Emily Richardson

“Purity most often leads to pride or to despair, not to holiness. Because holiness is about union with, and purity is about separation from.”
― Nadia Bolz-Weber, Shameless: A Case for Not Feeling Bad About Feeling Good

“Our purity systems, even those established with the best of intentions, do not make us holy.*4 They only create insiders and outsiders.”
― Nadia Bolz-Weber, Shameless: A Case for Not Feeling Bad About Feeling Good

“In my college sociolinguistics classes, I started learning about some of the subtle ways gender stereotypes are hiding in English . . . like how the term penetration implies (and reinforces) the idea that sex is from the male perspective. Like sex is defined as something a man does to a woman. The opposite might be envelopment or enclosure. Can you imagine how different life would be if that’s how we referred to sex? If women were linguistically framed as the protagonists of any given sexual scenario, could that potentially mean that a woman’s orgasm as opposed to a dude’s would be seen as the proverbial climax—the ultimate goal? Questions like that blew my mind.”
― Amanda Montell, Wordslut: A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language

“Some compelling proof that women are indeed not born any more capable of empathy or connection than men comes from psychologist Niobe Way. In 2013 Way published a book called Deep Secrets: Boys’ Friendships and the Crisis of Connection, which explores the friendships of young straight men. Way followed a group of boys from childhood through adolescence and found that when they were little, boys’ friendships with other boys were just as intimate and emotional as friendships between girls; it wasn’t until the norms of masculinity sank in that the boys ceased to confide in or express vulnerable feelings for one another. By the age of eighteen, society’s “no homo” creed had become so entrenched that they felt like the only people they could look to for emotional support were women, further perpetuating the notion that women are obligated by design to carry humanity’s emotional cargo.”
― Amanda Montell, Wordslut: A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language