“The greatest barrier preventing us from fully challenging sexism is the pervasive antifeminine sentiment that runs wild in both the straight and queer communities, targeting people of all genders and sexualities. The only realistic way to address this issue is to work toward empowering femininity itself. We must rightly recognize that feminine expression is strong, daring, and brave - that it is powerful - and not in an enchanting, enticing, or supernatural sort of way, but in a tangible, practical way that facilitates openness, creativity, and honest expression. We must move beyond seeing femininity as helpless and dependent, or merely as masculinity's sidekick, and instead acknowledge that feminine expression exists of its own accord and brings its own rewards to those who naturally gravitate toward it. By embracing femininity, feminism will finally be able to reach out to the vast majority of feminine women who have felt alienated by the movement in the past.”

Julia Serano

Julia Serano - “The greatest barrier preventing us from...” 1

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“Many of us reject all of the inferior meanings and connotations that others project onto femininity - that it is weak, artificial, frivolous, demure, and passive - because for us, there has been no act more bold and daring than embracing our own femininity. In a world that is awash in antifeminine sentiment, we understand that embracing and empowering femininity can potentially be one of the most transformative and revolutionary acts imaginable.”

Julia Serano
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“[U]ntil feminists work to empower femininity and pry it away from the insipid, inferior meanings that plague it - weakness, helplessness, fragility, passivity, frivolity, and artificiality - those meanings will continue to haunt every person who is female and/or feminine.”

Julia Serano
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“The result of this one-sided patriarchal stance, demonstrable in all areas of life, is an un integrated man who is attacked by his repressed side and often enough overwhelmed by it. This transpires not only in the fate of the individual man as seduction by a "lower" anima, but equally through seduction by a compensatory ideology, for example materialism, to which "spirit" men are especially susceptible.The man wants to remain exclusively masculine and out of fear rejects the transformative contact with a woman of equal status. Negativizing the Feminine in the patriarchate prevents the man from experiencing woman as a thou of equal but different status, and hence from coming to terms with her. The consequence of the patriarchal male's haughtiness toward women leads to the inability to make any genuine contact with the Feminine, i.e., not only in a real woman but also with the Feminine in himself, the unconscious. Whenever an integral relationship to the Feminine remains undeveloped, however, this means that, due to his fear, the male is unable to break through to his own wholeness that also embraces the Feminine. Thus the patriarchal culture's separation from the Feminine and from the unconscious becomes one of the essential causes for the crisis of fear in which the patriarchal world now finds itself.”

Erich Neumann
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“Femininity itself has become a brand, a narrow and shrinking formula of commoditised identity which can be sold back to women who have become alienated from their own power as living, loving, labouring beings.”

Laurie Penny
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“Gless's lexical shift from "sexiness" through "femininity" to a "real strong lady" is a discursive shift and therefore has sociopolitical dimension. "Sexiness" is from an explicitly patriarchal discourse, "femininity" is from a discourse that attempts to naturalize gender construction and difference in terms of the status quo and is therefore implicitly patriarchal, whereas "real strong lady" is from a discourse that consciously opposes and exposes both the explicit and implicit patriarchy of "sexiness" and "femininity".”

John Fiske
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