Females Supporting Females Quotes

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We teach girls to shrink themselves, to make themselves smaller. We say to girls, you can have ambition, but not too much. You should aim to be successful, but not too successful. Otherwise, you would threaten the man. Because I am female, I am expected to aspire to marriage. I am expected to make my life choices always keeping in mind that marriage is the most important. Now marriage can be a source of joy and love and mutual support but why do we teach girls to aspire to marriage and we don’t teach boys the same? We raise girls to see each other as competitors not for jobs or accomplishments, which I think can be a good thing, but for the attention of men. We teach girls that they cannot be sexual beings in the way that boys are.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (We Should All Be Feminists)
Many of my movies have strong female leads- brave, self-sufficient girls that don't think twice about fighting for what they believe with all their heart. They'll need a friend, or a supporter, but never a savior. Any woman is just as capable of being a hero as any man.
Hayao Miyazaki
Men don’t have to pay attention the way we do. Men die because they make mistakes. Women? We die because we’re female
Grady Hendrix (The Final Girl Support Group)
The first basic need of a male is sexual fulfillment; for a female, affection. The second most basic need of a male is recreational companionship; for a female, communication and conversation. The third basic need of a male in a relationship is an attractive woman; for a woman, honesty and openness. The fourth basic need of a male is domestic support; for a female, financial support. The fifth basic need of a male is admiration and respect; for a woman, family commitment.
Myles Munroe (The Purpose and Power of Love & Marriage)
Women helped each other in ways small and large every day, without thinking, and that was what kept them going even when the world came up with new and exciting ways to crush them.
Alyssa Cole (Let Us Dream)
a mother's death also means the loss of the consistent, supportive family system that once supplied her with a secure home base, she then has to develop her self-confidence and self-esteem through alternate means. Without a mother or mother-figure to guide her, a daughter also has to piece together a female self-image of her own.
Hope Edelman (Motherless Daughters: The Legacy of Loss)
Leigh did what any sane female faced with such an e-mail would do: deleted it to resist the temptation of replying, cleared her trash to resist the temptation of recalling it, and then called tech support to restore all her recently deleted e-mails. (Chasing Harry Winston)
Lauren Weisberger
Is the god the source, or is the god a human manner of conceiving of the force and energy that supports the world? In our tradition God is a male. This male and female differentiation is made, however, within the field of time and space, the field of duality. If God is beyond duality, you cannot say that God is a "He." You cannot say God is a "She." You cannot say God is an "It." (18)
Joseph Campbell (Thou Art That: Transforming Religious Metaphor)
White women and black men have it both ways. They can act as oppressor or be oppressed. Black men may be victimized by racism, but sexism allows them to act as exploiters and oppressors of women. White women may be victimized by sexism, but racism enables them to act as exploiters and oppressors of black people. Both groups have led liberation movements that favor their interests and support the continued oppression of other groups. Black male sexism has undermined struggles to eradicate racism just as white female racism undermines feminist struggle. As long as these two groups or any group defines liberation as gaining social equality with ruling class white men, they have a vested interest in the continued exploitation and oppression of others.
bell hooks
The sin we commit against each other as women is lack of support. We hurt. We hurt each other. We hide. We project. We become mute or duplicitous, and we fester like boiling water until one day we erupt like a geyser. Do we forget we unravel in grief?
Terry Tempest Williams (When Women Were Birds: Fifty-four Variations on Voice)
It might sound chauvinistic, but there is a sad reality in rock music: Bands who depend on support from females inevitably crash and burn.
Chuck Klosterman (Fargo Rock City: A Heavy Metal Odyssey in Rural North Dakota)
There is only one princess in the Disney tales, one girl who gets to be exalted. Princesses may confide in a sympathetic mouse or teacup, but they do not have girlfriends. God forbid Snow White should give Sleeping Beauty a little support. Let's review: princesses avoid female bonding. Their goals are to be saved by a prince, get married, and be taken care of the rest of their lives.
Peggy Orenstein (Cinderella Ate My Daughter: Dispatches from the Frontlines of the New Girlie-Girl Culture)
The most cursory examination of even the most progressive organs of information reveals a curious inability to recognize women as newsmakers, unless they are young or married to a head of state or naked or pregnant by some triumph of technology or perpetrators or victims of some hideous crime or any combiniation of the above. Women's issues are often disguised as people issues, unless they are relegated to the women's pages which amazingly still suvive. Senior figures are all male; even the few women who are deemed worthy of obituaries are shown in images from their youth, as if the last fourty years of their lives have been without achievement of any kind. If you analyse the by-lines in your morning paper, you will see that the senior editorial staff are all older men, supported by a rabble of junior females, the infinitely replacesable 'hackettes'.
Germaine Greer (The Whole Woman)
Much of the prejudice against women is stored at an unconscious level. Many of those with the most punishing attitudes towards passionate women -and free women are passionate women – consider themselves social liberals, even feminists. Women’s rights seem to them to be of obvious importance, but what is not obvious to them is how much they conspire to keep the lid on female power. Female power transcends what are thought of as “woman’s issues”. Female power involves women taking part in the conversation either in the public arena or the dinner table, and having the same emotional space in which to do so as men. It means women not having to fear punishment of any kind. It means women not having to worry that they will be considered “unfeminine” if they speak up. It means women really coming out to play and getting support for their playing from men as well as women. Until this is accomplished, political, economic and reproductive freedom will still not be enough. We will not be free until we can speak our minds and our hearts without having to worry that men will crucify us, women will crucify us, the press will crucify us, or our children will be ashamed… Women are still in emotional bondage as long as we feel we have to make a choice between being heard and being loved.
Marianne Williamson
A circle of women may just be the most powerful force known to humanity. If you have one, embrace it. If you need one, seek it. If you find one, for the love of all that is good and holy, dive in. Hold on. Love it up. Get Naked. Let them see you. Let them hold you. Let your reluctant tears fall. Let yourself rise fierce and love gentle. You will be changed. The very fabric of your being will be altered by this, if you allow it. Please, please allow it.
Jeanette LeBlanc
The basic distortions in the media are not innocent errors, for they are not random; rather they move in the same overall direction again and again, favoring management over labor, corporatism over anti-corporatism, the affluent over the poor, private enterprise over socialism, Whites over Blacks, males over females, officialdom over protesters, conventional politics over dissidence, anticommunism and arms-race militarism over disarmament, national chauvinism over internationalism, US dominance of the Third World over revolutionary or populist nationalist change. The press does many things and serves many functions but its major role, its irreducible responsibility, is to continually recreate a view of reality supportive of existing social and economic class power.
Michael Parenti (Inventing Reality: The Politics of News Media)
Static cackled from the cafeteria speaker. A bored female voice come on. “Victoria Brennan, please report to the headmaster's office. Victoria Brennan to the headmaster's office.” Classmates glanced our way. Whispers sprang up around me. “Not good.” Shelton was reaching for his earlobe. “Tell them you have amnesia,” Hi said. “Or dementia. Pretend you're Joan of Arc.” “Thanks for the support, guys. If I'm not back for class, look for my body in the harbor.” Hiram's hand flew up. “I call her iTunes collection. Shelton can have the mutt.” “Nice.
Kathy Reichs (Exposure (Virals, #4))
She can. But I don’t care what she thinks, she’s not back to full strength yet.” Hawke raised an eyebrow. “Want a piece of advice, one male to another?” Judd waited. “Wolf females get really, really, really pissed off when their males don’t support them against others in public.” A flashing smile. “You’re going to have to grovel to get back in her good graces.” “Loyalty. I understand that.” And he did. Hawke angled his head. “One of the scouts is returning.
Nalini Singh (Caressed by Ice (Psy-Changeling, #3))
You would think women would want to stick together when there weren’t that many of them, but they never did. It was as if being a woman was a disease that you didn’t wish to catch. As long as you didn’t associate with the other women, you could imply to the majority, the men: I’m not like those other ones.
Gabrielle Zevin (Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow)
I'm never going to say male rape and abuse victims don't deserve as much care and support as female ones, but look at who is hurting them, and look at who built this system of hurt
Joan Tierney (September: A Map)
Shared gender or shared hearts I know you would help me pull out from my back that frozen shards ~
Sijdah Hussain (Red Sugar, No More)
I feel compelled to make another 'nonapology.' Many readers are likely to be concerned about my use of masculine pronouns in relation to God. I think I both understand and appreciate this concern. It is a matter to which I have given much thought. I have generally been a strong supporter of the women's movement and action that is reasonable to combat sexist language. But first of all, God is not neuter. He is exploding with life and love and even sexuality of a sort. So 'It' is not appropriate. Certainly I consider God androgynous. He is as gentle and tender and nurturing and maternal as any woman could ever be. Nonetheless, culturally determined though it may be, I subjectively experience His reality as more masculine than feminine. While He nurtures us, He also desires to penetrate us, and while we more often than not flee from His love like a reluctant virgin, He chases after us with a vigor in the hunt that we most typically associate with males. As CS Lewis put it, in relation to God we are all female. Moreover, whatever our gender or conscious theology, it is our duty---our obligation---in response to His love to attempt to give birth, like Mary, to Christ in ourselves and in others. "I shall, however, break with tradition and use the neuter for Satan. While I know Satan to be lustful to penetrate us, I have not in the least experienced this desire as sexual or creative---only hateful and destructive. It is hard to determine the sex of a snake.
M. Scott Peck (People of the Lie: The Hope for Healing Human Evil)
Teach her, too, to question the idea of women as a special species. I once heard an American politician, in his bid to show his support for women, speak of how women should be “revered” and “championed”—a sentiment that is all too common. Tell Chizalum that women actually don’t need to be championed and revered; they just need to be treated as equal human beings. There is a patronizing undertone to the idea of women needing to be “championed” and “revered” because they are women. It makes me think of chivalry, and the premise of chivalry is female weakness.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Dear Ijeawele, or A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions)
Their chattel status continues in their loss of name, their obligation to adopt the husband’s domicile, and the general legal assumption that marriage involves an exchange of the female’s domestic service and (sexual) consortium in return for financial support.31
Kate Millett (Sexual Politics)
Our friendships—the ones we’re living every day—can stand on their own. They are supportive, enthralling, entirely wonderful, and, often, all we need.
Kayleen Schaefer (Text Me When You Get Home: The Evolution and Triumph of Modern Female Friendship)
Most abusive men put on a charming face for their communities, creating a sharp split between their public image and their private treatment of women and children. He may be: Enraged at home but calm and smiling outside Selfish and self-centered with you but generous and supportive with others Domineering at home but willing to negotiate and compromise outside Highly negative about females while on his own turf but a vocal supporter of equality when anyone else is listening Assaultive toward his partner or children but nonviolent and nonthreatening with everyone else Entitled at home but critical of other men who disrespect or assault women The pain of this contrast can eat away at a woman. In the morning her partner cuts her to the quick by calling her a “brainless fat cow,” but a few hours later she sees him laughing with the people next door and helping them fix their car. Later the neighbor says to her, “Your partner is so nice. You’re lucky to be with him—a lot of men wouldn’t do what he does.” She responds with a mumbled “Yeah,” feeling confused and tongue-tied. Back at home, she asks herself over and over again, “Why me?
Lundy Bancroft (Why Does He Do That? Inside the Minds of Angry and Controlling Men)
Is it because Evelyn can’t handle the fact that Celia received the Most Promising Female Personality Award that night? Or is it that Celia’s been nominated for an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress for their movie Little Women, and Evelyn didn’t get a mention
Taylor Jenkins Reid (The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo)
The best support Western feminists could give their global sisters (she said), was to listen first and speak later, following the lead of and partnering with local feminists, giving economic and other support from a position of ‘solidarity’ rather than ‘saving
Sayantani DasGupta
For a century, the human response to stress and danger has been defined as “fight or flight.” A 2000 UCLA study by several psychologists noted that this research was based largely on studies of male rats and male human beings. But studying women led them to a third, often deployed option: gather for solidarity, support, advice. They noted that “behaviorally, females’ responses are more marked by a pattern of ‘tend-and-befriend.’ Tending involves nurturant activities designed to protect the self and offspring that promote safety and reduce distress; befriending is the creation and maintenance of social networks that may aid in this process.
Rebecca Solnit (The Mother of All Questions: Further Feminisms)
SWAT? For me?" Still trembling, one hand clung to the ambulance gurney, the other held a massive sterilised cotton wool wad under my nose. "Tactical Support was busy. You got Dennis and Arlo," said Harry, speed-reading the papers he'd snatched from inside my jacket. Closest his hands had been to my chest in a long time. "Which one broke my nose?" "That'd be Dennis.
Morana Blue (Gatsby's Smile)
...above all, let your focus be on remaining a full person. Take time for yourself. Nurture your own needs. Please do not think of it as 'doing it all'. Our culture celebrates the idea of women who are able to 'do it all' but does not question the premise of that praise. I have no interest in the debate about women doing it all because it is a debate that assumes that caregiving and domestic work are singularly female domains, and idea that I strongly reject. Domestic work and caregiving should be gender-neutral, and we should be asking not whether a woman can 'do it all' but how best to support parents in their dual duties at work and at home.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Dear Ijeawele, or a Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions)
Men who struggle with deadlines or disorganization more frequently find the socially acceptable support of executive assistants, wives, or mothers … they are the “absent-minded professors,” while there is no word for emotional, discombobulated women.
Jennifer O'Toole (Autism in Heels: The Untold Story of a Female Life on the Spectrum)
Behind every great woman... is another great woman.
Kate Hodges (I Know a Woman: The Inspiring Connections Between the Women Who Have Shaped Our World)
Women are more powerful than most of us give ourselves credit for. When we actually decide to stop the jealousy and the finger pointing, and band together to laugh with one another and understand one another, it's like a beautiful firework display on the Fourth of July in Vegas, baby!
Helen Edwards (Nothing Sexier Than Freedom)
When a woman understands the uniqueness of the female brain—how to care for it, how to make the most of its strengths, how to overcome its challenges, how to fall in love with it, and ultimately, how to unleash its full power—there is no stopping her. In her personal development, at work, and in her relationships, she can bring the best of herself to her family, her community, and her planet. By contrast, a woman who is not caring optimally for her brain, who is not giving it the full range of nutrients, exercise, sleep, and emotional support that it needs, is squandering her most valuable resource. If you are not taking good care of your brain, you are at a significantly higher risk of brain fog, memory problems, low energy, distractibility, poor decisions, obesity, heart disease, cancer, and diabetes.
Daniel G. Amen (Unleash the Power of the Female Brain: Supercharging Yours for Better Health, Energy, Mood, Focus, and Sex)
Cleopatra moreover came of age in a country that entertained a singular definition of women’s roles. Well before her and centuries before the arrival of the Ptolemies, Egyptian women enjoyed the right to make their own marriages. Over time their liberties had increased, to levels unprecedented in the ancient world. They inherited equally and held property independently. Married women did not submit to their husbands’ control. They enjoyed the right to divorce and to be supported after a divorce. Until the time an ex-wife’s dowry was returned, she was entitled to be lodged in the house of her choice. Her property remained hers; it was not to be squandered by a wastrel husband. The law sided with the wife and children if a husband acted against their interests. Romans marveled that in Egypt female children were not left to die; a Roman was obligated to raise only his first-born daughter. Egyptian women married later than did their neighbors as well, only about half of them by Cleopatra’s age. They loaned money and operated barges. They served as priests in the native temples. They initiated lawsuits and hired flute players. As wives, widows, or divorcées, they owned vineyards, wineries, papyrus marshes, ships, perfume businesses, milling equipment, slaves, homes, camels. As much as one third of Ptolemaic Egypt may have been in female hands.
Stacy Schiff (Cleopatra)
So although in Genesis 2, ezer is often translated "helper" or "helpmeet," its meaning includes far more. Woman is Man's ezer- she is a delivering, warring, supporting, shielding, capable, and vibrant female image bearer of God.
Jonalyn Fincher (Ruby Slippers: How the Soul of a Woman Brings Her Home)
We need to upgrade from female empowerment to female engagement. No matter how confident or empowered a woman feels if they don't act or work towards their vision and mission, that power depletes. How do we help take our sisters to their next level?
Janna Cachola
Female power is the foundation of all other power structures. Social power systems that do not rest directly on instinct can never be more than superstructures. Their leaders can rule only in areas of no special value to sex partners and proteges. A system that disregards the power of the really powerful sex is doomed from the outset: it cannot gain adherents. It is by the power of the dominant sex that all systems function at all. Without the consent of women, there could have been no fascism, no imperialism, no Inquisition. Men could not have become the tools of such systems, had they not been ruled by women. Only a person attached and subservient to another through his basic social instincts - a man with a family to support, typically - can be sucked into the treadmill of such a secondary system and be driven to commit acts of hypocrisy, terror, and treason. The power of woman is the root of force in others.
Esther Vilar (The Polygamous Sex)
Plato and Aristotle.....survived to become the twin pillars of philosophic and scientific thinking in the Western world, supporting the massive edifice of Christianity. Plato's Theory of Forms, with it's inherent contempt for the physical world, and Aristotle's biological dualism, in which females were seen as failed males, provided the intellectual apparatus for the centuries of misogyny that were to follow.
Jack Holland (Misogyny: The World's Oldest Prejudice)
Whether they regard themselves as pro- or antifeminist, most women want men to do more of the emotional work in relationships. And most men, even those who wholeheartedly support gender equality in the workforce, still believe that emotional work is female labor. Most men continue to uphold the sexist decree that emotions have no place in the work world and that emotional labor at home should be done by females.
bell hooks
To be perfectly honest, if I had my way women wouldn’t even be allowed inside grounds, and I certainly believe that if a ground is sold out and a male of the species is locked outside, someone should go in, grab the nearest female and throw her out so that the bloke can have her seat.
Dougie Brimson (Geezer's Guide to Football: A Lifetime of Lads, Lager and Labels)
An Aspergirl must face the world with the aim of supporting herself, being fulfilled and not needing anyone else to support her—especially in the United States, where benefits are very hard to come by and have several hurdles, all of which seem to have the aim of humiliating you and eroding self-esteem.
Rudy Simone (Aspergirls: Empowering Females with Asperger Syndrome)
Sewers are necessary to guarantee the wholesomeness of palaces, according to the Fathers of the Church. And it has often been remarked that the necessity exists of sacrificing one part of the female sex in order to save the other and prevent worse troubles. One of the arguments in support of slavery, advanced by the American supporters of the institution, was that the Southern whites, being all freed from servile duties, could maintain the most democratic and refined relations among themselves; in the same way, a caste of 'shameless women' allows the 'honest woman' to be treated with the most chivalrous respect. The prostitute is a scapegoat; man vents his turpitude upon her, and he rejects her. Whether she is put legally under police supervision or works illegally in secret, she is in any case treated as a pariah.
