Gender Stereotypes Quotes

If you join the rat race — you're in the race of rats.

Just watch any husband arguing with his wife about something insignificant; listen to what they say and watch how their residual emotions manifest when the fight is over. It’s so formulaic and unsurprising that you wouldn’t dare re-create it in a movie. All the critics would mock it. They’d all say the screenwriter was a hack who didn’t even try. This is why movies have less value than we like to pretend — movies can’t show reality, because honest depictions of reality offend intelligent people.

Chuck Klosterman

She is a good girl," Park said. "You don't even know her." His dad was standing, pushing Park toward the door. "Go," he said sternly. "Go play basketball or something.""Good girls don't dress like boys," his mother said.

Rainbow Rowell

Quickly I find another surprise. The boys are wilder writers — less careful of convention, more willing to leap into the new. I start watching the dozens of vaguely familiar girls, who seem to have shaved off all distinguishing characteristics. They are so careful. Careful about their appearance, what they say and how they say it, how they sit, what they write. Even in the five-minute free writes, they are less willing to go out from where they are — to go out there, where you have to go, to write. They are reluctant to show me rough work, imperfect work, anything I might criticize; they are very careful to write down my instructions word by word.They’re all trying themselves on day by day, hour by hour, I know — already making choices that will last too unfairly long. I’m surprised to find, after a few days, how invigorating it all is. I pace and plead for reaction, for ideas, for words, and gradually we all relax a little and we make progress. The boys crouch in their too-small desks, giant feet sticking out, and the girls perch on the edge, alert like little groundhogs listening for the patter of coyote feet. I begin to like them a lot.Then the outlines come in. I am startled at the preoccupation with romance and family in many of these imaginary futures. But the distinction between boys and girls is perfectly, painfully stereotypical. The boys also imagine adventure, crime, inventions, drama. One expects war with China, several get rich and lose it all, one invents a time warp, another resurrects Jesus, another is shot by a robber. Their outlines are heavy on action, light on response. A freshman: “I grow populerity and for the rest of my life I’m a million air.” [sic] A sophomore boy in his middle age: “Amazingly, my first attempt at movie-making won all the year’s Oscars. So did the next two. And my band was a HUGE success. It only followed that I run the country.”Among the girls, in all the dozens and dozens of girls, the preoccupation with marriage and children is almost everything. They are entirely reaction, marked by caution. One after the other writes of falling in love, getting married, having children and giving up — giving up careers, travel, college, sports, private hopes, to save the marriage, take care of the children. The outlines seem to describe with remarkable precision the quietly desperate and disappointed lives many women live today.

Sallie Tisdale

The biased use of pronouns serves to perpetuate the culturally based myth that men are perpetrators and women are victims. This myth is extremely damaging to the millions of male victims of sexual and physical abuse who live unacknowledged by our society.

David Lisak

At times I am flabbergasted that my memory is considered false and my alcoholic father's memory is considered rational and sane. Am I not believed because I am a woman? If Peter Freyd were a man who lived in my neighborhood during my childhood instead of my father, would he and his wife be so believable? If not, what is it about his status as my father that makes him more credible?

Jennifer J. Freyd

New York City has finally hired women to pick up the garbage, which makes sense to me, since, as I've discovered, a good bit of being a woman consists of picking up garbage.

Anna Quindlen

It can be exhausting eating a meal cooked by a man. With a woman, it's, Ho hum, pass the beans. A guy, you have to act like he just built the Taj Mahal.

Deb Caletti

In 1916, Infants' and Children's Wear Review insisted upon pink for boys and blue for girls. In 1939, Parents magazine claimed that pink was a good color for boys because it was a pale version of red, which was the color of Mars, the war god. Blue was good for girls because it was the color of Venus, and of the Virgin Mary. So, pink for girls is a relatively recent trend, and utterly random.

Tim Gunn

Like all men who look this good, Frank has no interest in women.

Dennis Sharpe

If we do not redefine manhood, war is inevitable.

Paul Fussell

All surgery and no makeup make Jack a dull girl.

