Pain is real when you get other people to believe in it. If no one believes in it but you, your pain is madness or hysteria or your own unfeminine inadequacy. Women have learned to submit to pain by hearing authority figures - doctors, priests, psychiatrists - tell us that what we feel is not pain.

The reason I'm voting for Barack Obama is that it's either him or a police state - someone who's carrying on policies that are clearly stated and directed at subverting liberty. He's definitely the lesser of two evils.

Culture stereotypes women to fit the myth by flattening the feminine into beauty-without-intelligence or intelligence-without-beauty; women are allowed a mind or a body but not both.

If people wake up, think critically, and get angry, we get connected to that courage that the founding generation meant us to have. History shows when millions just don't go along, resist at any level - and I'm talking about all the way up to bipartisan impeachment and arrest of the leaders of the coup - then it can't happen.

In 70s America, protest used to be very effective, but in subsequent decades municipalities have sneakily created a web of "overpermiticisation" - requirements that were designed to stifle freedom of assembly and the right to petition government for redress of grievances, both of which are part of our first amendment.

Al Gore was a good guy and he wanted to give flextime to American women who are trying to balance work and family, but he couldn't because the business interests are organized, and they don't want it to happen.

It is never smart, even in a strong democracy, to declare some debate off limits. In a weakening democracy it is catastrophic.