Quotes About Gender

I was arguing not that everyone should read books by ladies—though shifting the balance matters—but that maybe the whole point of reading is to be able to explore and also transcend your gender (and race and class and orientation and nationality and moment in history and age and ability) and experience being others.

There are good and great books on the Esquire list, though even Moby-Dick, which I love, reminds me that a book without women is often said to be about humanity, but a book with women in the foreground is a woman's book.

Men's bodies are weapons and women's bodies are targets and queer bodies are hated for blurring the distinction or rejecting the metaphors.

Violence doesn't have a race, a class, a religion, or a nationality, but it does have a gender.

Women worldwide ages 15 through 44 are more likely to die or be maimed because of male violence than because of cancer, malaria, war and traffic accidents combined

Women have routinely been punished and intimidated for attempting that most simple of freedoms, taking a walk, because their walking and indeed their very beings have been construed as inevitably, continually sexual in those societies concerned with controlling women's sexuality.

In contemporary parlance, sex is biological and gender is socially constructed.

Of course false-rape allegations have happened. My friend Astra Taylor points out that the most dramatic examples in this country were when white men falsely accused Black men of assaulting white women. Which means that if you want to be indignant on the subject, you'll need to summon up a more complicated picture of how power, blame, and mendacity actually work. ("Feminism: The Men Arrive")

The pandemic of violence always gets explained as anything but gender, anything but what would seem to be the broadest explanatory pattern of all.

Some men explained why men explaining things to women wasn't really a gendered phenomenon. Usually, women pointed out that, in insisting on their right to dismiss the experiences women say they have, men succeeded in explaining in just the way I said they sometimes do.

So much of feminism has been women speaking up about hitherto unacknowledged experiences, and so much of antifeminism has been men telling them these things didn't happen. You were not just raped, your rapist may say, and then if you persist there may be death threats, because killing people is the easy way to be the only voice in the room.

Mostly when people write about the trauma of gender violence, it's described as one awful, exceptional event or relationship, as though you suddnly fell into the water, but what if you're swimming through it your whole life, and there is no dry land in sight?

Yes, people of both genders pop up at events to hold forth on irrelevant things and conspiracy theories, but the out-and-out confrontational confidence of the totally ignorant is, in my experience, gendered. Men explain things to me, and other women, whether or not they know what they're talking about.

explaining men still assume I am, in some sort of obscene impregnation metaphor, an empty vessel to be filled with their wisdom and knowledge.

I just think some books are instructions on why women are dirt or hardly exist at all except as accessories or are inherently evil and empty.

Women are afraid of being raped and murdered all the time and sometimes that's more important to talk about than protecting male comfort levels. Or

Smile, a man orders you, and that's a concise way to say that he owns you; he's the boss; you do as you're told; your face is there to serve his life, not express your own. He's someone; you're no one.

When you say lone gunman, everyone talks about loners and guns, but not about men

Women's liberation has often been portrayed as a movement intent on encroaching upon or taking power and privilege away from men, as though in some dismal zero-sum game, only one gender at a time could be free and powerful. But we are free together or slaves together. Surely the mindset of those who think they need to win, to dominate, to punish, to reign supreme must be terrible and far from free, and giving up this unachievable pursuit would be liberatory.

Men explain things to me, and other women, whether or not they know what they're talking about. Some men.

Domestic violence, mansplaining, rape culture, and sexual entitlement are among the linguistic tools that redefine the world many women encounter daily and open the way to begin to change it.

Some men told me they wished someone would sexually harass them, because they seemed to be unable to imagine it as anything but pleasant invitations from attractive people. No one was offering the help of recognizing what I was experiencing or agreeing that I had the right to be safe and free. It was a kind of collective gaslighting.

In my case, this meant identifying with male protagonists, with the Jim of the almost womanless Lord Jim and Jim Carroll's self-anointing stud junkie in The Basketball Diaries and with Pip rather than Estella in Great Expectations, and all the grail seekers and ring beaters and western explorers and chasers and conquerors and haters of women and inhabitants of worlds where women were absent.

about sixty-six thousand women are killed by men annually, worldwide, in the specific circumstances they began to call "femicide." Most of them are killed by lovers, husbands, former partners, seeking the most extreme form of containment, the ultimate form of erasure, silencing, disappearance. Such deaths often come after years or decades of being silenced and erased in the home, in daily life, by threat and violence. Some women get erased a little at a time, some all at once.