Extreme Feminist Quotes

There's always the danger that the extreme feminist will end up quite unfulfilled as a girl.

That word can be very extreme… But I guess I am a modern-day feminist. I do believe in equality. Why do you have to choose what type of woman you are? Why do you have to label yourself anything? I’m just a woman and I love being a woman. If you’re attractive then you can’t be sexy, and you can’t be intelligent? What is all of that? -from Vogue

No matter that information abounds that lets the public know that gay males come from two-parent homes and can be macho and women-hating, misguided assumptions about what makes a male gay still flourish. Every day boys who express feelings are psychologically terrorized, and in extreme cases brutally beaten, by parents who fear that a man of feeling must be homosexual. Gay men share with straight men the same notions about acceptable masculinity.

I live off my wife. It’s extremely modern and feminist of me.

More troubling than this oddly timed debate about birth control is the vehemence with which women need to justify or explain why they take birth control—health reasons, to regulate periods, you know, as if there’s anything wrong with taking birth control simply because you want to have sex without that sex resulting in pregnancy. In certain circles, birth control is being framed as whore medicine. We are now dealing with a bizarre new morality where a woman cannot simply say, in one way or another, “I’m on the pill because I like dick.” It’s extremely regressive for women to feel like they need to make it seem like they are using birth control for reasons other than what birth control was originally designed for: to control birth.

It is not women, or even feminists, who have limited, frustrated, diminished, hurt, and damaged men but masculinity itself or, rather, our society’s constricting, toxic, self-defeating version of what it means to perform being a man. Yet every time anybody tries to make progress in tackling this particular version of masculinity, the MRM rises up as a united voice to condemn and undermine the attempt.

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.

The impact of articles like this is to create a false equivalence between the violently misogynistic men’s rights community and the feminist movement, suggesting that disagreements between the two are a matter of balanced debate.

The more different someone seems from us, the more unreal they may feel to us. We can too easily ignore or dismiss people when they are of a different race or religion, when they come from a different socioeconomic “class.” Assessing them as either superior or inferior, better or worse, important or unimportant, we distance ourselves. Fixating on appearances—their looks, behavior, ways of speaking—we peg them as certain types. They are HIV positive or an alcoholic, a leftist or fundamentalist, a criminal or power monger, a feminist or do-gooder. Sometimes our typecasting has more to do with temperament—the person is boring or narcissistic, needy or pushy, anxious or depressed. Whether extreme or subtle, typing others makes the real human invisible to our eyes and closes our heart.

When feminist women told the world that patriarchy promotes woman-hating, the response was that feminists were being too extreme, exaggerating the problem. Yet when men who knew nothing about feminism claimed that feminists were man-hating, there was no response from the nonfeminist world saying that they were being too extreme. No feminists have murdered and raped men. Feminists have not been jailed day after day for their violence against men. No feminists have been accused of ongoing sexual abuse of girl children, including creating a world of child pornography featuring little girls. Yet these are some of the acts of men that led some feminist women to identify men as woman-hating.

I understood and agreed that from a feminist perspective working in a strip club was extremely problematic, but I was saving money to travel and making more in one night than most of my friends made in a week. Plus, it was interesting.

The late Francis Schaeffer, one of the wisest and most influential Christian thinkers of the twentieth century, warned of this exact trend just a few months before his death in 1984. In his book The Great Evangelical Disaster he included a section called “The Feminist Subversion,” in which he wrote: There is one final area that I would mention where evangelicals have, with tragic results, accommodated to the world spirit of this age. This has to do with the whole area of marriage, family, sexual morality, feminism, homosexuality, and divorce. . . . The key to understanding extreme feminism centers around the idea of total equality, or more properly the idea of equality without distinction. . . . the world spirit in our day would have us aspire to autonomous absolute freedom in the area of male and female relationships—to throw off all form and boundaries in these relationships and especially those boundaries taught in the Scriptures. . . . Some evangelical leaders, in fact, have changed their views about inerrancy as a direct consequence of trying to come to terms with feminism. There is no other word for this than accommodation. It is a direct and deliberate bending of the Bible to conform to the world spirit of our age at the point where the modern spirit conflicts with what the Bible teaches.2 My argument in the following pages demonstrates that what Schaeffer predicted so clearly twenty-two years ago is increasingly coming true in evangelicalism today. It is a deeply troubling trend.

Women are these wonderful mysteries and they excite me on all kinds of levels. Their power over us is, I think, often a moral power as well as a sexual power. I think women, generally speaking, have a better sense of what is whole and good and sensible. The old feminist line, 'Take the toys from the boys' is an extremely sensible observation, you know?

We now self-righteously condemn the sexually abusive male. Feminist critics find a lot of hypocrisy in this stance. It allows us to conceal from ourselves that the man's behavior is only an extreme form of a more commonplace aggression toward women and children that is condoned and even encouraged, both in popular media and within the economic power structure.

