"I need feminism to make me feel like a person. I need feminism to help me understand why I feel this sense of rage and helplessness living in this culture and to put a name to that which provokes those feelings - misogyny. I need feminism in order to see myself, and to get others to see me, as a complex, multidimensional human being with my own unique likes, dislikes, personality traits, etc. rather than something that I am told I should be. I need feminism in order to expect more from everyone around me. I need feminism in order to remind myself and others that the "war of the sexes/men are from mars women are from venus" ideas are bullshit, and that the fight for equality and equal opportunities isn't a zero sum game. I need feminism to recognize that men can be more, can be better, than what the patriarchy says they are. I need feminism to know that it's not just me, to know that others are seeing and feeling and realizing what I do. I need feminism to know better than to swallow shit and think that it's ice cream. I need feminism to know that there are infinitely many ways to be a person, and that NONE of them need be defined solely or primarily by my gender."
Comment made on a thread where people are asked to share why they need feminism.
"On Men Being Part of the Solution: To a woman whose every post on sexual assault and domestic abuse has prompted untold numbers of women (and some men) to share their stories of having been raped or otherwise violently abused, that the subject could never come up among men is simply astounding. And yet I am assured by the men in my life, it does not. Of the issues with which they concern themselves, sending them into tumbling debates about what should be done and how best to solve the problem—the environment, poverty, encroachments on civil liberties, etc. etc. etc.—the fact that one out of four women will be raped in her lifetime, and many more yet victims of domestic abuse, rarely, if ever, makes the list. How can it be that so many men and women live such different lives? I dream of the day when we don't."
THAT I want that, Santa.
