Feminism

"...I definitely believe that everyone has the right to be able to make the choices that they want to make for their own lives..."

"Don't understand the problem so many are having with #MeraJismMeriMarzi"-Mera jism meri marzi nahi toh kis ki marzi ho gi?? "My body is mine" is a critical component of the Life Skills Based Education classes we teach to help children protect themselves from abuse & harassment"

"‘Mera jism, meri marzi’ means ‘nobody touch us without our consent’ and there is nothing wrong about it(slogan)."

""My body, my choice" is an issue that is relevant to Pakistani women across all classes. When a woman is killed in the name of "honor," her body is attacked; when a woman is denied the right to choose her partner, her body and her choice are compromised; and when a woman faces domestic violence, her body is attacked. All other issues that our "Aurat March" (women's march) raised are equally important, but they all emanate from a deep-rooted misogyny in our society. Women do not have the agency over their own bodies and that is the main issue, in my opinion."

"My body my rules. My flower pot My rules; Your flower pot, your flowers (English+Hindustani the original quip:Mah badan, mah rulz..My gamla my phoolz..Your Gamla, your phool.) (Of uncertain south Asian origin)"

"“Why character is always related to size of cloth? Or Does really covering full body makes a difference? Answer is No! Most of us would have faced issues even after being covered up top to toe isn’t it? Eyes on us like they can see through clothes, which makes us feel like “Kuch dikh rha h kya ?” Looking for a chance every time “SHE” bends areee kya pta kuch dikh jaye. Stop being judgemental about me. It’s my body my choice who you are to tell me? If something has to be changed it’s you, your thought about woman. It’s never about the size of clothes it’s about how he or she is been raised up? Reason I am including “She” here is because there are also set of woman who provokes such things. This is not to offend anyone, I totally understand all men aren’t like this but unfortunately number of men who aren’t like this is very small.”"

"...The problem is, according to medical professionals, choosing whether or not to vaccinate yourself or your child isn’t merely a personal choice—scientifically speaking, it’s a matter of public health, while abortion is not. Someone's choice about whether or not to have an abortion doesn't potentially affect the health of the people they interact with, while choosing not to get vaccinated does....There are people who should not get the measles vaccine for CDC-approved medical reasons (pregnant people, people with weakened immune systems, children under age 1) and those people could get measles from someone who chose not to get vaccinated because of personal beliefs...."

"I woke up angry today cos of a conversation I had before bed. Women are so strong. So OBVIOUSLY strong. You sweat blood for a spot at a table that disrespects your sweat. Then you spend EVERY SINGLE DAY convincing people you belong there. And the damn table isn't even all that,...And when you say "Fuck it. My life, my rules." They ask why. It's because it never ends. Nothing is ever enough. And complaining is a waste of time.This is why most of the women that STAY winning have to win on their own terms. Ass-kissing is exhausting..."

""...Has my body ever really been..really mine! Has there ever been a time that I could do whatever I wanted with it and not fear other people’s judgement? I was born with my body and it is attached to my brain. I control the mobility of it. But do I really have control of it? I like putting clothes on it, and making a statement when I walk out my front door. ....Over the years I have spent a lot of time and energy on my body. But can I say that I feel 100% ownership of it? No, I can’t! Sometimes I feel like I am renting it and doing the best I can.....I noticed that if my body had over a certain fat percentage that I was not accepted very easily...When I got to college, the boys my age liked it if I filled my body with liquids that made me less coherent and more willing to do what they wanted me to do...After college I ... started dating. It seemed the main question between my potential boyfriend and me was when was I going to give him my body?..., these magazines put me over the edge as the women looked amazing!..I felt fat and ugly and sidelined from society....So, I had a 2 year old baby, my body was back in shape and I was feeling pretty good. Was my body mine yet? Did my husband like my body? I started to feel like his eyes were drifting to other bodies. Was I not good enough anymore?.. For years I continued to pour my energy into my body so that it appeared inviting and vibrant. I wasn’t ready not to be noticed and a lot of my self esteem came from being admired for my outside qualities. But, shouldn’t I be the one who accepts my body first, rather than worry if everyone else accepts it? Now that I am entering midlife,.... And I sometimes look at my body and feel that it is not good enough..not beautiful enough....But I am starting to realize that the true beauty of my body doesn’t solely depend on how it looks but what it does for me. My body held it all together for me when I was a child, it got me through trauma and confusion. It stayed strong and held me up so that I could walk away from the abuse. My body walked me to work and helped me to be proficient in my..career so that I could support myself and start my own life. My body would give me signals that helped me to figure out who was on my side and who just wanted to use me. My body felt relaxed and safe when I met my husband, and it let me know that it was ok to let my guard down. My body became more powerful when my daughter was born, as it filled with strength to protect her and guide her through life. My body has been there for me every step of the way.....My body has been beat up, tormented, used and taken for granted but it keeps honoring me, it keeps talking to me, it keeps telling me what is best for me. My body is my best friend. And now I have the power to decide if I love and honor my best friend or turn my back on her."

