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Sexism Quotes

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Sexism Quotes

“Granted;—but would you use the same argument with regard to a girl?’ ‘Certainly not.’ ‘No; you would have her to be tenderly and delicately nurtured, like a hothouse plant—taught to cling to others for direction and support, and guarded, as much as possible, from the very knowledge of evil. But will you be so good as to inform me why you make this distinction? Is it that you think she has no virtue?”

FeminismSexismClassics
Book:The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
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“When The Woman Roars (Sonnet) Just in case it isn't obvious to the vacant lot you call a brain fumigated by testosterone, women age just like human, women get wrinkles just like a human, we aren't born with glitters on our skin, women have body hair just like a human - women fall, women fly, just like a human, our taste changes over time just like human, our figure changes like any living organism, it's called being alive, being content, you overinflated pheromone merchant!”

FeminismFeministSexismMisogynyPatriarchySexistToxic MasculinityBeauty StandardsMisogynistFeminist Poem
Book:Nazmahal: Palace of Grace
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“Puede que también haya una guerra constante y sigilosa, un caballo de Troya relleno de información cancerígena solo para un grupo de la población, pues no conoce cuentos clásicos, ni Historia del Arte, ni espectáculo público donde no se especifique que ellas — niñas y mujeres — no estaban en casa, sino en un bosque oscuro, o lavándose en un río...o en mitad de una carretera. Y que lo peor no habría sucedido de haber evitado esos mismos lugares que los hombres pisan con total tranquilidad.”

FeminismSexismViolence Against Women
Book:La educación física
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“Todo el mundo le ha dado a entender a Catalina que cuando un lobo anda suelto, se encierra bajo llave a las cien ovejas y, si una se escapa, será culpa de la oveja que el lobo la encuentre porque está en la naturaleza del lobo asustar a la oveja, torturar a la oveja, matar a la oveja, zamparse a la oveja...pero nadie se pregunta si está en la naturaleza de la oveja quedarse encerrada hasta que deje de existir el lobo, ya que no parece que el lobo vaya a dejar de acechar jamás.”

FeminismSexismViolence Against Women
Author:Rosario Villajos
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“She will save herself by proving that she is loyal, obedient, useful, even fanatic in the service of the men around her. She is the happy hooker, the happy homemaker, the exemplary Christian, the pure academic, the perfect comrade, the terrorist par excellence. Whatever the values, she will embody them with a perfect fidelity. The males rarely keep their part of the bargain as she understands it: protection from male violence against her person. But the militant conformist has given so much of herself […] that this betrayal is akin to nailing the coffin shut; the corpse is beyond caring.”

FeminismIdentityConformitySexismPatriarchyRight WingGender Based Violence
Book:Right-Wing Women
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“It's tempting to base a woman's evil on the abuse of a man or the death of a child, because they are, unfortunately, relatable and understandable motivations. However, insisting that women can only be evil once violence has been done to them robs them of agency and puts them on an unrealistic, restrictive pedestal as literary and critical figures.”

FeminismSexismMisogynyWriting ProcessCharacter BuildingFemale Characters
Book:Let Her Be Evil
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“Isn't it wild the way our puritanical culture represses women's love of their own bodies, their discovery and the joy of their sexual experiences? All the things that my kid should be able to naturally be, she is going to have to defend. She is going to have to become skilled as dismantling the information that comes in, sifting through it the noise and the human collision, and not allowing it to reshape her in the image of the distorted sexist lens of our culture.”

FeminismFeministSexism
Book:Here We Are
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“As an awake man, I need to acknowledge that feminism benefits me. Feminism seeks to dismantle all gender stereotypes. By redefining what it means to be a 'woman,' feminism also redefines what is means to be a 'man.' And to live in a world where men are encouraged to express their full range of emotions, where they are encouraged to be their own unique selves without being anchored down to some narrow, societal definition of 'masculinity'? Count. Me. In.”

