Laurie Penny > Quotes

“Public ‘career feminists’ have been more concerned with getting more women into ‘boardrooms’, when the problem is that there are altogether too many boardrooms, and none of them are on fire.”
― Laurie Penny, Unspeakable Things: Sex, Lies and Revolution

“Feminism has never just been about liberating women from men, but about freeing every human being from the straitjacket of gender oppression.”
― Laurie Penny, Unspeakable Things: Sex, Lies and Revolution

“One sure test of social privilege is how much anger you get to express without the threat of expulsion, arrest, or social exclusion,”
― Laurie Penny, Unspeakable Things: Sex, Lies and Revolution

“Of all the female sins, hunger is the least forgivable; hunger for anything, for food, sex, power, education, even love. If we have desires, we are expected to conceal them, to control them, to keep ourselves in check. We are supposed to be objects of desire, not desiring beings.”
― Laurie Penny, Unspeakable Things: Sex, Lies and Revolution

“The best way to stop girls achieving anything is to force them to achieve everything.”
― Laurie Penny, Unspeakable Things: Sex, Lies and Revolution

“Those who are so eager for women and girls to go back to the kitchen might think again about just what it is we might be up to in there. You can plan a lot of damage from a kitchen. It’s also where the knives are kept.”
― Laurie Penny

“Femininity itself has become a brand, a narrow and shrinking formula of commoditised identity which can be sold back to women who have become alienated from their own power as living, loving, labouring beings.”
― Laurie Penny, Meat Market: Female Flesh Under Capitalism

“It is no surprise that so many women and girls have what are delicately called 'control issues' around their bodies, from cutting and injuring their flesh to starving or stuffing themselves with food, compulsive exercise, or pathological, unhappy obsession over how we look and dress. Adolescence, for a woman, is the slow realisation that you are not considered as fully human as you hoped. You are a body first, and your body is not yours alone: whether or not you are attracted to men, men and boys will believe they have a claim on your body, and the state gets to decide what you're allowed to do with it afterwards.”
― Laurie Penny, Unspeakable Things: Sex, Lies and Revolution

“Only by remembering to say 'no' will the women of 21st century regain their voice and remember their power. 'No' is the most important word in a woman's dialectic arsenal, and it is the one word that our employers, our leaders, and quite often, the men in our lives would do anything to prevent us from saying. No, we will not serve. No, we will not settle for the dirty work, the low-paid work, the unpaid work. No, we will not stay late at the office, look after the kids, sort out the shopping. We refuse to fit the enormity of our passion, our creativity, and our potential into the rigid physical prison laid down for us since we were small children. No. We refuse. We will not buy your clothes and shoes and surgical solutions. No, we will not be beautiful; we will not be good. Most of all, we refuse to be beautiful and good.”
― Laurie Penny, Meat Market: Female Flesh Under Capitalism

“That's how oppression works. Thousands of otherwise decent people are persuaded to go along with an unfair system because changing it seems like too much bother. The appropriate response when somebody demands a change in that unfair system is to listen, rather than turn away or yell, as a child might, that it's not your fault. Of course it isn't your fault. I'm sure you're lovely. That doesn't mean you don't have a responsibility to do something about it.”
― Laurie Penny, Unspeakable Things: Sex, Lies and Revolution

“We were there too, the other geeks and weird kids whose lives were hellish at school, who escaped into books and computers, who stayed up all night scanning obscure forums, looking for transcendence, dreaming of elsewhere. We were there too, but you didn’t see us, because we were girls. And the costs of being the geek were the same for us, right down to the sexual frustration, the yearning, the being laughed at, the loneliness. […] We had to fight the same battles you did, only harder, because we were women and we also had to fight sexism, some of it from you, and when we went looking for other weird kids to join our gang, we were told we weren’t ‘real geeks’ because we were girls.”
― Laurie Penny, Cybersexism: Sex, Gender and Power on the Internet

