I think love transcends ethnicity, gender, political boundaries, and religion. Anyone who turns love between two consenting adults into a negative, doesn’t understand the meaning of the word.
Fran Drescher
“I tell my students, ‘When you get these jobs that you have been so brilliantly trained for, just remember that your real job is that if you are free, you need to free somebody else. If you have some power, then your job is to empower somebody else. This is not just a grab-bag candy game.”
― Toni Morrison
"
“It’s important to clarify that sex education that teaches about pleasure doesn’t have to teach about technique (though elective college-level sex education that does this is great). Letting teens know that women usually achieve orgasm through the rubbing of the clitoris, whether fingers, mouth, object, or penis, isn’t the same as screening an instructional video on giving good cunnilingus. It’s not the same as writing down the names of sex-toy shops on the blackboard, or handing out diagrams of cool and exciting coital positions. And teaching that lubricants reduce pain and increase safety and pleasure during many kinds of sex should be thought of not as performance advice, but on par with vital lessons about condom use.
Real sex education is not the same as porn education. Instead, it’s about teaching that pleasure is an important part of any sexual relationship. It’s about teaching that there is nothing wrong with wanting to feel sexual pleasure and seeking it out, so long as it is done safely and responsibly. It’s about teaching comfort with one’s body and a lack of shame over desires, and there is more to sex for all people than sticking penises into vaginas. Real sex education teaches how to go about making intelligent , safe choices, rather than just stating the choices available. I believe there is a big difference. And I believe that teaching teens to make smart choices about sex must involve teaching them that having sex, partnered or alone, can be a smart choice”.
"—
Real Sex Education by Cara Kulwicki in Yes Means Yes
"Living authentically is never an easy path. People will hate you, friends and lovers will leave you, even family will forsake you…but we all must live by our own truth."
—
My Momma
"
“Herein lies the problem—with the advent and proliferation of internet pornography, the fantasy of rape, torture, and bondage becomes an issue of access. No longer reserved for an informed, invested viewer who carefully sought it out after a trip to a fetish bookstore, BDSM is represented in every porn portal on the internet. The average computer user can have instant access to a full catalog of BDSM practices, ranging from light, softcore spanking to hardcore torture, in a matter of seconds. This kind of constant, unrestrained availability trains viewers who don’t have a BDSM cultural awareness, investment or education to believe that what women want is to be coerced and, in some cases, forced into acts they don’t consent to. Over the years, various interpretations of the genre have made it into straight porn, without any suggestion of artifice—women on leashes, in handcuffs, gagged, tied up, and told to “like it” are all commonplace imagery in contemporary pornography. While serious BDSM practitioner thrives on that artifice, the average young, male, heterosexual porn audience member begins to believe that forcing women into sex acts is the norm—the imagery’s constant, instant availability makes rape and sex one and the same for the mainstream viewer. Couple that private home viewing to get off with the proliferation of graphic crime shows on prime-time television and torture porn masquerading as a “psychological thrillers” in theatres, and our cultural imagery screams that “women as sexual victims” is an acceptable reality. For someone who is raised and reaches sexual maturity in this environment, the idea of forcing a woman into a sex act seems, although logically “wrong”, completely commonplace and possibly quite sexy.
The appropriation of BDSM imagery is problematic because while the community members understand that is important to be sensitive to the needs, boundaries, and rules of players in order for a scene to function fairly and enjoyably, mainstream porn is primarily about getting off as quickly as possible. Add to that the disgraceful lack of sexual education (both in safety and in pleasure) across the country, and a general belief perpetrated by the media that women are sex objects to be consumed, and you have a rape culture that started by borrowing from BDSM’s images without reading its rules.”
"—
Stacy May Fowles—The Fantasy of Acceptable “Non-Consent”: Why the Female Sexual Submissive Scares Us (And Why She Shouldn’t) in Yes Means Yes
"…consenting to some sexual activity with a person, or having consented to sex with a person in the past, doesn’t mean you’ve consented to anything and everything with that person, or that you automatically consent to fuck that person again, and that a quiet “no”, even if it’s not accompanied by a knee to the groin or any other physical struggle, is still a valid “no”."
—
Lisa Jervis - An Old Enemy in a New Outfit: How Date Rape Became Grey Rape and Why it Matters in Yes Means Yes.
"A healthy system encourages innovation and growth. An unhealthy system makes you swear the earth is flat when you know full well that the earth is round”."
—
My most incredibly awesome doctor.
"Even if we put aside the question of fetal personhood and assume that a fetus should have the same rights as a born human being, giving that fetus the right to use another person’s body for it’s survival would give it privileges that born people do not have. In no other case is a person legally compelled to use their body and their internal organs to sustain another’s life. We do not require parents to donate kidneys or even blood to their children, and we do not require anyone to be a good Samaritan and risk their life or health for another. It is difficult to imagine a case in which we would legally require a father to keep his child physically attached to his body, using his organs for survival, physically impairing him, and requiring him to miss work and possibly undergo surgery, for nearly 10 months. It would be difficult to make the case that the child (or full-grown adult) has a right to use the father’s body for its survival. Yet this is exactly what opponents of abortion rights argue—except the body in question is female”."
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Jill Filipovic, Offensive Feminism: The conservative gender norms that perpetuate rape culture, and how feminists can fight back, in Yes Means Yes
"But I would be happier if my daughter and her friends were crashing through the glass ceiling instead of the sexual ceiling. Being able to have an orgasm with a man you don’t love or having Sex and the City on television, that is not liberation. If you start to think about women as if we’re all Carrie on Sex and the City, well, the problem is: you’re not going to elect Carrie to the Senate or to run your company. Let’s see the Senate fifty percent female; let’s see women in decision-making positions—that’s power. Sexual freedom can be a smoke-screen for how far we haven’t come."
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Erica Jong in Female Chauvinist Pigs by Ariel Levy
"We’ve become a heavily sexualized culture, but it’s consumerism and sex rolled into one. Revolutionary movements tend to be co-opted—swallowed up by the mainstream and turned into pop culture. It’s a way of neutralizing it, when you think about it…it makes it all safe and palatable, it shuts up the radicals. Once that happens, the real power is pretty much dissipated."
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Candida Royalle in Female Chauvinist Pigs by Ariel Levy
"We’ve chosen the path to equality, don’t let them turn us around."
—
Geraldine Ferraro
(The first woman to be nominated as Vice President of the United States)
"Orgasm is the body’s natural call to feminist politics."
— Naomi Wolf
