#stereotypes

What we ask is to be human individuals, however peculiar and unexpected. It is no good saying: "You are a little girl and therefore you ought to like dolls"; if the answer is, "But I don't," there is no more to be said. ↗

— Dorothy L. Sayers

#dignity #empowerment #freedom #gender #girls

The problem of unmet expectations in marriage is primarily a problem of stereotyping. Each and every human being on this planet is a unique person. Since marriage is inevitably a relationship between two unique people, no one marriage is going to be exactly like any other. Yet we tend to wed with explicit visions of what a “good” marriage ought to be like. Then we suffer enormously from trying to force the relationship to fit the stereotype and from the neurotic guilt and anger we experience when we fail to pull it off. ↗

— M. Scott Peck

#marriage #stereotypes #anger

In reaction against the age-old slogan, "woman is the weaker vessel," or the still more offensive, "woman is a divine creature," we have, I think, allowed ourselves to drift into asserting that "a woman is as good as a man," without always pausing to think what exactly we mean by that. What, I feel, we ought to mean is something so obvious that it is apt to escape attention altogether, viz: (...) that a woman is just as much an ordinary human being as a man, with the same individual preferences, and with just as much right to the tastes and preferences of an individual. What is repugnant to every human being is to be reckoned always as a member of a class and not as an individual person. ↗

— Dorothy L. Sayers

#clichés #dignity #discrimination #double-standards #empowerment

Is it possible to say "It was a beautiful morning at the end of November" without feeling like Snoopy? ↗

— Umberto Eco

#originality #stereotypes #writing #beauty

Women are extraordinary creatures! ↗

— Roman Payne

#extraordinary #extraordinary-women #fashion #gender #gender-equality

Not all gays respond to the same stuff. Would Alexander the Great have loved Auntie Mame? ↗

— Bruce Bawer

#gay #gay-rights #gay-stereotypes #humor #equality

If woman had no existence save in the fiction written by men, one would imagine her a person of the utmost importance (...); as great as a man, some think even greater. But this is woman in fiction. In fact, as Professor Trevelyan points out [in his History of England], she was locked up, beaten and flung about the room. ↗

— Virginia Woolf

#clichés #dignity #equality #fiction #gender

She was heartily ashamed of her ignorance - a misplaced shame. Where people wish to attach, they should always be ignorant. To come with a well−informed mind is to come with an inability of administering to the vanity of others, which a sensible person would always wish to avoid. A woman especially, if she have the misfortune of knowing anything, should conceal it as well as she can. ↗

— Jane Austen

#clichés #concealment #empowerment #feminism #ignorance

I even tried to usher her into this century by explaining that wearing rainbows didn’t automatically mean a person was gay. The Lucky Charms leprechaun was not necessarily a homosexual. The Care Bear with the rainbow on his tummy did not have a life partner. He didn’t even have genitals. (6) ↗

— Elna Baker

#homosexuality #life

Valéry used to speak of those people who die in an accident because they are unwilling to let go of their umbrellas; how many subjects repressed, refracted, blinded as to their true sexuality, because they are unwilling to let go of a stereotype. ↗

— Roland Barthes

#life #stereotypes #life