Nicky

“Misogynists have often reproached intellectual women for 'letting themselves go'; but they also preach to them: if you want to be our equals, stop wearing makeup and polishing your nails. This advice is absurd. Precisely because the idea of femininity is artificially defined by customs and fashion, it is imposed on every woman from the outside[...]. The individual is not free to shape the idea of femininity at will.”
― Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex

“Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.”
― audre lorde

“The object, the woman, goes out into the world formed as men have formed her to be used as men wish to use her. She is then a provocation. The object provokes its use. It provokes its use because of its form, determined by the one who is provoked. The carpenter makes a chair, sits on it, then blames the chair because he is not standing. When the object complains about the use to which she is put, she is told, simply and firmly, not to provoke.”
― Andrea Dworkin, Pornography: Men Possessing Women

“Sweet mother, I cannot weave –
slender Aphrodite has overcome me
with longing for a girl.”
― Sappho, Sappho: A New Translation of the Complete Works