FeminismFeministSexism
Book:Here We Are
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“La vecchiaia femminile nella fiabe è un posto dove nessuna vuole andare. In questo tipo di racconto le donne più anziane, che hanno perso la freschezza di un tempo, sono spesso crudeli e invidiose verso le fanciulle, ancora avvenenti in un mondo dove attirare lo sguardo degli uomini è la massima ambizione per ogni creatura di sesso femminile. La vecchiaia delle donne non è saggia né desiderabile, ma rancorosa e sulla difensiva di fronte alla gioventù altrui. La hellezza e la gioventù vanno in parallelo: la protagonista è sempre incantevole, le donne che la odiano sono brutte e la detestano per questo. La leggenda nera delle donne che sarebbero le peggiori nemiche delle donne si fonda su questi due assunti, ma in realtà ci dice pochissimo delle donne e moltissimo degli uomini che cosí le hanno concepite. Gli autori della fiaba erano infatti maschi e, poiché sono loro a volere per sé belle fanciulle, suppongono che anche le donne non desiderino che soddisfare tale desiderio.”

FeminismFeministSexismFairytales
Book:God Save the Queer: Catechismo femminista
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“Quando leggiamo Cenerentola (e tutte le altre) è utile ricordare che non stiamo guardando le donne come sono, ma come gli uomini di cultura patriarcale le hanno immaginate e forse, in fondo, ancora le immaginano. Le donne di queste fiabe consumano le proprie vite senza orizzonte: lo scenario in cui si muovono è spesso rappresentato dalle quattro mura di un'abitazione. Non le vedremo mai vivere avventure, compiere missioni all'esterno, avere grandi aspirazioni o mirare a compiti sociali: il loro scopo è uscire dalla casa del padre per ri-accasarsi in quella del marito. Se sono sfortunate svolgono le faccende domestiche, se invece sono fortunate sposano un uomo che possa far sgobbare qualcun'altra al posto loro.”

FeminismFeministSexismFairytale
Book:God Save the Queer: Catechismo femminista
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“Pagani e giudei potevano avere idee diverse su Dio, ma sulla donna avevano di sicuro la stessa. Il problema non era il fatto che Dio fosse «solo uno», ma chi dovesse essere il suo corrispettivo sociale, cioè l'uno che nella società aveva il potere di occupare la casella di Dio con la sua faccia. Se qualche categoria doveva essere esclusa, era più logico fosse una sottomessa, impossibilitata a opporsi al suo annichilimento. Sia nel mondo giudaico di partenza sia in quello greco-romano di arrivo c'erano persone - donne e bambini, schiavi, poveri e stranieri - che erano meno persone di altre, o non lo erano affatto, e a stabilirne la dignità erano gli uomini, cittadini, i patriarchi e i ricchi padroni. Per chi era già all'apice della scala sociale, la svolta storica del cristianesimo di Stato fu una manna dal cielo: disegnare Dio a propria immagine fu il modo in cui le classi privilegiate riuscirono a rendere letteralmente sacrosanto il dislivello dei diritti che c'era da prima.”

ChurchPowerFeminismCatholicFeministSexism
Book:God Save the Queer: Catechismo femminista
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“Under the guise that their predilections were about something biological - a misplaced female mind in a male body rather than sexual excitement - they have represented themselves as an oppressed minority akin to homosexuals. This has enabled them to infiltrate their fantasies and priorities into policy making at local and national levels, health policy, sports policy, education policy, prison policy.”

FeminismSexismMisogynyWomen S RightsWomen S LiberationRadical Feminism
Book:Penile Imperialism: The Male Sex Right and Women's Subordination
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“Women and girls need single sex toilets to avoid men's sexual harassment and aggression. In the UK in 2018, it was reported that just under 90% of complaints regarding changing room sexual assaults, voyeurism and harassment were about incidents in unisex facilities, and two thirds of all sexual harassment in leisure centres and public swimming pools were in unisex changing rooms.”

FeminismSexismMisogynyWomen S RightsWomen S LiberationRadical Feminism
Book:Penile Imperialism: The Male Sex Right and Women's Subordination
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“Transgender rights activists campaign to downgrade the importance of biology in support of the claim that men can really be women. This has had particularly widespread consequences for women's status. For a feminist movement to exist, women have to be thinkable, to conceptualise themselves as an oppressed group based upon a common characteristic. If the word 'woman' ceases to have any meaning, or the meaning is downgraded, then feminism cannot exist because 'women' have become unthinkable. This erasure of women is the ultimate triumph of transvestism at this time in history.”

