Select Quotes
Introduction
Feminism (N.): Plural
When feminism falls short of our expectations, we decide the problem is with feminism rather than with the flawed people who act in the name of the movement. – Page 7
I was called a feminist, and what I heard was, “You are an angry, sex-hating, man-hating victim lady person.” This caricature is how feminists have been warped by the people who fear feminism most, the same people who have the most to lose when feminism succeeds. Anytime I remember how I once disavowed feminism, I am ashamed of my ignorance. I am ashamed of my fear because mostly the disavowal was grounded in the fear that I would be ostracized, that I would be seen as a troublemaker, that I would never be accepted by the mainstream. – Page 8
I try to keep my feminism simple. I know feminism is complex and evolving and flawed. I know feminism will not and cannot fix everything. I believe in equal opportunities for women and men. I believe in women having reproductive freedom and affordable and unfettered access to the health care they need. I believe women should be paid as much as men for doing the same work. Feminism is a choice, and if a woman does not want to be a feminist, that is her right, but it is still my responsibility to fight for her rights. I believe feminism is grounded in supporting the choices of women even if we wouldn’t make certain choices for ourselves. I believe women not just in the United States but throughout the world deserve equality and freedom but know I am in no position to tell women of other cultures what that equality and freedom should look like. – Page 9
Feminism’s failings do not mean we should eschew feminism entirely. People do terrible things all the time, but we don’t regularly disown our humanity. We disavow the terrible things. We should disavow the failures of feminism without disavowing its many successes and how far we have come. – Page 10
Me
Feel Me. See Me. Hear Me. Reach Me.
I love being with someone who is endlessly interesting because we are so different. Wanting to belong to people or a person is not about finding a mirror image of myself. – Page 14
If you watch BET, you get the sense that the only way black people succeed is through professional sports, music, or marrying/ fucking/ being a baby mama of someone who is involved with professional sports or music. Once in a while, I would love to see an example of black success that involves other professional venues. – Page 15
I learned so much more in grad school out of the classroom than I ever did sitting around a table talking about theoretical concepts. – Page 18
At the end of our sessions, the students I worked with would generally say, “Don’t tell anyone I came to see you.” It wasn’t that they were embarrassed to get help, most of the time. They were embarrassed to be seen putting effort into their education, to be seen caring. – Page 19
By the end of my last year of school, with all the other things I was dealing with in my personal life, I was completely burnt out. I had nothing left to give. All too often, the students just did not give a damn and neither did I. I’m not proud of this, but I really was dealing with a lot. – Page 20
Peculiar Benefits
We tend to believe that accusations of privilege imply we have it easy, which we resent because life is hard for nearly everyone. Of course we resent these accuastions. Look at white men when they are accused of having privilege. They tend to be immediately defensive (and, at times, understandably so). – Page 27
To have privilege in one or more areas does not mean you are wholly privileged. Surrendering to the acceptance of privilege is difficult, but it is really all that is expected. – Page 27
Does privilege automatically negate any merits of what a privilege holder has to say? – Page 28
Typical First Year Professor
Walking down the hall, I hear a young woman saying “Dr. Gay” over and over and think, That Dr. Gay is rather rude for ignoring that poor student. I turn around to say something before I realize she is talking to me. – Page 32
There is a plague on grandmothers. The elder relations of my students begin passing away at an alarming rate one week. – Page 34
Gender & Sexuality
How To Be Friends With Another Woman
Abandon the cultural myth that all female friendships must be bitchy, toxic, or competitive. – Page 51
If you are the kind of woman who says, “I’m mostly friends with guys,” and act like you’re proud of that, like that makes you closer to being a man or something and less of a woman as if being a woman is a bad thing, see Item 1B. It’s okay if most of your friends are guys, but if you champion this as a commentary on the nature of female friendships, well, soul-search a little. – Page 51
If you feel like it’s hard to be friends with women, consider that maybe women aren’t the problem. Maybe it’s just you. – Page 52
Sometimes you will be the person dating someone your friends cannot stand. If your man or woman is a scrub, just own it so you and your friends can talk about more interesting things. My go-to explanation is “I am dating an asshole because I’m lazy.” You are welcome to borrow it. – Page 52
Girls, Girls, Girls
Girls reminds me of how terrible my twenties were—being lost and awkward, having terrible sex with terrible people, being perpetually broke, eating ramen. I am not nostalgic for that time. I had no money and no hope. Like the girls in Girls, I was never really on the verge of destitution but I lived a generally crappy life. There was nothing romantic about the experience. – Page 59
I Once Was Miss America
They were so American and, therefore, exotic because they had freedoms I did not. – Page 67
Nostalgia is powerful. It is natural, human, to long for the past, particularly when we can remember our histories as better than they were. Life happens faster than I can comprehend. I am nearly forty, but my love of Sweet Valley remains strong and immediate. When I read the books now, I know I’m reading garbage, but I remember what it was like to spend my afternoons in Sweet Valley, hanging out with the Wakefield twins and Enid Rollins and Lila Fowler and Bruce Patman and Todd Wilkins and Winston Egbert. – Page 70
