M.

“In the United States, the cost of maintaining racism has been a loss of self-knowledge (and thus love) for those who refuse to know what they have because others suffer. What they have includes a sense of superiority that substitutes for a real identity. Maintaining racism has required an emotional numbness, a proud and fatal incapacity to feel, because that is the cost of purposely maintaining ignorance: one must block life out—the world around one and one’s own emotional possibilities. For that reason, in this country there is “an emotional poverty so bottomless, and a terror of human life, of human touch, so deep” that most Amerikans lack “the most elementary and crucial connections.”
― Andrea Dworkin, Intercourse

“Men often react to women’s words—speaking and writing—as if they were acts of violence; sometimes men react to women’s words with violence. So we lower our voices. Women whisper. Women apologize. Women shut up. Women trivialize what we know. Women shrink. Women pull back. Most women have experienced enough dominance from men—control, violence, insult, contempt—that no threat seems empty.”
― Andrea Dworkin, Intercourse

“However, as Bordo herself notes, the problem with the adoption of postmodern ideas in general is that they have led some writers to disregard the materiality of power relations.”
― Sheila Jeffreys, Beauty and Misogyny: Harmful Cultural Practices in the West

“The world had changed a great deal, but the little rules, contracts and customs had not, which meant the world hadn't actually changed at all.”
― Cho Nam-Joo, 82년생 김지영