"What about my choice? Shouldn’t my right to an intact body matter? Lerner doesn’t address the possibility that a man should have the right to make the choice for himself. Advocates of circumcision evidently believe the feelings of the human who is being cut are irrelevant. Anyone with an open heart who listens to the screams of a baby being circumcised cannot honestly believe that babies want to be circumcised."

"Still my body is not determined by my limitations. Rather I create my body through my choices and my actions, in this I have created myself.My entire lived experience determines my body. My choice...,my habits...result in what I may call at any moment - for that time - by body. My body is mutable chargeable living substance. It is continuous with my mind, which is no less subject to temporal change, mutability, growth, and decay, and no less a product of my exercise of choice and free will."

"It's My life, my choice and my responsibility"

"The right to control and make decisions about our own bodies is fundamental to women's freedom. Seems simple right? Logically 'My body my choice' should be met with "Her body her choice." But far too often it's not. Instead "My body my choice" is often is met with a resounding wall of "not really your body, not really your choice." And yes this makes steam comes out of my ears. My ears are in my body, by the way. There is good reason for this steam; A woman's right to access to birth control, abortion, and reproductive health care has all been increasingly under attack in the past several years."

"Good sexual and reproductive health is a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being in all matters relating to sexuality and the reproductive system. All individuals have a right to make decisions governing their body and to access services that support that right (Starrs and others, 2018). Every individual has the right to make his or her own choices about his or her sexual and reproductive health, which implies that people should be able to have a satisfying and safe sex life, the capability to reproduce and the freedom to decide if, when and how often to do so (United Nations Population Fund, 2014; WHO, 2004)."

"I have poetry on my body and the idea is my body is mine to use and abuse,.....It's mine. It's not God's or anybody else's. It's mine. I'm a writer and I see myself as a canvas, as a space where I can write as well,"

"“....My body, my choice, my life, my … Free yourself from people’s judgement, feel liberated, live with a kind heart & love yourself, or change till you do… For when you truly love yourself, you can truly love someone other than you...""

"My body, my choice! has long been the rallying cry of the abortion movement. In recent years, advocates made a more concerted effort to substantiate the sound bite by pushing a philosophical argument for abortion they called the “bodily autonomy” (or bodily “integrity”) argument. ... The argument goes like this: The highest moral good is to have autonomy over one’s own body. This autonomy includes the right to kill the body of a preborn child attached to and reliant on my body. Therefore, abortion is moral."

"...The lack of autonomy is a cruelty thrust on them by a society that has decided their value is in their biology, not their minds...To have a soul is to be human, to have bodily autonomy is to exist freely."

"Mera jism, meri marzi literally means that womxn want bodily autonomy and have the right to make decisions concerning their bodies"

"“My Body My Choice” His Body My choice. His life My choice. His money My choice. His freedom My choice. His mannerisms My choice. His family My Choice. His decisions My Choice – Stop these double standards and then say this is a patriarchal society."

"Justice is a day where I can confidently say, “My sexuality, my decision. My body, my choice.”"

"...Trans persons should have the right to access legal and safe healthcare which includes medical procedures, surgeries, and hormones without discrimination. Folks who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, queer, and two-spirit should not be forced into conversion therapy and should have the right to engage in sexual relationships without violations towards their bodily autonomy...."