The confusion boys experience about their identity is heightened during adolescence. In many ways the fact that today's boy often has a wider range of emotional expression in early childhood, but if forced to suppress emotional awareness later on makes adolescence all the more stressful for boys. Tragically, were it not for the extreme violence that has erupted among teenage boys throughout our nation, the emotional life of boys would still be ignored. Although therapists tell us that mass media images of male violence and domination teach boys that violence is alluring and satisfying, when individual boys are violent, especially when they murder randomly, pundits tend to behave as though it were a mystery why boys are so violent.

We all have this circuit and need to exercize it periodically. Cuddling, sucking, hugging etc. and daily playing with (a) one’s own body (b) another’s body and (c) the environment, are perpetually necessary to neurosomatic-endocrine health. Those who deny such primordial functions because of rigid imprinting on the Third (rationalistic) or Fourth (moralistic) circuit tend to become “dried up,” “prune-faced,” unattractive, “cold,” and muscularly rigid. The baby-functions of playing with one’s own body, another’s body and the environment continue throughout life in all animals. This “playfulness” is a marked characteristic of all conspicuously healthy individuals of the sort Maslow calls “self-actualizers.” If this initial imprint is negative — if the universe in general and other humans in particular are imprinted as dangerous, hostile and frightening — the Prover will go on throughout life adjusting all perceptions to fit this map. This is what is known as the “Injustice Collector” syndrome (in the language of Dr. Edmund Bergler). The female members of this imprint group become Radical Feminists; the male members are less organized and can be found in fringe groups of the extreme Left and extreme Right.

White feminists did not challenge the racist-sexist tendency to use the word "woman" to refer solely to white women; they supported it. For them it serves two purposes. First, it allowed them to proclaim white men world oppressors while making it appear linguistically that no alliance existed between white women and white men based on shared racial imperialism. Second, it made it possible for white women to act as if alliances did exist between themselves and non-white women in our society, and by so doing they could deflect attention away from their classism and racism. Had feminists chosen to make explicit comparisons between the status of white women and that of black people, or more specifically the status of black women and white women, it would have been more than obvious that the two groups do not share an identical oppression. It would have been obvious that similarities between the women under patriarchy and that of any slave or colonized person do not necessarily exist in a society that is both racially and sexually imperialistic. In such a society, the woman who is seen as inferior because of her sex, can also be seen as superior because of her race, even in relationship to men of another race. Because feminists tended to evoke an image of women as a collective group, their comparisons between "women" and "blacks" were accepted without question. This constant comparison of the plight of "women" and "blacks" deflected attention away from the fact that black women were extremely victimized by both racism and sexism - a fact which, had it been emphasized, might have diverted public attention away from the complaints of middle and upper class white feminists.

To clarify the dilemma women have about sexual enthusiasm for men, it is helpful to contrast it with men's situation. It is unlikely in the extreme that men will have experienced actual sexual violence from women or its threat. Men do not live in cultures where the degradation and brutalisation of men at the hands of women is the stuff of pornography, entertainment and advertising. Men do not live with the consciousness that they are being hunted by women who would take sexual delight in dismembering them simply on account of their gender. They do not live in a society in which their degradation through sex is the dominant theme of the culture. They do not have to approach women sexually in fear or with distressing images or associations with their own oppression. The images they are likely to carry with them are those of women degraded and brutalised by men. In fact they are likely to have practised sexual arousal with such images, extensively, through pornography and fantasy. It is not surprising, then, that sexologists have identified women's 'inhibition' as the main sexual problem of this century. They have identified as healthy sexual feelings those which the male ruling class experiences and have chosen to avoid recognising the political reasons why women might feel differently.

How can a trail running shoe with an outer sole designed like a goat's hoof help me avoid compressing my spinal cord into a Slinky® on the side of some unsuspecting conifer, thereby rendering me a drooling, misshapen non-extreme-trail-running husk of my former self, forced to roam the earth in a motorized wheelchair with my name, embossed on one of those cute little license plates you get at carnivals or state fairs, fastened to the back?

Radicals have value, at least; they can move the center. On a scale of 1 to 5, 3 is moderate, 1 and 5 the hardliners. But if a good radical takes it up to 9, then 5 becomes the new center. I already saw it working in the American Muslim community. For years women were neglected in mosques, denied entrance to the main prayer halls and relegated to poorly maintained balconies and basements. It was only after a handdful of Muslim feminists raised "lunatic fringe" demands like mixed-gender prayers with men and women standing together and even women imams giving sermons and leading men in prayer that major organizations such as ISNA and CAIR began to recognize the "moderate" concerns and deal with the issue of women in mosques. I've taken part in the woman-led prayer movement, both as a writer and as a man who prays behind women, happy to be the extremist who makes moderate reform seem less threatening. Insha'Allah, what's extreme today will not be extreme tomorrow.

The disabled people populating these billboards epitomize the paradoxical figure of the supercrip: supercrips are those disabled figures favored in the media, products of either extremely low expectations (disability by definition means incompetence, so anything a disabled person does, no matter how mundane or banal, merits exaggerated praise) or extremely high expectations (disabled people must accomplish incredibly difficult, and therefore inspiring, tasks to be worthy of nondisabled attention).

