Best 46 quotes of Laura Bates on MyQuotes

A compliment makes someone feel good about themselves. A catcall is harassment.

A huge amount of what feminists are fighting for would have major positive impact for men as well as women. Take the male suicide rate, for example. In part, the problem arises from the idea that men are tough and manly, that 'boys don't cry' and it's embarrassing for them to talk about their feelings. So men are less likely to reach out for help and support with mental health issues. But that gender stereotype, which exists alongside the converse notion that women are over-emotional, 'hysterical', or 'hormonal', is one feminists are fighting hard to debunk.

As girls are given dollies and pushchairs while little boys are frowned upon for picking them up; while men are 'congratulated' for occasionally 'babysitting' their own children and women are castigated for daring to combine motherhood and career; while baby changing facilities are provided in women's toilets but rarely in the men's, is it any wonder we tend to take on the roles society stereotypically pushes on us when it comes to caregiving?

As long as 85,000 women are raped every year and 400,000 sexually assaulted in England and Wales alone, it's hard to argue that there isn't a problem. Not to mention the fact that fewer than 1/3 of our MPs are female, that women write only 1/5 front page newspaper articles, that they're less than 1/10 of engineers and that 54,000 a year lose their jobs as a result of maternity discrimination... to name but a tiny sample of issues. It's not 'going too far' to demand equality, and we're certainly not there yet.

Feminism doesn't mean hating pink, make-up and high heels!

Feminism means believing that everybody should be treated equally regardless of their sex. Which happens to include the right to wear whatever you want, for your own reasons, without being forced or pressured into wearing what's considered societally required because of your sex.

If your compliments are making women feel uncomfortable, scared, anxious, annoyed or harassed, you're probably not doing them right.

If you think quotas mean the best person not getting the job, you have to believe that the best person always gets the job at the moment. Do you really believe there are more than three times more men named John qualified to lead FTSE 100 companies in the UK than all the women put together? All the 32 MILLION women combined? Just statistically, that doesn't make sense.

In order to achieve that end goal of equality it is a very gendered oppression primarily affecting women that needs to be tackled.

In the 21st Century, I'd like to think women have the right to live lives free of both sexual violence and daily harassment, as well as any other form of inequality.

It's true that the gender pay gap is complicated. It's true that it is very slowly getting smaller. But that doesn't mean it doesn't exist. It would have to be a pretty HUGE conspiracy for every reputable major news outlet to report on it annually if it was a massive feminist lie.

Nobody thinks quotas are a great win for women - the win would be removing the discrimination and inequality that creates under-representation in the first place. But in the short term, alongside other measures, they can be an effective way to make progress happen faster.

Protesting against sexism doesn't mean saying that all men are actively sexist.

The argument goes that the pay gap only exists because of women's 'choices' of work type, hours, and child related career breaks, effectively making it a myth. But research shows that while those are factors, they don't account for the whole gap, suggesting that discrimination certainly plays a role as well.

The fact that traditionally 'female' jobs are paid less, that women end up working part-time because they're societally pressured into caring roles, and that having children has a negative impact on women's wages but a positive impact on men's, are all problems that should deeply concern us, not 'explanations' that can be happily accepted.

The idea that feminism is a 'battle of the sexes' about blaming all men and setting up a 'gender war' is a handy, controversial media hook. But it doesn't reflect reality.

The idea that men 'lose control' around a woman in a short skirt is insulting to men, completely relieves perpetrators of responsibility, and erases and ignores male victims.

Turns out, this 'whatabboutery' is a classic way of silencing women when you don't like what they're fighting for. Don't panic, feminists are quite capable of fighting multiple battles at once!

We can't create a shift in normalised attitudes and behaviours without everybody on board, so not being sexist isn't enough - get stuck in and start tackling sexism too.

We have to name a problem to solve a problem.

While gender stereotypes can have negative impacts on men as well, the vast majority of structural gender inequality: socially, politically, professionally and economically, as well as the overwhelming burden of sexual violence is disproportionately borne by women.

