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Jessica Valenti Quotes

Jessica Valenti quote from classy quote

What’s the worst possible thing you can call a woman? Don’t hold back, now.You’re probably thinking of words like slut, whore, bitch, cunt (I told you not to hold back!), skank.Okay, now, what are the worst things you can call a guy? Fag, girl, bitch, pussy. I’ve even heard the term “mangina.”Notice anything? The worst thing you can call a girl is a girl. The worst thing you can call a guy is a girl. Being a woman is the ultimate insult. Now tell me that’s not royally fucked up.

~ Jessica Valenti

Jessica Valenti Double Standards Eye Opening Feminism Gender Inequality Insults Men Names Sexism Woman Womanhood Women

..the hope I have for women: that we can start to see ourselves-and encourage men to see us-as more than just the sum of our sexual parts: not as virgins or whores, as mothers or girlfriends, or as existing only in relation to men, but as people with independent desires, hopes and abilities. But I know that this can't happen as long as American culture continues to inundate us with gender-role messages that place everyone-men and women-in an unnatural hierarchical order that's impossible to maintain without strife. For women to move forward, and for men to break free, we need to overcome the masculinity status quo-together.

~ Jessica Valenti

Jessica Valenti Feminism Men Status Quo Women

Trusting women means also trusting them to find their way. This isn’t to say, of course, that I think women’s sexual choices are intrinsically “empowered” or “feminist.” I just believe that in a world that values women so little, and so specifically for their sexuality, we should be giving them the benefit of the doubt. Because in this kind of hostile culture, trusting womenis a radical act.

~ Jessica Valenti

Jessica Valenti Women

Trusting women means also trusting them to find their way. This isn’t to say, of course, that I think women’s sexual choices are intrinsically 'empowered' or 'feminist.' I just believe that in a world that values women so little, and so specifically for their sexuality, we should be giving them the benefit of the doubt. Because in this kind of hostile culture, trusting womenis a radical act.

~ Jessica Valenti

Jessica Valenti Feminism Sexuality Women Women S Rights

Perhaps it’s true that in our sex-saturated culture it does take a certain amount of self-discipline to resist having sex, but restraint does not equal morality. And let’s be honest: if this were simply about resisting peer pressure and being strong, then the women who have sex because they actively want to — as appalling as that idea might be to those who advocate abstinence — wouldn’t be scorned. Because the “strength” involved in these women’s choice would be about doing what they want despite pressure to the contrary, not about resisting the sex act itself.

~ Jessica Valenti

Jessica Valenti Abstinence Feminism Morality Peer Pressure Sex Virginity Women

Value yourself for what the media doesn't - your intelligence, your street smarts, your ability to play a kick-ass game of pool, whatever. So long as it's not just valuing yourself for your ability to look hot in a bikini and be available to men, it's an improvement.

~ Jessica Valenti

Jessica Valenti Beauty Body Image Feminism Media

As Feministing.com commenter electron-Blue noted in response to the 2008 New York Times Magazine article “Students of Virginity,” on abstinence clubs at Ivy League colleges, “There were a WHOLE LOTTA us not having sex at Harvard . . . but none of us thought that that was special enough to start a club about it, for pete’s sake.

~ Jessica Valenti

Jessica Valenti Abstinence Feminism Sex Virginity

Sex for pleasure, for fun, or even for building relationships is completely absent from our national conversation. Yet taking the joy out of sexuality is a surefire way to ensure not that young women won't have sex, but rather that they'll have it without pleasure.

~ Jessica Valenti

Jessica Valenti Pleasure Sex Young Women

If being premenstrual is “innocence,” does that make those of us with periods guilty? And this really gets to the heart of the matter: These concerns aren't about lost innocence; they're about lost girlhood. The virginity movement doesn't want women to be adults. Despite the movement's protestations about how this focus on innocence or preserving virginity is just a way of protecting girls, the truth is, it isn't a way to desexualize them. It simply positions their sexuality as “good”— worth talking about, protecting, and valuing—and women's sexuality, adult sexuality, as bad and wrong. The (perhaps) unintended consequences of this focus is that girl's sexuality is sexualized and fetishized even further.

~ Jessica Valenti

Jessica Valenti Abstinence Girlhood Innocence Innocent Sex Sexuality Sexualization Sexualization Of Women Viginity

I think virginity is fine, just as I think having sex is fine. I don't really care what women do sexually, and neither should you. In fact, that's the point. I believe that a young woman's decision to have sex, or not, shouldn't impact how she's seen as a moral actor.

~ Jessica Valenti

Jessica Valenti Sex Virginity

By erasing any nuance and complexity about porn and sexuality, the virginity movement gives young women only two choices of who they can be sexually: sluts or not sluts. While the first choice doesn't seem attractive, I can guarantee you that most young women are going to go with the option that allows them to have sex. And there's no in-between identity for young women who are making smart, healthy choices in their sexual lives.