Simone de Beauvoir (The Second Sex)
Maternal stress during pregnancy has effects on the emotional and stress hormone reactions, particularly in female offspring. These effects were measured in goat kids. The stressed female kids ended up startling more easily and being less calm and more anxious than the male kids after birth. Furthermore, female kids who were stressed in utero showed a great deal more emotional distress than female kids who weren’t. So if you’re a girl about to enter the womb, plan to be born to an unstressed mom who has a calm, loving partner and family to support her. And if you are a mom-to-be carrying a female fetus, take it easy so that your daughter will be able to relax.
Louann Brizendine (The Female Brain)
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.
Anna Hope (The Ballroom)
wanted a good smut book where the female lead was worshipped like a queen and dicked down by multiple men repeatedly. All day. Every day. Constant dicking. Also, the lead men needed to be super sweet and supportive. No growling, posturing, sneering, or excessive alpha testosterone. Just excessive cuddling, hand-holding, complimenting, and kissing.
Jasmine Mas (Psycho Fae (Cruel Shifterverse, #2))
Most girls--' I began. Lola snapped up her hand. 'Be very careful what you say next, Henry Page,' she said. 'Very few good things come out of sentences that begin with "Most girls.
Krystal Sutherland (Our Chemical Hearts)
Creation and destruction, female and male, life and death, birth and murder.
Grady Hendrix (The Final Girl Support Group)
There is no conclusive evidence to support that women are actually more emotional at work. But there is research to support that female emotion is perceived differently than men’s.
Jess Bennett (Feminist Fight Club: An Office Survival Manual for a Sexist Workplace)
They were the females who also supported men more than women, who could always see things from the male perspective.
bell hooks (Feminism Is for Everybody: Passionate Politics)
To Black women, the issue is not whether white women are more or less racist than white men, but that they are racist. If women committed to feminist revolution, be they Black or white, are to achieve any understanding of the charged connections between white women and Black women, we must first be willing to examine woman’s relationship to society, to race, and to American culture - as it is, and not as we would ideally have it be. That means confronting the reality of white female racism. Sexist discrimination has prevented white women from assuming the dominant role in the perpetuation of white racial imperialism, but it has not prevented white women from absorbing, supporting, and advocating racist ideology or acting individually as racist oppressors in various spheres of American life. Every women’s movement in America, from its earliest origin to the present day, has been built on a racist foundation, a fact which in no way invalidates feminism as a political ideology. The racial apartheid social structure that characterized 19th and early 20th century American life was mirrored in the women’s rights movement. The first white women’s rights advocates were never seeking social equality for all women. They were seeking social equality for white women.
bell hooks (Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism)
This book is about how anger works for men in ways that it does not for women, how men like both Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders can wage yelling campaigns and be credited with understanding--and compellingly channeling--the rage felt by their supporters while their female opponents can be jeered and mocked as shrill for speaking too loudly of forcefully into a microphone.
Rebecca Traister (Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women's Anger)
The concept of the "female" is a loaded one. Female. Woman. The entire concept of the womyn is derived from, and supports the existence and submission to the male. When you hear "female", the social association is weakness, incompetence, and fragility. Almost as if nothing done can shatter the chain of alleged inferiority. If you refuse this, society makes you a "radical".
Sasha Scarr
[These] powerful women understood that success in imperfect. What would happen if we all started speaking honestly and openly about our priorities and the choices we make about how we spend our time? How inspiring would it be to the young women in our offices if they saw female executives who don't pretend to do it all, but are open and honest about the balls they have dropped to get where they are today? Women need to support one another by being honest about the compromises we make and by speaking openly about the help we require from our partners and other support systems.
Tiffany Dufu (Drop the Ball: Achieving More by Doing Less)
Men grow up expecting to be the hero of their own story. Women grow up expecting to be the supporting actress in somebody else's. As a kid growing up with books and films and stories instead of friends, that was always the narrative injustice that upset me more than anything else. I felt it sometimes like a sharp pain under the ribcage, the kind of chest pain that lasts for minutes and hours and might be nothing at all or might mean you're slowly dying of something mundane and awful. It's a feeling that hit when I understood how few girls got to go on adventures. I started reading science fiction and fantasy long before Harry Potter and The Hunger Games, before mainstream female leads very occasionally got more at the end of the story than together with the protagonist. Sure, there were tomboys and bad girls, but they were freaks and were usually killed off or married off quickly. Lady hobbits didn't bring the ring to Mordor. They stayed at home in the shire.
Laurie Penny
Whether or not female victims obtain competent, professional support and are put in touch with the organisations best equipped to help them shouldn’t be a lottery, a question of sheer luck or social standing. The way things are right now, it’s the victim who has to take the initiative, and all too often, help is inaccessible. We take the walking wounded and abandon them in front of an obstacle course.
Caroline Darian (I'll Never Call Him Dad Again: Turning Our Family Trauma of Sexual Assault and Chemical Submission into a Collective Fight)
Much of what is considered "good" in little girls is considered downright repulsive in little boys. Physical timidity or hypercautiousness, being quietly "well behaved", and depending on others for help and support are thought to be natural - if not outright charming - in girls. Boys, however, are actively discouraged from the dependent forms of relating, which are considered "sissyish" in male children.
Colette Dowling (The Cinderella Complex: Women's Hidden Fear of Independence)
Sometimes I think Earth has got to be the insane asylum of the universe. . . and I'm here by computer error. At sixty-eight, I hope I've gained some wisdom in the past fourteen lustrums and it’s obligatory to speak plain and true about the conclusions I've come to; now that I have been educated to believe by such mentors as Wells, Stapledon, Heinlein, van Vogt, Clarke, Pohl, (S. Fowler) Wright, Orwell, Taine, Temple, Gernsback, Campbell and other seminal influences in scientifiction, I regret the lack of any female writers but only Radclyffe Hall opened my eyes outside sci-fi. I was a secular humanist before I knew the term. I have not believed in God since childhood's end. I believe a belief in any deity is adolescent, shameful and dangerous. How would you feel, surrounded by billions of human beings taking Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, the tooth fairy and the stork seriously, and capable of shaming, maiming or murdering in their name? I am embarrassed to live in a world retaining any faith in church, prayer or a celestial creator. I do not believe in Heaven, Hell or a Hereafter; in angels, demons, ghosts, goblins, the Devil, vampires, ghouls, zombies, witches, warlocks, UFOs or other delusions; and in very few mundane individuals--politicians, lawyers, judges, priests, militarists, censors and just plain people. I respect the individual's right to abortion, suicide and euthanasia. I support birth control. I wish to Good that society were rid of smoking, drinking and drugs. My hope for humanity - and I think sensible science fiction has a beneficial influence in this direction - is that one day everyone born will be whole in body and brain, will live a long life free from physical and emotional pain, will participate in a fulfilling way in their contribution to existence, will enjoy true love and friendship, will pity us 20th century barbarians who lived and died in an atrocious, anachronistic atmosphere of arson, rape, robbery, kidnapping, child abuse, insanity, murder, terrorism, war, smog, pollution, starvation and the other negative “norms” of our current civilization. I have devoted my life to amassing over a quarter million pieces of sf and fantasy as a present to posterity and I hope to be remembered as an altruist who would have been an accepted citizen of Utopia.
Forrest J. Ackerman
I am angry. We should all be angry. Anger has a long history of bringing about positive change. But I am also hopeful, because I believe deeply in the ability of human beings to remake themselves for the better." "We say to girls 'You can have ambition, but not too much. You should aim to be successful but not too successful, otherwise you will threaten the man. If you are the breadwinner in your relationship with a man, pretend you are not, especially in public, otherwise you will emasculate him.'" "Because I am female, I am expected to aspire to marriage. I am expected to make my life's choices always keeping in mind that marriage is the most important. Marriage can be a good thing, a source of joy, love and mutual support. But why do we teach girls to aspire to marriage, yet we don't teach boys to do the same?" "We are all social beings. We internalize ideas from our socialization.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (We Should All Be Feminists)
For academically talented women, in contrast, school success does not guarantee occupational success. Even the best female college students need people who will support them, encourage them, and – most important—who will connect them to opportunities.
Karen Arnold (Lives of Promise: What Becomes of High School Valedictorians: A Fourteen-year Study of Achievement and Life Choices (Jossey Bass Social and Behavioral Science Series))
One night at dinner, Mom casually mentioned that a woman in her support group, had been “cheating.” The offense? Noticing the mailman was attractive. In ConneXions’ warped reality, this constituted infidelity. Jodi’s teachings were extreme: a married man talking to a female coworker could be unfaithful, and glimpsing attractive people online might be classified as porn addiction. Only absolute purity of thought was acceptable. In Jodi’s rigid world, innocence was rare. Those deemed “distorted”—usually husbands—were told to abandon their families to work on themselves. Alone. Jodi seemed to specialize in guiding wives to distance themselves from their husbands. Or kicking them out entirely. ConneXions language framed it as “inviting him to leave,” code for “I’m going to make you isolate yourself from everyone you know, except Jodi.” Shockingly, the husbands often went along with it, fully convinced that it was in the best interest of their families. It was like watching lemmings jump off a cliff.
Shari Franke (The House of My Mother: A Daughter's Quest for Freedom)
David Buss has amassed a lot of evidence that human females across many cultures tend to prefer males who have high social status, good income, ambition, intelligence, and energy--contrary to the views of some cultural anthropologists, who assume that people vary capriciously in their sexual preferences across different cultures. He interpreted this as evidence that women evolved to prefer good providers who could support their families by acquiring and defending resources I respect his data enormously, but disagree with his interpretation. The traits women prefer are certainly correlated with male abilities to provide material benefits, but they are also correlated with heritable fitness. If the same traits can work both as fitness indicators and as wealth indicators, so much the better. The problem comes when we try to project wealth indicators back into a Pleistocene past when money did not exist, when status did not imply wealth, and when bands did not stay in one place long enough to defend piles of resources. Ancestral women may have preferred intelligent, energetic men for their ability to hunt more effectively and provide their children with more meat. But I would suggest it was much more important that intelligent men tended to produce intelligent, energetic children more likely to survive and reproduce, whether or not their father stayed around. In other words, I think evolutionary psychology has put too much emphasis on male resources instead of male fitness in explaining women's sexual preferences.
Geoffrey Miller (The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature)
regarding transwomen’s safety in men’s spaces, they have none for female people who can no longer keep men out of theirs. Such a man is the most profound type of misogynist: the type that, perhaps unconsciously, sees women as supporting actresses in men’s lives.
Helen Joyce (Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality)
The Women’s March did what it set out to do and that is to show the sheer magnitude of passion that the female voice can project and most importantly, for our future generations, it has shattered the falsity of the patriarch myth that women do not support other women.
Aysha Taryam
There is a similar system of discrimination, extending far beyond a small geographical region to the entire globe; it touches every nation, perpetuating and expanding the trafficking in human slaves, body mutilation, and even legitimized murder on a massive scale. This system is based on the presumption that men and boys are superior to women and girls, and it is supported by some male religious leaders who distort the Holy Bible, the Koran, and other sacred texts to perpetuate their claim that females are, in some basic ways, inferior to them, unqualified to serve God on equal terms. Many men disagree but remain quiet in order to enjoy the benefits of their dominant status. This false premise provides a justification for sexual discrimination in almost every realm of secular and religious life.
Jimmy Carter (A Call to Action: Women, Religion, Violence, and Power)
If women are to achieve sexual dominance it may be that female abusers are even more skilful than their male counterparts. It might also mean that female intimate abusers use different tactics and have different goals than the male abuser. What I have found is that the effect of female intimate abuse is different and that male victims and survivors seem to need a different response. Male victims need safety and options but they are denied these supports as the community treats male victims with an even greater degree of blame than it applies to female victims.
Don Hennessy (How He Gets Into Her Head: The Mind of the Male Intimate Abuser)
My last thought on male dominated industries is how a lot of men who actually work alongside females in these industries are quietly supportive. They’re not harassers, they don’t undermine a woman’s intelligence and they certainly create space. However, quiet support is not what is needed.
Candice Chirwa (Perils of Patriarchy)
Proposed in 1998, it posits that females who step out of the reproductive rat race mid-life and focus their energies on supporting their children (and grandchildren), instead of squeezing out yet more babies, significantly increase their offspring’s chances of survival and, in turn, their own genetic legacy.
Lucy Cooke (Bitch: On the Female of the Species)
Yours is a neurological, physical condition, not a spiritual one, not a psychological one, not an emotional one, although certainly problems in these areas will form if you don‘t get the help and support you need. Try re-framing each and every issue that is plaguing you. So much of life is how you look at it.
Rudy Simone (Aspergirls: Empowering Females with Asperger Syndrome)
In times of colonial expansion, when support for the slave trade was required, the historian fed readers tales of explorers and conquerors. When soldiers were needed, ready to die for king and country, the historian gave them heroes and warriors. When society favored male dominance and female subservience, the historian provided male oriented history What about writing history now, at a time when so many are striving for greater equality? Can looking backward impact how we look forward? Finding empowered women with agency from the medieval period is my way of shifting gear, providing new narratives for readers today.
Janina Ramírez (Femina: A New History of the Middle Ages, Through the Women Written Out of it)
A painting walks into the room supported by the collector. It is the painting of a nude by a contemporary artist. She is scarred by shadows from venetian blinds. “The ritual scarification of light and shadow,” I say. But am thinking, silently, the female nude is the self-ironization of the male. She, in his shadow, by design.
Carla Harryman (There Never Was a Rose Without a Thorn)
A man is NOT weak if he cries. A man is NOT a punk if he cries. A man is NOT acting like a little b*tch if he cries. He’s a Man! And he’s allowed to have and show his true feelings without feeling less than. Ladies, some of you need to do better. Learn to be compassionate, loving, supportive, and understanding. There’s NOTHING wrong with a man being vulnerable. I encourage you to be his joy, peace, and his safe place. Lift him up and be mindful NOT to tear him down. If you truly care for and love your man, do and say everything with love. Let him know that it’s okay to cry and that he doesn’t have to pretend to be okay when he’s not. Real men DO cry! They experience sadness, disappointments, pain, and many other feelings. A man shouldn’t have to suppress his emotions. That’s pure nonsense! A man that can cry, smile, and let his guards down is a keeper in my book. I couldn’t imagine acting hard all of the time. That’s so unfair! Ladies, strive to be a Queen of substance. PEACE.
Stephanie Lahart
Still, I was struck by this. Because I am female, I’m expected to aspire to marriage. I am expected to make my life choices always keeping in mind that marriage is the most important. Marriage can be a good thing, a source of joy, love and mutual support. But why do we teach girls to aspire to marriage, yet we don’t teach boys to do the same? I
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (We Should All Be Feminists)
I wanted a good smut book where the female lead was worshipped like a queen and dicked down by multiple men repeatedly. All day. Every day. Constant dicking. Also, the lead men needed to be super sweet and supportive. No growling, posturing, sneering, or excessive alpha testosterone. Just excessive cuddling, hand-holding, complimenting, and kissing.
Jasmine Mas (Psycho Fae (Cruel Shifterverse, #2))
Liberal feminism’s ethos converges not only with corporate mores but also with supposedly “transgressive” currents of neoliberal culture. Its love affair with individual advancement equally permeates the world of social-media celebrity, which also confuses feminism with the ascent of individual women. In that world, “feminism” risks becoming a trending hashtag and a vehicle of self-promotion, deployed less to liberate the many than to elevate the few. In general, then, liberal feminism supplies the perfect alibi for neoliberalism. Cloaking regressive policies in an aura of emancipation, it enables the forces supporting global capital to portray themselves as “progressive.” Allied with global finance in the United States, while providing cover for Islamophobia in Europe, this is the feminism of the female power-holders: the corporate gurus who preach “lean in,” the femocrats who push structural adjustment and microcredit on the global South, and the professional politicians in pant suits who collect six-figure fees for speeches to Wall Street.
Cinzia Arruzza (Feminism for the 99%: A Manifesto)
Romance is part of our female DNA. If you don’t believe me, think back on the Disney movies they started feeding us at the ripe old age of two. Although humorous supporting characters helped advance the plotlines, each and every one essentially involved a girl, a guy, and a happy ending: Belle, Ariel, Jasmine, Snow White, they’re all just looking for a good man!
Jordan Christy (How to Be a Hepburn in a Hilton World: The Art of Living with Style, Class, and Grace)
Reporters insist on portraying me as a curiosity. Rather like a talking horse." "You're an unusual woman." "Not really. Many thousands of women have the minds and temperaments to practice medicine. However, no medical school here will admit a female, which is why I had to study and train in France. I was fortunate enough to become certified before the British Medical Association closed the loopholes to prevent other women from doing the same." "What did your father say about it?" "At fist he was against the idea. He thought it indecent for a woman to have such an occupation. Viewing unclothed people, and so forth. However, as I pointed out to him, if we're made in God's image, there can be nothing wrong with the study of the human body.
Lisa Kleypas (Hello Stranger (The Ravenels, #4))
Dr. Deanna Adkins of Duke University School of Medicine claims that gender identity is “the only medically supported determinant of sex,” adding, “It is counter to medical science to use chromosomes, hormones, internal reproductive organs, external genitalia, or secondary sex characteristics to override gender identity for purposes of classifying someone as male or female.
Ben Shapiro (How to Destroy America in Three Easy Steps)
Unwed white girls who became pregnant in the postwar years were considered psychologically disturbed but treatable, whereas their black counterparts were presumed to be biologically hypersexual and deviant. Historian Rickie Solinger demonstrates that in the 1950s an unwed white girl who became pregnant could go to a maternity home before her pregnancy showed, deliver the baby and give it up for adoption, and return home to her community with no one the wiser. (White parents concocted stories of their daughters being given the opportunity to study for a semester with relatives.) She could then resume the role of the "nice" girl. Unwed pregnant black girls, on the other hand, were barred from maternity homes; they were threatened with jail or termination of welfare; and they were accused of using their sexuality in order to be eligible for larger welfare checks. Politicians regarded unwed pregnant black girls as a societal problem, declaring--as they continue to declare today--that they did not want taxpayers to support black illegitimate babies, and sought to control black female sexuality through sterilization legislation.
Leora Tanenbaum (Slut!: Growing Up Female with a Bad Reputation)
...the work of sexologists and the development of sex therapy are all instances of how men’s power over women was to be supported and managed through the regulation of marital sex. Sex, in this scheme of things, was not a natural and spontaneous seeking after pleasure by men and women, but a regulatory mechanism designed and constructed to enforce male dominance and female submission.
Sheila Jeffreys (Anticlimax: A Feminist Perspective on the Sexual Revolution)
University of Otago social historian Hera Cook provides a beautiful illustration of exactly this point in her rich account of the sexual revolution.49 Cook notes that in eighteenth-century England, women were assumed to be sexually passionate. But drawing on economic and social changes, fertility-rate patterns, personal accounts, and sex surveys and manuals, Cook charts the path toward the sexual repression of the Victorian era. This was a time of reduced female economic power, thanks to a shift from production in the home to wage earning, and there was less community pressure on men to financially support children fathered out of wedlock. And so, in the absence of well-known, reliable birth control techniques, “women could not afford to enjoy sex. The risk made it too expensive a pleasure.”50
Cordelia Fine (Testosterone Rex: Myths of Sex, Science, and Society)
As the feminist psychiatrist Judith Herman puts it in her book Trauma and Recovery: “His correspondence makes clear that he was increasingly troubled by the radical social implications of his hypothesis. . . . Faced with this dilemma, Freud stopped listening to his female patients.” If they were telling the truth, he would have to challenge the whole edifice of patriarchal authority to support them.
