262 Quotes by Jessica Valenti

Hearing the Beastie Boys speak out against sexism made me feel like if these men who had once sung about getting girls to ‘do the laundry’ and ‘clean up my room’ could understand, maybe the rest of the world would follow suit. It made me hopeful in the best way.

If you’re fighting to limit other women’s rights, then you can’t really call yourself a feminist.

As much as I disagree with Sarah Palin, there’s no denying that she was the victim of sexism.

And really, how insulting is it that to suggest that the best thing women can do is raise other people to do incredible things? I’m betting some of those women would like to do great things of their own.

If we have no place to go where we can escape that reaction to our bodies, where is it that we’re not forced? The idea that these crimes are escapable is the blind optimism of men who don’t understand what it means to live in a body that attracts a particular kind of attention with magnetic force.

You come to a point where you give up on holding yourself to a perfect feminist ideal – it just feels stifling.

If you go to places like YouTube, it’s a cesspool, and a lot of the comments are really horrifying and misogynist and harassing.

You have to have your personal life, and at the end of the day I think what people forget, especially when you’re online, is that you’re a person too, right, and that you’re not this ideal of feminism, that everything you do like feminism just like falls in your wake.

No matter the content, the message is clear: we are here for their enjoyment and little else. We have to walk through the rest of our day knowing that our discomfort gave someone a hard-on.