Norah Vincent

You can fire a professor because he's a bad or unqualified teacher, but you shouldn't be able to fire him because he expresses unpopular views. Otherwise, the 1st Amendment would be meaningless. After all, how free can your speech be if your job is in peril if you say the wrong thing?

I have a lot more sympathy for men. I understand that they too are victims of the so-called patriarchy, that their roles have been as toxic as ours, and that they haven't yet been liberated from them.

My gender has roots in my brain, possibly biochemical ones, living very close to the roots of my self-image... Far, far closer than my race or class or religion or nationality, so close in fact as to be incomparable with those categories.

Among people who have suffered, politics is never a pose adopted for its facile rectitude.