Conservative Woman Quotes

And, you know, politics aside, the success of Sarah Palin and women like her is good for all women - except, of course —those who will end up, you know, like, paying for their own rape ‘kit ‘n’ stuff, But for everybody else, it’s a win-win. Unless you’re a gay woman who wants to marry your partner of 20 years - whatever. But for most women, the success of conservative women is good for all of us. Unless you believe in evolution. You know - actually, I take it back. The whole thing’s a disaster.

He came back up with a brighter smile. "And I'm proven right, again! You guys should hire me for this talent I have. Mom, I bet you have a better sex life with that Garrett dude than you did with dad." "Logan!" He turned towards James. "And dad, I bet your sex life is pretty good with Analise. She strikes me as the slutty type." "Logan!" He grinned broadly. "And David…I don't know you that well, but you strike me as conservative. You're only going to be with a conservative woman, maybe one that looks exotic though. I can tell you have control issues. You don't like anyone who is wilder than you, probably why you had problems with your ex, huh? As for the current one, she's hot under the covers, but I don't know if you want her to be." He shook his head in sympathy. "You might want to take care of that.

The idea that we can somehow escape affecting each other is deeply conservative. Barbarous, even.

SEPTEMBER 1, 1939 I sit in one of the dives On Fifty-second Street Uncertain and afraid As the clever hopes expire Of a low dishonest decade: Waves of anger and fear Circulate over the bright And darkened lands of the earth, Obsessing our private lives; The unmentionable odour of death Offends the September night. Accurate scholarship can Unearth the whole offence From Luther until now That has driven a culture mad, Find what occurred at Linz, What huge imago made A psychopathic god: I and the public know What all schoolchildren learn, Those to whom evil is done Do evil in return. Exiled Thucydides knew All that a speech can say About Democracy, And what dictators do, The elderly rubbish they talk To an apathetic grave; Analysed all in his book, The enlightenment driven away, The habit-forming pain, Mismanagement and grief: We must suffer them all again. Into this neutral air Where blind skyscrapers use Their full height to proclaim The strength of Collective Man, Each language pours its vain Competitive excuse: But who can live for long In an euphoric dream; Out of the mirror they stare, Imperialism's face And the international wrong. Faces along the bar Cling to their average day: The lights must never go out, The music must always play, All the conventions conspire To make this fort assume The furniture of home; Lest we should see where we are, Lost in a haunted wood, Children afraid of the night Who have never been happy or good. The windiest militant trash Important Persons shout Is not so crude as our wish: What mad Nijinsky wrote About Diaghilev Is true of the normal heart; For the error bred in the bone Of each woman and each man Craves what it cannot have, Not universal love But to be loved alone. From the conservative dark Into the ethical life The dense commuters come, Repeating their morning vow; 'I will be true to the wife, I'll concentrate more on my work,' And helpless governors wake To resume their compulsory game: Who can release them now, Who can reach the dead, Who can speak for the dumb? All I have is a voice To undo the folded lie, The romantic lie in the brain Of the sensual man-in-the-street And the lie of Authority Whose buildings grope the sky: There is no such thing as the State And no one exists alone; Hunger allows no choice To the citizen or the police; We must love one another or die. Defenseless under the night Our world in stupor lies; Yet, dotted everywhere, Ironic points of light Flash out wherever the Just Exchange their messages: May I, composed like them Of Eros and of dust, Beleaguered by the same Negation and despair, Show an affirming flame.

When Jo's conservative sister Meg says she must turn up her hair now that she is a "young lady," Jo shouts, "I'm not! and if turning up my hair makes me one, I'll wear it in two tails till I'm twenty.... I hate to think I've got to grow up, and be Miss March, and wear long gowns, and look as prim as a China aster! It's bad enough to be a girl anyway, when I like boys' games and work and manners! I can't get over my disappointment in not being a boy; and it's worse than ever now, for I'm dying to go and fight with Papa, and I can only stay at home and knit, like a poky old woman.

Men will always underestimate you, he said, and their pride will make them want to vanquish you quickly, lest it be said that a woman tried them sorely. Let them spend their strength in furious attacks, whilst you conserve your own. Wait and watch, girl, wait and watch.

Vices are simply overworked virtues, anyway. Economy and frugality are to be commended but follow them on in an increasing ratio and what do we find at the other end? A miser! If we overdo the using of spare moments we may find an invalid at the end, while perhaps if we allowed ourselves more idle time we would conserve our nervous strength and health to more than the value the work we could accomplish by emulating at all times the little busy bee. I once knew a woman, not very strong, who to the wonder of her friends went through a time of extraordinary hard work without any ill effects. I asked her for her secret and she told me that she was able to keep her health, under the strain, because she took 20 minutes, of each day in which to absolutely relax both mind and body. She did not even “set and think.” She lay at full length, every muscle and nerve relaxed and her mind as quiet as her body. This always relieved the strain and renewed her strength.

It has been conservatively estimated that Victoria wrote an average of two and a half thousand words per day during her reign, a total of approximately sixty million words.

A liberal is a man or a woman or a child who looks forward to a better day, a more tranquil night, and a bright, infinite future.

Often, to keep the family together, the woman will accept repeated beatings and rapes, emotional battering and verbal degredation; she will be debased and ashamed but she will stick it out, or when she runs he will kill her. Ask the politicians who exude delight when they advocate for the so-called traditional family how many women are beaten and children raped when there is no man in the family. Zero is such a perfect and encouraging number, but who, among politicians in male-supremacist cultures, can count that high?

Never listen to a leftist who does not give away his fortune or does not live the exact lifestyle he wants others to follow. What the French call “the caviar left,” la gauche caviar, or what Anglo-Saxons call champagne socialists, are people who advocate socialism, sometimes even communism, or some political system with sumptuary limitations, while overtly leading a lavish lifestyle, often financed by inheritance—not realizing the contradiction that they want others to avoid just such a lifestyle. It is not too different from the womanizing popes, such as John XII, or the Borgias. The contradiction can exceed the ludicrous as with French president François Mitterrand of France who, coming in on a socialist platform, emulated the pomp of French monarchs. Even more ironic, his traditional archenemy, the conservative General de Gaulle, led a life of old-style austerity and had his wife sew his socks.

There’s a sense amongst liberals — who read identity politics into most everything — that conservative women are somehow traitors to their gender (much the same way that black conservatives are traitors to their race and young conservatives are traitors to their generation). To be a conservative woman in the 21st century is to be...ripe for scorn and ridicule by the demonstrably intolerant left.

Diane, in Jackie's mind, looked just like a woman who would be an active PTA mom, with her kind face and comfortable clothing. She also thought Diane looked like a woman who would be a loan officer, with her conservative makeup choices and serious demeanor. She would look like a pharmacist if she ever were to wear the standard white coat, gas mask, and hip waders.

Time stood still in a swelling moment where my curiosity drew me to be still in thought as the breaking speed of sound caused my heart to ascend to where my ears did know. An almost desperate attempt is made to catch my breath. Conservatively sitting down near behind the door reading, I make note of the incredible lines that veer beyond the vantage of what beauty I can absorb. She is a woman, if whose flaws were to unveil would only make her even more distinctly unique with beauty. Her ivory-colored complexion bears the brilliance of champagne balanced by a hint of ochre. Ringlets of black thread and pearl lay gracefully alongside her charming features. Her lips look as if they speak of love often, but only to herself. Her style, grace, elegance, and posture display the pure determination that she has made clear in her mind. The slight indent on the bridge of her adorable nose complements her slender face and endearing qualities. Her elegance alone surpasses any expression I’ve ever encountered.

He so enjoyed disconcerting a woman of conservative sensibilities, and he suspected that the detective had inhibitions atop reservations wrapped in reticense." --Lucan thinking about Samantha Dark Need by Lynn Viehl

It is deeply conservative to suggest that any sufficiently difficult woman from history -- say, one who rebelled against the constraints of femininity by dressing and acting in a masculine way -- must have been a man.

The idea that pornography is intrinsically exploitative and sexist is bizarre: pornography is just some fucking, after all. The act of having sex isn’t sexist, so there’s no way pornography can be, in itself, inherently misogynist. So no. Pornography isn’t the problem. Strident feminists are fine with pornography. It’s the porn industry that’s the problem. The whole thing is as offensive, sclerotic, depressing, emotionally bankrupt and desultory as you would expect a widely unregulated industry worth, at an extremely conservative estimate, $30 billion to be. No industry ever made that amount of money without being superlatively crass and dumb.

Men will always underestimate you, he said, and their pride will make them want to vanquish you quickly, lest it be said that a woman tried them sorely. Let them spend their strength in furious attacks, whilst you conserve your own.

To fight against these falsehoods, though, one needed to be able to see past the present-day and very male-oriented distortion lens to the underlying truth. Beyond question, Molly Valle could do this. A woman whose surface appearance, eyeglasses and conservative clothes, fit the schoolmarm stereotype to a T. Yet she had sloughed off that exterior and society’s restrictions as effortlessly as she had her clothes, and during their lovemaking, she had not only kept up with him but often passed ahead of him. With other women, he had seen the embers of passion but never the flame. Tonight, he had witnessed the bonfire.

