Bad Feminist Quotes
"The world changes faster than we can fathom in ways that are complicated."
"Feminism is flawed, but it offers, at its best, a way to navigate this shifting cultural climate."
"Feminism is flawed because it is a movement powered by people and people are inherently flawed."
"I am a bad feminist because I am human. I am messy."
"I embrace the label of bad feminist because I am human."
"I am not trying to say I have all the answers."
"I disavowed feminism because when I was called a feminist, the label felt like an insult."
"We should disavow the failures of feminism without disavowing its many successes."
"Feminism will better succeed with collective effort."
"We don’t all have to believe in the same feminism. Feminism can be pluralistic."
"I am still writing my way toward a place where I fit."
"Privilege is a right or immunity granted as a peculiar benefit, advantage, or favor."
"To have privilege in one or more areas does not mean you are wholly privileged."
"The acknowledgment of my privilege is not a denial of the ways I have been and am marginalized."
"You don’t necessarily have to do anything once you acknowledge your privilege."
"Abandon the cultural myth that all female friendships must be bitchy, toxic, or competitive."
"If you find that you are feeling bitchy, toxic, or competitive toward the women who are supposed to be your closest friends, look at why and figure out how to fix it."
"If you are the kind of woman who says, 'I’m mostly friends with guys,'... see Item 1B."
"Don’t flirt, have sex, or engage in emotional affairs with your friends’ significant others."
"If a friend sends a crazy e-mail needing reassurance about love, life, family, or work, respond accordingly and in a timely manner."
"We all have ideas about the way the world should be, and sometimes we forget how the world is."
"It is unreasonable to expect Dunham to somehow solve the race and representation problem on television."
"It’s not that people of color are deliberately excluded but that they are not included."
"There are few opportunities for people of color to recognize themselves in literature, in theater, on television, and in movies."
"Finally, I was able to recognize something about myself in popular culture."
"Women of color come of age and have the same experiences Dunham depicts in her shows, but we rarely see those stories."
"We want to see more complex, nuanced depictions of what it really means to be whoever we are or were or hope to be."
"Watching Williams and her perfect cheekbones and glittering teeth as she accepted the crown gave girls like me ideas."
"There is nothing more desperate and unrequited than the love an unpopular girl nurtures for the cool kids."
"In popular culture, the world often feels like a stage on which women perform."
"My memory of men is never lit up and illuminated like my memory of women."
"I am often drawn to unlikable characters, to those who behave in socially unacceptable ways."
"Far more pernicious than the characters whose likability serves a greater purpose within a narrative are the characters who are flatly likable."
"A great deal of nonsense is written every day about characters in fiction."
"We don’t need to get petty, though. The patriarchy, if that’s what we’re calling it today, is alive and well."
"It is far more important to discuss power than to exhaustively regurgitate the harmful cultural effects of power structures."
"I do remember that I was feral in high school, socially awkward, emotionally closed off, completely lost."
"At the fat camp, run by an incompetent group of people who have no business looking after anyone’s children."
"Gray isn’t that different from most summer camp counselors."
"Gray spends the summer trying to insert herself into Eden’s good graces with little luck because Eden is a teenager."
"I spent my free periods doing important things: folding Crest Whitestrips over my teeth, rubbing self-tanner into my breasts, trying on my jeans that were now too big, rolling the waistband down to admire the jut of my hipbones."
"Beauty is in the eye of the beholder and beauty I did not behold."
"If you wanted to change clothes or lie down for a minute or if, God forbid, you forgot something in your bunk, you had to scale the fat camp kid’s version of Everest."
"There is a certain thrill in corruption even though, for most of us, our corruptions had started long before we arrived at camp."
"I learned how to stand on the edges of the scale to throw my weight off a little."
"There is nothing more inescapable than our bodies."
"I don’t think I know any woman who doesn’t hate herself and her body at least a little bit."
