Female Socialization Quotes

Much of what is considered "good" in little girls is considered downright repulsive in little boys. Physical timidity or hypercautiousness, being quietly "well behaved", and depending on others for help and support are thought to be natural - if not outright charming - in girls. Boys, however, are actively discouraged from the dependent forms of relating, which are considered "sissyish" in male children. ~ Colette Dowling

Studies show that girls - especially smarter ones - have severe problems in the area of self-confidence.
They consistently underestimate their own ability. When asked how they think they'll do on different tasks - whether the tasks are untried or ones they've encountered before - they give lower estimates than boys do, and in general underestimate their actual performance as well. One study even showed that the brighter the girl, the less expectations she has of being successful at intellectual tasks. (...)
Low self-confidence is the plague of many girls, and it leads to a host of related problems. Girls are highly suggestible and tend to change their minds about perceptual judgments if someone disagrees with them. They set lower standards for themselves. While boys are challenged by difficult tasks, girls try to avoid them. (...) Given her felt incompetence, it's not surprising that the little girl would hotfoot it to the nearest Other and cling for dear life. (...) As we can see, the problems of excessive dependence follow female children right into adulthood. ~ Colette Dowling

Other victims of neurotic dependency are battered wives. The fact that they are so often financially dependent upon the men who beat them makes for a vicious kind of entrapment. It's emotional dependency, though that puts a double lock on the trap. "There's a kind of panic that many women have about being able to make it in any way other than being dependent on their husbands (...) They've been taught their whole lives that they can't. It's a conditioning process."
In situations in which they have no effect on their environments, animals begin to give up. (...) the same thing happens to humans. Stay long enough in a situation in which you feel you have no control, and you will simply stop responding. It's called learned helplessness. (...) Having been "shaped" to believe there is nothing she can do about the situation, the battered wife goes on being battered.Only after she begins to disengage from her belief in her own helplessness can she break out of the vicious cycle of dependency and its brutal effect on her life. ~ Colette Dowling

Does a man who is acting on the stage in a female part forget that he is a man? Similarly, we too must play our parts on the stage of life, but we must not identify ourselves with those parts. ~ Ramana Maharshi

Late twenties, single, female. Do the math.
Flirty flings were fabulous until you hit the big three-O, all downhill
from there. Biological clocks started ticking like time bombs waiting to
detonate, gravity exerted more force on your life than your mom, and
suddenly, the dog-ugliest creep looked like Jake Gyllenhaal. ~ Nicola Marsh

Indeed, many movies about artificial intelligence are so divorced from scientific reality that one suspects they are just allegories of completely different concerns. Thus the 2015 movie Ex Machina seems to be about an AI expert who falls in love with a female robot only to be duped and manipulated by her. But in reality, this is not a movie about the human fear of intelligent robots. It is a movie about the male fear of intelligent women, and in particular the fear that female liberation might lead to female domination. Whenever you see a movie about an AI in which the AI is female and the scientist is male, it's probably a movie about feminism rather than cybernetics. For why on earth would an AI have a sexual or a gender identity? Sex is a characteristic of organic multicellular beings. What can it possibly mean for a non-organic cybernetic being? ~ Yuval Noah Harari

You can't live an extraordinary life with an ordinary mindset. ~ Hermy L McCabe

The voices belonged to dragons.
Five of them lay on or sprawled over or curled around the various rocks and columns that filled the huge cave where Cimorene stood. Each of the males (there were three) had two short, stubby, sharp-looking horns on either side of their heads; the female dragon had three, one on each side and one in the center of her forehead. The last dragon was apparently still too young to have made up its mind which sex it wanted to be; it didn't have any horns at all. ~ Patricia C. Wrede

Imran Khan came across as an arrogant, rude, and rather illmannered man. Even back then, I disliked this attitude of arrogance and female subjugation I could certainly relate to the young girl marrying this domineering older man. Imran Khan came across as everything I detested in a man, yet he was everything men like my husband aspired to be. A close friend even gifted me an Imran Khan coffee table book in an effort to convert me. I passed it on without reading it. Perhaps this was a mistake. Reading up on people who do not appeal to you can come in handy later in life. ~ Reham Khan

