Hanne Blank > Quotes

“Excuse me while I throw this down, I’m old and cranky and tired of hearing the idiocy repeated by people who ought to know better.
Real women do not have curves. Real women do not look like just one thing.

Real women have curves, and not. They are tall, and not. They are brown-skinned, and olive-skinned, and not. They have small breasts, and big ones, and no breasts whatsoever.

Real women start their lives as baby girls. And as baby boys. And as babies of indeterminate biological sex whose bodies terrify their doctors and families into making all kinds of very sudden decisions.

Real women have big hands and small hands and long elegant fingers and short stubby fingers and manicures and broken nails with dirt under them.

Real women have armpit hair and leg hair and pubic hair and facial hair and chest hair and sexy moustaches and full, luxuriant beards. Real women have none of these things, spontaneously or as the result of intentional change. Real women are bald as eggs, by chance and by choice and by chemo. Real women have hair so long they can sit on it. Real women wear wigs and weaves and extensions and kufi and do-rags and hairnets and hijab and headscarves and hats and yarmulkes and textured rubber swim caps with the plastic flowers on the sides.

Real women wear high heels and skirts. Or not.

Real women are feminine and smell good and they are masculine and smell good and they are androgynous and smell good, except when they don’t smell so good, but that can be changed if desired because real women change stuff when they want to.

Real women have ovaries. Unless they don’t, and sometimes they don’t because they were born that way and sometimes they don’t because they had to have their ovaries removed. Real women have uteruses, unless they don’t, see above. Real women have vaginas and clitorises and XX sex chromosomes and high estrogen levels, they ovulate and menstruate and can get pregnant and have babies. Except sometimes not, for a rather spectacular array of reasons both spontaneous and induced.

Real women are fat. And thin. And both, and neither, and otherwise. Doesn’t make them any less real.

There is a phrase I wish I could engrave upon the hearts of every single person, everywhere in the world, and it is this sentence which comes from the genius lips of the grand and eloquent Mr. Glenn Marla: There is no wrong way to have a body.

I’m going to say it again because it’s important: There is no wrong way to have a body.

And if your moral compass points in any way, shape, or form to equality, you need to get this through your thick skull and stop with the “real women are like such-and-so” crap.

You are not the authority on what “real” human beings are, and who qualifies as “real” and on what basis. All human beings are real.

Yes, I know you’re tired of feeling disenfranchised. It is a tiresome and loathsome thing to be and to feel. But the tit-for-tat disenfranchisement of others is not going to solve that problem. Solidarity has to start somewhere and it might as well be with you and me”
― Hanne Blank

“We don't just want what we want because we want it; we want what we want because that's what we've learned to want.”
― Hanne Blank, Straight: The Surprisingly Short History Of Heterosexuality

“You have the right to not have to constantly manage how you look for other people’s sake. You aren’t here to decorate the world for other people. You’re here to live in it for yourself, no matter what that looks like.”
― Hanne Blank, The Unapologetic Fat Girl's Guide to Exercise and Other Incendiary Acts

“The models we have, and the standards we are expected to maintain, come to us via heterosexuality as a normative state. Heterosexuality--whatever the current version of that concept happens to be--is unremarkable because it is the standard by which everything else is measured. That is heterosexual privilege.”
― Hanne Blank, Straight: The Surprisingly Short History Of Heterosexuality

“(In actuality there are no such things as "male" or "female" hormones. Hormones have no sex of their own, and all types of sex hormones are present in all human beings in varying amounts.)”
― Hanne Blank, Straight: The Surprisingly Short History Of Heterosexuality

“Defining virginity means directly affecting the lives of nearly all women, and many men as well. Despite what some people appear to think, defining virginity is not merely a philosophical exercise. It is an exercise in controlling how people behave, feel, and think, and in some cases, whether they live or die.”
― Hanne Blank, Virgin: The Untouched History

“I want to get one thing straight right from the start: I am not a natural-born jock. I am about as intrinsically athletic as an oyster, with the innate grace and sporty prowess of a brick—a very cute oyster and a very intelligent brick, if I do say so myself, but oysterly and bricklike nevertheless.”
― Hanne Blank, The Unapologetic Fat Girl's Guide to Exercise and Other Incendiary Acts

“My favorite Viagra ad, a Spanish-language print ad I saw some years ago, simply shows an image of the distinctive blue pill with the text “Un divorcio menos. Gracias, Pfizer.” (“One less divorce. Thanks, Pfizer.”)”
― Hanne Blank, Straight: The Surprisingly Short History Of Heterosexuality

“Opinions are like assholes. Everyone’s got one. Most people are quite fond of their own, especially in private. Yet they’re not really something that should be waved around too much in public. When they are, it’s okay to ignore them, because showing them off, unsolicited, is actually kind of rude.”
― Hanne Blank, The Unapologetic Fat Girl's Guide to Exercise and Other Incendiary Acts

