“But I do have conversations about the Patriarchy and I am having them with gay men. At eighteen, I am discovering what generations of women have long known. The natural ally of the straight woman is the gay man because they are others losers too.”
“But, of course, you might be asking yourself, 'Am I a feminist? I might not be. I don't know! I still don't know what it is! I'm too knackered and confused to work it out. That curtain pole really still isn't up! I don't have time to work out if I am a women's libber! There seems to be a lot to it. WHAT DOES IT MEAN?'I understand. So here is the quick way of working out if you're a feminist. Put your hand in your pants.a) Do you have a vagina? andb) Do you want to be in charge of it?If you said 'yes' to both, then congratulations! You're a feminist.”
“At its best fashion is a game. But for women it's a compulsory game, like net ball, and you can't get out of it by faking your period. I know I have tried. And so 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. No wonder there are so many fashion magazines. No wonder the fashion industry is worth an estimated 900 billion dollars a year. No wonder every woman's first thought is, for nearly every event in her life, be it work, snow or birth. The semi-despairing cry of "but what will I wear?" Because when a woman says I have nothing to wear, what she really means is there is nothing here for who I am supposed to be today.”
“I have read more about Oprah Winfrey’s ass than I have about the rise of China as an economic superpower. I fear this is no exaggeration. Perhaps China is rising as an economic superpower because its women aren’t spending all their time reading about Oprah Winfrey’s ass.”
“I am 13 years old, I am 13 stone, I have no money, no friends, and boys throw gravel at me. It's my birthday, and I went to bed at 7.15pm.”
“But deciding not to have children is a very, very hard decision for a woman to make: the atmosphere is worryingly inconducive to saying, "I choose not to," or "it all sounds a bit vile, tbh." We call these women "selfish" The inference of the word "childless" is negative: one of lack, and loss. We think of nonmothers as rangy lone wolves--rattling around, as dangerous as teenage boys or men. We make women feel that their narrative has ground to a halt in their thirities if they don't "finish things" properly and have children.”
“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.”