Gender Quotes - Page 2

It is impossible to credit one gender with every good and perfect gift without slighting the other. That’s what extreme diversity does to us.

The instant that you forget about the consequences of your actions on other people, is the moment that you are about to lose your humanity. We all are related, no matter, what skin color, sexual orientation, gender or religion we hold. We all like rosary beads. Our existence is depended to the rest, if one bead falls apart, the rest of us will do too. Our humanity defines by how we accept, respect and support each other, otherwise we are simply a bunch of animals acting according to our instinct and killing one another to survive.

That’s the funny thing,” she said. “Men always want to die for something. For someone. I can see the appeal. You do it once and it’s done. No more worrying, not knowing, about tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. I know you all think it sounds brave, but I’ll tell you something even braver. To struggle and fight for the ones you love today. And then do it all over again the next day. Every day. For your whole life. It’s not as romantic, I admit. But it takes a lot of courage to live for someone, too.

The first question we usually ask new parents is : “Is it a boy or a girl ?”.There is a great answer to that one going around : “We don’t know ; it hasn’t told us yet.” Personally, I think no question containing “either/or” deserves a serious answer, and that includes the question of gender.

I don't know why people persist in believing women are inferior, when it is quite clear that men are the more feeble-minded of the two.

Neither (brother) even glaced at the counter. She smiled. Her dumb brothers never cooked. She didn’t think they even knew how! A human being who needs food to live but cannot prepare that food to eat? Pathetic. In this case, it was an advantage. They weren’t interested in any food until it had been cooked for them.

If we do not redefine manhood, war is inevitable.

For my relationships with men to change, I needed to change my relationship to myself as a woman.

The fundamental condition of man is his verticality.

It really is something ... that men disapprove even of our doing things that are patently good. Wouldn't it be possible for us just to banish these men from our lives, and escape their carping and jeering once and for all? Couldn't we live without them? Couldn't we earn our living and manage our affairs without help from them? Come on, let's wake up, and claim back our freedom, and the honour and dignity that they have usurped from us for so long. Do you think that if we really put our minds to it, we would be lacking the courage to defend ourselves, the strength to fend for ourselves, or the talents to earn our own living? Let's take our courage into our hands and do it, and then we can leave it up to them to mend their ways as much as they can: we shan't really care what the outcome is, just as long as we are no longer subjugated to them.

Why do you consult [women's] words when it is not their mouths that speak? Consult their eyes, their colour, their breathing, their timid manner, their slight resistance, that is the language nature gave them for your answer. The lips always say 'No,' and rightly so; but the tone is not always the same, and that cannot lie. Has not a woman the same needs as a man, but without the same right to make them known? Her fate would be too cruel if she had no language in which to express her legitimate desires except the words which she dare not utter.

In contemporary parlance, sex is biological and gender is socially constructed.

Another example was relentlessly expressed during Hillary Clinton’s campaign for the presidency, and especially since her defeat: the assertion that she was the victim of misogynistic comments and that she lost because she was a woman. None of it is true. But it keeps feminists thinking of women as victims — and people who think of themselves as victims are rendered weak....Modern feminists are afraid of life. They are afraid of differences of opinion, and especially afraid of men.....Feminists are outraged and unduly stressed by much of life itself.

Guys, you don't have to act "manly" to be considered a man; you are a man, so just be yourself. Don't let society make you believe you have to prove your masculinity to anyone because you don't. You are you and you are worthy, full stop.

When, however, one reads of a witch being ducked, of a woman possessed by devils, of a wise woman selling herbs, or even of a very remarkable man who had a mother, then I think we are on the track of a lost novelist, a suppressed poet, of some mute and inglorious Jane Austen, some Emily Bronte who dashed her brains out on the moor or mopped and mowed about the highways crazed with the torture that her gift had put her to. Indeed, I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.

TRINA:I'm tired of all the happy men who rule the world.Their smile, their smile's their pedigree. They smile, but not for me.I'd like the chance to hideIn their world.I'm happy, but I'm not at ease with that whole world.

You can learn more by going to the opera than you ever can by reading Emerson. Like that there are two sexes.

It’s ridiculous – a girl steps out, goes dancing, gets her hair cut, decides to spend the summer in Italy and it’s a scandal. A chap does it and no one bats an eyelid.

Gender is like a Rubik’s Cube with one hundred squares per side, and every time you twist it to take a look at another angle, you make it that much harder a puzzle to solve.

All this pitting of sex against sex, of quality against quality; all this claiming of superiority and imputing of inferiority, belong to the private-school stage of human existence where there are 'sides,' and it is necessary for one side to beat another side, and of the utmost importance to walk up to a platform and receive from the hands of the Headmaster himself a highly ornamental pot.

