Rose McGowan Quotes

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.

When I was really young, my mum used to make my clothes - I hated that. I liked the way boys dressed - I still do. I wanted to wear what they wore.

I was raised to think women had babies, stayed at home, and men worked. By the time I got ready to do it, I thought I had all the answers. Only somebody had changed the questions.

There are certain expectations placed on writers if other people have put a value on their gender. I'm aware of the hundreds of tiny differences that happen when people are seeing your gender before they see something else.

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

One way I try to manage it is by not having a princess party for my daughter and trying to do things that are not so stereotyped. But if she's invited to a princess party, of course I'm not going to stop her going.

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.

It was so fascinating to be a part of this, because as the women took on these central roles that had all the good lines, therefore all the good laughs, all the great moments- the men, who had joined us to sit on stage, started squirming rather uncomfortably. And got really bored. Because they weren't used to being the supporting cast. It was fascinating to feel their discomfort, to discuss it with them afterwards when they said, 'It's boring to play the girl role.' And I said, 'Yeah. Yeah, ya think? Welcome to our world.'

I have always felt one of the things dance should do - its business being so clearly physical - is challenge the culture's gender stereotypes.

If you're a man and you have big tits, don't wear a tight T-shirt, okay? It confuses the children!

She has very strong ideas about family - ideas that probably sound kind of sexist to you. She believes all dhampirs should train and put in time as guardians, but that the women should eventually return home to raise their children together. But not the men? No, he said wryly. She thinks men still need to stay out there and kill Strigoi.

I don't think men try to make women be like them, but I think women try to make men be like them, a lot.

Ladies and gentlemen are supposed to be looked after by others, like children and pets.

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

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

Maleness in America is not absolutely defined; it has to be kept and re-earned every day, and one essential element in the definition is beating women in every game that both sexes play.

Leaning her silly, beautiful, drunken head on my shoulder, she said, "Oh, Esther, I don't want to be a feminist. I don't enjoy it. It's no fun." "I know," I said. "I don't either." People think you decide to be a "radical," for God's sake, like deciding to be a librarian or a ship's chandler. You "make up your mind," you "commit yourself" (sounds like a mental hospital, doesn't it?). I said Don't worry, we could be buried together and have engraved on our tombstone the awful truth, which some day somebody will understand: WE WUZ PUSHED.

And that is a hard route for a woman to come through. There's still a lot of roles that have to be conformed to. It's quite an old fashioned environment in a lot of ways.

I've worked in pubs for years and you get people challenging you. Challenging your masculinity.

I dare say you marvel sometimes at my independent way of walking through the world just as if nature had made me of your sex instead of poor Eve's. Trust me, my beloved friend, the mind has no sex but what habit and education give it, and I who was thrown in infancy upon the world like a wreck upon the waters have learned, as well to struggle with the elements as any male child of Adam.

Liberation and equal-rights issues notwithstanding, it was a man's job to make a woman feel cherished and respected.

The Olinka girls do not believe girls should be educated. When I asked a mother why she thought this, she said: A girl is nothing to herself; only to her husband can she become something. What can she become? I asked. Why, she said, the mother of his children. But I am not the mother of anybody's children, I said, and I am something.

The average woman is at the head of something with which she can do as she likes; the average man has to obey orders and do nothing else.

Isn't it interesting how men 'leave' their families, but women 'abandon' their children?

In America, more than anywhere else in the world, care has been taken constantly to trace clearly distinct spheres of action for the two sexes, and both are required to keep in step, but along paths that are never the same.