Brian Spellman

The world is changing, I said. It is no longer a world just for boys and men.Our women are respected here, said the father. We would never let them tramp the world as American women do. There is always someone to look after the Olinka woman. A father. An uncle. A brother or nephew. Do not be offended, Sister Nettie, but our people pity women such as you who are cast out, we know not from where, into a world unknown to you, where you must struggle all alone, for yourself.So I am an object of pity and contempt, I thought, to men and women alike.Furthermore, said Tashi’s father, we are not simpletons. We understand that there are places in the world where women live differently from the way our women do, but we do not approve of this different way for our children.But life is changing, even in Olinka, I said. We are here.He spat on the ground. What are you? Three grownups and two children. In the rainy season some of you will probably die. You people do not last long in our climate. If you do not die, you will be weakened by illness. Oh, yes. We have seen it all before. You Christians come here, try hard to change us, get sick and go back to England, or wherever you come from. Only the trader on the coast remains, and even he is not the same white man, year in and year out. We know because we send him women.Tashi is very intelligent, I said. She could be a teacher. A nurse. She could help the people in the village.There is no place here for a woman to do those things, he said.Then we should leave, I said. Sister Corrine and I.No, no, he said.Teach only the boys? I asked.Yes, he said, as if my question was agreement.There is a way that the men speak to women that reminds me too much of Pa. They listen just long enough to issue instructions. They don’t even look at women when women are speaking. They look at the ground and bend their heads toward the ground. The women also do not “look in a man’s face” as they say. To “look in a man’s face” is a brazen thing to do. They look instead at his feet or his knees.

Alice Walker

No one escapes gender conditioning. Most of us unwittingly carry the cultural gender shadow into our important relationships, and we end up in struggles with our partners, family members, friends, and colleagues that aren’t really about us as individual. When women and men do gender reconciliation work in community, they begin to see the power of this cultural baggage in a new light. They realise the prevalence of overarching social patterns and conditioning in much of their experience – and comprehend that, in this larger context, they are not alone in what happened to them.

William Keepin

Gender is a shell game. What is a man? Whatever a woman isn't. What is a woman? Whatever a man is not, Tap on it and it's hollow. Look under the shells: it's not there.

Naomi Alderman

He said, I won't have one of those things in the house. It gives a young girl a false notion of beauty, not to mention anatomy. If a real woman was built like that she'd fall on her face.She said, If we don't let her have one like all the other girls she'll feel singled out. It'll become an issue. She'll long for one and she'll long to turn into one. Repression breeds sublimation. You know that. He said, It's not just the pointy plastic tits, it's the wardrobes. The wardrobes and that stupid male doll, what's his name, the one with the underwear glued on.She said, Better to get it over with when she's young. He said, All right but don't let me see it.She came whizzing down the stairs, thrown like a dart. She was stark naked. Her hair had been chopped off, her head was turned back to front, she was missing some toes and she'd been tattooed all over her body with purple ink, in a scrollwork design. She hit the potted azalea, trembled there for a moment like a botched angel, and fell.He said, I guess we're safe.

Margaret Atwood

For every woman you know who has been given substandard treatment by her parents, used by her friend or boyfriend, abused by her husband, discriminated by her employers and ridiculed by society, I know a man who has been burdened with family responsibility since childhood, humiliated by his girlfriend, bullied by his employers, pushed by society and harassed by his wife. Everybody is fighting their own battle.

Sanjeev Himachali

Gender is not only women and sexual orientation has multiple choices.

Gloria D. Gonsalves

I knew I was different. I thought that I might be gay or something because I couldn't identify with any of the guys at all. None of them liked art or music. They just wanted to fight and get laid. It was many years ago but it gave me this real hatred for the average American macho male.

Kurt Cobain

Girls can be athletic. Guys can have feelings. Girls can be smart. Guys can be creative. And vice versa. Gender is specific only to your reproductive organs (and sometimes not even to those), not your interest, likes, dislikes, goals, and ambitions.

Connor Franta

Women are extraordinary creatures!

Roman Payne

Your old tutor did you a great disservice, Mr. Kynaston. He taught you how to speak, and swoon, and toss your head but he never taught you how to suffer like a woman, or love like a woman. He trapped a man in a woman's form and left you there to die! I always hated you as Desdemona. You never fought! You just died, beautifully. No woman would die like that, no matter how much she loved him. A woman would fight!

Stage Beauty

He always thought of the sea as 'la mar' which is what people call her in Spanish when they love her. Sometimes those who love her say bad things of her but they are always said as though she were a woman. Some of the younger fishermen, those who used buoys as floats for their lines and had motorboats, bought when the shark livers had brought much money, spoke of her as 'el mar' which is masculine.They spoke of her as a contestant or a place or even an enemy. But the old man always thought of her as feminine and as something that gave or withheld great favours, and if she did wild or wicked things it was because she could not help them. The moon affects her as it does a woman, he thought.

