61 Quotes by Laura Bates

The way that the obsessive focus on girls' looks plays into the dialogue around what they can and can't do is particularly poisonous. It inserts the self-consciousness of the watched, objectified woman into girls' internal narratives before they would ever have noticed it themselves.[...]And it teaches them lessons about their own value being measured by their bodies and faces – lessons that will stay with them for the rest of their lives.

Both boys and girls are seeing mainstream porn that suggests a woman's role during sex is to be subjugated or humiliated, to please a man, and often even to be hurt or punished. And without receiving any counterinformation to offset these norms, or mitigate them with ideas about consent, relationships , respect and boundaries, they are simply, inevitably, accepting these things as the 'reality' of sex.

This inequality, this pattern of casual intrusion whereby women could be leered at, touched, harassed and abused without a second thought, was sexism: implicit, explicit, commonorgarden and deeprooted sexism, pretty much everywhere you'd care to look. And if sexism means treating people differently or discriminating against them purely because of their sex, then women were experiencing it on a near-daily basis.

Tired of cold callers asking to speak to the 'man in the house', now I put them on to my 6-year old son... he sings them 'Sexy and I Know It'.

One of the cleverest and most insidious twists in the whole sorry tale is the way women are double bound by a gender-biased definition of professionalism and the threat of being labeled "whining.

One day, in the very early months of the project, I read several entries in a single week from girls who had been subjected to leering and shouting from men in the street while walking home from school in their uniforms. Dismayed, I posted a question on Twitter: Surely, I asked, this couldn't be a common occurrence? By the end of the day, a deluge of hundreds of tweets had confirmed that the experience was not only common but almost ubiquitous.

Girls are not only being denied access to scientific and adventurous toys, they're also presented with such a narrow range of options that domesticity and stereotypically "female" duties are shoved down their throats before they've even reached the age of five.

Women are silenced by both the invisibility and the acceptability of the problem.

As long as we as a society continue to belittle and dismiss women's accounts, disbelieve and question their stories, and blame them for their own assaults, we are playing right into the hands of those who silence victims by asking: "who would believe you anyways?".