Femininity Quotes
The fact that we are all trained to be mothers from infancy on means that we are all trained to devote our lives to men, whether they are our sons or not; that we are all trained to force other women to exemplify the lack of qualities which characterizes the cultural construct of femininity.
Andrea Dworkin
Unconscious assumptions or opinions are the worst enemy of woman; they can even grow into a positively demonic passion that exasperates and disgusts men, and does the woman herself the greatest injury by gradually smothering the charm and meaning of her femininity and driving it into the background. Such a development naturally ends in profound psychological disunion, in short, in a neurosis.
Carl Jung
Imagine that for hundreds of years your most formative traumas, your daily suffering and pain, the abuse you live through, the terror you live with, are unspeakable - not the basis of literature. You grow up with your father holding you down and covering your mouth so another man can make a horrible searing pain between your legs.... You learn how to leave your body and create someone else who takes over when you cannot stand it any more. You develop a self who is ingratiating and obsequious and imitative and aggressively passive and silent - you learn, in a word, femininity.
Catharine MacKinnon
Femininity is not just lipstick, stylish hairdos, and trendy clothes. It is the divine adornment of humanity. It finds expression in your qualities of your capacity to love, your spirituality, delicacy, radiance, sensitivity, creativity, charm, graciousness, gentleness, dignity, and quiet strength.
James E. Faust
I think we won't be able to understand the operations of trans-phobia, homophobia, if we don't understand how certain kinds of links are forged between gender and sexuality in the minds of those who want masculinity to be absolutely separate from femininity and heterosexuality to be absolutely separate from homosexuality.
Judith Butler
An efficient woman secretary is the perfect assistant. Her role is not confined to taking dictation and "tapping out" letters; she must also file letters and replies, memorize addresses, and turn herself into a walking index. She must possess all the virtues of a departmental head, as well as those of a woman. Being a woman, she has intuition; she can keep intact the self-esteem of her superiors, and she spreads and agreeable atmosphere about the office. At the same time she must not make her femininity obvious, for if one of her superiors should become too conscious of it, the work would suffer. A difficult balance, but one that can be maintained.
André Maurois
The female life-force is characterized as a negative one: we are defined as inherently masochistic. [. . .] Sexual masochism actualizes female negativity, just as sexual sadism actualizes male positivity. A woman's erotic femininity is measured by the degree to which she needs to be hurt, needs to be possessed, needs to be abused, needs to submit, needs to be beaten, needs to be humiliated, needs to be degraded.
Andrea Dworkin
In America, the best model yet for the first woman president can be found among the Texas feminists, notably Governor Ann Richards. East Coast feminists, like Gloria Steinem, who created the smug, superior feminist smirk (done to an unctuous turn by NOW president Patricia Ireland), have failed to produce a credible persona for national leadership, partly because of their juvenile, jeering attitude towards men. The irony is that the legal and media world inhabited by Steinem and her cronies is filled with bookish white-collar men who are the only ones in the world who actually listen to feminists rhetoric and can be guilt-tripped into trying to obey it. ... In Texas, unlike the urban Northeast, men are men. Women politicians in that state have the toughness and grit to handle men at their most macho. Southern women, particularly those of the plantation-belt, "iron magnolia” school, are able to get what they want and still retain their graceful femininity.
Camille Paglia