Quotes About Cultural norms

Generally speaking, historically in this country, the care of a child has been thought of as female business.

Only a man knows how a woman is supposed to act

Why should the arbitrary assignment of genital parts determine whether or not you want to be with a person?

Indeed, cuckolded men are universal objects of disrespect and derision.

I attributed their behavior to the fact that they didn't have a TV, but television didn't teach you everything. Asking for candy on Halloween was called trick-or-treating, but asking for candy on November first was called begging, and it made people uncomfortable. This was one of the things you were supposed to learn simply by being alive, and it angered me that the Tomkeys did not understand it.

in Japan, if you commit suicide by throwing yourself in front of a train, your family gets fined the equivalent of eighty thousand dollars for all the inconvenience you caused. Of course, if your family was the whole reason you were killing yourself, I suppose it would just be an added incentive.

Normal Iraqi etiquette was forgotten the moment drivers sat behind the wheel.

If religion is the opiate of the people, tradition is an even more sinister analgesic, simply because it rarely appears sinister.

American society is still puritanical.

Trasladada a París, una mujer que en provincias pasa por ser bonita no llama la menor atención, porque solo es bella según el refrán que reza que «en el país de los ciegos, el tuerto es rey».

The way an institution works is that you go along with the prevailing fiction.

The major civilizing force in the world is not religion, it is sex.

Every society and religion has rules, for both have moral laws. And the essence of morality consists, as in art, of drawing the line somewhere.

Woman's virtue is man's greatest invention.

because of cultural differences—different, deeply held beliefs and instincts about what is natural, normal, right, and good—cross-cultural interactions are subject to all manner of confusion, misunderstanding, and misinterpretation. In a word, they are often unsuccessful.

One does not have to sleep with, or even touch, someone who has paid for your meal. All those obligations are hereby rendered null and void, and any man who doesn't think so needs a quick jab in the kidney.

The bus is unpleasantly full men sitting and girls standing, which seems the usual thing in this part of the world.

I've always wanted to do a video of me following a girl down the street. Michael Jackson's done it. Omarion's done it. All these male pop artists have followed women down streets in videos - it's kind of the classic thing. And I was like, there is no video of a girl following a girl down the street. I need to do this at some point in my life.

You let him touch you," Todd observed idly. My eyes widened. "I do not." "Yes you do. Just little touches here and there. He puts his hand on your arm or back, he stands close to you, getting you used to him . . . it's a mating ritual. Like March of the Penguins." "It has nothing to do with mating rituals. It's a Texas thing. People are touchy-feely here.

If you had a guy who could carry you, why weren't women carried around all the time?

And often it would be a woman who was in her 70s or 80s who would win the beauty contest, because bound feet never age.

If it is perfectly acceptable for a widow to disfigure herself or commit suicide to save face for her husband's family, why should a mother not be moved to extreme action by the loss of a child or children? We are their caretakers. We love them. We nurse them when they are sick. . . But no woman should live longer than her children. It is against the law of nature. If she does, why wouldn't she wish to leap from a cliff, hang from a branch, or swallow lye?

It was true: I was starting to hate girls. Not that I was into the machismo of being a "manly-man." It was just that, for boys, there seemed to be more options available: there were more ways to be a boy and still be accepted, whereas the popular girls all appeared to be cut from the same cloth. Or they were clones or something.

For white males, it is impossible to have tits that are too big, and for black males, you cannot get the butt big enough. At the same time, if your tits are big enough, white guys don't care how big your butt is; and if your butt's big enough, black guys don't care what's happening around front.