“Politics isn’t the most important thing. A supreme court nomination isn’t the most important thing. The most important thing, when stories like this are in the news, is the victim, and how we treat them, how we speak about them.”

Jenn Berney on raising boys in a hard-to-navigate world: “I want them to understand their luck, to care about the world and the many many ways it’s broken, but when I try to explain its brokenness, they can barely comprehend.”

Journalist Natalia Antonova on writing about abuse: “Being vulnerable is not just about opening up to other people — it’s about opening up to yourself. Knowing yourself. Knowing what you are actually capable of.”

“But there’s also the passive sexism — the status quo — that people have trouble seeing or don’t think they engage in until they catch themselves doing it because it’s so ingrained, that we also desperately need to fix.”

This is just how white supremacy works. Without vigilance, it seeps into everything: like an overlooked red sock that stains the whole laundry load pink. That one red sock that makes my whites look as if, pre-wash, I had soaked ’em all in blood.

“It’s kind of related to this concept that Gloria Steinem writes about, the idea that we are linked, not ranked.”

“Any meaningful life choice involves a degree of sacrifice. So you do what you must. And you give thanks for being disliked, because, honestly, most people in the world won’t care enough to dislike you in the first place.”

“We read to prepare for life. It follows, then, that we are raising our boys to dismiss other people’s experiences, and to see their needs and concerns as the center of things. We are raising our boys to lack empathy.”

And every time we squick around with calling ourselves feminists, we continue to appease the status quo. We sell ourselves short with our fear of being loud, or offensive, or ugly. It’s not a label, it’s a fight. One that is eons away from over.

If you feel that you have so far lived your life unaffected by even the mildest form of sexism . . . and are treated with love and respect by every man in your life, then to you I say: I’m glad for you. If you don’t think you need feminism, then that is a victory for the movement.

There is a WORLD of difference between ‘I know you want it,’ and ‘I know you wanted it.’ If when Beyoncé or Rihanna say ‘I know you want it,’ they’re seen as strong, empowered, independent sexual beings rightfully expressing their desires, why, the second a man says it, do we equate him to a rapist?

That’s when I made the decision to change my name. Because I was no longer drifting, because I was choosing to anchor myself to someone. . . . It was a profoundly personal and thoughtful decision made by a feminist, and thus it was definitely not unfeminist.