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. The “working poor,” as there are approvingly termed, are in fact the major philanthropists of our society. They neglect their own children so that the children of others will be cared for; they live in substandard housing so that other homes will be shiny and perfect; they endure privation so that inflation will be low and stock prices high. To be a member of the working poor is to be an anonymous donor, a nameless benefactor, to everyone else.
Barbara Ehrenreich, “Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By In America”
I recently read this book, and while several observations and statistics stuck out to me, this quote, on the last page, I believe really sums things up quite well.
(via lostgrrrls)
“Women are more likely to be attracted to personality and men are more likely to be attracted to physical appearance.”
Woah maybe that’s because we teach women to see men as people and we teach men to see women as objects.
Ding ding ding ding ding.
10r3:
it is so upsetting listening to so many males talk about all of the times they have gone on road trips alone and slept in their cars alone or on the side of the road, or travelled overseas alone and slept on the floor of strangers homes or in parks or at hostels, and they appear to have such freedom in that they are able to be alone in ways that females, unfortunately, cannot. and there is an ignorance surrounding this in that these boys never seem to comprehend just how fortunate they are that strange people and unfamiliar places and the dark of night are not their enemies but rather exciting, promising things.
“Yes, my consuming desire is to mingle with road crews, sailors and soldiers, barroom regulars—to be a part of a scene, anonymous, listening, recording—all this is spoiled by the fact that I am a girl, a female always supposedly in danger of assault and battery. My consuming interest in men and their lives is often misconstrued as a desire to seduce them, or as an invitation to intimacy. Yes, God, I want to talk to everybody as deeply as I can. I want to be able to sleep in an open field, to travel west, to walk freely at night…”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
*jokes about making out with you until it actually happens*