Margaret

“The threat of “Lock her up”—so chilling to women who heard it hurled at Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, and Christine Blasey Ford—is the threat that what looks like law will become the mechanism for undoing the law. For the millions of American women who witnessed Ford’s testimony and Kavanaugh’s response, the icy realization that male entitlement, threats, and fury could still outrun and overmaster the truth, even in a process that purported to surface the truth, was another earthquake in the Trump years. Law or the trappings of law could be used to silence and sideline women. That isn’t a fight about equality; it’s a fear of retribution.”
― Dahlia Lithwick, Lady Justice: Women, the Law, and the Battle to Save America

“No matter the problem, no matter the actions of an aggressor, the fault is mine. Regardless of the politics or life experience of the person I am talking to, the answer comes like clockwork. I guess if you hate it that much, you should just lose weight. But despite its ubiquity in conversations about fatness and fat people, that is the logic of abuse. You made me do this. I wouldn’t hurt you if you didn’t make me. Just because we are accustomed to hearing it doesn’t make it healthy, productive, humane, or helpful. Its functions are threefold: One, to absolve us of any responsibility to address a widespread social problem. Two, to free us from having to re-examine our own beliefs and biases. And three, to silence and isolate fat people, to show us that any complaint we lodge and any issue we raise will be for naught, and may even cost us relationships, respect, comfort, and safety.”
― Aubrey Gordon, What We Don't Talk About When We Talk About Fat

“Lock her up”—as a prong of Make America Great Again—became a promise to weaponize the machinery of law to silence, threaten, and isolate women. In the end it didn’t even matter whom the pronoun “her” referenced. For crowds who embraced it, it was a generalized promise that after centuries of women’s diligent efforts at bending and shaping and coaxing the law into affording them equal protection and dignity, their gender itself could become a crime.”
― Dahlia Lithwick, Lady Justice: Women, the Law, and the Battle to Save America

“Temperance is the place where magic meets the mundane, Wilhelmina. Remembering the mundane makes us smart; remembering the magic makes us brave.”
― Kristin Cashore, There Is a Door in This Darkness