not inferior, they had to be bombarded with a massive literature of religious, social, biological and, more recently, psychological ideology to explain, insist, that women are secondary to men. And to make women believe that they are inferior what better subject for this literature of religious teaching, cautionary folk tales, jokes and customs, than the female body?”

“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.”

“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.”

“To women, therefore, the effect was broadly the same, however the message of male supremacy came packaged. All these systems - Judaism, Confucianism, Buddhism, Christianity and Islam - were presented to them as holy, the result of divine inspiration transmitted from a male power to males empowered for this purpose, thereby enshrining maleness itself as power.”

“For whatever needs were answered by the new patriarchies as they grew, throve and put on beef, they were bot the deeper needs of the female sex. Of course, there were attractions - there had to be, for women to swallow the ideological bait without perceiving either the hook or the poisonous lead weighing it down. None of these systems could have been imposed on women against their will. There had to be consent from the women members of each tribe, township or race proselytized by the zealots of the new gods, at some level. Which of them, though, presented with the first appealing package of function and freedom, could have known what she was consenting to for herself and all her female descendants for the next 2,000 years?”

“The attack on women's bodies that was one of the most marked consequences of the imposition of patriarchal monotheism has no convenient onset or conclusion - but it was a principle determining factor of every woman's history over an extended period of time. It signaled, precipitated even, the decline of women into their long night of feudal oppression and grotesque persecution.”

“For women were dangerous in every part of their anatomy, from top to toe. Luxuriant hair could excite lust accordingly the Jewish Talmud from A.D. 600 onward allowed a man to divorce a wife who appeared in public with her hair uncovered. While St Paul went so far as to instruct Christians that a woman who came bare headed to church had better have her head shaved. The female face was another Venus's flytrap for helpless males - in a bizarre piece of theology dated from the 3rd Century A.D., the early Christian father Tertullian held that "the blume of virgins" was responsible for the fall of the angels: "so perilous a face, then, ought to be kept shaded when it has cast stumbling stones even so far as heaven.”

“Edgar Allan Poe once called the death of a beautiful woman "the most poetical topic in the world" and I have often found myself wondering how many women writers who have killed themselves or let themselves be otherwise obliterated were trying, somehow, to fulfil this most popular of narratives. We're most valuable when we're smiling, dead, posing, our words hanging on the page with no real body behind them.”

“Men's pain and existential angst are the stuff of myth and legend and narratives that shape everything we do, but women's pain is a backdrop - a plot development to push the story along for the real protagonists. Disrupting that story means we're needy or selfish, or worst of all, man-haters - as if after all men have done to women over the ages the mere act of not liking them for it is most offensive.”

“When I say we, I'm referring to society: copywriters, companies, and overall general opinion; I am in no way taking personal responsibility. We/they market to women like they are giant toddlers. This endless, pejorative, female-targeted infantilization of the English language when it's directed toward women: "Mama Bear needs her beauty rest!" "Rockstar gal gets her glam on!" "Work it, she-entrepreneur!" "Be a diva-licious ass-kicker in stilettos! The biggest, badass, boss-babe in herstory! The fiercest, she-matologist working in the blood lab!" This pervasive rhetoric is basically watered down, digestible empowerment designed to get a woman's money. It's the advertising equivalent of a "Live Laugh Love" sign.”

“I looked into their new mom gift baskets. The basket included... a scarf. A fucking scarf. My first thought was that this company bulk ordered them for something else, and couldn't get rid of them, so they pivoted and tried to make it a "mommy scarf;" selling you on the idea that there are scarves specifically for women who have children. Which are very different, from normal scarves, for childless women. "Great for dressing up a look or just keeping mama warm while she's out conquering the world." The fact that they wrote a blurb about why a human would need a scarf at all, to me, further proves how dumb we think women are. As if there's some tired mom out there, typing into Google "what is scarf and how?" "neck cold. how do i hot it?”

“Is the suggestion that democracy requires a fair trail for all, except those charged with crimes against women? There are many brilliant feminist lawyers who defend people charged with serious sexual violence for a living. They are precisely the people who should be defending those trials. They challenge the evidence properly and legitimately. They make sure that the accused has a fair trail, and that any conviction is a safe one. But in doing so they do not pander to myths about female behaviour that are not only outdated, but demonstrably false. It is these lawyers, above all others, who are bringing the justice system up to date. We need more of them.”

“Of the cultural causes of misogyny, rejection of or guilt about sex is the most obvious. It leads naturally to the degradation of woman as the sexual object and the projection onto her of lust and the desire to seduce, which a man must repress in himself. At the same time that he denigrated woman’s sexual function, the preoccupation with sex resulting from the attempt to repress desire is apt to make him see her exclusively as a sexual being, more lustful than man and not spiritual at all….Misogyny can also develop as a result of the idealization with which men have glorified women as mistresses, wives, and mothers. This has led to a natural reaction, a desire to tear down what has been raised unduly high.”

“Vagina Power (The Sonnet) There's nothing special about growing balls, In fact, man-sack is the definition of weakness. If you wanna grow something, grow a vagina, For vagina is the epitome of resilience. There's an organism that goes through hell, Quite regularly, yet stands strong and brave. It is the source of all creation everywhere, Yet all through history it's been kept as slave. No love can surpass the love of a mother, No care can surpass a sister's care. Yet a society run by balls and bananas, Makes a hooker out of our mothers and sisters. Worship of balls is but a prehistoric mania. There will be no balls without a vagina.”

