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Womens Liberation Quotes

Browse 48 quotes about Womens Liberation.

Womens Liberation Quotes

“I'm beautiful, yeah, but that's not what's going to shake your world. My refusal to live in an echo chamber all my life is what's going to shake your world. I don't need to surround myself with people who will echo back to me everything I already think and I already believe. I need to grow and I will become. I am not stagnant and sheltered. I'm sexy, yeah, but that's not what's going to shake your world. My foreceful desire to exact change in this world, in the hearts of humankind, is what's going to rock your world. I will not pretend that all is well with the world just because the truth causes discomfort. I look dragons in their eyes. I'm charming, for sure. But that is not what's going to rearrange your mind. My refusal to put my goodness at the forefront of my life, is what will remould your mind. I don't need to be good; what I need to do is look darkness in the face and illuminate it with my own undying light. I don't need an 'image of myself' out there for people to gawk over. I need to grow, I need to change this world, I need to illuminate the night. I'm beautiful and all that; but you have no idea, how much that's not just it.”

“Shrinking from men, being on guard, avoiding drawing attention to oneself: this is the daily life of women in Africa and the Middle East. As girls growing up in Mogadishu and Nairobi, my sister and I covered ourselves with hijabs to conceal ourselves from public view. Today, women in Europe must consider what manner of dress will best deflect the attention of the increasing numbers of men on the prowl.”

“Because transsexuals have lost their physical “members” does not mean that they have lost their ability to penetrate women—women’s mind, women’s space, women’s sexuality. Transsexuals merely cut off the most obvious means of invading women so that they seem noninvasive.”

“Finally, and I think most important, there are more male-to-constructed-female transsexuals because men are socialized to fetishize and objectify. The same socialization that enables men to objectify women in rape, pornography, and “drag” enables them to objectify their own bodies.”

“The concept of the "female" is a loaded one. Female. Woman. The entire concept of the womyn is derived from, and supports the existence and submission to the male. When you hear "female", the social association is weakness, incompetence, and fragility. Almost as if nothing done can shatter the chain of alleged inferiority. If you refuse this, society makes you a "radical".”

“Societies that permit the existence of parallelthe girl’s situation did not meet the requirements for coercive measures under the law, and if the girl would not voluntarily move away from her husband, it could not force her to. As a direct consequence of the case, the social services in Mönsterås had to move to a different location after receiving threats.14 This is a blatant breakdown in the rule of law. This girl’s rights were not protected by those who are paid by Swedish taxpayers to enforce the law against child marriage. And there are many more like her. In the United States, an estimated 248,000 children, some as young as 12, were married between 2000 and 2010.15 In Germany, too, the problem of child marriage arose as asylum-seeker numbers increased. In 2016, the Federal Ministry of the Interior, Building and Community reported that 1,475 refugee minors were married, three-quarters of them girls and 361 of them under the age of 14.16 In response to these figures, the following year, the German government passed a law stating that the minimum marriage age is 18 years. In an attempt to pander to Muslim constituents, both the Left and the Greens voted against the law for being “too general.”17 SHARIA COUNCILS AND LEGAL DOUBLE STANDARDS Societies that permit the existence of parallel communities resign themselves to the growth of parallel legal systems. This is the case with sharia courts that apply Islamic law to the marital affairs of believers. Dutch researcher Machteld Zee’s study of sharia councils in the United Kingdom estimates that between ten and eighty-five sharia councils operate there.18 Zee documents cases of women seeking divorce being sent back to abusive husbands by sharia courts and being denied the legal protections that non-Muslim wives receive under UK law.”

“True white supremacists want to enslave, subjugate, or annihilate nonwhites—much as true jihadis think that those who refuse to submit to Islam ought to die. Ordinary Europeans who express concern that waiting lists for hospital services and housing will worsen as more migrants enter the country are not white supremacists. However, simply ignoring their concerns or labeling them racist will only create political opportunities for true racists.”

