A Quote by Christina Hoff Sommers

Trigger warnings and safe spaces are an infantilizing setback for feminism - and for women. — © Christina Hoff Sommers
Trigger warnings and safe spaces are an infantilizing setback for feminism - and for women.
The serious work for feminism in the 21st century is across the globe. Instead of retreating into "safe spaces" and focusing on their own imagined oppression, today's feminists should be reaching out to women's groups in the developing world.
During a large disaster, like Hurricane Katrina, warnings get hopelessly jumbled. The truth is that, for warnings to work, it's not enough for them to be delivered. They must also overcome that human tendency to pause; they must trigger a series of effective actions, mobilizing the informal networks that we depend on in a crisis.
It was feminism that made it possible for women to go to the Ivy League and women to be astronauts and women to have their own TV shows. What happened, though, was that the generation after feminism, which is my generation, misunderstood what feminism was saying.
I think feminism has always been global. I think there's feminism everywhere throughout the world. I think, though, for Western feminism and for American feminism, it not so surprisingly continues to center Western feminism and American feminism. And I think the biggest hurdle American feminists have in terms of taking a more global approach is that too often when you hear American feminists talk about international feminism or women in other countries, it kind of goes along with this condescending point of view like we have to save the women of such-and-such country; we have to help them.
I get very frustrated when I hear women saying, "Oh, feminism is passé," because I think feminism means empowerment. Men can be feminists, too! Many men are feminists. We need feminism. It's not against men; it's about the empowerment of women. It's the respect of women - giving women equal rights, the same opportunities.
People sometimes say that we will know feminism has done its job when half the CEOs are women. That’s not feminism; to quote Catharine MacKinnon, it’s liberalism applied to women. Feminism will have won not when a few women get an equal piece of the oppression pie, served up in our sisters’ sweat, but when all dominating hierarchies - including economic ones - are dismantled.
Trigger warnings are part of the West's debauchery of self-indulgent victimhood.
I don't think colleges are safe spaces. It's one thing to have a fraternity house or a community center where students can go and talk about their shared experiences. But it's another thing to have safe spaces in the sense that the university's providing them with protection from what they have to experience and find ways of protesting and resisting.
I really dislike it when women reject feminism; that's ridiculous. I am a product of feminism. Without feminism I would not be making films.
I had a real come-to-Jesus a couple of years ago when I started to see the direct line between feminism and everything else - feminism and climate change, feminism and poverty, feminism and hunger - and it was almost like I was born again and started walking down the street and was like, "Oh, my God, there are women everywhere! They're just everywhere you look. There's women all over the place!"
Trigger warnings are an instantiation of the West's zeitgeist of perpetual offense and victimhood that defines much of public discourse.
I think a big part of feminism - and this is something I'm sure a bunch of women will take my head off for - but a big part of feminism is women allowing other women to just be the kind of women that they are.
I'm a huge supporter of women. What I'm not is a supporter of liberalism. Feminism is what I oppose. Feminism has led women astray. I love the women's movement — especially when walking behind it.
Do I think that, when we're teaching a book at school, should we go through a myriad list of trigger warnings? No. But I understand why people desire it.
Women are allowed to enter the spaces of the senses, the space of the body, the spaces opened by sensations, all kinds of feelings, but women are not allowed to enter the spaces of reason to the same extent, that is to say the space of ideas, political ideas.
You had a generation of women, of which I'm part, where it was a stigma to be associated with feminism; there was a backlash. Now you have a generation that is clearly embracing feminism because, at the end of the day, the definition of feminism is just equality.
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