Gender Relations Quotes

Men who are afraid to feel must keep women around to do their feeling for them while dismissing us for the same supposedly "inferior" capacity to feel deeply. But in this way also, men deny themselves their own essential humanity, becoming trapped in dependency and fear. ~ Audre Lorde

Lovers are not snails; they don't have to protrude from their shells and meet each other halfway. Meet me within your own self. ~ Jerzy Kosinski

Historians who write about families are usually feminists who think in terms of gender relations. ~ Jane Ridley

It was fun to see him becoming sententious again, glorying in a science he had invented, and as positive as a village soothsayer.

'So one should neither give nor receive?' I laughed. 'And if the lover is poor, his mistress indigent, then both she and he must tactfully let themselves and each other die?'

'Let them die,' he repeated.

I had accompanied him as far as the revolving glass door of the lobby.

'Let them die,' he said again. 'It's less dangerous. I can swear on my word of honor that I never gave a present or made a loan or an exchange of anything except . . . this . . .'

He waved both hands in a complicated gesture which fleetingly indicated his chest, his mouth, his genitals, his thighs. Thanks no doubt to my fatigue, I was reminded of an animal standing on its hind legs and unwinding the invisible. Then he resumed his strictly human significance, opened the door, and easily mingled with the night outside, where the sea was already a little paler than the sky. ~ Colette

Oil production affects gender relations by reducing the presence of women in the labor force. The failure of women to join the nonagricultural labor force has profound social consequences: it leads to higher fertility rates, less education for girls, and less female influence within the family. It also has far-reaching political consequences: when fewer women work outside the home, they are less likely to exchange information and overcome collective action problems; less likely to mobilize politically, and to lobby for expanded rights; and less likely to gain representation in government. This leaves oil-producing states with atypically strong patriarchal cultures and political institutions ~ Michael L. Ross

Gender relations are a sad story of men talking trash about women all over the world. ~ John Darnielle

Bless the ladies and their charming inconsistency! They demand to be treated like men, but they react like women. ~ Elizabeth Peters

Do we need recourse to a happier state before the law in order to maintain that contemporary gender relations and the punitive production of gender identities are oppressive? ~ Judith Butler

I tell yeh, Bright-eyes. Men and women? A bloody mess. Every time. ~ David Kudler

The problem is people are being hated when they are real, and are being loved when they are fake ~ Bob Marley

Lot of people are not looking for solutions for their problems, but are looking for someone or something to blame as a solution to their problem. That is why their problems never go away, and they always have someone or something to blame. ~ De Philosopher DJ Kyos

I'll say this, and this has nothing to do with gender or sexuality: You do not want to get licked in the face repeatedly by another human being. You just don't. It's not pleasant. ~ Josh Radnor

When we say fathers are "helping," we are suggesting that child care is a mother's territory, into which fathers valiantly venture. It is not. ~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

I think I happened to work with sort of a bunch of slightly difficult male directors when I was a kid. I've since worked with lots of male directors that I love, so I no longer see the distinction gender-wise. ~ Gaby Hoffmann

What means, then, is the dream-work able to use to indicate these relations, which are so difficult to represent, in the dream-thoughts? I shall attempt to list them one by one. ~ Sigmund Freud

Contrary to the claims of the supporters of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the sponsors of H.Res. 676, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 did not improve race relations or enhance freedom. Instead, the forced integration dictated by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 increased racial tensions while diminishing individual liberty. ~ Ron Paul

For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled. ~ Richard Feynman

Being a true bad ass has no weight or gender requirement - just 100% commitment to greatness. ~ Dwayne Johnson

The recent upsurge of public concern over environmental questions reflects a belated recognition that man has been too cavalier in his relations with nature. Unless we arrest the depredations that have been inflicted so carelessly on our natural systems-which exist in an intricate set of balances-we face the prospect of ecological disaster. ~ Richard M. Nixon

But Tik Tok believes everything's circular, including men and women. He says nature seems to go around and around, and that we all have bits of everything. ~ Jodi Lynn Anderson

By 1950, American policing was at a crossroads. It could go on as it had for a hundred years, inefficient and often corrupt, or it could adopt the kind of professional management style advocated by reformers. At least, those appeared to be the choices at the time. As it turned out, postwar policing would be dominated by discussions far beyond how to make cops more honest, polite and efficient. Instead it would be caught up in large social questions involving race relations and what constituted the fair administration of justice. ~ Thomas A. Reppetto

