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“I didn’t hear words that were accurate, much less prideful. For example, I never once heard the word clitoris. It would be years before I learned that females possessed the only organ in the human body with no function than to feel pleasure. (If such an organ were unique to the male body, can you imagine how much we would hear about it—and what it would be used to justify?)”
― Gloria Steinem , The Vagina Monologues

“Body acceptance means, as much as possible, approving of and loving your body, despite its “imperfections��, real or perceived. That means accepting that your body is fatter than some others, or thinner than some others, that your eyes are a little crooked, that you have a disability that makes walking difficult, that you have health concerns that you have to deal with �� but that all of that doesn’t mean that you need to be ashamed of your body or try to change it. Body acceptance allows for the fact that there is a diversity of bodies in the world, and that there’s no wrong way to have one.”
― Golda Poretsky

“Weight and body oppression is oppressive to everyone. When you live in a society that says that one kind of body is bad and and other is good, those with “good�� bodies constantly fear that their bodies will go “bad��, and those with “bad�� bodies are expected feel shame and do everything they can to have “good�� bodies. In the process, we torture our bodies, and do everything from engage in disordered eating to invasive surgery to make ourselves okay. Nobody wins in this kind of struggle.”
― Golda Poretsky

“As the Taliban circled the bazaar in their Toyota pickup trucks, the ice cream is no longer my enemy. Sunita is risking her life for this pleasure. She is sharing it with me. Finally, my being fat is clearly less important than being free. I eat the ice cream.”
― Eve Ensler, The Good Body

“At what point would you finally say, 'I've had enough of hating my body.”
― Jessamyn Stanley, Every Body Yoga: Let Go of Fear. Get On the Mat. Love Your Body

“In other words, I want an erotic that demands space be made for honest bodies that like to also fuck.”
― Adrienne Maree Brown, Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good

“People try to shame me for being fat. When I am walking down the street, men lean out of their car windows and shout vulgar things at me about my body, how they see it and how it upsets them that I am not catering to their gaze and their preferences and desires. I try not to take these men seriously because what they are really saying is, ‘I am not attracted to you. I do not want to fuck you and this confuses my understanding of masculinity, entitlement, and place in this world.�� It is not my job to please them with my body.”
― Adrienne Maree Brown, Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good

“Body neutrality is experiential and not something that happens overnight ... It's one awareness at a time, one thought at a time.”
― Anne Poirier

“How much are we allowed to change our bodies while still being body positive? Does that amount of change decrease if we call ourselves part of the fat acceptance movement? Does the community get to vote you out if you go over a line? Where is the line? Does a group of people on a social media platform count as a community?”
― Jes Baker, Landwhale: On Turning Insults Into Nicknames, Why Body Image Is Hard, and How Diets Can Kiss My Ass

“...there are TONS of women who look like me but rarely did I see my body type represented in the media �� and that lack of representation distorted the way I perceived my own beauty.”
― Laura Delarato

“My body is the one steady thing I have in this life. I have raged at my body. I have ignored my body. I have reviled my body. I started calling her 'she' and treating her like part of me, not just calling her my body.”
― S.D.G., Naked

“The more I write openly into the space of sexual sovereignty, the more I hear from humans desperate for a safe space to share. Those who have nowhere to be fully honest and real about the whys and hows and whats and whos of their body and its desire. ��

What turns us on? What brings us pleasure? What completely normal and natural variation of human sexuality have we labeled deviant simply because it does not fit within the prescribed heteronormative, vanilla narrative for what we are permitted to experience? Where do we berate ourselves because we like what we like and we want what we want?��

It's a fucking shame that we've driven so much into the shadows. It's a travesty that we are forced to squeeze the entire spectrum of desire into such a tightly constructed box. ��

You've got 22 square feet of skin covering your holy human body—of course, there's a hell of a lot of different ways to make that skin feel good. ��

Coincidentally, 22 square feet is approximately the size of a standard closet door., and we all know a closet is a terrible place to live.

When we force people into the closet, we cause harm. We create an experience of othering based on our own discomfort and unwillingness to expand our notions of acceptability.��

We NEED to start having way more honest, open, and raw conversations about sex, desire, and kink.��

We need to blow the remaining closets to smithereens. ��

We need to talk about how to embrace the power of full, enthusiastic consent and expand our sex-positivity and our ability to say 'that's so not for me, but GO YOU and your bad self feeling all that pleasure'. We need to start really thinking about how, as long as we bring no harm to others in the fulfillment of desire, we aren't fucking wrong for the wanting. ��

Embrace your queerness or your kink or your fetish in your journal or to your bestie or to an internet stranger. Hell, start by whispering it out loud in an empty room and then breathe the power of that back into your being. ��

You are human. You get to want. You get to feel good. Anything else is blasphemy.”
― Jeanette LeBlanc