Gender Quotes

Like me wanting to get nailed made me less of a man than him? That was bullshit. He seemed kind of sexist. I bet he was a fucking Republican. ~ Megan Erickson

Me? I was obsessed with serial killers. More specifically, I was obsessed with the idea of female serial killers. Hear the phrase serial killer, and most of us probably picture a man. It's not surprising - let's be real, men are responsible for at least ninety-two percent of the evil in the world. For centuries, women have been socially programmed to be the nurturers, after all - the protectors, the emotional bridges - so when we hear of a woman who takes life instead of creating it, it's instinctively shocking. ~ Christina Lauren

I don't think about being male or female, I just behave naturally. I think in terms of excellence in science, not gender. ~ May-Britt Moser

For years, I've written narrators who aren't gender-identified. When I do autobiographical stuff, that's different, obviously. But I've always tried to keep my songs as potentially not a man's thing. ~ John Darnielle

It is a rather amazing fact that, of the very many dimensions along which the genital activity of one person can be differentiated from that of another (dimensions that include preference for certain acts, certain zones or sensations, certain physical types, a certain frequency, certain symbolic investments, certain relations of age or power, a certain species, a certain number of participants, and so on) precisely one, the gender of the object choice, emerged from the turn of the century, and has remained, as THE dimension denoted by the now ubiquitous category of 'sexual orientation. ~ Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

Most critics of gender division are women, and they're worried about girls and the roles presented for them by gendered entertainments. They are quite right to be. Telling girls that the cars and the guns are beyond their domain of expertise, and that they should content themselves with clothes and friendships, is limiting. ~ Russell Smith

I never did think that my own conundrum was a matter either of science or of social convention. I thought it was a matter of the spirit, a kind of divine allegory, and that explanations of it were not very important anyway. What was important was the liberty of us all to live as we wished to live, to love however we wanted to love, and to know ourselves, however peculiar, disconcerting or unclassifiable, at one with the gods and angels. ~ Jan Morris

You just wish sometimes that people would treat you like a human being rather than seeing your gender first and who you are second. ~ Frances O'Grady

I had a romance novel inside me, but I paid three sailors to beat it out of me with steel pipes. ~ Patton Oswalt

Linguists traditionally observe that esteemed writers have been using they as a gender-neutral pronoun for almost a thousand years. As far back as the 1400s, in the Sir Amadace story, one finds the likes of Iche mon in thayre degree ("Each man in their degree"). ~ John McWhorter

I can't tell you how many couples I know where the husband and the wife are both in the military and have deployed together, and they've got kids, and so I think times have changed and gender roles have blurred when it comes to the military. ~ Tanya Biank

If the immutable character of sex is contested, perhaps this construct called 'sex' is as culturally constructed as gender; indeed, perhaps it was always already gender, with the consequence that the distinction between sex and gender turns out to be no distinction at all. ~ Judith Butler

Need someone to rescue?" She interrupted him again, spitting her words out with all the rage, contempt, and anger she had bottled up inside. "I'm not a damsel in distress, and you sir, are no knight in shining double breasted, JC Penny! ~ Dennis Sharpe

When a woman is successful, people of both genders like her less. This truth is both shocking and unsurprising: shocking because no one would ever admit to stereotyping on the basis of gender and unsurprising because clearly we do. ~ Sheryl Sandberg

Sex, after all, is about being separate and joined at the same time. The fact that men tend to emphasize the former and women the latter is not an irreducible fact of gender, but the result of asymmetries in childrearing and socialization. But more than that, such tensions reflect the fact that in our society as a whole we don't know how to be involved with one another without feeling burdened or selfishly indulgent without feeling guilty. If we can solve this problem on a societal level, it will go a long way to solving it in the bedroom. ~ Michael J. Bader

The need to control others as a prerequisite for male agency presupposed self-control. That imperative, in turn, included both the physical and emotional dimensions of a man's bodily self. ~ Thomas Van Nortwick

Actively question what we are doing and why. Rather than passively consuming our culture's ideas and representation of gender, break them down. Reflect on why they are the way they are. Greater undestanding comes through analysis. ~ Ashley Mardell

