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“In my own case, I had to train myself out of that phony smile, which is like a nervous tic on every teenage girl. And this meant that I smiled rarely, for in truth, when it came down to real smiling, I had less to smile about. My ‘dream’ action for the women’s liberation movement: a smile boycott, at which declaration all women would instantly abandon their ‘pleasing’ smiles, henceforth smiling only when something pleased them.”
-Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution
“At this moment, the liberal basis of most progressive movements is impeding our ability, individually and collectively, to take action. The individualism of liberalism, and of American society generally, renders too many of us unable to think clearly about our dire situation. Individual action is not an effective response to power because human society is political; by definition it is built from groups, not from individuals. That is not to say that individual acts of physical and intellectual courage can’t spearhead movements. But Rosa Parks didn’t end segregation on the Montgomery, Alabama, bus system. Rosa Parks plus the stalwart determination and strategic savvy of the entire black community did.
Liberalism also diverges from a radical analysis on the question of the nature of social reality. Liberalism is idealist. This is the belief that reality is a mental activity. Oppression, therefore, consists of attitudes and ideas, and social change happens through rational argument and education. Materialism, in contrast, is the understanding that society is organized by concrete systems of power, not by thoughts and ideas, and that the solution to oppression is to take those systems apart brick by brick. This in no way implies that individuals are exempt from examining their privilege and behaving honorably. It does mean that antiracism workshops will never end racism: only political struggle to rearrange the fundamentals of power will.”
Lierre Keith. – From the Essay Oppression and Subordination.
— Andrea Dworkin
“Before I became radicalised as a man-hating, separatist feminzai hell-bent on installing a matriarchy and imprisoning men as its slaves, I possessed a nominal amount of internalised misogyny. Women were bitchy and mean. They cared about irrelevant rubbish and talked in loud, shrill voices. Their laughter was annoying and tinny, and they did it performatively and too often. Women were boring and dumb, especially if they were pretty and nice.
Were I born a few years later, I’ve no doubt that I could have easily fallen into the horrifying hole that is Women Against Feminism. Being down on other girls was a gesture to reassure all the boys around me that while I may have looked vaguely like a girl on the outside, I wasn’t really like a girl-girl.
Like so many girls caught in this trap, it wasn’t enough for me to be considered an intellectual and social equal by men (because really, that’s what a lot of this scrabbling for their approval comes back to—the misplaced desire to achieve equality for ourselves by being welcomed into the inner sanctum rather than to destroy the sanctum and redefine the dynamic entirely); I also had to climb a tower made of the discarded and disdained bodies of other women in order to prove myself worthy to enter.
Because I was born a girl, I was taught to fundamentally distrust other women. Whether it arises as bullying, cruelty, or viciously-applied sexism, girls are separated from each other (and from organising into a bloc of power) by being encouraged to view each other as competition for male approval.”
— Clementine Ford, Fight Like A Girl
“Dilbert comic Scott Adams wrote last month that we live in a matriarchy because, ‘access to sex is strictly controlled by the woman.’ Meaning that you don’t get to have sex with someone unless they want to have sex with you, which if we say it without any gender pronouns sounds completely reasonable. You don’t get to share someone’s sandwich unless they want to share their sandwich with you, and that’s not a form of oppression either. You probably learned that in kindergarten. But if you assume that sex with a female body is a right that heterosexual men have, then women are just these crazy illegitimate gatekeepers always trying to get in between you and your rights. Which means you have failed to recognize that women are people, and perhaps that comes from the books and movies you have—and haven’t—been exposed to, as well as the direct inculcation of the people and systems around you.”
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