A Quote by Christina Hoff Sommers

Now you ask a group of young women on the college campus, 'How many of you are feminists?' Very few will raise their hands because young women don't want to be associated with it anymore because they know it means male-bashing, it means being a victim, and it means being bitter and angry.
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.
Young women don't want to be called feminists because it's not sexy and ah they think that their mothers and grandmothers have achieved everything they want. They don't know how poor women live, how women in rural places live, how 80 percent of women in the world are the poorest of the poor, how still there are 27 million slaves, and most of them women and girls.
I think people resist feminism because they're scared. I think for women, they're scared of being picked on or of being called out. I hear from a lot of young women, you know, I don't want to call myself a feminist because I don't want to get in an argument with someone. And it's just not cool; like it's not a cool thing to be associated with. There's no benefit to saying that you're a feminist.
Now, I think a lot of people look around and feel that we're relatively equal with men. In fact, women are now the majority of college graduates, we have role models like Hillary Clinton to look up to - it seems like the world is completely open to us and we can accomplish anything. I think feminists are often disdained today because we're seen as complaining about a problem people think no longer exists. I also think young women shy away from calling themselves feminists because many haven't been educated about it or exposed to it. They don't know enough about it to identify with it.
So many girls out there say, "I'm not a feminist" because they think it means something angry or disgruntled or complaining or they picture, like, rioting and picketing. It is not that at all. It just simply means that you believe that women and men should have equal rights and opportunities.
I think we need to teach pleasure. What beautiful touch means. What reciprocity means. What being connected and what intimacy means. Boys get out there at a young age and the performance posturing is so great and ends up being hard and aggressive.
I despise the fact that the youth today acts as if being youthful is the answer to everything. It's a very young minded perspective and if you're not smart enough to realize that in life evolution is real. What that means is, we all are evolving and getting older every second of the day. That means it's about what you know, what you do and how hard you press the button to make it go. If you're not willing to put it in the time, energy and work in, then it doesn't matter how young you are. You'll be here and gone tomorrow if you don't learn something.
When I had a group of undergraduates in the room, I would say to them, 'How many of you want to run for office someday?' And almost every male hand in the room would go up. And very few of the young women.
When I see a lot of young faces in the audience, it's just sort of sinking in how important that is. Because you're old enough now to identify them very strongly as being young - whereas before, of course they were young, because you were young. Now it's not like that.
The early feminists were pro-life. And really, abortion is a huge disservice to women, and it hasn't been presented that way. As Feminists for Life-what we're trying to do is support women, and so what we want to do is-reach women on campus-college campuses so that, when they get pregnant, they can find housing. They can find money they need to stay in school.
Hillary Clinton knows, as I did know, as my women members know - that a woman being elected to a position, it's not about what it means to that woman. It's not about what it means to Hillary to be the first president. It's about what it means to all of the women in America, that a woman has broken the ultimate marble ceiling and that anything is possible for them and their daughters - and their sons. It's about sons, too.
On Girls I like being a mouthpiece for the issues I think young females face today. It’s always shocking when people question whether it’s a feminist show. How could a show about women exploring women not be? Feminism isn’t a dirty word. It’s not like we’re a deranged group who think women should take over the planet, raise our young on our own and eliminate men from the picture. Feminism is about women having all the rights that men have.
I don't know" means "NO!" "I don't know" means "I'm too cowardly to tell you the truth because I can't deal with confrontation." "I don't know" means please do the dirty work for me because I don't want to hurt your feelings even more then I already have.
It just struck me as really odd that there were all of these conversations going on about what young women were up to. Were young women having too much sex? Were young women politically apathetic? Are young women socially engaged or not? And whenever these conversations were happening, they were mostly happening by older women and by older feminists. And maybe there would be a younger woman quoted every once in a while, but we weren't really a central part of that conversation. We weren't really being allowed to speak on our own behalf.
Being a Negro in America means trying to smile when you want to cry. It means trying to hold on to physical life amid psychological death. It means the pain of watching your children grow up with clouds of inferiority in their mental skies. It means having their legs off, and then being condemned for being a cripple.
For years, more women were steered toward the studio or toward being a reporter. If that's what you want to do and that's what you love - by all means, go do it. That's OK to be ambitious and do things that are out of the norm if that's the route you want to take. We're already seeing women breaking down those barriers in what was once male-dominated. There are opportunities for women to fill those roles.
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