While not all men are sexist, all women face the impact of sexism in some way, so the point is there's a massive problem to be solved, and you can be a big part of the solution.

Women of all ages in countries around the world are raped at all different times of day, in different circumstances, wearing all different kinds of clothing (including in countries where the majority of women wear completely covering clothing). The one thing they all have in common? They came into contact with a rapist.

As long as we as a society continue to belittle and dismiss women's accounts, disbelieve and question their stories, and blame them for their own assaults, we are playing right into the hands of those who silence victims by asking: "who would believe you anyways?".

A slut isn’t a person, it’s in the eye of the beholder. Like beauty, or an annoying eyelash. We decide who a girl is based on something she’s done (or even just rumoured to have done) and then brand her with it as if it’s a permanent part of her identity. Guys, on the other hand, get to wear their relationships and ‘conquests’ like medals or badges of honour, which are much easier to take off, and hurt a lot less.

Both boys and girls are seeing mainstream porn that suggests a woman's role during sex is to be subjugated or humiliated, to please a man, and often even to be hurt or punished. And without receiving any counterinformation to offset these norms, or mitigate them with ideas about consent, relationships , respect and boundaries, they are simply, inevitably, accepting these things as the 'reality' of sex.

How can I believe the people that say women have equal rights? When the worst insult a man can be called is a woman, girly, a twat, a cunt, that he needs to 'man up' and the list goes on. My gender is not an insult. I'm tired of all this shit.

If a guy is put off by you being a feminist, you need to ask yourself how put off you are by someone who doesn't believe in equality for women.

I’m fifteen and I feel like girl my age are under a lot of pressure that boys are not under. I know I am smart, I know I am kind and funny, and I know that everyone around me keeps telling me that I can be whatever I want to be. I know all this but I just don’t feel that way. I always feel like if I don’t look a certain way, if boys don’t think I’m ‘sexy’ or ‘hot’ then I’ve failed and it doesn’t even matter if I am a doctor or writer, I’ll still feel like nothing. I hate that I feel like that because it makes me seem shallow, but I know all of my friends feel like that, and even my little sister. I feel like successful women are only considered a success if they are successful AND hot, and I worry constantly that I won’t be. What if my boobs don’t grow, what if I don’t have the perfect body, what if my hips don’t widen and give me a little waist, if none of that happens I feel like what’s the point of doing anything because I’ll just be the ‘fat ugly girl’ regardless of whether I do become a doctor or not. I wish people would think about what pressure they are putting on everyone, not just teenage girls, but even older people – I watch my mum tear herself apart every day because her boobs are sagging and her skin is wrinkling, she feels like she is ugly even though she is amazing, but then I feel like I can’t judge because I do the same to myself. I wish the people who had real power and control the images and messages we get fed all day actually thought about what they did for once. I know the girls on page 3 are probably starving themselves. I know the girls in adverts are airbrushed. I know beauty is on the inside. But I still feel like I’m not good enough.

I quickly learned, however, that a university education is not a prerequisite to reading Shakespeare. After all, his original audience was not college-educated. Neither was he.

Newton: but a lot of the guys here were in prison before they came here and they’ll still be in prison when they leave here…they associate their misery to the fact that they’re in prison, and it’s not that. I think a lot of my misery was me hating me, and hating me made me hate everyone else...Now, I feel more okay with myself, I’m feeling stronger in my abilities every day, and the world just opens up. You really can do anything, you can shape your life any way you want it to be. Because prison isn’t the great prison. Prison is being entrapped by those self-destructive ways of thinking

One day, in the very early months of the project, I read several entries in a single week from girls who had been subjected to leering and shouting from men in the street while walking home from school in their uniforms. Dismayed, I posted a question on Twitter: Surely, I asked, this couldn't be a common occurrence? By the end of the day, a deluge of hundreds of tweets had confirmed that the experience was not only common but almost ubiquitous.

