Rebecca Traister

Quotes by Rebecca Traister

It's true that increasing one's number of sexual partners almost certainly increases the risk of sexually transmitted disease and of unintended pregnancy. It increases the chance of having your soul stomped on, and of having really bad sex. It also, I should add, increases the odds of finding someone with whom you have terrific sex, and learning more about what turns you on and what turns you off, how your body works and how other people's bodies work.
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In work, it is possible to find commitment, attachment, chemistry, and connection. In fact, it's high time that more people acknowledged the electric pull that women can feel for their profession, the exciting heat of ambition and frisson of success.
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In fact, it is the progressive nature of a nation that permits continuing revisions to its bedrock institutions –– its constitution, its electorate, its definition of marriage –– that has allowed marriage to evolve, to become more inclusive, more equal, and potentially more appealing to more people.
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Joel Kotkin, a professor of urban development, argued in the daily beast that the power of the single voter is destined to fade, since single people Have no heirs, while their religious, conservative, counterparts will repopulate the nation with children who will replicate their parents politics, ensuring that conservative, more familial-oriented values inevitably prevail. Kotkin's error, of course, is both in assuming that unmarried people do not reproduce -- in fact, they are doing so in ever greater numbers -- but also in failing to consider whence the gravitation away from married norms derived. A move toward independent life did not simply emerge from the clamshell: it was born of generations of dissatisfaction with the inequalities of religious, conservative, social practice.
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In part, that's because when we delay marriage, it's not just women who become independent. It's also men, who, like women, learn to clothe and feed themselves, to clean their homes iron their shirts and pack their own suitcases.
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O'rourke's alienation from the married woman comes in part because she's filling in the imaginative blank of that woman's union with a fantasy of fulfillment. If loneliness is a want of intimacy, then being single lends itself to loneliness because the loving partnerships we imagine in comparison are always, in our minds, intimate; they are not distant or empty of abusive or dysfunctional. We don't fantasize about being in bad marriages, or about being in what were once good marriages that have since gone stale or sexless or hard, creating their own profound emotional pain.
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This would be the last moment of the primary during which I felt as though I inhabited a different planet than everyone else in my party, that I had heard a different speech, seen a different person, been in a different room than everyone else. But I can't say that I was unhappy that they had heard what they did. If they thought Hillary was telling them to fuck off, that was okay with me. For just one last day, before I joined their ranks, I wanted them to fuck off too.
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As the second decade of the twenty-first century has worn on, politicians of all stripes, aware of the political power of the unmarried woman yet seemingly incapable of understanding female life outside of a marital context, have come to rely on a metaphor in which American women, no longer bound to men, are binding themselves to government.
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What [Sarah] Palin so beguilingly represented ... was a form of female power that was utterly digestible to those who had no intellectual or political use for actual women: feminism without the feminists.
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O'rourke's alienation from the married woman comes in part because she's filling in the imaginative blank of that woman's union with a fantasy of fulfillment. If loneliness is a want of intimacy, then being single lends itself to loneliness because the loving partnerships we imagine in comparison are always, in our minds, intimate; they are not distant or empty of abusive or dysfunctional. We don't fantasize about being in bad marriages, or about being in what were once good marriages that have since gone stale or sexless or hard, creating their own profound emotional pain.
Read quote
In work, it is possible to find commitment, attachment, chemistry, and connection. In fact, it's high time that more people acknowledged the electric pull that women can feel for their profession, the exciting heat of ambition and frisson of success.
Read quote
Joel Kotkin, a professor of urban development, argued in the daily beast that the power of the single voter is destined to fade, since single people Have no heirs, while their religious, conservative, counterparts will repopulate the nation with children who will replicate their parents politics, ensuring that conservative, more familial-oriented values inevitably prevail. Kotkin's error, of course, is both in assuming that unmarried people do not reproduce -- in fact, they are doing so in ever greater numbers -- but also in failing to consider whence the gravitation away from married norms derived. A move toward independent life did not simply emerge from the clamshell: it was born of generations of dissatisfaction with the inequalities of religious, conservative, social practice.
Read quote
In fact, it is the progressive nature of a nation that permits continuing revisions to its bedrock institutions –– its constitution, its electorate, its definition of marriage –– that has allowed marriage to evolve, to become more inclusive, more equal, and potentially more appealing to more people.
Read quote
It's true that increasing one's number of sexual partners almost certainly increases the risk of sexually transmitted disease and of unintended pregnancy. It increases the chance of having your soul stomped on, and of having really bad sex. It also, I should add, increases the odds of finding someone with whom you have terrific sex, and learning more about what turns you on and what turns you off, how your body works and how other people's bodies work.
Read quote
In part, that's because when we delay marriage, it's not just women who become independent. It's also men, who, like women, learn to clothe and feed themselves, to clean their homes iron their shirts and pack their own suitcases.
Read quote
This would be the last moment of the primary during which I felt as though I inhabited a different planet than everyone else in my party, that I had heard a different speech, seen a different person, been in a different room than everyone else. But I can't say that I was unhappy that they had heard what they did. If they thought Hillary was telling them to fuck off, that was okay with me. For just one last day, before I joined their ranks, I wanted them to fuck off too.
Read quote
What [Sarah] Palin so beguilingly represented ... was a form of female power that was utterly digestible to those who had no intellectual or political use for actual women: feminism without the feminists.
Read quote
As the second decade of the twenty-first century has worn on, politicians of all stripes, aware of the political power of the unmarried woman yet seemingly incapable of understanding female life outside of a marital context, have come to rely on a metaphor in which American women, no longer bound to men, are binding themselves to government.
Read quote
All the epic allusions contribute to the difficulty Clinton has long had in coming across as, simply, a human being. She is uneasy with the press and ungainly on the stump. Catching a glimpse of the 'real' her often entails spying something out of the corner of your eye, in a moment when she's not trying to be, or to sell, 'Hillary Clinton.'
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There are a whole bunch of structural and systemic factors we need to address in order to move away from the model in which women really are still dependent on men.
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