Simone de Beauvoir Quotes

I'm not ashamed to dress "like a woman" because I don't think it's shameful to be a woman.

I see myself as quite feminine. But many people seem to think differently about that; sometimes people mistake me for a man. In Paris I often hear 'bonjour monsieur'.

I grew up in a very patriarchal family. And I believe that I like being a woman. I act behaving like a woman.

They always said to me that I needed to be more feminine. I think it's so wrong. Being boisterous doesn't mean you are not feminine.

Those that think my clothes are androgynous also still believe that women should look like Barbie dolls. That's precisely the problem, the deep-rooted assumptions about what is feminine.

I hate men who are in touch with their feminine side.

Ah, well, do I wish that we lived in a world where gender didn't figure so prominently? Of course. Do I even think about myself as a woman when I go to make art? Of course not.

I do believe that it's something that we don't talk about, but when there are clearly defined gender roles, it is much simpler. Because you don't have to think, which people apparently don't like to do.

In a family of all girls, I was always the 'boy' in my mind - the protector, the masculine one. No one would ever have to worry about me.

No, I have never wanted to be a man. I have often wanted to be more effective as a woman, but I have never felt that trousers would do the trick!

I was really raised in a gender-neutral household. I always knew I was a girl, but it never occurred to me that there was a limitation.

I'm pretty feminine.

I feel like it's too easy to just say, "We'll just change the name of this male character to a female, but have her do all the same things that a male does." I don't believe in that. I think there's something else. I think there's more to women than that.

It would be a thousand pities if women wrote like men, or lived like men, or looked like men, for if two sexes are quite inadequate, considering the vastness and variety of the world, how should we manage with one only? Ought not education to bring out and fortify the differences rather than the similarities?

After a long time spent learning how to write as a woman instead of as an honorary man, I was able to come back to Earthsea and write the next three books in another and newer tradition: that of questioning, rather than accepting, the gendering of power as male.

I don't think about being male or female, I just behave naturally. I think in terms of excellence in science, not gender.

I think in times of fear and hysteria in a culture, gender experimentation as it pertains to men has to go underground because it scares people too much and it's too much for people to take on. Especially when a culture is held hostage by fear and hysteria and fundamentalism.

I knew I wasn't the person to play Ponyboy because I'm a girl, but without knowing it, I understand that was a place I could put all the stuff that I was feeling.

I want to say that the way in which we understand gender actually changes the way we live gender.

Would it upset men if they found out we weren't different? Are we? Aren't we? Damned if I know.

The problem with gender is that it prescribes how we should be, rather than recognising how we are.

I don't think men are the enemy. I think women are the enemy.

I am a feminist. I reject wholeheartedly the way we are taught to perceive women. The beauty of women, how a woman should act or behave. Women are strong and fragile. Women are beautiful and ugly. We are soft-spoken and loud, all at once. There is something mind-controlling about the way we're taught to view women.

It is fatal to be a man or woman pure and simple; one must be woman-manly or man-womanly. It is fatal for a woman to lay the least stress on any grievance; to plead even with justice any cause; in any way to speak consciously as a woman. And fatal is no figure of speech; for anything written with that conscious bias is doomed to death. It ceases to be fertilized.