Quotes About Stigma

This is not promiscuity on my part, not at its roots; more that so few women will make concessions to the HIV-positive male that I am forced to do far more than my share.

If Russians knew how to read they would write me off.

I used to think a drug addict was someone who lived on the far edges of society. Wild-eyed, shaven-headed and living in a filthy squat. That was until I became one...

we are all the shunned masses, part of the bands of outcasts of a society that worships self-control and despises addiction as a moral failing.

As I try to move beyond the stereotypes to express my inner consciousness, it's clear that how i am perceived inheres to who i am.

So we blame ourselves for being too outspoken or too proud or too ambitious.

I confront the infinite chasm between the audience's conception of Poet and the underwhelming evidence of me as that poet. I just don't look the part. Asians lack presence. Asians take up apologetic space. We don't even have enough presence to be considered real minorities. We're not racial enough to be token. We're so post-racial we're silicon

Yeah," he said, rolling his eyes. "Because when I think 'game architect' and 'engineering,' I think 'extrovert.

Until Islam's articulate spokeswomen such as Rana Kabbani target their misguided coreligionists with the fervor they expend on outside critics, the grave mistake of conflating Islam with clitoridectomy and honor killings will continue. And much more importantly, so will the practices themselves, at the cost of so many Muslim women's health and happiness.

My mother, my grandmother and my great-grandmother all told me it was right, that without it a woman wouldn't be able to control herself, that she would end up a prostitute," said Aset, a beautiful twenty-eight-year-old whose own genitals had been mutilated when she was about seven years old.

Suicide and sexual diseases. Two great killers of the Viennese, from the highest born to the lowest.

Guilt is one side of a nasty triangle; the other two are shame and stigma. This grim coalition combines to inculpate women themselves of the crimes committed against them.

In the popular imagination hairiness is like furriness, an index of bestiality, and as such an indication of aggressive sexuality. Men cultivate it, just as they are encouraged to develop competitive and aggressive instincts, women suppress it, just as they suppress all the aspects of their vigour and libido.

Psychologists cannot fix the world so they fix women.

believed that education was damaging—too much blood to a woman's brain would cause reproductive malfunction. To prove her

Minorities, on the other hand, are always judged by their lowest common denominator.

Ask a woman if she's ambitious and she'll look at you as if you just asked whether she sticks pins in puppies for fun. Ask a woman if she's competitive and she'll look at you as if you suggested that she's a hooker.

Much of what keeps the ego's lies in place now is the fear of being different from the crowd, of stepping beyond convention and going against how most people think. Once there is less of a stigma around questioning your programming, because more people are not drinking the ego's Kool-Aid, people will awaken to the truth—to reality—much more easily.

It was depressing how pornography had so emphatically demoted the vagina. The poor old vagina!

If women have young children, they are one man away from welfare.

Suddenly, I began to wonder: If one in three or four American women had an abortion at some time in her life--a common statistical estimate, even in those days of illegality-- then why, WHY should this single surgical procedure be deemed a criminal act?

I had been silent and silenced about an abortion I'd had years before. Like many women, I'd been made to feel at fault, not realizing there were political reasons why female humans were not supposed to make decisions about our own bodies.

This was my first hint of the truism that depression is anger turned inward; thus women are twice as likely to be depressed.

At first, feminists were assumed to be only discontented suburban housewives; then a small bunch of women's "libbers", bra burners, and radicals; then women on welfare; then briefcase carrying imitations of male executives; then unfulfilled women who forgot to have children; then women voters...that really could decide elections. That last was too dangerous, so suddenly we were told we were in a "postfeminist" age...