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The stereotypes of feminists as ugly, or man-haters, or hairy, or whatever it is - that's really strategic. That's a really smart way to keep young women away from feminism, is to kind of put out this idea that all feminists hate men, or all feminists are ugly and that they really come from a place of fear.

Jessica Valenti

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Jessica Valenti
Age: 46
Born: 1978
Born: November 1
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Journalist
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New York City
New York
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Keep
Feminist
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More quotes by Jessica Valenti

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Wedding fever is one of the scariest diseases I have ever seen.
Jessica Valenti
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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.
Jessica Valenti
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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.
Jessica Valenti
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If your husband is cheating on you, it doesn't mean that you need to get prettier -- it means he's a scumbag.
Jessica Valenti
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I think it is effective when activists work from the margins, and I think that's the best way to go about it. And I do think that it's increasingly being more effective with the work that's being done online, that it is a bit more democratized, that whatever kind of activism is being done, it's not necessarily coming from one centralized place.
Jessica Valenti
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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.
Jessica Valenti
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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.
Jessica Valenti
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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.
Jessica Valenti
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Given the reality of unintended parenthood and parental unhappiness, one would think that women and men who make the decision not to have children - who are deliberate and thoughtful about the choice to bring another person into the world - would be seen as less selfish than those who unthinkingly have children. Yet the stigma remains.
Jessica Valenti
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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.
Jessica Valenti
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Something I say a lot when it comes to anti-feminist stereotypes is that they exist for a reason.
Jessica Valenti
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[Virginity is] a cultural ideology that conflates passivity - the act of not having sex - with superior morality.
Jessica Valenti
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You know, 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.
Jessica Valenti
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If you're fighting to limit other women's rights, then you can't really call yourself a feminist.
Jessica Valenti
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Life is messy, and it's okay if you are too! We all screw up, that doesn't have to define us.
Jessica Valenti
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I think that blogging and the Internet has completely changed feminism for ever, I think.
Jessica Valenti
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Child-rearing can be a tedious and thankless undertaking.
Jessica Valenti
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There's going to be biological differences between the genders. There's going to be biological differences between two women or two men. There's biological differences between all of us. My concern is, why are we so concerned about it?
Jessica Valenti
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I think feminism has always been global. I think there's feminism everywhere throughout the world.
Jessica Valenti
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There is something to be said for the power of figureheads. After Hillary Clinton became secretary of state, a record number of countries posted female ambassadors to the U.S. - some of whom have dubbed this 'the Hillary effect.'
Jessica Valenti