Gabrielle Korn > Quotes

“As soon as I got an editor title I was met with raised eyebrows from peers and people older than me. I don’t think that men face this challenge; what I’ve observed is that men in my industry who get ahead early are called trailblazers, while women who get ahead early are simply not taken seriously. The messaging is confusing: we’re repeatedly told we should want to look young. Our culture is, in fact, obsessed with it; the global antiaging industry was valued at 250 billion dollars in 2016 and has grown year over year ever since. But if we do look young, and furthermore if we are young, we’re treated like we don’t know anything. For a culture that is so preoccupied with maintaining female youth, we certainly have quite a few parameters around what kind of power that youth is allowed to access.”
― Gabrielle Korn, Everybody (Else) Is Perfect: How I Survived Hypocrisy, Beauty, Clicks, and Likes

“You never stop being someone’s sister, even when your sister is gone.”
― Gabrielle Korn, The Shutouts: A Novel

“There are certain male figures we were just told to believe in, to trust. Our rock gods. Our politicians. Our medical professionals. A cornerstone of reaching adult womanhood is realizing that this is a myth—that men, no matter what their profession or how deeply their work speaks to you, can be dangerous.”
― Gabrielle Korn, Everybody (Else) Is Perfect: How I Survived Hypocrisy, Beauty, Clicks, and Likes

“Generations before us, women fought for the right to wear pants. Now we need to make sure those pants don't make us want to starve, don't punish us for eating a nice big lunch, and can be worn by all of us. The argument, really, is that we need clothes more befitting of women who are trying their damnedest to live their best lives while changing the world in the process... And if low-rise jeans really do become cool again, I'll have no problem sitting it out.”
― Gabrielle Korn

“It's as though intellectualizing of body politics isn't enough to conquer the dominant cultural messaging we're constantly barraged with. It's especially not enough when that messaging is validated by real-life personal experiences - like how people talk to you about your body... It's one thing to objectively understand that your value is independent of how thin you are, but when people around you still struggle to disentangle thinness from attractiveness, it's hard to keep in mind.”
― Gabrielle Korn

“If we’re going to make it out alive, women must stop hesitating, and start claiming.”
― Gabrielle Korn, Yours for the Taking

“I've also learned that culturally there's no "right" way to be an ambitious women. We don't have a lot of models for young female leadership, and many people's first instinct is to be suspicious of that kind of drive. I've never heard about any of my male coworkers being called entitled when asking for more money. I think if anything it probably gains them respect.”
― Gabrielle Korn

“Thinness, then, was idealized for me because it represented not having needs - not just nutritional ones but the need for support from other people. As someone who has always been obsessed with the idea of being totally independent, this, in a twisted way, was the embodiment of what I thought the shape of my life was supposed to be.”
― Gabrielle Korn

“I was well aware that I had major, intensely physical crushes on girls... but it felt totally separate from who I was, a subtext that I didn't realize informed the plot.”
― Gabrielle Korn

“Hypothetical global chaos had more appeal than the slow-burn anxiety of going through the motions of normalcy when you knew, in no uncertain terms, that the world was actually going to shit.”
― Gabrielle Korn, Yours for the Taking

“In our current political landscape, when there are more men accused of sexual assault on the Supreme Court than there are women of color, this can seem superficial. It's just fashion, after all - surely there are more important things to worry about, like, um, our fundamental rights over our own bodies. But how you clothe your body is a right, too.”
― Gabrielle Korn

“under patriarchy whiteness is read as a neutral identity, as is heterosexuality and skinniness...”
― Gabrielle Korn

“But really, according to the feedback I got from the world at large, I'd been too young for every single step of my career except when I was an assistance in my early twenties... I don't think that men face this challenge; what I've observed is that men in my industry who get ahead early are called trailblazers, while women who get ahead early are simply not taken seriously. The messaging is confusing: we're repeatedly told we should want to look young... But if we do look young, and furthermore, if we are young, we're treated like we don't know anything. For a culture that is so preoccupied with maintaining female youth, we certainly have quite a few parameters around what kind of power that youth is allowed to access.”
― Gabrielle Korn

“The unfortunate truth is that climate change is coming for us faster than equal rights are.”
― Gabrielle Korn, Yours for the Taking

“the only way out was through... That was the only way to open the door to real change, too - not quietly, not out the back, but with everyone watching.”
― Gabrielle Korn

“She realized that it wasn’t enough to assume the things you wanted would happen; you had to make them happen. The things that she wanted were hers for the taking, or not taking, but either way, action and choice were imperative. Passivity would never yield the intended results.”
― Gabrielle Korn, Yours for the Taking

“This is a book about what happens when you put your own well-being on hold to achieve a version of success that you think you’re supposed to want, and how I finally was able to see—and then escape—the confines of perfection.”
― Gabrielle Korn, Everybody (Else) Is Perfect: How I Survived Hypocrisy, Beauty, Clicks, and Likes

“I'm heaviest when I'm happy. This is true for most women I know. Happy weight happens when you're in love and you stop worrying so much about how good you look because you're so distracted by how good you feel... it has terrible connotations. It signifies that you've let yourself go... I think the key for me has been not necessarily "letting myself go" but letting go of the things that are holding me back - like the idea that if you pretend to not have needs, the needs will go away. They don't, of course; needs that you put on hold will show up disguised as other needs.”
― Gabrielle Korn

“the sociopolitical progress made under Obama turned out to be not as widely celebrated as those of us living in progressive bubbles liked to believe - bubbles that were popped in 2016, when we were all so sure we were about to witness the election of the first-ever female president... Trump was the embodiment of every guy who had ever assaulted me or bullied me or harassed me, and he was being taken seriously.”
― Gabrielle Korn

“It’s not like men have made the world better.”
― Gabrielle Korn, Yours for the Taking

“Every generation thinks the world is ending,”
― Gabrielle Korn, Yours for the Taking

“When people complain about something they don't like about themselves and it's something I also have but never really paid attention to or felt bad about, suddenly I wonder if I should feel bad about it. Then I fixate on it and berate myself for not noticing and worry about how people saw me.”
― Gabrielle Korn

“Equality is only scary if you have to give up power to attain it.”
― Gabrielle Korn, Yours for the Taking

“The unfortunate truth is that climate change is coming for us faster than equal rights are. The data proves it: if we stay on our current course, women will not become truly equal to men before the world is made uninhabitable. What is urgently needed now, if we have any hope of changing our fate, is an immediate, complete restructuring of how gender dynamics play out in our culture. And rather than continuing to focus on empowerment for women, it is imperative that what is considered and worked toward, instead, is power—in its simplest, purest form. Did I lose you when I said that? I implore my female readers to stop for a moment and think about why you’ve been told to feel that power is such a dirty word.”
― Gabrielle Korn, Yours for the Taking

“as a woman, believing in yourself sometimes had to be enough.”
― Gabrielle Korn, Yours for the Taking

“I'd been led to believe that notoriety is the ultimate aspiration, but the truth of the matter was I had been running a company as though it were mine when I didn't own a single piece of it. I had made positive change, but when you strip all the pretense away - the things our culture says makes you an empowered woman - what's left? Who are we, as contemporary feminists, without capitalism?”
― Gabrielle Korn