Women Activists From The United States

"I actually share one thing with Whitney Houston, which is, I also have sweating issues."

"I had a run in with Whitney Houston, or as I call her, "Cracky." Allegedly."

"Huh, guess ah shouldn't huh did it. (imitating Britney's 55-hour husband Jason Allen Alexander) Come on, Mr. Britney. Grammar, grammar."

"Don't you love the new crazy Britney, she's our new Liza."

"So, Hanson, which one of you boys is coming home with me tonight? (greeting the band Hanson)"

"I don't know about you, but I fucked a midget. I have secrets."

"She (Monica Lewinsky) is the kinda girl who'll blow a guy and call you and tell you all about it."

"She (Mariah Carey) could not fuck more black rappers. Oh, yeah. If your name is "Puff" or "Daddy," she'll fuck you."

"(describing Celine Dion's family of 14 siblings) You know there is just issues and boundries and secrets. The name of my book."

"There's something about Shania Twain I just don't trust. I don't know, I can't put my finger...she's just too thin. I like my country singers to have the big hair and the big ass."

"Have you guys noticed that Madonna is British now? OK, let's talk about her lineage for a minute. Raised in Michigan, moved to New York, is British. She started turning British like at the Golden Globes and she was doing the interviews and she says "telly" instead of "television" and she uses the word "actually" way too much and then she's also sorta bringing her voice down to a register around here (brings her voice down) and she's being interviewed for the Golden Globes and she's got whole, you know, crazy hair that everybody hated and everybody has and they were saying, "Well, Madonna, we're so glad to have you at the Golden Globes." (speaks in Madonna British accent) "Well, actually, it is more fun to come here than watch it on the telly". You know. Look, I'm from the midwest- its a TV."

"You know what's great about my mom? She compulsively swears and doesn't know it. Like...I mean, she doesn't have Tourettes. I could never get that lucky. Can you imagine how it would be to have parents with Tourettes? I would be in heaven...but anyway. That is one funny fucking disease."

"4th booster f**kers. Oh, and CVS gave us EIGHT free Covid tests for getting boosted!"

"Can you believe this shit? Hell has frozen over. Now, a lot of people come up here and thank Jesus for this award. I want you to know that no one had less to do with this award than Jesus. He didn't help me a bit. If it was up to him, Cesar Millan would be up here with that damn dog. So all I can say is- suck it, Jesus! This award is my god now!"

"Postmodern descriptions of prostituted women as sex workers promotes an acceptance of conditions that in any other employment context would be correctly described as sexual harassment, sexual exploitation, or rape. Women’s experiences of violence and their psychological response to it cannot be theorized away."

"While feminists have spoken about prostitution as the buying and selling of women’s bodies, one trick more specifically explained what he did in prostitution as "renting an organ for ten minutes." Another explained, "Guys get off on controlling women, they use physical power to control women, really. If you look at it, [prostitution is] paid rape. You’re making them subservient during that time, so you’re the dominant person. She has to do what you want.""

"Prostitution is advertised online, where it is indistinguishable from pornography. The Internet has expanded the reach of traffickers and it has intensified the humiliation and violence of prostitution. Pornography is one specific means of trafficking women for the purpose of selling women into prostitution."

"Prostitution is sexual violence that results in massive economic profit for some of its perpetrators. The sex industry, like other global enterprises, has domestic and international sectors, marketing sectors, a range of physical locations out of which it operates in each community, is controlled by many different owners and managers, and is constantly expanding as technology, law, and public opinion permit."

"Some words hide the truth. Just as torture can be named enhanced interrogation, and logging of old-growth forests is named the Healthy Forest Initiative, words that lie about prostitution leave people confused about the nature of prostitution and trafficking. The words "sex work" make the harms of prostitution invisible."

"Prostitution/trafficking/pornography systematically discriminate against women, against the young, against the poor and against ethnically subordinated groups. Specific acts commonly perpetrated against women in prostitution and pornography are the same as the acts defining what torture is: verbal sexual harassment, forced nudity, rape, sexual mocking, physical sexual harassment such as groping, and not permitting basic hygiene. The psychological consequences of these acts are the same whether it is named state-sponsored torture or prostitution."

"Sexist and racist economic policies in the United States such as a lack of educational opportunity for poor families and a lack of sustainable income from many jobs contribute to women’s and girls’ entry into prostitution. The economic and legal vulnerability of undocumented immigrant women in the United States is exploited in prostitution/pornography."