FeminismSexismMisogynyWomen S RightsWomen S LiberationRadical Feminism
Author:Sheila Jeffreys
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“Transvestites are seeking to empty the word 'woman' of meaning and are forming language about female biology to suit their own sexual excitements and to prevent any challenge to their ideology. They have created their own language to downgrade women's status such as the word 'ciswoman' which they use to distinguish adult human females from 'transwomen'. In this way they demote those born female to just one variety of the category of women and provide an object lesson in how men have labelled and defined women to suit their purposes over the centuries of male domination.”

FeminismSexismMisogynyWomen S RightsWomen S LiberationRadical Feminism
Author:Sheila Jeffreys
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“Men who practice transvestism as an expression of the male sex right have been turned into a rights-bearing category, an oppressed minority whose excitements have precedents over the dignity, safety, and civil and political freedoms of women, and even the existence of women as a social and biological category. This achievement has depending upon obscuring their sexual motivations in favour of the idea that they are somehow essentially female in their heads.”

FeminismSexismWomens RightsMisogynyRadical FeminismWomens Liberation
Book:Penile Imperialism: The Male Sex Right and Women's Subordination
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“There can be no liberation of women without a complete transformation of the way that male sexuality is constructed. Whilst the eroticising of women's subordination remains the basis of what is seen as sex, women cannot escape coercion in the bedroom, sexual harassment on the streets and at work, and the requirement to service men's excitements in the way they dress and behave. Women's appearance, behaviour, body language, opportunities are shaped by this 'duty'.”

FeminismSexismWomens RightsMisogynyRadical FeminismWomens Liberation
Book:Penile Imperialism: The Male Sex Right and Women's Subordination
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“The most obvious proof that male sexuality is constructed to be abusive is the fact that men do not rape women in the breakfast cereal isle of the local supermarket. They are not subject to forces beyond their control. Men's sex right is socially constructed and expressed only where there is likely to be no immediate sanction. Men's sexual violence towards women is a product of their minds and not their biology.”

FeminismSexismWomens RightsMisogynyRadical FeminismWomens Liberation
Book:Penile Imperialism: The Male Sex Right and Women's Subordination
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“Men's sexual violence in all these forms ensures women's awareness of their second class status and constructs the way in which women interact with the world. However, many of the forms of men's sexual violence are not taken seriously, they are blamed on women, hidden, or compartmentalised so that the whole picture of how women's lives are affected cannot be grasped.”

FeminismSexismMisogynyWomen S RightsWomen S LiberationRadical Feminism
Book:Penile Imperialism: The Male Sex Right and Women's Subordination
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“The forms of men's fetish behaviour that have been unleashed in recent decades are not private. They do not consist of fantasies that men keep to themselves but affect women profoundly. In some cases, as with contemporary men's transvestism, they threaten the whole understanding of what women are, attack the very basis of feminism and destroy women's human rights because the men actually claim to be women.”

FeminismSexismMisogynyWomen S RightsWomen S LiberationRadical Feminism
Book:Penile Imperialism: The Male Sex Right and Women's Subordination
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“Clans became patrilineal, which inevitably entails male-domination. Naming children for fathers is intrinsically an act of force: it reverses natural mother right. And because it is impossible until recent years to assure paternity, patrilineality requires abuse of women.”

FeminismSexismMisogynyWomen S RightsWomen S LiberationRadical FeminismWomen S History
Book:From Eve to Dawn: A History of Women in the World, Vol. 1
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“Religion, as it is known in the western world in the 19th century, was male religion. Judaism, Christianity and Islam, though they may differed about what sacrament to take when or which day was actually the Sabbath, were in completed agreement on one subject - the status of women. Females were to be regarded as inferior creatures who were divinely intended to be obedient and silent vessels for the production of children and the pleasure and convenience of men. These attitudes not only thrived in the Church but found their way past those great arched doorways to install themselves in a more personal way into the thoughts, feelings and values of every Jewish, Christian or Mohammedan family.”