"..When we say that people should have full bodily autonomy, that having bodily autonomy is a human right, we mean that people should have full control over their body and be able to freely make choices concerning their body (unless it means that your choice will cause public health concerns and outbreaks, making other people ill, such as within the case of refusing vaccinations)...Bodily autonomy is a human right, a concept that is applied not only to abortion, but also for ending human rights violations such as slavery, female genital mutilation, forced sterilization, sex trafficking, sexual assault, rape, to name some examples.....Your fight for bodily autonomy must be all-inclusive. If your fight for human rights are not universal, it is self serving and it allows unjust harm onto vulnerable and marginalized peoples. One should have full control over their body. Our body. Our choice..."

"'..My fans love the fact that everything I’m doing is my choice. It’s my body. I want what I do to be memorable and so do my fans – I’m just living, just being.’"

"I have been trolled a lot of times for my size, make-up, clothes, hair, for my low cleavage. ..... Sometimes I gain or lose weight, so they have a problem with that too. There are times when they don't like my clothes or dance, so they comment on that too. I want to tell these faceless people it is my body, my choice I will do what I feel is right. I have earned it,"

"One Instagram user "..“My body is not mine, but rather Allah’s..”."

"“Mummy, at the very least it makes people think about women and their choices. What choices did you have when you were younger? You had to stay at home, then get married, have kids and by the time you were forty, life was at a standstill; at least women can try different things now.”"

"But the chant ‘Mera Jism Meri Marzi‘ is important because of the vast injustices women in Pakistan and all around the world have to face at the hands of the patriarchy against their very own bodies. The message behind the slogan is important. Like a man, it is a woman’s right to choose whatever happens with her body. Whether she chooses to follow a certain religion or whether she chooses to walk around proudly without any clothes, it is her right to do as she wants and nobody else has a right to prevent her from exercising her choice."

"Men, women and even kids need to learn this important lesson about boundaries and consent. Just like we teach kids not to let strangers touch them or let even those they know well touch them inappropriately, women have a right to claim their own bodies and not be forced to do things that someone else wants them to."

"Why is #MeraJismMeriMarzi considered so offensive? Because the control of women’s bodies is the bedrock of our patriarchal system. If a woman refuses this & asserts that her body is her own, it shakes the foundations of patriarchy. Sugarcoat it how you like; this is the truth!"

"Men may rule the world, but women rule the men who rule the world."

"Women are the carriers of society’s values ... men are deviant in the sense that many of the qualities admired in them are also one’s that society has to regard with disapproval ... Women’s Lib portrays society and morality as a male invention to coerce and punish women ... [yet] women are a virtuous group seeking to impose their moral standards on men."

"Feminism, coveting social power, is blind to women’s cosmic sexual power."

"I'm absolutely a feminist. The reason other feminists don't like me is that I criticize the movement, explaining that it needs a correction. Feminism has betrayed women, alienated men and women, replaced dialogue with political correctness."

"There’s hardly a woman writer who doesn’t receive some kind of support from the women’s movement. We’re very lucky to be living and writing now."

"That word identity has been hard for many women who live secular lives and maybe harder for religious women and also feminists. But the women's movement has made a big difference. I don't know who it hasn't helped in this world. It's given a lot of Jewish women courage to stay Jewish and fight."

"(How do you relate to the women's movement?) LMS: I feel I've benefited by it just generally in the sense that anything that undermines the stereotypes perpetrated on all of us by white men is helpful. What it does is take some of the pressure off those of us who have never lived very close to the stereotypes. I've always been the way I was. Here at Laguna, a lot more is expected of women; women are expected to be strong, to manage the property. Children belong to women and to their families. Women do the plastering. It's a relief to have the stereotypes knocked down. It's just made it easier for me to do what I want to do."

"The emancipation of women is not an act of charity, the result of a humanitarian or compassionate attitude. The liberation of women is a fundamental necessity for the Revolution, the guarantee of its continuity and the preconditions for its victory."