We’re in a period right now where nobody asks any questions about psychology. No one has any feeling for human motivation. No one talks about sexuality in terms of emotional needs and symbolism and the legacy of childhood. Sexuality has been politicized--“Don’t ask any questions!” "No discussion!" “Gay is exactly equivalent to straight!” And thus in this period of psychological blindness or inertness, our art has become dull. There’s nothing interesting being written--in fiction or plays or movies. Everything is boring because of our failure to ask psychological questions. So I say there is a big parallel between Bill Cosby and Bill Clinton--aside from their initials! Young feminists need to understand that this abusive behavior by powerful men signifies their sense that female power is much bigger than they are! These two people, Clinton and Cosby, are emotionally infantile--they're engaged in a war with female power. It has something to do with their early sense of being smothered by female power--and this pathetic, abusive and criminal behavior is the result of their sense of inadequacy. Now, in order to understand that, people would have to read my first book, "Sexual Personae"--which of course is far too complex for the ordinary feminist or academic mind! It’s too complex because it requires a sense of the ambivalence of human life. Everything is not black and white, for heaven's sake! We are formed by all kinds of strange or vague memories from childhood. That kind of understanding is needed to see that Cosby was involved in a symbiotic, push-pull thing with his wife, where he went out and did these awful things to assert his own independence. But for that, he required the women to be inert. He needed them to be dead! Cosby is actually a necrophiliac--a style that was popular in the late Victorian period in the nineteenth-century. It's hard to believe now, but you had men digging up corpses from graveyards, stealing the bodies, hiding them under their beds, and then having sex with them. So that’s exactly what’s happening here: to give a woman a drug, to make her inert, to make her dead is the man saying that I need her to be dead for me to function. She’s too powerful for me as a living woman. And this is what is also going on in those barbaric fraternity orgies, where women are sexually assaulted while lying unconscious. And women don’t understand this! They have no idea why any men would find it arousing to have sex with a young woman who’s passed out at a fraternity house. But it’s necrophilia--this fear and envy of a woman’s power. And it’s the same thing with Bill Clinton: to find the answer, you have to look at his relationship to his flamboyant mother. He felt smothered by her in some way. But let's be clear--I’m not trying to blame the mother! What I’m saying is that male sexuality is extremely complicated, and the formation of male identity is very tentative and sensitive--but feminist rhetoric doesn’t allow for it. This is why women are having so much trouble dealing with men in the feminist era. They don’t understand men, and they demonize men.

The on-screen depiction of oral sex performed on women has consistently earned movies an NC-17 rating – Blue Valentine, Boys Don’t Cry, and Charlie Countryman are a few that come to mind. The same standard has certainly not been applied to on-screen blow jobs. I often think of 2013s Lovelace, a biopic about the star of the 1972 porn film Deep Throat. This was an entire movie dedicated to fellatio, and to extreme sexual violence, and even that was given a mild R. Sure, let the kids watch a porn star get repeatedly raped, but female desire? No, no, no.

In its beginnings, feminism, which today we take for granted, seemed extreme, and most Chilean women wondered why they needed it since they were already queens of their households and it was natural for men to be the bosses outside, the way God and Nature had intended. It was hard work to convince them that they weren’t queens anywhere. There were not many visible feminists; at the most, half a dozen. I try not to remember what aggravation we had to put up with! I realized that to wait to be respected for being a feminist was like expecting the bull not to charge because you’re a vegetarian.

A great liberal betrayal is afoot. Unfortunately, many “fellow-travelers” of Islamism are on the liberal side of this debate. I call them “regressive leftists”; they are in fact reverse racists. They have a poverty of expectation for minority groups, believing them to be homogenous and inherently opposed to human rights values. They are culturally reductive in how they see “Eastern”—and in my case, Islamic—culture, and they are culturally deterministic in attempting to freeze their ideal of it in order to satisfy their orientalist fetish. While they rightly question every aspect of their “own” Western culture in the name of progress, they censure liberal Muslims who attempt to do so within Islam, and they choose to side instead with every regressive reactionary in the name of “cultural authenticity” and anticolonialism. They claim that their reason for refusing to criticize any policy, foreign or domestic—other than those of what they consider “their own” government—is that they are not responsible for other governments’ actions. However, they leap whenever any (not merely their own) liberal democratic government commits a policy error, while generally ignoring almost every fascist, theocratic, or Muslim-led dictatorial regime and group in the world. It is as if their brains cannot hold two thoughts at the same time. Besides, since when has such isolationism been a trait of liberal internationalists? It is a right-wing trait. They hold what they think of as “native” communities—and I use that word deliberately—to lesser standards than the ones they claim apply to all “their” people, who happen to be mainly white, and that’s why I call it reverse racism. In holding “native” communities to lesser—or more culturally “authentic”—standards, they automatically disempower those communities. They stifle their ambitions. They cut them out of the system entirely, because there’s no aspiration left. These communities end up in self-segregated “Muslim areas” where the only thing their members aspire to is being tin-pot community leaders, like ghetto chieftains. The “fellow-travelers” fetishize these “Muslim” ghettos in the name of “cultural authenticity” and identity politics, and the ghetto chieftains are often the leading errand boys for them. Identity politics and the pseudo-liberal search for cultural authenticity result in nothing but a downward spiral of competing medieval religious or cultural assertions, fights over who are the “real” Muslims, ever increasing misogyny, homophobia, sectarianism, and extremism. This is not liberal. Among the left, this is a remnant of the socialist approach that prioritizes group identity over individual autonomy. Among the right, it is ironically a throwback from the British colonial “divide and rule” approach. Classical liberalism focuses on individual autonomy. I refer here to liberalism as it is understood in the philosophical sense, not as it’s understood in the United States to refer to the Democratic Party—that’s a party-political usage. The great liberal betrayal of this generation is that in the name of liberalism, communal rights have been prioritized over individual autonomy within minority groups. And minorities within minorities really do suffer because of this betrayal. The people I really worry about when we have this conversation are feminist Muslims, gay Muslims, ex-Muslims—all the vulnerable and bullied individuals who are not just stigmatized but in many cases violently assaulted or killed merely for being against the norm.

