Ruth Barrett > Quotes

“The crimes men commit against women aren’t done to women as random individuals; they’re done because women belong to a subordinate class and they’re done to keep women a subordinate class. The”
― Ruth Barrett, Female Erasure: What You Need To Know About Gender Politics War On Women, the Female Sex and Human Rights

“Divide and conquer is best accomplished through silencing, through calling into question those who speak out. There is so much of this attached to the trans movement. Even just wondering about a profound concept such as transgender is labeled “transphobic”. What I think has happened is that people are now phobic about their own gut responses to life. We are being systematically separated from our own intuition. This is fatal for a civilization, I think. Not that our intuition always tells the truth with a capital T, but it is a critical piece of who we are. Without it, we remain profoundly directionless, and more susceptible to coercion of all types. What”
― Ruth Barrett, Female Erasure: What You Need To Know About Gender Politics War On Women, the Female Sex and Human Rights

“Growing up under patriarchy is a grooming process that leaves girls and women extremely vulnerable to male manipulation.”
― Ruth Barrett, Female Erasure: What You Need to Know About Gender Politics' War on Women, the Female Sex and Human Rights

“Female erasure is and has been the essential tool used throughout history to ensure the success and continuation of patriarchal values.”
― Ruth Barrett, Female Erasure: What You Need to Know About Gender Politics' War on Women, the Female Sex and Human Rights

“If feminism was reduced to one word, it would be this: No. "No" is a boundary, spoken only by a self who claims one. Objects have neither; subjects begin at "No". Feminists said "No" and we meant it.”
― Ruth Barrett, Female Erasure: What You Need to Know About Gender Politics' War on Women, the Female Sex and Human Rights

“No one, certainly no woman, is allowed to question his femaleness.
Men who adopt femininity may believe that they are achieving femaleness, but femaleness is a tougher destiny than they can know or guess. Femaleness is demanding and painful, whether at menarche, menstruation, childbed or menopause, and born women have no choice but to deal with it. Painted faces, depilated bodies, hair extensions and pumped up tits are available to all human beings. Femininity is a de-sexed masquerade. Men can be as good at it and better than women, but that does not make them women.”
― Ruth Barrett, Female Erasure: What You Need to Know About Gender Politics' War on Women, the Female Sex and Human Rights

“IN THE BEGINNING…WAS a very female sea. For two-and-a-half billion years on earth, all lifeforms floated in the womb-like environment of the planetary ocean – nourished and protected by its fluid chemicals, rocked by the lunar-tidal rhythms. Charles Darwin believed the menstrual cycle originated here, organically echoing the moon-pulse of the sea. And, because this longest period of life’s time on earth was dominated by marine forms reproducing parthenogenetically, he concluded that the female principle was primordial”
― Ruth Barrett, Female Erasure: What You Need to Know About Gender Politics' War on Women, the Female Sex and Human Rights

“When women occupy public spaces as persons who understand that for millennia they have been denied their inalienable rights as human beings, they begin to demand the restitution of those rights through the creation of structures within which they situate financial, technical and intellectual resources.”
― Ruth Barrett, Female Erasure: What You Need to Know About Gender Politics' War on Women, the Female Sex and Human Rights

“Some nouns: glass, scissors, razors, acid. Some verbs: cut, scrape, cauterize, burn. These nouns and verbs create unspeakable sentences when the object is a seven year old girl with her legs forced open. The clitoris, with it's 8000 nerve endings, is always sliced up. In the most extreme forms of female genital mutilation (FGM), the labia are cut off and the vagina is sewn shut. On her wedding night, the girl's husband will penetrate her with a knife before his penis.”
― Ruth Barrett, Female Erasure: What You Need to Know About Gender Politics' War on Women, the Female Sex and Human Rights

“The spaces we refer to as public are assumed to be male, and for centuries men have excluded women from the public where all the key decisions relating to power are deliberated and implemented.”
― Ruth Barrett, Female Erasure: What You Need to Know About Gender Politics' War on Women, the Female Sex and Human Rights

“Patriarchy has effectively used exclusion as a central tenet of its ideological claims to hegemony in all our societies, where one is looking at notions of identity, of rights and privilege, of access and inclusion into institutions and sites of power.”
― Ruth Barrett, Female Erasure: What You Need to Know About Gender Politics' War on Women, the Female Sex and Human Rights

“If you were born female, you were born on a battlefield. You will be punished for even saying that out loud, but the grim truth is you are going to be punished no matter what for the sin of being female.”
― Ruth Barrett, Female Erasure: What You Need to Know About Gender Politics' War on Women, the Female Sex and Human Rights

“What is "male privilege," and why is it important to name the elephant in the living room? My friend Patricia Monaghan (of blessed memory) describes it this way: "For those who have male privilege, it's like a person wearing strong perfume. Rarely can the wearer smell it, but those around begin to leave the room.”
― Ruth Barrett, Female Erasure: What You Need to Know About Gender Politics' War on Women, the Female Sex and Human Rights

“Patriarchy denies reality, that Woman is primary for she creates man.”
― Ruth Barrett, Female Erasure: What You Need to Know About Gender Politics' War on Women, the Female Sex and Human Rights