"The revolutionary Chicana does not identify with the so-called women's liberation movement in the United States because up to now that movement has been dominated by white women of middle class background...Up to now, the U.S. women's liberation movement has been mainly concerned with sexism and ignored or denied the importance of racism. For the Chicana, the three types of oppression cannot be separated. They are all a part of the same system, they are three faces of the same enemy."

"Only the fresh revolutionary storms were strong enough to sweep away hoary prejudices against woman and only the productive-working people is able to effect the complete equalization and liberation of woman by building a new society."

"The way Jews have been met with "not you too," the way anti-Semitism becomes the one issue too many, suggest that many white women are angry and resistant to dealing with racism but are too frightened to express that anger openly; suggest further how little our movement has taught us to see struggles against racism as life-giving, nourishing; as our own."

"By speaking about anti-Semitism, Jewish women unsettle an unspoken equation in the radical women's movement: in a society like ours, deeply racist and absurdly pretending to classlessness, class comes to be seen as identical to race. People of color are considered the same as working and poor people."

"1980. I recognized in Reagan's election that the liberalism I had for years seen as the real danger was being superseded, that the right was gaining power, with all its Jew-hating, racist, sexist, homophobic capitalist thrust. At the same time the anti-Semitism I was encountering in the women's movement and on the left hurt me more, not because it was more threatening but because the feminist left was where I needed to be: this added to my sense of isolation as a Jew."

"I think the women’s movement is wonderful, a great thing. I hate to see some of the mean struggles within it, but I don’t see how it could exist without it. Everybody should try to be as honorable and truthful and fierce as they can be."

"(Women's Liberation) ... is an ontological, spiritual revolution, pointing beyond the idolatries of sexist society and sparking creative action in and toward transcendence. The becoming of women implies universal human becoming. It has everything to do with the search for ultimate meaning and reality which some would call God. p. 6"

"I think 99% of women’s lib comes from technology making different kinds of lives possible, and then the follows the technology, it doesn’t precede it. The complaints may precede it, but the change follows. So I think that women who are are not as in touch with reality as they ought to be, because technology makes our lives possible. I certainly wouldn’t want to live in any earlier time, speaking as a woman. I would be dead several times over by now."

"It requires a kick in the imagination, a wrenching of tired words, to realize that feminism is the final and therefore the first cause, and that this movement is movement. Realization of this is already the beginning of a qualitative leap in be-ing. For the philosophers of senescence 'the final cause' is in technical reason; it is the Father's plan, an endless flow of Xerox copies of the past. But the final cause that is movement is in our imaginative-cerebral-emotional-active-creative be-ing. p. 190"

"[A]s feminists gained positions of leadership in the abortion-rights movement, women activists began reinterpreting abortion rights, arguing that they reflected the constitutional significance of women's interests in autonomy and equality. As had been the case for Betty Friedan and Carol Greitzer before Roe, many feminists viewed abortion as being a women's-rights issue. With the controversy surrounding population control and the necessity of defending Roe, feminists saw a valuable opportunity to reframe abortion as an issue of rights for women."

"Abortion-rights groups often adopted population-control arguments as a more pragmatic alternative to those involving women's rights. For movement pragmatists, women's-rights claims likely seemed risky. In the early 1970s, the women's movement remained poorly understood and, in some cases, unpopular, A 1970 Harris poll, for example, found that sympathy for the women's movement did not top fifty percent in any of the age groups surveyed.""

"Abortion-rights groups often adopted population-control arguments as an alternative to those involving liberty and equality for women. Some supporters of abortion rights had no independent interest in the women’s movement or its demands. Many other activists, however, sympathizes with or even focused on the struggle for women’s liberation. For movement pragmatists, however, women’s rights claims seemed risky. In the early 1970s the women’s movement remained poorly understood and, in some cases, unpopular. For example, the 1971 Virginia Slims American Women’s Opinion Poll found that only 42 percent of respondents favored a movement to “strengthen or change women’s status in society.” Moreover, the women’s movement pushed not only for abortion but also for equal employment, changes in the portrayal of women in the media, and publicly funded child care. Invoking women’s liberation appeared likely to create the kind of controversy the movement could ill afford."