Best 487 quotes in «sexism quotes» category

Oppressions are by definition linked--linked by common ideologies, by institutional forces, and by socialization that makes oppressions normative and invisible.

Our culture is obsessed with perfection, especially when it comes to the way women look. The parameters of acceptability as far as physical appearance go are so limiting that only a handful of women actually fall into this category. And the rest of us are left to either squeeze ourselves into molds that don't fit, hating ourselves all the while, or we just give up entirely.

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.

Our laws as we support them now are slow, wasteful, cumbrous systems, which require a special caste to interpret and another to enforce; wherein the average citizen knows nothing of the law, and cares only to evade it when he can, obey it when he must.

Our minds, society and neurosexism create difference. Together, they wire gender. But the wiring is soft, not hard. It is flexible, malleable and changeable. And, if we only believe this, it will continue to unravel.

O woman, thou art my imperfection!

Oxford was not a conspiracy of silence as far as women were concerned; it was a conspiracy of ignorance.

People don't hate other people because they're different. They hate themselves because they're weak, and they take it out on those who are powerless.

People like Jim [a defender of punch-down rape jokes] desperately want to believe that the engines of injustice run on outsized hate—stranger rapes in dark alleys, burning crosses and white hoods—but the reality is that indifference, bureaucracy, and closed-door snickers are far more plentiful fuels.

People tend to refer to nonhuman animals as “it” or sometimes “he,” regardless of the individual’s sex. This one-sex-fits-all approach objectifies and denies individuality. In fact, nonhuman animals who are exploited for food industries are usually females. Such unfortunate nonhumans are not only exploited for their flesh, but also for their nursing milk, reproductive eggs, and ability to produce young. When guessing the gender of a nonhuman animal forced through slaughterhouse gates, we would greatly increase odds of being correct if we referred to such unfortunate individuals as “she.

Poor Sasha. Poor girls. The world fattens them on the promise of love. How badly they need it, and how little most of them will ever get. The treacled pop songs, the dresses described in the catalogs with words like 'sunset' and 'Paris.' Then the dreams are taken away with such violent force; the hand wrenching the buttons of the jeans, nobody looking at the man shouting at his girlfriend on the bus

Personally, I believe "if it ain't broke, don't fix it". I'd rather use film cameras and vinyl records and cathode ray tubes than any sort of the digital technology available. Look around! The streets are full of people who would rather have their eyes on their cell phones than on the world around them! Scientists are researching technology to erase specific memories from people! Our thrown-away digital technology is showing up overseas in huge piles of toxic heavy metals and plastic! And yet there are still people who keep wanting technology and the future to keep going. They dream of flying cars, or humanoid robots, of populated cities on Mars. But do we really NEED this stuff? Maybe before we try to keep turning our world into an episode of The Jetsons, we should focus more on the problems that are surprisingly being overlooked now more than ever. Before we design another stupid cell phone or build a flying car, let's put a stop to racism, to sexism, to homophobia, to war. Let's stop buying all our "American" products from sweat shops overseas and let's end poverty in third-world countries. Let's let film photography never go obsolete, let's let print books continue to be printed. Let's stop domestic violence and child abuse and prostitution and this world's heavy reliance on prescription drugs. Let's stop terrorism, let's stop animal cruelty, , let's stop overpopulation and urbanization, let's stop the manufacture of nuclear weapons... ...I mean come on, we have all these problems to solve, but digital tech enthusiasts are more concerned that we don't have flying cars or robotic maids yet? That's pathetic.

Privilege is when you can afford to sit back and watch as others' rights are trampled upon.

Privilege is not knowing that you're hurting others and not listening when they tell you.

Pride. You have it where you can have it.

Prejudice is learned. What will you teach others through your actions and words?

Prejudice plunges you into a world of fear and hate. That's no way to live.

Privilege doesn't just insulate people from the consequences of their prejudice, it cuts them off from their humanity.

Punishment [is] applied like a rabbit's foot, with as little regard to its efficacy.