For some, measuring porn’s real-world effects boils down to one extreme and ultimately misleading question: “Does it lead to rape?” What is overlooked here is the more subtle question of how porn shapes the culture and the men who use it. No anti-porn feminist I know has suggested that there is one image, or even a few, that could lead a nonrapist to rape; the argument, rather, is that taken together, pornographic images create a world that is at best inhospitable to women, and at worst dangerous to their physical and emotional well-being. In an unfair and inaccurate article that is emblematic of how anti-porn feminist work is misrepresented, Daniel Bernardi claims that Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon believed that “watching pornography leads men to rape women.”³ Neither Dworkin nor MacKinnon, pioneers in developing a radical feminist critique of pornography, saw porn in such simplistic terms. Rather, both argued that porn has a complicated and multilayered effect on male sexuality, and that rape, rather than simply being caused by porn, is a cultural practice that has been woven into the fabric of a male-dominated society. Pornography, they argued, is one important agent of such a society since it so perfectly encodes woman-hating ideology, but to see it as simplistically and unquestionably leading to rape is to ignore how porn operates within the wider context of a society that is brimming with sexist imagery and ideology.

Emotional abuse can pose a threat to a person’s psychological survival, particularly if that person is a child and if the emotional abuse is chronic and severe. Threat of abandonment is experienced by some as a threat to physical and/or psychological survival. This is particularly so if the victim is dependent on the person threatening abandonment, as a child may be. Incest is a form of physical and emotional abuse that threatens a child’s psychological survival and sometimes even her or his physical survival. Extreme sexual or emotional abuse may produce fragmentation of identity, as in multiple personality, or psychic annihilation, as in psychosis. Threat to psychological survival can also occur, for example, when someone threatens to kill your children, when someone continues to sexually abuse your children and there is nothing you can do to stop it, or when someone prevents you from seeing your children.

I didn’t think of myself as a feminist. I’m not sure I knew then what a feminist was. That was when our daughter Jenn was a little less than a year old. Twenty-two years later, I am an ardent feminist. To me, it’s very simple. Being a feminist means believing that every woman should be able to use her voice and pursue her potential, and that women and men should all work together to take down the barriers and end the biases that still hold women back. This isn’t something I could have said with total conviction even ten years ago. It came to me only after many years of listening to women—often women in extreme hardship whose stories taught me what leads to inequity and how human beings flourish. But those insights came to me later. Back in 1996, I was seeing everything through the lens of the gender roles I knew, and I told Bill, “I’m not going back.” This threw Bill for a loop. Me being at Microsoft was a huge part of our life together.

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.

Take Canada again: why does Canada have the health-care program it does? Up until the mid-1960s, Canada and the United States had the same capitalist health service: extremely inefficient, tons of bureaucracy, huge administrative costs, millions of people with no insurance coverage―exactly what would be amplified in the United States by Clinton's proposals for "managed competition" [put forward in 1993].21 But in 1962 in Saskatchewan, where the N.D.P. is pretty strong and the unions are pretty strong, they managed to put through a kind of rational health-care program of the sort that every industrialized country in the world has by now, except the United States and South Africa. Well, when Saskatchewan first put through that program, the doctors and the insurance companies and the business community were all screaming―but it worked so well that pretty soon all the other Provinces wanted the same thing too, and within a couple years guaranteed health care had spread over the entire country. And that happened largely because of the New Democratic Party in Canada, which does provide a kind of cover and a framework within which popular organizations like unions, and then later things like the feminist movement, have been able to get together and do things.

In the logic of ableism, anyone who can handle such an (allegedly) horrible life must be strong; a lesser man would have given up in despair years ago. Indeed, Reeve's refusal to “give up” is precisely why the FBL selected Reeve for their model of strength; in the “billboard backstories” section of their website, they praise Reeve for trying to “beat paralysis and the spinal cord injuries” rather than “giv[ing] up.” Asserting that Goldberg is successful because of her hard work suggests that other people with dyslexia and learning disabilities who have not met with similar success have simply failed to engage in hard work; unlike Whoopi Goldberg, they are apparently unwilling to devote themselves to success. Similarly, by positioning Weihenmayer's ascent of Everest as a matter of vision, the FBL implies that most blind people, who have not ascended Everest or accomplished equivalently astounding feats, are lacking not only eyesight but vision. The disabled people populating these billboards epitomize the paradoxical figure of the supercrip: supercrips are those disabled figures favored in the media, products of either extremely low expectations (disability by definition means incompetence, so anything a disabled person does, no matter how mundane or banal, merits exaggerated praise) or extremely high expectations (disabled people must accomplish incredibly difficult, and therefore inspiring, tasks to be worthy of nondisabled attention).

