78 Quotes About Radical-feminism

Forget the myths you have heard about radical feminism, for only some of them are true. Instead, prepare to think about why so many lies are told about this particular brand of feminism, how it acts as a scapegoat for all that is most threatening about our social movement and how any revolutionary movement for change could really ever be anything but threatening. These are the women you were warned about; you can be too.

There should be no necessary contradiction between recognizing the harms women suffer from male dominance as well as their courage and resourcefulness in dealing with them. Otherwise feminist critique might have to be abandoned altogether on the grounds that it is insulting to women.

Men have been adjudicating on what women are, and how they should behave, for millennia through the institutions of social control such as religion, the medical profession, psychoanalysis, the sex industry. Feminists have fought to remove the definition of what a woman is from these masculine institutions and develop their own understandings.

It would take a denial of all cultural tradition for women to produce even a true 'female' art. For a woman who participates in (male) culture must achieve and be rated by standards of a tradition she had no part in making - and certainly there is no room in that tradition for a female view, even if she could discover what it was.

We have to imagine something before we can build the infrastructure that will allow it to exist. We have failed here on both fronts: in imagination and in reality. Our great weirdos, from Emily Dickinson to Simone Weil to Coco Chanel, are seen as outliers, as not relevant to the way we think through what we want out of life. It's the same way we discuss radical feminist writers like Dworkin and Firestone. Dworkin is unhinged, Firestone is too eccentric to be taken seriously.

The common perception is that man hating is solely a radical feminist practice. In my essay, I maintain that is neither radical nor particularly feminist. It's a human response to having your autonomy restricted, and in some cases, destroyed.

In my own case, I had to train myself out of that phony smile, which is like a nervous tic on every teenage girl. And this meant that I smiled rarely, for in truth, when it came down to real smiling, I had less to smile about. My 'dream' action for the women's liberation movement: a smile boycott, at which declaration all women would instantly abandon their 'pleasing' smiles, henceforth smiling only when something pleased them.

As a feminist, I consider the female pronoun to be an honorific, a term that conveys respect. Respect is due to women as members of a sex caste that have survived subordination and deserve to be addressed with honour. Men who transgender cannot occupy such a position.

Pornography is to sex what McDonalds is to food. A plasticized, generic version of the real thing.