Put differently, the rhetoric of Williams’ different body isn’t just sexist – it’s profoundly racist.

Real cases highlight the fiction surrounding the popular imagery of divided families, a fiction that deserves further examination. The imaginative dissolution of the Union-Confederate border by postwar authors was made possible not only by a reinforcement of the boundary between public and private life, but also by a defense of existing social borders in American society.

Quickly I find another surprise. The boys are wilder writers — less careful of convention, more willing to leap into the new. I start watching the dozens of vaguely familiar girls, who seem to have shaved off all distinguishing characteristics. They are so careful. Careful about their appearance, what they say and how they say it, how they sit, what they write. Even in the five-minute free writes, they are less willing to go out from where they are — to go out there, where you have to go, to write. They are reluctant to show me rough work, imperfect work, anything I might criticize; they are very careful to write down my instructions word by word. They’re all trying themselves on day by day, hour by hour, I know — already making choices that will last too unfairly long. I’m surprised to find, after a few days, how invigorating it all is. I pace and plead for reaction, for ideas, for words, and gradually we all relax a little and we make progress. The boys crouch in their too-small desks, giant feet sticking out, and the girls perch on the edge, alert like little groundhogs listening for the patter of coyote feet. I begin to like them a lot. Then the outlines come in. I am startled at the preoccupation with romance and family in many of these imaginary futures. But the distinction between boys and girls is perfectly, painfully stereotypical. The boys also imagine adventure, crime, inventions, drama. One expects war with China, several get rich and lose it all, one invents a time warp, another resurrects Jesus, another is shot by a robber. Their outlines are heavy on action, light on response. A freshman: “I grow populerity and for the rest of my life I’m a million air.” [sic] A sophomore boy in his middle age: “Amazingly, my first attempt at movie-making won all the year’s Oscars. So did the next two. And my band was a HUGE success. It only followed that I run the country.” Among the girls, in all the dozens and dozens of girls, the preoccupation with marriage and children is almost everything. They are entirely reaction, marked by caution. One after the other writes of falling in love, getting married, having children and giving up — giving up careers, travel, college, sports, private hopes, to save the marriage, take care of the children. The outlines seem to describe with remarkable precision the quietly desperate and disappointed lives many women live today.

Racism, sexism, heightism, ageism... the only do-goodism is baptism!

Several psychologists (L. Armstrong, 1994; Enns, McNeilly, Corkery, & Gilbert, 1995; Herman, 1992; McFarlane & van der Kolk, 1996; Pope & Brown, 1996) contend that the controversy of delayed recall for traumatic events is likely to be influenced by sexism. Kristiansen, Gareau, Mittleholt, DeCourville, and Hovdestad (1995) found that people who were more authoritarian and who had less favorable attitudes toward women were less likely to believe in the veracity of women’s recovered memories for sexual abuse. Those who challenged the truthfulness of recovered memories were more likely to endorse negative statements about women, including the idea that battered women enjoy being abused. McFarlane and van der Kolk (1996) have noted that delayed recall in male combat veterans reported by Myers (1940) and Kardiner (1941) did not generate controversy, whereas delayed recall in female survivors of intrafamilial child sexual abuse has provoked considerable debate.

Schopenhauer said only men had the total objectivity necessary for genius, and that you only had to look at a woman’s shape to see that she wasn’t intended for much mental or physical work.

Sexism is hence to bad science as misogyny is to moralism. Sexism wears a lab coat; misogyny goes on witch hunts.

Sexists refer to every female political opinion as "hysterical," just like they refer to every word a woman says when she opens her mouth as "shouting," and for the same reasons — not because the women are actually being loud or unreasonable, but because women are not supposed to have opinions or voices at all.

Self-governance does not mean no one is responsible. It means everyone is.

Sexism is not confined by border, race, class, sexuality or gender and, to my mind (and Margo Kingston's in Chapter 6), it is inextricably bound up with a mindset of entitlement that also afflicts our relationship with the planet.

