Against Feminism Quotes

#1. The backlash against feminism remains savage, strong, and omnipresent, but it is not winning. The world has changed profoundly, and it needs to change far more.

Rebecca Solnit

#2. I think the problem is that there has been a kind of backlash against feminism. I think women just didn't really see themselves winning that fight, and I think that probably led to a lot women feeling trapped in a perpetual cycle of disappointment - trying to be feminists and failing to be.

Romola Garai

#3. Horror stories give us a way of exhausting our emotions around social issues, like a woman's right to an abortion, which I always thought was the core of 'Rosemary's Baby,' or the backlash against feminism which I always thought was the core to 'Stepford Wives.'

Chuck Palahniuk

#4. I'm completely against [feminism]. I have no desire to give up my privileges.

Hannah Arendt

#5. I think too often we forget that girls can like sport; we are not biologically programmed to detest it, we are - in the main - conditioned against it. But shouldn't we try to change that?

Anna Kessel

#6. The outcry against killing women, if you accept killing at all, is sheer sentimentality. Why is it worse to kill a woman than a man?

George Orwell

#7. We have an abundance of rape and violence against women in this country and on this Earth, though it's almost never treated as a civil rights or human rights issue, or a crisis, or even a pattern. Violence doesn't have a race, a class, a religion, or a nationality, but it does have a gender.

Rebecca Solnit

#8. Diversity has got to be a part of modern feminism, and I think that my feminism is stronger because its an inclusive thing. I won't be backed into a corner that polarizes me against other women. And I wished they wouldn't be either.

Betty Friedan

#9. All sex, even consensual sex between a married couple, is an act of violence perpetrated against a woman.

Catharine MacKinnon

#10. The very act of accepting her position at Mademoiselle was an act of open defiance against Dick Norton, his entire family, and the gendered expectations of midcentury America.

Elizabeth Winder

#11. Out with stereotypes, feminism proclaims. But stereotypes are the west's stunning sexual personae, the vehicles of art's assault against nature. The moment there is imagination, there is myth.

Camille Paglia

#12. If you propose there is a feminism problem in Korea, somebody would point out that you are bringing up antiquated issues. No one acknowledges that discrimination against women is still widespread.

Kim Hyesoon

#13. WANTING to be anything is the whole point of feminism. HAVING TO BE SOMETHING is what feminists fight against, or at least the ones I know.

Alida Nugent

#14. Men have committed the greatest crime against women. Insidiously, violently, they have led them to hate women, to be their own enemies, to mobilize their immense strength against themselves, to be the executants of their virile needs.

Helene Cixous

#15. Women that speak against Islam are being labelled as islamophobic, as though our right to free speech is disregarded, when it comes down to an oppressive regime, which does not even recognise women as human...

Anita B. Sulser PhD

#16. One group of people that get a lot of PTSD are soldiers who have been in combat. You know who gets more PTSD, has higher rates of PTSD? Women who have escaped prostitution. That tells me that the war that men wage against women is actually worse than the wars they wage against each other.

Lierre Keith

#17. Blatant, intentional discrimination against women is far from being something merely to be read about in history books.

Cordelia Fine

#18. The fact is that it was bourgeois white feminism that I was reacting against when I stood in my first women's studies classes and said, "Black women have always worked."

Bell Hooks

#19. Women, it is said, have a bad attitude toward sex. Women, it not said often enough, have a long-lived resentment against forced-sex and a longing for freedom.

Andrea Dworkin

#20. The college strike didn't happen overnight. It started years ago when the war against boys began after the feminist era. Initially, feminism was presented as being about equal rights between the sexes. Now it is often about revenge and special privileges for women and girls.

Helen Smith

#21. You're sexist. I'm so sick of liberal lefty men practicing sexual discrimination under the guise of protecting women against sexual discrimination.

Gillian Flynn

#22. Some problems we share as women, some we do not. You fear your children will grow up to join the patriarchy and testify against you; we fear our children will be dragged from a car and shot down in the street, and you will turn your backs on the reasons they are dying.

Audre Lorde

#23. Through the 1990s, 'Reason' was a voice of 'dissident feminism,' upholding the equal dignity of both sexes and supporting the rights of individuals against a government that had gone mad over sexual harassment.