A final depressing point about inequality and violence. As we’ve seen, a rat being shocked activates a stress response. But a rat being shocked who can then bite the hell out of another rat has less of a stress response. Likewise with baboons—if you are low ranking, a reliable way to reduce glucocorticoid secretion is to displace aggression onto those even lower in the pecking order. It’s something similar here—despite the conservative nightmare of class warfare, of the poor rising up to slaughter the wealthy, when inequality fuels violence, it is mostly the poor preying on the poor. This point is made with a great metaphor for the consequences of societal inequality.41 The frequency of “air rage”—a passenger majorly, disruptively, dangerously losing it over something on a flight—has been increasing. Turns out there’s a substantial predictor of it: if the plane has a first-class section, there’s almost a fourfold increase in the odds of a coach passenger having air rage. Force coach passengers to walk through first class when boarding, and you more than double the chances further. Nothing like starting a flight by being reminded of where you fit into the class hierarchy. And completing the parallel with violent crime, when air rage is boosted in coach by reminders of inequality, the result is not a crazed coach passenger sprinting into first class to shout Marxist slogans. It’s the guy being awful to the old woman sitting next to him, or to the flight attendant.*

In the last month of the presidential campaign, I tuned in to conservative talk radio and listened as callers considered the unthinkable. One after another, they all threatened the same thing: “If McCain doesn’t win, I’m leaving the country.” “Oh, right,” I’d say. “You’re going to leave and go where? Right-wing Europe?” In the Netherlands now, I imagine it’s legal to marry your own children. Get them pregnant, and you can abort your unborn grandbabies in a free clinic that used to be a church. The doctor might be a woman who became a man and then became a woman again, all on taxpayers’ dollars, but as long as she saves the stem cells, she’ll have the nation’s blessing.

Free-thinking, powerful, passionate women are dangerous to a conservative male-dominated culture. They tend to do what they want and believe is right...not what you tell them. And so patriarchal cultures have a deep-seated fear of women in their power, their ability to give life...and take life, their uncontrollable emotions, their intuition, their constant changing. Rather than seek partnership with this power, the patriarchal system has chosen to dominate and subdue the women who show signs of it through shaming, branding, naming, ostracising, traumatising, raping, medicating...and burning. In patriarchy powerful women are a threat. Their

The "fashion-beauty complex'," representing the corporate interests involved in the fashion and beauty industries, has, Bartky argues, taken over from the family and church as "central producers and regulators of 'femininity'" (1990, p. 39). The fashion-beauty complex promotes itself to women as seeking to, "glorify the female body and to provide opportunities for narcissistic indulgence'' but in fact its aim is to "depreciate woman's body and deal a blow to her narcissism'' so that she will buy more products. The result is that a woman feels constantly deficient and that her body requires "either alteration or else heroic measures merely to conserve it'' (p. 39).

Unlike music, excessive reading has been shown to be dangerous for the female mind. It was taught in our earliest lectures: the male cells are essentially katabolic: active energetic; and female cells are anabolic: there to conserve energy and support life. While a little light reading is fine, breakdown follows when woman goes against her nature.

He saw her legs first. Ankle boots met her bare calves, and the tops of her knees were hidden under a maroon, long-sleeved body-con dress. His gaze momentarily flitted to her breasts, which were pushed up and toward him. He was only human, after all, and they were really amazing breasts. He was used to seeing her in conservative wardrobe choices for the show, or the casual-date look she'd had at the pumpkin patch and ice-cream shop. In this fitted, sleek dress that showed off every one of her curves, though, she looked...

To her credit, though, Trace didn't lose her famous temper, not at that moment. At eighteen she was already expert at the older woman's art of fermenting rage, conserving it, for later use.

Dinah O’Halloran is seated beneath a large painting of a nude woman. The model’s golden hair is down and she’s looking over her shoulder, green eyes narrowed seductively at the viewer. It…oh my God. The woman’s face is Dinah’s. “Do you like it?” Dinah asks with raised eyebrows. “I have others in the house but this is the most conservative.” Conservative? Lady, I can see your ass crack in the picture. “It’s

When we leave the realm of cinema, it is obvious that the dynamics of white supremacist capitalist patriarchy---which has historically represented black females as "undesirable mates" even if they are desirable sex objects, and so rendered it socially unacceptable for powerful white males to seek committed relationships with black women---continue to inform the nature of romantic partnership in our society. What would happen to the future of white supremacist patriarchy if heterosexual white males were choosing to form serious relationships with black females? Clearly, this structure would be under mined. Significantly, The Bodyguard reaffirms this message. Frank Farmer is portrayed as a conservative Republican patriarch, a defender of the nation. Once he leaves the black woman "she devil" who has seduced and enthralled him, he returns to his rightful place as keeper of the nation's patriarchal legacy. In the film, we see him protecting the white male officers of state. These last scenes suggest that loving a black woman would keep him from honoring and protecting the nation.

The girls of the sixties had mothers who predicted, insisted, argued that those girls would be hurt; but they would not say how or why. In the main, the mothers appeared to be sexual conservatives: they upheld the marriage system as a social ideal and were silent about the sex in it. Sex was a duty inside marriage; a wife’s attitude toward it was irrelevant unless she made trouble, went crazy, fucked around. Mothers had to teach their daughters to like men as a class—be responsive to men as men, warm to men as men—and at the same time to not have sex. Since males mostly wanted the girls for sex, it was hard for the girls to understand how to like boys and men without also liking the sex boys and men wanted. The girls were told nice things about human sexuality and also told that it would cost them their lives—one way or another. The mothers walked a tough line: give the girls a good attitude, but discourage them. The cruelty of the ambivalence communicated itself, but the kindness in the intention did not: mothers tried to protect their daughters from many men by directing them toward one; mothers tried to protect their daughters by getting them to do what was necessary inside the male system without ever explaining why. They had no vocabulary for the why—why sex inside marriage was good but outside marriage was bad, why more than one man turned a girl from a loving woman into a whore, why leprosy or paralysis were states preferable to pregnancy outside marriage. They had epithets to hurl, but no other discourse. Silence about sex in marriage was also the only way to avoid revelations bound to terrify—revelations about the quality of the mothers’ own lives.

Once a woman put her hand in a gate and it ate her fingers. A five-legged spider with red eyes crawled out. That woman put in three fingers from her other hand, so that the spider might be complete. Do you have that integrity of purpose, sister?

Isaac Watts’s hymn is reminiscent of three daily prayers that male Orthodox and Conservative (but not Reform) Jews are taught to recite: shall in a ‘Blessed are You for not making me a Gentile. Blessed are You for not making me a woman. Blessed are You for not making me a slave.’ Religion

Independence is a feeling a bird has when released from the cage....a feeling child has when he or she learns to walk....a feeling a youngster has when he or she receives the first pay....a feeling that a woman of conservative Muslim family has when she removes her 'burqa'....a feeling the soul has when liberated!!!

fishing, my philosophy is that men will treat women like one of these two things: a sports fish or a keeper. How we meet, how the conversation goes, how the relationship develops, and the demands you make on a man will all determine whether you’ll be treated like a sports fish—a throwback—or a keeper, the kind of woman a man can envision settling down with. And the way we separate the two is very simple, as I explain next. A SPORTS FISH . . . Doesn’t have any rules, requirements, respect for herself, or guidelines, and we men can pick up her scent a mile away. She’s the party girl who takes a sip of her Long Island iced tea or a shot of her Patrón, then announces to her suitor that she just wants to “date and see how it goes,” and she’s the conservatively dressed woman at the office who is a master at networking, but clueless about how to approach men. She has no plans for any ongoing relationships, is not expecting anything in particular from a man, and sets absolutely not nary one condition or restriction on anyone standing before her—she makes it very clear that she’s just along for whatever is getting ready to happen. For sure, as soon as she lets a man know through words and action that he can treat her just any old kind of way, he will do just

Justice Harry Blackmun’s majority opinion in Roe v. Wade was all about privacy, but the most private parts of a woman’s body and the most private decisions she will ever make have never been more public. Everyone gets to weigh in. Even, according to the five conservative Catholic men on the Supreme Court, her employer.

Lifestyle feminism ushered in a notion that there could be as many versions of feminism as there were women. Suddenly the politics was being slowly removed from feminism. And the assumption prevailed that no matter what a woman's politics, be she conservative or liberal, she too could fit feminism into her existing lifestyle.

At first glance, the stewardess appears to have been a reflection of conservative postwar gender roles—an impeccable airborne incarnation of the mythical homemaker of the 1950s who would happily abandon work to settle down with Mr. Right. A high-flying expert at applying lipstick, warming baby bottles, and mixing a martini, the stewardess was popularly imagined as the quintessential wife to be. Dubbed the “typical American girl,” this masterful charmer—known for pampering her mostly male passengers while maintaining perfect poise (and straight stocking seams) thirty thousand feet above sea level—became an esteemed national heroine for her womanly perfection. But while the the stewardess appears to have been an airborne Donna Reed, a closer look reveals that she was also popularly represented as a sophisticated, independent, ambitious career woman employed on the cutting edge of technology. This iconic woman in the workforce was in a unique position to bring acceptance and respect to working women by bridging the gap between the postwar domestic ideal and wage work for women. As both the apotheosis of feminine charm and American careerism, the stewardess deftly straddled the domestic ideal and a career that took her far from home. Ultimately, she became a crucial figure in paving the way for feminism in America.