One early terracotta statuette from Catal Huyuk in Anatolia depicts an enthroned female in the act of giving birth, supported by two cat-like animals that form her seat (Plate 1). This figure has been identified as a 'birth goddess' and it is this type of early image that has led a number of feminist scholars to posit a 'reign of the goddess' in ancient Near Eastern prehistory. Maria Gimbutas, for whom such images are proof of a perfect matriarchal society in 'Old Europe' , presents an ideal vision in which a socially egalitarian matriarchal culture was overthrown by a destructive patriarchy (Gimbutas 1991). Gerda Lerner has argued for a similar situation in the ancient Near East; however, she does not discuss nude figurines at any length (Lerner 1986a: 147). More recently, critiques of the matriarchal model of prehistory have pointed out the flaws in this methodology (e.g. Conkey and Tringham 1995; Meskell 1995; Goodison and Morris 1998). In all these critiques the identification of such figures as goddesses is rejected as a modern myth. There is no archaeological evidence that these ancient communities were in fact matriarchal, nor is there any evidence that female deities were worshipped exclusively. Male gods may have worshipped simultaneously with the 'mother goddesses' if such images are indeed representations of deities. Nor do such female figures glorify or show admiration for the female body; rather they essentialise it, reducing it to nothing more nor less than a reproductive vessel. The reduction of the head and the diminution of the extremities seem to stress the female form as potentially reproductive, but to what extent this condition was seen as sexual, erotic or matriarchal is unclear. ....Despite the correct rejection of the 'Mother Goddess' and utopian matriarchy myths by recent scholarship, we should not loose track of the overwhelming evidence that the image of female nudity was indeed one of power in ancient Mesopotamia. The goddess Ishtar/Inanna was but one of several goddesses whose erotic allure was represented as a powerful attribute in the literature of the ancient Near East. In contact to the naked male body which was the focus of a variety of meanings in the visual arts, female nudity was always associated with sexuality, and in particular with powerful sexual attraction, Akkadian *kuzbu*. This sexuality was not limited to Ishtar and her cult. As a literary topos, sensuousness is a defining quality for both mortal women and goddesses. In representational art, the nude woman is portrayed in a provocative pose, as the essence of the feminine. For femininity, sexual allure, *kuzbu*, the ideal of the feminine, was thus expressed as nudity in both visual and verbal imagery. While several iconographic types of unclothed females appear in Mesopotamian representations of the historical period - nursing mothers, women in acts of sexual intercourse, entertainers such as dancers and musicians, and isolated frontally represented nudes with or without other attributes - and while these nude female images may have different iconographic functions, the ideal of femininity and female sexuality portrayed in them is similar. -Zainab Bahrani, Women of Babylon: Gender and Representation in Mesopotamia

The Beast considered these arguments circular, but she discovered also that she was unhappy. Boys didn’t interest her. She fell in love with a girl. The girl disapproved, and she found that she was now the object of ridicule. She became more and more solitary and turned to books. But the books made it clear that men loved women, and women loved men, and men rode off and had all sorts of adventures and women stayed at home. ‘I know what it is,’ she said one day, ‘I know what is wrong: I am not human. The only story that fits me at all is the one about the Beast. But the Beast doesn’t change from a Beast to a human because of its love. It’s just the reverse. And the Beast isn’t fierce. It’s extremely gentle. It loves Beauty, but it lives alone and dies alone.’ And that’s what she did. Her

The “increasingly sophisticated” new Theory is actually overly simplistic—everything is problematic somehow, because of power dynamics based on identity. It is also functionally impossible, a characteristic that is misinterpreted as extreme complexity. The needle Collins expects (white) feminists to thread involves including—but not appropriating—the experiences of women of color, providing space for them to be heard, and amplifying their voices—without exploiting them or becoming voyeuristic consumers of their oppression. These kinds of impossible, contradictory, double-binding demands are a persistent feature of applied postmodern Theory

So-called “battered women’s shelters” have been called “one-stop divorce shops” because they are “extreme militant feminist” operations that exist mostly to separate children from their fathers, even without any demonstration of violence. Erin Pizzey, who founded the first shelter in London in 1971, claims that her movement has been “hijacked” by feminists. Extended investigations by Canada’s National Post and others revealed a violently anti-male agenda, corruption, drug and alcohol use, child abuse, and even, ironically, violence against women. Yet they continue to receive government funding. One woman whose husband “didn’t beat me up or nothing, we just had an argument,” says shelter workers ignored her pleas and pressured her to leave her marriage. “They asked me if I was abused, and I said, ‘No.’ They wanted me to get a lawyer, and I said, ‘For what?’” She maintains shelter employees tried to “trick” her into making incriminating statements about her husband. “Everything negative about him, they wrote it down. If I said something nice about him, they wouldn’t write it down. I kept telling them, ‘No, he didn’t hit me.’” She was offered financial incentives to leave her husband. “They said, ‘If you leave him, we can help you find a place right away.’ But I said, ‘I don’t want to leave him.’ . . . They wanted that so bad. They were trying to break up a family, and I didn’t want that.