"Gray drowns herself in her affair with Bennett so she can avoid confronting herself or her grief."
"The body is a personal territory and every person’s weight struggle should be taken seriously."
"I don’t understand why such a show was needed."
"Sometimes, a bold, sort of callous person will ask me how I got so fat."
"I tried to concentrate, but all I could hear was the hiss of the word 'slut'."
"Perhaps I loved the Hunger Games trilogy because the books were, in their own way, a fairy tale and I am always, always in search of a fairy tale."
"It is perversely thrilling to see the gorgeous, perfectly fit trainers yelling at and shaming the fat contestants until their vocal cords bleed."
"We’re supposed to give accused criminals the benefit of the doubt."
"Sally Ride ranks among the greatest pioneers. I count myself among the millions of Americans she inspired with her travel to space."
"The damage, though, has been done and it cannot be undone."
"He believes that just because you can say something, you should."
"For every step forward, there is some asshole shoving progress back."
"No one ever asks heterosexual parents to ensure that their children are models of citizenry."
"Even if we can only fight the small injustices, at least we are fighting."
"Too often, we fail to ask ourselves what sacrifices we will make for the greater good."
"The term 'women’s fiction' is so wildly vague it is mostly useless."
"When did we collectively decide writing was more worthy if men embraced it?"
"Sometimes, saying what others are afraid to say is just being an asshole."
"Silence gives consent. When we say nothing, we are consenting to these trespasses against us."
"A prison is still a prison even when the sheets are 1200 thread count."
"History is important, but sometimes the past renders me hopeless and helpless."
"Racism and slavery aren’t terribly amusing to me unless Dave Chappelle is running the show."
"My slavery revenge fantasy would involve the reclamation of dignity on my own terms."
"The reality depicted is so harsh I cannot help but wonder if people find the movie excellent because of the sheer relentlessness."
"Black women’s suffering is used to tell a man’s story."
"Early on Eliza, played by the immensely talented Adepero Oduye, has been separated from her children—an alarmingly regular occurrence during the slave era."
"Ultimately, Solomon Northup is freed because he has finally gotten word to his family in New York that he is alive."
"Filmmakers take note and keep giving Hollywood exactly what it wants."
"We’re ready for more of everything but the same, singular stories we’ve seen for so long."
"He has been writing plays and films since he was twenty-two."
"Perry writes, directs, produces, and often stars in his movies."
"The reality is that marriages end and often."
"The likelihood of a woman in Judith and Brice’s demographic contracting HIV is not very."
"Social networks are more than just infinite repositories for trivial, snap judgments."
"It is a small miracle women do not have short memories about our rights that have always, shamefully, been alienable."
"Justice should be blind. You are innocent until proven guilty."
"The way we see danger is, in large part, about racial profiling."
"These negative images have been seared into our collective consciousness."
"Racial profiling is nothing more than a delusion born of our belief that we can profile danger."
"Everyone holds certain judgments about others, and those judgments are often informed by race."
"The entire transcript is as revealing as it is fascinating; it’s a bit funny and a bit sad."
"Maybe it’s people of color who wait, without bated breath, for that when."
"I wasn’t interested in playing that game where we bond as we reveal our racist secret selves to each other."
"All too often, suffering exists in a realm beyond vocabulary."
"We pretend we are somehow different from those we otherwise condemn."
"We take to these tools of the modern age, and there are those among us who, in the wake of tragedy, point fingers or proselytize."
"We cannot put these two tragedies on a chart and connect them with a straight line."
"I have never considered compassion a finite resource."
"Good women are charming, polite, and unobtrusive."
"I sometimes cringe when I am referred to as a feminist."
"The most significant problem with essential feminism is how it doesn’t allow for the complexities of human experience or individuality."
"I want to be in charge and respected and in control, but I want to surrender, completely, in certain aspects of my life."
"I am a bad feminist. I would rather be a bad feminist than no feminist at all."