• “When I am assertive, I’m a bitch. When a man is assertive, he’s a boss. He’s bossed up. No negative connotation behind ‘bossed up.’ But lots of negative connotation behind being a bitch. Donald Trump can say, ‘You’re fired.’ Let Martha Stewart run her company the same way and be the same way. People will say: ‘f**king old evil bitch!’ But Donald Trump, he gets to hang out with young bitches and have 50 different wives and just be cool. ‘Oh, Donald, we love you, Donald Trump!’ … When you’re a girl, you have to be everything. You have to be dope at what you do but you have to be super sweet and you have to be sexy and you have to be this, you have to be that, and you have to be nice. It’s like, ‘I can’t be all those things at once. I’m a human being.’”- Nicki Minaj
  • “To “slut shame” is to perpetuate the idea that sex is dirty, and in particular, dirty and dangerous for a woman. That rigid mindset is problematic as it is unrealistic and does little in the way of advancing the way we discuss consensual sex between adults.”- Lindy West
  • "Girls tend to not take seriously the talents they could have maybe they sing or maybe they play guitar a little bit, but there aren’t many that want to become like Jimi Hendrix.” - Theresa
  • “One of the ways I started to love and accept my body was by actively living in my body. That is to say, sometimes, I grab my squishy bits for no reason. I trace my stretchmarks. I play connect-the-dots with my freckles. I own these things, because they are mine, and to me, that’s something worth celebrating.” -Shakethecobwebs
  • "The girls are never supposed to end up together. I watched that movie with Ellen Page and Alia Shawkat, the roller-skating movie, the one where Ellen and Alia are best friends, each other's only comforts in their podunk town. They need each other, and they hug, and they dance, and they tell each other I Love You, and Ellen meets a skinny boy who plays in a band. It doesn't even work out with the boy, but that's almost tangential. The girl was never a real option.I think that's why it's really difficult for girls. For me. We follow narratives and our fingertips trace the contours of the stories we love and we long to escape within the confines of our own lives. Meet your boyfriend in the pouring rain and yank down his mask and kiss him upside down. Run with your boyfriend to the front of the ferry and throw your arms out to the side and scream, ...I'm king of the world!“ If you are a girl in love with a boy, your possibilities are infinite. If there is a special girl in your life, you love her as a friend. You love her as a friend, but she becomes less important to you as you grow, and you leave her behind for a boy. She might even stand next to you when you marry the boy, and she might catch the bouquet of flowers that you throw to her. You're giving her permission to move on, move away from you. It's a ceremony of separation. But if you should fall in love with a girl - and loving and falling in love are two very distinct things - the first kiss is the end. You've all seen the movie. Or the television show. Or the after-school special, or you've read the book that was banned from your school's library for containing Sexual Content. The point of your story is not to fall in love. The point of your story is to struggle. Your story begins with a lie and climaxes in a truth and ends with a kiss. In the movie of your life, forty-five minutes are devoted to you figuring out how to say that you want to kiss girls, and another half-hour is devoted to people's objections, and maybe the last fifteen minutes is you kissing the girl. Maybe you don't even get to kiss the girl. Maybe she tells you that she's flattered, but she doesn't bat for your team. The critics swoon; it's realistic, they say, so realistic, to depict the struggle of the modern teen, the heartbreak of irresolvable incompatibility. Isn't that always what celebrities cite in their divorces? ..."Irreconciliable differences.“ And so you're lying on the floor of your bathroom, your knees curled to your chest, or you're on your sofa with a pint of ice cream, or you're in bed watching your favourite sad movie on Netflix, and the collective weight of all that you consume settles on your shoulders, leans in, and whispers, ..."You were never meant to fall in love.“ You were never meant to fall in love. Your story ends in tears or it ends in death. Jack Twist was bludgeoned to death with a tire iron and Ennis Del Mar was left alone in his closet to dance with an empty shirt. Alby Grant found Dale Tomasson swinging by a noose in the apartment that had been their safehouse, their respite, and he sank to his knees and cradled Dale's bare feet and he cried. The Motion Picture Association of America axed Lana Tisdel and Brandon Teena's sex scenes, but they didn't have a problem with the extended shot of Lana cradling Brandon's corpse in her fragile arms and falling asleep next to his body.Love and intimacy are ours only in death, or so it would seem. I don't want to die. Isn't that a very human experience? Not wanting to die? When does anyone who looks like me get to grow old and raise grandchildren and hold her wife's hand as the skin wrinkles, turns translucent?Sometimes my father asks me if I'll ever date a man. Sometimes he doesn't ask. ..."You are attracted to men, and you dream about falling in love with men,“ he says, as if he can will his imaginary daughter into existence merely by speaking about her. Or maybe he is just looking out for my safety. He's seen the movies, too. He loves me. He doesn't want me to die."--tumblr user jessicacapshaw
  • "Intuitive eating” or whatever you want to call the radical notion of eating what you want, when you're hungry, and stopping when you're full demands that we trust our bodies. Most women learn early and often that their bodies are never to be trusted, that their bodies need strict regulation, especially when it comes to desire, be it the desire for food or for sex. As a result, learning to trust one's body is difficult enough; when you add in a past that includes trauma and abuse, it becomes harder still. But your body IS trustworthy. I promise you that. Your body is not your enemy."--Lesley Kinzel
  • "I design clothes because I don't want women to look all innocent and naive¦I want woman to look stronger¦I don't like women to be taken advantage of¦I don't like men whistling at women in the street. I think they deserve more respect. I like men to keep their distance from women, I like men to be stunned by an entrance. I've seen a woman get nearly beaten to death by her husband. I know what misogyny is¦ I want people to be afraid of the women I dress."--Alexander McQueen
  • "There are no Jack Kerouacs or Holden Caulfields for girls. Literary girls don't take road-trips to find themselves; they take trips to find men. "Great" books, as defined by the Western canon, didn't contain female protagonists I could admire. In fact, they barely contained female protagonists at all."--Kelsey McKinney
  • Mother says there are locked rooms inside all women, kitchen of love, bedroom of grief, bathroom of apathy. Sometimes, the men, they come with keys, and sometimes the men, they come with hammers.
jan 22 2015 ∞
sep 25 2015 +