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She never acquires a name, never paints, but is only the wife, the one who gets the kid breakfast and dispatches him to school, tends the house, and represents all the things the men are escaping or avoiding and definitely disdaining.
stream-of-consciousness spontaneity, art freed up from composition and plan.
As in the film, a woman is a stationary object, a man is a pilgrim and a heroic wanderer. He’s Odysseus; she’s Penelope, but Homer took an interest in the gallant struggle of the woman who stayed home.
I’ve often found that I want to live up to my outfit, and a festive outfit produces a festive spirit,
I rarely seemed to be regarded as in possession of much competence and credibility in those days, whether it was about a personal interaction or about history.
2008 I wrote an essay called “Men Explain Things to Me” that contains the sentence “Credibility is a basic survival tool.”
not always possible to say that a given weather event is due to climate change, but that climate change shapes the trends is clear, and the same can be said of discrimination—that this particular event may or may not be due to someone’s attitudes about people in your category, but the cumulative effect suggests a pattern.
Native people had been rendered invisible by representations or rather nonrepresentations—in
in land management practices, and in the depiction of Yosemite by environmental organizations and artists as an uninhabited wilderness recently discovered by white people and a place people only belonged as visitors.
symbolic annihilation, a term for the nonrepresentation of a group—a gender, an ethnicity, an orientation—in the popular culture or the arts
If someone had listened to me when I began to distrust him out loud, his malice or incompetence might not have had such an impact.
Not everyone makes it through, and what tries to kill you takes a lot of your energy that might be better used elsewhere and makes you tired and anxious.
gender is whatever you want it to be, and that the rules were breakable,
Inside homophobia is misogyny: the act of being a man is a constant striving to not be a woman.
It’s a version of love that’s war, the enactment or realization of a set of metaphors in which men’s bodies are weapons and women’s bodies are targets, and queer bodies are hated for blurring the distinction or rejecting the metaphors.
absurdities and excesses were occasion for more wit, because heartbreak and loneliness have their comic sides, and finding them can be key to survival.
It was a bulwark against the widespread, wearing insistence that only the nuclear family supplies love and stability—which sometimes it does, but we all know that sometimes it supplies misery and sabotage.
We would like the people involved in monstrosity to be recognizably monstrous, but many of them are diligent, unquestioning, obedient adherents to the norms of their time,
Myriad forms of injustice became visible in ways that made it seem normal to recognize them and easy to forget by what toil they became visible (which always raises the question of what else we do not yet see, and for what failings future eras will rebuke us).
bodhisattvas: “the liberation of all beings.”
When the long tolerated is suddenly seen as intolerable, someone has become audible and someone else has begun listening for the first time.
no matter how credible some women are by supposedly objective standards reinforced by evidence and witnesses and well-documented patterns, they will not be believed by people committed to protecting men and their privileges.
It is almost worse to say something and have it not matter than to be silent.