Like I said, nostalgia is powerful and that power builds with time; it often reshapes our memories. – Page 72
I was never going to become Miss America. I know that now. Vanessa Williams and her glittering teeth could only do so much. Nonetheless, I continue to have a very active fantasy life. – Page 73
Not Here To Make Friends
When characters are unlikable, they don’t meet our mutable, varying standards. Certainly we can find kinship in fiction, but literary merit shouldn’t be dictated by whether we want to be friends or lovers with those about whom we read. – Page 90
Freed from the constraints of likability, they are able to exist on and beyond the page as fully realized, interesting, and realistic characters. – Page 94
How We All Lose
If women’s fortunes improve, it must mean men’s fortunes will suffer, as if there is a finite amount of good fortune in the universe that cannot be shared equally between men and women. This is certainly how I felt while reading Hanna Rosin’s interesting and intelligent, but ultimately frustrating, The End of Men: And the Rise of Women. What does it even mean to suggest that the end of men is explicitly connected to the rise of women? – Page 100
Disagreement, however, is not anger. Pointing out the many ways in which misogyny persists and harms women is not anger. Conceding the idea that anger is an inappropriate reaction to the injustice women face backs women into an unfair position. Nor does disagreement mean we are blind to the ways in which progress has been made. Feminists are celebrating our victories and acknowledging our privilege when we have it. We’re simply refusing to settle. We’re refusing to forget how much work there is yet to be done. – Page 106
Western opinions on the hijab or burkas are rather irrelevant. We don’t get to decide for Muslim women what does or does not oppress them, no matter how highly we think of ourselves. – Page 107
Her criticism rises from emotion. It is appealing to see a writer so plainly locate the motivations behind her criticism. All too often, criticism is treated rather antiseptically under the auspices of objectivity. There is no such distance in Heroines. Zambreno revels in subjectivity. – Page 109
Reaching For Catharsis: Getting Fat Right (Or Wrong) And Diana Spechler’S Skinny
She spends her days trying to make herself beautiful, as if through beauty she will find happiness. – Page 115
Gray thinks about her boyfriend, Mikey, occasionally but shows little remorse for how she betrays the man who loves her and how she betrays herself. She is grieving, after all, and in grief, there is a certain amount of indulgence for bad behavior. Sorrow allows us a freedom happiness does not. – Page 118
When it comes to fat, there has to be a reason. We need to be able to trace the genealogy of obesity. Without that genealogy, we are simply mystified. People need an explanation for how a person can lose such control over her body. – Page 119
The Smooth Surfaces Of Idyll
Happiness is not a popular subject in literary fiction. We struggle, as writers, to make happiness, contentment, and satisfaction interesting. Perfection often lacks texture. What do we say about that smooth surface of idyll? How do we find something for narrative to hold on to? Or, perhaps, we fail to see how happiness can have texture and complexity so we write about unhappiness. – Page 125
What We Hunger For
As a critic, I recognize the significant flaws, I do, but The Hunger Games is not a movie I am able to watch as a critic. The story means too much to me. – Page 144
The books’ imperfections are easily forgiven because the best parts of the books are the truest—that sometimes, the one you love best is the one who has always been right by your side, even when you didn’t notice. – Page 144
When we were together, he’d tell me what he wanted to do to me. He wasn’t asking permission. I was not an unwilling participant. I was not a willing participant. I felt nothing one way or the other. I wanted him to love me. I wanted to make him happy. If doing things to my body made him happy, I would let him do anything to my body. My body was nothing to me. It was just meat and bones around that void he filled by touching me. Technically, we didn’t have sex, but we did everything else. The more I gave, the more he took. At school, he continued looking right through me. I was dying but I was happy. I was happy because he was happy, because if I gave enough, he might love me. As an adult, I don’t understand how I allowed him to treat me like that. – Page 145
At times, I thought, This is too much, but I know something of the world now, and there are rarely limits to suffering. – Page 149
The Illusion Of Safety/The Safety Of Illusion
Human endurance fascinates me, probably too much because more often than not, I think of life in terms of enduring instead of living. – Page 156
The Spectacle Of Broken Men
When asked, “Are you sexually attracted to young boys?,” Sandusky repeats the question. Instead of simply saying, “No,” which is what most people would say whether they were guilty or innocent, he says, “Am I sexually attracted to young boys? I enjoy young people. I love to be around them. But no, I’m not sexually attracted to young boys.” The denial is an afterthought. – Page 161
A Tale Of Three Coming Out Stories
We want to know everything. In this information age, we are inundated with information, so now we feel entitled. We also like taxonomy, classification, definition. Are you a man or a woman? Are you a Democrat or a Republican? Are you married or single? Are you gay or straight? We don’t know what to do when we don’t know the answers to these questions or, worse, when the answers to these questions do not fall neatly into a category. – Page 164
It’s a problem, though, that there’s a right kind of gay, that there are LGBT people who are warmly encouraged to step out of the closet while others who don’t fit certain parameters go largely ignored. – Page 170