"U.S. prostitution can be understood in the context of the cultural normalization of prostitution as a glamorous and wealth-producing “job” for girls who lack emotional support, education, and employment opportunities. The sexual exploitation of children and women in prostitution is often indistinguishable from incest, intimate partner violence, and rape."

"Within the gendered institution of prostitution, race and class create a hierarchy with indigenous women at its lowest point."

"For many women, the experience of prostitution stems from the historical trauma of colonization."

"We feminists think that women deserve the right NOT to prostitute."

"Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), commonly occurs among prostituted women, and is indicative of their extreme emotional distress. PTSD is characterized by anxiety, depression, insomnia, irritability, flashbacks, emotional numbing, and hyperalertness. In nine countries, we found that sixty-eight percent of those in prostitution met criteria for a diagnosis of PTSD, a prevalence that was comparable to battered women seeking shelter, rape survivors seeking treatment, and survivors of state-sponsored torture. Across widely varying cultures on five continents, the traumatic consequences of prostitution were similar."

"Prostitution myths justify the existence of prostitution, promote misinformation about prostitution, and contribute to a social climate that exploits and harms not only prostituted women but all women."

"When I’m told to be careful not to impose Western values on people who don’t want them, I beg to differ. I was not born in the West and I did not grow up in the West. But the delight of being able once I came to the West to let my imagination run free, the pleasure of choosing whom I want to associate with, the joy of reading what I want, and the thrill of being in control of my life—in short, my freedom—is something I feel intensely as I manage to extricate myself from all the shackles and obstacles that my bloodline and my religion imposed. I am not the only one who feels and thinks this."

"Contempt for women is inscribed in the works of Saint Paul."

"That is my dream. But frankly, I do not know if Western feminists have the courage or clarity of vision to help me realize it."

"The liberation of women is like a vast, unfinished house. The west wing is fairly complete…. Go to the east wing, however, and what you find is worse than unfinished."

"I believe the honor-and-shame culture can be discarded. To think otherwise is to define Muslims as as incapable of growth and adaptation, and I can’t think of anything more pejorative and racist."

"Ignoring the problem means abandoning the next victims to their fate; even worse, it means abandoning the core values that sustain Western society."

"But the more pressing business is what feminists can do to prevent an alien culture of oppression from taking root in the West."

"If feminism means anything at all, women with power should be addressing their energies to help the girls and women who suffer the pain of genital mutilation, who are at risk of being murdered because of their Western lifestyle and ideas, who must ask permission just to leave the house, who are treated no better than serfs, branded and mutilated, traded without regard to their wishes. If you are a true feminist, these women should be your first priority."

"The fact that honor killings can occur in Texas, New York, and Georgia makes the virtual silence of Western feminists on this subject all the more bizarre and deplorable."

"Virginity is the obsession, the neurosis of Islam."

"All these were conflicts of principle. All of these struggles addressed the consequences of denying men and women their freedom. All these struggles were won essentially by revealing the immorality of the opposing arguments, whether they involved the Bible or long-held feudalistic traditions. (Those who wanted slavery, civil rights abuses, and misogyny to continue all used religious arguments.) These arguments were revealed, reviled, and ridiculed, and eventually the laws that institutionalized inequality were repealed. Yet, paradoxically, because the struggles were all fought against white men they helped fix in the minds of most people the simplistic notion that blacks, women, and colonized peoples can be victims only of white male oppression. Having sided with other movements of social revolution, such as the movements for national independence in southeast Asia and minority rights of all kinds, particularly the fight against apartheid and for the Palestinians, feminists began to define white men as the ultimate and only oppressors. White men had engaged in the slave trade, apartheid, and colonialism as well as in the subjugation of women. Nonwhite men were, almost by definition, seen as members of the oppressed. As a result, the plight of Muslim women—indeed all third-world women who are oppressed in the name of a moral framework of custom or creed created and maintained by men of color—has largely gone unchallenged. A few nonprofit organizations address it, to be sure; the World Bank, for one, has grown more self-confident in condemning the subjugation of Muslim women. But the massive public effort to reveal, ridicule, revile, and replace old views has not begun. In fact a certain kind of feminism has worsened things for the female victims of misogyny perpetrated by men of color. My colleague at the American Enterprise Institute, Christina Hoff-Sommers, calls this “the feminism of resentment.” This is the position of “feminists who believe that our society [read, Western society] is best described as a ‘male hegemony,’ a ‘sex/gender system’ in which the dominant gender [read, white male] works to keep women cowering and submissive.” These feminists of resentment refuse to appreciate the progress Western women have made, from the right to vote to the punishment of those who try to harass women at work. They see only the iniquity of the white man and reduce such universal concepts as freedom of expression and the right to choose one’s own destiny to mere artifacts of Western culture. Thus they provide the men of color with an escape route. If the king of Saudi Arabia is questioned about the laws in his land pertaining to women, he merely demands respect for his faith, culture, and sovereignty, and apparently this argument suffices. Because these Western feminists manifest an almost neurotic fear of offending a minority group’s culture, the situation of Muslim women create a huge philosophical problem for them."

