A Quote by P. J. O'Rourke

Feminism is the result of a few ignorant and literal-minded women letting the cat out of the bag about which is the superior sex. Once women made it public that they could do things better than men, they were, of course, forced to do 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.
Feminism's agenda is basic: it asks that women not be forced to "choose" between public justice and private happiness. It asks that women be free to define themselves-instead of having their identity defined for them, time and again, by their culture and their men.
That's what's always been such a curious thing to me about feminism. They never lost any power. However, when you start talking about this particular area of our population, you're talking about the politicized nature of our country where feminism dominates and all heterosexual men want women. And all men realize you've got to do certain things. If you want to get a woman who happens to be a feminist, then you better do and say, be certain things. Men have gone crazy trying to be what they think women want them to be, and that's men in Washington, gone crazy.
[Demystifying lesbian sex for an interviewer] In a way, the sex isn't really that different... From what I can tell, no, not really. All the things that men and women do together, think of everything that men and women do together, women and women can do together. And that makes you realize that sex is just simply about connecting with another person, or about intimacy.
I don't think that there's a target audience at all. These stories were in circulation. The stories were told by men, told in the marketplace by men, but also behind doors by women, but there's no real record of this. It's likely they were told by women to children in their interior rooms. The story could be a negative story, they could be presented as a, "Watch out! Women will get round you, do things to you, weave you in their toils." It could be buried in it an old cautionary story about women and their wiles.
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.
In the early fight for women's rights, the point was not that women were morally superior or better. The conversation was about the difference between men and women - power, privilege, voting rights, etc. Unfortunately, it quickly moved to the "women are better" argument. If this were true in life or in fiction, we wouldn't have any dark or deep characters. We wouldn't have any Salomes, Carmens, Ophelias. We wouldn't have any jealousy or passion.
Many women, particularly young women, have claimed the right to use the most explicit sex terms, including extremely vulgar ones, in public as well as private. But it is men, far more than women, who have been liberated by this change. For now that women use these terms, men no longer need to watch their own language in the presence of women. But is this a gain for women?
Without seeing any reason to believe that women are, on the average, so strong physically, intellectually, or morally, as men, I cannot shut my eyes to the fact that many women are much better endowed in all these respects than many men, and I am at a loss to understand on what grounds of justice or public policy a career which is open to the weakest and most foolish of the male sex should be forcibly closed to women of vigor and capacity.
Humans became easy prey when they moved from the forest to the savanna, which deprived them of the option of climbing trees to flee predators. This shift made it necessary for the men to actively protect the women and their babies. Only as a result of this protection were women able to give birth in shorter intervals, perhaps once every two or three years. This meant that they could produce offspring about twice as frequently as apes. I would be willing to bet that this rapid reproduction is one of the reasons why we dominate the world today, and not the apes.
Sex workers are the last women police stand in to protect. Sex workers are the last people that room is made for in many ways. You get a different kind of feminism if you put people at the margins at the center. It's a recently resonant lesson, but black feminists have been saying this for decades. Now when I talk to people engaged in sex workers' rights advocacy and people who identify as intersectional feminists, this is the air they breathe. We can't just make feminism about improving the lives of all women. Because there is no such thing as all women and universal female experience.
Most feminists in France came to feminism after '68 as a result of the hypocrisy they experienced in leftist movements. In these movements, where everyone believed there was going to be true equality, fraternity between men and women, and that together they were going to struggle against this rotten society, even there they noticed that the leftists, the militants, kept them "in their place." Women made the coffee while the others did the talking; they were the ones who typed the letters.
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.
Women will work out their destinies — much better, too, than men can ever do for them. All the mischief to women has come because men undertook to shape the destiny of women.
To confound the tyranny of man there should exist for a century a third sex, both male and female, and stronger than men. This new sex would prove with the lash that men as well as women are made for its pleasure; and then you would hear men protesting against the tyranny of the hermaphrodite sex and admitting that strength should not be the sole rule of right. Just why do they refuse to grant the women the independence which they would demand from the third sex?
A feminist is a person who answers 'yes' to the question 'Are women human?' Feminism is not about whether women are better than, worse than or identical with men...It's about justice, fairness, and access to the broad range of human experience.
This site uses cookies to ensure you get the best experience. More info...
Got it!