Ernest Hemingway

Maybe this was a male-female translation problem. I read an article once that said that when women have a conversation, they're communicating on five levels. They follow the conversation that they're actually having, the conversation that is specifically being avoided, the tone being applied to the overt conversation, the buried conversation that is being covered only in subtext, and finally the other person's body language.That is, on many levels, astounding to me. I mean, that's like having a freaking superpower. When I, and most other people with a Y chromosome, have a conversation, we're having a conversation. Singular. We're paying attention to what is being said, considering that, and replying to it. All these other conversations that have apparently been going on for the last several thousand years? I didn't even know that they ~existed~ until I read that stupid article, and I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one.

Jim Butcher

There is a time in a boy’s life when the sweetness is pounded out of him; and tenderness, and the ability to show what he feels, is gone.

Norah Vincent

Sadly, our society still perpetuates the false ideal that a real man should be all masculine, and a real woman all feminine. Neither is possible, nor desirable.

William Keepin

One day stores will no longer have gender classifications. Instead the consumer decides how and what they want, rather than the social engineering of corporations. The concept of gender will be extinct.

Lorin Morgan-Richards

blatant, intentional discrimination against women is far from being something merely to be read about in history books.

Cordelia Fine

People call me a feminist whenever I express statements that distinguish me from a doormat.

Rebecca West

Do you love him?”Deryn swallowed, then pointed at the screen. “He makes me feel like that. Like flying.”“Then, you have to tell him.”“I told you, I kissed him!”“It’s hardly the same. I kissed you, after all. That wasn’t love, Mr. Sharp.”“Aye, and what exactly was it?”“Curiosity.” Lilit smiled. “And as I said, you’re quite a dashing boy.”“But I’m pretty sure Alek doesn’t want a dashing boy!”“You can’t be sure until you ask.”Deryn shook her head. “You were raised to throw bombs. I wasn’t.”“Were you raised to wear trousers and be a soldier?

Scott Westerfeld

Men are not from Mars and women are not from Venus instead we are all people. Deal with it.

Shahla Khan

All men are ‘real men’, whether they wear KingGees or a pink tutu.

Miya Yamanouchi

Both men and women experience pressure to conform to social standards of attractiveness. Men to look strong and be tough, women to look pretty and soft. Men to be masculine, women to be feminine. Men get judged for being "too feminine", women get criticized for being "too masculine". Gender policing affects us all.

Miya Yamanouchi

Guys, you don't have to act "manly" to be considered a man; you are a man, so just be yourself. You don't have to prove your masculinity to anyone.

Miya Yamanouchi

Guys, you don't have to act "manly" to be considered a man; you are a man, so just be yourself. Don't let society make you believe you have to prove your masculinity to anyone because you don't. You are you and you are worthy, full stop.

Miya Yamanouchi

To every guy who tries to say that we have already achieved equality for the sexes, if this were true, you wouldn't be told to "man up", "be a man", "stop being a p*#%y", "harden the fuck up", "toughen up", "boys don't cry", "don't be such a girl", "stop being a wimp". As long as this type of language still exists in our society, then gender equality, my friends, has in fact not been achieved after all.

Miya Yamanouchi

Whether they regard themselves as pro- or antifeminist, most women want men to do more of the emotional work in relationships. And most men, even those who wholeheartedly support gender equality in the workforce, still believe that emotional work is female labor. Most men continue to uphold the sexist decree that emotions have no place in the work world and that emotional labor at home should be done by females.

Bell Hooks

Even as a child, In-hye had possessed the innate strength of a character necessary to make one's own way in life. As a daughter, as an older sister, as a wife and as a mother, as the owner of a shop, even as an underground passenger on the briefest of journeys, she had always done her best. Through the sheer inertia pf a life lived in this way, she would have been able to conquer everything, even time. If only Yeong-hye hadn't suddenly disappeared last March. If only she hadn't been discovered in the forest that rainy night. If only all of her symptoms hadn't suddenly got worse.

Han Kang

There is nothing innate, immutable or inevitable about boys or girls doing particularly well or badly in different subjects. Girls in Shanghai outperform western boys in math, the same boys that outshine the girls in the US. The variable factor is the educational system, the society and the parents.

Jamie Le Fay

It takes a near act of rebellion for even a four-year-old to break away from society's expectations.

Sheryl Sandberg

But by far the worst thing we do to males—by making them feel they have to be hard—is that we leave them with very fragile egos. The harder a man feels compelled to be, the weaker his ego is.

