Quotes About Stereotypes

The fact is that Chinese parents can do things that would seem unimaginable-even legally actionable-to Westerners. Chinese mothers can say to their daughters, Hey fatty-lose some weight. By contrast, Western parents have to tiptoe around the issue, talking in terms of health and never ever mentioning the f-word, and their kids still end up in therapy for eating disorders and negative self image.

Who am I? Oh, yes: I'm the kind of person who doesn't like fiction, country music, or cilantro. We use these defining truths to help us stay in the lines of ourselves. We think we have to hold on to these labels, we feel comfortable holding on to these labels, but it turns out the labels are removable, you can peel them right off.

Chinese people do business, do medicine, do painting. Not lazy like American people. We do torture. Best torture.

This is the kind of China you Americans always see in the movies - the poor countryside, people wearing big hats to protect themselves from the sun. No, I never wore a hat like that! I was from Shanghai. That's like thinking someone from San Francisco wears a cowboy hat and rides a horse. Ridiculous!

Chinese people do many things," she said simply. "Chinese people do business, do medicine, do painting. Not lazy like American people. We do torture. Best torture.

Henry:] Was thinking last night apropos of "Mile. Claude" and Germaine that it was a pity that women could not enjoy gigolos in the same way as men enjoy a whore.

Women [are] dwarfed not developed by competition. . . . What men did not want to do, they said was women's sphere. If a woman is natural[,] a man does not want her. This makes of woman a liar and a pretender. A woman is an actress who plays to an audience of men. They know what will be applauded and what will be hissed.

Some women are bred from the beginning to be perfect specimens for men

At the word witch, we imagine the horrible old crones from Macbeth. But the cruel trials witches suffered teach us the opposite. Many perished precisely because they were young and beautiful.

While gossip among women is universally ridiculed as low and trivial, gossip among men, especially if it is about women, is called theory, or idea, or fact.

I've read Hamlet, I know men suffer.

sexual freedom is when women do the things men think are sexy; the more women do these things, the more sexually free they are.

The intelligence of women is not out in the world, acting on its own behalf; it is kept small, inside the home, acting on behalf of another. This is true even when the woman works outside the home, because she is segregated into women's work, and her intelligence does not have the same importance as the lay of her ass.

The argument between wives and whores is an old one; each one thinking that whatever she is, at least she is not the other.

Men hate intelligence in women. It cannot flame; it cannot burn; it cannot burn out and end up in ashes, having been consumed in adventure. It cannot be cold, rational, ice; no warm womb would tolerate a cold, icy, splendid mind. It cannot be ebullient and it cannot be morbid; it cannot be anything that does not end in reproduction or whoring. It cannot be what intelligence is: a vitality of mind that acts directly in and on the world, without mediation.

I listened; I wrote; I learned. I do not know why so many women trusted me enough to speak to me, but underneath anything I write one can hear the percussive sound of their heartbeats. If one has to pick one kind of pedagogy over all others, I pick listening. It breaks down prejudices and stereotypes; it widens self-imposed limits; it takes one into another's life, her hard times and, if there is any, her joy too.

It was the pornographers, not feminists, who punished women in the public square, as puritans had, for being sexual.

The discovery is, of course, that "man" and "woman" are fictions, caricatures, cultural constructs. As models they are reductive, totalitarian, inappropriate to human becoming. As roles they are static, demeaning to the female, dead-ended for male and female both. The conclusion is inescapable: we are, clearly, a multisexed species which has its sexuality spread along a vast continuum where the elements called male and female are not discrete.

His first response to Peter was to ask: "How did they even know I was gay?" He asked this from his front porch, wearing a kimono

In the twentieth century, homosexuality was said to be caused by overbearing mothers and passive fathers; schizophrenia reflected the parents' unconscious wish that their child did not exist; and autism was the result of "refrigerator mothers," whose coldness doomed their children to a fortress of silence. We've now realized that such complex and overdetermined conditions are not the result of parental attitude or behavior.

When an illness is viewed as inexplicable and impenetrable, people tend to react to it with one of two extremes: either they stigmatize it or they romanticize it.

If we are going to persuade victims to come forward, we must rethink how manhood and womanhood are defined and how both definitions create unrealistic and unsafe demands on our behavior, starting when we're children.

Does it ever happen that a nice girl is a Lesbian? she asked him shyly.

I didn't think they liked women in a place like this." Jack guided her to a barstool. "Oh, they're friendly enough. They know you wouldn't be here if you weren't gay. They figure, you leave them alone and they'll leave you alone.