Feminist Quotes about Gender

excerpts from some of my favorite feminist authors, including Andrea Dworkin, Andrea Long Chu, Shulamith Firestone, and more

Andrea Dworkin

“We are born into a world in which sexual possibilities are narrowly circumscribed” Cinderella, Snow-White, Sleeping Beauty, O, Claire, Anne; romantic love and marriage; Adam and Eve, the Virgin Mary. These models are the substantive message of this culture- they define psychological sets and patterns of social interaction, which, in our adult personae, we live out. We function inside the socioreligious scenario of right and wrong, good and bad, licit and illicit, legal and illegal, all saturated with shame and guilt.” (Woman-Hating)

“As individuals, we experience ourselves as the center of whatever social world we inhabit. We think that we are free and refuse to see that we are functions of our particular culture. That culture no longer organically reflects us, it is not our sum total, it is not the collective phenomenology of our creative possibilities—it possess and rules us, reduces us, obstructs the flow of sexual and creative energy and activity, penetrates even into what Freud called the id, gives nightmare shape to natural desire. In order to achieve proper balance in interhuman interaction, we must find ways to change ourselves from culturally defined agents to naturally defined beings. We must find ways of destroying the cultural personae imposed on our psyches and we must discover forms of relationship, behavior, sexual being and interaction, which are compatible with our inherent natural possibilities. We must move away from the per­verse, two-dimensional definitions which stem from sexual repression, which are the source of social op­pression, and move toward creative, full, multidimen­sional modes of sexual expression.” (Woman-Hating)

“The discovery is, of course, that ‘man’ and ‘woman’ are fictions, caricatures, cultural constructs. As models they are reductive, totalitarian, inappropriate to human becoming. As roles they are static, demeaning to the female, dead-ended for male and female both. Culture as we know it legislates those fictive roles as normalcy. Deviations from sanctioned, sacred behavior are ‘gender disorders,’ ‘criminality,’ as well as ‘sick,’ ‘disgusting,’ and ‘immoral.’ Heterosexuality, which is properly defined as the ritualized behavior built on polar role definition, and the social institutions related to it (marriage, the family, the Church, ad infinitum) are ‘human nature.’ Homosexuality, transsexuality, incest, and bestiality persist as the ‘perversions’ of this ‘human nature’ we presume to know so much about.” (Woman-Hating) note: I do not condone incest or beastiality, but I still believe this is a beautiful quote, and I understand this was written in the 70s when literally every great philosopher was on copious amounts of drugs

“I have defined heterosexuality as the ritualized behavior built on polar role definition. Intercourse with men as we know them is increasingly impossible. It requires an aborting of creativity and strength, a refusal of responsibility and freedom: a bitter personal death. It means remaining the victim, forever annihilating all self-respect. It means acting out the female role, incorporating the masochism, self-hatred, and passivity which are central to it. Unambiguous conventional heterosexual behavior is the worst betrayal of our common humanity. That is not to say that ‘men’ and ‘women’ should not fuck. Any sexual coming together which is genuinely pansexual and role-free, even if between men and women as we generally think of them (i. e., the biological images we have of them), is authentic and androgynous. Specifically, androgynous fucking requires the destruction of all conventional role-playing, of genital sexuality as the primary focus and value, of couple formations, and of the personality structures dominant-active (‘male’) and submissive-passive (‘female’).” (Woman-Hating)

“The propaganda for femininity assumes that the girl still lives inside the woman; that the lessons of femininity must be taught and retaught without letup; that the woman left to herself would repudiate the male use of her body, simply not accept it. The propaganda for femininity teaches women over and over, endlessly, that they must like intercourse; and the lesson must be taught over and over, endlessly, because intercourse does not express their own sexuality in general and the male use of women rarely has anything to do with the woman as an individual. The sexuality they are supposed to like does not recognize, let alone honor, their individuality in any meaningful way. The sexuality they must learn to like is not concerned with desire toward them as distinct personalities—at best they are ‘types’; nor is it concerned with their own desire toward others.” (Right-Wing Women)

