Me, I believe in monogamy in much the s... - Laurie Penny - Quotes.Pub

Me, I believe in monogamy in much the same way as I believe in, say, cheese on toast. I’ll eat it, but only for very special people, and not for every meal. There are other interesting and delicious toast options out there, and I support people’s right to investigate those options without being punished.

Laurie Penny Quotes

Sometimes you have to decide between doing what you love and being loveable, and the decision is always painful.

I’m sure that Trump wants to sit in a shiny chair in the Oval Office and have people tell him all day that he’s the most powerful and impressive man in the world, and I’m just as sure that he doesn’t want to be bothered with the actual business of government.

If you’re a woman and somebody calls you ‘attention seeking’, that’s a sure way to tell you’ve made an impact.

According to the current logic of online misogyny a woman’s right to self-expression is less important by far than a man’s right to punish her for that self-expression.

Feminism, like wealth, does not trickle down, and while a small number of extremely privileged women worry about the glass ceiling, the cellar is filling up with water, and millions of women and girls and their children are crammed in there, looking up as the flood creeps around their ankles, closes around their knees, inches up to their necks.

Fake tiaras and fashion handbooks play into the collective fantasy that one day, if you are beautiful and good enough, you too can marry the inbred great-great-grandchild of some bloodless aristocrat whose distant relations were better at murdering huge numbers of peasants than some other bloodless aristocrat.

Every so often I wonder why I didn’t become a restaurant critic. They get free dinners. Being a feminist journalist, I get free death threats.

It was always somebody else’s apocalypse. Until it wasn’t.

We can have everything we want as long as what we want is a life spent searching for exhausting work that doesn’t pay enough, shopping for things we don’t need and sticking to a set of social and sexual rules that turn out, once you plough through the layers of trash and adverts, to be as rigid as ever.

That’s how oppression works. Thousands of otherwise decent people are persuaded to go along with an unfair system because changing it seems like too much bother. The appropriate response when somebody demands a change in that unfair system is to listen, rather than turn away or yell, as a child might, that it’s not your fault. Of course it isn’t your fault. I’m sure you’re lovely. That doesn’t mean you don’t have a responsibility to do something about it.

The problem is capitalism. The problem is that in order to sell seven billion people on the necessity of globalisation, we’ve created a moral universe where people who do not work to create profit are considered less than human, and used as surplus labour to drive down the cost of wages.

This is one of the reasons why women, and particularly young women, have adapted particularly well to the way in which social media and the capitalisation of the social realm requires everyone to apply the logic of branding to our own lives in order to gain followers. We have always been encouraged to understand femininity as a form of branding, albeit one burnt into our flesh at birth.

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.

Feminism has never just been about liberating women from men, but about freeing every human being from the straitjacket of gender oppression.

The best way to stop girls achieving anything is to force them to achieve everything.

The fact that ‘attention seeking’ is still considered a slur says much about the role of women in public life, on every scale.

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.

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.

The reason the word Feminism has power is because the concept has power and the reason it has power is because people are still afraid of it.

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

There comes a time when you have to decide whether to change yourself to fit the story, or change the story itself. The decision gets a little easier if you understand that refusing to shape your life and personality to the contours of an unjust world is the best way to start creating a new one. There.

Everyone who was ever told a fairytale knows what happens to women who do their own magic.

If all women on earth woke up tomorrow feeling truly positive and powerful in their own bodies, the economies of the globe would collapse overnight.

Stories matter. Stories are how we make sense of the world, which doesn’t mean that those stories can’t be stupid and simplistic and full of lies. Stories can exaggerate and offend and they always, always matter.

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.

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