Boo-Boo Pennyroyal did not like her male and female slaves to mingle. In the operas that she adored, young people brought together in tragic circumstances were forever falling in love with each other and then throwing themselves off things (cliffs, mostly, but sometimes battlements, or rooftops, or the brinks of volcanoes). Boo-Boo was fond of her slaves, and it pained her to think of them plummeting in pairs off the edges of Cloud 9, so she nipped all tragic love affairs firmly in the bud by forbidding the girls and boys to speak to one another. Of course, young people being what they were, girls sometimes fell in love with other girls, or boys with boys, but that never happened in the operas, so Boo-Boo didn't notice. ~ Philip Reeve

The suffering of either sex - of the male who is unable, because of the way in which he was reared, to take the strong initiating or patriarchal role that is still demanded of him, or of the female who has been given too much freedom of movement as a child to stay placidly within the house as an adult - this suffering, this discrepancy, this sense of failure in an enjoined role, is the point of leverage for social change. ~ Margaret Mead

They were on a first-name basis now, united in female solidarity after a twenty-minute conversation about cats. How women cemented alliances over less than nothing impressed him anew. ~ Monica Wood

What I find with my fellow female members of Congress is that we tend to work very hard. While we're very focused, we can also multitask a lot better. ~ Shelley Moore Capito

She is fragile as the morning dew
melting in the warmth of a child's smile;
stirring at the lonely, lovely waft
of a butterfly's wings;
tender as the curve
of a wildflower petal.
She is fierce as a summer storm
now raging against the fiery sky;
now raining tears to soothe
the sun-scorched earth.
She is soft as a midnight breeze
swaying to the sound of waves breaking
on distant shores;
whispering comfort to a world
steeped in the dark night of inhumanity.
She is brilliant as the rising Phoenix
lifting the suffering from the ashes;
her own suffering woven into wings of fire
in the long watches of the night.
She is serene and turbulent as the silvered water
hiding currents unknown beneath the gentle gaze
of a human who has walked a thousand miles and still has more to go. ~ L.R. Knost

Her. My mate. She's near . . . . She was downwind but close enough that he detected her. He didn't know what she looked like, what her name was, or even her species. Yet he'd been waiting a millennium - his entire existence - for her. His head swung around in the direction of the scent. A small female stood alone off to the side of the field. At his first sight of her, his breath was lost, his Lykae Instinct roaring to life within him. - Yours. Take her. - ~ Kresley Cole

The sea is a spirit level, a pantry, a playground, a mansion rowdy with life, a majestic reminder of our origins, another kind of body (a body of water), and female because of her monthly tides. But her bones are growing brittle, her brine turning ever more acidic from all the CO2 we've slathered into the air and all the fertilizer runoff from our fields. ~ Diane Ackerman

It often horrified the English community that she spent her time with local farmers and horse traders, eccentrics and mystics, but she valued expertise over convention and had long believed if you were going to make discoveries in the world you must first quit your Englishness and open your eyes. ~ Sara Sheridan

technology should never be allowed to outrun morality. ~ Lina J. Potter

The trainee knew he should leave, but he was unable to look away. He'd never seen anything snap out so fast or strike so hard as the male's fists. Obviously, the rumours about the instructor were all true. He was a flat-out killer.
With a metal clank, a door opened at the other end of the gym, and the sound of a newborn's cries echoed up into the high ceiling. The warrior stopped in midpunch and wheeled around as a lovely female carrying young in a pink blanket came over to him. His face softened, positively melted. ~ J.R. Ward

I'm in my dressing room about to play to a sold-out crowd at the O2 arena in Ireland. Name a female rapper who's ever done that and I will give you $100,000. ~ Nicki Minaj

The woman laughed again. She was the loudest person in the cave. Eena wondered if perhaps she was talking to a female Ghengat. Curiosity got the best of her and she turned around to look, surprised to find neither a Ghengat nor a Harrowbethian woman, but a Mishmorat. A striking, cheetah-spotted Mishmorat with straight lengths of charcoal hair and the most alluring dark eyes in existence. This bronzed female was the same size as Eena but observably more muscular. She appeared to be a mix of cheetah, Arabian princess, and gladiator in tight-fitting pants. Eena paused, dropping the stone in her hands.
"Kira?" she breathed.
"Hmmm," the woman grumbled. Her painted eyes scrunched with displeasure. The look was still stunning. "I see my reputation precedes me."
Eena gawked as if a legendary ghost had been resurrected. "You're alive? ~ Richelle E. Goodrich

My mother didn't teach me lessons about being Chinese as strongly as she did the notion of who I was as a female. ~ Amy Tan