Andrea Long Chu

“It’s not just that conventional beauty standards require [Gigi] Gorgeous to use these techniques to be recognized as a woman, though this is certainly true. It’s of the fact that her very submission to them is female. Gender transition, no matter the direction, is always a process of becoming a canvas for someone else’s fantasy. You cannot be gorgeous without someone to be gorgeous for.” (Females)

“The notion that trans women are the product of the pathological assimilation of misogynistic stereotypes here serves not as an unnatural exception, but as the rule governing all gender; not just all men, but also any woman who is not a member of SCUM- any woman at all, perhaps, except Valerie herself.” (Females)

“Everyone is female and everyone hates it. If this is true, then gender is very simply the form this self-loathing takes in any given case. All gender is internalized misogyny. A female is one who has eaten the loathing of another, like an amoeba that got its nucleus by swallowing its neighbor. Or, to put a finer point on it; gender is not just the misogynistic expectations a female internalizes but also the process of internalizing itself, the self’s gentle suicide in the name of someone else’s desire, someone else’s narcissism.” (Females)

“The claim that gender is socially constructed has rung hollow for decades not because it isn’t true, but because it is widely incomplete. Indeed, it is trivially true that a great number of things are socially constructed, from money to laws to genres of literature. What makes gender gender - the substance of gender, as it were- is the fact that it expresses, in every case, the desire of another. Gender has therefore a complementary relationship to sexual orientation; if sexual orientation is basically the social expression of one’s own sexuality, then gender is basically the social expression of someone else’s sexuality. In the former case, one takes an object, in the latter case, one is an object. From the perspective of gender, we are all dumb blondes.” (Females)

“Gender is always a process of objectification; transgender women like Gigi Gorgeous know this probably better than most. Gender transition begins, after all, from the understanding that how you identify yourself subjectively- as precious and important as this identification may be- is nevertheless on its own basically worthless. If identity were all there were to gender, transition would be as easy as thinking it- a lightbulb, suddenly switched on. Your gender identity would simply exist, in mute abstraction, and no one, least of all yourself, would care. On the contrary, if there is any lesson of gender transition- from the simplest request regarding pronouns to the most invasive surgeries- it’s that gender is something other people have to give you. Gender exists, if it is to exist at all, only in the structural generosity of strangers.” (Females)

Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí

“I posit that these assumptions are a result of the fact that in Western societies, physical bodies are always social bodies. As a consequence, there is really no distinction between sex and gender, despite the many attempts by feminists to distinguish the two. In the West, social categories have a long history of being embodied and therefore gendered. According to anthropologist Shelly Errington, ‘Sex (with a capital 'S') is the gender system of the West.’ She continues: ‘But Sex is not the only way to sort out human bodies, not the only way to make sense of sex. One can easily imagine different cultural classifications and rationales for gender categories, different scenarios that equally take into account the evidence our bodies provide." (The Invention of Women)

“From the ancients to the moderns, gender has been a foundational category upon which social categories have been erected.” (The Invention of Women)

Shulamith Firestone

 “Just as the end goal of the socialist revolution was not only to eliminate economic class privilege but of the economic class distinction itself, so the end goal of the feminist revolution must be, unlike the first feminist movement, not just the elimination of male privilege but of the sex distinction itself; genital differences between human beings would no longer matter culturally." (The Dialectic of Sex)

“Historical materialism is the view of the course of history which seeks the ultimate cause and the great moving power of all historical events in the dialectic of sex: the division of society into two distinct biological classes for procreative reproduction, and the struggles of these classes with one another; in the changes in the modes of marriage, reproduction and childcare created by these struggles; in the connected development of other physically-differentiated classes [castes]; and in the first division of labor based on sex which developed into the [economic-cultural] class system.” (The Dialectic of Sex)

Simone de Beauvoir

“One is not born, but becomes a woman. No biological, psychological, or economic fate determines the figure that the human female presents in society: it is civilization as a whole that produces this creature, intermediate between male and eunuch, which is described as feminine.” (The Second Sex)

“Woman has ovaries and a uterus; such are the particular conditions that lock her in her subjectivity; some even say she thinks with her hormones. Man vainly forgets that his anatomy also contains hormones and testicles. He grasps his body as a direct and normal link with the world that he believes he apprehends in all objectivity, whereas he considers woman's body an obstacle, a prison, burdened by everything that particularizes it.” (The Second Sex)

