Quotable Quotes – “The world’s definitions”

“The world’s definitions are one thing and the life one actually lives is quite another. One cannot allow oneself, nor can one’s family, friends, or lovers – to say nothing of one’s children – to live according to the world’s definitions: one must find a way, perpetually, to be stronger and better than that.”
- James Baldwin

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“It is my choice to not be a man, and it is my choice to be beautiful. I am not a female impersonator; I don’t want to mock women. I want to criticize and poke fun at the roles of women and of men too. I want to try and show how not-normal I can be. I want to ridicule and destroy the whole cosmology of restrictive sex roles and sexual identification.”
- Christopher Lonc, “Genderfuck and Its Delights”

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“I absolutely believe that sexuality is a continuum, and further, that my homosexuality resembles no one else’s; that in fact everyone’s sexuality is his or her own, and resembles nothing so much as itself. I feel it’s one of the jobs of novelists to try to help complicate our sense of human sexuality — to write according to the notion that the fact that someone is ‘gay,’ ’straight’ or ‘bisexual’ tells you almost nothing useful or meaningful about the person in question.”
- Michael Cunningham, author of “The Hours,” to the Tacoma News Tribune

Quotable Quotes – George W. Bush (boo!) / Gay Marriage Edition

“When Air National Guard absentee George W. Bush dressed up in [Tom] Cruise’s ‘Top Gun’ costume and used the USS Abraham Lincoln as a giant, nuclear-powered strap-on, that was as brazen an exhibition of cross-dressing as there’s ever been.”
- Author Mark Simpson, inventor of the word “metrosexual” (Salon.com)

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“I will defend the sanctity of marriage against activist courts and local officials who want to redefine marriage. The union of a man and woman is the most enduring human institution. I support a constitutional amendment to protect marriage as the union of a man and a woman.”
- George W. Bush, addressing the National Association of Evangelicals Convention

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“If the [Bush] administration and their allies want to make a campaign issue out of amending the Constitution [to ban gay marriage], we will not only stand against it, but we will point out that they’d rather talk about taking away rights and undermining the ability of Americans to live their own lives, to have their own families, than to talk about the miserable economy, to talk about their miserable foreign policy, to talk about their rollback of environmental laws and workers’ rights, education and health care.”
- Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., addressing the Empire State Pride Agenda

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“I have no problems with that issue [same-sex marriage] at all. … Marriage has been undermined by divorce. So don’t tell me about marriage. … People should look at their own life and look in their own mirror. I think marriage has been undermined for a number of years, if you look at the facts and figures on it. So don’t blame the gay, lesbian, transgender, transsexual community, please don’t blame them for it.”
- Chicago Mayor Richard Daley at a press conference.

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“Aristotle said, ‘You can’t live a good life in an unjust society.’ And I think there’s tremendous injustice when we deny the rights of 40-plus million Americans – the same rights that my wife and me have. That’s wrong, and I can’t feel in any way, shape or form that my marriage is as whole when I’m denying the same rights that I have as a married man to millions — millions and millions — of Americans.”
- San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom on CBS’s “60 Minutes II,”

“That train [gay marriage] had already left the station. This was going to be used as a wedge issue regardless of whether or not some crazy mayor was sworn in in San Francisco or not. I can’t stand my party right now. Is it political expediency? Is it accommodation that we’re after? Or is it about standing up on principles and values?”
- San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom speaking at Harvard University 

 

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“We can’t ever back down on this issue. Martin Luther King Jr. wrote a book on the battle for civil rights equality and entitled it ‘Why We Can’t Wait.’ It’s the same thing for same-sex marriage equality. Some people tell us this isn’t the time to push the matter. But for them, there’s never going to be a right time. So we have to just fight like hell.”
 -  New Paltz, N.Y., Mayor Jason West announcing that he would lead the town’s first gay-pride parade. West was being prosecuted for marrying same-sex couples.

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“I support it [gay marriage] because we’re asking for the same thing. If I have a partner and something happens to me, I want that partner to enjoy the benefits of what we have reaped together. It’s a civil-rights thing, isn’t it? … It’s like African-Americans. We were not allowed to go through certain doors because of our race, our color. Jews were not allowed to buy property.”
Singer Eartha Kitt to the Seattle Gay News, Feb. 11.

In the News: Japan to outlaw possession of child pornography

Justin McCurry writes in the Guardian that Japan “is to bow to international pressure and ban the possession of child pornography, although the new law is expected to anger child welfare groups by exempting manga comics and animated films.”

From the article: “Japan and Russia are the only G8 countries where it is still legal to own pornographic images of children, provided there is no intention to sell them or post them on the internet.

Japan is one of the world’s biggest suppliers of child pornography and the second biggest consumer after the US, despite a 1999 law that banned the production, sale and distribution of images of children under 18. The government decided to act following scathing public criticism by the US ambassador to Tokyo, Thomas Schieffer.

“The term ‘child pornography’ misrepresents the heinous nature of this crime,” Schieffer wrote in a recent newspaper article. “Unlike some people in adult pornography, children are not willing or paid participants. The majority of images and videos depict the violent and brutal sexual assault of children, most of them younger than 12 years old. We are talking about child rape.”