“Europe must stop pretending that the stabilization of the Muslim world is somebody else’s problem. More than “soft power” is required to restore order to the countries from which so many immigrants are coming. EU member states must be willing to engage in leadership and, if necessary, to intervene militarily to restore order in international conflict areas rather than continuing to depend on the United States to deal with each crisis. As it stands, European defense budgets are unjustifiably low considering the rapidly escalating violence of the regions to the south and east of the Mediterranean.”

“For decades Western authorities have turned a blind eye to unequal treatment of women in immigrant communities not only when it comes to marriage and divorce but also in regard to education. Examples of voluntary gender segregation at university student events may seem like minor encroachments on equal rights, but when university heads defend gender segregation, we should be concerned. In 2013, the University of Leicester’s Islamic Society seated women at the back of the room for a training course.21 Rather than condemning the discrimination, the head of Universities UK, Nicola Dandridge, defended it, suggesting that segregation of the sexes was “not completely alien to our culture.”

“The world’s population has trebled since 1951, when the Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees was ratified in Geneva. It was created in a completely different global context from the one that exists today. It was devised following the mass displacement and attempted genocide of European Jews during World War II and aimed to offer a safe haven to relatively small numbers of individuals from countries fleeing explicit, documented political persecution by governments. [...] In 1967, the convention was extended universally so that anyone living in a dangerous place, not just those personally persecuted by the state, had grounds for asylum. Millions—potentially hundreds of millions—of people now qualify.”

“More than any other major religion, Islam formalizes the subordination of women. Islamic religious law, as codified by the “official” schools of Sunni Islamic law (the Hanbali, Shafi’i, Hanafi, and Maliki schools), insists on male guardianship over women. In Islam, “any woman must have a ‘guardian,’ wali; her closest male relative if she is unmarried, her husband if she is not.”16 This remnant of seventh-century Arab culture—which has spread through Islam to the other parts of the world that are now Muslim majority—has never been revised in official schools of Islamic law.17 Imams and other Islamic religious leaders today continue to chastise women for disobeying the modesty doctrine. They cite passages in the Quran to assign girls a position in the family that requires them to be docile, to depend on male relatives for money, and to submit to their husband’s dominion over their bodies. Marriage is typically arranged, and there is often an exchange of money in the process. Under the religious rule of Islam, it is still common today that a woman’s rights are essentially sold to a man she may not even know.”

“Islamism has become the “go-to” haven for those seeking order amid such chaos. Sharia courts have been established in these countries, filling the void of social control. After the savagery of dictatorship and civil war, the promise of divine law is understandably welcomed by a population hungry for order and stability. When the Islamists come to town, they therefore reestablish order again with their own savagery. For example, the immodest woman is no longer considered simply immodest; she is an adulterous sinner who must be flogged and stoned.”

“The extreme, yet perhaps inevitable, expression of all these beliefs and behaviors—polygamy, religiously sanctioned bigotry, unchecked sexual harassment, a lack of sex education, repressed sexual urges, and the honor/shame dichotomy—is taharrush gamea, “the rape game” in Arabic.”

“In 2006, Egyptian bloggers witnessed hundreds of men thronging the streets to celebrate the end of Ramadan, harassing women with or without hijabs, ripping off their clothes, encircling them, and trying to assault them.48 Girls ran for cover in nearby restaurants, taxis, and cinemas. As protests continued in Tahrir Square in 2012, mob attacks against women became more organized. Men formed concentric rings around individual women, stripping and raping them.49 Some Egyptian women spoke out, taking their accounts and video evidence of sexual assaults to police, but little headway was made until laws against sexual harassment were introduced in 2014.50 The rape game crossed the Mediterranean in December 2015. During New Year’s Eve celebrations in Cologne, as we have seen, more than a thousand young men formed rings around individual women, sexually assaulting them.51 When the victims identified the perpetrators as looking “foreign,” “North African,” and “Arab,” they were pilloried as racists on social media.52 The local feminist and magazine editor Alice Schwarzer’s dogged reporting established that the young men had coordinated and planned the attacks that night “to the detriment of the Kufar [infidels].”53 Schwarzer was vindicated twelve months later, when Cologne police chief Jürgen Mathies confirmed that the attacks had been intentionally coordinated to intimidate the German population.”

