Lauren

“There's a difference between obsession and passion. One form of emotional oppression of women is the cheap and automatic labeling of passionate emotion as obsession, something neurotic and wrong.

If an artist like Aretha Franklin sings about love from the bottom of her gut, we call it genius. If an ordinary woman talks about love from the bottom of her gut, we call it co-dependent, obsessed, or over-wrought. This leads women to distrust our own instincts, to think of our own passions as delusional or, at the very least, unladylike.”
― Marianne Williamson, A Woman's Worth

“By the time I walked down the aisle—or rather, into a judge’s chambers—I had lived fourteen independent years, early adult years that my mother had spent married. I had made friends and fallen out with friends, had moved in and out of apartments, had been hired, fired, promoted, and quit. I had had roommates I liked and roommates I didn’t like and I had lived on my own; I’d been on several forms of birth control and navigated a few serious medical questions; I’d paid my own bills and failed to pay my own bills; I’d fallen in love and fallen out of love and spent five consecutive years with nary a fling. I’d learned my way around new neighborhoods, felt scared and felt completely at home; I’d been heartbroken, afraid, jubilant, and bored. I was a grown-up: a reasonably complicated person. I’d become that person not in the company of any one man, but alongside my friends, my family, my city, my work, and, simply, by myself. I was not alone.”
― Rebecca Traister, All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation

“the brilliant book Emotional Intelligence, Daniel Goleman describes seven key abilities most beneficial for human beings: the ability to motivate ourselves, to persist against frustration, to delay gratification, to regulate moods, to hope, to empathize, and to control impulse. Many of those who commit violence never learned these skills. If you know a young person who lacks them all, that’s an important pre-incident indicator, and he needs help.”
― Gavin de Becker, The Gift of Fear: Survival Signals That Protect Us from Violence

“I’ve successfully lobbied and testified for stalking laws in several states, but I would trade them all for a high school class that would teach young men how to hear “no,” and teach young women that it’s all right to explicitly reject.”
― Gavin de Becker, The Gift of Fear: Survival Signals That Protect Us from Violence