Quotes About Gender

When men lie to women, presenting a false self, the terrible price they pay to maintain power over us is the loss of their capacity to give and receive love.

Since our society continues to be primarily a Christian culture masses of people continue to believe that god has ordained that women be subordinate to men in the domestic household.

Whenever women thinkers, especially advocates of feminism, speak about the widespread problem of male violence, folks are eager to stand up and make the point that most men are not violent. They refuse to acknowledge that masses of boys and men have been programmed from birth on to believe that at some point they must be violent, whether psychologically or physically, to prove that they are men.

To understand feminism it implies one has to necessarily understand sexism.

When black people are talked about the focus tends to be on black men ; and when women are talked about the focus tends to be on white women.

We learn to love men more because they will not love us. If they dared to love us, in patriarchal culture they would cease to be real "men.

No other group in America has used black people as metaphors as extensively as white women involved in the women's movement.

When men did most of the work women worked to make home a site of comfort and relaxation for males. Home was relaxing to women only when men and children were not present. When women in the home spend all their time attending to the needs of others, home is a workplace for her, not a site of relaxation, comfort, and pleasure.

More than ever before in our nation's history, females are encouraged to assume the patriarchal mask and bury their emotional selves as deeply as their male counterparts do. Females embrace this paradigm because they feel it is better to be a dominator than to be dominated.

No male successfully measures up to patriarchal standards without engaging in an ongoing practice of self-betrayal.

In patriarchal culture males are not allowed simply to be who they are and to glory in their unique identity. Their value is always determined by what they do. In an antipatriarchal culture males do not have to prove their value and worth. They know from birth that simply being gives them value, the right to be cherished and loved.

No matter that information abounds that lets the public know that gay males come from two-parent homes and can be macho and women-hating, misguided assumptions about what makes a male gay still flourish. Every day boys who express feelings are psychologically terrorized, and in extreme cases brutally beaten, by parents who fear that a man of feeling must be homosexual. Gay men share with straight men the same notions about acceptable masculinity.

To be true to patriarchy we are all taught that we must keep men's secrets.

Feminism makes it possible for women and men to know love.

The fact that men use emotional withholding as a weapon of psychological terrorism is never discussed.

How can any girl sustain the belief that she is loved, truly loved, when all around her she sees that femaleness is despised? Unable to change the fact of femaleness, she strives to make herself over, to become someone worthy of love.

Any time a single male dares to transgress patriarchal boundaries in order to love, the lives of women, men, and children are fundamentally changed for the better.

We cannot teach boys that real men either do not feel or do not express feelings, then expect boys to feel comfortable getting in touch with their feelings.

Today small boys and young men are daily inundated with a poisonous pedagogy that supports male violence and male domination, that teaches boys that unchecked violence is acceptable, that teaches them to disrespect and hate women.

At times women find it difficult to hear what men have to say when what they tell us does not conform to our fantasies of who they are or who we want them to be.

White feminists so focused on the disparity between white male/white female economic status as an indication of the negative impact of sexism that they drew no attention to the fact that poor and lower-class men are as able to oppress and brutalize women as any other group of men in American society.

The structure of marriage in a patriarchal society is based on a system of exchange, one in which men are traditionally taught to provide economically for women and children in exchange for sexual, housekeeping, and nurturing services.

Since patriarchal parenting does not teach boys to express their feelings in words, either boys act out or they implode. Very few boys are taught to express with words what they feel, when they feel it. And even when boys are able to express feelings in early childhood, they learn as they grow up that they are not supposed to feel and they shut down.

Without confronting internalized sexism women who picked up the feminist banner often betrayed the cause in their interactions with other women.