Femininity Quotes - Page 6

• Imagine that for hundreds of years your most formative traumas, your daily suffering and pain, the abuse you live through, the terror you live with, are unspeakable - not the basis of literature. You grow up with your father holding you down and covering your mouth so another man can make a horrible searing pain between your legs.... You learn how to leave your body and create someone else who takes over when you cannot stand it any more. You develop a self who is ingratiating and obsequious and imitative and aggressively passive and silent - you learn, in a word, femininity.

  Catharine MacKinnon

  Growing Up, Pain, Father

  "Only Words". Book by Catharine MacKinnon, 1993.

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• Patriarchy values the hard over the soft; the tough over the tender; punishment, vengeance, and vindictiveness over compassion, negotiation, and reconciliation. The 'hard' qualities are linked to power, success, and masculinity - and exalted. The 'soft' qualities are identified with weakness, powerlessness, and femininity - and denigrated.

  Starhawk

  Compassion, Punishment, Quality

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• The misnamed "feminine" woman, so admired by her creator, man - the woman who is acquiescent in her inferiority and who has swallowed man's image of her as his ordained helpmate and no more - is in reality the "masculine" woman. The truly feminine woman "cannot help burning with that inner rage that comes from having to identify with her exploiter's negative image of her," and having to conform to her persecutor's idea of femininity and its man-decreed limitations.

  Elizabeth Gould Davis

  Men, Reality, Ideas

  "The First Sex". Book by Elizabeth Gould Davis. Chapter 22: "Woman in the Aquarian Age", 1971.

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• Using my own hand as a base material, I considered it a canvas upon which I stitched into the top layer of skin using thread to create the appearance of an incredibly work worn hand. By using the technique of embroidery, which is traditionally employed to represent femininity and applying it to the expression of its opposite, I hope to challenge the pre-conceived notion that 'women's work' is light and easy. Aiming to represent the effects of hard work arising from employment in low paid 'ancillary' jobs, such as cleaning, caring and catering, all traditionally considered to be 'women's work'.

  Eliza Bennett

  Jobs, Hard Work, Caring

  "This Artist Painstakingly Sews Her Incredible Art Into The Palms Of Her Own Hands" by Gil Kaufman, www.mtv.com. July 22, 2014.

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• I have chosen to no longer be apologetic for my femaleness and my femininity. And I want to be respected in all of my femaleness because I deserve to be.

  Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

  Want, Apologetic, Chosen

  "We should all be feminists". TEDxEuston, www.ted.com. December 2012.

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• Masculinity cannot exist without femininity. On its own, masculinity has no meaning, because it is but one half of a set of power relations. Masculinity pertains to male dominance as femininity pertains to female subordination.

  Sheila Jeffreys

  Males, Female, Half

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• I tend to like strong female characters. It just interests me dramatically. A strong male character isn't interesting because it has been done and it's so cliched. A weak male character is interesting: somebody else hasn't done it a hundred times. A strong female character is still interesting to me because it hasn't been done all that much, finding the balance of femininity and strength. [From a 1986 Fangoria interview]

  James Cameron

  Strong, Character, Interesting

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• I've been exploring gender performativity in the Gulf since I was a teenager. I'm not a gender anthropologist, but I feel like there's an extreme binary between femininity and masculinity in the Gulf. From a young age, I knew I didn't want to be part of it. Gender is a huge gray area, and the problem with defined roles is that they cover up undefined ones.

  Ayshay

  Teenager, Problem, Gender

  Source: pitchfork.com

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• On one hand the eternal attraction of man towards femininity (cf. Gn. 2:23) frees in him-or perhaps it should free-a gamut of spiritual-corporal desires of an especially personal and "sharing" nature (cf. analysis of the "beginning"), to which a proportionate pyramid of values corresponds. On the other hand, "lust" limits this gamut, obscuring the pyramid of values that marks the perennial attraction of male and female.

  Pope John Paul II

  Spiritual, Men, Hands

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• A woman must wait for her ovaries to die before she can get her rightful personality back. Post-menstrual is the same as pre-menstrual; I am once again what I was before the age of twelve: a female human being who knows that a month has thirty day, not twenty-five, and who can spend every one of them free of the shackles of that defect of body and mind known as femininity.

  Florence King

  Personality, Waiting, Mind

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• Because I didn't have any queer, lesbian, female role models I hated my own femininity and had to look deep within myself to create an identity that worked for me. Pop culture just doesn't hand us enough variety to choose from.

  Beth Ditto

  Hands, Female Role Models, Identity

  "What would Beth Ditto do?" by Beth Ditto, www.theguardian.com. February 8, 2008.

