“Men will never ovulate, gestate, lactate, menstruate, or go through menopause. Women who identify as men might, but that thing is different.”
Source: A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century: Evolution and the Challenges of Modern Life
“When we say that men are taller than women, the words -on average- are implied. Pointing to the existence of your friend Rhonda, who really is quite tall, does not negate the statistical truth that, on average, men are still taller than women.”
Source: A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century: Evolution and the Challenges of Modern Life
“Gestation and lactation are anatomically, physiologically mandated features of being a female mammal.”
Source: A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century: Evolution and the Challenges of Modern Life
“As long as men have pricks, all the evil in this world will go on existing.”
Source: The Mad Women's Ball
“I don't want to fall in love, I want to rise with love”
“How could they refuse to let girls have their own Chrysalises?' I say through clenched teeth. "It would be such a help to the war!"
Yizhi's eyes darken. "What family would let their son enlist if there's a realistic possibility that he'd be killed by a girl.”
Source: Iron Widow
“There has been no other movement for social justice in our society that has been as self-critical as feminist movement. Feminist willingness to change direction when needed has been a major source of strength and vitality in feminist struggle. That internal critique is essential to any politics of transformation. Just as our lives are not fixed or static but always changing, our theory must remain fluid, open, responsive to new information.”
Source: Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center
“And despite the punishments for boundary crossing, we continue to live, daily, with all our contradictory differences. Here I still stand, unmistakably "feminine" in style, and "womanly" in personal experience - and unacceptably "masculine" in political interests and in my dedication to writing poetry that stretches beyond the woman's domain of home. Here I am, assigned a "female" sex on my birth certificate, but not considered womanly enough - because I am a lesbian - to retain custody of the children I delivered from my woman's body. As a white girl raised in a segregated culture, I was expected to be "ladylike" - sexually repressed but acquiescent to white men of my class - while other, darker women were damned as "promiscuous" so their bodies could be seized and exploited. I've worked outside the home for at least part of my living since I was a teenager - a fact deemed masculine by some. But my occupation is now that of teacher, work suitably feminine for a woman as long as I don't tell my students I'm a lesbian - a sexuality thought too aggressive and "masculine" to fit with my "feminity.”
Source: S/He
“She let her hand linger on his shoulder for a moment as she dismounted, and she hated herself for it, for all of it. For charming him. She hated herself, because she didn't rightly know why she was bothering to do it— she didn't need anything from him other than safe and free passage in and out of Endurance. But she did it anyway, more of a compulsion than a reflex. Her speech drifted to the familiar, the ungrammatical, the helpless. She caught herself tucking her chin down, trying to make herself look just a little shy.”
Source: Upright Women Wanted
“I’d go from being a woman to being a mother—and somehow those things appeared mutually exclusive in Hollywood.”
Source: The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo