Mussolini on English feminism, quoted by Andrea Dworkin in Scapegoat: The Jews, Israel and Women’s Liberation, deploying the “feminists just need a good fuck” argument:
“In a country where animals are adored to the point of making cemetaries and hospitals and houses for them, and legacies are bequeathed to parrots, you can be sure that decadence has set in. Besides, other reasons apart, it is also a consequence of the composition of the English people. Four million surplus women. Four million women sexually unsatisfied, artificially creating a host of problems in order to excite or appease their senses. Not being able to embrace one man, they embrace humanity.”
“Men are not separate species from women. We’re both human, and it’s about damn time someone started saying “gee, we have an awful lot in common, don’t we?” My point is also that my state of BEING female is only relevant in the context of completely unnatural social norms that caused me to do things like starve myself when I was 13, or want boob implants at 17, or wish for a steady boyfriend at 9 before I even knew what the hell desire or love was. My real state is human. My social state is that of a woman. My sex is female, which is probably XX (or XXX, XXXX, XXXXX, XXY, or XXYY, which makes determining my sex as one of two possibilities fairly absurd). I’m genetically (probably) a woman, I’m socially a female, I’m most definitely human. Out of all of those identifiers, it should be the last one that matters most, not least.”
Or this could be. Or any number of essays or speeches by Andrea Dworkin. I can’t choose.
Only do exactly what you want to do. Trust me, everyone else does. Do you think the patriarchy would let you fuck it where it didn’t want you to? Really. Learn that young. Learn it now. Learn it every fucking day if you have to.
Comment by VeganRampage on this post by Twisty about vaginisimus and treatments that are all about making sure that “Nigel can get back in the saddle”
Carrie Chapman Catt, an American suffragist, describing the 72-year struggle for women to win the right to vote – via comment on Shakesville
“…During that time they were forced to conduct 56 campaigns of referenda to male voters; 480 campaigns to get state legislatures to submit suffrage amendments to voters; 47 state campaigns to get state constitutional conventions to write women’s suffrage into state constitutions; 277 campaigns to get presidential party conventions to adopt women suffrage planks in party platforms; and 19 campaigns in 19 successive Congresses…Millions of dollars were raised…hundreds of women gave the accumulated possibilities of an entire lifetime, thousands gave years of their lives, hundreds of thousands gave constant interest and such aid as they could…. Young suffragists who helped forge the last links of that chain were not born when it began. Old suffragists who forged the first links were dead when it ended.”
When I was 17, the thought of being accepted as a queer in my family, or in society at large — the idea of being “out” at a job — any job (except maybe a gay-bar) — simply did not exist.
At the time, I was pissed about this at some level — but it was a vague, subconscious kind of anger — and I would never have expected it to be addressed in the media or a topic of conversation outside of the secretive community that I inhabited as a queer.
Now, at 52, I’m pissed again — but this time, my anger is out in the open.
That may be bitter cause for Hope — but it is, for me, Hope, nonetheless.
“That’s the true power fantasy, the one we’re not allowed to have”
February 15, 2009 in Brilliant blogging, Commenty goodness. Closed
Tags: books, buffy, characters, feminism, film, labyrinth, love, patriarcy, power, quotes, relationships, resistance, romance, sex, television, twilight
Comment by lookingforwater on a post by ginmar on the Twilight books (emphasis mine):
(And ginmar replies with “I’d rather go down fighting than rise by surrender.”)