Courtney Barnett Quotes

And also I think particularly as a female, you're taught to be defensive your whole life. You're taught not to be aggressive.

Little girls as children, I think, are expected to behave better. If a boy's naughty at school, he's a little bit cheeky and mischievous. If a girl's naughty, she's trouble.

We have been very conditioned by the cultures that we come from and are usually very identified with the particular gender that we happen to be a member of.

When childhood ended, I had to suppress feminine characteristics and try and be a boy. I didn't want to grow up at all because it meant becoming someone else.

Men and women study things differently, and it's not because of our chromosomes. It's a product of our cultural conditioning.

[Feminists think difference in men and women] is all social. It is all about social cliches and pressures, that if you just leave boys and girls alone they're gonna grow up and be identical. They're gonna be the same in the way they look at life, the way they find things interesting. Nothing could be further from the truth.

We are in effect enculturating kids from the very beginning to see women and girls as not taking up half of the space.

I think there's a whole bunch of things that go along with being a girl. You're not supposed to have opinions or be tough or strong. You're supposed to be soft and vulnerable, and I find those qualities important in both men and women.

The parts for women, you're either like the quietly suffering wife or the wild girl.

Four of my children are daughters, and I've watched them devote themselves to reading books about how little girls learn to become women - how they learn to deal with boys and men, and the different hurdles females have to go over.

As you get older it's more confusing. Suddenly, there's more pressure to fit in to your assigned gender.

I grew up as a tomboy, so I'm used to being around guys.

I don't pretend there aren't biological differences, but I don't believe the desire for leadership is hardwired biology, not the desire to win or excel. I believe that it's socialization, that we're socializing our daughters to nurture and our boys to lead.

What we ought to see in the agonies of puberty is the result of the conditioning that maims the female personality in creating the feminine.

I think when I was quite younger, I was always quite a tomboy.

It is very difficult for girls. They're told to look one way, but to act another way.

I don't think most men do hate women at all - I think most men are trying their best and facing a culturation into masculine behaviour that forces them to deny their own humanity and to exaggerate distance from the world of women.

Parenting girls makes you quite gender-conscious - it's almost impossible to fight the power of pink. It's not such a terrible thing to want to be a princess when you're five, but it would be nice if there were some other options.

I was such a tomboy when I was young. I hated girls' clothes.

There is no longer a doubt that women are just as competent as men. Gender differences are guided by nurture, as society treats boys and girls differently from an early age.

I behaved the way I was taught to behave: like a woman in the company of men. If you behaved aggressively in the company of men, they wouldn't accept you.

I feel like I think like a woman because I grew up with my mother and my sister, so I've just been programmed to think like a girl.

I think young men and boys are taught to fail. It's nothing to them; they do sport, they fall over, they shout, 'I'm all right,' and carry on. But with girls, they're so appallingly embarrassed to fail, it's like it's considered unfeminine.

I had always been pegged for being feminine. People would always say, 'Ooh, that's a pretty little girl.' They would talk about my eyelashes or that I was sensitive or that I was crying all the time. I didn't want to play in the dirt outside with the boys.

There is a mindset that has to be changed - the sense of entitlement of the man. That happens when you are bringing up someone. If you are going to differentiate between a boy and a girl from age zero, then he is bound to grow up with the sense of entitlement.