Radical Feminists

"As much as the apartheid regime has no longer been constitutionalised, racism hasn't disappeared"

"I first-hand got to see racism from my identity not being welcomed or understood"

"The generation of Nelson Mandela brought political emancipation. But political emancipation doesn't exist without economic and mental emancipation"

"Laws can change, but people still have to change"

"I've realised that a big part of fighting racism deals with the mind — and the only way to unlock and liberate the mind is through access to knowledge"

"the oppressed — Black people, people of colour — need to get to a point where they take themselves out of their own mental prison and liberate their minds"

"I believe that books play a big role, especially books by Africans, in seeing representation, seeing yourself being written up in a positive light, seeing your existence reflected in the pages of literature"

"One of the things that the apartheid regime was very successful at was making all schools in rural areas and townships environments in which it's difficult to come out and be a leader in society"

"I believe that if we can work on empowering those schools, we'll definitely be doing a huge job in society"

"Poverty is a manmade crisis"

"The economy in South Africa is still divided, and wealth and poverty have opposite faces"

"The fight against racism is a fight for the betterment of all of humanity, because it determines how we will live amongst each other, and how resources will be shared"

"Young people make up a majority of the global population, but they are still not included in building a world that they are going to inherit"

"I still lived in a world where every last bit of your life was determined by your race: what kind of opportunities you're going to be exposed to, the kind of school you'll go to, the environment you’ll live in. My entire world still was determined on the basis of race."

"One of the things that made me unable to escape activism was that growing up, I experienced a huge amount of anti-Blackness, which I became very aware of just being in a family with both my parents of colour"

"I realised that you have one of two choices: either you try to speak up and see what the effects of speaking up will be, or you die in silence over the silent war you constantly find yourself in"

"I chose to speak up because I felt it was an injustice of its own for me to see the reality of the institution and still choose to be silent."

"I chose to be an activist because I don't want a generation of young South Africans to still be having the same kind of conversations about systemic and institutional racism 30 years from now"

"I was 13, 14 years old, a child basically, [and] I was receiving death threats from old white adults"

"we spoke up about something we were always taught to be silent about"

"I work in these spaces where you're constantly speaking up and you’re always pouring into other people's cups and your cup is hardly poured into"

"Black children see the diversity of the world around them and understand that just because someone doesn't look like them, that doesn't make them inferior"

"The most urgent thing that needs to happen to ensure that education is used as a tool to change the world is firstly, it needs to be accessible"

"We need to ensure that previously poorly funded schools aren't continuing to be disadvantaged now"

"If men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament."

"I am no longer submissive, no longer seductive; perhaps it is for that reason that my husband tells me sometimes that I have become hard, and that my hardness is unattractive. I would like it to be otherwise. I think that will take a long time."

"And I wonder always whether it is possible to define myself as a feminist revolutionary and still remain in any sense a wife. There are moments when I still worry that he will leave me, that he will come to need a woman less preoccupied with her rights, and when I worry about that I also fear that no man will ever love me again, that no man could ever love a woman who is angry. And that fear is a great source of trouble to me for it means that in certain fundamental ways I have not changed at all."

"I would like to be cold and clear and selfish, to demand satisfaction for my needs, to compel respect rather than affection. And yet there are moments, and perhaps there always will be, when I fall back upon the old cop-outs. Why should I trouble to win a chess game or a political argument when it is so much easier to lose charmingly? Why should I work when my husband can support me, why should I be a human being when I can get away with being a child?"

"Women's Liberation is finally only personal. It is hard to fight an enemy who has outposts in your head."

"I knew the writing came from the place that’s the closest you can get to truth. But the downside was, I became a character in a public story that resembled mine but was a huge oversimplification of a complex life."

"Writing about Cutting Loose, quoted in Sara Davidson article"

"I became a feminist as an alternative to becoming a masochist."

"When men imagine a female uprising, they imagine a world in which women rule men as men have ruled women. Most men can’t really imagine “equality.” All they can imagine is having the existing power structure inverted."

"When you give up partnership relationships you also give up a certain kind of intimacy. But you gain a lot of freedom, and you also experience a wider, less exclusive form of love."

"We can care about things without clinging to them."

"Male sexuality is apparently activated by violence against women and expresses itself in violence against women to a significant extent."

"Women fake vaginal orgasms, the only 'mature' sexuality, because men demand that they enjoy vaginal penetration."

"Nor is homosexuality without stake in this gendered sexual system. Putting to one side the obviously gendered content of expressly adopted roles, clothing, and sexual mimicry, to the extent the gender of a sexual object is crucial to arousal, the structure of social power that stands behind and defines gender is hardly irrelevant, even if it is rearranged."

"Some have argued that lesbian sexuality-meaning here simply women having sex with women not men-solves the problem of gender by eliminating men from women's voluntary sexual encounters. Yet women's sexuality remains constructed under conditions of male supremacy; women remain socially defined as women in relation to men; the definition of women as men's inferiors remains sexual even if not heterosexual, whether men are present at the time or not."

"Women are raped and coerced into sex."

"“Women are socially disadvantaged in controlling sexual access to their bodies through socialization to customs that define a woman's body as for sexual use by men. Sexual access is regularly forced or pressured or routinized beyond denial.”"

"Objectivity is the methodological stance of which objectification is the social process. Sexual objectification is the primary process of the subjection of women. It unites act with word, construction with expression, perception with enforcement, myth with reality. Man fucks woman; subject verb object."

"Imagine that for hundreds of years your most formative traumas, your daily suffering and pain, the abuse you live through, the terror you live with, are unspeakable — not the basis of literature. You grow up with your father holding you down and covering your mouth so another man can make a horrible searing pain between your legs.… You learn how to leave your body and create someone else who takes over when you cannot stand it any more. You develop a self who is ingratiating and obsequious and imitative and aggressively passive and silent — you learn, in a word, femininity."

"Empirically, all pornography is made under conditions of inequality based on sex, overwhelmingly by poor, desperate, homeless, pimped women who were sexually abused as children."

"So the idea that there is nothing essential, in the sense that there are no human universals, is dogma. Ask most anyone who is going to be shot at dawn."

"What postmodernism gives us instead is a multicultural defense for male violence - a defense for it wherever it is, which in effect is a pretty universal defense."

"Can postmodernism hold the perpetrators of genocide accountable?"

"Postmodernism is an academic theory, originating in academia with an academic elite, not in the world of women and men, where feminist theory is rooted."

"All sex, even consensual sex between a married couple, is an act of violence perpetrated against a woman."

"In a patriarchal society all heterosexual intercourse is rape because women, as a group, are not strong enough to give meaningful consent."