Feminist Theory Quotes

“... in practice the standard for what constitutes rape is set not at the level of women's experience of violation but just above the level of coercion acceptable to men.”
― Judith Lewis Herman

“Men who are in prison for rape think it's the dumbest thing that ever happened... it's isn't just a miscarriage of justice; they were put in jail for something very little different from what most men do most of the time and call it sex. The only difference is they got caught. That view is nonremorseful and not rehabilitative. It may also be true. It seems to me that we have here a convergence between the rapists's view of what he has done and the victim's perspective on what was done to her. That is, for both, their ordinary experiences of heterosexual intercourse and the act of rape have something in common. Now this gets us into immense trouble, because that's exactly how judges and juries see it who refuse to convict men accused of rape. A rape victim has to prove that it was not intercourse. She has to show that there was force and that she resisted, because if there was sex, consent is inferred. Finders of fact look for "more force than usual during the preliminaries". Rape is defined by distinction from intercourse - not nonviolence, intercourse. They ask, does this event look more like fucking or like rape? But what is their standard for sex, and is this question asked from the women's point of view? The level of force is not adjudicated at her point of violation; it is adjudicated at the standard for the normal level of force. Who sets this standard?”
― Catharine A. MacKinnon

“Feminism as a career is the province of the privileged; it's hard to read dozens of books on feminist theory while you're working in a hair salon or engaged in the kinds of jobs that put food on the table but also demand a lot of physical and mental energy.”
― Mikki Kendall, Hood Feminism: Notes from the Women That a Movement Forgot

“pornography is the orchestrated destruction of women’s bodies and souls; rape, battery, incest, and prostitution animate it; dehumanization and sadism characterize it; it is war on women, serial assaults on dignity, identity, and human worth; it is tyranny. Each woman who has survived knows from the experience of her own life that pornography is captivity—the woman trapped in the picture used on the woman trapped wherever he’s got her.”
― Andrea Dworkin, Pornography: Men Possessing Women

“Women who are radical feminists are not
men-hunters. Sorry, I meant men-haters. Radical Feminists don’t hate men. But you can, if you want to.”
― Andreia Nobre, The Grumpy Guide to Radical Feminism

“For as long as wimmin have had the temerity to experience feelings of anger, sadness, frustration, and deep resentment, patriarchal society has denied them these feelings, and, in fact, punished them heartily for feeling anything at all.”
― Elisa Albert, The Book of Dahlia

“Everyone knows what the female complaint is: women live for love, and love is the gift that keeps on taking”
― Lauren Berlant, The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture

“One of the simplest ways we can help another woman is just to say yes. Yes to an introduction. Yes to a thirty-minute call. Yes to giving some advice. Yes to any request within the realm of possibility.”
― Jane Finette, Unlocked: How Empowered Women Empower Women

“We can help another woman help herself, we can create potential opportunities for growth, we can share our wisdom, and advice, but there will come a time when the only thing left to do is stand up for her!”
― Jane Finette, Unlocked: How Empowered Women Empower Women

“By giving another woman a chance to help you, you are also giving her an opportunity to feel valued, and whole.”
― Jane Finette, Unlocked: How Empowered Women Empower Women

“Feminists fail to understand that doing household chores is the inherited nature of a woman”
― Atef Ashab Uddin Sahil

“In other words, sexualization is a more general tactic to delegitimize and dehumanize people. This helps to explain why there is often so much shame, reluctance, and secrecy surrounding discussions of sexuality, as even broaching the subject can lead a person to become stigmatized.”
― Julia Serano, Sexed Up: How Society Sexualizes Us, and How We Can Fight Back

“It [women's culture] survives also because it's central fantasy, and the one this book elaborates, is the constantly emplotted desire of a complex person to rework the details of her history to become a vague or simpler version of herself, usually in the vicinity of a love plot”
― Lauren Berlant, The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture

“We can no longer justify the maintenance of a discriminatory sex class system on grounds of its origin in nature.”
― Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution

“This radical movement was built by women who had literally no civil status under law; who were pronounced civilly dead upon marriage, or who remained legal minors if they did not marry who could not sign a will or even have custody of their own children upon divorce; who were not taught even to read, let alone admitted to college; who had no political voice whatever. Thus, even after the Civil War, more than half the USA's population was still legally enslaved, literally not owning even the bustles on their backs.”
― Shulasmith Firestone

“From the very beginning the feminist movement posed a serious threat to the established order, its very existence and long duration testifying to fundamental inequalities in a system that pretended to democracy.”
― Shulasmith Firestone

“The cultural indoctrinations necessary to reinforce sex role traditions had become blatant, tasteless, where before they had been insidious.”
― Shulasmith Firestone

“... feminism is secondary in the order of political priorities, and must be tailored to fit into a pre-existent (male-created) political framework.”
― Shulasmith Firestone

“For even if the woman is equally educated, even when she is working, she is rarely able, given the inequality of the job market, to make as much money as her husband.”
― Shulasmith Firestone

“Men are odd. They do not permit us to be only women, I mean women with all their weaknesses; but they do not for a moment let us forget we are only women.”
― Shulasmith Firestone

“Often the only difference between the modern college-educated housewife and her traditional prototype was the jargon she used in describing her marital hell.”
― Shulasmith Firestone

“The devaluation of women [under patriarchy] represents a necessary stage in the history of humanity, for it is not upon her positive value but upon man's weakness, that her prestige is founded.”
― Shulasmith Firestone

“So if women are a parasitical class living off, and at the margins of, the male economy, the reverse too is true: (male) culture is parasitical, feeding on the emotional strength of women without reciprocity.”
― Shulasmith Firestone

“I submit that love is essentially a much simpler phenomenon- it becomes complicated, corrupted, or obstructed by an unequal balance of power.”
― Shulasmith Firestone

“Virility and sexual performance become confused with social worth.”
― Shulasmith Firestone

“The sex privatization of women is the process whereby women are blinded to their generality as a class which renders them invisible as individuals to the male eye.”
― Shulasmith Firestone

“Thus sex privatization stereotypes women: it encourages men to see women as 'dolls' differentiated only by superficial attributes.”
― Shulasmith Firestone

“The tool for representing, for objectifying one's experience in order to deal with it, culture, is so saturated with male bias that women almost never have a chance to see themselves culturally through their own eyes.”
― Shulasmith Firestone

“”
― Hélène Cixous, The Laugh of the Medusa

“By writing her self, woman will return to the body which has been more than confiscated from her, which has been turned into an uncanny stranger on display- the ailing or dead figure, which so often turns out to be the nasty companion, the cause and location of inhibitions.”
― Hélène Cixous, The Laugh of the Medusa