Jess Zimmerman > Quotes

“For women, the boundaries of acceptability are strict, and they are many. We must be seductive but pure, quiet but not aloof, fragile but industrious, and always, always small. We must not be too successful, too ambitious, too independent, too self-centered—and when we can’t manage all the contradictory restrictions, we are turned into grotesques. Women have been monsters, and monsters have been women, in centuries’ worth of stories, because stories are a way to encode these expectations and pass them on.”
― Jess Zimmerman, Women and Other Monsters: Building a New Mythology

“The low-maintenance woman, the ideal woman, has no appetite. This is not to say that she refuses food, sex, romance, emotional effort; to refuse is petulant, which is ironically more demanding. The woman without appetite politely finishes what’s on her plate, and declines seconds. She is satisfied and satisfiable.

As a child, on an endless restrictive regimen that started when I was four, I was told ‘if you get used to eating less, you’ll stop being so hungry.’ The secret to satiation, to satisfaction, was not to meet or even acknowledge your needs, but to curtail them. We learn the same lesson about our emotional hunger: Want less, and you will always have enough.”
― Jess Zimmerman

“The monsters of myth have been stationed at those borders in order to keep us out; they are intended as warnings about what happens when women aspire beyond what we’re allowed.”
― Jess Zimmerman, Women and Other Monsters: Building a New Mythology

“When you embrace imperfection, your own imperfection stops consuming you. When your own imperfection stops consuming you, the imperfection itself can be art.”
― Jess Zimmerman, Women and Other Monsters: Building a New Mythology

“The low-maintenance woman, the ideal woman, has no appetite. This is not to say that she refuses food, sex, romance, emotional effort; to refuse is petulant, which is ironically more demanding. The woman without appetite politely finishes what’s on her plate, and declines seconds. She is satisfied and satisfiable.

A man’s appetite can be hearty, but a woman with an appetite is always voracious: her hunger always overreaches, because it is not supposed to exist. If she wants food, she is a glutton. If she wants sex, she is a slut. If she wants emotional care-taking, she is a high-maintenance bitch or, worse, an “attention whore”: an amalgam of sex-hunger and care-hunger, greedy not only to be fucked and paid but, most unforgivably of all, to be noticed.”
― Jess Zimmerman

“But attentiveness, consideration, compliments, small and large kindnesses, feeling truly loved, having someone put you first while you put them first because you’re in cahoots to make each other’s lives easier and better: most people do like that, when it’s thoughtful and sincere. It’s here, more than in the big gestures, that romance lives: in being actively caring and thoughtful, in a way that is reciprocal but not transactional.

And yet, for most of my life, I never would have asked for or expected such a thing. Many women wouldn’t, even the ones who secretly or not-so-secretly pine to be treated like a princess. It’s one thing to fantasize about a perfect proposal or an expensive gift; that’s high-maintenance, sure, but it’s also par for the course. It’s asking something from a man, but primarily it’s asking him to step into an already-choreographed mating dance. But asking to be thought of, understood, prioritized: this is a request so deep it is almost unfathomable. It’s a voracious request, the demand of the attention whore.

Women talk ourselves into needing less, because we’re not supposed to want more—or we know we won’t get more, and we don’t want to feel unsatisfied. We reduce our needs for food, for space, for respect, for help, for love and affection, for being noticed, according to what we think we’re allowed to have. Sometimes we tell ourselves that we can live without it, even that we don’t want it. But it’s not that we don’t want more. It’s that we don’t want to be seen asking for it. And when it comes to romance, women always, always need to ask.”
― Jess Zimmerman

“As always in myth, women win their fame by dying.”
― Jess Zimmerman, Women and Other Monsters: Building a New Mythology

“...and Athena, it must be admitted, has never been much of a friend to her fellow women. The war-like goddess of wisdom, who wasn't even gestated by a women (she sprang fully grown from her father's head), is the original "not-like-the-other-girls" girl.”
― Jess Zimmerman, Women and Other Monsters: Building a New Mythology

“What was it like for the sirens on their lonely rock, watching everyone who tried to love them drown?”
― Jess Zimmerman, Women and Other Monsters: Building a New Mythology

“The harpy wants to win, which means a man must lose. She wants justice, which means a man must be punished. She wants space that could be taken by a man. Are we really willing to make that sacrifice?