(When I ask one swimmer, a middle-aged woman named Kate, how she’d characterize the two clubs, she confides that the Dolphin Club is “like living with your parents—we’re more conservative. The South End is like the frat house. They’re more risky.” Standing next to Kate is her friend, a South Ender, who laughs appreciatively at this.)

The burgundy dress she's wearing stops just above her knees, showing the perfect amount of leg, but the sleeves are long and covered by some kind of lace overlay. It is the ideal attire for a corporate dinner party. Annika has the kind of body that isn't overtly noticeable. Her breasts never feel like they're in your face, but they make you wonder what they look like under her clothes. Her legs are only slightly longer than average, but they're toned. She is the most perfectly proportioned woman I've ever had the pleasure of seeing naked, and has the softest skin I've ever run my hands across. Tonight, she looks both sexy and conservative, and I look forward to introducing her to my fellow team members.

More than economic dependency of the wife and children on the husband and father is needed to preserve the institution of the authoritarian family [and its support of the authoritarian state]. For the suppressed classes, this dependency is endurable only on condition that the consciousness of being a sexual being is suspended as completely as possible in women and in children. The wife must not figure as a sexual being, but solely as a child-bearer. Essentially, the idealization and deification of motherhood, which are so flagrantly at variance with the brutality with which the mothers of the toiling masses are actually treated, serve as means of preventing women from gaining a sexual consciousness, of preventing the imposed sexual repression from breaking through and of preventing sexual anxiety and sexual guilt-feelings from losing their hold. Sexually awakened women, affirmed and recognized as such, would mean the complete collapse of the authoritarian ideology. Conservative sexual reform has always made the mistake of merely making a slogan of "the right of woman to her own body," and not clearly and unmistakably regarding and defending woman as a sexual being, at least as much as it regards and defends her as a mother. Furthermore, conservative sexual reform based its sexual policies predominantly on the function of procreation, instead of undermining the reactionary view that equates sexuality and procreation.

The decades that she devoted to conserving her husband’s legacy made Eliza only more militantly loyal to his memory, and there was one injury she could never forget: the exposure of the Maria Reynolds affair, for which she squarely blamed James Monroe. In the 1820s, after Monroe had completed two terms as president, he called upon Eliza in Washington, D.C., hoping to thaw the frost between them. Eliza was then about seventy and staying at her daughter’s home. She was sitting in the backyard with her fifteen-year-old nephew when a maid emerged and presented the ex-president’s card. Far from being flattered by this distinguished visitor, Eliza was taken aback. “She read the name and stood holding the card, much perturbed,” said her nephew. “Her voice sank and she spoke very low, as she always did when she was angry. ‘What has that man come to see me for?’” The nephew said that Monroe must have stopped by to pay his respects. She wavered. “I will see him,” she finally agreed. So the small woman with the upright carriage and the sturdy, determined step marched stiffly into the house. When she entered the parlor, Monroe rose to greet her. Eliza then did something out of character and socially unthinkable: she stood facing the ex-president but did not invite him to sit down. With a bow, Monroe began what sounded like a well-rehearsed speech, stating “that it was many years since they had met, that the lapse of time brought its softening influences, that they both were nearing the grave, when past differences could be forgiven and forgotten.” Eliza saw that Monroe was trying to draw a moral equation between them and apportion blame equally for the long rupture in their relationship. Even at this late date, thirty years after the fact, she was not in a forgiving mood. “Mr. Monroe,” she told him, “if you have come to tell me that you repent, that you are sorry, very sorry, for the misrepresentations and the slanders and the stories you circulated against my dear husband, if you have come to say this, I understand it. But otherwise, no lapse of time, no nearness to the grave, makes any difference.” Monroe took in this rebuke without comment. Stunned by the fiery words delivered by the elderly little woman in widow’s weeds, the ex-president picked up his hat, bid Eliza good day, and left the house, never to return.

Her apprehension was evident in the hurried movements around the kitchen and in her lonely fearing eyes. The Black woman in the South who raises sons, grandsons and nephews had her heartstrings tied to a hanging noose. Any break from routine may herald for them unbearable news. For this reason, Southern Blacks until the present generation could be counted among America's arch conservatives.

The calendar and his glass and the solicitude of his juniors may tell a man that he is old, and he can see for himself that the world and all around him have aged, but secretly he knows that he is still a youth of eighteen or twenty. And what I have said of a man, I have said because a man is what I am. It must be even more true of a woman, to whom youth and beauty and vitality are so much more to be treasured and conserved.

…the rising movement of romanticism, with its characteristic idealism, one that tended toward a black-and-white view of the world based on those ideas, preferred for different reasons that women remain untinged by “masculine” traits of learning. Famous romantic writers such as Lord Byron, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and William Hazlitt criticized the bluestockings. …and Hazlitt declared his 'utter aversion to Bluestockingism … I do not care a fig for any woman that knows even what an author means.' Because of the tremendous influence that romanticism gained over the cultural mind-set, the term bluestocking came to be a derogatory term applied to learned, pedantic women, particularly conservative ones. ... Furthermore, learned women did not fit in with the romantic notion of a damsel in distress waiting to be rescued by a knight in shining armor any more than they fit in with the antirevolutionary fear of progress.

Near the end of the session, a slight, middle-aged man in a dress shirt approached the microphone. “I’m here to ask your forgiveness,” he said quietly. “I’ve been a pastor with a conservative denomination for more than thirty years, and I used to be an antigay apologist. I knew every argument, every Bible verse, every angle, and every position. I could win a debate with just about anyone, and I confess I yelled down more than a few ‘heretics’ in my time. I was absolutely certain that what I was saying was true and I assumed I’d defend that truth to death. But then I met a young lesbian woman who, over a period of many years, slowly changed my mind. She is a person of great faith and grace, and her life was her greatest apologetic.” The man began to sob into his hands. “I’m so sorry for what I did to you,” he finally continued. “I might not have hurt any of you directly, but I know my misguided apologetics, and then my silent complicity, probably did more damage than I can ever know. I am truly sorry and I humbly repent of my actions. Please forgive me.” “We forgive you!” someone shouted from up front. But the pastor held up his hand and then continued to speak. “And if things couldn’t get any weirder,” he said with a nervous laugh, “I was dropping my son off at school the other day—he’s a senior in high school—and we started talking about this very issue. When I told him that I’d recently changed my mind about homosexuality, he got really quiet for a minute and then he said, ‘Dad, I’m gay.’ ” Nearly everyone in the room gasped. “Sometimes I wonder if these last few years of studying, praying, and rethinking things were all to prepare me for that very moment,” the pastor said, his voice quivering. “It was one of the most important moments of my life. I’m so glad I was ready. I’m so glad I was ready to love my son for who he is.

At some point, economists must study the Business Family Wedding Gift Economy. It is an extraordinary, closed bubble. What happens is this: a woman marries into a conservative Indian business family. She may well be energetic and bright, but there’s no place for her at work, nor can she work elsewhere. So, instead, she’s urged to ‘take up something’. Scented candles, usually. Sometimes kurta design. Or necklaces, or faux-Rajasthani coffee tables. She then becomes a ‘success’, because every other woman in the family buys her candles as wedding presents, at hideously inflated prices. In return, she buys their kurtas as wedding presents. Eventually, everyone is buying everyone else’s hideous creations at hideously high prices, and nobody can ever tell anyone else their stuff sucks, and that nobody really likes the smell of lavender anyway. The most amazing thing is, this is not a very different economy from the one their husbands are in.

My Fellow Non-American Blacks: In America, You Are Black, Baby Dear Non-American Black, when you make the choice to come to America, you become black. Stop arguing. Stop saying I’m Jamaican or I’m Ghanaian. America doesn’t care. So what if you weren’t “black” in your country? You’re in America now. We all have our moments of initiation into the Society of Former Negroes. Mine was in a class in undergrad when I was asked to give the black perspective, only I had no idea what that was. So I just made something up. And admit it—you say “I’m not black” only because you know black is at the bottom of America’s race ladder. And you want none of that. Don’t deny now. What if being black had all the privileges of being white? Would you still say “Don’t call me black, I’m from Trinidad”? I didn’t think so. So you’re black, baby. And here’s the deal with becoming black: You must show that you are offended when such words as “watermelon” or “tar baby” are used in jokes, even if you don’t know what the hell is being talked about—and since you are a Non-American Black, the chances are that you won’t know. (In undergrad a white classmate asks if I like watermelon, I say yes, and another classmate says, Oh my God that is so racist, and I’m confused. “Wait, how?”) You must nod back when a black person nods at you in a heavily white area. It is called the black nod. It is a way for black people to say “You are not alone, I am here too.” In describing black women you admire, always use the word “STRONG” because that is what black women are supposed to be in America. If you are a woman, please do not speak your mind as you are used to doing in your country. Because in America, strong-minded black women are SCARY. And if you are a man, be hyper-mellow, never get too excited, or somebody will worry that you’re about to pull a gun. When you watch television and hear that a “racist slur” was used, you must immediately become offended. Even though you are thinking “But why won’t they tell me exactly what was said?” Even though you would like to be able to decide for yourself how offended to be, or whether to be offended at all, you must nevertheless be very offended. When a crime is reported, pray that it was not committed by a black person, and if it turns out to have been committed by a black person, stay well away from the crime area for weeks, or you might be stopped for fitting the profile. If a black cashier gives poor service to the non-black person in front of you, compliment that person’s shoes or something, to make up for the bad service, because you’re just as guilty for the cashier’s crimes. If you are in an Ivy League college and a Young Republican tells you that you got in only because of Affirmative Action, do not whip out your perfect grades from high school. Instead, gently point out that the biggest beneficiaries of Affirmative Action are white women. If you go to eat in a restaurant, please tip generously. Otherwise the next black person who comes in will get awful service, because waiters groan when they get a black table. You see, black people have a gene that makes them not tip, so please overpower that gene. If you’re telling a non-black person about something racist that happened to you, make sure you are not bitter. Don’t complain. Be forgiving. If possible, make it funny. Most of all, do not be angry. Black people are not supposed to be angry about racism. Otherwise you get no sympathy. This applies only for white liberals, by the way. Don’t even bother telling a white conservative about anything racist that happened to you. Because the conservative will tell you that YOU are the real racist and your mouth will hang open in confusion.