~ Jessica Valenti

Jessica Valenti Sex

The desirable virgin is sexy but not sexual. She's young, white, and skinny. She's a cheerleader, a babysitter; she's accessible and eager to please (remember those ethics of passivity!). She's never a woman of color. SHe's never a low-income girl or a fat girl. She's never disabled. Virgin is a designation for those who meet a certain standard of what women, especially young women, are supposed to look like. As for how these young women are supposed to act? A blank slate is best.

~ Jessica Valenti

Jessica Valenti Feminism Purity Myth Virgin Virginity

While falling in love is fun, it's not everything, and it's not the antidote to an unfulfilled life, despite what Reese Witherspoon movies may tell you.

~ Jessica Valenti

Jessica Valenti Feminism Love

For women especially, virginity has become the easy answer- the morality quick fix. You can be vapid, stupid, and unethical, but so long as you've never had sex, you're a good (i.e. moral) girl and therefore worthy of praise.

~ Jessica Valenti

Jessica Valenti Ethics Feminism Purity Myth Virginity

If you spend any amount of time doing media analysis, it’s clear that the most frenzied moral panic surrounding young women’s sexuality comes from the mainstream media, which loves to report about how promiscuous girls are, whether they’re acting up on spring break, getting caught topless on camera, or catching all kinds of STIs. Unsurprisingly, these types of articles and stories generally fail to mention that women are attending college at the highest rates in history, and that we’re the majority of undergraduate and master’s students. Well-educated and socially engaged women just don’t make for good headlines, it seems.

~ Jessica Valenti

Jessica Valenti Feminism Non Fiction

Women are raising children, picking up socks, and making sure you feel like a man by supporting you when you need it and looking sexy (but not trying too hard, because that would be pathetic). We're being independent and bad bitches while wearing fucking lipstick and heels so as not to offend your delicate aesthetic sensibility, yet even just the word feminist pisses you off. How dare we.

~ Jessica Valenti

Jessica Valenti Feminism

Because even subversive sarcasm adds a cool-girl nonchalance, an updated, sharper version of the expectation that women be forever pleasant, even as we're eating shit.

~ Jessica Valenti

Jessica Valenti Feminism

Yes, we love the good men in our lives and sometimes, oftentimes, the bad ones too- but that we're not in full revolution against the lot of them is pretty amazing when you consider this truth: men get to rape and kill women and still come home to a dinner cooked by one.

~ Jessica Valenti

Jessica Valenti Feminism Misogyny Rape Culture Violence Against Women

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.

~ Jessica Valenti

Jessica Valenti Feminism Objectification Sexism

Because while my daughter lives in a world that knows what happens to women is wrong, it has also accepted this wrongness as inevitable.

~ Jessica Valenti

Jessica Valenti Feminism Misogyny Sexism

Still, somehow, inexplicably, “man-hater” is a word tossed around with insouciance as if this was a real thing that did harm. Meanwhile we have no real word for men who kill women. Is the word just “men”?

~ Jessica Valenti

Jessica Valenti Feminism

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.

~ Jessica Valenti

Jessica Valenti Feminism

Idolizing virginity as a stand-in for women's morality means that nothing else matters- not what we accomplish, not what we think, not what we care about and work for. Just if/how/whom we have sex with. That's all.

~ Jessica Valenti

Jessica Valenti Feminism Virginity

By fetishizing youth and virginity, we're supporting a disturbing message: that really sexy women aren't women at all- they're girls.

~ Jessica Valenti

Jessica Valenti Feminism Fetishization Virginity

Young women are not putting themselves in danger. The people around them are doing the real damage. Who? you might wonder. The abstinence teacher who tells her students that they'll go to jail if they have premarital sex. The well-founded organization that tells girls on college campuses that they should be looking for a husband, not taking women's studies classes. The judge who rules against a rape survivor because she didn't meet whatever standard for a victim he had in mind. The legislator who pushes a bill to limit young women's access to abortion because he doesn't think they're smart enough to make their own decisions. These are the people who are making the world a worse place, and a more dangerous one, at that, for girls and young women. We're just doing our best to live in it.

~ Jessica Valenti

Jessica Valenti Feminism Law Rape Victim Blaming Virginity

Antifeminists are the only ones who benefit from their version of working on women's behalf; in reality, they put other women at risk and fail to solve any larger problems.

~ Jessica Valenti

Jessica Valenti Antifeminism Feminism

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.

~ Jessica Valenti

Jessica Valenti Feminism

Young women are not putting themselves in danger. The people around them are doing the real damage. Who? you might wonder. The abstinence teacher who tells her students that they'll go to jail if they have premarital sex. The well-founded organizarion that tells girls on college campuses that they should be looking for a husband, not taking women's studies classes. The judge who rules against a rape survivor because she didn't meet whatever standard for a victim he had in mind. The legislator who pushes a bill to limit young women's access to abortion because he doesn't think they're smart enough to make their own decisions. These are the people who are making the world a worse place, and a more dangerous one, at that, for girls and young women. We're just doing our best to live in it.

~ Jessica Valenti

Jessica Valenti Feminism Law Rape Victim Blaming Virginity Women

Consider another abstinence product: a gold rose pin handed out in schools or at Christian youth events. The pin is attached to a small card that reads, You are like a beautiful rose. Each time you engage is pre-marital sex a previous petal is stripped away. Don't leave your future husband holding a bare stem. Abstain.Do we really want to teach our daughters that without their virginity they're nothing but a bare stem?