Men are so frustrating; sometimes I think they really do come from Mars. That's the planet where they take boy babies' souls at birth to raise them with no feminine influence of any kind. They use John Wayne as the primary role model and make them mean and tough. Then they return their souls to them when they start puberty. That's why they are so obsessed with the female species at that time. After all, they've been living on Mars, where no such things exist. ~ Carolyn Brown

Damn you to Lolth's web!" he said. "Don't you dare pretend if doesn't matter to you!" "Why do you care?" Drizzt growled back at him. "No one who has ever made a difference?" "Do you believe that?" "What do you want from me, son of Baenre?" "Just the truth-your truth. You believe that you have never made a difference?" "Perhaps there is no difference to be made," Drizzt replied. "Do not ever say that," Jarlaxle said to him. "Why do you care?" Drizzzt asked. "Because you were the one who escaped," Jarlaxle replied. "Don't you understand? Jarlaxle went on. "I watched you-we all watched you. Whenever a matron mother, or almost any female of Menzoberranzan was about, we spoke your name with vitriol, promising to avenge Lolth and kill you." "But whenever they were not around, the name of Drizzt Do'Urden was spoken with jealousy, often reverence. You do not understand, do you? You don't even recognize the difference you've made to so many of us in Menzoberranzan." "How? Why?" "Because you were the one who escaped!" "You are here with me!" Drizzt argued. "Are you bound to the City of Spiders by anything more than your own designs? By Bregan D'Aerthe?" "I'm not talking about the city, you obstinate fool," Jarlaxle replied, his voice lowering. Again Drizzt looked at him, at a loss. "The heritage," Jarlaxle explained. "The fate. ~ R.A. Salvatore

Making female noises, shrieking and squeaking and being shrill, all those things that annoy people with longer vocal cords. Another case where the length of organs seems to be so important to men. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

On American TV, there just aren't a lot of female leads in comedy, especially at the peak of all the Judd Apatow stuff. ~ Alia Shawkat

I think female solitude is a mental condition as well as a physical state. You can be married and a spinster. I think spinster is an identity every woman can claim, if she will ... I feel like a lot of women, or a lot of feminists, joke about taking to the sea or living alone in a cottage as this kind of fun freedom. ~ Mallory Ortberg

Families and societies are small and large versions of one another. Both are made up of people who have to work together, whose destinies are tied up with one another. Each features the components of a relationship: leaders perform roles relative to the led, the young to the old, and male to female; and each is involved with the process of decision-making, use of authority, and the seeking of common goals. ~ Virginia Satir

Female success stories from sporting events like the Olympic Games have played a role in shifting the Indian perception to see the female athlete as a hero and a role model for young Indian girls. ~ Richard Attias

Motherhood, in the sense of an intense, reciprocal relationship with a particular child, or children, is one part of female process; it is not an identity for all time. ~ Adrienne Rich

In 1850, four-fifths of New York's eleven thousand teachers were women, yet two-thirds of the state's $800,000 in teacher salaries was paid to men. It was not unusual for male teachers to earn twice as much as their female coworkers. ~ Dana Goldstein

Who do I like? I am a big fan of French and Saunders - not that that they are particularly stand-up I have to say, but I think they have been great for women and they are of themselves just incredibly funny whether they are male or female. ~ Jo Brand

Hegel held that the two sexes were of necessity different, the one being active and the other passive, and of course the female would be the passive one. ~ Simone De Beauvoir

Don't all women feel the same? The only difference is how much we know we feel it, how in touch we are with our fury. We're all furies, except the ones who are too damned foolish, and my worry now is that we're brainwashing them from the cradle, and in the end even the ones who are smart will be too damned foolish. What do I mean? I mean the second graders at Appleton Elementary, sometimes the first graders even, and by the time they get to my classroom, to the third grad, they're well and truly gone -- they're full of Lady Gaga and Katy Perry and French manicures and cute outfits and they care how their hair looks! In the third grade. They care more about their hair or their shoes than about galaxies or caterpillars or hieroglyphics. How did all that revolutionary talk of the seventies land us in a place where being female means playing dumb and looking good? Even worse on your tombstone than "dutiful daughter" is "looking good"; everyone used to know that. But we're lost in a world of appearances now. ~ Claire Messud

It's a very female thing, isn't it, to take one boys' night and snowball it into a marital infidelity that will destroy our marriage? ~ Gillian Flynn