I like dresses. They're the greatest hoax in history. You look all suave, and meanwhile you're literally wearing a bag with holes for your extremities.

In 1974 Freedman and Kaplan’s Comprehensive Textbook of Psychiatry stated that “incest is extremely rare, and does not occur in more than 1 out of 1.1 million people.”16 As we have seen in chapter 2 this authoritative textbook then went on to extol the possible benefits of incest: “Such incestuous activity diminishes the subject’s chance of psychosis and allows for a better adjustment to the external world. . . . The vast majority of them were none the worse for the experience.” How misguided those statements were became obvious when the ascendant feminist movement, combined with awareness of trauma in returning combat veterans, emboldened tens of thousands of survivors of childhood sexual abuse, domestic abuse, and rape to come forward. Consciousness-raising groups and survivor groups were formed, and numerous popular books, including The Courage to Heal (1988), a best-selling self-help book for survivors of incest, and Judith Herman’s book Trauma and Recovery (1992), discussed the stages of treatment and recovery in great detail.

The most impressive naval career of all the female sailors is that of William Brown, a black woman who spent at least twelve years on British warships, much of this time in the extremely demanding role of captain of the foretop. A good description of her appeared in London’s Annual Register in September 1815: “She is a smart, well-formed figure, about five feet four inches in height, possessed of considerable strength and great activity; her features are rather handsome for a black, and she appears to be about twenty-six years of age.” The article also noted that “in her manner she exhibits all the traits of a British tar and takes her grog with her late messmates with the greatest gaiety.” Brown was a married woman and had joined the navy around 1804 following a quarrel with her husband. For several years she served on the Queen Charlotte, a three-decker with 104 guns and one of the largest ships in the Royal Navy. Brown must have had nerve, strength, and unusual ability to have been made captain of the foretop on such a ship….The captain of the foretop had to lead a team of seamen up the shrouds of the foremast, and then up the shrouds of the fore-topmast and out along the yards a hundred feet or more above the deck…. At some point in 1815, it was discovered that Brown was a woman and her story was published in the papers, but this does not seem to have affected her naval career….What is certain is that Brown returned to the Queen Charlotte and rejoined the crew.

There’s a second reason the liberal class loves microfinance, and it’s extremely simple: microlending is profitable. Lending to the poor, as every subprime mortgage originator knows, can be a lucrative business. Mixed with international feminist self-righteousness, it is also a bulletproof business, immune to criticism. The million-dollar paydays it has brought certain microlenders are the wages of virtue. This combination is the real reason the international goodness community believes that empowering poor women by lending to them at usurious interest rates is a fine thing all around.29

If this initial imprint is negative — if the universe in general and other humans in particular are imprinted as dangerous, hostile and frightening — the Prover will go on throughout life adjusting all perceptions to fit this map. This is what is known as the “Injustice Collector” syndrome (in the language of Dr. Edmund Bergler). The female members of this imprint group become Radical Feminists; the male members are less organized and can be found in fringe groups of the extreme Left and extreme Right.

Wilhelm Reich in The Sexual Revolution summarized the specific objective reasons for the failure of the Russian communes in the best analysis to date: 1) Confusion of the leadership and evasion of the problem. 2) The laborious task of reconstruction in general given the cultural backwardness of Old Russia, the war, and famine. 3) Lack of theory. The Russian Revolution was the first of its kind. No attempt had been made to deal with emotional-sexual-familial problems in the formulation of basic revolutionary theory. (Or, in our terms, there had been a lack of “consciousness raising” about female/ child oppression and a lack of radical feminist analysis prior to the revolution itself.) 4) The sex-negative psychological structure of the individual, created and reinforced throughout history by the family, hindered the individual's liberation from this very structure. As Reich puts it: It must be remembered that human beings have a tremendous fear of just that kind of life for which they long so much but which is at variance with their own structure. 5) The explosive concrete complexities of sexuality. In the picture that Reich draws of the time, one senses the immense frustration of people trying to liberate themselves without having a well-thought-out ideology to guide them. In the end, that they attempted so much without an adequate preparation made their failure even more extreme: To destroy the balance of sexual polarization without entirely eliminating it was worse than nothing at all.

Caputi defines serial sex murder as 'gynocide, sexually political murder, an extreme form of terrorism in the service of the patriarchal state'. The result of this and other acts of sexual terrorism is that 'women are supposed to accept it as a "normal" , unavoidable consequence of modern life that we must conduct our lives in constant vigilance and fear, restricting our movements, staying inside at night'.