Our goals are simple enough to understand: we want to humanize the planet, to break down the national structures which separate us as people, the corporate structures which separate us into distinct classes, the racist structures which separate us according to skin color; to conserve air, water, life in its many forms; to create communities which are more than habitable—communities in which people are free, in which people have what they need, in which groups of people do not accumulate power, or money, or goods, through the exploitation of other people.

But there is a lightness about the feminine mind — a touch and go — music, the fine arts, that kind of thing — they should study those up to a certain point, women should; but in a light way, you know. A woman should be able to sit down and play you or sing you a good old English tune. That is what I like; though I have heard most things — been at the opera in Vienna: Gluck, Mozart, everything of that sort. But I’m a conservative in music — it’s not like ideas, you know. I stick to the good old tunes.” “Mr. Casaubon is not fond of the piano, and I am very glad he is not,” said Dorothea, whose slight regard for domestic music and feminine fine art must be forgiven her, considering the small tinkling and smearing in which they chiefly consisted at that dark period.

When Pétain had announced the armistice terms to the French people, he told them that a “new spirit of sacrifice” was needed. In order to recover from the anguish of defeat, he declared, France must undergo a complete transformation of its society, adhering to the conservative spirit of his government’s new motto—Travail, famille, patrie—rather than to France’s national motto since the French Revolution—Liberté, égalité, fraternité. Obedience to authority and devotion to work, he made clear, must replace the idea of freedom and equality. There must be a return to tradition, to working the land, and to so-called family values, which in his and Vichy’s eyes meant accepting men as the unquestioned authority figures of the family and viewing women solely through the prism of motherhood and caregiving.

Before I knew anything about church, I'd assumed that most Christians spoke the same language, shared a sense of fellowship, and beyond minor differences had a faith in common that could transcend political boundaries. But if I had imagined that, initiated as a Christian, I was going to achieve some kind of easy bond with other believers, that fantasy was soon shot. Just a few months after I began going to St. Gregory's, I found myself at a restaurant counter in the Denver airport, waiting for a flight home from a reporting trip. A woman—perhaps noticing the silver crucifix I had recently and self-consciously started to wear around my neck—caught my eye and smiled as she took the stool next to me. She had short blond hair and a cross of her own, and was wearing some kind of sexless denim jumper that reeked of piety. I smiled back, and we exchanged small talk about the weather and flight delays, and then she asked me what I was reading. I showed her the little volume of psalms that I'd borrowed from Rick Fabian. “From my church,” I said proudly. “What church is that?” the woman asked. She leaned forward, in a friendly way. “Saint Gregory of Nyssa Episcopal Church, in San Francisco,” I said, as her face rearranged itself, froze, and closed. It may have been the “San Francisco,” I realized later, but the city's name was a reasonable stand-in, by that point, for everything conservative Christians had come to hate about the Episcopal Church as a whole: homosexuality; wealth; feminism; and morally relativist, decadent, rudderless liberalism. The church I'd unknowingly landed in turned out to be a scandal, a dirty joke at airport restaurants, a sign—in fact, thank God, a sure bet—that I was going to eat with sinners.

Finally, as this vision of sexual liberation dominated the feminist platform, not having sex—or only wanting vanilla sex or only having sex within the confines of monogamous, heterosexual relationships—becomes a sign that someone is allied with backward, conservative political beliefs. Sexuality, which is already a maturity narrative where sex leads to adulthood, then becomes a political maturity narrative as well, an evolution in thought and practice. An imaginary line runs from “immature,” both sexually and politically, to “fully realized.” On one end is our old friend, the sexually repressed woman. She is heterosexual, probably a Republican, maybe a WASP. She is blonde and stays at home with her kids and clutches her pearls when she’s not clutching a cross. On the other end is a woman who is down for anything: threesomes, polyamory, kink, sex clubs. She has multiple orgasms and multiple partners and wants to abolish ICE.

For the next two years, Gary assisted unions in getting some justice for the worker from the business owner. Gary would also help educate voters, who didn’t have too much in the way of an education, to vote how Gary, and the other community organizers, wanted. They told those voters that the Republicans and conservatives wanted to enslave them, that they, the Republicans, were against the working man and woman, and the Republicans only cared about rich, white, old men, who were making millions of dollars off of the poor peoples’ backs. Gary helped hold protests all over the state for these poorer people, with other communist and socialist organizers. Any time a politician had to hold a town hall meeting, or a city council meeting, when the subject was jobs and housing, they were there. Gary knew this was all smoke and mirrors, because nothing would ever actually change, it was all to keep the supposedly downtrodden on the same side as Gary and the others.

The flowers must have been the latest generation of perennials, whose ancestors were first planted by a woman who lived in the ruins when the ruins were a raw, unpainted house inhabited by herself and a smoky, serious husband and perhaps a pair or silent, serious daughters, and the flowers were an act of resistance against the raw, bare lot with its raw house sticking up from the raw earth like an act of sheer, inevitable, necessary madness because human beings have to live somewhere and in something and here is just as outrageous as there because in either place (in any place) it seems like an interruption, an intrusion on something that, no matter how many times she read in her Bible, Let them have dominion, seemed marred, dispelled, vanquished once people arrived with their catastrophic voices and saws and plows and began to sing and hammer and carve and erect. So the flowers were maybe a balm or, if not a balm, some sort of gesture signifying the balm she would apply were it in her power to offer redress.

By nature and by training this woman was all for conservation of life. She had been brought up in rather a strict and narrow school. In her day although no one, certainly no woman, was expected to save humanity, every female was confidently expected to produce it. More than that, she was earnestly enjoined to guard and protect it. So Mary Ball and her successor Mary Washington, early imbibed not only a sense of the woman's responsibility for the family but a sense of her authority over it....At any rate, in this particular crisi she was merely obeying a law of nature as old as womanhood--to protect the creature she had brought into the world. There was no subtlety in her. She could not see the finer shadings of ths situation, the fact that in holding him back from the frontier she might be putting him into even greater peril. Her course was prompted by instinct and impulse, and she never thought of questioning the right or wrong of it. So, armed with the most primitive of all weapons, she faced her son for a hard fight. But she was pitted here against a temendous paradox. With her whole might she was resisting the demands of war, and yet it had been that very strength that had produced the warrior. Her opponent was remarkably like her--in strength of mind and body, in resolution, in force of will. Now, it is one of the ironies of life that sameness creates opposition. In the conflict that day at Mount Vernon, therefore, the contestants were fighting with identical weapons, even though from different spheres... George Washington must have been a very patient man. And if he had patience, that, too, came from her by that same theory of heredity that makes a firstborn son peculiarly like his mother. So this must be written in to her credity when for the third time she has to be recorded as trying to interrupt his destiny. As a last resort he used a weapon that she herself had put into his hand. Madam," he is said to have remarked with respectful finality, "the God to whom you commended me when first I went to war will be my protector stil.

Today, working hard is about taking apparent risk. Not a crazy risk like betting the entire company on an untested product. No, an apparent risk: something that the competition (and your co-workers) believe is unsafe but that you realize is in fact far more conservative than sticking with the status quo. Richard Branson doesn’t work more hours than you do. Neither does Steve Ballmer or Carly Fiorina. Robyn Waters, the woman who revolutionized what Target sells—and helped the company trounce Kmart—probably worked fewer hours than you do in an average week. None of the people who are racking up amazing success stories and creating cool stuff are doing it just by working more hours than you are. And I hate to say it, but they’re not smarter than you either. They’re succeeding by doing hard work. As the economy plods along, many of us are choosing to take the easy way out. We’re going to work for the Man, letting him do all the hard work while we put in the long hours. We’re going back to the future, to a definition of work that embraces the grindstone. Some people (a precious few, so far) are

The idea that pornography is intrinsically exploitative and sexist is bizarre: pornography is just “some fucking”, after all. The act of having sex isn’t sexist so there’s no way pornography can be, in itself, inherently misogynist. So no. Pornography isn’t the problem. Strident feminists are fine with pornography. It’s the porn industry that’s the problem. The whole thing is as offensive, sclerotic, depressing, emotionally bankrupt and desultory as you would expect a widely unregulated industry worth, at an extremely conservative estimate, $30 billion to be. No industry ever made that amount of money without being superlatively crass and dumb. But you don’t ban things for being crass and dispiriting. If you did, we would have to ban the Gregg’s Mega Sausage Roll first - and we would have a revolution on our hands. No. What we need to do is effect a 100 per cent increase in the variety of pornography available to us. Let’s face it: the vast majority of porn out there is as identikit and mechanical as fridge-freezers rolling off a production line. And there are several reasons why this is bad for everyone - men and women equally.