“Sexual objectification doesn't get oppressive until it is done consistently, and to a specific group of people, and with no regard whatsoever paid to their humanity. Then it ceases to become about desire and starts to be about control. Seeing another person as meat and fat and bone and nothing else gives you power over them, if only for an instant. Structural sexual objection of women draws that instant out into an entire matrix of hurt. It tells us that women are bodies first, idealised, subservient bodies, and men are not.”
― Laurie Penny, Unspeakable Things: Sex, Lies and Revolution

“The feminism that has mattered to the media and made magazine headlines in recent years has been the feminism most useful to heterosexual, high-earning middle- and upper-middle-class white women. Public ‘career feminists’ have been more concerned with getting more women into 'boardrooms’, when the problem is that there are altogether too many boardrooms, and none of them are on fire.”
― Laurie Penny, Unspeakable Things: Sex, Lies and Revolution

“I believe that if anything can save us in this fraught and dazzling future, it is the rage of women and girls, of queers and freaks and sinners. I believe that the revolution will be feminist, and that when it comes it will be more intimate and more shocking than we have dared to imagine.”
― Laurie Penny, Unspeakable Things: Sex, Lies and Revolution

“Secondly, you can spend your whole life being a story that happens to somebody else. You can twist and cram and shave down every aspect of your personality that doesn’t quite fit into the story boys have grown up expecting, but eventually, one day, you’ll wake up and want something else, and you’ll have to choose.
Because the other thing about stories is that they end. The book closes, and you’re left with yourself, a grown fucking woman with no more pieces of cultural detritus from which to construct a personality. I tried and failed to be a character in a story somebody else had written for me. What concerns me now is the creation of new narratives, the opening of space in the collective imagination for women who have not been permitted such space before, for women who don’t exist to please, to delight, to attract men, for women who have more on our minds. Writing is a different kind of magic, and everyone knows what happens to women who do their own magic - but it’s a risk you have to take.”
― Laurie Penny

“It is not elitist to look fascism in the face and reject it. It is not anti-democratic to carry on believing in a society where there is space for everyone. Fighting for tolerance, justice and dignity for women, queer people and people of colour is not frivolous or vain. Who decided that it was? Who decided that only those who place fear over faith in their fellow human beings are real, legitimate citizens whose voices matter? That’s not a rhetorical question. I want to know. Give me names.”
― Laurie Penny, Bitch Doctrine: Essays for Dissenting Adults

“Girls are better at this sort of labour, often called 'emotional labour', not because there's anything in the meat and matter of our living cells that makes us naturally better but because we're trained for it from birth. Trained to make other people feel good. Trained to serve the coffee, fill in the forms, organise the parties and wipe the table afterwards. Trained to be feisty, if we must, but not strong. To be bubbly, not funny. You must at no stage appear to have a body that functions in a normal human way, that pisses and shits and sweats and farts and falters. Decorate the prison of your body. Make yourself useful. Shut up and smile.”
― Laurie Penny, Unspeakable Things: Sex, Lies and Revolution

“Without courage, our generation is doomed to another decade of political disenfranchisement and shit music.”
― Laurie Penny

“The fact that ‘attention seeking’ is still considered a slur says much about the role of women in public life, on every scale.”
― Laurie Penny, Cybersexism: Sex, Gender and Power on the Internet

“Me, I believe in monogamy in much the same way as I believe in, say, cheese on toast. I'll eat it, but only for very special people, and not for every meal. There are other interesting and delicious toast options out there, and I support people's right to investigate those options without being punished.”
― Laurie Penny, Unspeakable Things: Sex, Lies and Revolution

“Feminism, like wealth, does not trickle down, and while a small number of extremely privileged women worry about the glass ceiling, the cellar is filling up with water, and millions of women and girls and their children are crammed in there, looking up as the flood creeps around their ankles, closes around their knees, inches up to their necks.”
― Laurie Penny, Unspeakable Things: Sex, Lies and Revolution