Rebecca Solnit (Men Explain Things to Me)
The combination of low empathizing and high systemizing abilities might mean a rapid ascent of a man to the top of the social pile. This is because men in every culture compete against each other for success in social rank. As we mentioned above, a male’s position in the social dominance hierarchy in most species directly affects his fertility. For example, in some species it is only the alpha male that gets to reproduce. And even today, among modern humans, men with higher social status tend to have more children and more wives, compared with men of lower social status. To achieve social dominance, males use physical force, or the threat of force, or other kinds of threat (for example, withdrawing support). That is why, in most species, males are bigger, stronger, and more aggressive than females.
Simon Baron-Cohen (The Essential Difference: Male And Female Brains And The Truth About Autism)
We're reshaping the idea of what our public support systems are supposed to look like and what they can be. Women who might have assumed they could find care, kindness, and deep conversations only in romantic relationships are no longer limited to that plotline. Whether women marry or not, whether they have children or not, their friends are fundamental parts of their lives that they won't be giving up.
Kayleen Schaefer (Text Me When You Get Home: The Evolution and Triumph of Modern Female Friendship)
As industrial jobs began disappearing from cities, many black men found themselves back in positions of economic helplessness, without the kinds of jobs that allowed a man to support a family. To survive, many families turned to the government’s welfare system for sustenance. In her commentary, “Black Females Raising Black Males,” Dr. Arlett Malvo described the ramifications of the welfare state on black
Tom Burrell (Brainwashed: Challenging the Myth of Black Inferiority)
WHY WAS A BEAUTIFUL YOUNG WOMAN SUCH A BIG DEAL? Beauty was a sign of health and reproductive capability; thus, a beautiful woman historically had wide hips (for childbearing), body symmetry (indicating no deformities), hair and teeth that weren’t falling out (indicating health). And she was young—at the beginning of her fertile years. Society needed to reinforce men’s biological dependency on female beauty for the same reasons it needed to make women dependent on male income: dependency created an incentive to marry. A man who was addicted to a woman’s beauty, youth, and sex would temporarily “lose his mind”—he would make the irrational decision to support her for the rest of his life. Female beauty, then, can be thought of as nature’s marketing tool: the way of marketing a woman for the survival of her genes.42 Which is why female beauty is the world’s most potent drug.
Warren Farrell (The Myth of Male Power)
A female’s primal instincts are not only concerned with finding a sexual partner who wants to have children with her or who will contribute traits that increase her children’s chances of survival, but she is also looking for a man who is devoted to her — someone who cares about her. She wants a man who will stick around after the insemination, protect her while she is pregnant, and then help her raise their offspring or support her while she does.
W. Anton (The Manual: What Women Want and How to Give It to Them)
The Southern man has a certain swagger about him that every woman craves in a man, whether she is willing to admit it or not. in this depressingly utilitarian age, when young lovers remove identical faded jeans and pea jackets before getting into bed together, the thought of a beau sabreur lover is not unappealing, Neither the overbearing male chauvinist nor the supportive gelding are capalbe of stirring the female blood, but a dashing cavalier is.
Florence King (Southern Ladies and Gentlemen)
Because marriage was the only way you could figure out to bring “foreverness,” or eternality, into your experience of love. It was the only way a female could guarantee her support and survival, and the only way a male could guarantee the constant availability of sex, and companionship. So a social convention was created. A bargain was struck. You give me this and I’ll give you that. In this it was very much like a business. A contract was made. And
Neale Donald Walsch (The Complete Conversations with God)
Almost every woman I know has talked about equality in the workplace, about women supporting women, and about women championing other women. But I've also seen that women knock each other down and say mean things about other women more than I've ever seen from my male counterparts. Women: Stop knocking each other down, and let's start building each other up. Men are already there to stomp on you; the last thing we need is for women to join in on the act.
Tan France (Naturally Tan)
As she crossed the defence team, Indrani saw Sesha sitting in a chair with his legs crossed and looking cool and composed. Mythili, who was by his side, was offering him coffee from a flask. As if they were in a cinema house waiting for the movie to resume after intermission. When everything pointed to an adverse verdict, how could he be so relaxed? He was typing something into his cell phone; perhaps tweeting. He had a massive following on Twitter. It ranged from simple appreciation for his administrative prowess to absolute fetish over everything about him—his trademark cotton pants and shirt, which had become a rage among his female fans, his Santro car, which had become a symbol of simplicity and his frugal dietary habits, which somehow raised him to a sainthood and absolved him of anything wicked. The more the mainstream media like TV and newspapers worked against him, the stronger was the support he got from his Twitter followers.
Hariharan Iyer (Surpanakha)
If you can't tell from my rap lyrics already, yes I am a feminist. And when I'm saying "hoe" or "bitch" I am actually referring to men. ...That sounded bad, in someway. But at the end of the day, I'm sick of rappers using "bitches" and "hoes" as terms towards women. Feminists are NOT a hate group. Feminists are not all female. Nor has it got an anti-male agenda. It's about equality! I've had a weird, special bond with women since I was a kid. And it's just a shame really that I'm gay.
scott mcgoldrick
I don’t relax until I’m on a city bus. On the street, anyone can come at you from any direction. On the bus, there are limited angles of attack. They’re advertising a horror movie overhead and the red signs makes me think of Adrienne, but I need to stay focused. Some boys with instrument cases sit at the back, heads bowed, engrossed in something on one of their phones. Men don’t have to pay attention the way we do. Men die because they make mistakes. Women? We die because we’re female.
Grady Hendrix (The Final Girl Support Group)
The other major hormonal player in your cycle is progesterone. It helps to prepare the uterus for implantation with a healthy fertilized egg and supports pregnancy. If no implantation occurs, progesterone levels drop, and another cycle begins. Progesterone receptors are highly concentrated in the brain. Progesterone can support GABA, the brain’s relaxation neurotransmitter; acts to protect your nerve cells; and supports the myelin sheath that covers neurons. I like to think of progesterone as the “feel-good hormone.” It makes you feel calm and peaceful and encourages sleep. It’s like nature’s Valium, but better, because instead of making your brain fuzzy, it sharpens your thinking. It has also been shown to help with brain injuries by reducing inflammation and counteracting damage. It is so much more than a sex hormone. Progesterone increases during pregnancy, which is why many pregnant women often feel great. Some women with hormonal issues, in fact, feel so much better during pregnancy that they will
Daniel G. Amen (Unleash the Power of the Female Brain: Supercharging Yours for Better Health, Energy, Mood, Focus, and Sex)
Social Eights are more loyal, more overtly friendly, and less aggressive. They are helpful Eights—people who are nurturing, protective, and concerned with the injustices that happen to people. Male Social Eights can look like Type Nines, and female Social Eights may resemble Type Twos. However, these Eights can be distinguished from Nines and Twos because they act in more direct, powerful ways, engage more readily in conflict, and express more power and control in seeking to protect and support other people.
Beatrice Chestnut (The Complete Enneagram: 27 Paths to Greater Self-Knowledge)
They are strong They are the rock. They are important Lets love them. Lets respect them Lets honor them. Lets appreciate them Lets protect them Lets support them Lets save them Lets listen to them Lets believe them Lets be there for them. They are our children, our sisters, our girlfriends, our friends, our wives, our mothers, our grand mothers, our colleagues, our neighbors. They don't need to prove themselves or to explain themselves to anyone. They need to be who they are. Phenomenal women. To all the women out there . Happy Women's Month
D.J. Kyos
The glue that holds the natural world together appears to be a harmonious balance of opposites: day and night, light and dark, winter and summer, liquid and solid, acidic and alkaline, male and female, wave and trough, proton and electron, etc. There prevails in our reality an explicit duality that represents an implicit unity (the “oneness” about which I’ve previously babbled), and the line of separation between those things just named is as thin as it is necessary: yang rubs up against yin, yin against yang, distinct but mutually supportive.
Tom Robbins (Tibetan Peach Pie: A True Account of an Imaginative Life)
My goal in changing how the world thinks about religion is not to make people stop believing in a god or gods; I care little for what people desire to believe in their own private lives. However, I care deeply about what they do with those beliefs. If their religious beliefs teach intolerance and hatred, are used to support war, genocide, female genital mutilation, honor killings or laws that protect or honor such rituals or beliefs, then we have a problem and I will stand up against every such instance and fight it with every means available to me.
Dan Arel (Parenting Without God: how to raise moral, ethical and intelligent children, free from religious dogma)
I am sure you understand," Father began, looking past Violet at the wall, "that I cannot allow you back into my house after what you have done. I have arranged for you to be taken to a finishing school in Scotland. You will stay there for two years, and after that I will decide what is to be done with you." Violet heard Graham clear his throat. "No," she said, before her brother could open his mouth to speak. "That won't be acceptable, I'm afraid, Father." His jowls slackened with shock. He looked as if she had slapped him. "I beg your pardon?" "I won't be going to Scotland. In fact, I won't be going anywhere. I'm staying right here." As she spoke, Violet became aware of a strange simmering sensation, as though electricity was humming beneath her skin. Images flashed in her mind---a crow cutting through the air, wings glittered with snow; the spokes of a wheel spinning. Briefly, she closed her eyes, focusing on the feeling until she could almost see it, glinting gold inside her. "That is not for you to decide," said Father. The window was open, and a bee flitted about the room, wings a silver blur. It flew near Father's cheek and he jerked away from it. "It's been decided." She stood up straight, her dark eyes boring into Father's watery ones. He blinked. The bee hovered about his face, dancing away from his hands, and she saw sweat break out on his nose. Soon it was joined by another, and then another and another, until it seemed like Father---shouting and swearing---had been engulfed in a cloud of tawny, glistening bodies. "I think it would be best if you left now, Father," said Violet softly. "After all, as you said, I'm my mother's daughter.
Emilia Hart (Weyward)
While we cannot directly affect the images, we can drain them of their power. We can turn away from them, look directly at one another, and find alternative images of beauty in a female subculture; seek out the plays, music, films that illuminate women in three dimensions; find the biographies of women, the women's history, the heroines that in each generation are submerged from view; fill in the terrible, 'beautiful' blanks. We can lift ourselves and other women out of the myth - but only if we are willing to seek out and support and really look at the alternatives.
Naomi Wolf (The Beauty Myth)
Traditionally men have created a deep split between the inner and outer world, between body and soul, between the material and spiritual world, between love and money and between male and female qualities. The inner man and woman are related to money, creativity and financial abundance. Through investigating the roots of the inner man and woman, we can find the creative potential of both the inner man and woman. Sometimes can either the inner man or woman also provide financial support for both sides, while the other side has the idea that it cannot support itself financially.
Swami Dhyan Giten (The Silent Whisperings of the Heart - An Introduction to Giten's Approach to Life)
Interestingly, married women in their early thirties are most likely to have an affair, perhaps reflecting a motivation to switch mates while their desirability is high and they are still fertile. Additional lines of evidence support the notion that infidelity serves a mate-switching function. First, women who initiate affairs are much more likely to suffer from marital dissatisfaction than women who do not. This might seem blindingly obvious, but the same studies show that men who have affairs do not, in fact, differ from those who abstain from affairs in their levels of marital happiness. Second, women are much more likely than men to become emotionally involved with, and to fall in love with, their affair partners. Roughly 79 percent of women report doing so, in contrast to only 30 percent of men.9 Moreover, women are more likely to cite emotional involvement as a reason for the affair. Men are more likely to cite pure sexual pleasure. These critical sex differences point to dramatically different functional reasons for male and female infidelity. For women especially, they point to the mate-switching function; for men, the desire for sexual variety.
David M. Buss (When Men Behave Badly: The Hidden Roots of Sexual Deception, Harassment, and Assault)
It is in light of such overwhelming (and interesting) research that Anne Campbell questions the myth of the “coy female” and the myth of the “nonaggressive woman.” Campbell writes: It is ironic that some of these myths have been supported by the feminist movement, which has tried to insist that women’s aggression is exclusively a response to male violence. The idea that females could have survived without the motivation and ability to compete for scarce resources is, from an evolutionary viewpoint, untenable. Nonetheless, it is a viewpoint that is congenial to the continuance of male protection and control over women.
Phyllis Chesler (Woman's Inhumanity to Woman)
Are the religious individuals in a society more moral than the secular ones? Many researchers have looked into this, and the main finding is that there are few interesting findings. There are subtle effects here and there: some studies find, for instance, that the religious are slightly more prejudiced, but this effect is weak when one factors out other considerations, such as age and political attitudes, and exists only when religious belief is measured in certain ways. The only large effect is that religious Americans give more to charity (including nonreligious charities) than atheists do. This holds even when one controls for demographics (religious Americans are more likely than average to be older, female, southern, and African American). To explore why this relationship exists, the political scientists Robert Putnam and David Campbell asked people about life after death, the importance of God to morality, and various other facets of religious belief. It turns out that none of their answers to such questions were related to behaviors having to do with volunteering and charitable giving. Rather, participation in the religious community was everything. As Putnam and Campbell put it, “Once we know how observant a person is in terms of church attendance, nothing that we can discover about the content of her religious faith adds anything to our understanding or prediction of her good neighborliness.… In fact, the statistics suggest that even an atheist who happened to become involved in the social life of the congregation (perhaps through a spouse) is much more likely to volunteer in a soup kitchen than the most fervent believer who prays alone. It is religious belongingness that matters for neighborliness, not religious believing.” This importance of community, and the irrelevance of belief, extends as well to the nastier effects of religion. The psychologist Jeremy Ginges and his colleagues found a strong relationship between religiosity and support for suicide bombing among Palestinian Muslims, and, again, the key factor was religious community, not religious belief: mosque attendance predicted support for suicide attacks; frequency of prayer did not. Among Indonesian Muslims, Mexican Catholics, British Protestants, Russian Orthodox in Russia, Israeli Jews, and Indian Hindus, frequency of religious attendance (but again, not frequency of prayer) predicts responses to questions such as “I blame people of other religions for much of the trouble in this world.
Paul Bloom (Just Babies: The Origins of Good and Evil)
In a chimpanzee group when two males are contesting the alpha position, they usually do so by forming extensive coalitions of supporters, both male and female, from within the group. Ties between coalition members are based on intimate daily contact – hugging, touching, kissing, grooming and mutual favours. Just as human politicians on election campaigns go around shaking hands and kissing babies, so aspirants to the top position in a chimpanzee group spend much time hugging, back-slapping and kissing baby chimps. The alpha male usually wins his position not because he is physically stronger, but because he leads a large and stable coalition.
Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind)
I'm going to throw some suggestions at you now in rapid succession, assuming you are a father of one or more boys. Here we go: If you speak disparagingly of the opposite sex, or if you refer to females as sex objects, those attitudes will translate directly into dating and marital relationships later on. Remember that your goal is to prepare a boy to lead a family when he's grown and to show him how to earn the respect of those he serves. Tell him it is great to laugh and have fun with his friends, but advise him not to be "goofy." Guys who are goofy are not respected, and people, especially girls and women, do not follow boys and men whom they disrespect. Also, tell your son that he is never to hit a girl under any circumstances. Remind him that she is not as strong as he is and that she is deserving of his respect. Not only should he not hurt her, but he should protect her if she is threatened. When he is strolling along with a girl on the street, he should walk on the outside, nearer the cars. That is symbolic of his responsibility to take care of her. When he is on a date, he should pay for her food and entertainment. Also (and this is simply my opinion), girls should not call boys on the telephone-at least not until a committed relationship has developed. Guys must be the initiators, planning the dates and asking for the girl's company. Teach your son to open doors for girls and to help them with their coats or their chairs in a restaurant. When a guy goes to her house to pick up his date, tell him to get out of the car and knock on the door. Never honk. Teach him to stand, in formal situations, when a woman leaves the room or a table or when she returns. This is a way of showing respect for her. If he treats her like a lady, she will treat him like a man. It's a great plan. Make a concerted effort to teach sexual abstinence to your teenagers, just as you teach them to abstain from drug and alcohol usage and other harmful behavior. Of course you can do it! Young people are fully capable of understanding that irresponsible sex is not in their best interest and that it leads to disease, unwanted pregnancy, rejection, etc. In many cases today, no one is sharing this truth with teenagers. Parents are embarrassed to talk about sex, and, it disturbs me to say, churches are often unwilling to address the issue. That creates a vacuum into which liberal sex counselors have intruded to say, "We know you're going to have sex anyway, so why not do it right?" What a damning message that is. It is why herpes and other sexually transmitted diseases are spreading exponentially through the population and why unwanted pregnancies stalk school campuses. Despite these terrible social consequences, very little support is provided even for young people who are desperately looking for a valid reason to say no. They're told that "safe sex" is fine if they just use the right equipment. You as a father must counterbalance those messages at home. Tell your sons that there is no safety-no place to hide-when one lives in contradiction to the laws of God! Remind them repeatedly and emphatically of the biblical teaching about sexual immorality-and why someone who violates those laws not only hurts himself, but also wounds the girl and cheats the man she will eventually marry. Tell them not to take anything that doesn't belong to them-especially the moral purity of a woman.
James C. Dobson (Bringing Up Boys: Practical Advice and Encouragement for Those Shaping the Next Generation of Men)
Feminist “theory,” as it is grandiloquently called, is simply whatever the women in the movement come up with in post facto justification of their attitudes and emotions. A heavy focus on feminist doctrine seems to me symptomatic of the rationalist fallacy: the assumption that people are motivated primarily by beliefs. If they were, the best way to combat an armed doctrine would indeed be to demonstrate that its beliefs are false. (…) A feminist in the strict and proper sense may be defined as a woman who envies the male role. By the male role I mean, in the first place, providing, protecting, and guiding rather than nurturing and assisting. This in turn envolves relative independence, action, and competition in the larger impersonal society outside the family, the use of language for communication and analysis (rather than expressiveness or emotional manipulation), and deliberate behavior aiming at objective achievement (rather than the attainment of pleasant subjective states) and guided by practical reasoning (rather than emotional impulse). Both feminist and nonfeminist women sense that these characteristically male attributes have a natural primacy over their own. I prefer to speak of“primacy” rather than superiority in this context since both sets of traits are necessary to propagate the race. One sign of male primacy is that envy of the female role by men is virtually nonexistent — even, so far as I know, among homosexuals. Normal women are attracted to male traits and wish to partner with a man who possesses them. (…) The feminists’ response to the primacy of male traits, on the other hand, is a feeling of inadequacy in regard to men—a feeling ill-disguised by defensive assertions of her “equality.”She desires to possess masculinity directly, in her own person, rather than partnering with a man. That is what leads her into the spiritual cul de sac of envy. And perhaps even more than she envies the male role itself, the feminist covets the external rewards attached to its successful performance: social status, recognition, power, wealth, and the chance to control wealth directly (rather than be supported).