Quotable Quotes – March 11 2008

There are two ways to fight a battle like ours. One is to whisper in the ear of the masses, try subtlety and gradually to change the gender expectations and mythic structures of our culture. That’s me. The other is to step up and confront the thousands of atrocities that are taking place around the world on an immediate, one-by-one basis. That’s a great deal harder, and that’s Equality Now. It’s not about politics; it’s about basic human decency.
- Joss Whedon, http://www.cantstoptheserenity.com

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The propagandist’s purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human.
-Aldous Huxley, novelist (1894-1963)

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The only man I know who behaves sensibly is my tailor; he takes my measurements anew each time he sees me. The rest go on with their old measurements and expect me to fit them.
- George Bernard Shaw, writer, Nobel laureate (1856-1950)

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The most futile thing in this world is any attempt, perhaps, at exact definition of character. All individuals are a bundle of contradictions – none more so than the most capable.
-Theodore Dreiser, author (1871-1945)

In the Beginning There Was the Word, Pt. I

Dale Spender’s Man Made LanguageI was in college in the late ’80’s, before the internets, and one night a friend did the equivalent of surfing a dictionary, just opening up to random pages looking for weird or funny entries. She cringed when she came upon “creeping vine,” which had one definition of “a woman.”

“Ball and chain” anyone? Talk about the institutionalization of gender stereotypes and sexism – it’s in the dictionary for christsake. The place where things are defined.

Now 20 years later, it turns out that the times haven’t changed much. In 2006, Vanessa from Feministing wrote a post, “Synonyms are a girl’s worst enemy.” She looked up synonyms for “girl” on Thesaurus.com and was dismayed by what she found. I just did the same search a minute ago and the list is identical or near-identical to 2006.

Main Entry: girl
Part of Speech: noun
Definition: female
Synonyms: babe, baby doll, bird, blonde, bobby-soxer, boytoy, broad, butterfly, canary, chick, coed, cupcake, cutie, dame, damsel, daughter, deb, debutante, doll, female, filly, gal, jail bait, lady, lassie, mademoiselle, maid, maiden, minx, miss, missy, mouse, nymph, nymphet, piece, queen, schoolgirl, she, sis, skirt, spring chicken, teenybopper, tomato, tomboy, virgin, wench, witch, woman

Even worse, looking down the rest of the page shows you what you’d find if you were a young girl trying to find out what being a “girl” means to this society. Here are the second through fourth results:

Main Entry: girl Friday
Part of Speech: noun
Definition: lady assistant
Synonyms: assistant, gal Friday, hired hand, right-hand girl
Antonyms: man Friday
Source: Roget’s New Millennium™ Thesaurus, First Edition (v 1.3.1) Copyright © 2008

Main Entry: bachelor girl
Part of Speech: noun
Definition: unmarried woman
Synonyms: old maid, single girl, single woman, unattached female
Source: Roget’s New Millennium™ Thesaurus, First Edition (v 1.3.1) Copyright © 2008

Main Entry: call girl
Part of Speech: noun
Definition: female prostitute
Synonyms: B-girl, harlot, hooker, hustler, lady of the evening, prostitute, scarlet woman, streetwalker, whore, working girl
Source: Roget’s New Millennium™ Thesaurus, First Edition (v 1.3.1) Copyright © 2008

For visitors who want to read up on the relationship of language and sexism, I’d like to recommend the following book, one of the first feminist books I ever read: Dale Spender’s Man Made Language.

From the inside cover: “For women, language is man-made, for it encompasses the meanings of men, who have arrived at their definitions of the world from a position of dominance, a position which women as a group do not occupy; for women, these meanings are partial, and false. In this book Dale Spender presents an exciting, wide-ranging feminist study of language, its rules and uses. Readable, positive and entertaining, she argues that, since language is fundamental to human-ness, it is through the patriarchal language that much of women’s subordination is structured.”

The Power of Vouz

NetVouz logoAfter setting up this blog I started working on a page of links so visitors could find gender related news and info, resources and tools. The problem is that managing a constantly growing list of links on a blog page, especially with categorization, can be a pain, so I’ve found a great solution.

Netvouz.com is a site where you can publicly share and organize web pages that you’ve bookmarked. I’ve been working on my pages and I’ve got a ton of great resources up, and I will continue to improve the pages by adding new categories plus additional descriptions and tags to the existing bookmarks.

Check it out here, and I’ve added a link to the sidebar of this blog also so you can always get there from the EndGender home page: http://www.NetVouz.com/EndGender.

Quotable Quotes – March 04 2008

In a pond koi can reach lengths of eighteen inches. Amazingly, when placed in a lake, koi can grow to three feet long. The metaphor is obvious. You are limited by how you see the world.
- Vince Poscente, Olympian (1961- )

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Interviewer: You’ve said that what happened in ‘68 had a profound impact on the world as a whole. What did you mean by that?

Bernardo Bertolucci: The life before ‘68 was very different from the life after ‘68. Before ‘68, our days were full of authoritarian moments. There were authorities everywhere. In fact, the movement of ‘68 was young people against their authorities, children against their parents. And that remained. The most important thing of all, the thing that lasted, was the first feminist movement and the position of women in society. That completely changed and that was very, very important.
http://www.theonionavclub.com/feature/index.php?issue=4107

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“Do you really believe that the Jesus who was depicted in the Scriptures as being on the side of those who were vilified, those who were marginalized, that this Jesus would actually be supporting groups that clobber a group that is already persecuted? That’s a Christ I would not worship. I’m glad that I believe very fervently that Jesus would not be on the side of gay bashers. To think that people say, as they used to say, that AIDS was God’s punishment for homosexuality. Abominable. Abominable.”
- Archbishop Desmond Tutu

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“We forfeit three-fourths of ourselves to be like other people.”
- Arthur Schopenhauer