“Men grow up expecting to be the hero of their own story. Women grow up expecting to be the supporting actress in somebody else's. As a kid growing up with books and films and stories instead of friends, that was always the narrative injustice that upset me more than anything else. I felt it sometimes like a sharp pain under the ribcage, the kind of chest pain that lasts for minutes and hours and might be nothing at all or might mean you're slowly dying of something mundane and awful. It's a feeling that hit when I understood how few girls got to go on adventures. I started reading science fiction and fantasy long before Harry Potter and The Hunger Games, before mainstream female leads very occasionally got more at the end of the story than together with the protagonist. Sure, there were tomboys and bad girls, but they were freaks and were usually killed off or married off quickly. Lady hobbits didn't bring the ring to Mordor. They stayed at home in the shire.”
― Laurie Penny

“According to the current logic of online misogyny a woman’s right to self-expression is less important by far than a man’s right to punish her for that self-expression.”
― Laurie Penny, Unspeakable Things: Sex, Lies and Revolution

“There comes a time when you have to decide whether to change yourself to fit the story, or change the story itself. The decision gets a little easier if you understand that refusing to shape your life and personality to the contours of an unjust world is the best way to start creating a new one. There”
― Laurie Penny, Unspeakable Things: Sex, Lies and Revolution

“Patriarchy, it turns out, is prettiest when it's on fire.”
― Laurie Penny, Bitch Doctrine: Essays for Dissenting Adults

“Love’ is one of those words, like ‘Freedom’, ‘Security’ and ‘Democracy’, that has been captured and tortured until it gives in to its polar opposite. Love is supposed to be the one thing you can’t kill. And maybe that’s true, if you come at it with a gun in your fist. But there are other things you can do to undermine the power of human passion. You can rip it away from kids and redeliver it processed and packaged in pink and blue cans for somebody else’s profit, like powdered milk you pay for with your heart’s blood. You can mangle it into a mode of production. You can use it to isolate people in antagonistic pairs and let them blame each other for the structural lack of sweetness in the world. You can privatise passion, annex affection. You can create the appearance of scarcity where there ought to be abundance. You can make the search for simple connection into a miserable, exhausting ritual that demands rigid gender conformity and represses the human spirit. And that’s how you kill love.”
― Laurie Penny, Unspeakable Things: Sex, Lies and Revolution

“„If all women on earth woke up tomorrow feeling truly positive and powerful in their bodies, the economies of the globe would collapse overnight.”
― Laurie Penny, Meat Market: Female Flesh Under Capitalism

“Feminism is active. It's not something you are; it's something you do. It's what you fight for that matters. Feminism is not an identity but a movement, a way of living. And feminism isn't just about women - it's about liberating everyone from gender oppression, but since women are most oppressed by modern gender norms and laws, and since the movement has always been driven by women's politics, 'feminism' is an appropriate name.”
― Laurie Penny, Bitch Doctrine: Essays for Dissenting Adults

“Almost every time I speak to teenagers, particularly young female students who want to talk to me about feminism, I find myself staggered by how much they have read, how creatively they think and how curiously bullshit-resistant they are. Because of the subjects I write about, I am often contacted by young people and I see it as a part of my job to reply to all of them - and doing so has confirmed a suspicions I’ve had for some time. I think that the generation about to hit adulthood is going to be rather brilliant.

Young people getting older is not, in itself, a fascinating new cultural trend. Nonetheless the encroaching adulthood and the people who grew up in a world where expanding technological access collided with the collapse of the neoliberal economic consensus is worth paying attention to. Because these kids are smart, cynical and resilient, and I don’t mind saying that they scare me a little.”
― Laurie Penny

“Every so often I wonder why I didn’t become a restaurant critic. They get free dinners. Being a feminist journalist, I get free death threats.”
― Laurie Penny, Bitch Doctrine: Essays for Dissenting Adults