“In the mouth of a man the epithet female has the sound of an insult, yet he is not ashamed of his animal nature; on the contrary, he is proud if someone says of hirn: 'He is a male!' The term 'female' is derogatory not because it emphasizes woman’s animality, but because it imprisons her in her sex; and if this sex seems to man to be contemptible and inimical even in harmless dumb animals, it is evidently because of the uneasy hostility stirred up in him by woman. Nevertheless he wishes to find in biology a justification for this sentiment. The word female brings up in his mind a saraband of imagery - a vast, round ovum engulfs and castrates the agile spermatozoon; the monstrous and swollen termite queen rules over the enslaved males; the female praying mantis and the spider, satiated with love, crush and devour their partners; the bitch in heat runs through the alleys, trailing behind her a wake of depraved odours; the she-monkey presents her posterior immodestly and then steals away with hypocritical coquetry; and the most superb wild beasts - the tigress, the lioness, the panther - bed down slavishly under the imperial embrace of the male. Females sluggish, eager, artful, stupid, callous, lustful, ferocious, abased - man projects them all a once upon woman. And the fact is that she is a female. But if we are willing to stop thinking in platitudes, two questions are immediately posed: what does the female denote in the animal kingdom? And what particular kind of female is manifest in woman?” (The Second Sex)

Monique Wittig

“Although practical facts and ways of living contradict this theory in lesbian society, there are lesbians who affirm that ‘women and men are different species or races (the words are used interchangeably): men are biologically inferior to women; male violence is a biological inevitability...’ By doing this, by admitting that there is a ‘natural’ division between women and men, we naturalize history, we assume that ‘men’ and ‘women’ have always existed and will always exist. Not only do we naturalize history, but also consequently we naturalize the social phenomena which express our oppression, making change impossible. For example, instead of seeing giving birth as a forced production, we see it as a ‘natural,’ ‘biological’ process, forgetting that in our society births are planned (demography), forgetting that we ourselves are programmed to produce children, while this is the only social activity ‘short of war’ that presents such a great danger of death.” (The Straight Mind and Other Essays)

“A materialist feminist approach shows that what we take for the cause or origin of oppression is in fact only the mark imposed by the oppressor: the ‘myth of woman,’ plus its material effects and manifestations in the appropriated consciousness and bodies of women. Thus, this mark does not predate oppression: Colette Guillaumin has shown that before the socioeconomic reality of black slavery, the concept of race did not exist, at least not in its modern meaning, since it was applied to the lineage of families. However, now, race, exactly like sex, is taken as an ‘iommediate given,’ a ‘sensible given,’ ‘physical features,’ belonging to a natural order. But what we believe to be a physical and direct perception is only a sophisticated and mythic construction, an ‘imaginary formation,’ which reinterprets physical features (in themselves as neutral as any others but marked by the social system) through the network of relationships in which they are perceived. (They are seen as black, therefore they are black; they are seen as women, therefore, they are women. But before being seen that way, they first had to be made that way.)” (The Straight Mind and Other Essays)

Thus it is our historical task, and only ours, to ‘define what we call oppression in materialist terms, to make it evident that women are a class, which is to say that the category ‘woman’ as well as the category ‘man’ are political and economic categories not eternal ones. Our fight aims to suppress men as a class, not through a genocidal, but a political struggle. Once the class ‘men’ disappears, ‘women’ as a class will disappear as well, for there are no slaves without masters. Our first task, it seems, is to always thoroughly dissociate ‘women’ (the class within which we fight) and ‘woman,’ the myth. For ‘woman’ does not exist for us: it is only an imaginary formation, while ‘women’ is the product of a social relationship.” (The Straight Mind and Other Essays)

“Furthermore, we have to destroy the myth inside and outside ourselves. ‘Woman’ is not each one of us, but the political and ideological formation which negates ‘women’ (the product of a relation of exploitation). ‘Woman’ is there to confuse us, to hide the reality ‘women.’ In order to be aware of being a class and to become a class we first have to kill the myth of ‘woman’ including its most seductive aspects.” (The Straight Mind and Other Essays)