F. Roger Devlin (Sexual Utopia in Power: The Feminist Revolt Against Civilization)
for ordinary African Americans, coping with hegemonic gender ideology can be so demanding that generating alternatives can seem virtually impossible. But the importance of this task cannot be underestimated because African American survival may depend on it. One important task lies in rejecting dominant gender ideology, in particular, its use of the thesis of "weak men, strong women" as a source of Black social control. Because hegemonic masculinity equates strength with dominance, an antiracist politics must challenge this connection. Within this project, the fundamental premise of any progressive Black gender ideology is that it cannot be based on someone else's subordination. This means that definitions of Black masculinity that rely on the subordination of Black women, poor people, children, LGBT people, or anyone else become invalid. Definitions of Black femininity that do not challenge relations of sexism, economic exploitation, age, heterosexism, and other markers of social inequality also become suspect. Rather than trying to be strong within existing gender ideology, the task lies in rejecting a gender ideology that measures masculinity and femininity using gendered definitions of strength. In this endeavor to craft a more progressive Black gender ideology, African American men and women face similar yet distinctive challenges. The task for African American men lies in developing new definitions of masculinity that uncouple strength from its close ties to male dominance. Good Black men need not rule their families with an iron hand, assault one another, pursue endless booty calls, and always seem to be "in control" in order to avoid the sigma of weakness. The task for African American women lies in redefining strength in ways that simultaneously enable Black women to reclaim historical sources of female power, yet reject the exploitation that has often accompanied that power. Good Black women need not be stoic mules whose primary release from work and responsibility comes once a week on Sunday morning. New definitions of strength would enable Black men and women alike to be seen as needing and worthy of one another's help and support without being stigmatized as either overly weak or unnaturally strong.
Patricia Hill Collins (Black Sexual Politics: African Americans, Gender, and the New Racism)
By taking on political correctness so frontally, Trump has played a critical role in moving the focus of identity politics from the left, where it was born, to the right, where it is now taking root. Identity politics on the left tended to legitimate only certain identities while ignoring or denigrating others, such as European (i.e., white) ethnicity, Christian religiosity, rural residence, belief in traditional family values, and related categories. Many of Donald Trump’s working-class supporters feel they have been disregarded by the national elites. Hollywood makes movies with strong female, black, or gay characters, but few centering around people like themselves, except occasionally to make fun of them (think of Will Ferrell’s Talladega Nights).
Francis Fukuyama (Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment)
We are past our reproductive years. Men don’t want us; they prefer younger women. It makes good biological sense for males to be attracted to females who are at an earlier point in their breeding years and who still want to build nests, and if that leaves us no longer able to lose ourselves in the pleasures and closeness of pairing, well, we have gained our Selves. We have another valuable thing, too. We have Time, or at least the awareness of it. We have lived long enough and seen enough to understand in a more than intellectual way that we will die, and so we have learned to live as though we are mortal, making our decisions with care and thought because we will not be able to make them again. Time for us will have an end; it is precious, and we have learned its value. Yes, there are many of us, but we are all so different that I am uncomfortable with a sociobiological analysis, and I suspect that, as with Margaret Mead, the solution is a personal and individual one. Because our culture has assigned us no real role, we can make up our own. It is a good time to be a grown-up woman with individuality, strength and crotchets. We are wonderfully free. We live long. Our children are the independent adults we helped them to become, and though they may still want our love they do not need our care. Social rules are so flexible today that nothing we do is shocking. There are no political barriers to us anymore. Provided we stay healthy and can support ourselves, we can do anything, have anything and spend our talents any way that we please.
Sue Hubbell (A Country Year: Living the Questions)
There are enough women prepared to boast of having got a man in a million to persuade other women that their failure to find a man rich enough, handsome enough, skilled enough as a lover, considerate enough, is a reflection of their inferior deserts or powers of attraction. More than half the housewives in this country work outside the home as well as inside it because their husbands do not earn enough money to support them and their children at a decent living standard. Still more know that their husbands are paunchy, short, unathletic, and snore or smell or leave their clothes lying around. A very high proportion do not find bliss in the conjugal embrace and most complain that their husbands forget the little things that count. And yet the myth is not invalidated as a myth
Germaine Greer (The Female Eunuch)
For if single women are looking for government to create a "hubby state" for them, what is certainly true is that their male counterparts have a long enjoy the fruits of a related "wifey state," in which the nation and its government supported male independence in a variety of ways. Men, and especially married wealthy white men, have a long relied on government assistance. It's a government that has historically supported white men's home and business ownership through grants, loans, incentives, and tax breaks. It has allowed them to accrue wealth and offer them shortcuts and bonuses for passing it down to their children. Government established white men's right to vote and thus exert control over the government at the nation's founding and has protected their enfranchisement. It has also bolstered the economic and professional prospects of men by depressing the economic prospects of women: by failing to offer women equivalent economic and civic protections, thus helping to create conditions whereby women were forced to be dependent on those men, creating a gendered class of laborers who took low paying or unpaid jobs doing the domestic and childcare work that further enabled men to dominate public spheres. But the growth of a massive population of women who are living outside those dependent circumstances puts new pressures on the government: to remake conditions in a way that will be more hospitable to female independence, to a citizenry now made up of plenty of women living economically, professionally, sexually, and socially liberated lives.
Rebecca Traister (All the Single Ladies)
They (orcas) certainly display extraordinary levels of social support, including babysitting for each other's calves and caring for disabled individuals. Giles told me of a male orca from a transient mammal-eating pod, outside of the southern residents that has scolioses, yet is a thriving member of his family. 'They bring him food' she told me. 'It's hard for him to keep up with them, bur they loop back and bring him chunks of seal or whatever it is they've just killed. In a lot of human cultures they would leave that individual behind.' I can't help but think about how many of our human leaders would benefit from a paralimbic lobe transplant - to become more like these wise and compassionate matriarchs, with their unfathomable emotions and supportive, socially inclusive society.
Lucy Cooke (Bitch: On the Female of the Species)
Being a full-time feminist means that every day I make a choice to make equality a part of my life, mind, and behavior. I set out purposefully to support women, to create a dialogue with men, and to interject when I see ignorance and misunderstanding. For me this has meant that in my work I often choose to share my financial gains with women (although I do also employ men regularly, to film my music videos or produce my songs with my band Girlboy), and when I see a woman working, or reaching for her ambitions, I like to show my support. In my romantic relationships with men, this has meant when there is misunderstanding, I take the time to think about why that could be, and to discuss whatever problems we face. Thinking about the influence of the gender concept on our behavior and decisions is now ingrained in my subconscious.
Abigail Tarttelin
The seeking of a lover to embody these words; the pining for a love that will be unconditional; the search for a union that is absolute; the sense that our partners should give us what we were given--or what we believe we should have been given--by our parents; the craving for reassurance--tell me I’m special, tell me I’m beautiful, tell me I’m smart, tell me I’m successful, tell me you love me, tell me it’s forever, no matter what, till death do us part--these were scarcely more than a child’s cries. Yet most us could not bear to give up on these longings. Most of us could not stand to relinquish the yearning for someone to be our fulfillment, our affirmation, because to turn away from such hope would be to acknowledge that we are, inescapably, navigating our lives alone, supported by love if we are lucky but, finally, on our own. pp. 144-45.
Daniel Bergner (What Do Women Want?: Adventures in the Science of Female Desire)
When two males are contesting the alpha position, they usually do so by forming extensive coalitions of supporters, both male and female, from within the group. Ties between coalition members are based on intimate daily contact – hugging, touching, kissing, grooming and mutual favours. Just as human politicians on election campaigns go around shaking hands and kissing babies, so aspirants to the top position in a chimpanzee group spend much time hugging, back-slapping and kissing baby chimps. The alpha male usually wins his position not because he is physically stronger, but because he leads a large and stable coalition. These coalitions play a central part not only during overt struggles for the alpha position, but in almost all day-to-day activities. Members of a coalition spend more time together, share food, and help one another in times of trouble.
Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind)
High levels of female hormone seem to enhance coordination skills in women. From early on, girls are superior in tasks requiring rapid, skillful, fine movements as well as, of course, in everything requiring verbal fluency and articulation. However, girls with the highest oestrogen levels seem to be at an intellectual disadvantage, while boyish girls do particularly well in the field of spatial skills - the traditional area of male advantage. There is growing support for the belief that girls with male character traits such as aggression, independence, self-confidence and assertion tend to achieve higher academic success than the norm for their sex. Teenage girls whose mothers took male hormones during pregnancy have higher overall IQs, and are more likely to pass university extramce examsinations. They also seem to be disproportionately interested, for their sex, in science subjects.
Anne Moir (Brain Sex: The Real Difference Between Men and Women)
The important parts of my story, I was realizing, lay less in the surface value of my accomplishments and more in what undergirded them—the many small ways I’d been buttressed over the years, and the people who’d helped build my confidence over time. I remembered them all, every person who’d ever waved me forward, doing his or her best to inoculate me against the slights and indignities I was certain to encounter in the places I was headed—all those environments built primarily for and by people who were neither black nor female. I thought of my great-aunt Robbie and her exacting piano standards, how she’d taught me to lift my chin and play my heart out on a baby grand even if all I’d ever known was an upright with broken keys. I thought of my father, who showed me how to box and throw a football, same as Craig. There were Mr. Martinez and Mr. Bennett, my teachers at Bryn Mawr, who never dismissed my opinions. There was my mom, my staunchest support, whose vigilance had saved me from languishing in a dreary second-grade classroom. At Princeton, I’d had Czerny Brasuell, who encouraged me and fed my intellect in new ways. And as a young professional, I’d had, among others, Susan Sher and Valerie Jarrett—still good friends and colleagues many years later—who showed me what it looked like to be a working mother and consistently opened doors for me, certain I had something to offer. These were people who mostly didn’t know one another and would never have occasion to meet, many of whom I’d fallen out of touch with myself. But for me, they formed a meaningful constellation. These were my boosters, my believers, my own personal gospel choir, singing, Yes, kid, you got this! all the way through. I’d never forgotten it. I’d tried, even as a junior lawyer, to pay it forward, encouraging curiosity when I saw it, drawing younger people into important conversations.
Michelle Obama (Becoming)
The sex ratio of those being referred had shifted dramatically too. The number of girls (known at that time at GIDS as ‘natal females’, now ‘birth-assigned females’) seeking help had equalled the number of boys for the first time in 2011. Previously, GIDS’s caseload had been nearly three-quarters male for those referred in childhood, or two-thirds overall. At first, this change was understood to be positive – a sort of balancing-out – and attributed to the fact that the girls were perhaps being better supported to seek help. But by 2015 it was clear that, in fact, something bigger was happening. There had been a complete reversal. Referrals for natal girls made up 65 percent of the total. In 2019/20 girls outnumbered boys by a ratio of six to one in some age groups, most markedly between the ages of 12 and 14 … Moreover, the majority were girls whose gender-related distress had begun after the onset of puberty, during adolescence. They didn’t have a history of childhood dysphoria.
Hannah Barnes (Time to Think: The Inside Story of the Collapse of the Tavistock's Gender Service for Children)
Bust magazine, back when it was a more outwardly feminist publication, used to ask each of their female interview subjects whether or not they identified as feminist. In 2005, the musician Björk said no, and that interview is still used in these online lists as of this year. Björk is a female artist often credited with being one of the most innovative and daring musicians of her generation, regardless of gender. She has collaborated with and supported women musicians, fashion designers, video directors. She has spoken frankly and openly in interviews about the difficulties of being a woman in a male-dominated industry. She has proven herself to be an exemplary human being and creator, and she is a tremendous role model for young aspiring musicians. If we understand that the problem feminists have with Björk has nothing to do with her actions and is only about her language and way of identifying herself, then we can recognize that this is about a feminist marketing campaign and not a philosophy. Compare
Jessa Crispin (Why I Am Not a Feminist: A Feminist Manifesto)
Within the institution of patriarchal marriage, the following is true: A woman may be challenged with "unfitness" as a mother if she works outside the home and is thereby able to support her children (a threat to the economic basis of father-right). A woman who wishes to divorce her husband to marry another man is tolerated more readily than a woman who leaves a marriage in order to be separate and self-sufficient, or because she finds marriage itself an oppresive institution. (...) Motherhood is identified with nurture, fatherhood with the moment of conception and with economic power. (...) "Father -right" is seen as one specific form of the rights men are presumed to enjoy simply because of their gender: the "right to the priority of male over female needs, to sexual and emotional services from women (...) The husband's "rights" over his wife are, in social terms, all inclusive; they can be whatever the man defines them to be at any given moment: all inclusive "rights" of men to the bodies, emotions, and services of women.
Adrienne Rich (On Lies, Secrets, and Silence. Selected Prose 1966-1978)
In the wild, a young female is an allomother long before she bears her own offspring. She has fifteen years to practice being a big sister to the calves that are born to the herd. I’d seen calves approach young female elephants to suckle for comfort, even though the juveniles did not have breasts or milk yet. But the young female would put her foot forward, the way her mother and aunties did, and proudly pretend. She could act like a mother without having any of the real responsibility until she was ready. But when there is no family to teach a young female to raise her own calf, things can go horribly awry. When I was working in Pilanesberg, this story repeated itself. There, young bulls that had been translocated began to charge vehicles. They killed a tourist. More than forty white rhino were found dead in the reserve before we realized that these subadult males were the ones who’d attacked them—highly aggressive behavior that was far from normal. What is the common denominator for the odd behavior of the young female elephant that didn’t care about her own calf and the belligerent pack of teenage bulls? Certainly there was a lack of parental guidance. But was that the only issue at play? All those elephants had seen their families killed in front of them, as a result of culling. The grief that I have studied in the wild, where a herd loses an old matriarch, for example, must be contrasted to the grief that comes from observing the violent death of a family member—because the long-term effects are so markedly different. After a natural death, the herd encourages the grieving individual to eventually move on. After a mass killing by humans, there is—by definition—no herd left for support. To date, the animal research community has been reluctant to believe that elephant behavior might be affected by the trauma of watching one’s family being killed. I think this isn’t scientific objection as much as it is political shame—after all, we humans have been the perpetrators of this violence. At the very least, it is crucial when studying the grief of elephants to remember that death is a natural occurrence. Murder is not.
Jodi Picoult (Leaving Time)
I HATE Unnatural, Abnormal, Disgusting, Sick, Ugly, Unfit, Funny, Idiotic, Stupid, Nonsense, Immature, SICK minded, Narrow Minded, Uncultured, Filthy, Cheap, Superstitious, Ignorant, Perverted, Paraphilic, Illogical Gender Biased/sexist, Stereotypical female sex Objectification based ABNORMAL inappropriate activities and Sexism or Sexist Mentality. And people who practice this Abnormality, they are Unnatural, Abnormal, Disgusting, Sick, Ugly, Unfit, Funny, Idiotic, Stupid, Nonsense, Immature, SICK minded, Narrow Minded, Uncultured, Filthy, Cheap, Superstitious, Ignorant, Perverted, Paraphilic, Illogical Gender Biased/sexist, Stereotypical female sex Objectification based SICK minded humanoid Species But They Are NOT HUMAN. And I Support Solid Male Sex Objectification or Male Sexualization based world or Male Sex Symbol or Male Sexual Image or whatever you say. Because This world is Natural, Normal, Real and Truth. And Male Sex Objectification or Male Sexualization is a Part of The Real Sex. Because Male Beauty and Male Body is a Work of Art and It's A Gift for women From God. And That's The Truth.
Nirzhar Hussain
New sciences developed, based on observation of the real world, rather than speculation. Rational thought was valued over inspiration, and logic over magic. All the natural world was closely observed and recorded by self-styled "scientists" who thought that the rich diversity in nature would be understood by being defined and categorized. The diversity of human beings, the one human body, that could have both male and female qualities, and change from female to male, did not fit this new hunger for precise and limited labeling. The new philosophers decided that there were only two sexes, fixed and unchanging, completely opposite, male and female, normal and other. They saw this simple binary model because they favored it. They found it because they looked for it, because it fitted their ideas of male and female status. When they saw behaviors or nature that did not support a rigid binary model, they explained them away. The changing sex of the developing fetus, the presence of all the sex organs in early development was ignored. Two sexes, completely opposite, were never a genuine observation, supported by all the other evidence, but an intellectual fashion, in all modernizing Europe thought, invented to explain and justify sexual inequality.
Philippa Gregory (Normal Women: Nine Hundred Years of Making History)
The traditional community of property in a marriage, i.e., the wife’s claim to support from her husband, should again be made conditional on her being a wife to him. She may run off with the milkman if she wishes—leaving her children behind, of course (a woman willing to do this is perhaps na unfit mother in any case); but she may not evict her husband from his own house and replace him with the milkman, nor continue to extract resources from the husband she has abandoned. Until sensible reforms are instituted, men must refuse to leave themselves prey to a criminal regime which forces them to subsidize their own cuckolding and the abduction of their children. The date rape issue can be solved overnight by restoring shotgun marriage—but with the shotgun at the woman’s back. The “victim” should be told to get into the kitchen and fix supper for her new lord and master. Not exactly a match made in heaven, but at least the baby will have both a father and a mother. Furthermore, after the birth of her child, the woman will have more important things to worry about than whether the act by which she conceived it accorded with some Women’s Studies professor’s newfangled notion of “true consent.” Motherhood has always been the best remedy for female narcissism.
F. Roger Devlin (Sexual Utopia in Power: The Feminist Revolt Against Civilization)
Divinely sanctioned wife-beating “There is no basis in Islamic theology to support domestic abuse of any kind,” declared Qanta A. Ahmed, author of In the Land of Invisible Women: A Female Doctor’s Journey in the Saudi Kingdom, in May 2009.43 But it all depends on one’s definition of “abuse:” wife-beating exists in all cultures, but only in Islam does it enjoy divine sanction. The Koran tells men to beat their disobedient wives after first warning them and then sending them to sleep in separate beds (4:34)—a punishment that suggests the Koran regards women as sexually insatiable and needing to be kept under control. This is, of course, an extremely controversial verse, so it is worth noting how several translators render the key word here, waidriboohunna:              Pickthall: “and scourge them”              Yusuf Ali: “(and last) beat them (lightly)”              Al-Hilali/Khan: “(and last) beat them (lightly, if it is useful)”              Shakir: “and beat them”              Sher Ali: “and chastise them”              Khalifa: “then you may (as a last alternative) beat them”              Arberry: “and beat them”              Rodwell: “and scourge them”              Sale: “and chastise them”              Asad: “then beat them”              Dawood: “and beat them
Robert Spencer (The Complete Infidel's Guide to the Koran)
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
Mona Chollet (In Defense of Witches: The Legacy of the Witch Hunts and Why Women Are Still on Trial)
Even what passes as heterosexual intimacy is often resented by straight women who find themselves doing the emotional heavy lifting for men who have no close friends and won’t go to therapy. Men are less likely than women to discuss mental health with friends and family, to seek out psychotherapy, or to recognize they are depressed—a pattern so common as to be termed “normative male alexithymia” by psychologists.51 For straight men in relationships, all of these needs get aimed at women partners. In 2016, the writer Erin Rodgers coined the term “emotional gold digger” to describe straight men’s reliance on women partners to “play best friend, lover, career advisor, stylist, social secretary, emotional cheerleader, mom.”52 Elaborating on this dynamic and the emotional burnout it produces in straight women, Melanie Hamlett further explains that the concept of the emotional gold digger “has gained more traction recently as women, feeling increasingly burdened by unpaid emotional labor, have wised up to the toll of toxic masculinity, which keeps men isolated and incapable of leaning on each other. . . . While [women] read countless self-help books, listen to podcasts, seek out career advisors, turn to female friends for advice and support, or spend a small fortune on therapists to deal with old wounds and current problems, the men in their lives simply rely on them.
