Jessica Valenti Quotes

I think you can't have this discussion and you can't have a discussion about feminism and the consciousness of the world without having a discussion about what has happened to men lately. They're holding the other side of the bag.

Usually the male control and domination that tends to be in our genes gets around a powerful woman who has the ability to make choices different from guys, it throws you off and you get frustrated.

Men haven't changed their behaviour, so women somehow have to be strengthened to be able to ward off the men.

'Power' is an explosive word, particularly when applied to women.

Until the masculine role is humanized, women will tend to be much better at solving dangerous conflicts.

Men that aren't threatened by opinionated, faintly aggressive women are in a minority.

Women have become stronger, and there's a backlash. Men have become terribly possessive. I find it much easier to get on with women.

There are also just as many, if not more, women who are anxious to hold down the status quo.

Men seem unable to feel equal to women: they must be superior or they are inferior.

The thing women must do to rise to power is to redefine their femininity. Once, power was considered a masculine attribute. In fact, power has no sex.

Masculine ideals have become very confused in the modern world.

We, all of us, are awakening to the reality that how men have behaved toward women for eons is not OK. The rules are changing invisibly underneath our feet. I am playing catch up. Maybe we all are.

Nothing scares a straight man more than a woman in her full glory.

We're not hard-core feminists. We like men and we like to have fun with them. But we also want men to think about females in different ways.

I want the kind of feminism that allows me to have a voice and to compete on equal terms with men yet still, potentially, to have one of them hurl me over their shoulder and carry me off somewhere, because I still find proper, old-fashioned masculinity deeply attractive.

Our society really needs to take a better look at what we're selling, because I think women being empowered will be as beneficial to men as it is to us.

Just in the real world I think women are the ones that have all the power anyway.

As I see it, our revolutionary task is to destroy phallic identity in men and masochistic non-identity in women--that is, to destroy the polar realities of men and women as we now know them so that this division of human flesh into two camps--one an armed camp and the other a concentration camp--is no longer possible. Phallic identity is real and it must be destroyed. Female masochism is real and it must be destroyed.

I think the main thing that has to end is men's defensiveness.

Women must understand that simply attacking or hating men is just another form of disempowerment. A woman has to realize that when she makes a man crawl it doesn't give her power.

Everything I do is going to contain the message that men who are going to be comfortable with powerful women are going to be more powerful men

There are some people who still feel threatened by strong women. That's their problem. It's not mine.

I've never seen a world where only men were responsible for the violence, and the women were innocent. They go together. Men and women are a violent mixture.

Men's need to dominate women may be based in their own sense of marginality or emptiness; we do not know its root, and men are making no effort to discover it.

Male privilege and entitlement are dying a very painful death; no one gives up power without a struggle.