God, grant me the serenity to be an awesome mom for my gender-nonconforming child and the courage not to send him to UCLA to be experimented on; and wisdom, because we are different. Oh, and watch over Anderson Cooper, too.
Amen. ~ Lori Duron

There is no power relation without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same time power relations ~ Michel Foucault

You notice patterns. White guests often are mortified - that word again - when they learn their ancestors owned slaves. But I've never had a black guest who was upset to learn about white ancestry that probably involved forced sexual relations. ~ Henry Louis Gates

In the name of feminism, we denied some essential aspects of our authentic selves. While feminism should have been nothing if not a celebration of our own unique characteristics, we insisted that we had no unique characteristics ... that gender differences were hogwash, and a feminine woman was nothing more than a plaything for men. ~ Marianne Williamson

What is masculine and what is feminine, anyway? Why should men not show that they can be fragile or seductive? I am only happy when there is no discrimination. ~ Jean Paul Gaultier

It's tragic that you can define a whole movement in music by gender alone. People are like, 'Oh, look, another quirky girl.' ~ Paloma Faith

As a girl, I would have liked to have my intelligence and intellectual labors regarded as an unmitigated good and as a source of pride, rather than something I had to handle delicately, lest I upset or offend. Success can contain implicit failure for straight women, who are supposed to succeed as women by making men feel godlike in their might. As Virginia Woolf reflected: "Women have served all these centuries as looking glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size." Which can come to seem something you're obliged to be and they're entitled to see. ~ Rebecca Solnit

The Concept of Gender Does Not Exist....All There Is, Is What Is ~ Andrea Bird

Much of the present difficulty in industrial relations arises from the fact that too many employers as well as too many legislators take the Labor Leader more seriously than he deserves to be taken, while taking the ordinary, everyday, middle-of-the-road wage-earner less seriously than he deserves to be taken. ~ Whiting Williams

Novels, says Sartre, are not life, but they owe our power upon us, as upon himself as an infant, to the fact that they are somehow like life. In life, he once remarked, 'all ways are barred and nevertheless we must act. So we try to change the world; that is, to live as if the relations between things and their potentialities were governed not by deterministic processes but by magic.' The as if of the novel consists in a similar negation of determinism, the establishment of an accepted freedom by magic. We make up aventures, invent and ascribe the significance of temporal concords to those 'privileged moments' to which we alone award their prestige, make our own human clocks tick in a clockless world. And we take a man who is by definition de trop, and create a context in which he isn't.

The novel is a lie only as our quotidian inventions are lies. The power which goes to its making--the imagination --is a function of man's inescapable freedom. This freedom, in Mary Warnock's words, 'expresses itself in his ability to see things which are not.' It is by his fiction that we know he is free. It is not surprising that Sartre as ontologist, having to describe many kinds of fictive behaviour, invents stories to do so, thus moving into a middle ground between life and novel. .... ~ Frank Kermode

I'm struggling at the end to get out of the valley of hectoring youth, journalistic middle age, imposture, moneymaking, public relations, bad writing, mental confusion. ~ Stephen Spender

I was not ladylike, nor was I manly. I was something else altogether. There were so many different ways to be beautiful. ~ Michael Cunningham

My design was not so much to contribute new facts as to shape the narrative in such a way as to emphasize relations of cause and effect that are often buried in the mass of details. ~ John Fiske

How do we know that the creation of worlds is not determined by the fall of grains of sand? Who knows the reciprocal ebb and flow of the infinitely great and the infinitely little, the reverberations of causes in the precipices of being, and the avalanches of creation? The tiniest worm is of importance; the great is little, the little is great; everything is balanced in necessity; alarming vision for the mind. There are marvelous relations between beings and things; in that inexhaustible whole, from the sun to the grub, nothing despise the other; all have need of each other. The light does not bear away terrestrial perfumes into the azure depths, without knowing what it is doing; the night distributes stellar essences to the sleeping flowers. All birds that fly have round their the thread of the infinite. Germination is complicated with the bursting forth of a meteor and with the peck of a swallow cracking its egg, and it places on one level the birth of an earthworm and the advent of Socrates. Where telescopes end, the microscopes begin. Which of the two possesses the larger field of vision? Choose. A bit of mould is a pleiad of flowers; a nebula is an ant hill of stars. ~ Victor Hugo