Jane Ward (The Tragedy of Heterosexuality)
Psychologists who study peer influence ask what it is about teenage girls that makes them so susceptible to peer contagion and so good at spreading it. Many believe it has something to do with the way girls tend to socialize.35 “When we listen to girls versus boys talk to each other, girls are much more likely to reply with statements that are validating and supportive than questioning,” Amanda Rose, professor of psychology at the University of Missouri, told me. “They’re willing to suspend reality to get into their friends’ worlds more. For this reason, adolescent girls are more likely to take on, for instance, the depression their friends are going through and become depressed themselves.” This female tendency to meet our friends where they are and share in their pain can be a productive and valuable social skill. Co-rumination (excessive discussion of a hardship) “does make the relationship between girls stronger,” Professor Rose told me. But it also leads friends to take on each other’s ailments. Teenage girls spread psychic illness because of features natural to their modes of friendship: co-rumination; excessive reassurance seeking; and negative-feedback seeking, in which someone maintains a feeling of control by angling for confirmation of her low self-concept from others.36 It isn’t hard to see why the 24/7 forum of social media intensifies and increases the incidence of each.
Abigail Shrier (Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters)
Since my biographer may be too staid Or know too little to affirm that Shade Shaved in his bath, here goes: "He'd fixed a sort Of hinge-and-screw affair, a steel support Running across the tub to hold in place The shaving mirror right before his face And with his toe renewing tap-warmth, he'd Sit like a king there, and like Marat bleed." The more I weigh, the less secure my skin; In places it's ridiculously thin; Thus near the mouth: the space between its wick And my grimace, invited the wicked nick. Or this dewlap: some day I must set free The Newport Frill inveterate in me. My Adam's apple is a prickly pear: Now I shall speak of evil and despair As none has spoken. Five, six, seven, eight, Nine strokes are not enough. Ten. I palpate Through strawberry-and-cream the gory mess And find unchanged that patch of prickliness. I have my doubts about the one-armed bloke Who in commercials with one gliding stroke Clears a smooth path of flesh from ear to chin, Then wipes his faces and fondly tries his skin. I'm in the class of fussy bimanists. As a discreet ephebe in tights assists A female in an acrobatic dance, My left hand help, and holds, and shifts its stance. Now I shall speak...Better than any soap Is the sensation for which poets hope When inspiration and its icy blaze, The sudden image, the immediate phrase Over the skin a triple ripple send Making the little hairs all stand on end As in the enlarged animated scheme Of whiskers mowed when held up by Our Cream.
Vladimir Nabokov (Pale Fire)
The proof that the One Stone Solution is political lies in what women feel when they eat “too much”: guilt. Why should guilt be the operative emotion, and female fat be a moral issue articulated with words like good and bad? If our culture’s fixation on female fatness or thinness were about sex, it would be a private issue between a woman and her lover; if it were about health, between a woman and herself. Public debate would be far more hysterically focused on male fat than on female, since more men (40 percent) are medically overweight than women (32 percent) and too much fat is far more dangerous for men than for women. In fact, “there is very little evidence to support the claim that fatness causes poor health among women…. The results of recent studies have suggested that women may in fact live longer and be generally healthier if they weigh ten to fifteen percent above the life-insurance figures and they refrain from dieting,” asserts Radiance; when poor health is correlated to fatness in women, it is due to chronic dieting and the emotional stress of self-hatred. The National Institutes of Health studies that linked obesity to heart disease and stroke were based on male subjects; when a study of females was finally published in 1990, it showed that weight made only a fraction of the difference for women that it made for men. The film The Famine Within cites a sixteen-country study that fails to correlate fatness to ill health. Female fat is not in itself unhealthy.
Naomi Wolf (The Beauty Myth)
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
Zainab Bahrani
Ben’s dead,” he says not moving or breaking his stare. “And?” “Just thought you should know,” he says, looking at me in the eyes like he’s waiting for me to confess. “Thanks for waking me up to share the information,” I tell him. “Where’s Venessa?” “At home,” he says. “Needed to see you first, alone.” “Quit looking at me like that, partner,” I tell him. “I ain’t left this floor all night.” Which isn’t a lie. Ben’s room is on this floor, but he doesn’t know I know that. “Even if you did, you know I wouldn’t —” “Partner,” I tell him straight, letting him figure it out. “I didn’t shut off his life support.” After he blinks several times he gives me that smirk. He looks around me to my sleeping wife and then back at me and tells me straight, too. “Go back to sleep partner. You look like shit.” With that he gets up and walks out. Staring at the door he walks out of, I smile. He gets it. Turns out the staff at that front desk got it, too. They didn’t stop my wife from doing what she needed to do; seems like they had other shit going at that time. Heard through the grapevine one of the women taken and held by Ben happened to work on this very floor. It also turns out the coffee pot wasn’t working and it was an all hands on deck kinda thing to get it fixed. I get it, the women need their coffee. They also didn’t run to his aid until I had my wife safe back in her bed. Those women have husbands and children of their own; I owe them a debt for letting my wife give Ben what he deserved. Those same women respect my wife and the women taken, and they ain’t got no respect for a man, any man, shooting another woman, a pregnant woman, one of theirs, in the stomach. You just don’t fuck with the female species. Brawler-K.S. Adkins
K.S. Adkins
In 1932 Pravda published a short story by Ilf and Petrov, titled 'How Robinson Was Created,' about a magazine editor who commissions a Soviet Robinson Crusoe from a writer named Moldavantsev. The writer submits a manuscript about a Soviet young man triumphing over nature on a desert island. The editor likes the story, but says that a Soviet Robinson would be unthinkable without a trade union committee consisting of a chairman, two permanent members, and a female activist to collect membership dues. The committee, in its turn, would be unthinkable without a safe deposit box, a chairman's bell, a pitcher of water, and a tablecloth ('red or green, it doesn't matter; I don't want to limit your artistic imagination'), and broad masses of working people. The author objects by saying that so many people could not possible be washed ashore by a single ocean wave: 'Why a wave?' asked the editor, suddenly surprised. 'How else would the masses end up on the island? It is a a desert island, after all!' 'Who said it was a desert island? You're getting me confused. Okay, so there's an island, or, even better, a peninsula. It's safer that way. And that's where a series of amusing, original, and interesting adventures will take place. There'll be some trade union work going on, but not enough. The female activist will expose certain deficiencies - in the area of due collection, for example. She'll be supported by the broad masses. And then there be the repentant chairman. At the end you could have a general meeting. That would be quite effective artistically. I guess that's about it.' 'But - what about Robinson?' stammered Moldavantsev. 'Oh yeah ..., thank for reminding me. I'm not wild about Robinson. Just drop him. He's a silly, whiny, totally unnecessary character.
Yuri Slezkine (The House of Government: A Saga of the Russian Revolution)
Activists who expressed genuine and reasonable concern for the struggles of trans-identified people would simultaneously dismiss women’s desire for safety, privacy, dignity and fair competition. Unlike those activists, I feel compassion both for people who feel at odds with their sexed bodies, and for the people, mainly women and children, who are harmed when sexual dimorphism is denied. At first I was puzzled that well-educated young women were the most ardent supporters of this new policy of gender self-identification, even though it is very much against their interests. A man may be embarrassed if a female person uses a male changing room; a male in a communal female facility can inspire fear. I came to see it as the rising generation’s ‘luxury belief’ – a creed espoused by members of an elite to enhance their status in each other’s eyes, with the harms experienced by the less fortunate. If you have social and financial capital, you can buy your way out of problems – if a facility you use jeopardises your safety or privacy, you will simply switch. It is poorer and older women who are stuck with the consequences of self-ID in women’s prisons, shelters and refuges, hospital wards and care homes. And some women’s apparent support for self-ID is deceptive, expressed for fear of what open opposition would bring. The few male academics and journalists who write critically on this topic tell me that they get only a fraction of the hate directed at their female peers (and are spared the sexualised insults and rape threats). This dynamic is reinforced by ageism, which is inextricably intertwined with misogyny – including internalised misogyny. I was astonished by the young female reviewer who described my book’s tone as ‘harsh’ and ‘unfortunate’. I wondered if she knew that sexists often say they would have listened to women if only they had stated their demands more nicely and politely, and whether she realised that once she is no longer young and beautiful, the same sorts of things will be said about her, too.
Helen Joyce (Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality)
It wasn't only my friends who suffered from female rivalry. I remember when I was just sixteen years old, during spring vacation, being whisked off to an early lunch by my best friend's brother, only to discover, to my astonishment and hurt, that she was expecting some college boys to drop by and didn't want me there to compete with her. When I started college at Sarah Lawrence, I soon noticed that while some of my classmates were indeed true friends, others seemed to resent that I had a boyfriend. It didn't help that Sarah Lawrence, a former girls' school, included very few straight men among its student body--an early lesson in how competing for items in short supply often brings out the worst in women. In graduate school, the stakes got higher, and the competition got stiffer, a trend that continued when I went on to vie for a limited number of academic jobs. I always had friends and colleagues with whom I could have trusted my life--but I also found women who seemed to view not only me but all other female academics as their rivals. This sense of rivalry became more painful when I divorced my first husband. Many of my friends I depended on for comfort and support suddenly began to view me as a threat. Some took me out to lunch to get the dirt, then dropped me soon after. I think they found it disturbing that I left my unhappy marriage while they were still committed to theirs. For other women, the threat seemed more immediate--twice I was told in no uncertain terms that I had better stay away from someone's husband, despite my protests that I would no more go after a friend's husband than I would stay friends with a woman who went after mine. Thankfully, I also had some true friends who remained loyal and supportive during one of the most difficult times of my life. To this day I trust them implicitly, with the kind of faith you reserve for people who have proved themselves under fire. But I've also never forgotten the shock and disappointment of discovering how quickly those other friendships turned to rivalries.
Susan Shapiro Barash (Tripping the Prom Queen: The Truth About Women and Rivalry)
I have chosen to use the terms lesbian existence and lesbian continuum because the word lesbianism has a clinical and limiting ring Lesbian existence suggests both the fact of the historical presence of lesbians and our continuing creation of the meaning of that existence I mean the term lesbian continuum to include a range—through each woman’s life and throughout history—of woman-identified experience; not simply the fact that a woman has had or consciously desired genital sexual experience with another woman. If we expand it to embrace many more forms of primary intensity between and among women, including the sharing of a rich inner life, the bonding against male tyranny, the giving and receiving of practical and political support; if we can also hear in it such associations as marriage resistance and the ‘haggard’ behavior identified by Mary Daly (obsolete meanings ‘intractable,’ ‘willful,’ ‘wanton,’ and ‘unchaste’ a woman reluctant to yield to wooing’)—we begin to grasp breadths of female history and psychology that have lain out of reach as a consequence of limited, mostly clinical, definitions of ‘lesbianism.’ Lesbian existence comprises both the breaking of a taboo and the rejection of a compulsory way of life It is also a direct or indirect attack on male right of access to women But it is more than these, although we may first begin to perceive it as a form of nay-saying to patriarchy, an act or resistance It has of course included role playing, self-hatred, breakdown, alcoholism, suicide, and intrawoman violence; we romanticize at our peril what it means to love and act against the grain, and under heavy penalties; and lesbian existence has been lived (unlike, say, Jewish or Catholic existence) without access to any knowledge of a tradition, a continuity, a social underpinning The destruction of records and memorabilia and letters documenting the realities of lesbian existence must be taken very seriously as a means of keeping heterosexuality compulsory for women, since what has been kept from our knowledge is joy, sensuality, courage, and community, as well as guilt, self-betrayal, and pain.
Adrienne Rich (Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence)
There was a bell clanging in the tower of the building next to the black-shrike-thorn-cave. She found the noise irritating, so she twisted her neck and loosed a jet of blue and yellow flame at it. The tower did not catch fire, as it was stone, but the rope and beams supporting the bell ignited, and a few seconds later, the bell fell crashing into the interior of the tower. That pleased her, as did the two-legs-round-ears who ran screaming from the area. She was a dragon, after all. It was only right that they should fear her. One of the two-legs paused by the edge of the square in front of the black-shrike-thorn-cave, and she heard him shout a spell at her, his voice like the squeaking of a frightened mouse. Whatever the spell was, Eragon’s wards shielded her from it--at least she assumed they did, for she noticed no difference in how she felt or in the appearance of the world around her. The wolf-elf-in-Eragon’s-shape killed the magician for her. She could feel how Blödhgarm grasped hold of the spellcaster’s mind and wrestled the two-legs-round-ears’ thoughts into submission, whereupon Blödhgarm uttered a single word in the ancient-elf-magic-language, and the two-legs-round-ears fell to the ground, blood seeping from his open mouth. Then the wolf-elf tapped her on the shoulder and said, “Ready yourself, Brightscales. Here they come.” She saw Thorn rising above the edge of the rooftops, Eragon-half-brother-Murtagh a small, dark figure on his back. In the light of the morning sun, Thorn shone and sparkled almost as brilliantly as she herself did. Her scales were cleaner than his, though, as she had taken special care when grooming earlier. She could not imagine going into battle looking anything but her best. Her enemies should not only fear her, but admire her. She knew it was vanity on her part, but she did not care. No other race could match the grandeur of the dragons. Also, she was the last female of her kind, and she wanted those who saw her to marvel at her appearance and to remember her well, so if dragons were to vanish forevermore, two-legs would continue to speak of them with the proper respect, awe, and wonder.
Christopher Paolini (Inheritance (The Inheritance Cycle, #4))
Local Teen Adopted Finds Adoptive Family Within 24 Hours of 18th Birthday The final chapter of a family tragedy was written yesterday at the county courthouse when Cynthia and Tom Lemry signed formal adoption papers, gaining custody of Sarah Byrnes less than 24 hours before her 18th birthday. Local readers will remember Ms. Byrnes as the youngster whose face and hands were purposely burned on a hot wood stove by her father 15 years ago. The incident came to light this past February after Virgil Byrnes assaulted another teenager, 18-year-old Eric Calhoune, with a hunting knife. “Better late than never,” said Cynthia Lemry, a local high school teacher and swimming coach, in a statement to the press. “If someone had stepped up for this young lady a long time ago, years of heartache could have been avoided. She’s a remarkable human being, and we’re honored to have her in our family.” “I guess they’re just in the nick of time to pay my college tuition,” the new Sarah Lemry said with a smile. Also attending the ceremony were Eric Calhoune, the victim of Virgil Byrnes’s attack; Sandy Calhoune, the boy’s mother and a frequent columnist for this newspaper; Carver Milddleton, who served time on an assault charge against Virgil Byrnes in a related incident; the Reverend John Ellerby, controversial Episcopalian minister whose support of female clergy and full homosexual rights has frequently focused a spotlight on him in his 15-year stay at St. Mark’s; and his son, Steve Ellerby, who describes himself as “a controversial Episcopalian preacher’s kid.” Sarah Lemry confirmed that following the burning 15 years ago, her father refused her opportunities for reconstructive surgery, saying her condition would teach her to “be tough.” She refused comment on further torturous physical abuse allegations, for which, among other charges, Byrnes has been found guilty in superior court and sentenced to more than 20 years in the state penitentiary at Walla Walla. When asked if she would now seek the reconstructive surgery she was so long denied, Sarah Lemry again smiled and said, “I don’t know. It’d be a shame to change just when I’m getting used to it.
Chris Crutcher (Staying Fat for Sarah Byrnes)
The reality is that men are hurting and that the whole culture responds to them by saying, “Please do not tell us what you feel.” I have always been a fan of the Sylvia cartoon where two women sit, one looking into a crystal ball as the other woman says, “He never talks about his feelings.” And the woman who can see the future says, “At two P.M. all over the world men will begin to talk about their feelings—and women all over the world will be sorry.” If we cannot heal what we cannot feel, by supporting patriarchal culture that socializes men to deny feelings, we doom them to live in states of emotional numbness. We construct a culture where male pain can have no voice, where male hurt cannot be named or healed. It is not just men who do not take their pain seriously. Most women do not want to deal with male pain if it interferes with the satisfaction of female desire. When feminist movement led to men’s liberation, including male exploration of “feelings,” some women mocked male emotional expression with the same disgust and contempt as sexist men. Despite all the expressed feminist longing for men of feeling, when men worked to get in touch with feelings, no one really wanted to reward them. In feminist circles men who wanted to change were often labeled narcissistic or needy. Individual men who expressed feelings were often seen as attention seekers, patriarchal manipulators trying to steal the stage with their drama. When I was in my twenties, I would go to couples therapy, and my partner of more than ten years would explain how I asked him to talk about his feelings and when he did, I would freak out. He was right. It was hard for me to face that I did not want to hear about his feelings when they were painful or negative, that I did not want my image of the strong man truly challenged by learning of his weaknesses and vulnerabilities. Here I was, an enlightened feminist woman who did not want to hear my man speak his pain because it revealed his emotional vulnerability. It stands to reason, then, that the masses of women committed to the sexist principle that men who express their feelings are weak really do not want to hear men speak, especially if what they say is that they hurt, that they feel unloved. Many women cannot hear male pain about love because it sounds like an indictment of female failure. Since sexist norms have taught us that loving is our task whether in our role as mothers or lovers or friends, if men say they are not loved, then we are at fault; we are to blame.
