LBLaura Bates

24 collected words

Laura Bates

Dates not recorded

Name supplied in the contributor-provided quotation collection. Basic attribution label; identity, lifetime and quotation authenticity have not been independently verified.

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Quotations and sayings

01Undated

This is not a men vs women issue. It’s about people vs prejudice.

Laura Bates / quote

02Undated

How can I believe the people that say women have equal rights? When the worst insult a man can be called is a woman, girly, a twat, a cunt, that he needs to 'man up' and the list goes on. My gender is not an insult. I'm tired of all this shit.

Laura Bates / quote

03Undated

Women who lead, read

Laura Bates / quote

04Undated

This is a battle that we will win. Because women are wittier, brighter, stronger and braver than a misogynistic and patriarchal world has given us credit for.

Laura Bates / quote

05Undated

Just got called a slag by two guys sitting outside the University of York library. A slag for books?

Laura Bates / quote

06Undated

Yes, for the love of God young women, come along – learn your limits. Or, rather, know society’s limits. How dare you think you have the right to go out wearing whatever you like – how foolish and ignorant of you to expect not to be assaulted, you brazen hussies! What do you think this is? A free country?

Laura Bates / quote

07Undated

Tired of cold callers asking to speak to the 'man in the house', now I put them on to my 6-year old son... he sings them 'Sexy and I Know It'.

Laura Bates / quote

08Undated

If a guy is put off by you being a feminist, you need to ask yourself how put off you are by someone who doesn't believe in equality for women.

Laura Bates / quote

09Undated

A slut isn’t a person, it’s in the eye of the beholder. Like beauty, or an annoying eyelash. We decide who a girl is based on something she’s done (or even just rumoured to have done) and then brand her with it as if it’s a permanent part of her identity. Guys, on the other hand, get to wear their relationships and ‘conquests’ like medals or badges of honour, which are much easier to take off, and hurt a lot less.

Laura Bates / quote

10Undated

...this pattern of casual intrusion whereby women could be leered at, touched, harassed, and abused without a second though, was sexism: implicit, explicit, commonplace, and deep-rooted, pretty much everywhere you'd care to look.

Laura Bates / quote

11Undated

I quickly learned, however, that a university education is not a prerequisite to reading Shakespeare. After all, his original audience was not college-educated. Neither was he.

Laura Bates / quote

12Undated

Women are silenced by both the invisibility and the acceptability of the problem.

Laura Bates / quote

13Undated

One of the cleverest and most insidious twists in the whole sorry tale is the way women are double bound by a gender-biased definition of professionalism and the threat of being labeled "whining.

Laura Bates / quote

14Undated

Our experiences of all forms of gender prejudice - from daily sexism to distressing harassment to sexual violence - are part of a continuum that impacts all of us, all the time, shaping ourselves, and our ideas about the world. To include stories of assault and rape within a project documenting everyday experiences of gender imbalance is simply to extend its boundaries to the most extreme manifestations of that prejudice. To see how great the damage can become when the minor, "unimportant" issues are allowed to pass without comment. To prove how the steady drip-drip-drip of sexism and sexualization and objectification is connected to the assumption of ownership and control over women's bodies, and how the background noise of harassment and disrespect connects to the assertion of power that is violence and rape.

Laura Bates / quote

15Undated

The more stories I heard, the more I tried to talk about the problem. And yet time and time again I found myself coming up against the same response: Sexism doesn't exist anymore. Women are equal now, more or less. You career girls these days have the best of all worlds - what more do you want? Think about the women in other countries dealing with real problems, people told me - you women in the West have no idea how lucky you are. You have "gilded lives"! You're making a fuss about nothing. You're overreacting. You're uptight, or frigid. You need to learn to take a joke, get a sense of humor, light up...You really need to learn to take a compliment.

Laura Bates / quote

16Undated

Sexism is often an invisible problem. This is partly because it's so frequently manifest in situations where the only witnesses present are victim and perpetrator.

Laura Bates / quote

17Undated

The incidents that go unwitnessed definitely help to keep sexism off the radar, and unacknowledged problem we don't discuss. But so too do the regular occurrences that hide in plain sight, within a society that has normalized sexism and allowed it to become so ingrained that we no longer notice or object to it. Sexism is a socially acceptable prejudice and everybody is getting in on the act.

Laura Bates / quote

18Undated

When we suggest victims can stop rape, we also (however unintentionally) imply that rape is an inevitable aspect of life rather than an action deliberately carried out by a perpetrator.

Laura Bates / quote

19Undated

As long as we as a society continue to belittle and dismiss women's accounts, disbelieve and question their stories, and blame them for their own assaults, we are playing right into the hands of those who silence victims by asking: "who would believe you anyways?".

Laura Bates / quote

20Undated

The very fact that it is necessary in the twenty-first century to explain why it's not okay to publicly debate whether or not women are "asking" for sexual assault is mind-boggling.

Laura Bates / quote

21Undated

This combination of ageism and sexism was also blatant in the Boston Herald's treatment of sixty-three-year-old Elizabeth Warren, whose 2012 Senate bid it sought to undermine by repeatedly dubbing her "Granny" in its pages, as if to imply that an older woman could not possibly be trusted with political responsibility.

Laura Bates / quote

22Undated

One day, in the very early months of the project, I read several entries in a single week from girls who had been subjected to leering and shouting from men in the street while walking home from school in their uniforms. Dismayed, I posted a question on Twitter: Surely, I asked, this couldn't be a common occurrence? By the end of the day, a deluge of hundreds of tweets had confirmed that the experience was not only common but almost ubiquitous.

Laura Bates / quote

23Undated

Girls are not only being denied access to scientific and adventurous toys, they're also presented with such a narrow range of options that domesticity and stereotypically "female" duties are shoved down their throats before they've even reached the age of five.

Laura Bates / quote

24Undated

Disbelief is the first great silencer.

Laura Bates / quote