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Radical Feminism Quotes

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Radical Feminism Quotes

“[...] the argument that rape - by violence or deception - is a good method to ensure the survival of the human species has never been convincing. Women, like men, are born with a biological imperative to procreate and they are instinctively equipped to choose males that have a chance of producing the fittest offspring, either due to superior / compatible genetics or a willingness to help raise the young. Taking this choice away from a woman undermines the basic process of mate selection and ultimately works against the survival of the species. Selfish males who sexually coerce women seldom make good fathers and providers. Their violence, neglect, and abandonment creates significant psychological and physical trauma, which is passed on to the next generation, creating a cycle of despair and destructiveness.”

“The belief that a man not being able to orgasm in whatever way he wants is a tragedy, and something that - no matter how drastic - must be done about it, is in fact the bread and butter of male supremacy. to this end, men have created prostitution, pornography, sex dolls and even the oppression of women, which includes an expectation that women will do whatever it takes to satisfy male sexual urges, and take responsibility for male sexual offending.”

“History is full of women who thought they could bargain their way out of oppression by throwing other women under the bus. Women who believe that if only they joined in with the persecution of feminists, lesbians, women in prison and domestic violence shelters, they would be immune from attack. Believe this at your peril.”

“Have you thought about why, in the UK and Ireland, we can't stop men who identify as women from competing in women's sporting events, becoming Women's Officers and winning 'woman of the year' awards, but women who identify as men still can't inherit peerages or become catholic priests? It's because this ideology you are caught up in is patriarchy on steroids, designed to rig the game even more to women's disadvantage.”

“Transactivists try to liken single sex spaces and services to racial segregation or discrimination based on sexual orientation, but that is a false equivalent. Men being violent towards women is a well documented problem in our society. We have no evidence that people of certain races or sexual orientations are more dangerous than others. Therefore, a woman requesting a female doctor is both reasonable and justified in light of male pattern violence, while discrimination against a lesbian or a black doctor would clearly be wrong.”

“The shift from female centrality to male domination occurred before the development of writing, so its roots are hidden. In consequence, and men's response over the millennia to all moves by women towards greater autonomy, suggests that it emerged from male hostility towards women and was imposed on them. The destruction of matricentry was the first and most important male war against women.”

“Men believe that women were nonvolitional beings, bound to their bodies and their instincts. But studies have shown that mothering is learned; is not instinctive. We learn to mother by being mothered, and creatures that are not mothered cannot do it. Taking care creates love, for a baby, a piece of land, an animal. Men devalue this work, attributing it to mere instinct, ignoring the many women who abandon children or raise them cruelly. Taking responsibility is not instinctual in human beings as it is in other mammals. It is a choice.”

“Gender is to sexism as woman is to misogyny. Sexism and gender are male friendly neo liberal words. “Won’t somebody please think of the men?” because they are, apparently, equal to women in their oppression by sexism and gender. The male elite of the new world order are actually victims of heterosexual masculinity. It would make as much sense to replace ‘white supremacy’ with the concept of ‘racially based discrimination’, or ‘ruling class oppression’ with the concept of ‘economically based prejudice’. The tactic is about obscuring forms of violence which, despite the laboriously pompous deconstructions of identity politics, are still identity based.”

“Telling rape jokes or laughing at women being brutalised has become a sign of virility and a marker of masculine freedom. In this context, raping women becomes a status enhancing smashing of the feminising legal restraints imposed on male sexuality. The trending of rape jokes on the internet also gains cool currency precisely because the internet is seen as a feral outlaw social technology, anarchic carnival space where every kind of subversion is permitted and defended in the name of freedom of speech – for those men who have access to the playground, at least.”

“Every gun, warship, jet and bomb is also a theft from women as a sex class. There is more than enough money for public education, health, state funded day care systems, food and other necessities; there is more than enough money to protect single mothers and their children from deadly forms of poverty and social exclusion. There is more than enough money. Austerity is the propaganda of the new fascism which delivers violent budget cuts against its own citizens just as it ramps up global inequality and steadily arms itself with weapons of mass murder.”

“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.”

“To discouraged women, radical feminists offered an analysis of the movement's failure. More importantly, they offered a solution: Reform can never produce justice for women, they maintained. The problems are rooted too deeply for halfway measures to address them adequately. Salvation lay in revolution-a revolution so profound that it extended beyond politics into human sexuality itself. According to radical feminists, only a fundamental difference between the sexes could explain the perpetual oppression of women.”

“Anti-porn feminists want us to accept their sexual preferences as gospel. Presumably, their theories are based on solid fact and deep insight. Although they have been born and raised in the same patriarchal culture that has warped other women, radical feminists have somehow escaped unscathed. Just as they have escaped being damaged by the pornography they view. Somehow these women have scaled the pinnacle, from which they now look down and make pronouncements on the lifestyle of those beneath them. Perhaps radical feminists are superwomen. Perhaps they are merely fanatics unwilling to respect any position other than their own. If women's choices are to be trashed, why should radical feminists fare better than other women? Are they the elite? If the choices of pornographic models are not to be taken seriously, radical feminists cannot claim respect for their choices either. If culture negates the free will of women, anti-porn feminists are in the same boat as the rest of us.”

