But as the years went on, I realised that what I really want to be, all told, is a human. Just a productive, honest, courteously treated human.
It’s difficult to see the glass ceiling because it’s made of glass. Virtually invisible. What we need is for more birds to fly above it and shit all over it, so we can see it properly.
Heaven. The biggest waste of our time we ever invented, outside jigsaws.
You stop talking about things when you’ve worked them out. You’re no longer an observer but a participant. You’re too busy for this bullshit.
But I am, personally, not a gambler. I wouldn’t spend £1 on the lottery, let alone take a punt on a pregnancy. The stakes are far, far too high. I can’t agree with a society that would force me to bet on how much I could love under duress.
I want a Zero Tolerance policy on All The Patriarchal Bullshit.
When a woman says, ‘I have nothing to wear!’, what she really means is, ‘There’s nothing here for who I’m supposed to be today.
And the question is always “When are you going to have kids?” Rather than “Do you want to have kids?
… motherhood is a game you must enter with as much energy, willingness, and happiness as possible.
It makes you love vividly, work intensely, and realize that, in the scheme of things, you really don’t have time to sit on the sofa in your undies watching Homes Under the Hammer.
The aphorism “If you want something done, ask a busy woman” is in direct acknowledgment of the efficiency boot camp parenthood puts you through.
The problem with battling yourself is that even if you win, you lose.
I am a massive slag!” I think to myself, in a motivational way. “I’m a Lady Sex Adventuress! I’m a Pirate of Privates! I’m a swashfuckler!” … I think of “Teenage Whore” by Courtney Love as my personal anthem.
Parents drinking is the reason you came into the world, and if we didn’t keep doing it then, by God, it would be the reason you went back out of it.
What is feminism? Simply the belief that women should be as free as men, however nuts, dim, deluded, badly dressed, fat, receding, lazy and smug they might be. Are you a feminist? Hahaha. Of course you are.
Batman doesn’t want a baby in order to feel he’s ‘done everything’. He’s just saved Gotham again! If this means that Batman must be a feminist role model above, say, Nicola Horlick, then so be it.
Your key hobbies need to be long country walks (get some fresh air in those lungs!), masturbation, and the revolution. Between those three, you should, in the long term, stay relatively sane.
When a woman walks into a room, her outfit is the first thing she says, before she even opens her mouth. Women are judged on what they wear in a way men would find incomprehensible.
The reason they don’t ask me when they’re having kids, of course, is because men can, pretty much, carry on a normal life once they’ve had a baby.
Strip clubs let everyone down. Men and women approach their very worst here.
We’re supposed to speak from the heart in what we wear. We have to find capsule wardrobes.
Women wear heels because they think they make their legs look thinner.
Not one had ever passed judgement on my cheap handbag to my face. But then, this is a reserved country.
The actual handbag is neither here nor there– it’s what you keep in it that’s the most important thing.
Between 60 and 80 percent of strippers come from a background of sexual abuse.
Within living memory of this country, men could rape their wives: women were not seen as a separate sexual entity, with the right of refusal.
Amnesty International Survey found that 25 percent of people believe a woman is to blame for being raped if she dresses “provocatively.
For a woman, every outfit is a hopeful spell, cast to influence the outcome of the day. An act of trying to predict your fate, like looking at your horoscope.
Life is really the only place you can learn the most important lessons about how to get dressed and to be happy.
Women are always being asked when they’re going to have children. It’s a question they’re asking even more often.
These hormones do not make me feel feminine: every night, I lie in bed feeling wrenched, and the bulge of my sanitary napkin in my kickers looks like a cock.
But when women are asked when they’re going to have children, there is, in actually, another darker, more pertinent question lying underneath it.
Men and women alike have convinced themselves of a dragging belief: that somehow women are incomplete without having children.
If you take a moment to consider the state of the world, the thing you notice is that there are plenty of babies being born; the planet doesn’t really need all of us to produce more babies.
First world babies are eating this planet like termites.
In the 21st century, it can’t be about who we might make, and what they might do, anymore. It has to be about who we are and what we’re going to do.