“It may no longer be fashionable to make such comparisons, but the economic evidence is unequivocal: liberal democratic societies are more peaceful, prosperous, and tolerant than those that permit autocratic rule, as in Russia; one-party rule, as in China; or theocracy, as in Iran. Yet these days, those who advocate the superiority of Western civilization are demonized, especially on university campuses, as racists or white supremacists. Few within the establishment are willing to challenge the politically correct consensus and insist instead on upholding the core classical liberal values.”

“men monopolizes the most desirable mates. Since accumulating wealth and status takes time and work for most men, the norm of polygamy pushes up the age of marriage for males, drives down the age of marriage for females, removes incentives for female educational and economic attainment, and increases the fertility rate. The surplus of unmarried males scrambling for an artificially reduced pool of marriageable females spurs the growth of crime and violence.”

“Rapists are created, not born” has become the accepted wisdom.39 But when it comes to migrants and minorities, pointing to cultural explanations for their behavior toward women is taboo. This seems contradictory. Indeed, when you consider how Muslim men are educated about sex—or not—it makes no sense at all.”

“Dawa is happening not only in Muslim communities but also in Western prisons. Believing that religious education will benefit prisoners, the authorities mistakenly give agents of dawa access to Muslim prisoners. Like wolves in sheep’s clothing, they claim to be religious community representatives, all the while harboring links to terrorist organizations such as the Muslim Brotherhood, ISIS, and Hizb ut-Tahrir.”

“Honor violence is a set of enforcement measures used to uphold the modesty doctrine. Girls and women who step out of line face injury and even murder at the hands of relatives if they drift too far toward emancipation. So-called honor killing is meant to remove a stain on a family’s honor caused by real or alleged sexual misconduct. In Western countries, the victims of honor violence also include Sikh, Hindu, and Kurdish women, but most appear to be Muslim.”

“Young people in Western societies have grown up with the assumption that gender equality is a given. They did not have to fight for basic equality and are often oblivious to its being undermined around them. Even when they are confronted with the erosion of women’s rights in the street, they sometimes apologize for criticizing their attackers. In court, victims of sexual assault appearing on the witness stand have to insist that they are not racists. Almost every woman I interviewed in the course of researching this book felt obliged to begin with a caveat: “I’m not against migrants,” “I’m from the Left,” or “I am not racist.”

“My view is that, using Woodhouse’s own words, the male-to-female transsexual is a “fantastic woman, ” the incarnation of a male fantasy of feeling like a woman trapped in a man’s body, the fantasy rendered flesh by a further male medical fantasy of surgically fashioning a male body into a female one. These fantasies are based in the male imagination, not in any female reality. It is this female reality that the surgically-constructed woman does not possess, not because women innately carry some essence of femininity but because these men have not had to live in a female body with all the history that entails. It is that history that is basic to female reality, and yes, history is based to a certain extent on female biology.”

“The female-to-constructed-male transsexual is the token that saves face for the male “transsexual empire. ” She is the buffer zone who can be used to promote the universalist argument that transsexualism is a supposed “human” problem, not uniquely restricted to men. She is the living “proof” that some women supposedly want the same thing. However, “proof” wanes when it is observed that women were not the original nor are they the present agents of the process. Nor are the stereotypes of masculinity that a female-to-constructed-male transsexual incarnates products of a female-directed culture. Rather women have been assimilated into the transsexual world, as women are assimilated into other male-defined worlds, institutions, and roles, that is, on men’s terms, and thus as tokens.”

“Male-to-constructed-female transsexualism is only one more relatively recent variation on this theme where the female genitalia are completely separated from the biological woman and, through surgery, come to be dominated by incorporation into the biological man. Transsexualism is thus the ultimate, and we might even say the logical, conclusion of male possession of women in a patriarchal society. Literally, men here possess women.”

