57 Quotes by Peggy Orenstein

People in pain are so vulnerable, such easy marks. We're desperate for reasons, for a sense of control, even if it means incriminating ourselves.

It wasn't just hostility I felt around my mother, it was inadequacy. I had loved my early childhood with her. We'd spent long hours playing beauty parlor and teay party, baking holiday cookies.

It is one thing, I was discovering, to think, "Maybe I won't have kids," and quite another to be told, "Maybe you can't." This is how impatience turns to desperation.

When you're talking about over 26,000 items - and that's just Disney - it's a little hard to say where "want" ends and "coercion" begins.

At one time or another, every young man will get a letter of admission to dick school. The question is will he drop out, graduate, or go for an advanced degree?

I understood that impulse. I felt so broken, my well-being so battered- who was going to give me an Rx for that?

Psychologist Michael Thompson has pointed out that silence in the face of cruelty or sexism is how boys become men.

I kind of wish, even after I fired back at him, there was still an opportunity for him to have that conversation with me. Maybe if he had said 'This [porn] will skew the way you view women. It's not real. And it's not going to help you get a girl; it's only going to keep you from interacting with girls in a healthy manner', that might have made a difference for me. But my parents were to fearful to actually deal with any of it.

As culture critic Dara Mathis tweeted about Kanye West, 'Daughters are not spiritual retribution for your misogyny.' They are neither a form of punishment nor "tiny spiritual guides sent to newly show you the humanity of girls and women.