It occurred to me that as a man I could do anything, everything I wanted.

We seem to assume that no one really wants to be a girl or a woman, and therefore some people, say female-bodied people, must be forced into these abject genders

The specious idea that gender differences are due entirely to culture, and have nothing to do with biological or archetypal predispositions, still enjoys wide currency in our society, yet it rests on the discredited tabula rasa theory of human development and is at variance with the overwhelming mass of anthropological and scientific evidence.

To be called a copy, to be called unreal, is thus one way in which one can be oppressed. But consider that it is more fundamental than that. For to be oppressed means that you already exist as a subject of some kind, you are there as the visible and oppressed other for the master subject as a possible or potential subject. But to be unreal is something else again. For to be oppressed one must first become intelligible. To find that one is fundamentally unintelligible (indeed, that the laws of culture and of language find one to be an impossibility) is to find that one has not yet achieved access to the human. It is to find oneself speaking only and always as if one were human, but with the sense that one is not. It is to find that one's language is hollow, and that no recognition is forthcoming because the norms by which recognition takes place are not in one's favour.

While railing against the manufactured prerequisites of womanhood or manhood, we need to avoid manufacturing our own prerequisites. The non-operative journey and the objection to it illustrate just one area in which we need to open our thinking to other journeys while expecting that others respect our own. - Mercedes Allen

Men may or may not be better drivers than women, but they seem to die more often trying to prove that they are.

The role of gender in society is the most complicated thing I’ve ever spent a lot of time learning about, and I’ve spent a lot of time learning about quantum mechanics.

Maimed, mad, and sexually different people were believed to possess supernatural powers by primal cultures' magico-religious thinking. For them, abnormality was the price a person had to pay for her or his extraordinary gift.

When gender non-conforming people cross paths with sexually confused and repressed people, shit hits the fan.

To grow up, a man must stand apart not only from his mother but from his fellows. Human achievement, according to this perspective, is always to be measured in difference, who is the fastest, the most handsome, the richest. The quarrel between Achilles and Agamemnon highlights this way of looking at human achievement. Not only do the two men compete for the most honor, symbolized by possessions, but they see their contest as a zero-sum game. That is, they—and all the other warriors—assume that there is a finite amount of honor available, so that if one man gets more, then someone else gets less.Achilles, with his semidivine nature and abundant physical gifts, would seem to be an example of a man fully equipped for success in this system. And yet, Achilles does not prosper in the world of the poem. As he pursues honor and status among his fellows, he becomes more and more isolated, the price of distinction in a competitive society.

Are we to deny our daughters the works of Oscar Wilde, Charles Dickens, John Steinbeck or Shakespeare?....Where is the equality in banning girls from enjoying wonderful works of literature?....What kind of society defines suitable reading material by sex? This is indefensible censorship encouraging ignorance and bias. [About Caitlin Moran's statement.]

Pink is female - but why? Are girls any more pink than boys? Are boys any more blue than girls? It's something that has been sold to us, mostly so other things can be sold to us.

Today, many of us are trying to understand just what male and female energies are, since we are calling old rigid stereotypes into questions. There is a risk of replacing such stereotypes with even more politically correct rigid stereotypes. The destructive aspect of the masculine has been emphasized in recent years, but both the feminine and the masculine have destructive sides. (The evil witch in fairy tales is an example of the destructive feminine.) Love is the ultimate nature of everything; it is not just the feminine that is loving. We tend to think of female energy as nurturing because it is undirected—it includes everything—but perhaps one could say that the feminine loves and nurtures in a being way, and the masculine does so in a doing way. We are each capable of loving in both ways.

But by far the worst thing we do to males—by making them feel they have to be hard—is that we leave them with very fragile egos. The harder a man feels compelled to be, the weaker his ego is.

Accepted social gender roles and expectations are so entrenched in our culture that most people cannot imagine any other way. As a result, individuals fitting neatly into these expectations rarely if ever question what gender really means. They have never had to, because the system has worked for them.

The tape measures and weighing scales of the Victorian brain scientists have been supplanted by powerful neuroimaging technologies, but there is still a lesson to be learned from historical examples such as these. State-of-the-art brain scanners offer us unprecedented information about the structure and working of the brain. But don't forget that, once, wrapping a tape measure around the head was considered modern and sophisticated, and it's important not to fall into the same old traps. As we'll see in later chapters, although certain popular commentators make it seem effortlessly easy, the sheer complexity of the brain makes interpreting and understanding the meaning of any sex differences we find in the brain a very difficult task. But the first, and perhaps surprising, issue in sex differences research is that of knowing which differences are real and which, like the intially promising cephalic index, are flukes or spurious.