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• Very often I hear talk about female literature, or femininity in literature. It's a categorization I am not sure about. Maybe there are a few elements that distinguish women's observations from men's, like the ability to notice some fine details.

  Luljeta Lleshanaku

  Female, Literature, Observation

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• Actually, I'm looking forward to being 50. Because to me, that's when a woman is at the pinnacle of her femininity and her womanhood.

  Helen McCrory

  Looking Forward, Pinnacle, Womanhood

  "Biography/Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• Masculinity is what you believe it to be. I think masculinity and femininity is something that's very old-fashioned. There's a whole new generation of people who aren't defined by their sex or race or who they like to sleep with.

  Johnny Weir

  Sex, Believe, Sleep

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• Absolutely, but let me qualify that - I consider myself an authentic feminist. Not as defined by the modern movement. And, let me clarify that a little bit more. I was an English major, so break it down: -ist means one who celebrates. As a feminist, I celebrate my femininity.

  Christine O'Donnell

  Mean, Feminist, Movement

  "Christine O'Donnell Running For Senate In Delaware At AFP's RightOnline Conference". Interview at Americans for Prosperity's RightOnline Conference, www.youtube.com. July 2010.

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• It meant something to me – the idea of a coat guarding and hiding a woman’s body. For me, a woman who is absorbed in her work, who does not care about gaining one’s favor, strong yet subtle at the same time, is essentially more seductive. The more she hides and abandons her femininity, the more it emerges from the very heart of her existence.

  Yohji Yamamoto

  Strong, Heart, Ideas

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• Quite honestly, even as a woman dealer, I really wasn't interested in masculinity or femininity as such. What was important to me was the value of the work itself. If a woman had come along, somebody like Lee Bontecou or Louise Nevelson, and said, "I'm working on the land," I would have gone to see it.

  Virginia Dwan

  Important, Masculinity, Honestly

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• Radical feminist theorists do not seek to make gender a bit more flexible, but to eliminate it. They are gender abolitionists, and understand gender to provide the framework and rationale for male dominance. In the radical feminist approach, masculinity is the behaviour of the male ruling class and femininity is the behaviour of the subordinate class of women. Thus gender can have no place in the egalitarian future that feminism aims to create.

  Sheila Jeffreys

  Radical Feminism, Class, Feminist

  Sheila Jeffreys (2014). “Gender Hurts: A Feminist Analysis of the Politics of Transgenderism”, p.42, Routledge

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• When one begins to think about it, America depends rather heavily on women's passive dependence, their femininity. Femininity, if one still wants to call it that, makes American women a target and a victim of the sexual sell.

  Betty Friedan

  Thinking, America, Target

  BETTY FRIEDAN (1963). “The Feminine Mystique”

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• Many of us reject all of the inferior meanings and connotations that others project onto femininity - that it is weak, artificial, frivolous, demure, and passive - because for us, there has been no act more bold and daring than embracing our own femininity. In a world that is awash in antifeminine sentiment, we understand that embracing and empowering femininity can potentially be one of the most transformative and revolutionary acts imaginable.

  Julia Serano

  Empowering, World, Revolutionary

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• The hardest part has been learning how to take myself seriously when the entire world is constantly telling me that femininity is always inferior to masculinity

  Julia Serano

  World, Masculinity, Hardest

  Julia Serano (2016). “Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity”, p.130, Seal Press

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• People of all sexes have the right to explore femininity, masculinity-and the infinite variations between-without criticism or ridicule.

  Leslie Feinberg

  Sex, People, Criticism

  Leslie Feinberg (1998). “Trans liberation: beyond pink or blue”, Beacon Pr

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• One of the challenges is to create an equally positive, satisfying sense of femininity and feminine identity in a different way so that there are things you're saying yes to and satisfying that urge that your daughter has to be assert her girlness. The surface level of the culture, and really several inches into it, makes that very hard to do. I hate to put another thing on parents' plates. But the culture is very intentional in what it's telling your daughter and what it's telling you about the message of femininity. And if you're not intentional and conscious back, you lose.

  Peggy Orenstein

  Daughter, Hate, Challenges

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• What was so interesting about the glam era was that it was about bisexuality and breaking down the boundaries between gays and straights, breaking down the boundaries between masculinity and femininity with this androgyny thing.

  Todd Haynes

  Gay, Interesting, Eras

  Source: www.avclub.com

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• According to the norms of the hijras community, it's not necessary that one be castrated. Castration is your choice. If you do it, testosterone doesn't build up, femininity comes, but I have always said that castration is not the right way. A person should go for complete sexual reassignment surgery, hormone therapy, psychological counseling.

  Laxmi Narayan Tripathi

  Community, Choices, Psychological

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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