Creativity Quote by Holly Near

A musician’s line that reads like a rallying cry, Holly Near’s quote doesn’t ask for tolerance; it demands desire. “Essential” frames women’s interior lives not as optional enrichment but as a social requirement, the missing nutrient in a malnourished culture. The provocation is in the verbs: “interested” and “excited.” Near isn’t lobbying for men to be polite listeners or better allies on paper. She’s calling out the emotional economy that treats women’s thoughts as secondary, quaint, or only valuable when they flatter male narratives. Interest is the baseline of respect; excitement is the shift from duty to genuine curiosity, from inclusion as compliance to inclusion as appetite.

The subtext is also a critique of who gets to be considered complex. For generations, men have been granted full human range - philosophical, contradictory, visionary - while women are too often reduced to roles, bodies, or “issues.” Near pushes against that flattening by insisting women’s cognition is thrilling, not merely instructive. It’s a subtle reversal: instead of women performing relatability to be heard, men are asked to expand their attention.

Context matters: Near emerged from feminist and queer activism in the 1970s, where “the personal is political” wasn’t a slogan but a method. In that world, taking women’s thinking seriously wasn’t just cultural nicety; it was strategy for survival and liberation. The quote’s intent is a cultural rewiring: make women’s minds magnetic, and the power dynamics that depend on ignoring them start to weaken.