“Lesbian is the only concept I know of which is beyond the categories of sex (woman and man), because the designated subject (lesbian) is not a woman, either economically, or politically, or ideologically. For what makes a woman is a specific social relation to a man, a relation that we have previously called servitude, a relation which implies personal and physical obligation as well as economic obligation (‘forced residence,’ domestic corvée, conjugal duties, unlimited production of children, etc.), a relation which lesbians escape by refusing to become or to stay heterosexual. We are escapees from our class in the same way as the American runaway slaves were when escaping slavery and becoming free. For us this is an absolute necessity; our survival demands that we contribute all our strength to the destruction of the class of women within which men appropriate women. This can be accomplished only by the destruction of heterosexuality as a social system which is based on the oppression of women by men and which produces the doctrine of the difference between the sexes to justify this oppression.” (The Straight Mind and Other Essays)

Germaine Greer

“The compound of induced characteristics of soul and body is the myth of the Eternal Feminine, nowadays called the Stereotype. This is the dominant image of femininity which rules our culture and to which all women aspire. Assuming that the goddess of consumer culture is an artefact, we embark on an examination of how she comes to be made, the manufacture of the Soul. The chief element in this process is like the castration that we saw practised upon the body, the suppression and deflection of Energy. Following the same simple pattern, we begin at the beginning with Baby, showing how of the greater the less is made. The Girl struggles to reconcile her schooling along masculine lines with her feminine conditioning until Puberty resolves the ambiguity and anchors her safely in the feminine posture, if it works. When it doesn’t she is given further conditioning as a corrective, especially by psychologists, whose assumptions and prescriptions are described as the Psychological Sell.” (The Female Eunuch)

“The castration of women has been carried out in terms of a masculine-feminine polarity, in which men have commandeered all the energy and streamlined it into an aggressive conquistatorial power, reducing all heterosexual contact to a sadomasochistic pattern. This has meant the distortion of our concepts of Love.” (The Female Eunuch)

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

“The problem with gender is that it prescribes how we should be rather than recognizing how we are. Imagine how much happier we would be, how much freer to be our true individual selves, if we didn’t have the weight of gender expectations.” (“We Should All Be Feminists”)

John Stoltenberg

“We are remarkably resistant to recognizing the idea of sexual identity as having solely a political meaning. We very much prefer to believe, instead, that it has a metaphysical existence. For instance, we want to think that the idea of sexual identity ‘exists’ the way that the idea of a chair does. The idea of a chair can have an actual existence in the form of a real chair. There can be many different kinds of chairs, but we can know one when we see one, because we have the idea of a chair in our head. And every actual chair has a degree of permanence to its chairness; we can look at it and sit in it today and tomorrow and the day after that and know it solidly as a chair. We believe the idea of sexual identity can have such a continuity and permanence too, in the form of a real man or a real woman. We believe that though people’s appearances and behaviors differ greatly, we can know a real man or a real woman when we see one, because we have the ideas of maleness and femaleness in our head.” (Refusing to be a Man)

“Male sexual identity is not a ‘role.’ Male sexual identity is not a set of anatomical traits. Male sexual identity—the belief that one is male, the belief that there is a male sex, the belief that one belongs to it—is a politically constructed idea. This means that masculinity is an ethical construction: We construct it through our acts, through the things we choose to do and not do, through the acts we commit that are ‘male’ things to do. Most of our choice making has to do with choosing to do acts that will make the idea of our maleness real and that will keep far away the idea that, really, this dividing up of the species into two separate and distinct sex classes may be utterly specious after all. Most of our choice making has to do with dissociating from all that is coded and stigmatized ‘female.’ Most of our choice making has to do with disidentifying with women. Most of our choice making creates our sexedness. So long as we continue to try to act in ways that keep us still ‘men,’ we are doomed to paralysis, guilt, self-hatred, inertia. So long as we try to act as men, in order to continue to be men, in order to do our bit in the social construction of the entity that is the sex class men, we doom women to injustice: the injustice that inheres in the very idea that there are two sexes. Male sexual identity is constructed through the choices we make and the actions we take. We cannot continue to construct it and give ourselves fully to feminist activism. One cannot cling to one’s gender as the core of one’s being and be of use in the struggle. One must change the core of one’s being. The core of one’s being must love justice more than manhood.” (Refusing to be a Man)