Sexism occurs when we assume that some people are less valid or natural than others because of their sex, gender, or sexuality; it occurs when we project our own expectations and assumptions about sex, gender, and sexuality onto other people, and police their behaviors accordingly; it occurs when we reduce another person to their sex, gender, or sexuality rather than seeing them as a whole, legitimate person. That is sexism. And a person is a legitimate feminist when they have made a commitment to challenging sexist double standards wherever and whenever they arise. An individual's personal style, mannerisms, identity, consensual sexual partners, and live choices simply shouldn't factor into it.

Sexual distortions carry strong undertones of prejudice—sexism, racism and homophobia—that rob individuals of their individuality. Common stereotypes include “men are all dogs,” “women are less interested in sex,” “gays are promiscuous,” certain races are frigid or hung, and certain sex acts are indulgent, effeminate, or immoral. Other distortions clearly function as tools of organizations or of religious or political figures to shape public opinion through dogma and to control their followers’ lives.

Six men control almost all the media in the United States--book publishing, magazines, television, movie studios, newspapers, and radio. They are not friendly toward feminism, which has almost disappeared from the surface of our society. You will almost never see a feminist column on an op-ed page, a feminist article in a magazine, or newspaper, actual (not satirized) feminist ideas on television or in the movies. Only magazines & radio controlled by feminists--and these are few and not well-funded--offer information on the feminist perspective. This might be understandable if feminism were a wild-eyed manic philosophy. But it is a belief, a politics, based on one simple fact: women are human beings who matter as much as men. That is all that feminism claims. As human beings, women have the right to control their own bodies, to walk freely in the world, to train their minds and bodies, and to love and hate at will. Only those who wish to continue to coerce women into a servant/slave class for men cannot accept this principle.

She is a good girl," Park said. "You don't even know her." His dad was standing, pushing Park toward the door. "Go," he said sternly. "Go play basketball or something." "Good girls don't dress like boys," his mother said.

Silencing women silences justice.

Simply being born female in our society is to grow up being told your worth as a person is tied to how slim and attractive you are. Even for those of us lucky enough to have evolved parents, the message is still driven home by the world at large.

Social justice has to do with issues such as poverty, inequality, war, racism, sexism, abortion, and lack of concern for ecology because what lies at the root at each of these is not so much someone's private sin but rather a huge, blind system that is inherently unfair.

Society' consists mostly of women. Women carry on most of its processes, therefore women are its makers and masters, they are responsible for it, that is the general belief. We might as well hold women responsible for harems--or prisoners for jails. To be helplessly confined to a given place or condition does not prove that one has chosen it; much less made it. No; in an androcentric culture "society," like every other social relation, is dominated by the male and arranged for his convenience.

She had to fight against developing too combative a personality or becoming altogether a misanthrope. She suddenly caught herself. "Misanthrope" is someone who dislikes everybody, not just men. And they certainly had a word for someone who hates women: "misogynist." But the male lexicographers had somehow neglected to coin a word for the dislike of men. They were almost entirely men themselves, she thought, and had been unable to imagine a market for such a word.

She remembered how, as a young man, she had insisted that women must be obedient, chaste, scented, and exquisitely apparelled. "Now I shall have to pay in my own person for those desires," she reflected; "for women are not (judging by my own short experience of the sex) obedient, chaste, scented, and exquisitely apparelled by nature. They can only attain these graces, without which they may enjoy none of the delights of life, by the most tedious discipline. There's the hairdressing," she thought, "that alone will take an hour of my morning, there's looking in the looking-glass, another hour; there's staying and lacing; there's washing and powdering; there's changing from silk to lace and from lace to paduasoy; there's being chaste year in and year out...

She said my glasses made me look like a butch jock's locker room bitch.