It's definitely part of it, that the men were having fun and doing the interesting things but also, I don't know, I'm just thinking more about gender and how maybe in some way I am more of a boy than a girl. ~ Alison Bechdel

As a woman, for example, I live and work very much like a man. I take a lot of things from the man's world and I have to do that if I want to survive modern life. Conversely, men have to take things from the woman's world to survive. It's a very beautiful thing that you have to mold your own gender nowadays. But it's a very stressful thing for us. ~ Pernille Fischer Christensen

Becoming is the action that births our womanhood, rather than passive act of being born (an act none of us has a choice in). This short, powerful statement assured me that I have the freedom, in spite of and because of my birth, body, race, gender expectations, and economic resources, to define myself for myself and for others. ~ Janet Mock

We need to celebrate stories by women, for women, as just one more way to redress gender injustice. ~ Shami Chakrabarti

It's fear. Not of the devil, but fear of change. Fear of doing anything different that might cause a ripple and bring it all down. Fear of a little boy in a dress, because he didn't fit into the structure of town, the rules. There was never anything wrong with Arthur. ~ Tessa Gratton

Gender is but a doorway to a vast inner universe of ultimate relationships between oneness and duality, manifest and divine, being and nonbeing, temporal and eternal. ~ William Keepin

While railing against the manufactured prerequisites of womanhood or manhood, we need to avoid manufacturing our own prerequisites. The non-operative journey and the objection to it illustrate just one area in which we need to open our thinking to other journeys while expecting that others respect our own. - Mercedes Allen ~ Kate Bornstein

It was during my study in Israel that I came to the realization that most of what I had learned in my courses in religion in the United States was outdated or in error. In order to understand what the biblical position is on any subject and, particularly on the subject of sex, one has to do it from a Hebrew perspective. ~ Roy B. Blizzard

I take a daily men's multivitamin. Why would I take vitamins for women? Because I want less of what's important, fewer nutrients and minerals? I refuse to conspire in my own oppression. ~ Elisabeth Cohen

When you say lone gunman, everyone talks about loners and guns, but not about men ~ Rebecca Solnit

As to sex, the original pleasure, I cannot recommend too highly the advantages of androgyny. ~ Jan Morris

I explain my gender by saying I am happiest on the road when I'm not here or there, but in between, that yellow line coming down the center of it all like a goddamn sunbeam. ~ Andrea Gibson

If there's specific resistance to women making movies, I just choose to ignore that as an obstacle for two reasons: I can't change my gender, and I refuse to stop making movies. ~ Kathryn Bigelow

I was arguing not that everyone should read books by ladies - though shifting the balance matters - but that maybe the whole point of reading is to be able to explore and also transcend your gender (and race and class and orientation and nationality and moment in history and age and ability) and experience being others. ~ Rebecca Solnit

Capitalism knows only one color: that color is green; all else is necessarily subservient to it, hence, race, gender and ethnicity cannot be considered within it. ~ Thomas Sowell

I don't know if foreigners will take to my novels or not. It may be that my books appeal only to a particular gender or age group rather than convey a more universal appeal. ~ Natsuo Kirino

The human in what it is objectively ever since its beginning is two, two who are different. Each part of what constitutes the unity of the human species corresponds to a proper being and a proper Being, to an identity of one's own. In order to carry out the destiny of humanity, the man-human and the woman-human each have to fulfill what they are and at the same time realize the unity that they constitute. ~ Luce Irigaray

This point is often missed by evangelical feminists. They conclude that a difference in function necessarily involves a difference in essence; i.e., if men are in authority over women, then women must be inferior. The relationship between Christ and the Father shows us that this reasoning is flawed. One can possess a different function and still be equal in essence and worth. Women are equal to men in essence and in being; there is no ontological distinction, and yet they have a different function or role in church and home. Such differences do not logically imply inequality or inferiority, just as Christ's subjection to the Father does not imply His inferiority. ~ John Piper

