Quotes by Journalists - Page 172

There. There you are. You have dropped a marker pin on your body, to reclaim yourself, to remind you where you are: inside yourself. Somewhere. Somewhere in there.
Caitlin Moran
In a world where you can get a spare kidney, a black-market Picasso or a ticket to ride into space, why can’t I see some actual sex? Some actual fucking from people who want to fuck each other? Some chick in an outfit I halfway respect, having the time of her life? I have MONEY. I’m willing to PAY for this. I AM NOW A 35-YEAR-OLD WOMAN, AND I JUST WANT A MULTI-BILLION-DOLLAR INTERNATIONAL PORN INDUSTRY WHERE I CAN SEE A WOMAN COME. I just want to see a good time.
Caitlin Moran
Because there’s a silent, shrugging, stoical acceptance of all the things in the world we can never be part of: shorts, swimming pools, strappy dresses, country walks, roller-skating, ra-ra skirts, vest tops, high heels, rope climbing, sitting on a high stool, walking past building sites, flirting, being kissed, feeling confident. And ever losing weight, ever. The idea of suggesting we don’t have to be fat –that things could change –is the most distant and alien prospect of all. We’re fat now and we’ll be fat forever and we must never, ever mention it, and that is the end of it. It’s like Harry Potter’s Sorting Hat. We were pulled from the hat marked ‘Fat’ and that is what we must now remain, until we die. Fat is our race. Our species. Our mode. As a result, there is very little of the outside world –and very little of the year –we can enjoy. Summer is sweaty under self-conscious layers. On stormy days, wind flattens skirts against thighs, and alarms both us and, we think, onlookers and passers-by. Winter is the only time we feel truly comfortable: covered head to toe in jumpers, coats, boots and hat. I develop a crush on Father Christmas. If I married him, not only would I be expected to stay fat, but I’d look thin standing next to him, in comparison. Perspective would be my friend. We all dream of moving to Norway, or Alaska, where we could wear massive padded coats all the time, and never reveal an inch of flesh. When it rains, we’re happiest of all. Then we can just stay in, away from everyone, in our pyjamas, and not worry about anything. The brains in jars can stay inside, nice and dry.
Caitlin Moran
My fat years were when I was not human shaped. I was a 16-stone triangle, with inverted triangle legs, and no real neck. And that’s because I wasn’t doing human things. I didn’t walk or run or dance or swim or climb up stairs; the food I ate wasn’t the stuff that humans are supposed to eat. No one is supposed to eat a pound of boiled potatoes covered in Vitalite, or a fist-sized lump of cheese on the end of a fork, wielded like a lollipop. I had no connection to or understanding of my body. I was just a brain in a jar. I wasn’t a woman.
Caitlin Moran
We're forced to walk a difficult line by this insistence that we only write about our personal journeys," I told the audience. "We end up in this position of only being allowed to represent ourselves, but having to make sure we don't misrepresent everyone. This creates some division in our communities - everyone has their own opinion about what's good representation and what isn't, and you can't please them all." (p. 231)
Juliet Jacques
Women's bodies do not give up their babies so easily, and so silently, is the message. The heart will always remember.
Caitlin Moran
But women living in fear of aging, and pulling painful and expensive tricks to hide it from the world, does not say something amazing about us as humans.
Caitlin Moran
It’s amazing to me that it’s still considered a notable, commendable trait –‘Oh, she’s a well-known feminist’ –in a woman, or a girl, or a man, or a boy. That that is the unusual thing. Really, it should be the reverse. Rather than what seems like a minority having to spend time, energy, brain and heart explaining why they’re ‘into’ equality, the majority should be explaining why they’re not. You put the time into explaining why –in a world where every concept of justice, wisdom, progress and rightness is a human invention –we still prefer the human concept of ‘some people being inferior to others’ over ‘this is a vast, inky, cold, empty universe, and in it, we are the only humans that exist, all sharing a tiny milky green/ blue world, and faced with a multitude of problems, and an infinite capacity for joy, and should therefore try and stick together and accord each other some respect’.
Caitlin Moran
Personally, I feel the time has come for women to introduce their own Zero Tolerance policy on the Broken Window issues in our lives - I want a Zero Tolerance policy on "All the Patriarchal Bullshit.
Caitlin Moran
I’m not advocating a competition for who has it toughest. The caste systems of sex and race are interdependent and can only be uprooted together. It’s time to take equal pride in breaking all the barriers.
Gloria Steinem
We're supposed to speak from the heart in what we wear. We have to find capsule wardrobes.
Caitlin Moran
Women wear heels because they think they make their legs look thinner.
Caitlin Moran
Not one had ever passed judgement on my cheap handbag to my face. But then, this is a reserved country.
Caitlin Moran
The actual handbag is neither here nor there-- it's what you keep in it that's the most important thing.
Caitlin Moran
Between 60 and 80 percent of strippers come from a background of sexual abuse.
Caitlin Moran
Within living memory of this country, men could rape their wives: women were not seen as a separate sexual entity, with the right of refusal.
