Laura Bates Quotes

The world around us sends us messages about ourselves as women - about our guilt, and our difference, our accountability and our flaws. It gives us endless reminders of the vulnerability and victimization of women. It lets us know that it is normal and common for women to experience assault and harassment and rape. And it tells us that we deserve it. And all the while we are conditioned to be passive and pleasant, not to make a fuss - to be ladylike and compliant and socially acceptable. Before we experience violence we are conditioned to expect it - and to accept it.

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.

Eighty percent of the reviewers and authors of reviewed books in the New York Review of Books in 2013 were men, as were almost 80 percent of the 'notable deaths' reported in the New York Times in 2012.

...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.

Disbelief is the first great silencer.

Girls are not only being denied access to scientific and adventurous toys, they're also presented with such a narrow range of options that domesticity and stereotypically "female" duties are shoved down their throats before they've even reached the age of five.

Better we teach our teenage girls to carry whistles, and alarms, and travel in packs than question why the world allows them to be walking, talking prey.
Because after all, this is normal. This is the world we live in. This isn't something that's gone wrong; it's just the way thing already are - it's the point we started from. Don't forget that 'women are equal now, more or less'.
We immerse young people in a world of sex and sexualization, but we don't stop to talk about consent, or relationships, or their right not to be touched or coerced or assaulted.

There are never any victims who don't matter, because this isn't about men versus women.

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.

When you look in the mirror and cringe as a result of your shame, it is conscience. When you look in the mirror and cringe as a result of how people think of you, it is ego. Which of the two is more prevalent in your life?

Girls showed up in leggings to protest the sexist policy, bearing placards asking ARE MY PANTS LOWERING YOUR TEST SCORES?

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.

Intersectionality means being aware of and acting on the fact that different forms of prejudice are connected, because they all stem from the same root of being 'other', 'different' or somehow 'secondary' to the 'normal', 'ideal' status quo.

. . . there are two outlets for the frustration of that powerlessness: insanity and violence.

The incidents that go unwitnessed definitely help to keep sexism off the radar, and unacknowledged problem we don't discuss. But so too do the regular occurrences that hide in plain sight, within a society that has normalized sexism and allowed it to become so ingrained that we no longer notice or object to it. Sexism is a socially acceptable prejudice and everybody is getting in on the act.

No single example of sexism automatically gives rise to a specific incident of misogynistic violence, the picture is far more complex than that. But when you step back and join the dots between each of the different examples outlined in this book, it is very hard to deny that the bigger picture reveals systemic and widespread inequality

Women are silenced by both the invisibility and the acceptability of the problem.

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.

It is not our conscience that torments us over our image; that is our ego tormenting us. Our conscience torments us when we behave in ways that are contrary to our values. When you look in the mirror and cringe as a result of your shame, it is conscience. When you look in the mirror and cringe as a result of how people think of you, it is ego. (Larry Newton)

Nothing has emerged more clearly from the Everyday Sexism Project than the urgent need for far more comprehensive mandatory sex-and-relationships education in schools, to include issues such as consent and respect, domestic violence and rape. It's not just girls who need it so desperately. For boys porn provides some very scary, dictatorial lessons about what it means to be a man and how they are apparently expected to exert their male dominance over women. It is as unrealistic to expect them, unaided, to instinctively work out the difference between online porn and real, caring intimacy, as it is to demand the same intuition of young women. According

...I think a lot of my misery was me hating me, and hating me made me hate everyone else. I felt like such a punk, I felt so weak. I really was a coward. I never stood up for myself. I mean, I stood up for myself as we associate standing up for yourself -- fighting and violence. But that's not standing up for yourself. I mean standing up for myself like thinking for myself. Now, I feel more ok 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.

Why do we assume that educating a criminal is merely helping him commit more sophisticated crimes? Why can't we assume that an education can give this person the tools to make more acceptable choices?

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.

Sexism is often an invisible problem. This is partly because it's so frequently manifest in situations where the only witnesses present are victim and perpetrator.

Kevin, the only prisoner in the group who was not serving a murder sentence, summed it up by saying, "What a child experiences between the ages of seven and ten will determine his actions as a teenager and an adult.

Rape is not a sexual act; it is not the result of a sudden, uncontrollable attraction to a woman in a skimpy dress. It is an act of power and violence. To suggest otherwise is deeply insulting to the vast majority of men, who are perfectly able to control their sexual desires. The

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.

Because it isn't just about the individual incidents; it's about the collective impact on everything else – the way you think about yourself, the way you approach public spaces and human interaction, the limits you place on your own aspirations and the things you stop yourself from doing before you even try because of bitter learned experience.

Quite natural for men, of course, who have worked so hard and put so much into their prized jobs, to want to maintain a balance and not allow new fatherhood to derail a promotion or an ascending career path. But for a woman to voice the same priorities? Cold. Hard. Selfish.

We met three years prior, in 2003, when I created the first-ever Shakespeare program in a solitary confinement unit, and we spent three years working together in that unit. Now we have received unprecedented permission to work together, alone, unsupervised, to create a series of Shakespeare workbooks for prisoners. Newton is gesticulating so animatedly that it draws the attention of an officer walking by our little classroom. He pops his head inside. "Everything okay in here?" he asks. "Just reading Shakespeare," I reply. He shakes his head and walks on. "That is crazy!" Newton repeats, his head still in the book. A record ten and a half consecutive years in solitary confinement, and he's not crazy, he's not dangerous - he's reading Shakespeare. And maybe, just maybe, it is because he's reading Shakespeare that he is not crazy, or dangerous.

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.

Each time a girl sees science toys under a 'boys' sign, she is told science is not suitable for her.

Leaving women out of the story isn't a simple slip-up. It is a consequence of a world that tells us they just aren't quite as important. That their achievements don't really count. It means that even now, some of us do still need reminding that women are people, too.

Meanwhile London Mayor Boris Johnson 'joked' that women only go to university because 'they've got to find men to marry' (hilarious, no?) and