I was born modest; not all over, but in spots. ~ Mark Twain

The Southern strategy of the Nixon administration is based upon the same principle as the Compromise of 1876: namely, that Northern Republicans and Southern conservatives share common interests and together can rule this nation. I do not think it is possible to condemn too harshly what the President has done in the South in order to form this alliance. Indeed, I can think of no recent President who has more blatantly sacrificed the ideals of equality and racial justice for his own political ends. Nor is Nixon simply riding the wave of reaction. He is encouraging that reaction, for he knows that he became President because of divisions in the society, and that it is in his interest that these divisions grow wider. ~ Bayard Rustin

It is amazing to observe how many psychologists and psychiatrists have accepted this sort of propaganda, and have come to believe that homosexual males and females are discretely different from persons who respond to natural stimuli. Instead of using these terms as substantives which stand for persons, or even as adjectives to describe persons, they may better be used to describe the nature of the overt sexual relations, or of the stimuli to which an individual erotically responds. ~ Alfred Kinsey

How does ANY male-identified person know he is a man? And does my answer really diverge greatly from how many men, trans or cisgender, would answer?

Transgender people are often said to have a 'narrative' to their lives; we're encouraged to see our journey toward recognizing our gender as a story with an articulable pattern. The truth is, though, that everyone's gender is a story; it's just that trans folks are more likely to be - perhaps I could say "are given the gift of having to be" - aware of it.

The story of becoming a man, a woman, or a person of any other gender often follows aspects of that most instinctual of story arcs: the hero's journey. For instance, my personal narrative was one of effort in seeking a transformative goal (a quest), assistance (tools provided by medicine, law, and intangible emotional support), and mentorship by those who went before me (guides). And my manhood was ultimately achieved through what could be considered rites of passage - which is to say a similar structure to communal cultural tales of how one achieves cisgender manhood. It's simply some details that vary.

I do see one key difference in how all this plays out, however: Trans men make this invisible process disconcertingly visible by flipping the variables. While a cisgender man may be born with certain inherent potentials to physically embody a manhood that others will acknowledge socially, he's not necessarily imbued with the demanding dri ~ Mitch Ellis

My own personal, moral, spiritual, religious, etc. beliefs don't oppose same-gender marriage. ~ Ed Case

Sex is f-king, everything else is gender. ~ Kate Bornstein

There's something different about when a female directs versus a male. The level of maturity, mutual respect, and energy that you get from a female director is so different. I've worked with male directors who aren't good, and no one says anything about it, but then we had one female director who was kind of all over the place and everyone complained. It's so gendered. I feel safer when working with a female director because I know it's from a female gaze. ~ Rowan Blanchard

Real people have a way of banging against the doors you've closed; they know your name, your phone number. They live with you. ~ David Leavitt

Politeness is good only in social relations, because to be polite in literary or academic [matters] would be to be dishonest. Ipinasa mo out of politeness? Our of kwan to the father or...No! ~ Teodoro A. Agoncillo

YA heroines can have romances that are subplots: can have goals other than getting/keeping a man: can put their lovers second. JUST LIKE YAheroes DO! ~ Celine Kiernan

He showed the fineness of his nature by being kinder to me after that misunderstanding than before. Nay, the very incident which, by my theory, must in some degree estrange me and him, changed, indeed, somewhat our relations; but not in the sense I painfully anticipated. An invisible, but a cold something, very slight, very transparent, but very chill: a sort of screen of ice had hitherto, all through our two lives, glazed the medium through which we exchanged intercourse. Those few warm words, though only warm with anger, breathed on that frail frost-work of reserve; about this time, it gave note of dissolution. I think from that day, so long as we continued friends, he never in discourse stood on topics of ceremony with me. ~ Charlotte Bronte

In any war, except that for freedom from oppression, victory of any nation, is the defeat of all nations, because each war comes at the cost of lives, in the name of the same old tribal loyalty. ~ Abhijit Naskar

If we can abstract pathogenicity and hygiene from our notion of dirt, we are left with the old definition of dirt as matter out of place. This is a very suggestive approach. It implies two conditions: a set of ordered relations and a contrevention of that order. Dirt then, is never a unique, isolated event. Where there is dirt there is a system. Dirt is the by-product of a systematic ordering and classification of matter, in so far as ordering involves rejecting inappropriate elements. ~ Mary Douglas

It's always struck me as the ultimate insult to pay to park at hospitals; they incarcerate your friends and relations in rooms that cost six or seven hundred dollars a day, then put a little sting in by charging a few extra bucks to visit them. ~ Sara Paretsky