Abortions are never seen as a positive thing, as any other operation to remedy a potentially life-ruining condition would.
The idea that I might not– in an earlier era, or a different country– have a choice in the matter seems both emotionally and physically barbaric.
Women’s bodies do not give up their babies so easily, and so silently, is the message. The heart will always remember.
But women living in fear of aging, and pulling painful and expensive tricks to hide it from the world, does not say something amazing about us as humans.
Personally, I feel the time has come for women to introduce their own Zero Tolerance policy on the Broken Window issues in our lives – I want a Zero Tolerance policy on “All the Patriarchal Bullshit.
There. There you are. You have dropped a marker pin on your body, to reclaim yourself, to remind you where you are: inside yourself. Somewhere. Somewhere in there.
hearing women singing about themselves – rather than men singing about women – makes everything seem wonderfully clear, and possible
The people around you are mirrors, I think. You see yourself reflected in their eyes. If the mirror is true, and smooth, you see your true self. That’s how you learn who you are.
Feminism has had exactly the same problem that “political correctness” has had: people keep using the phrase without really knowing what it means.
When young people are cynical, and snarky, they shoot down their own future. When you keep saying “No,” all that’s left is what other people said “Yes” to before you were born. Really, “No” is no choice at all.
And every book, you find, has its own social group–friends of its own it wants to introduce you to, like a party in the library that need never, ever end.
Because I haven’t yet learned the simplest and most important thing of all: the world is difficult, and we are all breakable. So just be kind.
Always believe you can change the world – even if it’s only a tiny bit, because every tiny bit needed someone who changed it.
I have a pretty good handle on my anxiety. I basically treat myself like a nervy horse: lots of exercise, lots of sleep, lots of interesting work to keep my mind occupied, and generally avoiding being ridden hard by strangers.
It’s very important my parent’s don’t think I’m starting to fall in love with people, because then they might notice that I’m growing up, and I’m kind of trying to keep it a secret. I think it will cause an incident
It’s really best not to tell people when you feel bad. Growing up is about keeping secrets, and pretending everything is fine.
You can always tell when a woman is with the wrong man, because she has so much to say about the fact that nothing’s happening.
Any action a woman engages in from a spirit of joy, and within a similarly safe and joyous environment, falls within the city-walls of feminism. A girl has a right to dance how she wants, when her favourite record comes on.
He was bright, bright, bright, like a lantern above a pub door in November- he made you want to come in and never leave.
A library is such a potent symbol of a town’s values: each one closed down might as well be six thousand stickers plastered over every available surface, reading “WE CHOSE TO BECOME MORE STUPID AND DULL.
Lines and greyness are nature’s way of telling you not to fuck with someone – the equivalent of yellow and black lines on a wasp, or the markings on the back of a black widow spider.
Never feel this bad again. Never come back to this place, where only a knife will do. Live a gentle and kind life. Don’t do things that make you want to hurt yourself. Whatever you do, every day, remember this – then steer away from here.
Please wait for me. Don’t have all the fun now. Don’t fill up on other people who aren’t me. Don’t ruin your appetite.
In the end, I go where I always go when I need information on something baffling, poisonous, or terrifying: the library.
If I don’t keep this job, then my only future career-options are working in Argos, or being a prostitute,’ I say, w
A library in the middle of a community is a cross between an emergency exit, a life raft and a festival. They are cathedrals of the mind; hospitals of the soul; theme parks of the imagination.
The word ‘spinster’ tells you everything you need to know about our attitude of women who choose not to marry.
I never wanted to be famous. It was amusing at first, but now I hate it. I just wanted to be respected by people I respect. And I wanted to be rich. It’s best to get rich, then you can do what you want.
I hate that tabloid idea of anybody who is famous having to forfeit their privacy.
Watching ‘Girls’ has just given me renewed courage.
I’m so glad I spent 10 years being sad and lonely.
The first thing to improve society is not banning abortion, but making sure that everyone who had a child is in the best position to be able to rear it.