During the first suffragist wave in this nation, women were possessions, like a table or a chair. So violence toward them was quite condoned. The attitude has diminished, but it’s still there.
Without leaps of imagination, or dreaming, we lose the excitement of possibilities. Dreaming, after all, is a form of planning.
Whenever one person stands up and says, “Wait a minute, this is wrong,” it helps other people do the same.
The story of women’s struggle for equality belongs to no single feminist nor to any one organization but to the collective efforts of all who care about human rights.
A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle.
The problem is, for men and women, the idea that sexuality is about dominance and submission, when, in fact, cooperation is a lot more fun, to put it my way. So some of it, a lot of it, is just about empathy.
We have to stop arresting prostitutes and not arresting traffickers and pimps. It’s absurd. We’re arresting the victim or the survivor and not the oppressor.
I definitely think men can be leaders. I see an analogy in the case of what helped me think about racism, which was to find parallels with sexism. In other words, I don’t think I was such a great ally until I got mad on my own behalf.
When men realize that feminism is a universal good that affects them in very intimate ways then I think they really become allies and leaders.
I guess 35 years ago, I thought we had more of a democracy than we actually do. Majority support doesn’t help unless the majority is active and votes – but the opposition minority votes a much greater proportion, so we often lose by a narrow margin.
Anybody who has ever met a baby knows there is already a person in there.
There were never that many women stand-up comics in the past because the power to make people laugh is also a power that gets people upset.
I’ve only ever met one woman who actually was a prostitute of her own free will. She didn’t have a pimp. She could pick and choose her customers. That’s so rare.
People are quite clear in viewing nuns as the servants and the teachers and the supporters of the poor. You contrast that with the fact that the Vatican did virtually nothing about long-known pedophiles, and it’s just too much.
I think laughter is crucial. Some of the original cultures, like the Dalit and the Native American, don’t separate laughter and seriousness.
I’m more often confronted by women who come from religious traditions and don’t feel that they have a place in the feminist movement. I’ve felt pressure when reporters asked me, “Do you believe in God?” I do say, “No. I believe in people.”
It’s hard to measure success when we’re dealing with between 500 and 5,000 years of patriarchy depending on which continent we sit, so I would say feminism has been successful and we have a huge distance to go, huge.
I have always employed humor, and I think it’s absolutely crucial that we do because, among other things, humor is the only free emotion.
Sexuality has always been for humans a form of communication, a way we express love and caring and bonding, not only a way we have children if we choose to.
Human beings are communal beings and we can’t exist or prosper by ourselves. We need each other’s support.
People start to talk about post-racist, post-feminist. What does that mean? We’re clearly not post either. Would you say post-democracy? Clearly we haven’t reached true democracy yet.