Deeyah Khan Quotes

I can hear the roar of women's silence.

I think being a woman is like being Irish. Everyone says you're important and nice, but you take second place all the same.

Anyone who hates something feels threatened by it. A guy who says he hates feminism (a) doesn't understand or know feminism, and (b) is scared of powerful women. Most attacks come from fear.

This is what the media does with women. You try to divide and conquer women so you can intimidate and victimise them. This is why they don't make movies where a lot of women get to be on set together. It's about dividing.

The cost of speaking out is so high for women, I understand why most decide not to.

As women, we need to stand together. We are judged and objectified often enough by men.

The battle with Men Who Explain Things has trampled down many women - of my generation, of the up-and-coming generation we need so badly, here and in Pakistan and Bolivia and Java, not to speak of the countless women who came before me and were not allowed into the laboratory, or the library, or the conversation, or the revolution, or even the category called human.

The stereotypes of feminists as ugly, or man-haters, or hairy, or whatever it is - that's really strategic. That's a really smart way to keep young women away from feminism, is to kind of put out this idea that all feminists hate men, or all feminists are ugly; and that they really come from a place of fear.

My own contentious relationship with gaming continued through high school and college: I still enjoyed playing games from time to time, but I always found myself pushed away by the sexism that permeated gaming culture. There were constant reminders that I didn't really belong.

I wanted to write a voice that for me, as a reader, had been missing from the chorus: the voice of an angry woman.

I'm amazed by the misconceptions about Muslim women and the Arab world that I hear, and that really does hurt me.

Most Muslim women know it is fear and curiosity that cause people to stare. They know it is ignorance and stereotypes that cause people to suppose that a piece of material covering the hair strips a woman of the ability to speak English, pursue a career, work a remote control.

Women are being welcomed into science fiction, but it's through the back door.

People used to feel oddly empowered to tell me all the reasons I couldn't win. Because I was a woman. Because I was a lesbian. Because I was from the West Side of Manhattan.

Women's Lib? Poor little things. They always look so unhappy. Have you noticed how bitter their faces are?

I think a lot of people love to convolute what everyone else does in order to disempower women.

I've found that people get particularly frustrated and shut down when women in fiction are disgusting or disordered.

The industry is quite chauvinistic generally. Expectations of women, girls, what they should look like, how they should be, what they should say, what they should wear, how their hair should be, what colour their skin should be.

We are witnessing a very slow and painful cultural shift. Some male gamers with a deep sense of entitlement are terrified of change. They believe games should continue to cater exclusively to young heterosexual men with ever more extreme virtual power fantasies.

You would never expect a black woman to be the hero.

Women have a predestination to suffering.

Women are so powerful they're scary, and the incentive to squash this has been going on for so long that some of us actually believe we're subordinate.

If you look at any other group of people suffering injustice, women are always in the worst situation within that group.

Women should be obscene and not heard.

All my life, the naysayers have told me that I can't win because I'm a progressive... because I'm a woman... even because I'm a lesbian.