Fear and desire for pleasure. Aggressiveness comes out of fear, predominantly, and sexuality predominantly out of the other. But they mix in the middle. Anyway, both of these impulses can destroy order, which comes out of both drives, and which is another human need I haven't yet fit into my scheme. So both have to be controlled. But in fact, despite religious commands to the contrary, aggressiveness has never really been condemned. It's been exalted, from the Bible through Homer and Virgil right down to Humbert Hemingway. Have you ever heard of a John Wayne movie being censored? did you ever see them take war books off the bookstands? They leave the genitals off Barbie and Ken, but they manufacture every kind of war toy. Because sex is more threatening to us than aggression. There have been strict rules about sex since the beginning of written rules, and even before, if we can believe myth. I think that's because it's in sex that men feel most vulnerable. In war they can hype themselves up, or they have a weapon. Sex means being literally naked and exposing your feelings. And that's more terrifying to most men than the risk of dying while fighting a bear or a soldier. Look at the rules! You can have sex if you're married, and you have to marry a person of the opposite gender, the same color and religion, an age close to your own, of the right social and economic background, even the right height, for God's sake, or else everybody gets up in arms, they disinherit you or threa ~ Marilyn French

Elron: These were happy woods. The entire place was happy from the house to the gardens to the woods. But this one little garden had something extra. It was excited. Something odd for plants and trees. They were prone to joy, happiness, sorrow and tranquility but not something as active as excitement. Someone had spent a lot of time here and a bit of their personality had seeped into the place. That someone was excited about life and probably young. Strange. Few youth of any race knew enough to transmit their feelings. The trees whispered about a person, moving and bending with change. The plants gossiped about tenderness shown them but the air breathed words of rage and despair in my ear. The plants didn't know gender but I got the impression of a woman, a young woman. The altar indicated she was a witch. A good witch. ~ N.E. Conneely

Oh, please," Della said. "Excuse me while I go and grow a penis so the sausage-and-meatball-toting gender will stop thinking I need a man to protect me. ~ C.C. Hunter

What I do know is that traditional gender roles are very real and flipping the norm is difficult for even the strongest, funniest, smartest men. ~ Patti Stanger

Ironically, even as Khomeini empowered some women, he also found ways of oppressing their entire gender. The regime replaced the shah's secular law with an Islamic law, which allowed men to marry up to four wives, to divorce them whenever the husbands wished, and to retain custody of children. The law put the value of a woman's life at half of that of a man's life, and the value of her testimony at half that of a man's testimony.
Thus women in Iran became watchdogs and scapegoats, both the foot soldiers of the new regime and its victims. Newly empowered, they were also newly oppressed. Theirs was a paradoxical plight - and at the time, no one could have foreseen how it would one day make women a force of enormous change in Iran. ~ Nazila Fathi

The 'gens du monde' [for whom Boucher painted] celebrated an ideal of sociability, politesse, and reciprocity that insisted on the equality of men and women and de-emphasized sexual difference. In its entertainments, in its art, and even in its social reality, 'le monde' delighted in gender play - in mistaken identities, in cross-dressing disguise, in unresolved ambiguities and dualities. ~ Melissa Hyde

It might seem daunting to a congregation to have to learn about pronouns, or to designate a bathroom gender-neutral, or to have difficult conversations about what it means to affirm LGBTQ+ identities. But transgender people are not a burden for Christianity, or for the church. They come bearing gifts! ~ Austen Hartke

As a dedicated, successful writer, Lydia Sigourney violated essential elements of the very gender roles she celebrated. In the process, she offered young, aspiring women writers around the country an example of the possibilities of achieving both fame and economic reward. ~ Lydia Sigourney

The time has come for women and men to band together to jointly create gender harmony. We must gather in mixed group to plumb new depths of relational awareness, courageous truth-telling, compassionate listening, empathic sensitivity, and mutual healing. ~ William Keepin

Scientists can test only what they do not take for granted. That can make studying familiar phenomena particularly challenging...This may be especially true of masculinity, femininity and sexuality, because certain ideas abut gender and sexuality are so broadly shared in our culture ~ Rebecca M. Jordan-Young

If woman had no existence save in the fiction written by men, one would imagine her a person of the utmost importance ( ... ); as great as a man, some think even greater. But this is woman in fiction. In fact, as Professor Trevelyan points out [in his History of England], she was locked up, beaten and flung about the room. ~ Virginia Woolf

If you go to Europe, public bathrooms have any-gender sink areas and stalls for everyone to use. This is completely reasonable. It potentially involves the destruction of the urinal industry, which I think people would be happy to see go away. ~ Jill Soloway

A major assumption that underlies this selection is that it is only within work that is progressive, experimental or avant-garde that staid, old-fashioned images and ideas about gender can be challenged and alternatives imagined. I have never seen a ballet performance that has not disappointed me. ~ Ramsay Burt

The bonding of women that is woman-loving, or Gyn/affection, is very different from male bonding. Male bonding has been the glue of male dominance. It has been based upon recognition of the difference men see between themselves and women, and is a form of the behaviour, masculinity, that creates and maintains male power ... Male comradeship/bonding depends upon energy drained from women. ~ Sheila Jeffreys

The all American work ethic, destructive enough by itself, also packs a gender double standard that strip-mines the natural resources of both parents. It has taught us that as their earnings and success increase, men become "more manly," while women become "less feminine." This perverse cultural dynamic gives fathers an incentive to stay away from their families and kill themselves at work, while coercing mothers to limit their career commitment, which in turn limits their wages and shortchanges their families. ~ Letty Cottin Pogrebin

You can't really mean to punish the entire male gender for the errors of a few ~ Alyssa Rose Ivy

We still have gaps that are rooted in gender inequality. Certainly we have discrimination against the LGBT community. ~ Hillary Clinton

Maybe in that earlier phase I was painting the woman in me. Art isn't a wholly masculine occupation, you know. ~ Willem De Kooning

Always remember, wherever you are, whether near or far, you had a mother who really, really loved you. The original mother. Once you've found your true inner guru you can never again be divided. Perfect union with the divine, through the grace of your real teacher, transcends time, space, death and all worldly limitations. Your real teacher is the original mother - regardless in which manifest or non-manifest form, or gender, she appears. The one who nurtures you and the one who also, out of wisdom and compassion, corrects you if you are misguided. ~ Zeena Schreck

Neither gender is routinely more jealous - although women are more willing to work to win back a lover, while men tend to flaunt their money and status and are more likely to walk out to protect their self-esteem or save face. ~ Helen Fisher

The answers to making it, to me, are a lot more universal than anyone's race or gender, and center on having a tolerance for delayed gratification, a passion for the craft, and a willingness to fail. ~ Ali Wong

There is definitely a way in which women are raised to be less proactive, less business-oriented, and less willing to jump into creative no man's land. I think media has more of an influence on how we perceive gender identity than anything else. ~ Felicia Day

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

If a given idea has been held in the human mind for many generations, as almost all our common ideas have, it takes sincere and continued effort to remove it; and if it is one of the oldest we have in stock, one of the big, common, unquestioned world ideas, vast is the labor of those who seek to change it. ~ Charlotte Perkins Gilman

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

Evidence that [feminine aesthetic preferences and ways of expressing oneself] may be hardwired comes from the fact that they typically appear early in childhood and often in contradiction to one's socialization. [ ... ] This indicates that some aspects of feminine verbal and aesthetic expression precede and/or supersede gender socialization. ~ Julia Serano

Childbearing is the most consistent of human events. Male and female alike, we have all been gestated inside a woman's body. As a phenomenon, childbearing is seemingly eternal and universal, yet like no other it highlights the gender divide, the singularity of individual experience and sociocultural diversities. ~ Joan Raphael-Leff

How we're brought in to this world determines where we begin on life's starting line. Are we born on the first row or in the back of the line? Do we have to stand in the back because of our gender, race or color? Do we have enough food in the house to eat breakfast this morning? Do we own a pair of running shoes? Do we wake up with a view of the mountains or with metal bars on our doors? Do we need permission before leaving the house? How long is it going to take us to realize the structure we're born into? ~ Sadiqua Hamdan