“All the time I was growing up, I knew that there was something really problematical in my relationship to manhood. Inside, deep inside, I never believed I was fully male—I never believed I was growing up enough of a man. I believed that someplace out there, in other men, there was something that was genuine authentic all-American manhood—the real stuff— but I didn’t have it: not enough of it to convince me anyway, even if I managed to be fairly convincing to those around me. I felt like an impostor, like a fake. I agonized a lot about not feeling male enough, and I had no idea then how much I was not alone. Then I read those words—those words that suggested to me for the first time that the notion of manhood is a cultural delusion, a baseless belief, a false front, a house of cards. It’s not true. The category I was trying so desperately to belong to, to be a member of in good standing—it doesn’t exist. Poof. Now you see it, now you don’t. Now you’re terrified you’re not really part of it; now you’re free, you don’t have to worry anymore. However removed you feel inside from ‘authentic manhood,’ it doesn’t matter. What matters is the center inside yourself—and how you live, and how you treat people, and what you can contribute as you pass through life on this earth, and how honestly you love, and how carefully you make choices. Those are the things that really matter. Not whether you’re a real man. There’s no such thing.” (Refusing to be a Man)

“The idea of the male sex is like the idea of an Aryan race. The Nazis believed in the idea of an Aryan race—they believed that the Aryan race really exists, physically, in nature—and they put a great deal of effort into making it real. The Nazis believed that from the blond hair and blue eyes occurring naturally in the human species, they could construe the existence of a separate race—a distinct category of human beings that was unambiguously rooted in the natural order of things. But traits do not a race make; traits only make traits. For the idea to be real that these physical traits comprised a race, the race had to be socially constructed. The Nazis inferiorized and exterminated those they defined as ‘non-Aryan.’ With that, the notion of an Aryan race began to seem to come true. That’s how there could be a political entity known as an Aryan race, and that’s how there could be for some people a personal, subjective sense that they belonged to it. This happened through hate and force, through violence and victimization, through treating millions of people as things, then exterminating them. The belief system shared by people who believed they were all Aryan could not exist apart from that force and violence. The force and violence created a racial class system, and it created those people’s membership in the race considered ‘superior.’ The force and violence served their class interests in large part because it created and maintained the class itself. But the idea of an Aryan race could never become metaphysically true, despite all the violence unleashed to create it, because there simply is no Aryan race. There is only the idea of it—and the consequences of trying to make it seem real. The male sex is very like that.” (Refusing to be a Man)

“Penises and ejaculate and prostate glands occur in nature, but the notion that these anatomical traits comprise a sex—a discrete class, separate and distinct, metaphysically divisible from some other sex, the ‘other sex’ —is simply that: a notion, an idea. The penises exist; the male sex does not. The male sex is socially constructed. It is a political entity that flourishes only through acts of force and sexual terrorism. Apart from the global inferiorization and subordination of those who are defined as ‘nonmale,’ the idea of personal membership in the male sex class would have no recognizable meaning. It would make no sense. No one could be a member of it and no one would think they should be a member of it. There would be no male sex to belong to. That doesn’t mean there wouldn’t still be penises and ejaculate and prostate glands and such. It simply means that the center of our selfhood would not be required to reside inside an utterly fictitious category—a category that only seems real to the extent that those outside it are put down.” (Refusing to be a Man)

“Male sexual identity is the conviction or belief, held by most people born with penises, that they are male and not female, that they belong to the male sex. In a society predicated on the notion that there are two ‘opposite’ and ‘complementary’ sexes, this idea not only makes sense, it becomes sense; the very idea of a male sexual identity produces sensation, produces the meaning of sensation, becomes the meaning of how one’s body feels. The sense and the sensing of a male sexual identity is at once mental and physical, at once public and personal. Most people born with a penis between their legs grow up aspiring to feel and act unambiguously male, longing to belong to the sex that is male and daring not to belong to the sex that is not, and feeling this urgency for a visceral and constant verification of their male sexual identity—for a fleshy connection to manhood—as the driving force of their life. The drive does not originate in the anatomy. The sensations derive from the idea. The idea gives the feelings social meaning; the idea determines which sensations shall be sought.” (Refusing to be a Man)