One could understand feminism generally as an attack on woman as she was under “patriarchy” (that concept is a social construction of feminism). The feminine mystique was her ideal; in regard to sex, it consisted of women’s modesty and in the double standard of sexual conduct that comes with it, which treated women’s misbehavior as more serious than men’s. Instead of trying to establish a single standard by bringing men up to the higher standard of women, as with earlier feminism, today’s feminism decided to demand that women be entitled to sink to the level of men. It bought into the sexual revolution of the late sixties and required that women be rewarded with the privileges of male conquest rather than, say, continue serving as camp followers of rock bands. The result has been the turn for the worse. ... What was there in feminine modesty that the feminists left behind? In return for women’s holding to a higher standard of sexual behavior, feminine modesty gave them protection while they considered whether they wanted to consent. It gave them time: Not so fast! Not the first date! I’m not ready for that! It gave them the pleasure of being courted along with the advantage of looking before you leap. To win over a woman, men had to strive to express their finer feelings, if they had any. Women could judge their character and choose accordingly. In sum, women had the right of choice, if I may borrow that slogan. All this and more was social construction, to be sure, but on the basis of the bent toward modesty that was held to be in the nature of women. That inclination, it was thought, cooperated with the aggressive drive in the nature of men that could be beneficially constructed into the male duty to take the initiative. There was no guarantee of perfection in this arrangement, but at least each sex would have a legitimate expectation of possible success in seeking marital happiness. They could live together, have children, and take care of them. Without feminine modesty, however, women must imitate men, and in matters of sex, the most predatory men, as we have seen. The consequence is the hook-up culture now prevalent on college campuses, and off-campus too (even more, it is said). The purpose of hooking up is to replace the human complexity of courtship with “good sex,” a kind of animal simplicity, eliminating all the preliminaries to sex as well as the aftermath. “Good sex,” by the way, is in good part a social construction of the alliance between feminists and male predators that we see today. It narrows and distorts the human potentiality for something nobler and more satisfying than the bare minimum. The hook-up culture denounced by conservatives is the very same rape culture denounced by feminists. Who wants it? Most college women do not; they ignore hookups and lament the loss of dating. Many men will not turn down the offer of an available woman, but what they really want is a girlfriend. The predatory males are a small minority among men who are the main beneficiaries of the feminist norm. It’s not the fault of men that women want to join them in excess rather than calm them down, for men too are victims of the rape culture. Nor is it the fault of women. Women are so far from wanting hook-ups that they must drink themselves into drunken consent — in order to overcome their natural modesty, one might suggest. Not having a sociable drink but getting blind drunk is today’s preliminary to sex. Beautifully romantic, isn’t it?

The woman was in her middle twenties and she wore a sort of tennis dress that shouted Money almost as loudly as the car did, sleeveless and V neck, of a semi-transparent material, chiffon or crêpe-de-Chine or maybe georgette, which allowed the pink of her nipples to show through. She not only wore no brassiere, she obviously wore no undergarment of any description. There was nothing of modesty about her. Not that she was flaunting herself; that was what was so outlandish about it (for this was the late Twenties; plenty of women were dressing almost as scantily); she appeared not even to know the watchers were there. Her hair was brown with streaks of sunburnt yellow, bobbed just a little longer than ponjola, and her skin was tanned to the smooth, soft tint of café au lait. She moved slowly, after the manner of the inherently lazy, not so much as if she had no energy, but as if she were conserving it for something she really cared about—bed, most men would say, for there was a strong suggestion of such about her, like an aura. Her mouth was lipsticked savagely, no prim cupid’s bow, and there was a faint saddle of freckles across the bridge of her nose. She

I turned my focus to clothes, immediately endeavoring to find just the right dress for the occasion. This was huge--my debut as the girlfriend of Marlboro Man--and I shopped with that in mind. Should I go for a sleek, sexy suit? That might seem too confident and brazen. A floral silk skirt? Too obvious for a wedding. A little black dress? Too conservative and safe. The options pummeled my brain as I browsed the choices on the racks. I tried on dress after dress, suit after suit, outfit after outfit, my frustration growing more acute with each zip of the zipper. I wanted to be a man. Men don’t agonize over what to wear to a wedding. They don’t spend seven hours trying on clothes. They don’t think of wardrobe choices as life-or-death decisions. That’s when I found it: a drop-dead gorgeous fitted suit the exact color of a stick of butter. It was snug, with just a slight hint of sexy, but the lovely, pure color made up for it. The fabric was a lightweight wool, but since the wedding would be at night, I knew it would be just fine. I loved the suit--not only would I feel pretty for Marlboro Man, but I’d also appear moderately, but not overly, confident to all his cousins, and appropriate and proper to his elderly grandmothers.

No Language not only imagines a sexual politics as West Indian as the Caribbean Sea but also charts complex relationships between eroticism, colonialism, militarism, resistance, revolution, poverty, despair, fullness, and hope that explore the pliability necessary to imagine Caribbean same-sex loving politics differently, postcolonially. Myriam Chancy, in the first study of Brand’s poetry, writes her artistic vision as a rescripting of traditional poetics into poelitics: “A fusion of politics and poetry that recalls Lorde, who once wrote of the transformative power of poetry as ‘a revelatory distillation of experience’ and as an act of fusion between ‘true knowledge’ and ‘lasting action.’ ”8 Brand vocalizes quite lucidly the threat that this infusion of politics into poetics poses to both revolutionary and neocolonial Caribbean thinkers: “To dream about a Black woman, even an old Black woman, is dangerous even in a Black dream, an old dream, a Black woman’s dream, even in a dream where you are the dreamer,” she writes of reactions to her black lesbian feminist revolutionary artistic work by Marxists and conservatives alike. “Even in a Black dream, where I, too, am a dreamer, a lesbian is suspect; a woman is suspect even to other women, especially if she dreams of women.

During the 2016 US presidential campaign, the hatred shown toward Hillary Clinton far outstripped even the most virulent criticisms that could legitimately be pinned on her. She was linked with “evil” and widely compared to a witch, which is to say that she was attacked as a woman, not as a political leader. After her defeat, some of those critics dug out the song “Ding Dong, the Witch is Dead,” sung in The Wizard of Oz to celebrate the Witch of the East’s death—a jingle already revived in the UK at the time of Margaret Thatcher’s death in 2013. This reference was brandished not only by Donald Trump’s electors, but also by supporters of Bernie Sanders, Clinton’s main rival in the primaries. On Sanders’ official site, a fundraising initiative was announced under the punning title “Bern the Witch”—an announcement that the Vermont senator’s campaign team took down as soon as it was brought to his attention. Continuing this series of limp quips, the conservative commentator Rush Limbaugh quipped, “She’s a witch with a capital B”—he can’t have known that, at the Salem witch trials in the seventeenth century, a key figure had already exploited this consonance by calling his servant, Sarah Churchill, who was one of his accusers, “bitch witch.” In reaction, female Democrat voters started sporting badges calling themselves “Witches for Hillary” or “Hags for Hillary.”48

He talks about the way in which the American academy "assigns an official group identity" to students, eliminating the distinction "between voluntary association and imposed group identity." For example, "a Jewish student who is totally assimilated—whose Jewish identity is totally unimportant to him—goes to college and is assigned a special Jewish advisor." The academy also distinguishes between people who "own" their sexual, racial, or gender identity and those who, in its view, have "internalized their oppression.' For example, Kors says, Walter Olson, a tort reform expert at the Cato Institute who happens to be gay, "is not really gay because he doesn't understand the sources of his oppression." Thomas Sowell, an African American author based at the Hoover Institution, "isn't really black." And "Daphne Patai, a founder of Women's Studies at Amherst, isn't really a woman because she identifies with the oppressive culture around her. So in the humanities, when they speak of diversity, the one kind of diversity they don't mean is individuated intellectual diversity." On the contrary, there's a process of "vetting against individuation. The people who are most discriminated against, then, are not straight white males who just roll over and play along, but rather libertarian and conservative blacks, women who are critics of feminism, and gays and lesbians who are critics of the 'official' gay and lesbian positions on every issue in the world.

So let’s say you get home, and maybe you do your evening ritual, but out of nowhere the desire to drink smacks you across your face, possibly due to stress, or emptiness, or boredom, or even happiness. Maybe you think, I can start quitting again tomorrow, or some other allowing thought, even though you don’t want to drink. Here’s how it works: First, you recognize what is happening—you are experiencing a craving to drink alcohol. Say it to yourself: I am experiencing a craving for alcohol. The next step might seem counterintuitive, but it’s not: Allow the sensations to build, allow yourself to crave a drink. This allows you to conserve energy by giving space to the craving; instead of expending energy trying to resist the feeling by telling yourself it’s wrong or terrifying or shouldn’t be happening, you let nature take its course. In the third step, you set aside the story, which means you don’t tell yourself that you are miserable, that the craving is a sign of some eternal and endless struggle, or something more powerful than you. Instead, you spend that energy doing the fourth step, which is investigating the sensations in your body. What does it feel like? Is your throat closing up? Are your fists clenching? Are your legs full of energy? Is your heart tight? The fifth step is to name those sensations out loud, or better yet, write them down. And the final step is to ride or surf the physical sensations as they intensify, peak, and then dissipate.

