Top 100 Jessica Valenti Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “All women live in objectification the way fish live in water. – Catharine A. MacKinnon WHEN.”

— Jessica Valenti

2. “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.”

— Jessica Valenti

3. “Social media is not just another way to connect feminist and activist voices – it amplifies our messages as well.”

— Jessica Valenti

4. “The only purpose of an engagement ring is to show you ‘belong’ to someone, and your man makes bank.”

— Jessica Valenti

5. “You’re not too fat. You’re not too loud. You’re not too smart. You’re not unladylike. There is nothing wrong with you.”

— Jessica Valenti

6. “If feminism wasn’t powerful, if feminism wasn’t influential, people wouldn’t spend so much time putting it down.”

— Jessica Valenti

7. “Wedding fever is one of the scariest diseases I have ever seen.”

— Jessica Valenti

8. “And really, how insulting is it that to suggest that the best thing women can do is raise other people to do incredible things? I’m betting some of those women would like to do great things of their own.”

— Jessica Valenti

9. “I am tired of faking confidence or being told that my lack thereof is a fault when it seems to me the most natural reaction I could possibly have to the lifelong feedback women are given. I don’t want to be confident or inspirational and I don’t really want to buck up anymore because the faking takes more energy sometimes than the work itself.”

— Jessica Valenti

10. “Wanting to be liked means being a supporting character in your own life, using the cues of the actors around you to determine your next line rather than your own script. It means that your self-worth will always be tied to what someone else thinks about you, forever out of your control.”

— Jessica Valenti

11. “Making women the sexual gatekeepers and telling men they just can’t help themselves not only drives home the point that women’s sexuality is unnatural, but also sets up a disturbing dynamic in which women are expected to be responsible for men’s sexual behavior.”

— Jessica Valenti

12. “If your husband is cheating on you, it doesn’t mean that you need to get prettier – it means he’s a scumbag.”

— Jessica Valenti

13. “By fetishizing youth and virginity, we’re supporting a disturbing message: that really sexy women aren’t women at all- they’re girls.”

— Jessica Valenti

14. “A high school teacher once told me that identity is half what we tell ourselves and half what we tell other people about ourselves. But the missing piece he didn’t mention – the piece that holds so much weight, especially in the minds of young women and girls – is the stories that other people tell us about ourselves. Those narratives become the ones we shape ourselves into. They’re who we are, even if so much of it is a performance. This.”

— Jessica Valenti

15. “I think that online harassment has become so ubiquitous on the Internet that a lot of women do feel safer, whatever that means, in spaces where they know like people are not going to bother them in that kind of way.”

— Jessica Valenti

16. “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.”

— Jessica Valenti

17. “Bra-burning never happened. It was completely made up by the media. A couple of women protesting a Miss America pageant threw some bras into a garbage can, and somehow that became this longstanding idea of feminists as bra-burners.”

— Jessica Valenti

18. “According to the virginity movement, men have no self-control when it comes to anything sexual.”

— Jessica Valenti

19. “Once you get married, women are still implicitly expected to do the majority of the housework and take care of any future children.”

— Jessica Valenti

20. “What is crazy about killing a woman in a culture that tells you that women’s lives are worth nothing?”

— Jessica Valenti

21. “I revisit old favorites like ‘Buffy’ and ‘Battlestar Galactica’ when I’m bored. I am obsessed with ‘Scandal.’ I love TV.”

— Jessica Valenti

22. “While falling in love is fun, it’s not everything, and it’s not the antidote to an unfulfilled life, despite what Reese Witherspoon movies may tell you.”

— Jessica Valenti

23. “I think the biggest obstacle I still have to overcome is myself, and just kind of struggling every day with what to do with the work and where to go next.”

— Jessica Valenti

24. “The cultural insistence that parenting is the ‘most important’ job in the world is a smart way to satiate unappreciated women without doing a damn thing for them.”

— Jessica Valenti

25. “My informal writing style is a political choice, because I want feminism to be more accessible.”

— Jessica Valenti

26. “Social expectations about what constitutes a good or a bad mother haunt every decision, and the rise of the parental advice industry ensures that moms and dads feel inadequate at every turn.”

— Jessica Valenti

27. “Child-rearing can be a tedious and thankless undertaking.”

