Jo Brand Quotes

Women today are bombarded with so many messages, like we should have Naomi Campbell's body and Madeleine Albright's career.

Are you trivialising the sisterhood if you dye your hair or have your eyebrows threaded? I'd say the answer to that is no. But equally, it's a perfectly valid feminist thing to say there is a certain amount of attention on a woman's appearance, and I don't wish that to be the focus or a distraction.

The main criticism that I get is, 'Aren't you just conforming to a patriarchal standard of beauty?' Well, this is just the body I was given. I didn't do anything to it - it's just my body. But even if I had altered it, that would be fine, too.

For girls growing up, sometimes I think they get the wrong idea for what women should look like.

Whenever a female takes a strong stand for herself, the majority of the time they have to really, really narrow it down to being feminine and wearing dresses and just being lipstick chic.

There are so many images pushed at women and so many ideas of what you're supposed to be. I think there's too much of this superwoman, this woman with a bottom like two billiard balls. There's no real celebration of just being a person.

If taking one-self seriously as a woman means committing to a life of grooming, pumicing, pruning and polishing one's exterior for the benefit of onlookers, then I may as well leave my unwieldy rucksack to the top of a bleak Scottish hill and make my home there under a stone, where I'll fashion shoes out of mud and clothes out of leaves.

When women make their image about youth and sexuality, and not about intellect, that's kind of a dead-end road. So I think it's a combination of self-entrapment and entrapment by society.

I wish we lived in a world where how you looked or what you wore wasn't an issue for men or women, and it's by and large not an issue for men, so I wish it wasn't an issue for women, but it is.

It's really, really tough being a woman. I think about getting work done all the time. Look at Nicole Kidman - her face is completely done.

I think it's good for a woman to put on a bit of weight when she gets older - it looks better. But a man has to stay balanced.

Women must be freed from the idea that they always have to stay young and that they must disfigure themselves at a certain age.

If it was up to me, I would just wear jeans and t-shirts, even to red carpets, but then no one would photograph me, so that would make me very sad. So you know, I've gotta keep up with the rest of the female population and sometimes try a little harder.

I feel, at times, women in India go beyond their comfort zone just to clad the trend, and that automatically becomes a faux pas. If you are not comfortable with something, please don't wear it.

Women are 'expected' to have skinny waists yet still be voluptuous. People surrounding us tell us we need to eat but then look at us in disgust if we cross the invisible line of overeating.

I think that our culture is doing something to women - let's say women in their late 30s and 40s and probably even 50s, - where they really are expected to keep this insane level of fitness and youth. I find that just a real waste of women's lives. I really do think that.

I hate to say it, but one of the worst things you could be called when I was younger was unfeminine.

My general idea of the world is that I'm not different at all because I'm a girl. So I get blindsided sometimes because I forget that that's a thing.

I'm used to being told by society that I must regulate my body to fit the norm. I'm used to the fact that images of unaltered women are seen as unacceptable.

When you're a woman, you have such a strange relationship with your body because - especially when you're in the public eye - you're constantly being judged.

We live in a culture that does not encourage women to be epic heroes of their own Big Stories but the mothers and lovers and wives and mistresses and muses and personal assistants, the femme fatales and fantasies and manic pixie dream girls, in someone else's Big Story, and this someone else is usually a dude.

Our society is constantly creating this framework for girls to feel that their only worth is their appearance, and it's damaging on so many levels to so many people.

I was very self-conscious about my body from a young age. At school, I played football and netball and did ballet as well so was very athletic. I wasn't curvaceous; I had muscles on my arms and shoulders. Often I felt like hiding them rather than showing them off, as I felt they were masculine.

We can't shame women for trying to be beautiful. That's so mean and unfair. But there's a part of me that thinks it's really sad, too. It's very complicated.

I don't think 'Motherhood' is a map for women. I would never say that it's a template for every woman in response to her biology.