What makes a woman's ambition predatory, we are told, is that it overflows its natural bounds. It treads on the lands that men have marked as theirs.”
― Jess Zimmerman, Women and Other Monsters: Building a New Mythology

“When you’ve burned out all your circuits adoring someone for nothing, getting to be indifferent feels like grace.”
― Jess Zimmerman, Women and Other Monsters: Building a New Mythology

“Women have been monsters, and monsters have been women.”
― Jess Zimmerman, Women and Other Monsters: Building a New Mythology

“You can tell a lot about what a culture considers deformed by looking at its villains. They're more likely to be disabled in some way, but also more likely to be dark, old, fat, or fey.”
― Jess Zimmerman, Women and Other Monsters: Building a New Mythology

“Women may look harmless on the face, they said, but look at their snake hair and dog crotches and claws. Look at them crouched over a male victim, ready to bite. Beware their ambition, their ugliness, their insatiable hunger, their ferocious rage.”
― Jess Zimmerman, Women and Other Monsters: Building a New Mythology

“Before Lamia killed children, her children were killed. The root of her violence, like the root of so much violence, is grief.”
― Jess Zimmerman, Women and Other Monsters: Building a New Mythology

“So when I said “I don't like romance,” it was the equivalent of a dieter insisting she just doesn't want dessert. I did want it—I just thought I wasn't allowed.”
― Jess Zimmerman

“I never go to the doctor, though, because the only thing more embarrassing than having a body is having to admit that you have one.”
― Jess Zimmerman, Women and Other Monsters: Building a New Mythology

“...and Athena, it must be admitted, has never been much of a friend to her fellow women. The war-like goddess of wisdom, who wasn't even gestated by a woman (she sprang fully grown from her father's head), is the original "not-like-the-other-girls" girl.”
― Jess Zimmerman, Women and Other Monsters: Building a New Mythology

“For double X humans, our motley nature is usually less obvious, but we are genetic calicos. Every cell hosting a dormant sister. Every cell with the echo of what it could've been.

Inside each of us, another animal, sleeping.”
― Jess Zimmerman, Women and Other Monsters: Building a New Mythology

“Medusa lost her beauty—or rather, it was taken from her. Beauty is always something you can lose. Women’s beauty is seen as something separate from us, something we owe but never own: We are its stewards, not its beneficiaries. We tend it like a garden where we do not live.

Oh, but ugliness—ugliness is always yours. Almost everyone has some innate kernel of grotesquerie; even fashion models (I’ve heard) tend to look a bit strange and froggish in person, having been gifted with naturally level faces that pool light luminously instead of breaking it into shards. And everyone has the ability to mine their ugliness, to emphasize and magnify it, to distort even those parts of themselves that fall within acceptable bounds.

Where beauty is narrow and constrained, ugliness is an entire galaxy, a myriad of sparkling paths that lurch crazily away from the ideal. There are so few ways to look perfect, but there are thousands of ways to look monstrous, surprising, upsetting, outlandish, or odd.”
― Jess Zimmerman

“Beauty is demonstrably a cheat code for a slightly easier life. People just a little more likely to do you a favor, love just a little easier to access, the world just a little more welcoming.”
― Jess Zimmerman, Women and Other Monsters: Building a New Mythology

“This is our strength: that each of us has the capacity to be not only a monster but a mother of monsters. We can birth from our own bodies every one of men’s worst fears.”
― Jess Zimmerman, Women and Other Monsters: Building a New Mythology

“This closed-system idea of literary value, defined and defended by the kind of men who have always taken their power for granted and used it for gain, reverberates well beyond any single piece, or even any single publication.”
― Jess Zimmerman