— Jessica Valenti

28. “There’s going to be biological differences between the genders. There’s going to be biological differences between two women or two men. There’s biological differences between all of us. My concern is, why are we so concerned about it?”

— Jessica Valenti

29. “Ignoring men, whether romantically or rhetorically, is existential violence to them.”

— Jessica Valenti

30. “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.”

— Jessica Valenti

31. “You have to have your personal life, and at the end of the day I think what people forget, especially when you’re online, is that you’re a person too, right, and that you’re not this ideal of feminism, that everything you do like feminism just like falls in your wake.”

— Jessica Valenti

32. “As I grew up and began identifying myself as a feminist, there were plenty of issues that continued to make me question marriage: the father ‘giving’ the bride away, women taking their husband’s last name, the white dress, the vows promising to ‘obey’ the groom. And that only covers the wedding.”

— Jessica Valenti

33. “We say “misogynist”; I’ve written that “misogyny kills,” but the world falls flat on your tongue – it’s too academic sounding, not raw or horrifying enough to relay the truth of what it means.”

— Jessica Valenti

34. “Obviously Feministing is kind of a women’s space in a certain way, even though we have a lot of male readership and people who don’t identify as women.”

— Jessica Valenti

35. “I’m really aware of how feminism and feminist rhetoric has been appropriated by the right.”

— Jessica Valenti

36. “Yes, the more successful you are – or the stronger, the more opinionated – the less you will be generally liked. All of a sudden people will think you’re too braggy, too loud, too something. But the trade-off is undoubtedly worth it. Power and authenticity are worth it.”

— Jessica Valenti

37. “Yet despite all these things we know to be true- despite the preponderance of evidence showing the mental and emotional distress people demonstrate in violent and harassing environments- we still have no name for what happens to women living in a culture that hates them.”

— Jessica Valenti

38. “I think that we’re our own worst enemies in a lot of ways, especially when it comes to doing work where you’re criticized a lot or doing work where there’s a lot of hater directed at you; and to not constantly second-guess yourself.”

— Jessica Valenti

39. “Edgar Allan Poe once called the death of a beautiful woman “the most poetical topic in the world” and I’ve often found myself wondering how many woman writers who have killed themselves or let themselves be otherwise obliterated were trying, somehow, to fulfill this most popular of narratives. We’re most valuable when we’re smiling, dead, posing, our words hanging on the page with no real body behind them. I’m.”

— Jessica Valenti

40. “In fact, no group of parents – married, single, step, or even empty nest – reported significantly greater emotional well-being than people who never had children,” she said. “It’s such a counterintuitive finding because we have these cultural beliefs that children are the key to happiness and a healthy life, and they’re not.”

— Jessica Valenti

41. “So remember, this is definitely a screwed-if-you-do, screwed-if-you-don’t situation. You just remember to say, “Screw them.”

— Jessica Valenti

42. “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?”

— Jessica Valenti

43. “Women who are harassed, at work, on the street, or even online, are subject to the same rigid purity standards as women who are sexually assaulted, Just by virtue of being out in public, we’re overstepping certain boundaries.”

— Jessica Valenti

44. “I do think that we have this incredible opportunity because being on-line – the Internet is a relatively new space – we do have this incredible opportunity to change that dynamic, to make sure that women are present in all sorts of spaces, not just women-only spaces.”

— Jessica Valenti

45. “My parents have a wonderful marriage, but they have been together since my mother was 12, married when they were just teenagers and are barely ever separated. They even work together. As a result, I have always thought of marriage as involving the loss of a certain amount of autonomy.”

— Jessica Valenti

46. “Stress from blogging keeps me up at night.”

— Jessica Valenti

47. “My father took me aside one day soon after and told me this: The things you do in your twenties are just things you do. But as you approach thirty what you do starts to become who you are. And there are some things you do not want to be forever.”

— Jessica Valenti

48. “If you go to places like YouTube, it’s a cesspool, and a lot of the comments are really horrifying and misogynist and harassing.”

— Jessica Valenti

49. “You come to a point where you give up on holding yourself to a perfect feminist ideal – it just feels stifling.”

— Jessica Valenti

50. “Still, somehow, inexplicably, “man-hater” is a word tossed around with insouciance as if this was a real thing that did harm. Meanwhile we have no real word for men who kill women. Is the word just “men”?”

— Jessica Valenti