Daily Inspiration Quote by Kathy Acker

"There's a backlash against womyn that's really bad right now" lands like a status report from the front lines, and the spelling is half the payload. Acker doesn't say "women"; she says "womyn", the separatist, DIY orthography that rejects the word's built-in "men" and signals allegiance to a certain strain of feminist resistance. It's an activist shibboleth, but also a provocation: language itself is treated as contested territory, not neutral packaging.

The bluntness of "really bad right now" matters. It's deliberately unliterary, closer to street-level urgency than manifesto cadence, the kind of phrasing you use when you don't have the luxury of polishing. Subtext: this isn't theoretical sexism or a slow cultural drift; it's organized, immediate, and getting traction. "Backlash" implies reaction to gains, not a random flare-up. Someone felt threatened enough by women's autonomy to push back hard.

Contextually, Acker's lifetime tracks the whiplash from second-wave feminism's breakthroughs to the conservative retrenchment of the 1980s and early 1990s: Reagan-era moralism, the policing of sexuality, attacks on reproductive rights, and a media culture happy to rebrand feminism as humorless or passé. Acker, who wrote bodies and power with surgical irreverence, reads the moment as counterrevolution. The sentence is short because it's diagnostic: progress happened, and the system is correcting for it. The warning is that backlash isn't an anomaly; it's the mechanism.