I think of the security of cages. How violence, cruelty, oppression, become a kind of home, a familiar pattern, a cage, in which we know how to operate and define ourselves.
Interpretation
The quote highlights how individuals can become accustomed to negative environments and behaviors, often accepting them as normal.
Eve Ensler’s quote suggests that people can find a disturbing sense of security within oppressive situations, viewing them as a familiar space where they define their identity and operate. This phenomenon can result in individuals becoming desensitized to violence, cruelty, and oppression, ultimately leading to a cycle in which such conditions become ingrained and accepted as the norm.
In practice
This quote can be used in a discussion about the impacts of domestic violence during a seminar on relationships.
Dancing insists we take up space, and though it has no set direction, we go there together. Dance is dangerous, joyous, sexual, holy, disruptive, and contagious and it breaks the rules. It can happen anywhere, at anytime, with anyone and everyone, and it's free. Dance joins us and pushes us to go further and that is why it's at the center of ONE BILLION RISING.
Before cancer, I was obviously disconnected. I had a tumor the size of a mango inside me and didn't do anything about it. It wasn't like I didn't know something was wrong.
It's a weird thing about the truth: It protects you. What really makes you vulnerable is when you're lying because you're going to get caught. When you tell the truth, there's a strange relief that comes.
Well, the tyranny of masculinity and the tyranny of patriarchy I think has been much more deadly to men than it has to women. It hasn’t killed our hearts. It’s killed men’s hearts. It’s silenced them, it’s cut them off.
Why are women immobile? Because so many feel like they’re waiting for someone to say, "You’re good, you’re pretty, I give you permission."
Security is elusive. It's impossible. We all die. We all get old. We all get sick. People leave us. People change us. Nothing is secure.
Even when repressed, inequality grows; only the man who is below the average in economic ability desires equality; those who are conscious of superior ability desire freedom, and in the end superior ability has its way.
-I am not sure whether he's sane. -If there's any doubt about the matter, he is.
Attention should be paid to this question of our soul, and not simply to accounting procedures. Attention should be paid to the interest of those who are yet unborn, who should be able to see this generation as it saw itself, and the past generation as it saw itself.
The death of a single human being is too heavy a price for the vindication of any principle, however sacred.
In nature a repulsive caterpillar turns into a lovely butterfly. But with human beings it is the other way round: a lovely butterfly turns into a repulsive caterpillar.
Money is power, money is force, money will do good as harm. In the hands of good men and women it could accomplish, and it has accomplished, good.
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