Seek to Understand; Live to Spread Truth

“The woman of the future, who is really being born today, will be a woman completely free of guilt for creating and for self-development. She will be a woman in harmony with her own strength, not necessarily called masculine or eccentric or something unnatural. I imagine she will be very tranquil about her strength and her serenity, a woman who will know how to talk to children and to the men who sometimes fear her.”  -Anais Nin, Los Angeles (Silverlake), 1976 (via quiix0tiic)

(Source: zrosum)

“Many women, according to [sociologist Pat] O’Connor, feel the need for friendships with other women so intensely that they mentally create an idealized female friendship that in reality does not exist. The women believe this friendship involves a high level of what O’Connor calls ‘felt attachment,’ which includes a deep feeling of specialness, solidarity, and confiding, a history of shared experiences, the security of promised practical help, and the assurance of complete acceptance. O’Connor discovered, however, that the actual friendships described by her informants in this way really involved few, if any, of these qualities. The women simply mentally constructed a female friendship that fulfilled their emotional needs… many female friendship films can serve this same function. They offer prepackaged mental constructs of idealized friendships that women can use as fantasy substitutes for real-life friendships.” Karen Hollinger, In the Company of Women: Contemporary Female Friendship Films
(i.e. What Liz Lemon Wants)

(Source: themostpretentiousgirlintheworld)

“I just want to hear the true voices of women: self-expressing–smart ones, stupid ones, ugly ones, beautiful ones, good ones, bad ones, fat ones, thin ones, all of it–until the profound silence that has resounded throughout history is filled with a healthy chorus coming from our side of the aisle.” Liz Phair  (via playspopmusicofthefuture)

“I don’t remember people looking at John Howard and saying ‘Gee I wish he’d be warmer and cuddlier and more humorous and more engaging in his press conferences’, they looked at him and said ‘well he’s the bloke running the country’ … And I think the same standard should apply to me, I’m a woman running the country, I don’t ask people to come to the view that they want to have me round for dinner on Saturday night, that’s not what I’m here to do.” Prime Minister Julia Gillard (via tu-sei-piccolina)

“… for why was Miss West an arrant feminist for making a possibly true if uncomplimentary statement about the other sex? — [it] was not merely the cry of a wounded vanity; it was a protest against some infringement of his [all men’s] power to believe in himself. Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size. Without that power probably the Earth would still be swamp and jungle. … And it serves to explain how restless they are under her criticism; how impossible it is for her to say to them this book is bad … without giving far more pain and rousing far more anger than a man would do who gave the same criticism. For if she begins to tell the truth, the figure in the looking-glass shrinks; his fitness for life is diminished.” A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf (via highjinks)