The opponents of female suffrage lamented that woman’s emancipation would mean the end of marriage, morality and the state; their extremism was more clear-sighted than the woolly benevolence of liberals and humanists, who thought that giving women a measure of freedom would not upset anything. When we reap the harvest which the unwitting suffragettes sowed we shall see that the anti-feminists were after all right.

The elliptical mode in her poetry recalls late Shakespeare but is more extreme. A daemonic drive to negate precursors while maintaining their standards of excellence distinguishes her from some recent poetical ideologues of the feminist persuasion, whether in verse or prose. They claim Dickinson as ancestor, yet they do her wrong, she being so majestical, to offer her the show of violence.

Scholars argue that many gay men might unconsciously “learn” the gay voice not only from their communities but also from TV and movies. Since the nineteenth century, gay male characters have had a place in mainstream American entertainment; it’s just that until the 1990s or so they were always in the form of some extreme stereotype, like the wealthy, foppish “pansy” or the hyperintellectual cunning villain. In Do I Sound Gay? David Thorpe explains that growing up, he didn’t have any gay figures to relate to in his community (at least none that were out),* but he knew what gay men sounded like because of a few on-screen archetypes. These included Liberace and Truman Capote, with their nasally affects, as well as sophisticated movie villains like Waldo Lydecker in 1944’s Laura and Addison DeWitt in 1950’s All About Eve, both portrayed as impeccably dressed, acid-tongued dandies.

The primary causes of unhappiness? Having a bad commute. If you have a job, the drive there is the most stressful thing you’ll do on any given day. And people with particularly long car commutes are more likely to be depressed, have a mental health breakdown, and even get divorced.

If feminists had continued to talk about love, then we would have needed to speak about the extreme lovelessness that is at the heart of domination. ... patriarchy, like any colonizing system, does not create the context for men and women to love each other ... genuine love between females and males could only emerge in a context where the sexes would come together to challenge and change patriarchal thought.

Young feminists often speak of finding a third way between feminist extremism, on the one hand, and social conservatism on the other. Like Katie Roiphe or Naomi Wolf, they insist that women don't - or shouldn't have to compromise their independence in marriage or when they become mothers. We should be able to keep all the perks of modern female life along with all the perks of the traditional. But this notion is not sustainable. We must understand the trade-off of every action we take. If we want to be heart surgeons or presidents, we will have to accept that we may not be the mothers we want to be, or may not be mothers at all. If we are unwilling to trust men, we might not have the marriage we want. If we refuse to give ourselves over to our families, we cannot expect much from our families in return. If we wish to live for ourselves and think only about ourselves, we will manage to retain our independence but little else.

The anger that was coursing through America deeply worried her. Although she was too young to remember the beginnings of the civil rights, anti–Vietnam War, and feminist movements, she was also a student of history. Her sense was that as bad as things had been in the sixties, people of goodwill still dominated. The

It is equally hard to know what to make of Fausto-Sterling’s (1992, p. 199) claim that “there is no single undisputed claim about universal human behavior (sexual or otherwise).” Presumably even the most ardent cultural relativist would accept that everywhere; people live in societies; they eat, sleep, and make love; and that women give birth and men do not. The arguments seem to arise when we move from basic universals to their specific behavioral expression. Though everywhere women are the principal caretakers of children, the fact that there may be variation in how that task is fulfilled leads some anthropologists to conclude that mothering is not universal. This is analogous to arguing that because people eat different food in different parts of the world, eating is not universal. Evolutionary psychologists do not argue for cultural invariance in the expression of evolved adaptations. As Tooby and Cosmides (1992, p. 45) put it, “manifest expressions may differ between individuals when different environmental inputs are operated on by the same procedures to produce different manifest outputs.” At a behavioral level, the expression of the mechanism may vary but that does not question the universality of the generative mechanism itself. Fortunately Donald Brown (1991), trained in the standard ethnographic tradition, has documented the extent of human universals. The list is astoundingly long but here is a taste of the hundreds that he finds: gossip, lying, verbal humor, storytelling, metaphor, distinction between mother and father, kinship categories, logical relations, interpreting intention from behavior and recognition of six basic emotions. Of special interest to the study of gender we find: binary distinctions between men and women, division of labor by sex, more child care by women, more aggression and violence by men, acknowledgement of differences between male and female natures, and domination by men in the public political sphere. Now this last observation (that men predominate in positions of power) provides a nice example of the extreme reluctance of cultural anthropologists to acknowledge universals. In 1973, Steven Goldberg wrote a book documenting the universality of patriarchy. He was inundated with letters informing him that he was wrong and pointing out counter-examples. (Other feminists were more willing to accept his premise, see Bem, 1993; Millett, 1969; Rich, 1976.) Over the next 20 years, he carefully examined the available ethnographic documentation for each putative counter-example and in 1993 authored a second book in which he was emphatic that no society had yet been found that violated his rule. There are societies that are matrilineal and matrilocal and where women are accorded veneration and respect—but there are no societies which violate the universality of patriarchy defined as “a system of organisation … in which the overwhelming number of upper positions in hierarchies are occupied by males” (Goldberg, 1993, p. 14). Such a state of affairs is deplorable but mere denial of the facts will do nothing to alter it—women’s engagement in the political arena will.

