feminism

I should never call myself a feminist since feminists are women who are unhappy because they cannot find husbands.So I decided to call myself a Happy Feminist.

The laws of the solar system that previously only God had known could suddenly be read using scientific method. The view of the world changed. From one where God intervened, had opinions, smote, parted oceans, moved mountains and personally opened millions of flowers every day. To one where God was absent and the universe was a clock that he had created and wound up, but that now ticked of its own accord.

My father did not have to trade dying alone for the joys of the road. My mother did not have to give up a journey of her own to have a home. Neither do I. Neither do you.

I myself cried when I got angry, then became unable to explain why I was angry in the first place. Later I would discover this was endemic among female human beings. Anger is supposed to be "unfeminine", so we suppress it-until it overflows.

Feminism is a political practice of fighting male supremacy in behalf of women as a class, including all the women you don't like, including all the women you don't want to be around, including all the women who used to be your best friends whom you don't want anything to do with anymore. It doesn't matter who the individual women are. They all have the same vulnerability to rape, to battery, as children to incest. Poorer women have more vulnerability to prostitution, which is basically a form of sexual exploitation that is intolerable in an egalitarian society, which is the society we are fighting for.

Mrs. Greene made me understand the parallels between race and caste--- and how women's bodies were used to perpetuate both. Different prisons. Same key.

Now we are beginning to come to a point where human consciousness is moving back to female energy. The Earth is crying out very loudly, and the herbalists are springing up. Women are becoming healers again. That energy is coming back.

The patriarchal/kyriarchal/hegemonic culture seeks to regulate and control the body _ especially women__ bodies, and especially black women__ bodies _ because women, especially black women, are constructed as the Other, the site of resistance to the kyriarchy. Because our existence provokes fear of the Other, fear of wildness, fear of sexuality, fear of letting go _ our bodies and our hair (traditionally hair is a source of magical power) must be controlled, groomed, reduced, covered, suppressed.

In a world where you can get a spare kidney, a black-market Picasso or a ticket to ride into space, why can__ I see some actual sex? Some actual fucking from people who want to fuck each other? Some chick in an outfit I halfway respect, having the time of her life? I have MONEY. I__ willing to PAY for this. I AM NOW A 35-YEAR-OLD WOMAN, AND I JUST WANT A MULTI-BILLION-DOLLAR INTERNATIONAL PORN INDUSTRY WHERE I CAN SEE A WOMAN COME. I just want to see a good time.

I am willing to make people uncomfortable so that my daughter doesn't have to!

An older man who seems to be the leader of the Jesus Tshirt group says that the Bible forbids abortion in its commandment __hou shall not kill.__ut being in the Bible Belt, people really know their Bible, and an older woman cites Exodus 21:22_23, a passage that says a man who causes a pregnant woman to miscarry must pay a fine but is not charged with murder, not unless the woman herself dies.Thus the Bible is making clear, that a dependent life is not the same as an independent life.

Like many liberal men in the age of feminism, he believed women should have equal access to jobs and be given equal pay, but when it came to matters of home and heart he still believed caregiving was the female role. Like many men, he wanted a woman to be 'just like his mama' so that he did not have to do the work of growing up.

In the same way that individual women are often underestimated, a movement of women is also understimated, but the truth is that, if people realize someone is willing to talk about these deep and daily concerns, they show up.

If there was a party, everyone in turn would come sit next to me to regale me with how he or sh thought I should live and what I deserved to have. What it boiled down to was that I should live like them. Elvire, one half of a tightly knit couple would forget that her husband was clinically depressed. Guillaume, married to a harpy, maintained that if one laid low and said amen to everything, things worked out. Maria, fed up to the teeth with her children, wanted me to have my own. Assia loved women but it was killing her mother. Patrizio had bruises on his shoulders from his chronically jealous wife. Not one of them could stand my singleness, because it could have been theirs.

We cannot accept any code or creed that uniformly defrauds woman of all her natural rights.

I will keep writing about these intersections as a writer and a teacher, as a black woman, as a bad feminist, until I no longer feel like what I want is impossible. I no longer want to believe that these problems are too complex for us to make sense of them.

Don't write when you're angry and under deadline, with time to test it only on friends who know what you mean, not on strangers who don't.

We can have everything we want as long as what we want is a life spent searching for exhausting work that doesn't pay enough, shopping for things we don't need and sticking to a set of social and sexual rules that turn out, once you plough through the layers of trash and adverts, to be as rigid as ever.