“Feminists, in vivid essays praising Shulamith Firestone’s legacy, fail to mention this emphatic celebration of incest and paedophilia; had she been male, she would not only have been dismissed by the same women on these very grounds, but her legacy would have been cancelled”

“The assumption that femininity is always structured by and performed for a male gaze fails to take seriously queer feminine desire. The radical feminist critiques of femininity also disregarded the fact that not all who are (seen as) feminine are women. Crucially, what is viewed as appropriately feminine is not only defined in relation to maleness or masculinity, but through numerous intersections of power including race, sexuality, ability, and social class. In other words, white, heterosexual, binary gender-conforming, able-bodied, and upper- or middle-class femininity is privileged in relation to other varieties. Any social system may contain multiple femininities that differ in status, and which relate to each other as well as to masculinity. As highlighted by “effeminate” gay men, trans women, femmes, drag queens, and “bad girls,” it is possible to be perceived as excessively, insufficiently, or wrongly feminine without for that sake being seen as masculine. Finally, the view of femininity as a restrictive yet disposable mask presupposes that emancipation entails departure into neutral (or masculine) modes of being. This is a tenuous assumption, as the construction of selfhood is entangled with gender, and conceptions of androgyny and gender neutrality similarly hinge on culturally specific ideas of masculinity and femininity.”

“If a given idea has been held in the human mind for many generations, as almost all our common ideas have, it takes sincere and continued effort to remove it; and if it is one of the oldest we have in stock, one of the big, common, unquestioned world ideas, vast is the labor of those who seek to change it.”

“What do we find, here in America, in the field of 'politics?' We find first a party system which is the technical arrangement to carry on a fight. It is perfectly conceivable that a flourishing democratic government be carried on without any parties at all; public functionaries being elected on their merits, and each proposed measure judged on its merits; though this sounds impossible to the androcentric mind. 'There has never been a democracy without factions and parties!" is protested. There has never been a democracy, so far--only an androcracy.”

“Society' consists mostly of women. Women carry on most of its processes, therefore women are its makers and masters, they are responsible for it, that is the general belief. We might as well hold women responsible for harems--or prisoners for jails. To be helplessly confined to a given place or condition does not prove that one has chosen it; much less made it. No; in an androcentric culture "society," like every other social relation, is dominated by the male and arranged for his convenience.”

“Democratic government is no longer an exercise of arbitrary authority from one above, but is an organization for public service of the people themselves--or will be when it is really attained. In this change government ceases to be compulsion, and becomes agreement; law ceases to be authority and becomes co-ordination. When we learn the rules of whist or chess we do not obey them because we fear to be punished if we don't, but because we want to play the game.”

“The connection between our archaic system of punishment and our androcentric culture is two-fold. The impulse of resistance, while, as we have seen, of the deepest natural origin, is expressed more strongly in the male than in the female. The tendency to hit back and hit harder has been fostered in him by sex-combat till it has become of great intensity. The habit of authority too, as old as our history; and the cumulative weight of all the religions and systems of law and government, have furthermore built up and intensified the spirit of retaliation and vengeance. They have even deified this concept, in ancient religions, crediting to God the evil passions of men. As the small boy recited; 'Vengeance. A mean desire to get even with your enemies: 'Vengeance is mine saith the Lord'--'I will repay.”

“[Christianity] is a religion for slaves and women!' said the warrior of old. (Slaves and women were largely the same thing.) 'It is a religion for slaves and women' says the advocate of the Superman. Well? Who did the work of all the ancient world? Who raised the food and garnered it and cooked it and served it? Who built the houses, the temples, the aqueducts, the city wall? Who made the furniture, the tools, the weapons, the utensils, the ornaments--made them strong and beautiful and useful? Who kept the human race going, somehow, in spite of the constant hideous waste of war, and slowly built up the real industrial civilization behind that gory show?--Why just the slaves and women.”

“It is the inextricable masculinity in our idea of government which so revolts at the idea of women as voters. 'To govern:' that means to boss, to control, to have authority; and that only, to most minds. They cannot bear to think of the woman as having control over even their own affairs; to control is masculine, they assume. Seeing only self-interest as a natural impulse, and the ruling powers of the state as a sort of umpire, an authority to preserve the rules of the game while men fight it out forever; they see in a democracy merely a wider range of self interest, a wider, freer field to fight in.”

“It is the old masculine spirit of government as authority which is so slow in adapting itself to the democratic idea of government as service. That it should be a representative government they grasp, but representative of what? of the common will, they say; the will of the majority;--never thinking that it is the common good, the common welfare, that government should represent.”