Girls
Quotes - I took on the shape of a girl.
“When
at 15, my girlfriends started dropping out of their beloved sports teams,
because they didn’t want to appear muscle-y, when at 18, my male friends were
unable to express their feelings, I decided that I was a feminist.”
―
Emma Watson
“Does
that new man in your life call his ex "a slut", "a whore",
"a bitch", "psycho" , "crazy", "a
nutter" etc etc. Chances are, whatever he's calling his ex right now,
he'll be calling you when things don't go his way. Be warned.”
―
Miya Yamanouchi, Embrace Your Sexual Self: A Practical Guide for Women
“Girls
are the only ones who can really give each other close attention, the kind we
equate with being loved. They noticed what we want noticed.
And
that's what I did for Tamar, I responded to her symbols. To the style of her
hair and clothes and the smell of her L'Air Du Temps perfume. Like this was
data that mattered. Signs that reflected something of her inner self. I took
her beauty personally.”
―
Emma Cline, The Girls
“Does
he ever eat cotton candy for breakfast?"
He
stepped around the counter to face us, lowered his gaze, and took a sip from
the black mug in his hands.
"No,"
I said. "He's very much like the Big Bad Wolf. He eats little girls for
breakfast."
He
spoke from behind the cup, his voice deep and as smooth as butterscotch.
"She's wrong. I eat big girls for breakfast.”
―
Darynda Jones, The Curse of Tenth Grave
“Making
God a man is the consolation prize that our forefathers gave themselves for not
being the ones who were each blessed with a vagina.”
―
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
“I'm
sorry I left without telling you," she says. "I wasn't ready. I
wanted it so much, and I wasn't ready for that.”
―
Nina LaCour, You Know Me Well
“I
don't think it's really about being bitchy or demanding or cold or calculating:
those characteristics, after all, can be attached to most women with even the
paltriest of evidence. I think, quite frankly, that the world simply does not
care for the complicated girls, the ones who seem too dark, too deep, too
vibrant, too opinionated...”
―
Elizabeth Wurtzel, Bitch: In Praise of Difficult Women
“I
think too often we forget that girls can like sport; we are not biologically
programmed to detest it, we are - in the main - conditioned against it. But
shouldn’t we try to change that?”
―
Anna Kessel, Eat Sweat Play: How Sport Can Change Our Lives
“If
girls realized their responsibilities they would be so careful when they smiled
that they would probably abandon the practice altogether. There are moments in
a man's life when a girl's smile can have as important results as an explosion
of dynamite.”
―
P.G. Wodehouse, Something Fresh
“I
took on the shape of a girl.”
―
Emma Cline, The Girls
“In
a patriarchal society, one of the most important functions of the institution
of the family is to make feel like a somebody whenever he is in his own yard a
man who is a nobody whenever he is in his employer’s yard.”
―
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
“When
I think of New York City, I think of all the girls, the Jewish girls, the
Italian girls, the Irish, Polack, Chinese, German, Negro, Spanish, Russian
girls, all on parade in the city. I don't know whether it's something special
with me or whether every man in the city walks around with the same feeling
inside him, but I feel as though I'm at a picnic in this city. I like to sit
near the women in the theaters, the famous beauties who've taken six hours to
get ready and look it. And the young girls at the football games, with the red
cheeks, and when the warm weather comes, the girls in their summer dresses . .
.”
―
Irwin Shaw, Short Stories of Irwin Shaw
“Guys
who fuck a lot of women are happy motherfuckers but, girls who fuck a lot of
guys are miserable.”
―
Patrice O’Neal
“Some
women wear a miniskirt to reveal their thighs; some wear one to conceal their
age.”
―
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
“I'm
older now, I'm a man getting near middle age, putting on a little fat and I
still love to walk along Fifth Avenue at three o'clock on the east side of the
street between Fiftieth and Fifty-seventh streets, they're all out then, making
believe they're shopping, in their furs and their crazy hats, everything all
concentrated from all over the world into eight blocks, the best furs, the best
clothes, the handsomest women, out to spend money and feeling good about it,
looking coldly at you, making believe they're not looking at you as you go
past.”
―
Irwin Shaw, Short Stories of Irwin Shaw
“Some
people’s self-esteem was secretly improved when they discovered that their
then-lovers had killed themselves over them.”
―
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
“Girls
should be taught at school that giving birth to an unnaturally over-sized
western baby that no longer fits down the birth canal may lead to a multitude
of long term health problems.”
―
Steven Magee
“Girls
with poison necklaces
to
save themselves from torture.
Just
as women wear amulets
which
hold their rolled up fortunes
transcribed
on ola leaf.”
―
Michael Ondaatje, Handwriting
“Boys",
she says, "just aren't very good at being afraid.”
―
Maggie Stiefvater, The Scorpio Races
“Us
girls deserve more than one song. We deserve more than one pledge of
solidarity. We deserve better songs than any boy will ever write about us.”
―
Jessica Hopper
“if
you say!
"A
woman is A problem"
Gentleman,
"Probably
you have never seen her sweeter part”
―
Qalandar Nawaz
“And
no matter what
closet
we were thrown in,
up
what river we were sold
for
an embarrassment,
or
worse, traded
for
a bottle of gin--
we’d
carry on in
playful
stitches, friends
‘til
the end…which came
sooner
than wished.”
―
Kristen Henderson, Of My Maiden Smoking
“I’m
going to say this once here, and then—because it is obvious—I will not repeat
it in the course of this book: not all boys engage in such behavior, not by a
long shot, and many young men are girls’ staunchest allies. However, every girl
I spoke with, every single girl—regardless of her class, ethnicity, or sexual
orientation; regardless of what she wore, regardless of her appearance—had been
harassed in middle school, high school, college, or, often, all three. Who,
then, is truly at risk of being “distracted” at school?
At
best, blaming girls’ clothing for the thoughts and actions of boys is
counterproductive. At worst, it’s a short step from there to “she was asking
for it.” Yet, I also can’t help but feel that girls such as Camila, who favors
what she called “more so-called provocative” clothing, are missing something.
Taking up the right to bare arms (and legs and cleavage and midriffs) as a
feminist rallying cry strikes me as suspiciously Orwellian. I recall the simple
litmus test for sexism proposed by British feminist Caitlin Moran, one that
Camila unconsciously referenced: Are the guys doing it, too? “If they aren’t,”
Moran wrote, “chances are you’re dealing with what we strident feminists refer
to as ‘some total fucking bullshit.’”
So
while only girls get catcalled, it’s also true that only girls’ fashions urge
body consciousness at the very youngest ages. Target offers bikinis for
infants. The Gap hawks “skinny jeans” for toddlers. Preschoolers worship Disney
princesses, characters whose eyes are larger than their waists. No one is
trying to convince eleven-year-old boys to wear itty-bitty booty shorts or bare
their bellies in the middle of winter. As concerned as I am about the policing
of girls’ sexuality through clothing, I also worry about the incessant drumbeat
of self-objectification: the pressure on young women to reduce their worth to
their bodies and to see those bodies as a collection of parts that exist for
others’ pleasure; to continuously monitor their appearance; to perform rather
than to feel sensuality. I recall a conversation I had with Deborah Tolman, a
professor at Hunter College and perhaps the foremost expert on teenage girls’
sexual desire. In her work, she said, girls had begun responding “to questions
about how their bodies feel—questions about sexuality or arousal—by describing
how they think they look. I have to remind them that looking good is not a
feeling.”
―
Peggy Orenstein
