Mary Elizabeth Ellis Quotes

People try to make women a very specific thing so that we like them.

In my opinion it is a grave error for women to feel that they must move only in women's interests... . What, after all, would we think if men all got together and kept doing things that were supposed to be in the interest of men?

People put stock in someone being in a 'girl group,' but we don't say that a band is a 'man group.'

We are still vulnerable to gender-targeted marketing no matter how carefully we edit our children's bookshelves.

When you write, you are not either sex. But when you're read you are definitely gendered.

When my friends and I would act out movies as kids, we'd play the guys' roles, since they had the most interesting things to do. Decades later, I can hardly believe my sons and daughter are seeing many of the same limited choices in current films.

No one knows 'men' as such, any more than anyone knows 'women,' and if they do generalise they're probably trying to hide their own ignorance. You might know one 'man,' yes, or even lots of individual 'men'.

There aren't good roles for women: the female parts aren't developed: the women are serving the men.

In a lot of TV shows out there, the women are the weak ones, and the men are the strong ones.

Both men and women are really vast and boundless and yet in many films we're told that they're not. We're told they can only be one thing - like handsome and charming and that's it. Nothing more.

Boys will be boys. And even that wouldn't matter if only we could prevent girls from being girls.

I get the feeling that characters are written female when they have to be, and all the other characters are male, and it doesn't occur to somebody that the lawyer, the best friend, the landlord, whoever, can be female.

It's not at all a far jump to think that overall perceptions of gender - and what is and is not important in gender roles - would carry over from life to fiction.

History suggests that opposite gender debates, unfortunately, are accompanied by a host of expectations. Each candidate must tread carefully or risk running afoul of the gender stereotype they are subconsciously expected to conform to.

I'm saying the excessive focus on what gender a person is, rather than what they do, does a disservice to women.

One of the main problems of our time is that men are deprived of their human qualities that are wrongly called feminine, and women are deprived of their human qualities that are wrongly called masculine.

I'm not interested in making movies only with female protagonists. I think it's ridiculous to think that a female director can't direct men. That makes no sense to me.

Mia: I can't do this, I'm a girl. Gym Teacher Harbula: What am I? A duck?

People aren't comfortable thinking of women as people. Like we're not people, we're women, and that means something completely different, especially when you have power.

I think it would be folly to expect that women will ever dominate or even approach equal representation in a large number of areas simply because their aptitudes, abilities and interests are different for physiological reasons.

One distressing thing is the way men react to women who assert their equality: their ultimate weapon is to call them unfeminine. They think she is anti-male; they even whisper that she's probably a lesbian.

In regards to being female, I don't really think about it in the same way that other people do. I prefer to focus on my job rather than my gender. I'm still amazed that people think it's a big deal.

I think there are a lot of rules for women. We have a lot of expectations and a lot of rules for women. So we're expected to march in a straight line, and when we don't, all hell breaks loose.

An actor is something less than a man, while an actress is something more than a woman.

As an agent, I functioned like a guy. But the fact that I was a woman affected everything.