bell hooks (The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love)
In a Harvard Business Review article titled “Do Women Lack Ambition?” Anna Fels, a psychiatrist at Cornell University, observes that when the dozens of successful women she interviewed told their own stories, “they refused to claim a central, purposeful place.” Were Dr. Fels to interview you, how would you tell your story? Are you using language that suggests you’re the supporting actress in your own life? For instance, when someone offers words of appreciation about a dinner you’ve prepared, a class you’ve taught, or an event you organized and brilliantly executed, do you gracefully reply “Thank you” or do you say, “It was nothing”? As Fels tried to understand why women refuse to be the heroes of their own stories, she encountered the Bem Sex-Role Inventory, which confirms that society considers a woman to be feminine only within the context of a relationship and when she is giving something to someone. It’s no wonder that a “feminine” woman finds it difficult to get in the game and demand support to pursue her goals. It also explains why she feels selfish when she doesn’t subordinate her needs to others. A successful female CEO recently needed my help. It was mostly business-related but also partly for her. As she started to ask for my assistance, I sensed how difficult it was for her. Advocate on her organization’s behalf? Piece of cake. That’s one of the reasons her business has been successful. But advocate on her own behalf? I’ll confess that even among my closest friends I find it painful to say, “Look what I did,” and so I don’t do it very often. If you want to see just how masterful most women have become at deflecting, the next time you’re with a group of girlfriends, ask them about something they (not their husband or children) have done well in the past year. Chances are good that each woman will quickly and deftly redirect the conversation far, far away from herself. “A key type of discrimination that women face is the expectation that feminine women will forfeit opportunities for recognition,” says Fels. “When women do speak as much as men in a work situation or compete for high-visibility positions, their femininity is assailed.” My point here isn’t to say that relatedness and nurturing and picking up our pom-poms to cheer others on is unimportant. Those qualities are often innate to women. If we set these “feminine” qualities aside or neglect them, we will have lost an irreplaceable piece of ourselves. But to truly grow up, we must learn to throw down our pom-poms, believing we can act and that what we have to offer is a valuable part of who we are. When we recognize this, we give ourselves permission to dream and to encourage the girls and women
Whitney Johnson (Dare, Dream, Do: Remarkable Things Happen When You Dare to Dream)
extent, Polly Lear took Fanny Washington’s place: she was a pretty, sociable young woman who became Martha’s closest female companion during the first term, at home or out and about, helping plan her official functions. The Washingtons were delighted with the arrival of Thomas Jefferson, a southern planter of similar background to themselves, albeit a decade younger; if not a close friend, he was someone George had felt an affinity for during the years since the Revolution, writing to him frequently for advice. The tall, lanky redhead rented lodgings on Maiden Lane, close to the other members of the government, and called on the president on Sunday afternoon, March 21. One of Jefferson’s like-minded friends in New York was the Virginian James Madison, so wizened that he looked elderly at forty. Madison was a brilliant parliamentary and political strategist who had been Washington’s closest adviser and confidant in the early days of the presidency, helping design the machinery of government and guiding measures through the House, where he served as a representative. Another of Madison’s friends had been Alexander Hamilton, with whom he had worked so valiantly on The Federalist Papers. But the two had become estranged over the question of the national debt. As secretary of the Treasury, Hamilton was charged with devising a plan to place the nation’s credit on a solid basis at home and abroad. When Hamilton presented his Report on the Public Credit to Congress in January, there was an instant split, roughly geographic, north vs. south. His report called for the assumption of state debts by the nation, the sale of government securities to fund this debt, and the creation of a national bank. Washington had become convinced that Hamilton’s plan would provide a strong economic foundation for the nation, particularly when he thought of the weak, impoverished Congress during the war, many times unable to pay or supply its troops. Madison led the opposition, incensed because he believed that dishonest financiers and city slickers would be the only ones to benefit from the proposal, while poor veterans and farmers would lose out. Throughout the spring, the debate continued. Virtually no other government business got done as Hamilton and his supporters lobbied fiercely for the plan’s passage and Madison and his followers outfoxed them time and again in Congress. Although pretending to be neutral, Jefferson was philosophically and personally in sympathy with Madison. By April, Hamilton’s plan was voted down and seemed to be dead, just as a new debate broke out over the placement of the national capital. Power, prestige, and a huge economic boost would come to the city named as capital. Hamilton and the bulk of New Yorkers and New Englanders
Patricia Brady (Martha Washington: An American Life)
Year after year, they are joined by a new age group from Germany’s youth, totally educated in accordance with National Socialist principles, forged together by the ideas of our Volksgemeinschaft, and willing to move against anyone who should dare to sin against our fight for freedom. And just as in the time of the party’s struggle for power, our female party comrades, our German women and girls, were the most reliable supports of the movement, so now again the multitude of our women and girls form the strongest element in the struggle for the preservation of our Volk. After all, thank God, not only the Jews in London and New York but also those in Moscow made clear what fate might be in store for the German Volk. We are determined to be no less clear in our answer. This fight will not end with the planned annihilation of the Aryan but with the extermination of the Jew in Europe. Beyond this, thanks to this fight, our movement’s world of thought will become the common heritage of all people, even of our enemies. State after state will be forced, in the course of its fight against us, to apply National Socialist theories in waging this war that was provoked by them. And in so doing, it will become aware of the curse that the criminal work of Jewry has laid over all people, especially through this war. As our enemies thought in 1923 that the National Socialist Party was defeated for good and that I was finished with in the eyes of the German Volk because of my trial, so they actually helped National Socialist ideology to spread like wildfire through the entire German Volk and convey the essence of Jewry to so many million men, as we ourselves would never have been able to do under normal circumstances. In the same manner international Jewry, which instigated this new war, will find out that nation after nation engrosses itself more and more in this question to become finally aware of the great danger presented by this international problem. Above all, this war proves the irrefutable identity of plutocracy and Bolshevism, and the common ambition of all Jews to exploit nations and make them the slaves of their international guild of criminals. The same alliance we once faced as our common enemies in Germany, an alliance between the stock exchange in Frankfurt and the “Red Flag” in Berlin, now again exists between the Jewish banking houses in New York, the Jewishplutocratic class of leaders in London, and the Jews in the Kremlin in Moscow. Just as the German Volk successfully fought the Jewish enemy at home as a consequence of this realization and is now about to finish it off for good, the other nations will increasingly find themselves again in the course of this war. Together, they will make a stand against that race that is seeking to destroy all of them. Proclamation for the 23th anniversary of the N.S.D.A.P. (read by Hermann Esser) Fuhrer Headquarters, February 24, 1943
Adolf Hitler (Collection of Speeches: 1922-1945)
Bram stared into a pair of wide, dark eyes. Eyes that reflected a surprising glimmer of intelligence. This might be the rare female a man could reason with. “Now, then,” he said. “We can do this the easy way, or we can make things difficult.” With a soft snort, she turned her head. It was as if he’d ceased to exist. Bram shifted his weight to his good leg, feeling the stab to his pride. He was a lieutenant colonel in the British army, and at over six feet tall, he was said to cut an imposing figure. Typically, a pointed glance from his quarter would quell the slightest hint of disobedience. He was not accustomed to being ignored. “Listen sharp now.” He gave her ear a rough tweak and sank his voice to a low threat. “If you know what’s good for you, you’ll do as I say.” Though she spoke not a word, her reply was clear: You can kiss my great woolly arse. Confounded sheep. “Ah, the English countryside. So charming. So…fragrant.” Colin approached, stripped of his London-best topcoat, wading hip-deep through the river of wool. Blotting the sheen of perspiration from his brow with his sleeve, he asked, “I don’t suppose this means we can simply turn back?” Ahead of them, a boy pushing a handcart had overturned his cargo, strewing corn all over the road. It was an open buffet, and every ram and ewe in Sussex appeared to have answered the invitation. A vast throng of sheep bustled and bleated around the unfortunate youth, gorging themselves on the spilled grain-and completely obstructing Bram’s wagons. “Can we walk the teams in reverse?” Colin asked. “Perhaps we can go around, find another road.” Bram gestured at the surrounding landscape. “There is no other road.” They stood in the middle of the rutted dirt lane, which occupied a kind of narrow, winding valley. A steep bank of gorse rose up on one side, and on the other, some dozen yards of heath separated the road from dramatic bluffs. And below those-far below those-lay the sparkling turquoise sea. If the air was seasonably dry and clear, and Bram squinted hard at that thin indigo line of the horizon, he might even glimpse the northern coast of France. So close. He’d get there. Not today, but soon. He had a task to accomplish here, and the sooner he completed it, the sooner he could rejoin his regiment. He wasn’t stopping for anything. Except sheep. Blast it. It would seem they were stopping for sheep. A rough voice said, “I’ll take care of them.” Thorne joined their group. Bram flicked his gaze to the side and spied his hulking mountain of a corporal shouldering a flintlock rifle. “We can’t simply shoot them, Thorne.” Obedient as ever, Thorne lowered his gun. “Then I’ve a cutlass. Just sharpened the blade last night.” “We can’t butcher them, either.” Thorne shrugged. “I’m hungry.” Yes, that was Thorne-straightforward, practical. Ruthless. “We’re all hungry.” Bram’s stomach rumbled in support of the statement. “But clearing the way is our aim at the moment, and a dead sheep’s harder to move than a live one. We’ll just have to nudge them along.” Thorne lowered the hammer of his rifle, disarming it, then flipped the weapon with an agile motion and rammed the butt end against a woolly flank. “Move on, you bleeding beast.
Tessa Dare (A Night to Surrender (Spindle Cove, #1))
You are a totally pathetic, historical example of the phallocentric, to put it mildly." "A pathetic, historical example," Oshima repeats, obviously impressed. By his tone of voice he seems to like the sound of that phrase. "In other words you're a typical sexist, patriarchic male," the tall one pipes in, unable to conceal her irritation. "A patriarchic male," Oshima again repeats. The short one ignores this and goes on. "You're employing the status quo and the cheap phallocentric logic that supports it to reduce the entire female gender to second-class citizens, to limit and deprive women of the rights they're due. You're doing this unconsciously rather than deliberately, but that makes you even guiltier. You protect vested male interests and become inured to the pain of others, and don't even try to see what evil your blindness causes women and society. I realize that problems with restrooms and card catalogs are mere details, but if we don't begin with the small things we'll never be able to throw off the cloak of blindness that covers our society. Those are the principles by which we act." "That's the way every sensible woman feels," the tall one adds, her face expressionless. [...] A frozen silence follows. "At any rate, what you've been saying is fundamentally wrong," Oshima says, calmly yet emphatically. "I am most definitely not a pathetic, historical example of a patriarchic male." "Then explain, simply, what's wrong with what we've said," the shorter woman says defiantly. "Without sidestepping the issue or trying to show off how erudite you are," the tall one adds. "All right. I'll do just that—explain it simply and honestly, minus any sidestepping or displays of brilliance," Oshima says. "We're waiting," the tall one says, and the short one gives a compact nod to show she agrees. "First of all, I'm not a male," Oshima announces. A dumbfounded silence follows on the part of everybody. I gulp and shoot Oshima a glance. "I'm a woman," he says. "I'd appreciate it if you wouldn't joke around," the short woman says, after a pause for breath. Not much confidence, though. It's more like she felt somebody had to say something. Oshima pulls his wallet out of his chinos, takes out the driver's license, and passes it to the woman. She reads what's written there, frowns, and hands it to her tall companion, who reads it and, after a moment's hesitation, gives it back to Oshima, a sour look on her face. "Did you want to see it too?" Oshima asks me. When I shake my head, he slips the license back in his wallet and puts the wallet in his pants pocket. He then places both hands on the counter and says, "As you can see, biologically and legally I am undeniably female. Which is why what you've been saying about me is fundamentally wrong. It's simply impossible for me to be, as you put it, a typical sexist, patriarchic male." "Yes, but—" the tall woman says but then stops. The short one, lips tight, is playing with her collar. "My body is physically female, but my mind's completely male," Oshima goes on. "Emotionally I live as a man. So I suppose your notion of being a historical example may be correct. And maybe I am sexist—who knows. But I'm not a lesbian, even though I dress this way. My sexual preference is for men. In other words, I'm a female but I'm gay. I do anal sex, and have never used my vagina for sex. My clitoris is sensitive but my breasts aren't. I don't have a period. So, what am I discriminating against? Could somebody tell me?
Haruki Murakami (Kafka on the Shore)
Luit never came out of the anesthesia. He paid dearly for having stood up to two other males, frustrating them by his steep ascent. Those two had been plotting against him in order to take back the power they had lost. The shocking way they did so opened my eyes to how deadly seriously chimpanzees take their politics. Two-against-one maneuvering is what lends chimpanzee power struggles both their richness and their danger. Coalitions are key. No male can rule by himself, at least not for long, because the group as a whole can overthrow anybody. Chimpanzees are so clever about banding together that a leader needs allies to fortify his position as well as the greater community’s acceptance. Staying on top is a balancing act between forcefully asserting dominance, keeping supporters happy, and avoiding mass revolt. If this sounds familiar, it’s because human politics works exactly the same. Before Luit’s death, the Arnhem colony was ruled jointly by Nikkie, a young upstart, and Yeroen, an over-the-hill conniver. Barely adult at seventeen, Nikkie was a brawny character with a dopey expression. He was very determined, but not the sharpest knife in the drawer. He was supported by Yeroen, who was physically not up to the task of being a leader anymore, yet who wielded enormous influence behind the scenes. Yeroen had a habit of watching disputes unfold from a distance, stepping in only when emotions were flaring to calmly support one side or the other, thus forcing everybody to pay attention to his decisions. Yeroen shrewdly exploited the rivalries among younger and stronger males. Without going into the complex history of this group, it was clear that Yeroen hated Luit, who had wrested power from him years before. Luit had defeated Yeroen in a struggle that had taken three hot summer months of daily tensions involving the entire colony. The next year, Yeroen had gotten even by helping Nikkie dethrone Luit. Ever since, Nikkie had been the alpha male with Yeroen as his right-hand man. The two became inseparable. Luit was unafraid of either one of them alone. In one-on-one encounters in the night cages, Luit dominated every other male in the colony, taking away their food or chasing them around. No single one of them could possibly have kept him in his place. This meant that Yeroen and Nikkie ruled as a team, and only as a team. They did so for four long years. But their coalition eventually began to unravel, and as is not uncommon among men, the divisive issue was sex. Being the kingmaker, Yeroen had enjoyed extraordinary sexual privileges. Nikkie would not let any other males get near the most attractive females, but for Yeroen he had always made an exception. This was part of the deal: Nikkie had the power, and Yeroen got a slice of the sexual pie. This happy arrangement ended only when Nikkie tried to renegotiate its terms. In the four years of his rule, he had grown increasingly self-confident. Had he forgotten who had helped him get to the top? When the young leader began to throw his weight around, interfering with the sexual adventures not only of other males but also of Yeroen himself, things got ugly. Infighting within the ruling coalition went on for months, until one day Yeroen and Nikkie failed to reconcile after a spat. With Nikkie following him around, screaming and begging for their customary embrace, the old fox finally walked away without looking back. He’d had it. Luit filled the power vacuum overnight. The most magnificent chimpanzee male I have known, both in body and spirit, quickly grew in stature as the alpha male. Luit was popular with females, a mighty arbiter of disputes, protector of the downtrodden, and effective at disrupting bonding among rivals in the divide-and-rule tactic typical of both chimp and man. As soon as Luit saw other males together he would either join them or perform a charging display to disband them.
Frans de Waal (Our Inner Ape: A Leading Primatologist Explains Why We Are Who We Are)
As told in her book Heart Politics, social activist Fran Peavey was walking on the Stanford University campus one day when she happened upon a group of people carrying video equipment. They were crowding around a male chimp that was running loose and a female chimp that was on a long chain. The chimpanzees were apparently there for some research purposes, and the scientists and spectators (most of them men) were trying to get them to mate. The male didn’t need much encouragement. He was grunting and tugging at the smaller chimp’s chain, while she was whimpering and trying to avoid his advances. A feeling of empathy swept through Peavey. Then something happened that she would never forget: Suddenly the female chimp yanked her chain out of the male’s grasp. To my amazement, she walked through the crowd, straight over to me, and took my hand. Then she led me across the circle to the only other two women in the crowd, and she joined hands with one of them. The three of us stood together in a circle. I remember the feeling of that rough palm against mine. The little chimp had recognized us and reached out across all the years of evolution to form her own support group.
Tara Brach (True Refuge: Finding Peace and Freedom in Your Own Awakened Heart)
White men voted for Trump at 62 percent. White women at 53 percent. Latino men at 32 percent. Latina women at 25 percent. African-American men at 13 percent, and black women at 4 percent. Unlike the majority of white voters, every other group of voters supported the Democrat in 2016. The Democratic vote went as follows: White men, 31 percent. White women, 43 percent. Latino men, 63 percent. Latina women, 69 percent. African-American men, 82 percent. African-American women, whose race and gender together put them at the bottom of the country’s artificial hierarchy, supported the white female Democrat by 94 percent. While CNN did not break down the Asian vote by gender, Asians, like other nonwhites, voted overwhelmingly for Clinton, at 65 percent versus 27 percent for Trump, tracking the Latino vote overall.
Isabel Wilkerson (Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents)
Sexual dimorphism between species also helps to identify which mating pattern has been the species’ norm over evolutionary time (Baker & Bellis, 1995). For example, male chimpanzees’ testicle size is a whopping 3% of their total body weight, compared to .8% in human males and .02% in male gorillas. The promiscuous mating pattern of chimpanzees suggests that males with small testicles were selected against because they were unable to “wash out” the sperm of larger-testicled competitors. Among polygynous gorillas, one male controls a harem of females with little or no competition from other males, so there is little selection for large testicles and ejaculates. Male humans are between chimpanzees and gorillas in both testicle size and body size dimorphism; this supports the view that over evolutionary time humans have been at least mildly polygynous (Baker & Bellis, 1995). This point is further supported by genetic data concerning variation in Y chromosomes (genes passed only from fathers to sons), showing that just 19 male lineages have dominated in populating the world. One lineage within haplogroup C accounts for about 8% of the male population in Asia, suggesting that one male lineage, probably that of Gengis Khan, dominated mating within that region several hundred years ago.
Jon A. Sefcek
Another universal male mate preference is youth (Buss, 1989). Buss has found that males on average prefer females who are 2.5 years younger than themselves, with ranges between two and seven years, depending on the culture. This finding is supported by recent U.S. Census data that shows that the largest proportion of heterosexual married and cohabitating couples include men who are 2-5 years older than their partners (36.3% and 28.6%, respectively) (Fields and Casper, 2001). Notably, preferred age differences increase as men get older, with men preferring women who are increasingly younger relative to their own age (Kenrick & Keefe, 1992). Other studies have reported that women at the age of peak fertility, roughly 19-25 years of age, are typically rated as most attractive by men. It is probable that men are not responding to youth itself; rather, men may be responding to the fertility benefits that young age implies. Youthful physical features such as facial neotony, clear skin, and strong hair-growth and behavioral traits such as novelty-seeking and playfulness signal fertility through the combined effects of estrogen. Because women have a narrow reproductive window compared to men, over evolutionary history men who impregnated young women would have had the greatest reproductive success. This is especially true of men who selected young long-term mates; these men would have reaped the benefits of his mate’s peak fertility in the short-term and also would have enjoyed a longer period in which to produce more children by the same mate.
Jon A. Sefcek
stewardesses of the 1960s had filed a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), trying to change the “no men, no marriage” policy of their job. Aileen Hernandez, the only female or African American on the EEOC, supported them. Years later they finally won, but the airlines called the ruling “improper” because Hernandez, after leaving the EEOC, had become president of the National Organization for Women. A judge actually agreed.
Gloria Steinem (My Life on the Road)
You might just be able to make it, Alex,” he whispered, to give her strength. “And you might just be able to stop me,” she said, returning it.
