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Given the cultural barriers to intersex conversation, the amazing thing is that we would even expect women and men to have anything to say to each other for more than ten minutes at a stretch.

Barbara Ehrenreich

We need a kind of feminism that aims not just to assimilate into the institutions that men have created over the centuries, but to infiltrate and subvert them.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Feminism Needs Women
Personally, I have nothing against work, particularly when performed, quietly and unobtrusively, by someone else. I just don’t happen to think it’s an appropriate subject for an ‘ethic.’
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Ethics Thinking Work
You still don’t like the idea of gay marriage? Then, as my friend, the economist Julianne Malveaux, says: Don’t marry a gay person. Case closed, problem solved.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Gay Ideas Problem
war has dug itself into economic systems, where it offers a livelihood to millions … It has lodged in our souls as a kind of religion, a quick tonic for political malaise and a bracing antidote to the moral torpor of consumerist, market-driven cultures.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Political Soul War
war is, in some not yet entirely defined sense, a self-replicating pattern of behavior, possessed of a dynamism not unlike that of living things.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Behaviour Patterns Replicate Self War
The urge to transform one’s appearance, to dance outdoors, to mock the powerful and embrace perfect strangers is not easy to suppress.” –Barbara Ehrenreich, Dancing in the Streets, 260.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Dancing Perfect Powerful
Of all the nasty outcomes predicted for women’s liberation… none was more alarming, from a feminist point of view, than the suggestion that women would eventually become just like men.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Feminist Men Views
It is the marketplace that calls most clearly for men to be softer, more narcissistic and receptive, and the new man is the result.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Men Narcissistic Results
But our culture is in truly bad shape if we have come to define respecting something as the failure to set it on fire.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Culture Fire Shapes
There is a reason why America produced the most vigorous feminist movement in the world: We were one of the only countries in which the middle class (which is wealthy by world standards) customarily employed its own women as domestic servants.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Class Country Feminist Movement Vigorous
So why do people keep on watching? The answer, by now, should be perfectly obvious: we love television because television brings us a world in which television does not exist. In fact, deep in their hearts, this is what the spuds crave most: a rich, new, participatory life.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Heart Love People
Upscale young men seem to go for the kind of woman who plays with a full deck of credit cards, who won’t cry when she’s knocked to the ground while trying to board the six o clock Eastern shuttle, and whose schedule doesn’t allow for a sexual encounter lasting more than twelve minutes.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Card Deck Men Play Trying
Every time a bank swoops down to snatch up a home, it should be met with a crowd of jeering, obstructive neighbors. And although this may be point 4.5, how about organizing a mass refusal to pay back student loans?
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Bank Crowd Home Neighbour Swoop
Medical debts are the number-one cause of bankruptcy in America.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Country Debt Medical Number
our great common challenge … is to free people from religion, get it out of our laws, our schools, our health systems, our government and, I would add, also our sporting events. I would really like to see some separation of church and stadium, if we could work on that.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Government Law School
Given the cultural barriers to intersex conversation, the amazing thing is that we would even expect women and men to have anything to say to each other for more than ten minutes at a stretch.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Conversation Men Minutes
That’s free enterprise, friends: freedom to gamble, freedom to lose. And the great thing – the truly democratic thing about it – is that you don’t even have to be a player to lose.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Democracy Freedom Player
When someone works for less pay than she can live on – when, for example, she goes hungry so that you can eat more cheaply and conveniently – then she has made a great sacrifice for you, she has made you a gift of some part of her abilities, her health, and her life.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Example Pay Sacrifice
In matters of the heart as well, a certain level of negativity and suspicion is universally recommended. You may try to project a thoroughly positive outlook in order to attract a potential boyfriend, but you are also advised to Google him.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Heart Negativity Order
we are reaching the point, if we have not passed it already, where the largest public housing program in America will be our penitentiary system.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Country Pass Prison Program Reach
So even though I consider myself a fairly upbeat person, energetic and things like that, I never do very well on happiness tests.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Energetic Happiness Test Upbeat
The label of liberalism is hardly a sentence to public ignominy: otherwise Bruce Springsteen would still be rehabilitating used Cadillacs in Asbury Park and Jane Fonda, for all we know, would be just another overweight housewife.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Cadillacs Labels Liberalism Rehabilitating
Take motherhood: nobody ever thought of putting it on a moral pedestal until some brash feminists pointed out, about a century ago, that the pay is lousy and the career ladder nonexistent.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Careers Humorous Mother
Americans love marriage too much. We rush into mariage with abandon, expecting a micro-Utopia on earth. We pile all our needs onto it, our expectations, neuroses, and hopes. In fact, we’ve made marriage into the panda bear of human social institutions: we’ve loved it to death.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Earth Expectations Need Pandas Rush
Considering the absence of legal coercion, the surprising thing is that men have for so long, and, on the whole, so reliably, adhered to what we might call the breadwinner ethic.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Coercion Long Men
Warriors make wars, but it is also true that, in what has so far been an endless reproductive cycle, war makes warriors.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Endless War Warrior
The fact is that heterosexual sex for most people is in no way free of the power relations between men and women.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Men People Sex

Given the cultural barriers to intersex conversation, the amazing thing is that we would even expect women and men to have anything to say to each other for more than ten minutes at a stretch.

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Given the cultural barriers to intersex conversation, the amazing thing is that we would even expect women and men to have anything to say to each other for more than ten minutes at a stretch.

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Popular Authors

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