Oh, stick a cork in it, B," Jen snarled at Decebel.
Vasile cocked his head to the side as he looked at Jen. "B?"
"Yeah. Ya know, for Beta. Although, I like it because I could also be calling him the technical term for a female dog and he wouldn't know it. So really, calling him B totally works to my advantage," Jen explained in all seriousness.
Everyone turned when a quick burst of laughter came from the right side of the room. When Sorin saw everyone turn their eyes on him, he quickly began coughing.
Holding up his hands, he finally composed himself. "Pardon me, Alpha. I seemed to have swallowed wrong."
"You have to be careful while swallowing smart ass comments, Sorin," Jen teased.
"They tend to have a choking effect. ~ Quinn Loftis

Few women can resist a Scotsman. No woman can resist a Highlander." ~ A truth known by every female living. ~ Tarah Scott

But as the primeval past faded into memory, mankind's knowledge expanded and its hubris grew with the promise of the Serpent that humans would become as gods. The Watchers became less obvious with passing time, as they sought to work more behind the veil of the supernatural world. As divine beings, Watchers could exert hypnotic effect on humans to see them in any appearance they desired. Thus, the eight-foot tall shining Belial made himself appear to be a mere five-foot ten being, both male and female, neither male nor female, a dissolution of gender, an abomination in the Law of God. But to Belial, such intolerant condemnation would not stop him from looking good. Unlike the ordinary, quite uncomely human before him, Belial still wanted to stand out from the crowd. He reveled in abomination. ~ Brian Godawa

The powerful effect of female literacy contrasts with the comparatively ineffective roles of, say, male literacy or general poverty reduction as instruments of child mortality reduction. The increase in male literacy over the same range (from 22 to 75 percent) only reduces under-five mortality from 169 per thousand to 141 per thousand. And a 50 percent reduction in the incidence of poverty (from the actual 1981 level) only reduces the predicted value of under-five mortality from 156 per thousand to 153 per thousand.

Here again, the message seems to be that some variables relating to women's agency (in this case, female literacy) often play a much more important role in promoting social well-being (in particular, child survival) than variables relating to the general level of opulence in the society. These findings have important practical implications. Both types of variables can be influenced through public action, but respectively require rather different forms of public intervention. ~ Amartya Sen

After a while Mary said, "Zsadist?"

"Yeah?"

"What are those markings?"

His frowned and flicked his eyes over to her, thinking, as if she didn't know? But then . . . well, she had been a human. Maybe she didn't. "They're slave bands. I was . . . a slave."

"Did it hurt when they were put on you?"

"Yes."

"Did the same person who cut your face give them to you?"

"No, my owner's hellren did that. My owner . . . she put the bands on me. He was the one who cut my face."

"How long were you a slave?"

"A hundred years."

"How did you get free?"

"Phury. Phury got me out. That's how he lost his leg."

"Were you hurt while you were a slave?"

Z swallowed hard. "Yes."

"Do you still think about it?"

"Yes." He looked down at his hands, which suddenly were in pain for some reason. Oh, right. He'd made two
fists and was squeezing them so tightly his fingers were about to snap off at the knuckles.

"Does slavery still happen?"

"No. Wrath outlawed it. As a mating gift to me and Bella."

"What kind of slave were you?"

Zsadist shut his eyes. Ah, yes, the question he didn't want to answer. For a while it was all he could do to force himself to stay in the chair. But then, in a falsely level voice, he said,
"I was a blood slave. I was used by a female for blood."

The quiet after ~ J.R. Ward

If you are female, and conditions are otherwise apt, you are supposed to decide whether you want to become a mother by thinking carefully about whether you really want to have a child of your very own, what it would be like to be a mother, whether this is something you really want and will be happy with, etc. In general, you are supposed to evaluate whether you should have a child largely on the basis of what you think it will be like for you to have a child. ~ L.A. Paul

So perhaps we can learn to value the differences between the male and female value spheres. Those differences, even according to the radical feminists, appear to be here for good - but we can learn to value them with more equal emphasis. How to do so is one of the things we might want to talk about. ~ Ken Wilber

I've always had this female-empowerment thing in the back of my mind - because I wanted my mother to be stronger, and she couldn't be. ~ Nicki Minaj

Yeah, I've worked with a couple of female directors, now, and I think that they're amazing. As good or better than guy directors. ~ Alia Shawkat

Qhuinn gave in immediately, as he was categorically incapable of denying the female anything - most certainly not one of her hugs. They were even better than her lasagna. ~ J.R. Ward