Frances M. Beal Quotes

Men were only made into 'men' with great difficulty even in primitive society: the male is not naturally 'a man' any more than the woman. He has to be propped up into that position with some ingenuity, and is always likely to collapse.

If you're a man, you don't have to worry about your manliness.

In the last two or three decades, there's been a feminization of the man in popular media that I've never really understood.

I'm not macho, I'm not a Mel Gibson sort of person.

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.

Men are recognizing that they have been forced to conform to a very narrow and rather two-dimensional picture of maleness and manhood that they have never had the freedom to question.

No, real men don't watch 'Deuce Bigelow.'

I woke up one morning and realised that one of the problems with being a middle-aged man - of being a man in general - is the tyranny of fashion.

I'm very conditioned by my surroundings, by the influences of social media, by the television I watch. And I always found, growing up, that even inspiring female characters or complex female characters in television and film, I often found that their complexity was actually just another facet of their sexuality.

We also ought to recognize that unpaid labor falls predominantly to women. The other thing I would do in countries like the U.S. is to show more men, even in TV ads, doing household work. Only two percent of ads show men doing chores, and yet we know they actually do several hours of it in real life. Those images affect young boys and girls.

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.

I think it's interesting being American, the expectations for an American guy, and the image that has to be projected. 'Oh, I can't wear pink,' that kind of stuff. There's none of that in Europe.

Some gal would giggle and I'd get red, and some guy'd laugh and I'd bust his head. I tell ya, life ain't easy for a boy named Sue.

Women are mere "beauties" in men's culture so that culture can be kept male. When women in culture show character, they are not desirable, as opposed to the desirable, artless ingenue.

Being a male capable of grunting, sweating, and not asking for directions, but not yet having conqured a women...in our culture, that wasn't manhood, that was dorksville!

There are no dumb male questions. There are dumb males, but not dumb male questions.

I must say I can appreciate it when males are very male. Like Harrison [Ford], for instance. He's pretty butch. I guess I prefer butch to terribly fey.

We have been in the process of reprogramming men and the way they are raised for a long time.

How can I be a man if there is no role model?

Sex is the refuge of the mindless. And the more mindless the woman, the more deeply embedded in the male "culture," in short, the nicer she is, the more sexual she is. The nicest women in our "society" are raving sex maniacs.

I'm a very feminine man. I like feminine things. I don't go to strip clubs. I don't drink beer. I don't play sports.

I'm trying to illuminate how perilously narrow we draw the concepts of masculinity and sexuality in our male culture.

We teach girls that they cannot be sexual beings in the way that boys are. If we have sons, we don't mind knowing about our sons' girlfriends, but our daughters' boyfriends? God forbid. But of course when the time is right, we expect those girls to bring back the perfect man to be their husband.

Power has for so long been a male construct that it distorted the shape of the first women who tried it on, only to find themselves in a sort of straitjacket.

A woman has all too much substance in a man's eyes at the best of times. That is why men like women to be slim. Her lack of flesh negates her. The less of her there is, the less notice he need take of her. The more like a male she appears to be, the safer he feels.