檳榔嶼

Introduction
- My criticism of feminism stemmed from my own resistance to looking squarely at my relationships with men, with women, and with myself.
- Also, I just didn't get feminism. Before my own consciousness-raising, I didn't question the predominant myths of the day, or see beyond the male-defined reality I had accepted as a given. It was especially difficult to confront the fact that I, too, had lied to myself about my experience, fearing disapproval.
- We all have anxiety about facing the fact that sexism is as complicated, as evil, and as deeply rooted as racism. Changing the way we live and relate to each other will always be a scary business. And because patriarchy is the only reality that we know, it's hard even to begin to imagine another way.
  - When we are reeling from a divorce, depression, or low self-esteem, we view the problem as our individual responsibility to be solved through our own initiative and effort. It's hard to see social and political inequalities as equally important in our lives.
- Personal change is inseparable from social and political change. Intimate relationships cannot flourish in conditions of injustice and inequality.
- The thing about consciousness-raising is that you can't go back to being a sleepwalker.
  - Once you start noticing what groups of people are included and valued and paid - and what groups of people are not - there's no turning back.

Girls, Ladies, or Women? Does It Matter?
- Words are powreful and our choice of language both reflects and shapes attitudes.
- The preferred use of the terms girl, lady, or gal often reflects an unconscious wish to define woman in narrow, nonthreatening, or diminutive terms.

Is Hope Possible in This Violent World?
- The mainstream media focus relentlessly on violence and other calamities. Equal time and space are not given to the often remarkable and inspriring behavior of human beings everywhere, which is less frequently considered "hard news".
- As long as we feel hope, there is hope.
- Mahatma Gandhi : "Peace between countries must rest on the solid foundation of love between individuals."
- Whether we are speaking of warring couples or nations, it is an extraordinary challenge to move from blaming people toward understanding patterns and our own part in them.

Avoiding the F Word
- Anyone who takes the equality of women for granted is a coma.

Color Does Matter
- Being the only minority voice in an otherwise white group is not an optimal situation for learning.
- We can't even understand and appreciate ourselves when we narrow our attention to "our own kind."

Closets Are for Clothes
- Silence and scerecy erode dignity, spontaneity, self-regard, and joy. The right to live and love openly - and to be who we are - ar the most precious rights we have.
- Lesbians and gays do not want tolerance, but rather, visibility, celebration, and inclusion.

Are Women Too Dependent?
- Dependency, we are told, is a bad characteristic that women presumable possess more of than men. This is a questionable assumption at best, since emotional dependency is a universal aspect of human experience.
- Women are not dependent enough. Women tend to be far more skilled at attending to the dependency needs of others than in identifying and assertively claiming our own needs.

Women Who Read Too Much
- Self-help books for women are part of a multibillion-dollar business, sensitively attuned to our insecurities and our purses. There are countless books on the market that women learn to eat up like popcorn in our endless and impossible persuit of perfection.
  - Many of these books simplify human experience with platitudes, inspirational messages, recipes of success, and explain-everything guides to personal empowerment, self-esteem, and relational bliss.
  - Women have always been the primary consumers of self-help books. No wonder, given our culture's relentless focus on improving and perfecting women.
  - If only women would attract men or want them less, do better at balancing work and family, embrace the wounded child or the goddess within, twelve-step our way out of trouble, or somehow solve our own personal problems - then men and their institutions would not have to change.
- dos and don'ts to confront the self-help books :
  1. Don't believe authors who make large and silly promises.
    - No book will bring you ecstatic sex, high self-esteem, or an escape from the range of painful emotions that make us human.
    - Substantive change occurs slowly over time, with many frustrations and derailments. Small change will make a big difference in your life.
  2. Do take a good tip wherever you find it.
  3. Don't buy books that promote guilt
  4. Do take expert advice as just one opinion.
    - Maintain a healthy skepticism toward authors who presum to have a corner on the truth. Nothing is normal, right, or true for all women.
    - Run with good advice and ignore the rest.
  5. Don't buy books that promote a narrow, blaming attitude toward family members.
    - A good self-help book can provide creative options for changing your part in family patterns without promoting self-blame and without disqualifying legitimate anger and hurt.
  6. Do try to find books that engage your heart and mind.
    - Trust your evaluations and gut reaction, including negative ones. If you fail to change, why not blame the book, rather than yourself?

Are Women 50 Percent to Blame for Sexism?
- Many women are complicitous with sexist solutions, but no - we're not half the problem. Patriarchy won't fail just because women assert that it should. It's difficult to really see patriarchy, much less protest it, because it's the only reality we know.
- Fritjof Capra : "The power of patriarchy has been extremely difficult to understand because it is all pervasive.It has influenced our most basic ideas about human nature and about our relation to the universe.... It is the one system which, until recently, had never in recorded history been openly challenged, and whose doctrines were so universally accepted that they seemed to be laws of nature."
- Women are responsible for ending men's monopoly on power, for the simple reason that no one else will do it for us.

My Husband Has a Persecution Complex
- There are countless advantages that white skin confers, including the priviledge of not thinking about skin color.
  - You probably don't give your whiteness a thought when you go to rent an apartment, apply for a job, hail a taxi at night, or get pulled over by a policeman for speeding.

Tried of the Victim Mentality
- When we overfocus on what the other party is doing wrong, we underfocus on our part of the problem and our opinions for acting differently.
  - Blaming can lead men and women to become increasingly polarized and can mitigate against effective problem solving that considers the needs of all.
- Men do not sit around in smoke-filled rooms with maps and pins figuring out how to oppress women.
  - The taboos against blaming men serve to silence female anger and maintain the status quo.
  - The struggle of any subordinate group is weakend when its member's anger and frustration are disqualified by the argument that those in power are not to blame for anything or that the expression of anger itself denotes a lack of clarity, judgment, or maturity.
- Members of subordinate groups natually experience strong anger when they are able to see beyond the dominant group's definition of reality to identify clearly their own subordinate status. This anger reflects dignity and self-regard and is an essential milestone in the process of liberation.

Whose Truth Counts?
- What is traumatic is the idea that I could be forced to carry and give birth to a child involuntarily - that my body, spirit, will, and the direction of my life would no longer be my own.
- When we arrive at our views on abortion, we draw on personal values and beliefs that emerge from our unique family histories and ethnic traditions. We are further influenced by our deepest unconscious wishes, longings, and fears about such large subjects as life and death, birth and loss, sacrifice and entitlement, women, reproduction, and motherhood.
- Let's respect our differences rather than tyring to force everyone to examine a complex emotion issue through the same filter.

Finding the Right Therapist
- Gender, like race and class, is a primary determinant of an individual's sense of power, possibility, and place in the world.
- Trust your evaluation and gut reactions, including negative ones.

Hurt by Racial Prejudice
- Nothing is more natural than our human capacity to love.
- When anxiety is high and resources appear scarce, some individuals and groups will always act at the expense of others. There is never a resting place in the struggle for personal dignity and political integrity.
- Undeniably, our species has a poor track record for dealing with differences. We learn to hate or glorify differences, to exaggerate or ignore them.
- Whehter a particular behavior is 9 percent or 90 percent natural tells us nothing about whether we should accept it, cultivate it, or struggle against it.

I'm Uncomfortable Excluding Men
- Comedienne Kate Clinton : "When women go off together we call it separatism. When men go off together we call it Congress."
- The mainstream media does not truly include women.
- What women think and do is rarely considered "hard news".

Am I an Addict?
- Don't call yourself an addict - indeed, don't call yourself anything that feels diminishing, pathologizing, dispriting, or just plain "off".
- The term addiction has been globalized to include almost everything.