Simply put, feminism is a movement to end sexism, sexist exploitation, and oppression. This was a definition of feminism I offered in Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center more than 10 years ago. It was my hope at the time that it would become a common definition everyone would use. I liked this definition because it did not imply that men were the enemy. By naming sexism as the problem it went directly to the heart of the matter. Practically, it is a definition which implies that all sexist thinking and action is the problem, whether those who perpetuate it are female or male, child or adult. It is also broad enough to include an understanding of systemic institutionalized sexism. As a definition it is open-ended. To understand feminism it implies one has to necessarily understand sexism.

Sin embargo, cuando leemos algo sobre una bruja zambullida en agua, una mujer poseída de los demonios, una sabia mujer que vendía hierbas o incluso un hombre muy notable que tenía una madre, nos hallamos, creo, sobre la pista de una novelista malograda, una poetisa reprimida, alguna Jane Austen muda y desconocida, alguna Emily Brontë que se machacó los sesos en los páramos o anduvo haciendo muecas por las carreteras, enloquecida por la tortura en que su don la hacía vivir. Me aventuraría a decir que Anónimo, que escribió tantos poemas sin firmarlos, era a menudo una mujer. Según sugiere, creo, Edward Fitzgerald, fue una mujer quien compuso las baladas y las canciones folklóricas, canturreándolas a sus niños, entreteniéndose mientras hilaba o durante las largas noches de invierno. Quizás esto sea cierto, quizá sea falso —¿quién lo sabe?—, pero lo que sí me pareció a mí, repasando la historia de la hermana de Shakespeare tal como me la había imaginado, definitivamente cierto, es que cualquier mujer nacida en el siglo dieciséis con un gran talento se hubiera vuelto loca, se hubiera suicidado o hubiera acabado sus días en alguna casa solitaria en las afueras del pueblo, medio bruja, medio hechicera, objeto de temor y burlas.

So many men in my life have tried to “fix me”; they viewed me as a “fiery” being who is in need of taming

Some men are so indoctrinated that they sincerely believe that other than cooking and cleaning the only thing that a woman can do better than them is being a woman.

Somehow the ideals of sexual liberation had become twisted until women were being told that if they didn't buy into an increasingly narrow image of what female sexiness looked like, then they must be prudes. No matter if they were looking for something freer rather than less free, nobody wants to be told they're frigid. So even though this wasn't about disliking sex, but disliking sexism, the label 'prude' had become an effective gag on dissent.

Testimony in new age writing affirms the way in which embracing a love ethic transforms life for the good. Yet a lot of this information only reaches those of us who have class privilege. And often, individuals whose lives are rich in spiritual and material well-being, who have diverse friends from all walks of life who nurture their personal integrity, tell the rest of the world these things are impossible to come by. I am talking here about the many prophets of doom who tell us that racism will never end, sexism is here to stay the rich will never share their resources. We would all be surprised if we could enter their lives for a day. Much of what they are telling us cannot be had, they have. But in keeping with a capitalist-based notion of well-being, they really believe there is not enough to go around, that the good life can only be had by a few.

Son égale ! Mais comment ? Ne suis-je pas sa femme ? Quel autre que lui pourrait me diriger ? N'est-il pas mon maître par la loi ?

So remember, this is definitely a screwed-if-you-do, screwed-if-you-don't situation. You just remember to say, "Screw them.

So weak are their [Men's] intellectuals, and so untuned are their organs to the voice of reason, that custom makes more absolute slaves of their senses than they can make of us. They are so accustom'd to see things as they now are, that they cannot represent to themselves how they can be otherwise. It wou'd be extremely odd they think to see a Woman at the head of an army giving battle, or at the helm of a nation giving laws; pleading causes in quality of counsel; administring justice in a court of judicature; preceded in the street with sword, mace, and other ensigns of authority; as magistrates; or teaching rhetoric, medicine, philosophy, and divinity, in quality of university professors.

So, we may wreck people simply to validate ourselves. We may wreck them because we’re jealous. We may wreck them because we fear the sight of public suffering, or because, well, everyone else hates them, so they must have done something to deserve it. Maybe. But then, there’s my favorite theory: Maybe we wreck people because they’re women.