Quotes About Gender

The back windows looked out over the fields, then the Atlantic, maybe a hundred yards away. Actually, I'm just making that bit up. I had no idea how far away the sea was. Only men could do things like that. Half a mile. Fifty yards. Giving directions, that sort of thing. I could look at a woman and say Thirty-six C. Or Let's try it in the next size up. But I had no idea how far away Tim's sea was except that I wouldn't want to walk to it in high heels.

And Marrakech, a place that Himself had particularly loved, transpired to be not so wonderful for me because – in one of those unfortunate oversights – I didn't have a penis. They're not so keen on women in Marrakech. To put it mildly. But that's a different story.

noticed that he had small hands and, worse again, small feet. You could barely see his shoes under the cuffs of his trousers. I hated men with small hands and feet. It made them seem very unmanly, like imps or gnomes.

Not everyone likes an "ambitious" woman. When it's said about a man it's always in a good way. But a woman? Not so much.

What she saw in their eyes terrified her. She was a woman traveling alone, in a country that had not seen exposed female faces in over five years. She turned back and cried tears of frustration all the way to Pakistan. ...Asra..., I find her fantasy delightful. Who else would risk her life to take stuffies to Afghanistan?

If a man is unmarried, he is called a bachelor. If a woman is unmarried, she is called a spinster or an old maid. What is it about an unmarried woman that poses such a threat to the patriarchal order? Mainly, it is that women are no one's property when we're unmarried. We're under no one's control, and neither are our children. There is no telling what we might do or say.

Men in our culture have been spoiled, treated with false reverence instead of respect.

We don't know how to be women because we were taught it was not OK to be girls. Our most natural impulses were thwarted and distorted.

We are afraid to allow ourselves to blossom fully because of the general disapproval that fills our air whenever a 'little lady' forgets her place.

We must relinquish the paradigm of men as power with women as support and instead embrace the image of both men and women as powers, with each supporting the other. Any man who holds a woman back is not a man a woman can afford to be with.

Our womanhood is major business. When it is treated like a minor issue, we burn.

even the most commonplace man knows a great deal more concerning any fellow-man than does even the cleverest, shrewdest woman.

For one thing she [Alice Hayward] possessed that passionate love of abstract justice which has become more a woman's than a man's trait, in our modern civilisation.

He [Colonel George Scrutton] always, like the wise man a hard life had made him, allowed trouble to come to him, instead of hastening to meet it, as is a woman's way.

Les femmes n'ont pas de nom. Elles ont un prénom. Leur nom est un prêt transitoire, un signe instable, leur éphémère. Elles trouvent d'autres repères. Leur affirmation au monde, leur être là, leur création, leur signature, en sont déterminés. Elles s'inventent dans un monde d'hommes, par effraction.

She learned yet another critical fact, which is that those male animals have the good sense to interfere only with females in heat, but that men lack the sexual intelligence or instinct to leave their disinterested women alone.

My feelings about men are the result of my experience. I have little sympathy for them. Like a Jew just released from Dachau, I watch the handsome young Nazi soldier fall writhing to the ground with a bullet in his stomach and I look briefly and walk on. I don't even need to shrug. I simply don't care. What he was, as a person, I mean, what his shames and yearnings were, simply don't matter.

I hate discussions of feminism that end up with who does the dishes, she said. So do I. But at the end, there are always the damned dishes.

nineteenth-century feminism was defeated by men's adamant refusal to take responsibility for maintaining themselves and their children;

Women and men. They played by different rules because the rules applied to them were different. It was very simple. It was the women who got pregnant and the women who ended up with the kids. All the rest stemmed from that. So women had to learn to protect themselves, had to be wary and careful. The way the rules had been set up, everything was against them.

Laws institutionalized men's unfounded superiority over women by defining marriage as ownership

They saw women in the public sphere as whores, thieves, she-men with the audacity to carry guns and wear pants.

Charlotte Bunch writes that if one ethnic national group were attacking another, killing and maiming them at the same rate as men attack and kill women (and she is speaking only of attacks by intimates), the situation would be held to constitute a state of emergency or even war. But domestic violence is only one campaign in what amounts to a widespread war against women.

I don't mind living in a man's world, as long as I can be a woman in it.