I will invest my heart's desire and the work of my hands in things that will outlive me. Although it grieves me that houses are burning, I have fallen in love with freedom regardless, and the entitlement of a woman to get a move on, equipped with boots that fit and opinions that might matter. The treasures I carry closest to my heart are things I can't own: the curve of a five-year-old's forehead in profile, and the vulnerable expectation in the hand that reaches for mine as we cross the street. The wake-up call of birds in a forest. The intensity of the light fifteen minutes before the end of day; the color wash of a sunset on mountains; the ripe sphere of that same sun hanging low in a dusty sky in a breathtaking photograph from Afghanistan. In my darkest times I have to walk, sometimes alone, in some green place. Other people must share this ritual. For some I suppose it must be the path through a particular set of city streets, a comforting architecture; for me it's the need to stare at water until my mind comes to rest on nothing at all. Then I can go home. I can clear the brush from a neglected part of the garden, working slowly until it comes to me that here is one small place I can make right for my family. I can plant something as an act of faith in time itself, a vow that we will, sure enough, have a fall and a winter this year, to be followed again by spring. This is not an end in itself, but a beginning. I work until my mind can run a little further on its tether, tugging at this central pole of my sadness, forgetting it for a minute or two while pondering a school meeting next week, the watershed conservation project our neighborhood has undertaken, the farmer's market it organized last year: the good that becomes possible when a small group of thoughtful citizens commit themselves to it...Small change, small wonders - these are the currency of my endurance and ultimately of my life.

In the weeks that followed, Elizabeth discovered to her pleasure that she could ask Ian any question about any subject and that he would answer her as fully as she wished. Not once did he ever patronize her when he replied, or fend her off by pointing out that, as a woman, the matter was truly none of her concern-or worse-that the answer would be beyond any female’s ability to understand. Elizabeth found his respect for her intelligence enormously flattering-particularly after two astounding discoveries she made about him: The first occurred three days after their wedding, when they both decided to spend the evening at home, reading. That night after supper, Ian brought a book he wanted to read from their library-a heavy tome with an incomprehensible title-to the drawing room. Elizabeth brought Pride and Prejudice, which she’d been longing to read since first hearing of the uproar it was causing among the conservative members of the ton. After pressing a kiss on her forehead, Ian sat down in the high-backed chair beside hers. Reaching across the small table between them for her hand, he linked their fingers together, and opened his book. Elizabeth thought it was incredibly cozy to sit, curled up in a chair beside him, her hand held in his, with a book in her lap, and she didn’t mind the small inconvenience of turning the pages with one hand. Soon, she was so engrossed in her book that it was a full half-hour before she noticed how swiftly Ian turned the pages of his. From the corner of her eye, Elizabeth watched in puzzled fascination as his gaze seemed to slide swiftly down one page, then the facing page, and he turned to the next. Teasingly, she asked, “Are you reading that book, my lord, or only pretending for my benefit?” He glanced up sharply, and Elizabeth saw a strange, hesitant expression flicker across his tanned face. As if carefully phrasing his reply, he said slowly, “I have an-odd ability-to read very quickly.” “Oh,” Elizabeth replied, “how lucky you are. I never heard of a talent like that.” A lazy glamorous smile swept across his face, and he squeezed her hand. “It’s not nearly as uncommon as your eyes,” he said.

For a start, most books like this, rich in such expensive pigments, had been made for palaces or cathedrals. But a haggadah is used only at home. The word is from the Hebrew root ngd, “to tell,” and it comes from the biblical command that instructs parents to tell their children the story of the Exodus. This “telling” varies widely, and over the centuries each Jewish community has developed its own variations on this home-based celebration. But no one knew why this haggadah was illustrated with numerous miniature paintings, at a time when most Jews considered figurative art a violation of the commandments. It was unlikely that a Jew would have been in a position to learn the skilled painting techniques evinced here. The style was not unlike the work of Christian illuminators. And yet, most of the miniatures illustrated biblical scenes as interpreted in the Midrash, or Jewish biblical exegesis. I turned the parchment and suddenly found myself gazing at the illustration that had provoked more scholarly speculation than all the others. It was a domestic scene. A family of Jews—Spanish, by their dress—sits at a Passover meal. We see the ritual foods, the matzoh to commemorate the unleavened bread that the Hebrews baked in haste on the night before they fled Egypt, a shank bone to remember the lamb’s blood on the doorposts that had caused the angel of death to “pass over” Jewish homes. The father, reclining as per custom, to show that he is a free man and not a slave, sips wine from a golden goblet as his small son, beside him, raises a cup. The mother sits serenely in the fine gown and jeweled headdress of the day. Probably the scene is a portrait of the family who commissioned this particular haggadah. But there is another woman at the table, ebony-skinned and saffron-robed, holding a piece of matzoh. Too finely dressed to be a servant, and fully participating in the Jewish rite, the identity of that African woman in saffron has perplexed the book’s scholars for a century. Slowly, deliberately, I examined and made notes on the condition of each page. Each time I turned a parchment, I checked and adjusted the position of the supporting forms. Never stress the book—the conservator’s chief commandment. But the people who had owned this book had known unbearable stress: pogrom, Inquisition, exile, genocide, war.

Noah smiled at her, then his smile froze. He looked her slowly up and down. And again. “What?” she demanded hotly, hands on her hips. “Nothing,” he said, turning away. “No. What? What’s the matter?” He turned back slowly, put his tools down on top of the ladder and approached her. “I don’t know how to say this. I think it would be in the best interests of both of us if you’d dress a little more…conservatively.” She looked down at herself. “More conservatively than overalls?” she asked. He felt a laugh escape in spite of himself. He shook his head. “Ellie, I’ve never seen anybody look that good in overalls before.” “And this is a bad thing?” she asked, crossing her arms over her chest. “It’s provocative,” he tried to explain. “Sexy. People who work around churches usually dress a little more… What’s the best way to put this…?” “Frumpy? Dumpy? Ugly?” “Without some of their bra showing, for one thing.” “Well now, Reverend, just where have you been? Because this happens to be in style. And I’ll do any work you give me, but you really shouldn’t be telling me what to wear. The last guy I was with tried to do me over. He liked me well enough when he was trying to get my attention, but the second I married him, he wanted to cover me up so no one would notice I had a body!” “The husband?” “The very same. It didn’t work for him and it’s not going to work for you. You didn’t say anything about a dress code. Maybe I’ll turn you in to the Better Business Bureau or something.” “I think you mean the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Or maybe you should go straight to the American Civil Liberties Union.” He stepped toward her. “Ellie,” he said, using his tender but firm minister voice. “I’m a single man. You’re a very beautiful young woman. I would like it if the good people of Virgin River assumed you were given this job solely because of your qualifications and not because you’re eye candy. Tomorrow, could you please wear something less distracting?” “I’ll do my best,” she said in a huff. “But this is what I have, and there’s not much I can do about that. Especially on what you’re paying me.” “Just think ‘baggy,’” he advised. “We’re going to have a problem there,” she said. “I don’t buy my clothes baggy. Or ugly. Or dumpy. And you can bet your sweet a…butt I left behind the clothes Arnie thought I should wear.” She just shook her head in disgust. “I don’t know what you’re complaining about. You know how many guys would rather have something nice to look at than a girl in a flour sack? Guess you didn’t get to Count Your Blessings 101.” She cocked her head and lifted her eyebrows. “I’m counting,” he said. But his eyes bore down on hers seriously. He was not giving an inch. “Just an ounce of discretion. Do what you can.” She took a deep breath. “Let’s just get to work. Tomorrow I’ll look as awful as possible. How’s that?” “Perfect.

You are a thinker. I am a thinker. We think that all human beings are thinkers. The amazing fact is that we tend to think against artificial intelligence — that various kind of computers or artificial robots can think, but most of us never cast any doubt on human thinking potential in general. If during natural conservation with human any computer or artificial robot could generate human-like responses by using its own ‘brain’ but not ready-form programming language which is antecedently written and included in the brain design and which consequently determine its function and response, then that computer or artificial robot would unquestionably be acknowledged as a thinker as we are. But is it absolutely true that all humans are capable of using their own brain while interpreting various signals and responding them? Indeed, religion or any other ideology is some kind of such program which is written by others and which determines our vision, mind and behavior models, depriving us of a clear and logical thinking. It forces us to see the world with its eyes, to construct our mind as it says and control our behavior as it wants. There can be no freedom, no alternative possibilities. You don’t need to understand its claims, you need only believe them. Whatever is unthinkable and unimaginable for you, is said higher for your understanding, you cannot even criticise what seems to be illogical and absurd for you. The unwritten golden rule of religion and its Holy Scripture is that — whatever you think, you cannot contradict what is written there. You can reconcile what is illogical and absurd in religion with logic and common sense, if it is possible, if not, you should confine your thinking to that illogicality and absurdity, which in turn would make you more and more a muddled thinker. For instance, if it is written there that you should cut head or legs of anyone who dare criticize your religion and your prophet, you should unquestionably believe that it is just and right punishment for him. You can reason in favor of softening that cruel image of your religion by saying that that ‘just and right punishment’ is considered within religious community, but not secular society. However, the absurdity of your vision still remains, because as an advocate of your religion you dream of its spread all over the world, where the cruel and insane claims of your religion would be the norm and standard for everyone. If it is written there that you can sexually exploit any slave girl or woman, especially who doesn’t hold your religious faith or she is an atheist, you should support that sexual violence without any question. After all of them, you would like to be named as a thinker. In my mind, you are a thinker, but a thinker who has got a psychological disorder. It is logical to ask whether all those ‘thinkers’ represent a potential danger for the humanity. I think, yes. However, we are lucky that not all believers would like to penetrate into deeper ‘secrets’ of religion. Many of them believe in God, meditate and balance their spiritual state without getting familiar with what is written in holy scriptures or holding very vague ideas concerning their content. Many believers live a secular life by using their own brain for it. One should love anybody only if he thinks that he should love him/her; if he loves him/her because of God, or religious claims, he can easily kill him/her once because of God, or religious claims, too. I think the grave danger is the last motive which religion cause to arise.