Love cannot be controlled. It will flow wherever it chooses. It is an essential part of our nature and thus inherently free. Love has no respect for boundaries that would prohibit it based on age, gender, race, religion, class, politics, or ability. It is individuals striving to be happy and, as such, love is an oppositional power to state and institutional authority. ~ Rod Dubey

I don't admit that a woman draws that well! ~ Edgar Degas

I actually chafe at describing myself as masculine. For one thing, masculinity itself is such an expansive territory, encompassing boundaries of nationality, race, and class. Most importantly, individuals blaze their own trails across this landscape. And it's hard for me to label the intricate matrix of my gender as simply masculine.

To me, branding individual self-expression as simply feminine or masculine is like asking poets: Do you write in English or Spanish? The question leaves out the possibilities that the poetry is woven in Cantonese or Ladino, Swahili or Arabic. The question deals only with the system of language that the poet has been taught. It ignores the words each writer hauls up, hand over hand, from a common well. The music words make when finding themselves next to each other for the first time. The silences echoing in the space between ideas. The powerful winds of passion and belief that move the poet to write. ~ Leslie Feinberg

Most men are very attached to the idea of being male, and usually experience a lot of fear and insecurity around the idea of being a man. Most women are very identified with their gender, and also experience a tremendous amount of fear and insecurity. ~ Andrew Cohen

Women will not simply be mainstreamed into the polluted stream. Women are changing the stream, making it clean and green and safe for all - every gender, race, creed, sexual orientation, age, and ability. ~ Bella Abzug

Stupid men and their stupid violence. Tearing apart everything good that was ever built. Why couldn't you ever just go after your life without tripping over some idiot's dick? ~ Rebecca Makkai

There's no telling from poem to poem where this brilliant 'conversation' about maleness and gender will lead
there are poems about husbands and wives, parents and children, Elvis, Apollo, Walt Whitman, rhythms of its politics. Manthology is a remarkably honest and enormously heartening collection. ~ Nancy Eimers

The general public have a warped view of the speed at which an investigation proceeds. They like to imagine tense conversations going on behind the venetian blinds and unshaven, but ruggedly handsome, detectives working themselves with single-minded devotion into the bottle and marital breakdown. The truth is that at the end of the day, unless you've generated some sort of lead, you go home and get on with the important things in life - like drinking and sleeping, and if you're lucky, a relationship with the gender and sexual orientation of your choice. ~ Ben Aaronovitch

How far we claim to have come - accepting all men as created equal. Gender being the requisite qualifier, as women are not reviewed in the same fashion - their fashion hopefully better suited to the bedroom than the boardroom. And, you know, homosexuals not really being 'men,' cannot be judged equivalent to their stiffer-wristed brethren. On religion, well, some Christians are willing to make room for a Jew or two in their inner circles. But Mecca-facing prayer must be met with flaming crosses. Close your eyes to the details, the big picture can still be viewed through rose-colored glass. But go any distance beyond the rhetoric, truth becomes a shadowed lens. ~ Ellen Hopkins

Also, I had read a book called She's Not There: A Life in Two Genders, written by a professor who had gone through transgender surgery, but it took this person well into his thirties to come to terms with the absolute necessity of having to do it. ~ Mercedes Ruehl

The strongest common bond between the genders is the universally acknowledged truth that both men and women are unhappy with their hair. ~ Linda Sunshine

What does it mean to write a story of your own life in your head? We all do that whether we are writers or not. We all have a story about who we are: what gender we are, what experiences we have . . . all sorts of stories and narratives we allow ourselves to believe in and create as we go along. ~ Cyril Wong

The agencies tried to give the few incentive positions they had to women to encourage what they called 'gender balance' and, apart from those who chose to hustle in the market for a pittance, the remainder of the male population had no ability to provide for their families. They felt emasculated and camouflaged their injured pride in khat and idleness. There was little in their world that they controlled and so the one thing they sought to master, above all else, was their women. Muna ~ Ben Rawlence