Our experiences of all forms of gender prejudice - from daily sexism to distressing harassment to sexual violence - are part of a continuum that impacts all of us, all the time, shaping ourselves, and our ideas about the world. To include stories of assault and rape within a project documenting everyday experiences of gender imbalance is simply to extend its boundaries to the most extreme manifestations of that prejudice. To see how great the damage can become when the minor, "unimportant" issues are allowed to pass without comment. To prove how the steady drip-drip-drip of sexism and sexualization and objectification is connected to the assumption of ownership and control over women's bodies, and how the background noise of harassment and disrespect connects to the assertion of power that is violence and rape.

The idea that girls are somehow responsible for 'provoking' harassment from boys is shamefully exacerbated by an epidemic of increasingly sexist school dress codes. Across the United States, stories have recently emerged about girls being hauled out of class, publicly humiliated, sent home, and even threatened with expulsion for such transgressions as wearing tops with 'spaghetti straps,' wearing leggings or (brace yourself) revealing their shoulders. The reasoning behind such dress codes, which almost always focus on the girls' clothing to a far greater extent than the boys', is often euphemistically described as the preservation of an effective 'learning environment.' Often schools go all out and explain that girls wearing certain clothing might 'distract' their male peers, or even their male teachers....in reality these messages privilege boys' apparent 'needs' over those of the girls, sending the insidious message that girls' bodies are dangerous and provoke harassment, and boys can't be expected to control their behavior, so girls are responsible for covering up....his education is being prioritized over hers.

The more stories I heard, the more I tried to talk about the problem. And yet time and time again I found myself coming up against the same response: Sexism doesn't exist anymore. Women are equal now, more or less. You career girls these days have the best of all worlds - what more do you want? Think about the women in other countries dealing with real problems, people told me - you women in the West have no idea how lucky you are. You have "gilded lives"! You're making a fuss about nothing. You're overreacting. You're uptight, or frigid. You need to learn to take a joke, get a sense of humor, light up... You really need to learn to take a compliment.

The very fact that it is necessary in the twenty-first century to explain why it's not okay to publicly debate whether or not women are "asking" for sexual assault is mind-boggling.

The way that the obsessive focus on girls' looks plays into the dialogue around what they can and can't do is particularly poisonous. It inserts the self-consciousness of the watched, objectified woman into girls' internal narratives before they would ever have noticed it themselves. [...] And it teaches them lessons about their own value being measured by their bodies and faces – lessons that will stay with them for the rest of their lives.

This combination of ageism and sexism was also blatant in the Boston Herald's treatment of sixty-three-year-old Elizabeth Warren, whose 2012 Senate bid it sought to undermine by repeatedly dubbing her "Granny" in its pages, as if to imply that an older woman could not possibly be trusted with political responsibility.

This inequality, this pattern of casual intrusion whereby women could be leered at, touched, harassed and abused without a second thought, was sexism: implicit, explicit, commonorgarden and deeprooted sexism, pretty much everywhere you'd care to look. And if sexism means treating people differently or discriminating against them purely because of their sex, then women were experiencing it on a near-daily basis.

This is a battle that we will win. Because women are wittier, brighter, stronger and braver than a misogynistic and patriarchal world has given us credit for.

This is not a men vs women issue. It’s about people vs prejudice.

...this pattern of casual intrusion whereby women could be leered at, touched, harassed, and abused without a second though, was sexism: implicit, explicit, commonplace, and deep-rooted, pretty much everywhere you'd care to look.

Tired of cold callers asking to speak to the 'man in the house', now I put them on to my 6-year old son... he sings them 'Sexy and I Know It'.

When we suggest victims can stop rape, we also (however unintentionally) imply that rape is an inevitable aspect of life rather than an action deliberately carried out by a perpetrator.

Women who lead, read

Yes, for the love of God young women, come along – learn your limits. Or, rather, know society’s limits. How dare you think you have the right to go out wearing whatever you like – how foolish and ignorant of you to expect not to be assaulted, you brazen hussies! What do you think this is? A free country?