I was going to die, sooner or later, whether or not I had even spoken myself. My silences had not protected me. Your silences will not protect you…. What are the words you do not yet have? What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence? We have been socialized to respect fear more than our own need for language.
I began to ask each time: “What’s the worst that could happen to me if I tell this truth?” …Our speaking out will irritate some people, get us called bitchy or hypersensitive and disrupt some dinner parties. And then our speaking out will permit other women to speak, until laws are changed and lives are saved and the world is altered forever.
Next time, ask: What’s the worst that will happen? Then push yourself a little further than you dare. Once you start to speak, people will yell at you. They will interrupt you, put you down and suggest it’s personal. And the world won’t end.
And the speaking will get easier and easier. And you will find you have fallen in love with your own vision, which you may never have realized you had. And you will lose some friends and lovers, and realize you don’t miss them. And new ones will find you and cherish you. And you will still flirt and paint your nails, dress up and party, because, as I think Emma Goldman said, “If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution.” And at last you’ll know with surpassing certainty that only one thing is more frightening than speaking your truth. And that is not speaking.
(via zenjamaican)
Source: thepeoplesrecord
Um, tattling is when a little girl does it. When a hot woman does it, it’s called whistle-blowing.
And it’s all about our response, as the audience — as if the only possible reason a woman would show her body was because she expects praise for it, and not because it functions in the service of a story she is acting in, or simply because she individually likes the way she looks without pants.
When we dismiss Dunham as a woman in control of her own representation, we hinder our own ability to make decisions about our bodies that don’t come exclusively from social pressures to look a certain way. And who wants that? It’s certainly not doing any of us any good.
from the “Girls Are Not Chicks” Coloring Book.
I need to get my hands on a copy.
Source: in.zinio.com
Hillary Clinton on Being Asked about Her Clothes
Interviewer: Okay. Which designers do you prefer?
Hillary Clinton: What designers of clothes?
Interviewer: Yes.
Hillary Clinton: Would you ever ask a man that question?
Interviewer: Probably not. Probably not.
[Via UniteWomen.org; State.gov]
Original image by Diana Walker for Time.
thanks to jezebel for directing me to texts from hillary.