“Simone de Beauvoir gave us the insight that woman has been fabricated by man as “the other, ” the relative being—relative to himself as the norm. So it should not be surprising that men, who have literally and figuratively, constructed women for centuries, are now “perfecting” the man-made women out of their own flesh.”

“However, the other side of fetishization is worship or reverence for the fetish object. In primitive religions, fetish objects were worshiped because people were afraid of the power they were seen to contain. Therefore primitive peoples sought to control the power of the fetish by worshiping it and in so doing they confined it to its “rightful place. ” There was a recognition of a power that people felt they lacked and a constant quest in ceremonies and cults to invest themselves with the power of the fetish object. Thus to worship was also to control. In this way, objectification and worship are two sides of the same coin.”

“[...] The deceptiveness of men without “members, ” that is, castrated men or eunuchs, has historical precedent. There is a long tradition of eunuchs who were used by rulers, heads of state, and magistrates as keepers o f women. Eunuchs were supervisors of the harem in Islam and wardens of women’s apartments in many royal households. In fact, the word eunuch, from the Greek eunouchos, literally means “keeper of the bed. ” Eunuchs were men that other more powerful men used to keep their women in place. By fulfilling this role, eunuchs also succeeded in winning the confidence of the ruler and securing important and influential positions.”

“We might say that the body is part of the creative ground of existence, but we are not bound by that structure in the full creative sense. Our spirit is bound to our bodies, as its creative ground, but surpasses it through freedom and choice. The body is present in all our choices, but as total persons, we have the freedom to be other than what culturally accompanies a male or female body.”

“Men who practice transvestism as an expression of the male sex right have been turned into a rights-bearing category, an oppressed minority whose excitements have precedents over the dignity, safety, and civil and political freedoms of women, and even the existence of women as a social and biological category. This achievement has depending upon obscuring their sexual motivations in favour of the idea that they are somehow essentially female in their heads.”

“There can be no liberation of women without a complete transformation of the way that male sexuality is constructed. Whilst the eroticising of women's subordination remains the basis of what is seen as sex, women cannot escape coercion in the bedroom, sexual harassment on the streets and at work, and the requirement to service men's excitements in the way they dress and behave. Women's appearance, behaviour, body language, opportunities are shaped by this 'duty'.”

“The most obvious proof that male sexuality is constructed to be abusive is the fact that men do not rape women in the breakfast cereal isle of the local supermarket. They are not subject to forces beyond their control. Men's sex right is socially constructed and expressed only where there is likely to be no immediate sanction. Men's sexual violence towards women is a product of their minds and not their biology.”

“Og det slår meg en ting i at man uten videre godtar at en ung mann skal (og må) ha en tid hvor han lærer verden å kjenne, 'samler erfaringer', 'raser ut'... eller hva man nå vil kalle set. At han "gjør sine erfaringer" med kvinner, forutsetter at han har en partner, at man er to om det (eller minst to). Men hans partner? Herregud, hvor dypt det sitter i alle: at det som er tillatt for en ung mann, ja til og med en fordel, å ha 'verdenserfaring', det er for en tilsvarende ung pike ikke en fordel, men en skittflekk, en fornedrelse, noe som har merket henne for livet, noe som aldri mere kan vaskes av.”

“Every woman, from the prostitute to the nun, possesses equal right to safety, protection, and freedom; in a manner unrelated to the consent or standards drawn out by men. We do not choose which woman for whom to provide more protection and more safety based upon what she is doing with her own body, how she clothes herself, or the style by which she chooses to live.”

“There are too many young women now who want to be a girlfriend, or want to be a wife. An adjective in a man's life. I want to set a better example than that. I want young women to look at me and learn how to be their own source of love and acceptance. A man is another person that might join you on your journey but it's your own map you've got to be holding in your hand, it's your own window you've got to be opening up for the sunrise each morning.”