Quotes About Gender

the politeness people extend as a matter of course to the bodies of men does not apply to those of women: Women have little physical privacy. Each change or weight fluctuation is publicly observed, judged, and discussed.

When faced with the myth, the questions to ask are not about women's faces and bodies but about the power relations of the situation. Who is this serving? Who says? Who profits? When someone discusses a woman's appearance to her face, she can ask herself, is it that person's business? Are the power relations equal? Would she feel comfortable making the same personal comments in return?

The stronger that women grow, the more prestige, fame, and money is accorded to the display professions: They are held higher and higher above the heads of rising women, for them to emulate.

Economist Marvin Harris described women as a 'literate and docile' labor pool, and 'therefore desirable candidates for the information- and people-processing jobs thrown up by modern service industries.' The qualities that best serve employers in such a labor pool's workers are: low self-esteem, a tolerance for dull repetitive tasks, lack of ambition, high conformity, more respect for men (who manage them) than women (who work beside them), and little sense of control over their lives.

The beauty myth is not about women at all. It is about men's institutions and institutional power.

Ads do not sell sex—that would be counterproductive, if it meant that heterosexual women and men turned to one another and were gratified. What they sell is sexual discontent.

Women's flesh is evidence of a God-given wrongness; whereas fat men are fat gods.

Some men, certainly, have used the beauty myth abusively against women, the way some men use their fists; but there is a strong consciousness among both sexes that the real agents enforcing the myth today are not men as individual lovers or husbands, but institutions, that depend on male dominance.

Marina Warner's Monuments and Maidens explains how it comes about that individual men's names and faces are enshrined in monuments, supported by identical, anonymous (and beautiful) stone women.

At the interview luncheon, when boys were asked, "How do you plan to save the world from itself?" a girl was asked, "How do you manage to keep your lovely figure?

What little girls learn is not the desire for the other, but the desire to be desired. Girls learn to watch their sex along with the boys [...]

The more legal and material hindrances women have broken through, the more strictly and heavily and cruelly images of female beauty have come to weigh upon us.

Images of strangled women, women in cages do not push any limits; they are a mainstream cliche of a mainstream social order. Rock music fails to live up to its subversive tradition when it eroticizes the same old establishment sadomasochism rather than playing with gender roles to make us look at them afresh

How can a woman believe in merit in a reality like this? A job market that rewards her indirectly as if she were selling her body is simply perpetuating the traditional main employment options for women—compulsory marriage or prostitution—more politely and for half the pay.

How can woman believe in merit in a reality like this? A job market that rewards her indirectly as if she were selling her body is simply perpetuating the traditional main employment options for women—compulsory marriage or prostitution—more politely and for half the pay.

Religious beliefs had little or no effect on a man's sexual pleasure, but could slice as powerfully as the circumcision knife into a woman's enjoyment, undermining with guilt and shame any pleasure she might otherwise experience.

Where beautiful women in 1950s culture got married or seduced, in modern culture the beauty gets raped.

The idea that a woman's body has boundaries that must not be violated is fairly new. We evidently haven't taken it far enough. Can we extend that idea? Or are women the pliable sex, innately dapted to being shaped, cut, and subjected to physical invasion? Does the female body deserve the same notion of integrity as the male body?

If women cannot eat the same food as men, we cannot experience equal status in the community. As long as women are asked to bring a self-denying mentality to the communal table, it will never be round, men and women seated together; but the same traditional hierarchical dais, with a folding table for women at the foot.

Os homens são estimulados visualmente pelo corpo feminino e são menos impressionáveis pela personalidade da mulher porque desde cedo são treinados para reagir assim, enquanto as mulheres são menos estimuladas em termos visuais e mais em termos emocionais por ser este o treinamento que recebem.

Quando a romancista Margaret Atwood perguntou a mulheres o que elas mais temiam dos homens, elas responderam que tinham medo que eles as matassem. Quando fez a mesma pergunta aos homens com relação às mulheres, eles responderam que tinham medo que elas rissem deles.

Men are only in sexual competition when they are competing sexually, but the myth puts women in "sexual" competition in every situation. Competition for a specific sexual partner is rare; since it is not usually a competition "for men," it is not biologically inevitable.

As she put it more wearily in a later interview in New Woman, Advertisers don't believe in female opinion makers. Steinem believes that it's the advertisers who've got to change. And she believes they will, though perhaps not in her lifetime.

The last thing the consumer index wants men women to do is to figure out how to love one another: The 1.5$ trillion retail-sales industry depends on sexual estrangement between men and women, and is fueled by sexual dissatisfaction. Ads do not sell sex—that would be counterproductive, [...] What they sell is sexual discontent.