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I grew up definitely a feminist, but I didn't call myself a feminist until I took my first women's studies class in college.

Jessica Valenti

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Jessica Valenti
Age: 46
Born: 1978
Born: November 1
Author
Journalist
Writer
New York City
New York
Didn
Feminist
Women
Definitely
Firsts
Took
First
College
Grew
Study
Class
Call
Studies

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Child-rearing can be a tedious and thankless undertaking.
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I think it's important to let kids be kids and be cautious about accelerated sexuality as pressure to mature too quickly. My hackles go up when I see a teacher making kids feel like they are older, special, mature. Let kids be kids.
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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.
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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?
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I revisit old favorites like 'Buffy' and 'Battlestar Galactica' when I'm bored. I am obsessed with 'Scandal.' I love TV.
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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.
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It used to be that if someone was to get involved in feminism, it was probably because they were already interested. They were already interested in feminism they were already interested in being an activist, and they found their way to like a NOW meeting or to a consciousness-raising group or something like that.
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My informal writing style is a political choice, because I want feminism to be more accessible.
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Hearing the Beastie Boys speak out against sexism made me feel like if these men who had once sung about getting girls to 'do the laundry' and 'clean up my room' could understand, maybe the rest of the world would follow suit. It made me hopeful in the best way.
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Something I say a lot when it comes to anti-feminist stereotypes is that they exist for a reason.
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It's become impossible to enjoy most quality television shows because the hurt or endangered women device is so frequently used.
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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.
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According to the virginity movement, men have no self-control when it comes to anything sexual.
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If you're fighting to limit other women's rights, then you can't really call yourself a feminist.
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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.
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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.
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I think that blogging and the Internet has completely changed feminism for ever, I think.
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Making women the sexual gatekeepers and telling men they just can't help themselves not only drives home the point that women's sexuality is unnatural, but also sets up a disturbing dynamic in which women are expected to be responsible for men's sexual behavior.
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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.
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Women do not get raped because they weren’t careful enough. Women get raped because someone raped them.
Jessica Valenti