It's good to kind of get away from the star treatment.
If your husband is cheating on you, it doesn't mean that you need to get prettier -- it means he's a scumbag.
Hearing the Beastie Boys speak out against sexism made me feel like if these men who had once sung about getting girls to 'do the laundry' and 'clean up my room' could understand, maybe the rest of the world would follow suit. It made me hopeful in the best way.
Value yourself for what the media doesn't - your intelligence, your street smarts, your ability to play a kick-ass game of pool, whatever. So long as it's not just valuing yourself for your ability to look hot in a bikini and be available to men, it's an improvement.
Feminism isn't simply about being a woman in a position of power. It's battling systemic inequities; it's a social justice movement that believes sexism, racism and classism exist and interconnect, and that they should be consistently challenged.
I think motherhood has made issues all feel much more urgent than they did before. So it didn't necessarily change how I feel about certain things - it just fired me up to be even more active on behalf of my daughter.
When are we going to realize that hating other women - no matter how much money they have or how far they've fallen - is just as bad for ourselves as it is for anyone else?
People who want to manipulate you will fear your joy, because it's not easily controlled.
But maybe the Charm Bracelets understood more about life than I did. From an early age they knew what little value the world placed in books, and so didn't waste their time with them. Whereas I, even now, persist in believing that these black marks on white paper bear the greatest significance, that if I keep writing, I might be able to catch the rainbow of consciousness in a jar.
I learned a lot about my parents, who were both teachers. I had known that my parents were very strongly in favor of education. I had known that they had an impact on a lot of people, but people came out of the woodwork who have said, "You know, without your father, I would never have gone to college," very successful people. And so I learned how widespread their educational evangelism really was.
I didn't want to be a shock absorber; I wanted to deliver the shock.