Caitlin Moran
Amnesty International Survey found that 25 percent of people believe a woman is to blame for being raped if she dresses "provocatively.
Caitlin Moran
For a woman, every outfit is a hopeful spell, cast to influence the outcome of the day. An act of trying to predict your fate, like looking at your horoscope.
Caitlin Moran
Life is really the only place you can learn the most important lessons about how to get dressed and to be happy.
Caitlin Moran
Women are always being asked when they're going to have children. It's a question they're asking even more often.
Caitlin Moran
These hormones do not make me feel feminine: every night, I lie in bed feeling wrenched, and the bulge of my sanitary napkin in my kickers looks like a cock.
Caitlin Moran
But when women are asked when they're going to have children, there is, in actually, another darker, more pertinent question lying underneath it.
Caitlin Moran
Men and women alike have convinced themselves of a dragging belief: that somehow women are incomplete without having children.
Caitlin Moran
If you take a moment to consider the state of the world, the thing you notice is that there are plenty of babies being born; the planet doesn't really need all of us to produce more babies.
Caitlin Moran
First world babies are eating this planet like termites.
Caitlin Moran
In the 21st century, it can't be about who we might make, and what they might do, anymore. It has to be about who we are and what we're going to do.
Caitlin Moran
Abortions are never seen as a positive thing, as any other operation to remedy a potentially life-ruining condition would.
Caitlin Moran
The idea that I might not-- in an earlier era, or a different country-- have a choice in the matter seems both emotionally and physically barbaric.
Caitlin Moran
David Cameron is a C-3P0 made of ham.
Caitlin Moran
When a woman walks into a room, her outfit is the first thing she says, before she even opens her mouth. Women are judged on what they wear in a way men would find incomprehensible.
Caitlin Moran
The reason they don't ask me when they're having kids, of course, is because men can, pretty much, carry on a normal life once they've had a baby.
Caitlin Moran
Strip clubs let everyone down. Men and women approach their very worst here.
Caitlin Moran
There's no self-expression or joy in these joints-- no springboard to self-discovery, or adventure, like any decent night out involving men, women, alcohol, and taking your clothes off. Why do many people have a gut reaction to strip clubs? Because inside them, no one is having fun.
Caitlin Moran
In that instance, my body had decided that this baby was not to be and had ended it. This time, it is my mind that has decided that this baby was not to be. I don't believe one's decision is more valid than the other. They both know me. They are both equally capable of deciding what is right.
Caitlin Moran
I listened to Howard Stern every morning in college. I loved Howard. I still do, though I had to achingly bow out as my feminism solidified. (In a certain light, feminism is just the long, slow realization that the stuff you love hates you.)
Lindy West
In a certain light, feminism is just the long, slow realization that the stuff you love hates you
Lindy West
I HAVE SOME QUESTIONS ABOUT KING TRITON. Specifically, King, why are you elderly but with the body of a teenage Beastmaster? How do you maintain those monster pecs? Do they have endocrinologists under the sea? Because I am scheduling you some bloodwork......Question: How come, when they turn back into humans at the end of Beauty and the Beast, Chip is a four-year-old boy, but his mother, Mrs. Potts, is like 107? Perhaps you're thinking, "Lindy, you are remembering it wrong. That kindly, white-haired, snowman-shaped Mrs. Doubtfire situation must be Chip's grandmother." Not so, champ! She's his mom. Look it up. She gave birth to him four years ago... As soon as you become a mother, apparently, you are instantly interchangeable with the oldest woman in the world, and / or sixteen ounces of boiling brown water with a hat on it. Take a sec and contrast Mrs. Pott's literally spherical body with the cut-diamond abs of King Triton, father of seven.
Lindy West
The camera only documented what had been there all along, a marriage whose foundations, constructed from the cheap materials of convention and fear, had been buckling for years.
Susan Faludi
At a crucial point in my early twenties, being able to end a pregnancy had restored to me what I regarded as a normal life. I remember that it saved me.
Susan Faludi
Here was a Jewish man-turned-woman making fun of Jewish men for not being manly enough.
Susan Faludi
A Hillary Clinton presidency would symbolically break the glass ceiling for women in the United States, but it would be unlikely to break through the military-industrial complex that has been keeping our nation in a perpetual state of war--killing people around the world, many of them women and children.
Liza Featherstone
The right to choose to abort a fetus is critical, as is the ability to effect that choice in real life, so it's great that Hillary Clinton wants to repeal the Hyde Amendment. But without welfare, single-payer health care, a minimum wage of at least $15--all policies she staunchly opposes--many people have to forgo babies they'd really love to have. That's not really a choice.It seems ill-conceived to have tethered feminism to such a narrow issue as abortion. Yet it makes sense from an insular Beltway fundraising perspective to focus on an issue that makes no demands--the opposite, really--of the oligarch class; this is probably a big reason why EMILY'S List has never dabbled in backing universal pre-K or paid maternity leave; a major reason 'reproductive choice' has such a narrow and negative definition in the American political discourse.The thing is, an abortion is by definition a story you want to forget, not repeat and relive. And for the same reason abortion pills will never be the blockbuster moneymakers heartburn medications are, abortion is a consummately foolish thing to attempt to build a political movement around. It happens once or twice in a woman's lifetime.Kids, on the other hand, are with you forever. A more promising movement--one that goes against everything Hillary Clinton stands for--might take that to heart.
