Eniola Aluko Quotes

You think that being a girl is degrading, but secretly, you'd love to know what it's like, wouldn't you?

I went to an all-boys school, where I played rugby, so ballet wasn't the coolest thing to do.

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

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 did take some cooking classes in high school. Boys weren't really supposed to take them. I had to risk being made fun of.

It is a pity that so often the only way to treat girls like people seems to be to treat them like boys.

Some days you just want to get dressed and go about your business. But if you're a woman, you can't, because there is no unmarked woman.

Women do feel like they're in a box. Society, Hollywood, some men-they want to wrap women up in a neat little package.

As a woman, you're not accessible to every world.

People put stock in someone being in a 'girl group,' but we don't say that a band is a 'man group.'

When you write, you are not either sex. But when you're read you are definitely gendered.

In this society, if a man is called a woman, that's the biggest insult he could get. Is that because women are considered something less?

When my friends and I would act out movies as kids, we'd play the guys' roles, since they had the most interesting things to do. Decades later, I can hardly believe my sons and daughter are seeing many of the same limited choices in current films.

Some boys accepted me, some didn't. And my family had comments made to them. Brazil is still a very macho society, and sports are mainly for boys, so people would say to them: 'What is this girl doing? Why is she always out there in the soccer games with the boys?'

No one knows 'men' as such, any more than anyone knows 'women,' and if they do generalise they're probably trying to hide their own ignorance. You might know one 'man,' yes, or even lots of individual 'men'.

In the end, I do think it's insulting to men and women to insist that they fit a certain profile. I never understood that.

Every woman is supposed to have the same set of motives, or else to be a monster.

Many differences are rooted in biology and reinforced through culture, so it's important to acknowledge that. Because if you say men and women are the same and if male behaviour is the norm, and women are always expected to act like men, we will never be as good at being men as men are.

Especially with girls, people always want to put them in little brackets.

No one knows what women want!

Many societies have educated their male children on the simple device of teaching them not to be women.

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.

Given that we glimpse what distinguishes man from the beast, is there anything that distinguishes woman from man?

'Man up' is a sexist term that should be retired along with all the other gender-based imperious imperatives.

I think human beings have a really broad spectrum of traits, and I almost feel implicated when we say, 'Men are like this, women are like this.' Nobody was telling me, 'Don't get dirty, don't play in the mud, girls don't do that.'