"When slavery divided their nation, American feminists grasped the immorality of the arguments used by the slaveholders. They denounced slavery, but they took their reasoning one step further to also indict the values that justify the treatment of women as property. It is ironic that many educated Muslim women are so well able to condemn the principles used by foreign imperialists a century ago to dominate colonized countries but shy away from addressing the moral framework that underpins injustices against their own Muslim sisters."

"When Muslim women face not just oppression but violent death, why aren’t the feminists out protesting these abusers?"

"(Hirsi Ali has just given a page of examples of Islamic terrorism) Fear has an effect. Thus slowly, and sometimes not so slowly, people begin to get used to not saying certain things, or they say them but certainly won’t write them. The thin fingers of self-censorship begin to tighten around individual minds, then groups of people, then around ideas themselves and their expression. When free speech crumbles in this way, when Westerners refrain from criticizing or questioning certain practices, certain aspects of Islam, they abandon those Muslims who seek to question them too. They also abandon their own values. Once they have done that, their society is lost."

"Free speech is the bedrock of liberty and a free society. And yes, it includes the right to blaspheme and offend."

"I strongly believe that the Muslim mind can be opened. Yet when I have criticized the teachings of the Quran, as Enlightenment thinkers once challenged the revealed truths of the Bible, I have been accused of blasphemy. Muhammad says my husband can beat me and that I am worth half as much as a man. Is it I who am being disrespectful to Muhammad in criticizing his legacy, or is it he who is disrespectful to me?"

"No doubt there was one poetry in Somali clan culture; people dressed in colorful garments; they had a dark and biting sense of humor; they knew strategies for surviving a harsh desert environment that perhaps the world could have learned from. But the multiculturalist belief that Somali clan culture should somehow be preserved, even when its products move to Western societies, is a recipe for social failure. Multiculturalism helps immigrants postpone the pain of letting go of the anachronistic and inappropriate. It locks people into corrupt, inefficient, and unjust social systems, even if it does preserve their arts and crafts. It perpetuates poverty, misery, and abuse."

"In the real world, equal respect for all cultures doesn’t translate into a rich mosaic of colorful and proud peoples interacting peacefully while maintaining a delightful diversity of food and craftwork. It translates into closed pockets of oppression, ignorance, and abuse. Many people genuinely feel pain at the thought of the death of whole cultures. I see this all the time. They ask, “Is there nothing beautiful in these cultures? Is there nothing beautiful in Islam?” There is beautiful architecture, yes, and encouragement of charity, yes, but Islam is built on sexual inequality and on the surrender of individual responsibility and choice. This is not just ugly; it is monstrous."

"Here is something I have learned the hard way, but which a lot of well-meaning people in the West have a hard time accepting: All human beings are equal, but all cultures and religions are not. A culture that celebrates femininity and considers women to be the masters of their own lives is better than a culture that mutilates girls’ genitals and confines them behind walls and veils or flogs or stones them for falling in love. A culture that protects women’s rights by law is better than a culture in which a man can lawfully have four wives at once and women are denied alimony and half their inheritance. A culture that appoints women to its supreme court is better than a culture that declares that the testimony of a woman is worth half that of a man. It is part of Muslim culture to oppress women and part of all tribal cultures to institutionalize patronage, nepotism, and corruption. The culture of the Western Enlightenment is better."

"So this, in a nutshell, was my Enlightenment: free inquiry, universal education, individual freedom, the outlawing of private violence, and the protection of individual property rights."

"This is exactly how minds are opened: through honest, frank dialogue. Tears may be shed, but not blood."

"The intellectual tradition of the European Enlightenment, which began in the seventeenth century and produced its greatest works in the eighteenth, is based on critical reasoning. It employs facts instead of faith, evidence instead of tradition. Morality in this worldview is determined by human beings, not by an outside force."

"Islam is not just a belief; it is a way of life, a violent way of life. Islam is imbued with violence, and it encourages violence. Muslim children all over the world are taught the way I was: taught with violence, taught to perpetuate violence, taught to wish for violence against the infidel, the Jew, the American Satan. I belong to a small group of lucky people who have escaped the permanent closure of my mind through education."