gender conditioning Quotes

This effort to reprogram men has been going on a long time. It's not something we need to start now. We're in the middle of it and I think it's one of the reasons there is such confusion between men and women and the roles they're supposed to be playing, because they're at war with nature.

The message about sex and relationships that she had gotten as a child... was confused, contradictory. Sex was for men, and marriage, like lifeboats, was for women and children.

From infancy, almost, the average girl is told that marriage is her ultimate goal; therefore her training and education must be directed toward that end. Like the mute beast fattened for slaughter, she is prepared for that.

Traditionally in American society, men have been trained for both competition and teamwork through sports, while women have been reared to merge their welfare with that of the family, with fewer opportunities for either independence or other team identifications, and fewer challenges to direct competition. In effect, women have been circumscribed within that unit where the benefit of one is most easily believed to be the benefit of all.

There isn't any problem with little girls. And there isn't any problem with young women or adult women. I mean, they are model citizens. It's the guys that create all of the problems in our culture. And so it's the guys that have to be reprogrammed. Not the women.

I'm not suggesting that all men are beautiful, vulnerable boys, but we all started out that way. What happened to us? How did we become monsters of feminist nightmares? The answer, of course, is that we underwent a careful and deliberate process of gender training, sometimes brutal, always dehumanizing, cutting away large chunks of ourselves. Little girls went through something similarly crippling. If the gender training was successful, we each ended up being half a person.

Our culture seems to believe that it's entertaining to teach women to be frightened.

Just ask yourself, if we weren't taught to be women, what would we be? (Ask yourself this question even if you're a man, and don't cheat by changing the words.)

After centuries of conditioning of the female into the condition of perpetual girlishness called femininity, we cannot remember what femaleness is.

Understand that you are going to have to address several things navigating through the world as it pertains to men who have been conditioned to think that they are superior, which I don't believe, in the natural world, that is the case.

We come back to Kate Fagan of ESPN who says we need to reprogram the way we're raising men. You notice we never, ever, nobody ever discusses the possibility that we might need to reprogram the way we raise women. Why? Because that's already perfect.

Women are conditioned to believe Prince Charming is going to come and sweep them off their feet.

I don't want to because boys don't write poetry. Girls do.

In the '50s you had to wear pink ribbons if you were a girl, and you were supposed to become a hairdresser or a secretary. I couldn't stomach it. Later on, when I fell in love with my husband and had children, that's when my mother's earthiness or sense of femaleness kicked in.

Men, being conditioned badly, are always feeling nooses closing around their necks, even dumpy boors no girl would take on a bet.

I think it's a feminine energy, not necessarily men versus women, but a nurturing, mothering, loving energy. I think definitely. But I think you need a balance of both. I think right now we're just so in the extremes and people are just conditioned and given these gender assignments very early on.

I think even though things are changing a bit, we still kind of tend to grow up with girls being like, 'Don't be too loud, don't be too rude, don't be too naughty,' or whatever, to act a certain way.

In the past we believed both sexes were born with original sin. Today, we have come to unconsciously believe in the original sin of boys, but the original innocence of girls.

Honestly, folks, it's always reprogramming men. It's always men who seem to provide or be at the root of all of these cultural problems. And if we could just make men less like men and more like, I guess, women, then we would be rid of all of these problems.

They're all qualities wrongly called feminine: attention to detail, patience, empathy. I don't have children, but I was raised as a female to have those qualities because they're perceived as feminine. Until men are raised with those qualities, too, they won't have the full circle of human qualities.

I think there's a whole bunch of things that go along with being a girl. You're not supposed to have opinions or be tough or strong. You're supposed to be soft and vulnerable, and I find those qualities important in both men and women.