Quotes About Social norms

We actively encourage teenagers not to have babies, we applaud young career women in their twenties, then before you know it you find yourself, as I did, aged 32 at a friend's wedding and being quizzed by everyone about why you haven't got round to reproducing yet.

Boys can essentially wee anywhere, and my very scientific theory is that this privilege leads to some of the mind-blowing confidence they show in later life - for example, the number of guys I've known who've decided to 'give comedy a go' after finding out that I'm a comedian.

It's crazy that, as women, we are taught to be cute and nice and polite when we should learn to be less nice sometimes.

If sexual intercourse, as the poets tell us, began in 1963, it was another decade and a half before the American political system began to take notice.

In society, there is enormous pressure for us to try and look good, to be politically correct, to say the right things, to be polite and basically to sacrifice ourselves on the way.

Everything is politically correct nowadays.

Just because something exists in the society, it doesn't mean it has to be correct.

The bed is now as public as the dinner table and governed by the same rules of formal confrontation.

There are necessary taboos and essential decencies in every morally healthy society.

The day I stopped drinking milk' is a very sensitive story telling the tale of how we forget what is 'normal' for us falls under the category of 'expensive' or 'unaffordable' for middle or poor class.

What is it about our society where anyone who does not have Asperger's gets talked out of their heterodox ideas?

I'm a South Asian female that talks about relationships and periods and dating and all these things.

I'm a Brit, so I come from a country where in the run-up to a general election, no one talks about abortion.

Well, you know, it ain't nothin' out of the ordinary happened to Olive and me. Happens hundreds of times every day. But we're still livin' in the dark ages, I guess. Cain't just go to a doctor and say you want an abortion. Be ten thousand people that's got nothin' better to do than trying to run everybody else's lives, and they'd put you in jail, or shoot you or somethin'.

Who is he?" "An idiot, said Adrian. "Makes me look like an upstanding member of society.

Adrian ordered a martini, earning disapproving looks from his father and me. 'It's barely noon,' said Nathan. 'I know,' said Adrian. 'I'm surprised I held out that long too.

Propriety's never been Adrian's strong suit.

That's the craziest, dumbass thing I ever heard tell of. What's the point of being a lesbian if a woman is going to look and act like an imitation man? Hell, if I wanted a man, I'll get the real thing not one of these chippies.

The act of copulation is like that of picking the nose. It's all right to be doing it yourself but it is a singularly unattractive spectacle for the onlooker.

What happens is our lives become so heavily oriented around the expectations of others that we become more and more like them and less and less like ourselves. We become split. I was split. I had this person I knew I was made to be, yet it was mixed in with all of these other ... people. As the lights were turned on, I saw I had all of this guilt and shame because I wasn't measuring up to the image of the perfect person I had in my head.

Daughters can spend ten percent more than a man can make in any usual occupation. That's a law of nature, to be known henceforth as 'Harshaw's Law.

Customs, morals--is there a difference?

To Mahmoud, Harshaw looked like a museum exhibit of what he thought of as a "Yank"—vulgar, dressed too informally for the occasion, loud, probably ignorant and almost certainly provincial. A professional man, too, which made it worse, as in Dr. Mahmoud's experience most American professional men were under-educated and narrow, mere technicians.

No, not exactly. Damn it, why couldn't she have married a white man? We brought her up better than that.