Married, divorced or single here, it’s one family that mingles here. Conservative or liberal here, we’ve all gotta give a little here. Big or small here, there’s room for us all here. Doubt or believe here, we all can receive here. Gay or straight here, there’s no hate here. Woman or man here, everyone can serve here. Whatever your race here, for all of us grace here. In imitation of the ridiculous love Almighty God has for each of us and all of us, let us live and love without labels.

The refusal of religious conservatives to acknowledge established scientific evidence reminds me of a movie, A Guide for the Married Man, with a scene acted by comedian Joey Bishop. Bishop’s wife catches him in bed with another woman. Both Bishop and his lady friend get out of bed and get dressed, while Bishop keeps denying what his wife is witnessing. “What woman? What bed? What are you talking about?” he says as he strolls into the living room, sits down, and begins reading a newspaper in front of his bewildered wife, who then closes the door behind the departing other woman. “I don’t know what you are talking about,” he says in reply to her befuddled protests. “I’ve been sitting here this whole time, reading, and waiting for you to make dinner.” She eventually stops believing her own eyes and goes off to make dinner. It worked for Bishop and it works for the religious science deniers. Keep denying what is known and repeating what is false, and soon, because it is easier, your listeners will lose their conviction because they will get tired of having to refute you so much. The deniers win because the less the listener has to argue, the happier they’ll be—and the more they can be manipulated because they have to pay more attention to earning a living so that they can put food on the table.

With a gentle touch, she brushed the hair off his forehead. "I was sort of hoping you'd be a little more relaxed today." He took her hand and kissed it. "I'm very relaxed." "Finally?" She raised her eyebrows and snuggled closer. "You feel a little stiff." And getting stiffer by the second. He had zero control around this woman. "We should probably do something about that.

Soviet woman of child-bearing age had six to eight abortions. This translated into 10 million to 16 million abortions per year. (The comparable figures for the United States were 0.5 abortions per woman and roughly 1.5 million abortions per year.)

The true woman will not be exponent of another, or allow another to be such for her. She will be her own individual self—do her own individual work—stand or fall by her own individual wisdom and strength … The old idea that man was made for himself and woman for him, that he is the oak, she the vine, he the head, she the heart, he the great conservator of wisdom principle, she of love, will be reverently laid aside with other long since exploded philosophies of the ignorant past.” Susan had a vision: Women will become acting subjects in their own destiny. This became her most fervently held personal and political manifesto. It was not just a vision for what might be in the future, but her blueprint for who she and her sisters in the struggle would be in the present. And it was in fact the very blueprint for who she would become.

Luke seemed more the type to explode fully formed out of a pit of blistering lava, not spring from the loins of a woman with a conservative hairstyle, low-heeled, faultlessly-shined, bone-colored pumps and sporting a short-handled, matching-bone-colored purse two steps up from a granny bag.

[Queen Victoria had been denouncing the Women's Rights movement] ... And after chloroform was introduced to ease the pains of childbirth, she demanded that it be used on her. Religious and medical conservatives were shocked. They said God had decreed that women must suffer in childbirth as atonement for the sins of Eve. But queen Victoria wouldn't accept this particular anti-woman's-rights dictum. She became one of the first women to use anesthesia during childbirth , and knighted Dr. James Simpson, the Scottish physician who developed this use of chloroform, though he was excommunicated by his church for doing so.

It was too embarrassing to admit that a young woman was the most popular politician in the Islamic Republic. In the official tally she came in second, with slightly fewer votes than the older cleric—an injustice that must have riled Hashemi, given the nature of her platform. Hashemi had made her debut in politics by challenging conservative clerics who opposed women’s right to exercise in public. Using her standing as Rafsanjani’s daughter, she argued that there was nothing wrong with fully covered women exercising. An increasing number of old and young women already crowded parks to jog or play volleyball or badminton. But the Basij often harassed and intimidated them to discourage women from exercising. As part of her campaign to defend and expand women’s right to exercise, Hashemi built a bike path for women, increased women’s access to sports facilities such as golf courses and tennis courts, and set up the first women’s soccer and, eventually, rugby teams since the revolution. She also founded the Islamic Women’s Sport Foundation, through which she held games in Tehran involving Iranian athletes and Muslim women invited from other countries.

But Spain in the immediate post-war period remained a place of frighteningly separate social worlds. Alongside savage poverty and widespread terror, there existed other milieux of ease, security, and order regained. As Republican women were shaved and dosed with castor oil by the ‘victors’ of their villages, or transported with their children across Spain in cattletrucks, or raped in police stations, women of the southern landed aristocracy or from affluent provincial middle-class families in Spain’s conservative heartland celebrated the redemption of their private family sphere and revelled in the upsurge of public Catholic ceremonial. As one woman who had been close to the conservative Catholic party, CEDA, commented resonantly many decades later: there was an absence of freedom, but logically for those of us who had well-ordered lives, those of us who were professionals and saw things from the personal viewpoint only, we felt very much at ease and happy.

My evening was a perfect demonstration of how hard it is for one side to really understand the other. I think Hollywood feels more comfortable welcoming directors who are convicted pedophiles, famous actresses who are also thieves, boxers who are convicted rapists, directors who push cocaine, rappers who sell heroin, singers who solicit prostitutes, and actors who beat up their woman than a Republican in their midst. In fact, the people who fit into those categories still enjoy the professional adoration of their peers in Hollywood, even amidst the suspicion and guilt. It's like the only that can really ruin your reputation as a celebrity is to come out as a Republican.

And through these stories, I glimpse a traditional conservative and highly aspirational upbringing. I see a young woman in the process of redefining herself. Marigold shows us her first tattoo, a ballerina in repose, stretched out across her back.

But for now, I will say this: It would be a mistake to downplay the consequences of having Justice Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court. With this lifetime appointment, he will be in a position, along with the conservative majority on the court, to end a woman's right to choose as we know it; to invalidate the Affordable Care Act; to undo the legal basis by which corporations are regulated; to unravel fundamental rights to vote, to marry, and to privacy. I worry about the ways his partisanship and temperament will infect the court, how it will color his decision making, how it will disadvantage so many who seek relief in the courts. I worry about what it will do to the court itself to have a man credibly accused of sexual assault among its justices. I worry about the message that has been sent yet again to Americans and the world: that in our country, today, someone can rage, lash out, resist accountability, and still ascend to a position of extraordinary power over other people's lives.

Rather than focusing on “shattering the gender binary,” I believe we should turn our attention instead to challenging all forms of gender entitlement, the privileging of one’s own perceptions, interpretations, and evaluations of other people’s genders over the way those people understand themselves. After all, whenever we assign values to other people’s genders and sexualities—whether we call them subversive or conservative, cool or uncool, normal or abnormal, natural or unnatural—we are automatically creating or reaffirming some kind of hierarchy. In other words, when we critique any gender as being “good” or “bad,” we are by definition being sexist.

Maggy never fit in with her aristocratic European life. Jung mentioned in an unpublished lecture about this patient (where she also appears anonymously) that she was extremely intelligent and sensitive and did not share the interests of her peers or her culture. She insisted on behaving unconventionally and, as a young woman, refused to marry11—though with her wealth, her looks, her passion (Jung wrote that she played the piano with such intensity that her body temperature quickly rose above 100 degrees12), and her brains, she ought to have been quite a catch for any man of suitable quality. He would have to put up with her independent-mindedness and argumentativeness though, a product of her keen intelligence and education. In her conservative social world, these qualities did not contribute to her being happy.13 But now, in Zurich, freed from the stifling atmosphere of her youth, in an intellectually exciting milieu dominated by the psychiatrist-mystic Jung, all that was changing.14

Being asked to do more with less is inhumane. Frequently, social scientists point to the resilience of children from difficult backgrounds. One time, in a meeting on my campus, in a discussion about the hardships children of color face, a white woman remarked dismissively, "Oh, but children are resilient!" Celebrating the resilience of poor folks is a perverse way of acknowledging the unreasonable demands placed upon people who already are struggling to make it. In fact, in this moment, when a broad-scale conservative backlash threatens to absolutely gut the social safety net, "resilience" is a dangerous word. The logic of relying on people's resilience goes something like, "Let's see just how much we can take away from you before you break." That shit is evil.