~ Jessica Valenti

Jessica Valenti Feminism Purity Purity Myth Virginity

Young women are not putting themselves in danger. The people around them are doing the real damage. Who? you might wonder. The abstinence teacher who tells her students that they'll go to jail if they have premarital sex. The well-founded organizarion that tells girls on college campuses that they should be looking for a husband, not taking women's studies classes. The judge who rules against a rape survivor because she didn't meet whatevel standard for a victim he had in mind. The legislator who pushes a bill to limit young women's access to abortion because he doesn't think they're smart enough to make their own decisions. These are the people who are making the world a worse place, and a more dangerous one, at that, for girls and young women. We're just doing our best to live in it.

~ Jessica Valenti

Jessica Valenti College Feminism Law Rape Victim Blaming Virginity Women

Antifeminists are the only ones who benefit from their version of working on women's behalf; in reality, they put other women at risk and fail to solce any larger problems.

~ Jessica Valenti

Jessica Valenti Antifeminism Feminism

I've thought often about why - why?! - anyone, especially other women, would try to disrupt feminist work that combats violence. What in the world could be the point of that? The only reason I've come up with, and I think it makes sense, is fear of becoming that impure woman.

~ Jessica Valenti

Jessica Valenti Feminism Feminist Women

[Robert] Jensen calls for an end to our current understanding of masculinity. He says, We men can settle for being men, or we can strive to be human beings. What's funny is that that statement essentially echoes the same hope I have for women: that we can start to see ourselves, and encourage men to see us, as more than just the sum of our sexual parts: not as virgins or whores, as mothers or girlfriends, or as existing only in relation to men, but as people with independent desires, hopes and abilities.

~ Jessica Valenti

Jessica Valenti Feminism Men Women

While boys are taught that the things that make them men--good men--are universally accepted ethical ideals, women are led to believe that our moral compass lies somewhere between our legs. Literally.

~ Jessica Valenti

Jessica Valenti Feminism Morality Virginity

What’s the worst possible thing you can call a woman? Don’t hold back, now. You’re probably thinking of words like slut, whore, bitch, cunt (I told you not to hold back!), skank. Okay, now, what are the worst things you can call a guy? Fag, girl, bitch, pussy. I’ve even heard the term “mangina.” Notice anything? The worst thing you can call a girl is a girl. The worst thing you can call a guy is a girl. Being a woman is the ultimate insult. Now tell me that’s not royally fucked up.

~ Jessica Valenti

Jessica Valenti Bullying Degradation Dehumanization Feminism Gender Roles Hate Insults Men Misogyny Women

I’ve always found the idea of 'saving' your virginity intriguing: it’s not as if we’re packing our Saran-wrapped hymens away in the freezer, after all, or pasting them in scrapbooks. But packed-away virginities aside, the interesting — and dangerous — idea at play here is that of 'morality.” When young women are taught about morality, there’s not often talk of compassion, kindness, courage, or integrity. There is, however, a lot of talk about hymens (though the preferred words are undoubtedly more refined — think 'virginity' and 'chastity'): if we have them, when we’ll lose them, and under what circumstances we’ll be rid of them.

~ Jessica Valenti

Jessica Valenti Chastity Feminism Gender Equality Purity Myth Virginity

Be as pissed off as you want to be. Don’t hold back because you think it’s unladylike or some such nonsense. We shouldn’t be shamed out of our anger. We should be using it. Using it to make change in our own lives, and using it to make change in the lives around us. (I know, I’m cheesy.) So the next time someone calls you emotional, or asks if you’re PMSing, call them on their bullshit.

~ Jessica Valenti

Jessica Valenti Feminism

My least favorite form of street harassment is when a guy asks why I’m not smiling. It’s related to that: Women aren’t allowed to be quiet or stoic or shy—or, hell, just in a bad mood—without being criticized. Women are bitchy and frigid if we don’t seem accessible at all times, for the most part to men. We’re supposed to be perpetually friendly. Who wants to live up to that? And seriously, when was the last time you heard a quiet woman described as “deep”?Men who are serious are just that—serious. Think laconic cowboys and Clint Eastwood-style movie heroes. Strong and silent is a desirable personality trait for men—women, not so much. Because where silence in men is seen as strength, silence in women (if not seen as bitchy) is seen as weakness—she’s shy, a wallflower.

~ Jessica Valenti

Jessica Valenti Feminism

When are we going to realize that hating other women - no matter how much money they have or how far they've fallen - is just as bad for ourselves as it is for anyone else?

~ Jessica Valenti

Jessica Valenti Feminism

Do you think it is fair that guy will make more money doing the same job as you? Does it piss you off and scare you when you find out about your friends getting raped? Do you ever feel like shit about your body? Do you ever feel like something is weong with you because you don't fit into this bizarre ideal of what girls are supposed to be like? Well, my friend, I hate to break it to you, but you're hardcore feminist. I swear.

~ Jessica Valenti

Jessica Valenti Feminism Inspirirational Quotes
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