ReligionFeminismSexismMisogynyWomen S RightsWomen S LiberationWomen S HistoryGoddess Worship
Book:When God Was A Woman
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“Considering the hatred the Hebrews felt towards the asherim, a major symbol of the female religion, it would not be too surprising if the symbolism of the tree of forbidden fruit, said to offer the knowledge of good and evil, yet clearly represented in the myth as the provider of sexual consciousness, was included in the creation story to warn that eating the fruit of this tree has caused the downfall of all humanity. Eating of the tree of the Goddess, which stood by each alter, was as dangerously "pagan" as were Her sexual customs and Her oracular serpents. So into the myth of how the world began, the story that the Levites oferred as the explanation of the creation of all existence, they place the advisory serpent and the woman who accepted its counsel, eating of the tree that gave her the understanding of what "only the gods knew" - the secret of sex - how to create life.”

ReligionFeminismSexismMisogynyWomen S RightsWomen S LiberationWomen S HistoryGoddess Worship
Book:When God Was A Woman
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“According to Egyptian texts, to eat of this fruit was to eat of the flesh and the fluid of the Goddess, the patroness of sexual pleasure and reproduction. According to the Bible story, the forbidden fruit caused the couple's conscious comprehension of sexuality. Upon eating the fruit, Adam and Eve became aware of the sexual nature of their own bodies, "And they knew that they were naked." So it was that when the male deity found them, they had modestly covered their genitals with aprons of fig leaves. But it was vitally important to the construction of the Levite myth that they did not both decide to eat the forbidden fruit together, which would have been a more logical turn for the tale to take since the fruit symbolised sexual consciousness. No, the priestly scribes make it exceedingly clear that the woman Eve ate of the fruit first - upon the advice and counsel of the serpent. It can hardly have been chance or coincidence that it was a serpent who offerred Eve the advice. For people at that time knew that the serpent was the symbol, perhaps even the instrument, of divine counsel in the religion of the Goddess. It was surely intended in the Paradise myth, as in the Indo-European serpent and dragon myths, that the serpent, as the familiar counsellor of women, be seen as a source of evil and be placed in such a menacing and villainous role that to listen to the prophetesses of the female deity would be to violate the religion of the male deity in the most dangerous manner. {...} We are told that, by eating the fruit first, women possessed sexual consciousness before man and in turn tempted man to partake the forbidden fruit, that is, to join her sinfully in sexual pleasures. This image of Eve as a sexually tempting but god-defying seductress was surely intended as a warning to all Hebrew men to stay away from the sacred women of the temples, for if they succumb to the temptations of these women, they simultaneously accepted the female deity - Her fruit - Her sexuality and, perhaps most important, the resulting matrilineal identity for any children who might be conceived in this manner. It must also, perhaps even more pointedly, have been directed at Hebrew women, cautioning them not to take part in the ancient religion and its sexual customs, as they appear to have continued to do so, despite the warnings and punishments meted out by the Levite priests.”

ReligionFeminismSexismMisogynyWomen S RightsWomen S LiberationWomen S HistoryGoddess Worship
Book:When God Was A Woman
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“The first laws we know about that make females inferior Uruk (Sumer). These laws list a new crime - adultery - that only women could commit. And in Sumer, a knew occupation - prostitution - is devised by the temple priests. The coincidence (in the same culture if not at the same moment) of an assertion of female inferiority, the criminalisation of free sexuality in women, and the use of female sexuality in commercial transactions benefiting men demonstrates the new male vision of women: as sexual objects to be possessed and used by men.”

FeminismSexismMisogynyWomen S RightsWomen S LiberationRadical FeminismWomen S History
Book:From Eve to Dawn: A History of Women in the World, Vol. 1
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“Historians often debate whether women have more rights and capabilities in religious or secular, Catholic or Protestant, capitalist or communist, or militaristic or humanitarian states. Such debates assume that the oppression of women is incidental to another aspect of culture. All early states deprived women of their status as human beings and of the rights men possessed. Religious states like India used religion to justify this constriction; China's guiding secular philosophy, Confucianism, constricted women as much as India's religious laws.”

