Pamela Adlon Quotes

Some people look gender non-conforming because they want to look that way - they don't want to conform to society's expectations.

As societies continue to loosen their standards regarding what is appropriate female and male behavior, I think we are going to realize we have not only underestimated women, but also men.

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.

What I do know is that traditional gender roles are very real and flipping the norm is difficult for even the strongest, funniest, smartest men.

Even in 'Victor/Victoria,' there was talk about what it means to be a woman, what it means to be a man. You didn't get that in the old days, in 'Charley's Aunt' or 'Some Like It Hot.'

I think our society has sort of built this gender binary, and the way we've said it exists does not really exist in nature.

I do not feel that some things are masculine and others are feminine.

I'm of the opinion that gender is a social construct.

I absolutely think it is more acceptable for people who were assigned female at birth to dress in a typically gender non-conforming way. There was a time when people of all genders had long hair and anyone who wanted to wore jewelry - it was more a sign of status than a sign of femininity, per se.

We've been socialised and told that there is a way to describe people, and that way is by their gender or their sex.

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 am not metrosexual. I am not macho. I am normal. I don't even wear nail paint.

I felt alien my whole life, but I didn't feel alien because of my gender. Other people made me aware of my gender.

I know people want me to sort of defend myself, to sit here and be like, 'I'm a boy, but I wear make-up sometimes.' But, you know, to me, it doesn't really matter.

I wanted to show a normal young girl whose only difference was that she behaved in the way a boy might, without any sense of guilt on a moral or sexual level.

I'm an only child, so I never had sisters to tell me what I should like based on my gender. I liked what the boys were doing and thought: 'Why let them have all the fun?'

I think we're struggling with trying to redefine various positions at this point in history. To allow freedom for women, freedom for men, freedom from those sharply defined gender roles.

When I was born, there was a very isolated idea of what it meant to be a man or a woman, and you belonged to one gender or the other.

Being a parent of a boy who wants to wear sparkles and grow his hair long - especially when you don't know where it's all going to go - it's hard stuff. I'm not being politically incorrect in acknowledging that, am I?

There is more difference within the sexes than between them.

As a result of 50 years of emancipation, feminine qualities were dying out or being transferred to the males. Pansies of both sexes were everywhere, not yet completely homosexual, but confused not knowing what they were. The result was a herd of unhappy sexual misfits... the women wanting to dominate and the men to be nannied.

Masculine and feminine roles are not biologically fixed but socially constructed.

We act as if that being of a man or that being of a woman is actually an internal reality or something that is simply true about us, a fact about us, but actually it's a phenomenon that is being produced all the time and reproduced all the time, so to say gender is performative is to say that nobody really is a gender from the start.

Girls can wear jeans, cut their hair short, wear shirts and boots, 'cause it's okay to be a boy, but for a boy to look like a girl is degrading.

I do feel like I'm a tomboy at heart, so I have an easy time working with guys.