A women was beat to death by the police in the hall of the east entrance, and another woman was shot inside. The woman beat to death was Rosanne Boyland. The media reported she died from a drug overdose, and that her fellow protestors trampled her. It is not hard, however, to find the video of a female officer striking her repeatedly, until she was motionless, until the officer’s baton breaks. That officer was commended for her actions. She was invited to the Super Bowl. She was paraded around like a hero. Good job beating a white female conservative unconscious. Good job continuing to beat her to death.

Radical feminists have been distanced from their liberal counterparts. Ironically, however, they have become allied with another group of women: conservatives. Conservative women have been the bete noire of the feminist movement, because they oppose the full slate of feminist goals, from abortion to comparable worth. But these same women are willing to join hands with radical feminists on pornography. They are willing to march side-by-side in order to "take back the night." Why? Because they can co-opt the radical feminist agenda and use it for their own gains.

Through much of their history, women's rights and pornography have had common cause. The fates of feminism and pornography have been linked. Both have risen and flourished during the same periods of sexual freedom; both have been attacked by the same political forces, usually conservatives. Laws directed against pornography or obscenity, such as the Comstock laws in the late 1880s, have always been used to hinder women's rights, such as birth control. Although it is not possible to draw a cause-and-effect relationship between the rise of pornography and that of feminism, such a connection seems reasonable to assume. After all, both movements demand the same social condition-namely, sexual freedom.

the University of the South, a Tennessee liberal arts college with a handful of graduate students, known informally as Sewanee (because that’s the name of the town). The first thing you’ll notice on visiting Sewanee is that most of the men are wearing jackets and ties, while most of the women are wearing makeup and skirts. Forty years ago, most colleges had a similar dress code. Today, Sewanee is one of a handful. The majority of students pledge fraternities and sororities and social life revolves around a never-ending stream of “big-weekend” beer bashes. The biggest of them all is homecoming weekend, where students get a date and dress up for a huge see-and-be-seen fashion show that includes innumerable cocktail parties before and after. Conservative, well-heeled, and All-American, Sewanee is the perfect place for a carefree 1950s-style college education. In the words of one student, Sewanee has “the happiest college student body I have ever encountered.” No one would ever say such a thing about Bard College, a school of similar size about an hour north of New York City. Though the students may find happiness there, too, it is well hidden beneath a thick veneer of liberal artistic angst. Bard students, it seems, carry the weight of the world on their shoulders. If there is an oppressed group anywhere to be found, Bard students can be counted on to buy T-shirts, sell buttons, and organize protests on its behalf. As for clothes, you would be hard-pressed to find a Bard man who even owns a jacket and tie. Nor would the typical Bard woman be caught dead in a dress—unless it was paired with combat boots. Jewelry and makeup worn in traditional ways are nonexistent, but there is plenty of spiked hair, fluorescent hair, tattoos, and piercings protruding from every conceivable body part. As for football and fraternities? Take a wild guess. The biggest social event of the year at Bard is called Drag Race, where everyone dresses in drag and parties nonstop.

If a young man is interested in a young woman, he starts by praying about the relationship. With a go-ahead from the Lord and his parents, he then approaches the girl’s parents. The parents pray and, if the young woman has a reciprocal interest in the young man, her father talks through courtship and its expectations with the fellow.5

Conservative Christian circles often deny that a woman is being abused unless she has visible marks on her body, and even then they tend to be skeptical.

We talked about life inside the British bubble, inside the royal bubble. A bubble inside a bubble—impossible to describe to anyone who hasn’t actually experienced it. People simply didn’t realize: they heard the word “royal,” or “prince,” and lost all rationality. Ah, a prince—you have no problems. They assumed…no, they’d been taught…it was all a fairytale. We weren’t human. A writer many Britons admired, a writer of thick historical novels that racked up literary prizes, had penned an essay about my family, in which she said we were simply…pandas. Our current royal family doesn’t have the difficulties in breeding that pandas do, but pandas and royal persons alike are expensive to conserve and ill-adapted to any modern environment. But aren’t they interesting? Aren’t they nice to look at? I’ll never forget the highly respected essayist who wrote in Britain’s most highly respected literary publication that my mother’s “early death spared us all a lot of tedium.” (He referred in the same essay to “Diana’s tryst with the underpass.”) But this panda crack always struck me as both acutely perceptive and uniquely barbarous. We did live in a zoo, but by the same token I knew, as a soldier, that turning people into animals, into non-people, is the first step in mistreating them, in destroying them. If even a celebrated intellectual could dismiss us as animals, what hope for the man or woman on the street?

Though undoubtedly deplorable sexism existed in this movement, astute women supporters picked up the truth behind muscular Christianity and challenged women as much as men. Fitness advocate Helen McKinstry asked what man contemplating marriage would choose a “delicate, anaemic, hothouse plant type of girl” over a “strong, full-blooded, physically courageous woman, a companion for her husband on the golf links and a playmate with her children? “2 Of course, even this sounds sexist to contemporary ears (getting in shape because otherwise men won’t want you), but some, such as YWCA secretary Mary Dunn, called women to fitness for the sake of the spiritual challenge that lay before them: Muscular women wanted, young women. What kind? Those to whom the Lord can say, “Do this or that for me,” and who can respond to the hardest command, the carrying out of which will mean endurance, a knowledge of the principles of the conservation of energy and the putting forth of will power through bodily power. It will mean the clear shining of a flowing soul through a transparent medium, instead of the cloudy glass of an … ill-used body.3

That was probably more his mother than him.” “He was raised by that woman. Who, by the way, is not conservative, she’s homophobic.

I quickly learned that to grow up as a strong-willed woman in the conservative evangelical community is to never quite understand your place in the world. It means sorting through a barrage of mixed messages from both male and female authority figures regarding your proper role in society, the church, the home, even the bedroom, each message punctuated by the claim that it is God’s will that you do this or that.

When winter comes to a woman's soul, she withdraws into her inner self, her deepest spaces. She refuses all connection, refutes all arguments that she should engage in the world. She may say she is resting, but she is more than resting: She is creating a new universe within herself, examining and breaking old patterns, destroying what should not be revived, feeding in secret what needs to thrive. Winter women are those who bring into the next cycle what should be saved. They are the deep conservators of knowledge and power. Not for nothing did ancient peoples honour the grandmother. In her calm deliberateness, she winters over our truth, she freezes out false-heartedness. Look into her eyes, this winter woman. In their gray spaciousness you can see the future. Look out of your own winter eyes. You too can see the future.

Doesn’t have any rules, requirements, respect for herself, or guidelines, and we men can pick up her scent a mile away. She’s the party girl who takes a sip of her Long Island iced tea or a shot of her Patrón, then announces to her suitor that she just wants to “date and see how it goes,” and she’s the conservatively dressed woman at the office who is a master at networking, but clueless about how to approach men.

It would have been easier to defy convention if she was aristocratic, bohemian, insouciant — more like George Sand, in other words — and not a lower-middle-class woman from a conservative Anglican family, who harboured ‘a desire insatiable for the esteem of my fellow creatures’.

I came up with a method specific to the practice of disarming cravings. It's similar to what Judson Brewer outlines in his book, The Craving Mind. But I modified it based on my own experience. I call it RASINS. Recognize, allow, set aside the story, investigate what is happening in your body, name the sensations, and surf. The goal is to learn to relax into the craving rather than distract ourselves from it. Using the practice, we learned to stay in discomfort and witness our suffering instead of creating more suffering. So let's say you get home and maybe you do your evening rituals but out of nowhere the desire to drink smacks you across your face - possibly due to stress, or emptiness, or boredom, or even happiness. Maybe you think, I can start quitting again tomorrow or some other allowing thought even though you don't want to drink. Here's how it works first you recognize what is happening. You are experiencing A craving to drink alcohol. Say it to yourself. I am experiencing a craving for alcohol. The next step might seem counterintuitive but it's not. Allow the sensations to build allow. Allow yourself to crave a drink. This allows you to conserve energy by giving space to the craving instead of expending energy trying to resist the feeling by telling yourself it's wrong, or terrifying, or shouldn't be happening to you. Let nature take its course. In the third step you set aside the story, which means you don't tell yourself that you are miserable, that the craving is a sign of some eternal and endless struggle, or something more powerful than you. Instead, you spin that energy doing the 4th step, which is investigating the sensations in your body - what does it feel like, is your throat closing up, are your fists clenching, are your legs full of energy, is your heart tight? The fifth step is to name those sensations out loud or better yet write them down. And the final step is to ride or surf the physical sensations as they intensify peak and then dissipate.

In the mid-eighteenth century, some gloriously titled reformist books by women were published, such as: *Woman Not Inferior to Man* (1739) by the anonymous "Sophia," and *Inquiry into the Causes Preventing the Female Sex from Studying* (1742) by Dorothea Erxleben, the first female medical doctor in Germany. However, these works were hard to find a few decades later when, after the Reign of Terror in France and the execution of women's rights defender Olympe de Gouges, a more conservative movement gained ground across Europe and numerous philosophers, doctors, and anthropologists agreed that women were different from and inferior to men.

Despite her conservative clothes, her exceptional figure was easy to discern. Like a model from a fashion magazine, she was a woman who combined intelligence and beauty. But whether she realized this was a different matter.

on July 26, he filed to eliminate my father from that role. After a big court hearing on September 29, my father was suspended as my conservator. It was all over the news before Mathew could even call me after court.