Jo Goodman (The Captain's Lady)
Here are ten facts about IQ. These facts are debated and often controversial among the general public but far less so among scientists who study intelligence. The best review of the academic literature supporting these facts is a 2012 paper by Richard Nisbett and colleagues – an interdisciplinary team of leading scholars, household names within intelligence research, comprised of psychologists, an economist, a behavioral geneticist, and a former President of the American Psychological Association. Their areas of expertise include cultural and sex differences in intelligence, the effect of social and genetic factors that affect intelligence, the development of intelligence over the lifespan, the relationship between economic development and intelligence, and changes in intelligence over history 1. IQ is a good predictor of school and work performance, at least in WEIRD societies. 2. IQ differs in predictive power and is the least predictive of performance on tasks that demand low cognitive skill. 3. IQ may be separable into what can be called ‘crystallized intelligence’ and ‘fluid intelligence’. Crystalized intelligence refers to knowledge that is drawn on to solve problems. Fluid intelligence refers to an ability to solve novel problems and to learn. 4. Educational interventions can improve aspects of IQ, including fluid intelligence, which is affected by interventions such as memory training. Many of these results don’t seem to last long, although there is strong evidence that education as a whole causally raises IQ over a lifetime. 5. IQ test scores have been dramatically increasing over time. This is called the Flynn effect after James Flynn (also an author of the review mentioned above), who first noticed this pattern. The Flynn effect is largest for nations that have recently modernized. Large gains have been measured on the Raven’s test, a test that has been argued to be the most ‘culture-free’ and a good measure of fluid intelligence. That is, it’s not just driven by people learning more words or getting better at adding and subtracting. 6. IQ differences have neural correlates – i.e. you can measure these differences in the brain. 7. IQ is heritable, though the exact heritability differs by population, typically ranging from around 30% to 80%. 8. Heritability is lower for poorer people in the US, but not in Australia and Europe where it is roughly the same across levels of wealth. 9. Males and females differ in IQ performance in terms of variance and in the means of different subscales. 10. Populations and ethnicities differ on IQ performance. You can imagine why some people might question these statements. But setting aside political considerations, how do we scientifically make sense of this? Popular books from Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray’s The Bell Curve (1994) to Robert Plomin’s Blueprint (2018) have attributed much of this to genes. People and perhaps groups differ in genes, making some brighter than others. But humans are a species with two lines of inheritance. They have not just genetic hardware but also cultural software. And it is primarily by culture rather than genes that we became the most dominant species on earth. For a species so dependent on accumulated knowledge, not only is the idea of a culture-free intelligence test meaningless, so too is the idea of culture free intelligence.
Michael Muthukrishna
There are all sorts of examples of how we have been urged to take on trust a variety of extraordinary claims. Practitioners of 'Fat Studies' maintain that there are no authentic health risks to obesity, and that the seemingly irrefutable evidence to the contrary is the product of the inherent bigotry of the scientific method. An image of an individual with a bloodstained crotch is shared online to prove that men can menstruate, when we can all quite clearly see that this is a biological female who identifies as male. According to the new puritans, the observable realities of existence are a mirage. Only they have access to the truth, and we are all invited to jettison verifiable facts and nod along. Is this really any different from a preacher who insists that his supernatural interpretation of the world must be uncritically accepted without any evidence to support it?
Andrew Doyle (The New Puritans: How the Religion of Social Justice Captured the Western World)
10 Things You Should Always Discuss with Your Gynecologist – Motherhood Chaitanya Hospital Your gynecologist is your partner in women’s health, and open communication is key to receiving the best care. From reproductive health to general well-being, here are 10 crucial topics you should always discuss with your gynecologist. If you’re in Chandigarh, consider reaching out to the Best Female Gynecologist in Chandigarh through Motherhood Chaitanya for expert care. 1. Menstrual Irregularities Don’t dismiss irregular periods as a minor issue. They could be indicative of underlying conditions like polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS), thyroid disorders, or hormonal imbalances. 2. Contraception Discuss your contraception options to find the one that best suits your needs and lifestyle. Your gynecologist can provide guidance on various birth control methods, from pills to intrauterine devices (IUDs). 3. Pregnancy Planning If you’re planning to start a family, consult your gynecologist for preconception advice. This can help you prepare your body and address any potential risks or concerns. 4. Sexual Health Openly discuss any concerns related to sexual health, including pain during intercourse, sexually transmitted infections (STIs), or changes in sexual desire. Your gynecologist can provide guidance and offer solutions. 5. Menopause and Perimenopause If you’re in your 40s or approaching menopause, discuss perimenopausal symptoms like hot flashes, mood swings, and changes in menstrual patterns. Your gynecologist can recommend treatments to manage these changes. 6. Family History Share your family’s medical history, especially if there are instances of gynecological conditions, such as ovarian or breast cancer. This information is vital for early detection and prevention. 7. Breast Health Talk to your gynecologist about breast health, including breast self-exams and recommended mammograms. Regular breast checks are essential for early detection of breast cancer. 8. Pelvic Pain Don’t ignore persistent pelvic pain. It can signal a range of issues, including endometriosis, fibroids, or ovarian cysts. Early diagnosis and treatment are crucial. 9. Urinary Issues Frequent urination, urinary incontinence, or pain during urination should be discussed. These symptoms can be linked to urinary tract infections or pelvic floor disorders. 10. Mental Health Your gynecologist is there to address your overall well-being. If you’re experiencing mood swings, anxiety, or depression, it’s important to discuss these mental health concerns. Your gynecologist can offer guidance or refer you to specialists if needed. In conclusion, your gynecologist is your go-to resource for women’s health, addressing a wide spectrum of issues. Open and honest communication is essential to ensure you receive the best care and support. If you’re in Chandigarh, consider consulting the Best Gynecologist Obstetricians in Chandigarh through Motherhood Chaitanya for expert guidance. Your health is a priority, and discussing these important topics with your gynecologist is a proactive step toward a healthier, happier you
Dr. Geetika Thakur
They remind me where I come from; they remind me that I am loved and supported. I can’t tell you how many times I have needed them over the last decade. My female friendships are deeply, vitally important to me.
Leigh-Anne Pinnock (Believe)
Tolkien was very sensitive about anti-Semitism, so we know he would not have agreed with Justin Martyr’s comment we saw earlier in the book about the early church’s emerging replacement theology. In fact, in Rom 11: 18, Paul warned the gentiles coming into the church not to behave as if they had an advantage over either non-Christian Jews or Jewish members of the church: “Do not consider yourself to be superior to those other branches. If you do, consider this: You do not support the root, but the root supports you.” By Justin Martyr’s time (mid-second century), however, this warning went unheeded, largely due to two Jewish revolts against Rome, increasing tension between the various sects of Judaism, and the rise of a new messiah, Simon bar Kokhba. As we will see, Tolkien offered a corrective for this real historical problem through the relationship between Gimli and Legolas, who are close companions of Aragorn. Indeed, Aragorn’s return brings these two races back together, itself an indication that Aragorn resembles Jesus typologically. By including allusions to Israel’s story in the stories of elves and men in addition to the dwarves, Tolkien may have had Gal 3: 28 in mind where Paul says, “There is neither Jew nor gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.
Michael T. Jahosky (The Good News of the Return of the King: The Gospel in Middle-earth)
But Albert's physical strength and her physical softness seemed only right. They were well briefed about the respective roles of a lady and her Knight by their jointly admired Sir Walter Scott. "The fine delicate fragile form" of the female, as Scott put it, required "the support of the Master's muscular strength and masculine character.
Lucy Worsley
The affirmation of female power contained in the Goddess symbol has both psychological and political consequences. Psychologically, it means the defeat of the view engendered by patriarchy that women's power is inferior and dangerous. This new 'mood' of affirmation of female power also leads to new 'motivations' it supports and undergirds women's trust in their own power and the power of other women in family and society.
Carol P. Christ
Many women in the area complained of feeling unsafe, and local statistics supported their fears. Cases of assault, harassment, domestic violence, and rape had risen dramatically since the once-sleepy region began attracting thousands of male workers. Women spoke of carrying concealed weapons when they shopped at the grocery store and avoiding the bar scene, teeming with lonely males looking for female company. Rumors were rampant about where the next attack might occur—I frequently overheard women chatting about which areas to avoid or where a friend of so-and-so was attacked while walking to her car.
Blaire Briody (The New Wild West: Black Gold, Fracking, and Life in a North Dakota Boomtown)
I've made it my mission to be an ally to women in this generation, to break down misogynistic stereotypes, remove walls that divide them, and create a community grounded in us supporting one another. In my experience as a young women, a female business owner, a daughter, sister, and friend, I've learned the being a feminist isn't your own voice, but how you use your stage to encourage and support other women to find theirs.
Scarlett Curtis (Feminists Don't Wear Pink (And Other Lies): Amazing Women on What the F-Word Means to Them)
Despite how unpopular this idea has become, the reality is that hundreds of studies on sex difference support the simple idea that a majority (not all, just a majority) of people born into female bodies have slightly different brain structures, immune systems, and endocrine responses that do seem to explain a slightly (just slightly!) more feminine way of showing up in the world, and instinct for things like connection over domination, empathy over trying to immediately fix a problem, and sensitivity to poor environments instead of a stoic response to poor environments.
Sarah Ramey (The Lady's Handbook for Her Mysterious Illness)
Medusa is familiar to many as a symbol of women’s rage. Many feminists see their own rage reflected in the image of Medusa, ‘female fury personified.’ With her fearsome countenance framed with snakes, able to paralyse with a glance, it is true that Medusa is terrible, terrifying—but she is also terrified. Her face, frozen in an openmouthed scream, eyes wide, teeth bared, is the primal, primate mask of fear. This gut-wrenching image is an eloquent expression of women’s rage, but also, I suggest, of women’s trauma. In this short essay, I suggest that Medusa, Athena and Metis—goddesses of wisdom, healing, and protection—can offer valuable support to those on the journey of healing from trauma, but first we must look beyond patriarchal stereotypes which denigrate these powerful goddesses. Ultimately we are invited to hold our fear, rage and trauma in a place of love and compassion, for ourselves and others, so that we can be protected, instead of paralyzed.
Laura Shannon (Re-visioning Medusa: from Monster to Divine Wisdom)
She had to get back to her writing. She’d talked things out with Helene and instead of putting her on a fake payroll, the two of them had started working on a new pilot together. Female bounty hunters falling in love and fighting their way through space. Ignacio had loved Amanda’s initial pitch and he’d decided to option the idea, giving her the funds she needed to stay afloat and keep her place for the time being. Anytime she was having any hesitations about accepting their support neither of them would let a second pass without reminding her they hadn’t gotten to where they were without help. It was best to just embrace it and chase her dreams with all her heart.
Rebekah Weatherspoon (If the Boot Fits (Cowboys of California, #2))
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Vitamin DEE Gummies South Africa
The earth is a microscopic speck compared to the rest of the cosmos, but already Genesis 1:1 alludes to the central place it has in the story. According to Genesis 1, this otherwise piddling planet will be the primary stage for God to display the riches of his glory. Then the lens of the narrative narrowly focuses on one special object of God’s creation called adam, the Hebrew word for “man.” God created both “male and female,” uniquely in his own image (vv. 26–27). No other creatures possess such dignity (Ps. 8:4–5). God is the center of the story, but man is central to his unfolding plan. He is a supporting character, designed to live in perfect harmony and fellowship with his Creator, serving and honoring him in the establishment of a holy kingdom on earth (Gen. 1:28).
Scott Christensen (Defeating Evil: How God Glorifies Himself in a Dark World)
Feminism, in essence, is itself a giant female support group, where women (mostly) offer each other support and encouragement—literally, pass on courage to one another.
Jane Caro (Accidental Feminists)
I wanted a good smut book where the female lead was worshipped like a queen and dicked down by multiple men repeatedly. All day. Every day. Constant dicking. Also, the lead men needed to be super sweet and supportive.
Jasmine Mas (Psycho Fae (Cruel Shifterverse, #2))
Because I have a dick and you have a pussy?" he offered knowingly. "Oh, please. I'm a twenty-first century guy. I support equal rights for everyone, which includes the right for me, a dick owner, to tell a stalkerish female, such as yourself, to fuck off!" "That was impressive," Hughie mused. "I'm an impressive guy,
Chloe Walsh (Keeping 13 (Boys of Tommen #2))
We each have our own loads of primary responsibility to bear, and in the breakdown of household duties, I believe our primary roles should reflect our God-given talents, preferences, and circumstances first. In more cases than not, the result will mirror a traditional male-female dynamic because God has gifted men and women with unique temperaments and strengths that naturally lend themselves to particular tasks. It is far from a universal rule though. Regardless of who “runs point” for any given job, God’s Word calls us to share in the work and support our spouses rather than focus on our burdens alone.
Abbie Halberstadt (Hard Is Not the Same Thing as Bad: The Perspective Shift That Could Completely Change the Way You Mother)
Part 1 A Woman is a Fate? Or a Bless? When a baby is girl is born, to some is a blessing. She will grow as wonderful woman, beautiful, with nice features and showers love as a daughter, a sister, as a wife, as a friend and as a mother. It is also luck, or a Mahalakshmi to the house. Some centuries back, and to some people when she is born, she is a fate. An ill fated to some in orthodox families and believe that she brings bad luck. So, there is this ritual in some places or villages where, when a new born baby girl will be poisoned to death upon her arrival on earth. It is brutal and devastating. Yes it is still happening till today. Where did this ritual came from? Who started it? Where was it written that the baby must be killed if it is a girl. And WHY? Has anyone thought, that it was a woman who carried her for 9 months, loved her from the day she is created in her womb, and the moment when she is born, the tear of a joy and her happiness the moment she sees her little tiny human girl arrived, and her dreams as mother and to love her all her life… will be no longer alive in the next few minutes? I have always respected woman, for uncountable reasons. As much as I am happy to see them successful, but it also worries me most of the time. 99.9% of it I am worried for them! The one who gave birth to us, is a woman. We also worship to a female God and beg her to show mercy on us. It is also a woman, who becomes a wife and satisfies a husband’s needs. But still, there are no respect shown to them despite knowing these basics. In some houses while her parents off to work, or being abandoned, or lets just say the parents passed. It is her responsibility to take care the rest of her family as the family head. When it comes to education, she is not safe to study among the boys, neither in higher education. Same goes to a woman at work. As she will have those wild eyes on her, she has to take care of her virginity, her womb, and her dignity. Beyond these, there are also some beasts, who is talented in sweet talking and flirtatious towards her. When she is too naïve and fall for the trap, it happens to be a one night stand. Once a woman marriage is fixed, she gets married and goes off to her in laws. Her life changes in the moment the knots tied by the man. In todays millennia, womens are still carrying the burden of the responsibility of her maternal side, together with her new in-laws. Every morning she wakes up, she serves the husband, deal the day with by preparing him for his day, every day. As well taking care of her new in-laws all of her life. Then, comes the pregnancy moment, again, she carries her child her womb, making sure he is safe in there, and taking care of her world on the outside. She loses all her beauty, her happiness, her wishes, her ambitions, and it is all sacrificed for the sake of her marriage. And then the cycle never stops. She raises her children, become beautiful, and then one day they too get married. But as mother, she never stopped caring and provide them all the love, the needs, etc. It never stops. There are some man and in laws who support their daughter in law and I have a big salute to them. They are an example for today’s woman millennia, don’t stop her for what she is capable of, and don’t clip her wings..
Dr.Thieren Jie
For males, power is the ultimate aphrodisiac, and an addictive one at that. The violent reaction of Nikkie and Yeroen to their loss of power fits the frustration-aggression hypothesis to the letter: the deeper the bitterness, the greater the anger. Males jealously guard their power, and lose all inhibition if anyone challenges it. And this hadn’t been the first time for Yeroen. The ferocity of the attack on Luit may have been due to the fact that it was the second time he had come out on top. The first time Luit gained the upper hand - marking the end of Yeroen’s ancient regime - I was perplexed by the way the established leader reacted. Normally a dignified character, Yeroen became unrecognizable. In the midst of a confrontation, he would drop out of a tree like a rotten apple, writhing on the ground, screaming pitifully, and waiting to be comforted by the rest of the group. He acted much like a juvenile ape being pushed away from his mother’s teats. And like a juvenile who during tantrums keeps an eye on mom for signs of softening, Yeroen always noted who approached him. If the group around him was big and powerful enough, and especially if it included the alpha female, he would gain instant courage. With his supporters in tow, he would rekindle the confrontation with his rival. Clearly, Yeroen’s tantrums were yet another example of deft manipulation. What fascinated me most, however, were the parallels with infantile attachment, nicely captured in expressions like “clinging to power” and “being weaned from power.” Knocking a male off his pedestal gets the same reaction as yanking the security blanket away from a baby. When Yeroen finally lost his top spot, he would often sit staring into the distance after a fight, an empty expression on his face. He was oblivious to the social activity around him and refused food for weeks. We thought he was sick, but the veterinarian found nothing wrong. Yeroen seemed a mere ghost of the impressive big shot he had been. I’ve never forgotten this image of a beaten and dejected Yeroen. When power was lost, the lights in him went out.
Frans de Waal (Our Inner Ape: A Leading Primatologist Explains Why We Are Who We Are)
Where Are the Ads of Old? The granddaddy of them all was the Yuban coffee commercial, parodied so well in Airplane!, in which a couple is leaving a dinner party when the host appears and offers them a second cup of coffee. The husband, Jim, takes it. The wife, dejected and shamed, hangs her head like a dog that just got caught shitting on the carpet as we hear her internal monologue: “Jim never has a second cup of my coffee.” Her credentials as an adequate wife were just torched. This is the female equivalent of being cuckolded. She was cuckolded by coffee.
Adam Carolla (I'm Your Emotional Support Animal: Navigating Our All Woke, No Joke Culture)
For years I have been saying Let me in, Love me, Approve me, Define me, Regulate me, Validate me, Support me . Now I say Move over . If we are all Mankind, it follows to my interested and righteous and right now very bright and beady little eyes, that I too am a Man
Joanna Russ (The Female Man)
Jesus taught his followers to think of God as Father. In India it is more common to speak of God as Divine Mother. Saints of various persuasions have successfully communed with God by similarly idealizing other human relations — such as Friend or Beloved. It makes no difference. When I feel the gravity of wisdom, I speak of God as the Father. When I feel unbounded, unconditional love I call God Divine Mother. When I feel God as the nearest of the near, supporter and confidant, I call Him Friend. Thus, it is a misnomer to refer to God always as "He." It is equally appropriate to call God "She." But in the ultimate, God is Spirit, neither masculine nor feminine. Spirit is above any human correlation. Similarly, the soul is neither male nor female, though karmic inclinations cause it to incarnate either with the body of a man or a woman.