I don't buy this premise that the number of minifigures needs to be an equal amount to be gender neutral. Nobody makes artistic products like that; nobody makes a movie and says there has to be equal numbers of men and women. ~ Jorgen Vig Knudstorp

I started to see the bigger picture of things: Islam was not relegated to the tiny, sometimes frustrating and seemingly arbitrary details of practice, but rather entered the larger picture of spirituality and worship that contextualized my womanhood. In order to be able to derive these logical conclusions about my religion, I had to go back to the basics and understand the very fundamental principles upon which it was founded: justice, social equality, racial equality, financial equality, and, possibly most important of all, gender equality. Thus began my lifelong love affair with Islamic feminism. ~ Amani Al-Khatahtbeh

But millions at one time, beyond gender or race, had their attention fixed on her, and with that power, she chose to flash the word "feminist" all over our TV screens. If that don't do nothin' but make people Google the word, then that should make every feminist in the world proud. ~ Lizzo

I wished I was back in the convenience store where I was valued as a working member of staff and things weren't as complicated as this. Once we donned our uniforms, we were all equals regardless of gender, age, or nationality - all simply store workers. ~ Sayaka Murata

For every 100 women who earn a bachelors degree, 75 men do so. For every 100 American women who earn a Masters degree, 66 American men do so. For every 100 females, ages 20 to 24, who commit suicide, 624 males do so. For every 100 women, ages 18 to 21, in correctional facilities, 1430 men are so confined. ~ Mitch Pearlstein

What excited and challenged her shipmates horrified the churched women and each set believed the other deeply, dangerously flawed. Although they had nothing in common with the views of each other, they had everything in common with one thing: the promise and threat of men.
Here, they agreed, was where security and risk lay. And both had come to terms. ~ Toni Morrison

The Internet at that time was this big, exciting place where you could anonymously spill your guts about gender and discomfort and heteronormativity and how weird male privilege felt and lots of other things, except back then she didn't really have language for it so she just went like: everything sucks and I am totally sad. Just over and over and over and over, with minor variations and the occasional cuss word. ~ Imogen Binnie

Flame mails and offensive Internet activities are not classy. It doesn't fit with our culture here, where we respect the gender, race, opinions, ear-lobe apparel and choice of clothing of all employees. ~ David Duffield

You are an anomaly of a man," she said.

"Perhaps because I'm not a man at all." He sat closer now. The sheets wrinkled as he scooted himself toward her.

"Aye. You gender-malcontent. You otherling," she said..."Me too. I am a boy and a girl and a witch all wrapped into one very strange, flimsy, indecisive body. Do you think my body couldn't decide what it wanted to be?"

"I think it doesn't matter because we get to decide what our bodies are or are not," he answered. ~ Rivers Solomon

If you can kill it in the bedroom, chances are you can kill it in the kitchen, too - and studies have shown that men who help out more with the chores have more sex with their wives (really!). We know, gender roles run deep, which is why women in hetero relationships still end up doing the vast majority of the domestic work despite being the breadwinners in two-thirds of American homes, leaving them burned out, resentful, and, nope, not really in the mood. But it doesn't have to be this way - and, in fact, we might want to borrow a page from our LGBTQ sisters and brothers (or those who identify as neither): research shows they split chores, decisions, and finances more evenly ~ Jessica Bennett

Just across the ocean in, say Kenya or Tanzania, a two-gender system is vital for the survival of most of the folks who live there. Men do men's work, women do women's work, and so it all gets done and the jackals can't get into the hut and eat grandpa. So, the future of the transgender movement is like the future of all human rights movements: whatever the state of things in your area now, with some work it all gets a little bit better all the time, even if it is sometimes three steps ahead and two steps back. ~ Kate Bornstein

Gender equality is not something we should have to fight for, it should have always been. ~ Robyn Oyeniyi

Girls don't want men to be quiet and gentle, I'm told. If you're not panting with impatient lust they think you're not interested. ~ Iris Murdoch