Virginia Postrel

#24. I feel sad that we have allowed these knee-jerk feminists who want to act like it's a struggle against men ... but again that's the least politically developed strand of feminism.

Bell Hooks

#25. In every generation there is a chosen one. She alone will stand against the vampires the demons and the forces of darkness. She is the slayer.

Joss Whedon

#26. Vaginas beat penises every time.
They're like kryptonite.
Penises are defenseless against them.

Emma Chase

#27. Feminism, unlike almost every other social movement, is not a struggle against a distinct oppressor - it's not the ruling class or the occupiers or the colonizers - it's against a deeply held set of beliefs and assumptions that we women, far too often, hold ourselves.

Kavita Ramdas

#28. The pursuit and preservation of purity can drive prejudice and hate. Many crimes against humanity have been committed in its name. Purity is best applied to water.

Jamie Le Fay

#29. Like George Sand, the feminism of the present day asserts the right of free thought against the creed of authority in every field; the solidarity of mankind and the cause of peace against the patriotism of militarism; social reform against the existing relations of society.

Ellen Key

#30. Identifying feminism as women's enemy only furthers the ends of a backlash against women's equality, simultaneously deflecting attention from the backlash's central role and recruiting women to attack their own cause. Some

Susan Faludi

#31. At the demonstration of sixty feminists against the Miss America Pageant in 1968, when the women filled a trash can with bras, girdles, curlers and spike-heeled shoes, the bra-burning myth was launched by the media and, in spite of its inaccuracy and spiteful intent, put radical feminism on the map.

Hilda Scott

#32. We will not let ourselves be intimidated by the number and violence of attacks against women; nor be fooled by the self-serving praise showered on the "real woman"; nor be won over by men's enthusiasm for her destiny, a destiny they would not for the world want to share.

Simone De Beauvoir

#33. Women, on the other hand, had to wield their intellects like a scythe, hacking away against the stubborn underbrush of low expectations.

Margot Lee Shetterly

#34. Put it down in capital letters: SELF-DEVELOPMENT IS A HIGHER DUTY THAN SELF-SACRIFICE. The thing that most retards and militates against women's self development is self-sacrifice.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton

#35. I was never against marriage per se. Before feminism, I didn't think you had any choice. In fact, for a long time I always assumed I would get married. I just didn't see any marriages I wanted to emulate, so I kept putting it off.

Gloria Steinem

#36. When feminism and gay activism set themselves against organized religion, they have the obligation to put something better in its place.

Camille Paglia

#37. This is central to the development of feminist abolitionist theories and practices: we have to learn how to think and act and struggle against that which is ideologically constituted as "normal".

Angela Y. Davis

#38. The true mission of feminism today is not to carp about the woes of affluent Western career women but to turn the spotlight on life-and-death issues affecting women in the Third World, particularly in rural areas where they have little protection against exploitation and injustice.

Camille Paglia

#39. We've never heard
About a marvel quite so great,
For all the heroes who have lived
In history can't measure up
In bravery against the Maid.

Christine De Pizan

#40. Peace in patriarchy is war against women.

Maria Mies

#41. When a person feels powerless in regard to controlling his life, he can defend against the discomfort of such an experience by asserting control over someone else.

A. Nicholas Groth

#42. Misogyny has not been completely wiped out anywhere. Rather, it resides on a spectrum, and our best hope for eradicating it globally is for each of us to expose and to fight against local versions of it, in the understanding that by doing so we advance the global struggle.

Mona Eltahawy

#43. Having ascended to some spiritual strength by focusing on the power of the feminine, it is no doubt tempting to wield this strength against that which triggers memories of having once been weaker.

Thomm Quackenbush

#44. We are in the midst of a violent backlash againist feminism that uses images of female beauty as political weapons against women's advancement.

Naomi Wolf

#45. My activism does not need proof to be real. It exists in the work of my bones against weight in the morning.

Amandla Stenberg

#46. Advocating sexual repression as a solution to violence against women ends up mobilizing women around their fears rather than their visions.

Alice Echols