Jessica Valenti People Quotations

If feminism wasn't powerful, if feminism wasn't influential, people wouldn't spend so much time putting it down.

The truth is that we don't need everyone to like us; we need a few people to love us. Because what's better than being roundly liked is being fully known - an impossibility both professionally and personally if you're so busy being likable that you forget to be yourself.

People ask me a lot, 'Well, can you be pro-life and be feminist? Can you be conservative and be feminist?' And I think that, yeah, maybe personally you can be those things. But I think if you're advocating for legislation, or if you're fighting to limit other women's rights, then you can't really call yourself a feminist.

How insulting is it to suggest the best thing women can do is raise other people to do incredible things?

Something you hear a lot is that feminism dead. But if feminism is dead, why do people try so hard to kill it?

I think people resist feminism because they're scared. I think for women, they're scared of being picked on or of being called out.

Because there's no accountability on line in the same way there is in real life, all of a sudden you can say like, yeah, I hate women; I want to kill women. And you can say that online, and not only will you find a place to say it, but you'll find a place to say it where people are like, yeah, me too.

When it comes to people who are saying really extreme things online, we have the tendency to think that they are just kooks, or that you shouldn't pay attention to them, you shouldn't take them seriously.

People aren't comfortable thinking of women as people. Like we're not people, we're women, and that means something completely different, especially when you have power.

Obviously Feministing is kind of a women's space in a certain way, even though we have a lot of male readership and people who don't identify as women.

Instead of focusing on men and focusing on what we can do to prop them up, people seem really incredibly focused on the fact that women are doing well and maybe that's not such a good thing.

Yes, the more successful you are—or the stronger, the more opinionated—the less you will be generally liked. All of a sudden people will think you’re too braggy, too loud, too something. But the trade-off is undoubtedly worth it. Power and authenticity are worth it.

It's time to teach our daughters that their ability to be good people depends on their being good people, not on whether or not they're sexually active.

And really, how insulting is it that to suggest that the best thing women can do is raise other people to do incredible things? I'm betting some of those women would like to do great things of their own.

I don't think that there's a guy behind the desk at every newspaper saying "No, woman" and sending her on her way, but that's what's systemic about it, right, like that people don't quite realize that maybe they're attracted to a male op-ed more than a female op-ed, or because of networking they know this person from going out to a bar with them.

What bothers me the most about the way that people appropriate feminist language is that they are the same people who are - you know, anti-feminists - they're the same people who say that feminism is ruining the family, yet when it behooves them to, they'll say Sara Palin's a feminist - when all of a sudden it works in their favor.

You have to have your personal life, and at the end of the day I think what people forget, especially when you're online, is that you're a person too, right, and that you're not this ideal of feminism, that everything you do like feminism just like falls in your wake.

People are not going to give up marriage. But we can try to make it more fair. We can try to change that institution and make it more equal.

Whether people identify as feminists or not, if they're doing work that furthers a feminist cause, I think that's wonderful, like if it works for me, right, it works for the movement.

I do think that more people are feminists than they realize.