Chimanada Ngozi Adichie

Impressionable young students must be given true examples of the Arab woman through her own words. When I say students I do not mean young girls alone for in order to raise a generation that truly believes in gender equality it is the young boys that have to listen first, those boys who will grow up to have female rivals at every stage of their professional careers. In order to foster greater respect for their future interactions as equals at par with each other in every way we must introduce them both to those female thinkers, those female warriors who have fought to create a distinct voice, that voice that emanates from an agony, a sense of injustice and suffocation from years of silence, that no male thinker, no matter how great, can mimic.

Aysha Taryam

...above all, let your focus be on remaining a full person. Take time for yourself. Nurture your own needs. Please do not think of it as 'doing it all'. Our culture celebrates the idea of women who are able to 'do it all' but does not question the premise of that praise. I have no interest in the debate about women doing it all because it is a debate that assumes that caregiving and domestic work are singularly female domains, and idea that I strongly reject. Domestic work and caregiving should be gender-neutral, and we should be asking not whether a woman can 'do it all' but how best to support parents in their dual duties at work and at home.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Do not define me by my gender or my socio-economic status, Noah Willis. Do not tell me who I am and do not tell me who society thinks I am and then put me in that box and expect me to stay there. Because, I swear to God, I will climb the hell out of that box and I will take that box you've just put me in and I will use that box to smash your face in until you're nothing more than a freckly, bloodied pulp. You got that, sweet cheeks?

Megan Jacobson

We have gone on too long blaming or pitying the mothers who devour their children, who sow the seeds of progressive dehumanization, because they have never grown to full humanity themselves. If the mother is at fault, why isn't it time to break the pattern by urging all these Sleeping Beauties to grow up and live their own lives? There never will be enough Prince Charmings or enough therapists to break that pattern now. It is society's job, and finally that of each woman alone. For it is not the strength of the mothers that is at fault but their weakness, their passive childlike dependency and immaturity that is mistaken for "femininity." Our society forces boys, insofar as it can, to grow up, to endure the pains of growth, to educate themselves to work, to move on. Why aren't girls forced to grow up - to achieve somehow the core of self that will end the unnecessary dilemma, the mistaken choice between femaleness and humanness that is implied in the feminine mystique?

Betty Friedan

Whatever women do they must do twice as well as men to be thought half as good. Luckily, this is not difficult.

Charlotte Whitton

If we don't place the straitjacket of gender roles on young children, we give them space to reach their full potential.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Women leave their marriages when they can't take any more. Men leave when they find someone new.

J. Courtney Sullivan

Love has no gender - compassion has no religion - character has no race.

Abhijit Naskar

Either you are homophobic or you are a human - you cannot be both.

Abhijit Naskar

Homosexuals are not made, they are born.

Abhijit Naskar

Discriminations are never a sign of a civilized society. What makes us civilized is our act of liberated kindness with other people beyond the man-made primitive citadels of gender, race, religion and sexual orientation.

Abhijit Naskar

Discriminations suit animals, not humans. And yet, the unfortunate reality is, it is the humans that discriminate each other on the grounds of imaginary labels, not the animals. This way, animals are more civilized than humans.

Abhijit Naskar

Homosexuality is immutable, irreversible and nonpathological.

Abhijit Naskar

Being homosexual is no more abnormal than being lefthanded.

Abhijit Naskar

Can you imagine, somebody telling you, your love for your dearly beloved is a sin! Can you imagine, somebody telling you, women are inferior to men, and are meant only serve the men! Can you imagine, somebody telling you, a man can have multiple wives, and yet be deemed civilized! Here that somebody is a fundamentalist ape - a theoretical pest from the stone-age, that somehow managed to survive even amidst all the rise of reasoning and intellect.

Abhijit Naskar

Maybe men who still have the cave-man expectations of women should be sent back into caves. A lot of women will readily volunteer to build such caves free of charge.

Dauglas Dauglas

The self-esteem of western women is founded on physical being (body mass index, youth, beauty). This creates a tricky emphasis on image, but the internalized locus of self-worth saves lives. Western men are very different. In externalizing the source of their self-esteem, they surrender all emotional independence. (Conquest requires two parties, after all.) A man cannot feel like a man without a partner, corporation, team. Manhood is a game played on the terrain of opposites. It thus follows that male sense of self disintegrates when the Other is absent.

Antonella Gambotto-Burke

In politics, If you want anything said, ask a man. If you want anything done, ask a woman.

Margaret Thatcher

A man's face is his autobiography. A woman's face is her work of fiction.

Oscar Wilde

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Gender Stereotypes Quotes

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