262 Quotes by Jessica Valenti

A high school teacher once told me that identity is half what we tell ourselves and half what we tell other people about ourselves. But the missing piece he didn’t mention – the piece that holds so much weight, especially in the minds of young women and girls – is the stories that other people tell us about ourselves. Those narratives become the ones we shape ourselves into. They’re who we are, even if so much of it is a performance. This.

I think that the ideal of parenting can make people unhappy. It’s that this lie that they’re being told by society that parenting is one thing – and when parenting is something completely different – that’s what makes them unhappy.

What other movement has ensured that young women have the rights that they have today? Feminism is responsable not only for the decline in violence against women over the last decade, but also for equal pay and rights legislation, reproductive justice, and the list goes on. So I’m more than a little suspicious of those who see women’s advancement as a bad thing.

You just remember to say “Screw them.

The biggest thinker that’s influenced my feminism is definitely Bell Hooks, who’s a feminist cultural critic, because of her accessibility but also just because she’s a genius.

It’s time to teach our daughters that their ability to be good people depends on their being good people, not on whether or not they’re sexually active.

I think feminism has always been global. I think there’s feminism everywhere throughout the world.

I grew up definitely a feminist, but I didn’t call myself a feminist until I took my first women’s studies class in college.

If you want what’s best for your kids, one surefire way to provide them with a healthy, happy home is to make sure they have lesbian parents. In the longest-running study of lesbian families to date,2 zero percent of children reported physical or sexual abuse – not a one. In the general population, 26 percent of children report physical abuse and 8.3 percent report sexual abuse.