11 Quotes by Carina Chocano

In societies where women's rights are no longer openly, blatantly denied - as they are not in most of the Western world - women are instead encouraged to deny them voluntarily.

It [puberty] is not that you lose control of your body so much as that you lose control over the way your body is interpreted. Your body becomes an alien body, a question rather than a statement.

Sometimes, it seems like popular media exists primarily to set impossible standards and then to shame people who don't try their hardest to meet them.

Romantic love is a mirror in which you can see your whole self pleasantly reflected, if you’re lucky. Or it’s a dark mirror into which you can disappear.

It wasn’t just the movies. It was everything, everywhere. It was the sublimated sexism that mutated every experience but that we weren’t allowed to notice or acknowledge. It was the regressive subtext that seemed to undermine every progressive text.

Friedan demystified the fairy tale and traced it back to its roots. She named the unnamed problem. She told women they weren’t crazy, that the culture was set up to drive them crazy and make them relinquish themselves and step into a mass-produced, ready-made identity, ready to please.

Strategic girls manage perception; idealistic girls go up against the narrative, because it’s at the root of the problem, and they get crushed every time.

In societies where women’s rights are no longer openly, blatantly denied – as they are not in most of the Western world – women are instead encouraged to deny them voluntarily.

To remain a spinster was to be societally “redundant,” but to marry, for a girl, was to be absorbed into the self of another, like a vanishing twin. A woman’s education was designed to coax her to sleep at sixteen and keep her unchanged and unconscious forever. It was an undoing. It wasn’t a start but a “finishing.