Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Younger feminists actually care about stuff that came before them, the same way that I totally cared about and loved and felt so lucky to have access to the feminism that came before me. To have younger people take what me and my friends have done, and to say 'We have access to that, but we're going to put that through our own Internet generation filter and we're going to make it into something that speaks to us and is a lot smarter.'
I should say that feminism gave me permission to deal with my own emotional life and put it up front in certain ways, or use film as a way to examine, at that time, my own heterosexual experience. Lives of Performers was the beginning of that kind of investigation. But also, the film was influenced by the aesthetics and structures of experimental film as that was taking place at the same time. Hollis Frampton was a big influence on me at that time.
What we need is a tough new kind of feminism with no illusions. Women do not change institutions simply by assimilating into them. We need a feminism that teaches a woman to say no - not just to the date rapist or overly insistent boyfriend but, when necessary, to the military or corporate hierarchy within which she finds herself. 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.
Hey, folks, look at all the damage that Bill Clinton has done to feminism. First, oral sex is not sex now. You got a Lewinsky, it isn't sex. And sexual harassment, you know what it used to be? All you had to have for sexual harassment was for a superior in your office to use his power to have his way with you, no matter whether you wanted it or not. Now that's out the window. Because we can't, of course, have Bill Clinton said to have engaged in sexual harassment. No way. Not gonna happen.
Feminism is something I think about more when I watch the film, Christine, rather than when I was actually doing it, to be honest with you. But I do think it functions as a sort of interesting feministic critique, because you are seeing a woman who's resolutely incapable of behaving like the kind of woman that's acceptable at the time. She doesn't know how to play the game by everyone else's rules, and it makes you realize that actually there were rules that were functioning for a woman to be a careerist.
Feminism means to me aquality, actually. Women having equal rights to every thing the male population have in all aspects. Whether that's socially, or within the household or in the workplace. I don't find it a difficult word but it does have a lot of baggage. There's still a lot of work to be done in various parts of the world and society. If you look at where a woman's place was a couple of generations ago, there's been a huge development and progression. And it's an important queston to keep bringing up.
We're not saying that marriage, the thing, is now open to anyone of any gender. We are saying, when the word marriage is used in this particular context, this is what it means. And it was the same with "alternative facts." That was a big one. "Feminism" was a big one. And when people came to the "marriage" entry, because we live in the Internet age, they either immediately fire off an email to us saying they're horrified at how commie-pinko-liberal we are, or they fire off an e-mail saying thank you so much for speaking truth to power.
Let's admit that feminism came from liberalism and it was very positive. But then it went dark. It went into a bad place. When feminism replaced biology with social construct, they started to say that everything about a human being was created by your environment or by your - by environmental cues as opposed to innate traits... Like you didn't achieve what you could get because it was your fault. They denied traits that are applied across all cultures. And that's where feminism went wrong is it denied biology and makes them look foolish.