17 Quotes by Laura Bates about sexism


  • Author Laura Bates
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    How can I believe the people that say women have equal rights? When the worst insult a man can be called is a woman, girly, a twat, a cunt, that he needs to 'man up' and the list goes on. My gender is not an insult. I'm tired of all this shit.

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  • Author Laura Bates
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    This combination of ageism and sexism was also blatant in the Boston Herald's treatment of sixty-three-year-old Elizabeth Warren, whose 2012 Senate bid it sought to undermine by repeatedly dubbing her "Granny" in its pages, as if to imply that an older woman could not possibly be trusted with political responsibility.

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  • Author Laura Bates
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    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.

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  • Author Laura Bates
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    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.

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  • Author Laura Bates
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    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.

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  • Author Laura Bates
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    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.

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  • Author Laura Bates
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    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.

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