Paramahansa Yogananda (The Second Coming of Christ: The Resurrection of the Christ Within You (2 Volume Set) 1St edition by Yogananda, Paramahansa published by Self-Realization Fellowship Hardcover)
the deepest inner conflicts of smart girls were the fear of our bodies’ betraying us, the depression suffered from lack of emotional support, and the reality of there being nowhere to turn.
bell hooks (Communion: The Female Search for Love – A Profound Vision for Self-Love, Sisterhood, Liberation, and Emotional Growth (Love Song to the Nation Book 2))
You are responsible to get certain things you need for your own personal development and emotional and spiritual health outside the marriage. If you’ve blown off your support system—your female friends, your hobbies, your recreation, your spiritual friendships—hoping your husband could replace all of these while also meeting all your relational needs, then you’re setting up yourself (and your marriage) for disappointment and failure. No husband, by himself, is enough; you still need others, and it’s your responsibility to cultivate those other relationships. Could
Gary L. Thomas (Loving Him Well: Practical Advice on Influencing Your Husband)
Each one of my partners supported my intellectual and creative work in ways that I still appreciate and value, whereas the lack of mature emotional interaction helped retard my emotional growth.
bell hooks (Communion: The Female Search for Love – A Profound Vision for Self-Love, Sisterhood, Liberation, and Emotional Growth (Love Song to the Nation Book 2))
The Lottery by Stewart Stafford It was New York, 1984, The AIDS tsunami roared in, Friends, old overnight, no more, Breathless, I went for a check-up. A freezing winter's dawn, A solitary figure before me, What we called a drag queen, White heels trembled in the cold. "Hi, are you here to get tested?" Gum chewed, brown eyes stared. This was not my type of person, I turned heel and walked away. At month's end, a crippling flu, The grey testing centre called, Two hundred people ahead of me; A waking nightmare all too real. I gave up and turned to leave, But a familiar voice called out: "Hey, you there, come back!" I stopped and turned around. The drag queen stood there in furs, But sicker, I didn't recognise them, "Stand with me in the line, honey." "Nah, I'm fine, I'll come back again." "Support an old broad before she faints?" A voice no longer frail but pin-sharp. I got in line to impatient murmurs: "If anyone has a problem, see me!" Sylvester on boombox, graveyard choir. My pal's stage name was Carol DaRaunch, (After the Ted Bundy female survivor) Their real name was Ernesto Rodriguez. After seeing the doctor, Carol hugged me, Writing down their number on some paper, With their alias not their real name on it: "Is this the number of where you work?" "THAT is my home number to call me on. THAT'S my autograph, for when I'm famous!" "I was wrong about you, Carol," I said. "Baby, it takes time to get to know me!" A hug, shimmy, the threadbare blonde left. A silent chorus of shuffling dead men walking, Spartan results, a young man's death sentence. Real words faded rehearsal, my eyes watered. Two weeks on, I cautiously phoned up Carol. The receiver was picked up, dragging sounds, Like furniture being moved: "Is Carol there?" "That person is dead." They hung up on me. All my life's harsh judgements, dumped on Carol, Who was I to win life's lottery over a guardian angel? I still keep that old phone number forty years on, Crumpled, faded, portable guilt lives on in my wallet. © Stewart Stafford, 2024. All rights reserved.
Stewart Stafford
The abusive man learns early in life, from his surrounding society and beyond, that when he becomes an adult he has the right to swallow a female whole, and that in this way he will fill the vast emptiness inside of him and feel empty no more. He learns that the female of his choosing owes him her life entire in this fashion, that it would be wrong of her to fail to sacrifice her life and herself in this way. Not only that, but he learns that this self-erasure will be her greatest joy. He gets these messages all over the place, from his own unhealthy relatives all the way up to police responses, courts, and Disney movies. All of what he learns is a lie. It is a moral lie, meaning it’s a lie about what’s right and what’s wrong; no woman’s life should ever by martyred to fill a man’s (or anyone’s) emptiness. But not only should this not be done, it also cannot be done. Thus it is not only a moral lie but also a lie about the nature of reality. A human being cannot be vacuumed into the inside of another person and become part of that person, in some kind of twisted reversal of the birth process. It’s absurd that it’s even necessary for me to state this. The abusive man hates the woman for continuing to exist outside of him. No matter how hard she may try, in her terror and in her trauma, to disappear inside of him, she simply cannot do it. (And if she gets some support in her life, she may even attempt to refuse to continue trying.) He hates her for this, for still being there, because he was taught that to disappear inside of him is her unlimited obligation and will make him whole. When you find yourself wondering why the abuser hates you – as most abused women do at one point or another – this is why: because you continue to breathe, because you have skin, because you eat food and then move with the energy of that food, because by getting out of bed and standing up in the morning you have once again demonstrated your failure to become him.
Lundy Bancroft
I see no dishonor in a woman selling her body to support her children; the dishonor lies with a society that has placed her in that position.
Siddharth Katragadda (The Other Wife: A Novel in Verse)
Biology: how the physical body functions         • Psychology: developmental issues and thought patterns         • Social connections: social support and current life situation         • Spiritual health: what life means
Daniel G. Amen (Unleash the Power of the Female Brain: Supercharging Yours for Better Health, Energy, Mood, Focus, and Sex)
Estradiol—Estradiol is the strongest estrogen; it helps you think clearly. It is produced in the ovaries and has many protective effects, including maintaining bone density, improving growth hormone production and cardiovascular function, keeping your blood from getting “sticky,” supporting cognitive function and mood, assisting in growth hormone release, and improving your lipids profile. Too much estradiol can be associated with estrogen-related cancers, but deficiencies can lead to osteoporosis, heart disease, dementia, and other diseases of aging. Estradiol keeps you looking and feeling young and vibrant. It also provides antiaging protection for the skin. And it even helps prevent weight gain. Researchers at Yale University have found that estradiol suppresses appetite using the same pathways in the brain as leptin, which is one of the hormones that regulate appetite.
Daniel G. Amen (Unleash the Power of the Female Brain: Supercharging Yours for Better Health, Energy, Mood, Focus, and Sex)
still remains the only film in Oscar history to receive four female acting nominations – two for best actress and two for best supporting actress.
Anupama Chopra (100 Films to See before You Die)
Both white and black women were more likely than their male counterparts to support Hillary Clinton—and in my observation, also more likely to believe that she couldn’t win. Male and female black voters were more likely than white voters to support Obama and also to believe he couldn’t win. Each group was made pessimistic by the depth of the bias they had experienced.
Gloria Steinem (My Life on the Road)
I knew that outside the women’s movement, I would be better liked if I chose Obama. Women are always better liked if we sacrifice ourselves for something bigger—and something bigger always means including men, even though something bigger for men doesn’t usually mean including women. In choosing Hillary, I would be seen as selfish for supporting a woman “like” me. But that was a warning, too. Needing approval is a female cultural disease, and often a sign of doing the wrong thing.
Gloria Steinem (My Life on the Road)
In a Harvard Business Review article titled “Do Women Lack Ambition?” Anna Fels, a psychiatrist at Cornell University, observes that when the dozens of successful women she interviewed told their own stories, “they refused to claim a central, purposeful place.” Were Dr. Fels to interview you, how would you tell your story? Are you using language that suggests you’re the supporting actress in your own life? For instance, when someone offers words of appreciation about a dinner you’ve prepared, a class you’ve taught, or an event you organized and brilliantly executed, do you gracefully reply “Thank you” or do you say, “It was nothing”? As Fels tried to understand why women refuse to be the heroes of their own stories, she encountered the Bem Sex-Role Inventory, which confirms that society considers a woman to be feminine only within the context of a relationship and when she is giving something to someone. It’s no wonder that a “feminine” woman finds it difficult to get in the game and demand support to pursue her goals. It also explains why she feels selfish when she doesn’t subordinate her needs to others. A successful female CEO recently needed my help. It was mostly business-related but also partly for her. As she started to ask for my assistance, I sensed how difficult it was for her. Advocate on her organization’s behalf? Piece of cake. That’s one of the reasons her business has been successful. But advocate on her own behalf? I’ll confess that even among my closest friends I find it painful to say, “Look what I did,” and so I don’t do it very often. If you want to see just how masterful most women have become at deflecting, the next time you’re with a group of girlfriends, ask them about something they (not their husband or children) have done well in the past year. Chances are good that each woman will quickly and deftly redirect the conversation far, far away from herself. “A key type of discrimination that women face is the expectation that feminine women will forfeit opportunities for recognition,” says Fels. “When women do speak as much as men in a work situation or compete for high-visibility positions, their femininity is assailed.” My point here isn’t to say that relatedness and nurturing and picking up our pom-poms to cheer others on is unimportant. Those qualities are often innate to women. If we set these “feminine” qualities aside or neglect them, we will have lost an irreplaceable piece of ourselves. But to truly grow up, we must learn to throw down our pom-poms, believing we can act and that what we have to offer is a valuable part of who we are. When we recognize this, we give ourselves permission to dream and to encourage the girls and women around us to do the same.
Whitney Johnson (Dare, Dream, Do: Remarkable Things Happen When You Dare to Dream)
To sit beside Eve and not touch her was difficult. To sit beside her and not argue his case was making Deene clench his jaw and ball his fists and recite the Lord’s Prayer in Latin, Greek, French, and German. Marrying Eve made such sense. When last he’d considered the notion, he hadn’t been dealing with nasty rumors that had Mildred Staines eyeing his crotch and the clubs going oddly silent when Deene walked into the room. The idea of taking Eve to wife loomed as not just right, but necessary for them both. The list of arguments in support of their wedding circled through his head faster than the wheels of their conveyance bore them toward a reckoning: He and Eve were of appropriate rank. They had shared interests. Their lands marched. They were compatible in ways both mundane and intimate. He needed to marry well, and Eve needed to marry a man who’d be a true husband to her if she was to have the children and loving family that was her God-given right. He’d give her all the children she wanted and delight in doing so… A white marriage, for God’s sake… As Eve turned the cart up the Moreland drive, it occurred to Deene that in some convoluted, unfathomable female manner, Eve was probably seeking to relieve her family of worrying over her and punish herself in the bargain with this notion of a white marriage. Which he could not allow. She deserved so much better. She deserved every happiness a family and home of her own could afford, and more, given… given everything. She
Grace Burrowes (Lady Eve's Indiscretion (The Duke's Daughters, #4; Windham, #7))
I always say that my success has been three parts support and encouragement from my amazing network and one part piss and vinegar.
Amber Hurdle (The Bombshell Business Woman: How to Become a Bold, Brave Female Entrepreneur)
Creating a plan to bring in more business in a way that does not ultimately support your annual goals is fighting against yourself.
Amber Hurdle (The Bombshell Business Woman: How to Become a Bold, Brave Female Entrepreneur)
Ann CoulterAnn Coulter > Quotes Ann Coulter quotes (showing 1-30 of 210) “Guns are our friends because in a country without guns, I'm what's known as "prey." All females are.” ― Ann Coulter, If Democrats Had Any Brains, They'd Be Republicans tags: humor, politics, second-amendment 143 likes Like “I'm a Christian first, and a mean-spirited, bigoted conservative second, and don't you ever forget it. You know who else was kind of "divisive" in terms of challenging the status quo and the powers-that-be of his day? Jesus Christ.” ― Ann Coulter, If Democrats Had Any Brains, They'd Be Republicans tags: faith, humor, politics 112 likes Like “When conservative judges strike down laws, it's because of what's in the Constitution. When liberal judges strike down laws (or impose new laws), it's because of what's in the New York Times” ― Ann Coulter, If Democrats Had Any Brains, They'd Be Republicans tags: humor, politics 60 likes Like “The Democratic Party supports criminals and Islamic terrorists but has no sympathy for taxpayers.” ― Ann Coulter, If Democrats Had Any Brains, They'd Be Republicans tags: humor, politics 50 likes Like “No matter what argument you make against evolution, the response is Well, you know, it's possible to believe in evolution and believe in God. Yes, and it's possible to believe in Spiderman and believe in God, but that doesn't prove Spiderman is true.” ― Ann Coulter, Godless: The Church of Liberalism tags: faith, humor, politics 45 likes Like “As far as I'm concerned, I'm a middle-of-the-road moderate and the rest of you are crazy.
Ann Coulter
It is hardly surprising that within a patriarchy, these young (uninitiated) female characters are inevitably drawn to their powerful, older counterparts. This is perhaps even why we require this (often fairly rough) initiation/intervention of the “dark forces.” We are not supported to achieve maturity and power; our culture conspires to keep us youthful, innocent, and powerless.
Cassius Sparrow (Llewellyn's 2017 Witches' Companion: An Almanac for Contemporary Living)
What will you do with Anna?” “I’ve proposed and proposed and proposed.” The earl sighed, surprising himself and apparently his brother with his candor. “She’ll have none of that, though the last time, she put me off rather than turn me down flat.” “Things are a little unsettled,” Dev pointed out dryly. “And marriage would settle them,” the earl shot back. “Married to me, there wouldn’t be any more nonsense from her brother, not for her or Morgan. Her grandmother would be safe, and Stull would be nothing but a bad, greasy memory.” “He is enough to give any female the shudders, though maybe Anna has the right of it.” “What can you possibly mean?” The earl stood up and paced to the French doors. “You and she are in unusual circumstances,” Dev began. “You are protective of her and probably not thinking very clearly about her. She is not a duke’s daughter, as you might be expected to marry, not even a marquis’s sister. She’s beneath you socially and likely undowered and not even as young as a proper mate to you should be.” “Young?” the earl expostulated. “You mean I can get her to drop only five foals instead of ten?” “You have a duty to the succession,” Dev said, his words having more impact for being quietly spoken. “Anna understands this.” “Rot the fucking succession,” Westhaven retorted. “I have His Grace’s permission to marry for love, indeed, his exhortation to marry only for love.” “Are you saying you love her?” Dev asked, his voice still quiet. “Of course I love her,” the earl all but roared. “Why else would I be taking such pains for her safety? Why else would I be offering her marriage more times than I can count? Why else would I have gone to His Grace for help? Why else would I be arguing with you at an hour when most people are either asleep or enjoying other bedtime activities?” Dev rose and offered his brother a look of sympathy. “If you love her, then your course is very easy to establish.” “Oh it is, is it?” The earl glared at his brother. “If you love her,” Dev said, “you give her what she wants of you, no matter how difficult or irrational it may seem to you. You do not behave as His Grace has, thinking that love entitles him to know better than his grown children what will make them happy or what will be in their best interests.” Westhaven sat down abruptly, the wind gone from his sails between one heartbeat and the next. “You are implying I could bully her.” “You know you could, Gayle. She is grateful to you, lonely, not a little enamored of you, and without support.” “You are a mean man, Devlin St. Just.” The earl sighed. “Cruel, in fact.” “I would not see you make a match you or Anna regret. And you deserve the truth.” “That’s what Anna has said. You give me much to think about, and none of it very cheering.” “Well, think of it this way.” Dev smiled as he turned for the door. “If you marry her now, you can regret it at great leisure. If you don’t marry her now, then you can regret that as long as you can stand it then marry her later.
Grace Burrowes (The Heir (Duke's Obsession, #1; Windham, #1))
Nature Favors Risk Takers Starting something new means taking a risk. But in our society, the word "risk" has assumed mostly negative connotations. When someone tells us "that's risky," most of us have a visceral, fearful reaction. But Mother Nature seems to have built a loophole into our sense of well-being, because embedded somewhere within the human genetic makeup is an inclination to take risks. Of course, in order for evolution and natural selection to favor risk-taking as a behavior there has to be a benefit, and that benefit has to outweigh the outcome of doing nothing. Many examples from the animal kingdom support this hypothesis. According to research by Dr. Lee Alan Dugatkin, who was trying to understand a continuum of risk-taking, fish willing to take risks were likely to mate better.11 Guppies, for example, engage in what is known as predator inspection behavior. Predator inspection is akin to guard duty. A few fish break away from the group and slowly approach the predator to obtain information. In taking risks in the presence of a predator, a guppy is more likely to get eaten, but a male guppy that takes this risk is more attractive as a mate to females.12 The bolder guppies are also better at learning.
Whitney Johnson (Disrupt Yourself: Putting the Power of Disruptive Innovation to Work)
While Katharine masked almost all her actions in ladylike, feminine trappings, she was a shrewd businesswoman at heart, more capable than most men of managing a hundred employees and making a killing on Wall Street. Katharine spent her adulthood extending her freedom and authority as a woman, and R.J.R. supported her in that quest. As much as R.J.R. and Katharine challenged traditional gender conventions by creating a more modern model for marriage, however, they did not question the fundamental inequalities of the new order that they themselves generated and benefited from. While both took action to improve the quality of the lives of many people, white and black, throughout the city and the state as benevolent paternalists, they never questioned the myriad racial injustices imposed on African Americans by white supremacy and the Jim Crow system. Nor were they troubled enough by structural inequities experienced across the whole working class, white and black, male and female, to propose substantive change.
Michele Gillespie (Katharine and R.J. Reynolds: Partners of Fortune in the Making of the New South)
THE CODE OF A GOOD TRAINING PARTNER I will show up on time for every workout, and if I can’t avoid missing one, I’ll let my partner know as soon as I know. I will come to the gym to train—not to chat. When we’re in the gym, we focus on our workouts, we’re always ready to spot each other, and we get our work done efficiently. I will train hard to set a good example for my partner. I will push my partner to do more than she thinks she can. It’s my job to motivate her to do more weight and more reps than she believes possible. I will be supportive of my partner and will compliment her on her gains. I won’t let my partner get out of a workout easily. I will reject any excuses that are short of an actual emergency or commitment that can’t be rescheduled, and I will insist that she comes and trains. In the case where there’s a valid excuse, I’ll offer to train at a different time so we can get our workout in (if at all possible).
Michael Matthews (Thinner Leaner Stronger: The Simple Science of Building the Ultimate Female Body)
One positive move would be for managers to seek out qualified female candidates to hire and promote. They can also invest more in the recruiting of these female candidates plus their mentoring and helping them get the experience they need. The battle between the stay-at-home moms and the career moms needs to stop. Each group should stop judging each other and causing guilt trips. Those women who have decided to stay at home and raise a family should not be looked down upon by the career women. Career women with families need not feel like the stay-at-home mothers and feminism both are making them feel guilty. Each group needs to be respectful of the other and their contributions. As more women attain senior positions of leadership, things will change. These women will raise the ceiling and the floor. This book was written to encourage women to dream big. It is also hoped that men will do their part to support women in their careers and in the workplace. While many women may not be focused on getting to the top, if more women lean in then conditions for all women will improve. Sheryl Sandberg looks forward to a world where her children and others, both boys and girls, will be able to make the choice of what to do with their lives without obstacles, both internal and external, slowing them down.
Natalie Thompson (Lean In: A Summary of Sheryl Sandberg's Book)
The stress of rapid change, the absence of supportive female relatives and the attempt to adjust to an alien way of life disturbed the cultural practices which protected mothers and babies.
Gabrielle Palmer (The Politics of Breastfeeding: When Breasts are Bad for Business)
On a biological level, women do care more about finding a male who has the ability and willingness to care for them. But the extent to which he is able to support a female is measured by his confidence, while his will to care is found in his charm, and both traits are reflected in how much responsibility he takes. It is these three personality traits themselves and their appearance in a male that turn females on and bring a male his success with women, not his achievements or wealth. And the level of caring that is necessary, and what it means to care for a woman, is very far from having a successful career or paying her bills
Anonymous