Quotes About Gender

Whenever anything went wrong at home, because I was the only boy, I would get blamed for it straight away. Girls stick together.

The male is always the pawn in a romantic comedy. Come together, break up, go chase her, get her, roll credits. That's what happens in all of them.

Long before history began we men have got together apart from the women and done things. We had time.

Who says we didn't have controversial subjects on TV back in my time? Remember Bonanza? It was about three guys in high heels living together

It's really funny if two women stand on the House floor. There are usually at least two men who go by and say, 'What is this, a coup?' They're almost afraid to see us in public together.

The sight of women talking together has always made men uneasy; nowadays it means rank subversion.

I can see why men do not take up knitting and such. They would never be able to pluck up the courage to go and get what they needed.

You said I was free, she told him. I have never been free—very few women ever are.

It is applied exclusively to girls. Have you noticed? I know a few wild boys, and people generally think none the worse of them—boys will be boys. I have never heard any of them called hoydens.

You cannot easily fit women into a structure that is already coded as male; you have to change the structure.

For a start it doesn't much matter what line you take as a woman, if you venture into traditional male territory, the abuse comes anyway. It is not what you say that prompts it, it's simply the fact that you're saying it.

When it comes to silencing women, Western culture has had thousands of years of practice.

we have no template for what a powerful woman looks like, except that she looks rather like a man.

It is not just that it is more difficult for women to succeed; they get treated much more harshly if ever they mess up.

Those reasons are much more basic: it is flagrantly unjust to keep women out, by whatever unconscious means we do so; and we simply cannot afford to do without women's expertise, whether it is in technology, the economy or social care. If that means fewer men get into the legislature, as it must do – social change always has its losers as well as its winners – I am happy to look those men in the eye.

You cannot easily fit women into a structure that is already coded as male; you have to change the structure. That means thinking about power differently. It means decoupling it from public prestige. It means thinking collaboratively, about the power of followers not just of leaders. It means, above all, thinking about power as an attribute or even a verb ('to power'), not as a possession.

What I mean is that public speaking and oratory were not merely things that ancient women didn't do: they were exclusive practices and skills that defined masculinity as a gender.

More interesting is another cultural connection this reveals: that unpopular, controversial or just plain different views when voiced by a woman are taken as indications of her stupidity. It is not that you disagree, it is that she is stupid.

Other classical writers insisted that the tone and timbre of women's speech always threatened to subvert not just the voice of the male orator but also the social and political stability, the health, of the whole state.

For some of us, "chauvinism" is simply a shortening of "male chauvinism." For others, it is a reminder of the dangers of devotion to the superiority of any group, gender, race, religion, or nation, or even to the truths of any era.

I don't reckon men are supposed to think, Sally said philosophically, as the pile of hemp rope grew at her feet. That's why God gave 'em big muscles.

Rafe hadn't been around women much, but since he'd gotten married to one of the little critters, he'd noticed they seemed to have to say out loud every thought in their head. Including stuff everybody already knew. It'd snowed. Today it was real nice. It was called weather. What was there to talk about?

Between bad ideas of gender neutrality and even worse ideas of the innocence of pornography, we reach the world so vividly described by so many dissatisfied women today, one where men act like stereotypical women, and retreat from real relationships into a fantasy life via pornography (rather than Harlequin novels), and where women conversely act like stereotypical men, taking the lead in leaving their marriages and firing angry charges on the way, out of frustration and withheld sex.

When boys get angry with each other, they just fight it out and it's all over. But girls are dirty. They pretend to be your friend and go behind your back.