To Bette Davis, Gena Rowlands, Romy Schneider... To all actresses who have played actresses, to all women who act, to all men who act and become women, to all the people who want to be mothers. To my mother. - Dedication, Todo Sobre Mi Madre

It's Saturday; a day off, or it's not; maybe it's a day off connected to countless days off. Some are secure, some not, some wonder. But there's a common thread; each of us having purpose; some living after learning it, some learning while living it, some looking. We are all connected in purpose, all of us loved equally by a race and gender-blind Christ walking with us in that purpose.

Shooting Willoughby carrying Marianne up the path. ... Male strength -- the desire to be cradled again? ... I'd love someone to pick me up and carry me off. Frightening. Lindsay assures me I'd start to fidget after a while. She's such a comfort.

In reaction against the age-old slogan, "woman is the weaker vessel," or the still more offensive, "woman is a divine creature," we have, I think, allowed ourselves to drift into asserting that "a woman is as good as a man," without always pausing to think what exactly we mean by that. What, I feel, we ought to mean is something so obvious that it is apt to escape attention altogether, viz: (...) that a woman is just as much an ordinary human being as a man, with the same individual preferences, and with just as much right to the tastes and preferences of an individual. What is repugnant to every human being is to be reckoned always as a member of a class and not as an individual person.

Most women are all too familiar with men like Calvin Smith. Men whose sense of prerogative renders them deaf when women say, "No thanks," "Not interested," or even "Fuck off, creep.

Anything may happen when womanhood has ceased to be a protected occupation.

When we talk about my gender as though it were a performance, we let the audience - with all their expectations, prejudices, and presumptions - completely off the hook. - Scott Turner Schofield

Of course, men often 'use their economic superiority to gain sexual advantages,' but women often use their sexual superiority to gain economic advantages. So who is the extortionist?

It's imprecise and insufficient, defining the homosexual as a person whose gender expression is at odds with his or her sex.

...but he is a man, hence cannot see how tiresome it is to have explained at length what one has already fully understood.

Ruth believes that boys are not found around stables because what they like is taking things apart and putting them together again, and for this purpose horses are not so satisfactory as cars, motorcycles, and even bicycles, while girls adore horses because they are biological and have functions.

A choice of pains. That's what living was all about.

It's a good thing I was born a girl, otherwise I'd be a drag queen.

When the two become the oneAnd the inside outside, the outside inSo that the male be not male nor the female femaleThen will you see me.

I was not really surprised by what he was saying. A lot of people felt that way. Especially men. There was a quantity of things that men hated. Or had no use for, as they said. And that was exactly right. They had no use for it, so they hated it. Maybe it was the same way I felt about algebra- I doubted very much that I would ever find any use for it. But I didn't go so far as to want it wiped off the face of the earth for that reason.

Trying to take away someone’s language is usually the first step in trying to change them.

John [the father] kept saying, "You have a penis. That means you’re a boy." One day, Shannon noticed that her son had been in the bathroom an awfully long time and pushed the door open. "He had a pair of my best, sharpest sewing scissors poised, ready to cut. Penis in the scissors. I said, 'What are you doing?' He said, 'This doesn’t belong here. So I’m going to cut it off.' I said, 'You can’t do that.' He said, 'Why not?' I said, 'Because if you ever want to have girl parts, they need that to make them.' I pulled that one right out of my ass. He handed me the scissors and said, 'Okay.

I had yet to learn that when it came to gender, I was both and neither.

But the essence of the process at its best is basically the same: women and men join together as equals, they get deeply honest with each other about their experiences, and through this process they heal past wounds, awaken to new realisations together, reach a place of reconciliation and forgiveness, and are thereby mutually transformed.

The ways of men and women are such a puzzle. And I could barely decipher my own feelings, let along anyone else's.

I think the Big Bang theory must have been invented by a man. A woman would have wanted it to take longer and insisted on a commitment.

It's the story of the City of Women; of how it came to be, how it flourished, and how it was destroyed by a reckless and irrevocable act of mercy.

Sorry," I said to the Duke."Eh, it's not your fault. It's Carla's fault. You were turning the wheel. Carla just wasn't listening. I knew I shouldn't have loved her. She's like all the others, Tobin; as soon as I confess my love, she abandons me."I laughed. "I never abandoned you," I said patting on her back."Yeah, well, (a.) I never confessed my love to you, and (b.) I'm not even female to you.

Centuries of social conditioning has created a generational fear among women of being perceived as masculine.This is where all the shaming and labels come into play, which perpetuate the oppression of girls and women. As a society we shame girls with deep voices or masculine features and we shame boys with soft voices or effeminate gestures. Girls get called "too manly" and boys get called "too girly". The only solution I can think of is to be unashamedly "you". If that means challenging stereotypes and gender norms, go right ahead!