Quotes About Stigma

Somebody called me a homophobe. I'm not homophobic.

I think that one of the things that we have to recognize is that the longer somebody doesn't have a job, the harder it is to get a new job. You know, the reality is that if you're out of job, and you're looking for a job, then the new employer's going to say, 'Well, why, you know, don't you have a job now? What's wrong with you?'

Someday, being gay will be a simple fact, free of party hats and blame. But not yet.

Somehow it's O.K. for people to chuckle about not being good at math. Yet if I said, 'I never learned to read,' they'd say I was an illiterate dolt.

There's this idea that if you take your clothes off, somehow you must have loose morals.

I'm certainly not the first person to be in a relationship with a younger man, but somehow I was plucked out as a bit of a poster girl.

Coming from The Disney Channel, anything I do is going to offend somehow, somewhere, somehow.

Virginia Alison, Heaven Scent

It just didn't make sense, I kept thinking. Here they worried you to death, made you a nervous wreck, don't do this, don't do that, don't do anything that'd bring shame to the Japanese race, don't be a rotten apple and spoil the whole barrel. What chance have I got, me, a single apple getting slammed by a barrelful of rottenness? Even if I tried deliberately, every day of my life, I wouldn't be able to produce one-thousandth of the massive shame of Pearl Harbor.

I had unwittingly crossed a line. Not only was Hikari-chan an outcast, but she was also a half-breed, fathered out of wedlock by an American GI. It was all too much for Auntie Oima, who couldn't contain her fear that I would be contaminated by association. Keeping my reputation unsullied was one of her major preoccupations.

He didn't understand depression. To him it was weakness.

Take my condition. The things I am supposed to be embarrassed about now—not being able to walk, not being able to wipe my ass, waking up some mornings wanting to cry—there is nothing innately embarrassing or shaming about them. "It's the same for women not being thin enough, or men not being rich enough. It's just what our culture would have you believe. Don't believe it.

When Orion finally got round to dumping me, I wanted to come out of this mess as something more than a school-wide reputation for being a bit of a slapper.

In drawing attention to the physical characteristics of women leaders, they can be dismissed as either too pretty or too ugly. The net effect is to prevent women's identification with the issues. If the public women is stigmatized as too 'pretty,' she's a threat, a rival--or simply not serious; if derided as too 'ugly,' one risks tarring oneself with the same brush by identifying oneself with her agenda.

Women are told for so long that our feelings—our internal sensations of pain, pleasure, joy, sadness, or anger—are too much, or wrong, or bad. So eventually we can't stop thinking and thinking about these problems, trying to think them out, but we stop feeling our feelings about them.

The actual demographics of obesity are irrelevant, because this religion is not about whose body is fat, but whose body is wrong.

Goddard seemed comfortable with the notion that 40 percent of immigrants were morons. "It is admitted on all sides that we are getting now the poorest of each race

in 1972, the revelation that a vice-presidential candidate—George McGovern's running mate, Thomas Eagleton—had undergone psychotherapy was reason enough to have him removed from the ticket. The notion of working through a trauma therapeutically was still unfamiliar

Des « bâtards du Rhin », environ la moitié (soit trois cent quatre-vingt-cinq) fut stérilisée23.

That dowdy little prig is that good in bed.

Being addicted to soft-porn romance novels in Ithaca, Georgia, was like filling a prescription for head lice or genital herpes. It just wasn't the kind of thing you went around bragging about, not if you were a good Southern girl, anyway, from a good Southern family.

I don't think she liked being called a slut, I don't know why… some women are just funny like that.

I often cried when I got angry; I hated that. Crying just made you look weak, no matter what triggered it.

But men are less used to the idea of being raped than women are, and it strikes them with a fresh horror. With women, that horror comes right along with the female genitals.