Gender Stereotypes Quotes

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

~ Rebecca West

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

~ Cordelia Fine

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

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

I would rather trust a woman's instinct than a man's reason.

~ Stanley Baldwin

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

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

You know, there are several gay men on the faculty. Professor Montag makes jelly beans look colorless(...)

~ Tara Lain

He says in his defence he never meddled with married women, only with virgins.

~ Hilary Mantel

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

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

Identity is one of those absurd synthetic terms that if you ask someone about it, they can’t give you a proper definition of it without recapping what they’ve learned in school. Identity supposedly is a state or a condition of being oneself or itself, and not another. At least, this is what dictionary.com explains to us. They always say that you need to define who you are and this definition is always labeled by gender role and preference, political views, religious beliefs, nationality, family bonds, age, jobs and education titles.” Lucera looked at the doctor and shrugged her shoulders. “This might be only MY perception.

~ Neda Aria

What matters most is not 'what' you are, but 'who' you are.

~ Dashanne Stokes

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

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

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

~ Gloria D. Gonsalves

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

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

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

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

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

If we do not redefine manhood, war is inevitable.

~ Paul Fussell

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

~ Dennis Sharpe

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

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

...sitting and waiting is one of the most miserable occupations known to man - not that it usually is known to men, women do it much more often.

~ Diana Gabaldon

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

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

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

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

~ Bertolt Brecht