Jaclyn Friedman > Quotes

“A slut is someone, usually a woman, who’s stepped outside of the very narrow lane that good girls are supposed to stay within. Sluts are loud. We’re messy. We don’t behave. In fact, the original definition of “slut” meant “untidy woman.” But since we live in a world that relies on women to be tidy in all ways, to be quiet and obedient and agreeable and available (but never aggressive), those of us who color outside of the lines get called sluts. And that word is meant to keep us in line.”
― Jaclyn Friedman

“I felt drained and frustrated (not to mention flat-out dirty) operating within a framework that positioned the criminal legal system as the primary remedy for sexual violence. The prison-industrial complex, to which the mainstream rape crisis movement is intimately and often unquestioningly linked, is an embodiment of nonconsent used to reinforce race and class inequality. Prisons take away the rights of people, primarily poor people of color, to control their own lives and bodies. This is glaringly apparent when one sits in a courtroom and observes the ways in which race, class, and power intersect in this space. How, then, do we as a movement whose fundamental principle is consent see this as an appropriate solution? A successful anti-rape movement will focus not only on how rape upholds male supremacy, but also on how it serves as a tool to maintain white supremacy and myriad other oppressive systems. When this is done, the importance of creating alternative ways to address violence becomes more apparent, and the state-sponsored systems that reproduce inequality seem less viable options for true transformative change.”
― Jaclyn Friedman, Yes Means Yes: Visions of Female Sexual Power and A World Without Rape

“humanizing men, even those who might dehumanize women.”
― Jaclyn Friedman, Unscrewed: Women, Sex, Power, and How to Stop Letting the System Screw Us All

“Trump has spent his life defining his manliness in opposition to the women he dominates and degrades.”
― Jaclyn Friedman, Unscrewed: Women, Sex, Power, and How to Stop Letting the System Screw Us All

“We need a new cultural definition of masculinity.”
― Jaclyn Friedman, Unscrewed: Women, Sex, Power, and How to Stop Letting the System Screw Us All

“In every medium, women are relentlessly presented as either rewards, ornaments, or obstacles.”
― Jaclyn Friedman, Unscrewed: Women, Sex, Power, and How to Stop Letting the System Screw Us All

“men who happily enjoy misogynist porn in private feel equally free to shame women who dare to breastfeed in public.”
― Jaclyn Friedman, Unscrewed: Women, Sex, Power, and How to Stop Letting the System Screw Us All

“Do what you can. Nothing more and nothing less.”
― Jaclyn Friedman, Unscrewed: Women, Sex, Power, and How to Stop Letting the System Screw Us All

“even when women are in the spotlight, men are often in control behind the scenes.”
― Jaclyn Friedman, Unscrewed: Women, Sex, Power, and How to Stop Letting the System Screw Us All

“Paying attention to your own desires and limites teaches you to trust yourself, to be strong on your own behalf.”
― Jaclyn Friedman, What You Really Really Want: The Smart Girl's Shame-Free Guide to Sex and Safety

“One of the best ways to free yourself to what you want is to feel secure in your ability to say no to what you don’t”
― Jaclyn Friedman, What You Really Really Want: The Smart Girl's Shame-Free Guide to Sex and Safety

“Why can’t we see how important it is for boys to identify with and look up to complex, badass women?”
― Jaclyn Friedman, Unscrewed: Women, Sex, Power, and How to Stop Letting the System Screw Us All

“Women’s dress codes at work and school are often cloaked in rhetoric about not “distracting” men”
― Jaclyn Friedman, Unscrewed: Women, Sex, Power, and How to Stop Letting the System Screw Us All

“find the cracks in the gates and wedge them open wider,”
― Jaclyn Friedman, Unscrewed: Women, Sex, Power, and How to Stop Letting the System Screw Us All

“When women act on behalf of our own sexual desires, we get blamed for being raped, for the demise of modern masculinity, for men’s cheating, for getting cervical cancer, for street harassment, even for earthquakes.”
― Jaclyn Friedman, What You Really Really Want: The Smart Girl's Shame-Free Guide to Sex and Safety

“Our federal government has been taken over by men who rape and beat the women in their lives,”
― Jaclyn Friedman, Unscrewed: Women, Sex, Power, and How to Stop Letting the System Screw Us All

“We need to create a culture in which we have more actual value.”
― Jaclyn Friedman, Unscrewed: Women, Sex, Power, and How to Stop Letting the System Screw Us All

“In 2016, Utah passed a law declaring pornography a “public health crisis,”
― Jaclyn Friedman, Unscrewed: Women, Sex, Power, and How to Stop Letting the System Screw Us All

“when there’s a man making money off of nearly every prominent Girl Power message, something’s wrong.”
― Jaclyn Friedman, Unscrewed: Women, Sex, Power, and How to Stop Letting the System Screw Us All

“masculinity is an ever-shifting set of cultural standards that so many men feel insecure about”
― Jaclyn Friedman, Unscrewed: Women, Sex, Power, and How to Stop Letting the System Screw Us All

“male peer reviewers regularly drag down aggregate review scores for TV shows aimed at women,”
― Jaclyn Friedman, Unscrewed: Women, Sex, Power, and How to Stop Letting the System Screw Us All

“school dress codes often have many more picayune regulations specifically targeting girls’ clothing than boys’,”
― Jaclyn Friedman, Unscrewed: Women, Sex, Power, and How to Stop Letting the System Screw Us All

“Big Thinkers like IBM’s Watson are programmed and named to sound like men.”
― Jaclyn Friedman, Unscrewed: Women, Sex, Power, and How to Stop Letting the System Screw Us All

“Critics are also overwhelmingly male—one survey of film review aggregator site Rotten Tomatoes found only 22 percent of the critics afforded “top critic” status were female.14 More recently, of course, we have become accustomed to a second set of gatekeepers: our friends and family and even random strangers we’ve decided to follow on social media, as well as “peer” reviewers on sites like Goodreads and IMDb. But peer review sites are easily skewed by a motivated minority with a mission (see the Ghostbusters reboot and the handful of manbabies dedicated to its ruination) or by more stubborn and pervasive implicit biases, which most users aren’t even aware they have. (The data crunchers at FiveThirtyEight.com found that male peer reviewers regularly drag down aggregate review scores for TV shows aimed at women, but the reverse isn’t true.)15 As for the social networks we choose? They’re usually plagued by homophily, which is a fancy way to say that it’s human nature to want to hang out with people who make us feel comfortable, and usually those are people who remind us of us. Without active and careful intervention on our part, we can easily be left with an online life that tells us only things we already agree with and recommends media to us that doesn’t challenge our existing worldview.”
― Jaclyn Friedman, Unscrewed: Women, Sex, Power, and How to Stop Letting the System Screw Us All

“It is not yours to complete the work, neither is it yours to desist from it.”
― Jaclyn Friedman, Unscrewed: Women, Sex, Power, and How to Stop Letting the System Screw Us All

“government shouldn’t be in the business of imposing someone else’s dubious religious code on you.”
― Jaclyn Friedman, Unscrewed: Women, Sex, Power, and How to Stop Letting the System Screw Us All

“it’s so slow that it’s almost immune to presidential administrations.”
― Jaclyn Friedman, Unscrewed: Women, Sex, Power, and How to Stop Letting the System Screw Us All

“It’s unclear, as of this writing, whether the ACA will survive a Trump administration. “I’m so pissed about that,”
― Jaclyn Friedman, Unscrewed: Women, Sex, Power, and How to Stop Letting the System Screw Us All