If victims deny their own terror, the danger they are in, and their rage, how can they understand their strict compliance with the captor’s every order, their state of extreme arousal, and their hypervigilance to the abuser’s needs, wants, and moods? Having denied the danger, terror, and rage, victims look to their environment and to their internal motivations for cues to explain their behavior and state of extreme arousal (cf. D. J. Bern 1972; Festinger 1957; Schachter and Singer 1962). Seeing themselves being compliant and even hypervigilant to the abuser’s needs, they interpret their physiological arousal and behavior as indicating they have strong positive feelings for the abuser (cf. Walster 1971; Walster and Berscheid 1971). The more extreme the state of arousal, the stronger the bond experienced by the victims. The more hypervigilant the victims are relative to the kindness shown by the abuser, the stronger the bond is interpreted to be. The harder the victims have to work to win over the abuser, the stronger the victims’ bond to the abuser (cf. Walster and Berscheid 1971).

If victims arc given the opportunity to leave their abuser after being subjected to the precursor conditions for a prolonged period, they will have an extremely difficult time doing so. Having denied the violent, terrifying side of the abuser as well as their own anger, the victims see no reason to leave the abuser. At the same time, intense, unconsciously driven “push-pull” dynamics characterize the victims’ orientation toward the abuser. These dynamics involve powerful, survival-based feelings of being pulled toward the abuser (because it is the mutual bonding between victims and abuser that convinces the abuser to let victims live and that gives hope to victims) and of being pushed away from the abuser (because the abuser is threatening the victims' survival, even though this may be recognized only unconsciously). “Pull” forces are expressed as cognitive distortions, for example: victims believe they must help the abuser because the abuser needs them; victims see the abuser himself as a victim who would stop being abusive if he were given enough love; victims believe they are the only ones who really understand the abuser; and victims want to protect the abuser, because they perceive that the abuser has protected them. These cognitive distortions provide an interpretation of the victims’ behavior to the victims themselves. The content of the distortions, and the fact that the distortions provide meaning to the victims about their own behavior, help the victims believe they are in control. The cognitive distortions provide the only sense of control in a life-threatening relationship, and thus cannot be abandoned. “Push” forces are experienced as terror and anger, though victims almost never express these emotions to the abuser because they fear it will threaten their survival.

Clones are more susceptible to pests and thus require an extremely vigilant and aggressive integrated pest management plan. Also,

Expecting perfection is the new extreme fundamentalism. Our addiction to attacking women, having unrealistic standards, and finding anything we can to discredit them, shows our rage addiction and expecting perfection is just a new way of repackaging hating women, and it is so destructive and dangerous. People apologize, grow and change. Let them.

Types of Funds MUTUAL FUNDS. A group of stocks tracking a particular part of the stock market that can be traded only when the stock market is open. They are actively managed, meaning that you’ll pay an extra fee for an “expert” to pick stocks for you. EXCHANGE-TRADED FUNDS (ETFs). A group of stocks tracking a particular part of the stock market that can be traded at any time, even when the stock market is closed. Typically, ETFs are cheaper than a mutual fund, because they are passively managed (no manager to pay). INDEX FUNDS. One of the most popular choices in the personal finance community, an index fund is a mutual fund or an ETF that’s designed to track a particular part of the stock market, such as the S&P 500. I’m index funds’ biggest fan: they are diversified, extremely low in fees, and more stable than individual stocks.

As Coates explains, hedges like these “are used to respect the face needs of all participants, to negotiate sensitive topics, and to encourage the participation of others.” These interpersonal tools are especially handy for women, who almost always dive into sensitive territory at some point during their discussions. Coates collected some enlightening data on how women hedge with one another from a group discussion among female friends about Britain’s notorious Yorkshire Ripper case of the early 1980s. The speakers were recalling how, during the hunt for the perpetrator, the police asked the public to consider their family members as suspects. At one point, a woman named Sally revealed that she once thought for a second that the killer might have been her husband. The hedges in her statement are underlined: “Oh god yes well I mean we were living in Yorkshire at the time and I—I mean I. I mean I did/ I sort of thought well could it be John?” These hedges here are not representative of Sally’s indecision—she isn’t hedging or breaking off her sentences due to, as Otto Jespersen said, “talking without having thought out what [she is] going to say.” Sally knows exactly what she wants to get across. But because the topic at hand is so sensitive, she needs the wells and I means so she doesn’t come off as brusque and unfeeling. “Self-disclosure of this kind can be extremely face-threatening,” Coates explains. “Speakers need to hedge their statements.” This is true in so many situations. For instance, saying something along the lines of, “I mean, I just feel like you should maybe, well, try seeing a therapist” is a gentler, easier-to-hear way of saying, “You should see a therapist.” The latter statement, though direct, could come across as cold in the context of a heart-to-heart conversation. The hedged version is more tactful and open, inviting of the listener’s point of view, and leaves space for them to interject or share a different perspective (unlike “You should see a therapist,” which is closed off and doesn’t make room for anyone else’s input).