S and M is only the expression in the bedroom of an oppressive-submissive relation which can happen also in the kitchen or at the factory, can happen between people of any gender. There is obviously something titillating about these relationships, but it isn't the sexual components that makes them ugly, they're uglier elsewhere. Nothing sexual is depraved. Only cruelty is depraved, and that's another matter. ~ Marilyn French

I think that issues of gender have been discussed widely at Harvard. But I think I was chosen clearly on the merits, and I wish to operate as president on the merits. I think, on one level, we might say that I can affirm that women have the aptitude to do science or to do anything, including being president of Harvard. ~ Drew Gilpin Faust

In a sane world, love and sex would not divide by gender. We could love like and unlike beings, love them for a variety of reasons. The battered adjectives for homosexuality
queer, lesbian, gay
would disappear and we would only have people making love in different ways, with different body parts. We are too far gone with overpopulation to insist that procreation be an immutable part of desire. Desire needs only itself, not the proof of a baby. We would do well to baby each other instead of making all these unwanted babies that no one has time to nurture or to love.
At this point in my life, I am blessed by my friendships with women. I make no distinction between my gay and straight women friends. I hat the very terms, feeling that any of us could be anything
if we were to unlock the full range of possibilities within. ~ Erica Jong

We want different things. Men want to have sex with a woman. Then they want to have sex with another woman. And then another. Then they want to eat cornflakes and sleep for a while, and then they want to have sex with another woman, and another, until they die. Women,' and I thought I'd better pick my words carefully when describing a gender I didn't belong to, 'want a relationship. They may not get it, or they may sleep with a lot of men before they do get it, but ultimately that's what they want. That's the goal. Men do not have goals. Natural ones. So they invent them, and put them at either end of a football pitch. And then they invent football. Or they pick fights, or try and get rich, or start wars, or come up with any number of daft bloody things to make up for the fact that they have no real goals.'
'Bollocks,' said Ronnie.
'That, of course, is the other main difference. ~ Hugh Laurie

Our culture is constantly thrusting gender expectations on all of us. This becomes a problem when it limits people's expressions and identities and perpetuates intolerance of anything that's not the norm. ~ Ashley Mardell

We don't put gender roles on our marriage and our relationship. If I'm working a lot and Cory's home, he will put Cree to bed, and if dishes need to be washed, he will wash them. So it's not like, 'Oh, I'm going to wait until my wife gets home, and she's going to be doing all that.' ~ Tia Mowry

A feminist is just someone who recognizes power structures that keep people from having the fullest life they can. ~ Lauren Groff

I made sure we fucked whenever the conversations got too emotional or too long - we weren't lesbians, after all. ~ Manil Suri

Norway, Iceland, Australia, Canada, Sweden, Switzerland, Belgium, Japan, the Netherlands, Denmark, and the United Kingdom are among the least religious societies on [E]arth. According to the United Nations' Human Development Report (2005) they are also the healthiest, as indicated by life expectancy, adult literacy, per capita income, educational attainment, gender equality, homicide rate, and infant mortality. Insofar as there is a crime problem in Western Europe, it is largely the product of immigration. Seventy percent of the inmates of France's jails, for instance, are Muslim. The Muslims of Western Europe are generally not atheists. Conversely, the fifty nations now ranked lowest in terms of the United Nations' [H]uman [D]evelopment [I]ndex are unwaveringly religious.
Other analyses paint the same picture: the United States is unique among wealthy democracies in its level of religious adherence; it is also uniquely beleaguered by high rates of homicide, abortion, teen pregnancy, sexually transmitted disease, and infant mortality. The same comparison holds true within the United States itself: Southern and Midwestern states, characterized by the highest levels of religious literalism, are especially plagued by the above indicators of societal dysfunction, while the comparatively secular states of the Northeast conform to European norms. ~ Sam Harris

Love is love. Regardless of gender. ~ Jeff Erno

The invisible fuel for this healing process is our heartfelt compassion and loving presence and the sincerity of the collective intention that we bring to it. ~ William Keepin