Quotes About Gender

It was one thing to have a professor tell you that gender was socially constructed, and another to hear it from a person who had actually done construction work.

As far as I could tell, he earned his hundred thousand a year by wandering the hallway with a Styrofoam cup of coffee, smiling at the pretty girls and scowling at the boys who didn't play sports. Somebody should have stuck a broom in his hand and made him an honest man.

If there was one thing that rankled about being a woman, it was this conviction, drummed into your head before you had a chance to defend yourself, that it was your job - your obligation- to always look your best, even in situations when you had no logical reason to care.

Beer can lead men to think they're mighty and foul-mouthed women to believe themselves amusing and hip.

One of the other musicians said that the tambourine is a female due to the fact that it makes a pretty jingle and is designed to be spanked. That is the more recent, patriarchal attitude, I suppose.

Life still begins in the womb, cocky erections still collapse and lie useless when woman's superior sexuality is finished with them, but men control the divine channels now, and while that control may be largely an illusion, their laws, institutions, and elaborate weaponry exist primarily to maintain it.

They called her a disgrace to the nurturing traditions of womankind. They threatened to paint a mustache on her and shoot off her nipples.

You stupid woman, if rationality were the criterion for things being allowed to exist, the world would be one gigantic field of soya beans!

It is plain that there are some things a girl is allowed to understand, and these include the whole of algebra, but there are others, such as embracing a side of beef, that must be kept from her until she is old enough to have a carcass of her own.

I don't think a female running a house is a problem, a broken family. It's perceived as one because of the notion that a head is a man.

True the Black woman did the housework, the drudgery; true, she reared the children, often alone, but she did all of that while occupying a place on the job market, a place her mate could not get or which his pride would not let him accept.And she had nothing to fall back on: not maleness, not whiteness, not ladyhood, not anything. And out of the profound desolation of her reality she may very well have invented herself.

Where do you get the right to decide our lives? I'll tell you where. From that little hog's gut that hangs between your legs. Well, let me tell you something... you will need more than that. I don't know where you will get it or who will give it to you, but mark my words, you will need more than that.... You are a sad, pitiful, stupid, selfish, hateful man. I hope your little hog's gut stands you in good stead, and you take good care of it, because you don't have anything else.

A son ain't what a woman say. A son is what a man do.

It is this rattling I believe that affects the second point: our uneasiness with our own feelings of foreignness, our own rapidly fraying sense of belonging. To what do we pay greatest allegiance? Family, language group, culture, country, gender? Religion, race? And if none of these matter, are we urbane, cosmopolitan, or simply lonely? In other words, how do we decide where we belong? What convinces us that we do? Or put another way, what is the matter with foreignness?

Female freedom always means sexual freedom, even when—especially when—it is seen through the prism of economic freedom.

Adam first, Eve next, and also, confused about her role, the first outlaw?

Men wear you down to a sharp piece of gristle if you let them.

Navigating a white male world was not threatening. It wasn't even interesting. I was more interesting than they were.

But he could see why she wasn't married; she stirred a mans mind maybe, but not his body.

Well, if the belly buttons are to grow like-lines to give the baby blood, and only girls have babies, how come boys have belly buttons?" Maureen hesitated. "I don't know," she admitted. "But boys have all sorts of things they don't need.

This may sound sexist,' Joslyn said, 'but my theory is that men like the Civil War because it's an action story, they're caught up in the battlefield drama. The prisoners are an emotional side of the War. Women are attracted to all that raw feeling, we understand it better....

Canadian Labor Department in 1948 rejected girls and women applying to emigrate to Canada for jobs in domestic service if there was any sign that they had education beyond secondary school.

M. Masculinity, Manhood. What makes a man a Man? As a woman at the dawn of mid-life, I can confess to having learned, for sure, that I have more testosterone in my right foot then most men have surging around their entire bodies. You don't have to be born with balls to have balls. There is spunk and there is mental spunk, and it's the latter that gets me up in the mornings, that makes me change my life, that moves the world around me.

I couldn't understand what Dad was so angry about. What had we done wrong? Was it because we were girls? My mom always said he wanted a son and I wondered if things would be different if we were boys. Would that make everything better?