“Pero me sobran motivos para ser feliz. Sobre todo cuando estoy en los brazos de mis tres misses. Son tres gentiles damas a las que se llega cuando las cosas adquieren una claridad inusitada: Miss Antropía, Miss Oginia y Miss Eria; pero no las comparto, como hago con el resto de mis mujeres.”

“All acts of sex were forms of degradation. Some random recollections: East 11th Street, on the bed with Murray Groman: “Swallow this mother ’til you choke.” East 11th Street, in the bed with Gary Becker: “The trouble with you is, you’re such a shallow person.” East 11th Street, up against the wall with Peter Baumann: “The only thing that turns me on about you is pretending you’re a whore.” Second Avenue, the kitchen, Michael Wainwright: “Quite frankly, I deserve a better-looking, better-educated girlfriend.” What do you do with the Serious Young Woman (short hair, flat shoes, body slightly hunched, head drifting back and forth between the books she’s read)? You slap her, fuck her up the ass and treat her like a boy. The Serious Young Woman looked everywhere for sex but when she got it it became an exercise in disintegration. What was the motivation of these men? Was it hatred she evoked? Was it some kind of challenge, trying to make the Serious Young Woman femme?”

“We’re in a period right now where nobody asks any questions about psychology. No one has any feeling for human motivation. No one talks about sexuality in terms of emotional needs and symbolism and the legacy of childhood. Sexuality has been politicized--“Don’t ask any questions!” "No discussion!" “Gay is exactly equivalent to straight!” And thus in this period of psychological blindness or inertness, our art has become dull. There’s nothing interesting being written--in fiction or plays or movies. Everything is boring because of our failure to ask psychological questions. So I say there is a big parallel between Bill Cosby and Bill Clinton--aside from their initials! Young feminists need to understand that this abusive behavior by powerful men signifies their sense that female power is much bigger than they are! These two people, Clinton and Cosby, are emotionally infantile--they're engaged in a war with female power. It has something to do with their early sense of being smothered by female power--and this pathetic, abusive and criminal behavior is the result of their sense of inadequacy. Now, in order to understand that, people would have to read my first book, "Sexual Personae"--which of course is far too complex for the ordinary feminist or academic mind! It’s too complex because it requires a sense of the ambivalence of human life. Everything is not black and white, for heaven's sake! We are formed by all kinds of strange or vague memories from childhood. That kind of understanding is needed to see that Cosby was involved in a symbiotic, push-pull thing with his wife, where he went out and did these awful things to assert his own independence. But for that, he required the women to be inert. He needed them to be dead! Cosby is actually a necrophiliac--a style that was popular in the late Victorian period in the nineteenth-century. It's hard to believe now, but you had men digging up corpses from graveyards, stealing the bodies, hiding them under their beds, and then having sex with them. So that’s exactly what’s happening here: to give a woman a drug, to make her inert, to make her dead is the man saying that I need her to be dead for me to function. She’s too powerful for me as a living woman. And this is what is also going on in those barbaric fraternity orgies, where women are sexually assaulted while lying unconscious. And women don’t understand this! They have no idea why any men would find it arousing to have sex with a young woman who’s passed out at a fraternity house. But it’s necrophilia--this fear and envy of a woman’s power. And it’s the same thing with Bill Clinton: to find the answer, you have to look at his relationship to his flamboyant mother. He felt smothered by her in some way. But let's be clear--I’m not trying to blame the mother! What I’m saying is that male sexuality is extremely complicated, and the formation of male identity is very tentative and sensitive--but feminist rhetoric doesn’t allow for it. This is why women are having so much trouble dealing with men in the feminist era. They don’t understand men, and they demonize men.”

“Slavery was horrible for all miss treated. The lack of compassion for another human was obsolete. (Misogyny ) Was quite prevalent back then as well as the legal doctrine of couverture. which for the record still exists to an extent. However the laws have not been officially demolished. nearly piece by piece broken away to fit within today's society. Slavery was not of color. ( SLAVERY WAS OF ALL COLORS ) !!!!!!!!! I am not racist, I do not believe human beings are illegal, I believe woman's rights are civil rights and yes I do believe in science. I respect you and your beliefs. I expect the same back!!!!!! HOWEVER, I DO NOT DISRESPECT MYSELF NOR OTHERS BY SAYING THOSE DAMN GERMANS, CHINESE, ENGLISH,BLACKS, JEWS, ETC. SO I TAKE OFFENSE TO BEING DISRESPECTED. WHEN I HAVE TO HEAR THOSE WHITE PEOPLE OR DUMB AMERICANS !!!!! I PROMISE YOU NO MATTER WHERE YOUR FAMILY CAME FROM THEY HAD IT HARD !!! VERY HARD!!! IN MOST CASES IT WAS SO PAINFUL THEY CAN'T BRING THEMSELVES TO TALK ABOUT IT!!!! I AM SURE THOSE OF YOU WHO ARE THROWING STONE ARE COMING FROM GLASS HOUSES. LOOK INTO YOUR OWN FAMILY HISTORY AND WHERE THEY CAME FROM AND I AM SURE THEIR HAVE BLOOD ON THEY HANDS!!!!!! NOT ALWAYS BY CHOICE HOWEVER BY SELF DEFENSE !!!!!!!!!!! By Bonnie Zackson Koury”