31 Quotes by Laurie Penny

The feminism that has mattered to the media and made magazine headlines in recent years has been the feminism most useful to heterosexual, high-earning middle- and upper-middle-class white women. Public ‘career feminists’ have been more concerned with getting more women into 'boardrooms’, when the problem is that there are altogether too many boardrooms, and none of them are on fire.

Public ‘career feminists’ have been more concerned with getting more women into ‘boardrooms’, when the problem is that there are altogether too many boardrooms, and none of them are on fire.

Without courage, our generation is doomed to another decade of political disenfranchisement and shit music.

The engine of capitalist patriarchy runs on the dirty fuel of women’s shame.

Femininity itself has become a brand, a narrow and shrinking formula of commoditised identity which can be sold back to women who have become alienated from their own power as living, loving, labouring beings.

Those who are so eager for women and girls to go back to the kitchen might think again about just what it is we might be up to in there. You can plan a lot of damage from a kitchen. It’s also where the knives are kept.

There is a princess in all our heads: she must be destroyed.

This, however, is OKCupid, the vast, weird pink-and-blue toned jungle of the id masquerading as a dating site, where rare birds of modern romance flutter amongst the night-terrors of human loneliness and despair and the suspicious skin irritants of late-night hook-uppery.

Men grow up expecting to be the hero of their own story. Women grow up expecting to be the supporting actress in somebody else’s I refuse to burn my energy adding extra magic and sparkle to other people’s lives to get them to love me. I’m busy casting spells for myself.