Liza Featherstone
Feminism is really just the long slow realization that the things you love hate you.
Lindy West
There is nothing novel or comedic or righteous about men using the threat of sexual violence to control non-compliant women. This is how society has always functioned. Stay indoors, women. Stay safe. Stay quiet. Stay in the kitchen. Stay pregnant. Stay our of the world. IF you want to talk about silencing, censorship, placing limits and consequences on speech, this is what it looks like.
Lindy West
The mainstream media perpetuates the notion that women should focus entirely on a static image of a perfect body as the end goal. There are no messages about the process, the active body, how it makes us feel in that moment.
Anna Kessel
The real problem here is a massive elephant in the room: our own culture. Our social values, our media - so influential on impressionable young girls - that have been allowed, for millenia, to send out this powerful, alienating message about girls and sport: that sport is unfeminine, that sport makes you sweaty and muscular, that sport is swearing and violence, that sport is ugliness in a world where women’s sole priority, value and focus should be beauty and becoming an object of desire.
Anna Kessel
In fact, in recent years I have become more and more didactic about pubic hair - to the point where I now believe that there are only four things a grown, modern woman should have: a pair of yellow shoes (they unexpectedly go with everything), a friend who will come and post bail at 4 a.m., a fail-safe pie recipe, and a proper muff. A big, hairy minge. A lovely furry moof that looks - when she sits, naked - as if she has a marmoset sitting in her lap. A tame marmoset, that she can send of to pickpocket things, should she so need it - like that trained monkey in Raiders of the Lost Ark.
Caitlin Moran
Knowing what I know today about how deeply the word feminist threatens the existing social compact, to say radical feminist now seems to me almost redundant. (Robin Morgan)
Clara Bingham
It was the 'Are the boys doing it?' basis on which I finally decided I was against women wearing burkas. Yes, the idea is that it protects your modesty, and ensures that people regard you as a human being, rather than just a sexual object (...) But who are you being protected from? Men. And who - so long as you play by the rules, and wear the correct clothes - is protecting you from the men? Men. And who is it that is regarding you as a sexual object, instead of another human being, in the first place? Men. Well. This all seems like quite a man-based problem, really. (...) I don't know why we're suddenly having to put things on our heads to make it better.
Caitlin Moran
Fighting for equality is often misunderstood as simply being offered the same terms as men on paper. In may ways we already have that. What we don’t have is emancipation: the opportunity to be free of social and external shackles that perpetuate inequality and women’s lower position.
Dawn Foster
Women, “the softer sex”, are expected to bare this emotional performance yet accept the fact it is undervalued, both classified as an intrinsic skill that accompanies living whilst female, and the belief that it cannot be taught formally, so is less valuable
Dawn Foster
There are really not many jobs that actually acquire a penis or a vagina, and all other occupations should be open to everyone.
Gloria Steinem
Actually, the idea of economic man is an efficient way of excluding women. We have historically allocated women certain activities and said that she must do them because she is a woman. Then we create an economic theory that states that these activities have no economic meaning.
Katrine Marçal
Sexual objectification doesn't get oppressive until it is done consistently, and to a specific group of people, and with no regard whatsoever paid to their humanity. Then it ceases to become about desire and starts to be about control. Seeing another person as meat and fat and bone and nothing else gives you power over them, if only for an instant. Structural sexual objection of women draws that instant out into an entire matrix of hurt. It tells us that women are bodies first, idealised, subservient bodies, and men are not.
Laurie Penny
Extreme inequality and financial crisis usually coincide. But the elite who cause it usually come out OK. And they are usually man.
Katrine Marçal
Whether women work in the care sector because the wages are low or whether wages are low because women work there is a question that cannot be answered. But we know that a big reason for economic inequality is that women to a much greater extent work with care.
Katrine Marçal
Anybody who has spent time in Indian brothels and also, say, at Indian brick kilns knows that it is better to be enslaved working a kiln. Kiln workers most likely live together with their families, and their work does not expose them to the risk of AIDS, so there's always hope of escape down the road.
Nicholas D. Kristof
Here, in impoverished northern India state of Bihar, near the Nepalese border, there's not much else available commercially-- except sex.
Nicholas D. Kristof
Imagine the outcry if the Pakistani or Indian governments were burning women alive at those rates. Yet when the government is not directly involved people shrug.
Nicholas D. Kristof
In India, a "bride burning"-- to punish a woman for inadequate dowry or to eliminate her so a man can remarry-- takes place approximately once every two hours, but rarely constitute news.
Nicholas D. Kristof