FeminismSexismMisogynyWomen S RightsWomen S LiberationRadical FeminismWomen S History
Book:From Eve to Dawn: A History of Women in the World, Vol. 1
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“Both men and women collude in their oppression when they accept their societies myths, but many believe the myths and propaganda teaching male superiority. Laws forcing women into marriage by denying them any other avenue of support, or allowing them access to power only through sons, co-opt their loyalty. Women may even accept constrictions if it puts them in the superior group, makes them "ladies" in worlds that despise women.”

FeminismSexismMisogynyWomen S RightsWomen S LiberationRadical FeminismWomen S History
Book:From Eve to Dawn: A History of Women in the World, Vol. 1
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“Unlike men, women have not, until the feminist movement had sex based solidarity the isolation is not incidental; solidarity is what men have feared most in women. To prevent its formation, every state we know about separated women from each other, imprisoning them in the home, where they were under the direct surveillance of husbands or kin. When women began to ally with each other and to politic during the French revolution, men barred female assembly. In India today, men suspiciously eye women who gather at wells or pumps. Women are afraid to speak to each other, although no law forbids it. Simply making men central, by making them necessary to survival, is enough to set women against each other.”

FeminismSexismMisogynyWomen S RightsWomen S LiberationRadical FeminismWomen S History
Book:From Eve to Dawn: A History of Women in the World, Vol. 1
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“In 381 Theodosius I organised the Council of Constantine, which proclaimed the doctrine of the Trinity: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are of the same substance, consubstantial, one person comprising god. The doctrine went even further than Greek myth in eliminating the female from the godhead. The Christian father-god utters the Word, his son, and procreates through language, entirely without a woman. The holy spirit is born from the mutual love of son and father. This creation is not incest because bodies are not involved. The Trinity, understandably called a mystery, lies at the heart of Christianity. It achieves two major goals: it posits a realm that transcends the physical world, in which reality is made by the word. History is filled with rules who claim divinity to justify their superiority, but not until Christianity and the sacralising of the notion that language creates reality does the debate between appearance and reality begin to pervade Western literature and thought. [...] the Trinity procreates without the female - without body, blood, ooze, without nature, and superior to it. Generations of clerical writers, wishing that women did not exist, lament that this sort of procreation was possible only to god. The church defined the divine realm in opposition to the earthly one, celebrating birth through utterance, death as life, the overcoming of sex and body, a realm where nothing changes and power and justice are one.”

FeminismSexismMisogynyWomen S RightsWomen S LiberationRadical FeminismWomen S History
Book:From Eve to Dawn: A History of Women in the World, Vol. 1
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“Everywhere, men base their claim to superiority on a connection with the deity that women lack. During the period of state formation, women lost the right to perform rites of worship. This denial led to the devaluation of female children and the exclusion of women from property rights.”

FeminismSexismMisogynyWomen S RightsWomen S LiberationRadical FeminismWomen S History
Book:From Eve to Dawn: A History of Women in the World, Vol. 1
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“We have seen that the orders for the destruction of the religion of the Goddess were built into the very canons and laws of the male religions that replaced it. It is clear that the ancient reverence for the female deity did not simply cease to be but that its disappearance was gradually brought about, initially by the Indo-European invaders, later by the Hebrews, eventually by the Christians and even further by the Mohammedans. Along with the ultimate acceptance of the male religions throughout a large part of the world, the precepts of sexual "morality," that is, pre marital virginity and marital fidelity for women, were incorporated into the attitudes and laws of the societies which embraced them.”

ReligionFeminismSexismMisogynyWomen S RightsWomen S LiberationWomen S HistoryGoddess Worship
Book:When God Was A Woman
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“We cannot avoid observing the continual emphasis upon female sexuality as acceptable only when women were safely designated as the property of one specific male and that any deviation from that rule was denounced as harlotry or adultery and subject to punishment by death, making the sexual customs of the older religion rather difficult to follow.”

ReligionFeminismSexismMisogynyWomen S RightsWomen S LiberationWomen S HistoryGoddess Worship
Book:When God Was A Woman
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