“My point is that sexuality does not have a gender; it creates a gender. It creates for those who adapt to it in narrow and specified ways the confirmation for the individual of belonging to the idea of one sex or the other. So-called male sexuality is a learned connection between specific physical sensations and the idea of a male sexual identity. To achieve this male sexual identity requires that an individual identify with the class of males—that is, accept as one’s own the values and interests of the class. A fully realized male sexual identity also requires nonidentification with that which is perceived to be nonmale, or female. A male must not identify with females; he must not associate with females in feeling, interest, or action. His identity as a member of the sex class men absolutely depends on the extent to which he repudiates the values and interests of the sex class ‘women.” (Refusing to be a Man)

Valerie Solanas

“The male is a biological accident: the y (male) gene is an incomplete x (female) gene, that is, has an incomplete set of chromosomes. In other words, the male is an incomplete female, a walking abortion, aborted at the gene stage. To be male is to be deficient, emotionally limited; maleness is a deficiency disease and males are emotional cripples.” (SCUM Manifesto)

“The male is completely egocentric, trapped inside himself, incapable of empathizing or identifying with others, of love, friendship, affection or tenderness. He is a completely isolated unit, incapable of rapport with anyone. His responses are entirely visceral, not cerebral; his intelligence is a mere tool in the service of his drives and needs; he is incapable of mental passion, mental interaction; he can’t relate to anything other than his own physical sensations. He is a half dead, unresponsive lump, incapable of giving or receiving pleasure or happiness; consequently, he is at best an utter bore, an inoffensive blob, since only those capable of absorption in others can be charming. He is trapped in a twilight zone halfway between humans and apes, and is far worse off than the apes because, unlike the apes, he is capable of a large array of negative feelings—hate, jealousy, contempt, disgust, guilt, shame, doubt—and, moreover he is aware of what he is and isn’t.” (SCUM Manifesto)

“To call a man an animal is to flatter him; he’s a machine, a walking dildo. It’s often said that men use women. Use them for what? Surely not pleasure. Eaten up with guilt, shame, fears and insecurities and obtaining, if he’s lucky, a barely perceptible physical feeling, the male is, nonetheless, obsessed with screwing; he’ll swim a river of snot, wade nostril-deep through a mile of vomit, if he thinks there’ll be a friendly pussy awaiting him. He’ll screw a woman he despises, any snaggletoothed hag, and, furthermore, pay for the opportunity. Why? Relieving physical tension isn’t the answer, as masturbation suffices for that. It’s not ego satisfaction; that doesn’t explain screwing corpses and babies.” (SCUM Manifesto)

“Completely egocentric, unable to relate, empathize or identify, and filled with a vast, pervasive, diffuse sexuality, the male is psychically passive. He hates his passivity, so he projects it onto women, defines the male as active, then sets out to prove that he is (‘prove he’s a Man’). His main means of attempting to prove it is screwing (Big Man with a Big Dick tearing off a Big Piece). Since he’s attempting to prove an error, he must “prove” it again and again. Screwing, then, is a desperate, compulsive attempt to prove he’s not passive, not a woman; but he is passive and does want to be a woman. Being an incomplete female, the male spends his life attempting to complete himself, to become female. He attempts to do this by constantly seeking out, fraternizing with and trying to live through and fuse with the female, and by claiming as his own all female characteristics—emotional strength and independence, forcefulness, dynamism, decisiveness, coolness, objectivity, assertiveness, courage, integrity, vitality, intensity, depth of character, grooviness, etc.—and projecting onto women all male traits—vanity, frivolity, triviality, weakness, etc. It should be said, though, that the male has one glaring area of superiority over the female—public relations. (He has done a brilliant job of convincing millions of women that men are women and women are men.) The male claim that females find fulfillment through motherhood and sexuality reflects what males think they’d find fulfilling if they were female. Women, in other words, don’t have penis envy; men have pussy envy.” (SCUM Manifesto)

“Screwing is, for a man, a defense against his desire to be female. Sex is itself a sublimation.” (SCUM Manifesto)