“The more you behave like you have the right to exist in the world without interference, the less others will question it. The power of a fait accompli is astonishing. The more people see fat bodies moving and being physical and doing whatever makes them happy in the world, without apology and without shame, the more they get used to seeing that and thinking of it as normal.”
― Hanne Blank, The Unapologetic Fat Girl's Guide to Exercise and Other Incendiary Acts

“[Masters and Johnson found] the so-called vaginal orgasm was actually not vaginal. When it happened at all, it was the result of friction between clitoral hood and clitoris that some women experienced when the thrusts of the penis tugged at connected flesh.”
― Hanne Blank, Straight: The Surprisingly Short History Of Heterosexuality

“Sylvester Graham, he of the eponymous health-food cracker, claimed that a man who could make it to the age of thirty without giving in to the temptations of his sexual urges would be a veritable god.”
― Hanne Blank, Straight: The Surprisingly Short History Of Heterosexuality

“Personally, I have learned to welcome the sensation of boredom when I’m working out because boredom can actually provide opportunities that are relaxing and, dare I say it, even useful.”
― Hanne Blank, The Unapologetic Fat Girl's Guide to Exercise and Other Incendiary Acts

“Heterosexuals and homosexuals are considered different because they can be divided into two groups on the basis of the belief that they can be divided into two groups.”
― Hanne Blank, Straight: The Surprisingly Short History Of Heterosexuality

“Some readers were aware that the novels they loved amounted to a propaganda campaign, that the love stories had a particular agenda that might or might not have anything at all to do with reality. But then as now, being a canny and independent-minded consumer of popular media did not bar one from also enjoying being manipulated by it.”
― Hanne Blank, Straight: The Surprisingly Short History Of Heterosexuality

“The opposite of “slut” is someone who has not been labeled a slut, someone who has never been charged with violating doxa.”
― Hanne Blank, Straight: The Surprisingly Short History Of Heterosexuality

“For Hitschmann and Bergler, 'frigidity' had a single criterion: 'absence of the vaginal orgasm.' The standard was unqualified and absolute. A woman who did not enjoy intercourse: frigid. Women who derived sexual pleasure from acts other than intecourse were frigid too. Nothing else mattered, only whether a woman had an orgasm because a man's penis was inside her vagina. Sexually agressive women were labeled 'frigid' because of the association between masculinity and aggressiveness. Womanhood that was not passive was not properly womanly. "Frigidity," as Jane Gerhardt points out, "thus became a label and a diagnosis that defined how much sexual desire a woman must have and in what kinds of sexual behavior she must engage to be 'healthy'.”
― Hanne Blank, Straight: The Surprisingly Short History Of Heterosexuality

“Locker rooms are not, in actual fact, the secret clubhouses of the Effortlessly Thin Women’s Fat-Lady Harassment Society.”
― Hanne Blank, The Unapologetic Fat Girl's Guide to Exercise and Other Incendiary Acts

“Most of all, it teaches you that your body is not just a sort of jar made out of meat that you lug around because it’s what you keep your brain in, but an equal and in fact quite opinionated and demonstrative partner in the joint production that is you.”
― Hanne Blank, The Unapologetic Fat Girl's Guide to Exercise and Other Incendiary Acts

“Kertbeny coined 'heterosexual' and 'homosexual' as a pair on purpose: having two marked categories instead of only one generates a certain amount of equality, which was precisely his point. The paired words suggest that both 'homo' and 'hetero' are marked categories whose specialization sets them off from the unmarked human universal, the undifferentiated 'sexual'.”
― Hanne Blank, Straight: The Surprisingly Short History Of Heterosexuality

“Hell is other people,” said the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, and he wasn’t even a fat guy.”
― Hanne Blank, The Unapologetic Fat Girl's Guide to Exercise and Other Incendiary Acts

“Not every human culture places a particular value on virginity, and not every culture that does value it values it the same way or to the same degree. Indeed, a given culture's treatment of virginity can change over time.”
― Hanne Blank, Virgin: The Untouched History

“Sometimes “concern” is the foot someone jams in the door so you can’t close it against condescension, presumption, invasiveness, and, at times, outright abuse.”
― Hanne Blank, The Unapologetic Fat Girl's Guide to Exercise and Other Incendiary Acts

“Swiftly I learned that regardless of the source or when it was written, information relating to virginity is rarely presented in such a way that it is free of bias, superstition, or simply the kind of inaccuracies that often sneak into even academic books under the guise of "things everybody knows".”
― Hanne Blank, Virgin: The Untouched History

“While the “women just want to have consequence-free sex” anti-contraceptive argument is often trotted out by latter-day social conservatives, such a view is a cruel and misogynist oversimplification. A more realistic assessment of the struggle for effective contraception would be to see it as the struggle to achieve some level of control over the single most dangerous, resource-intensive, and biologically crucial activity in which human beings regularly engage.”
― Hanne Blank, Straight: The Surprisingly Short History of Heterosexuality

“57. Kiss. If this is not a whole-body exercise, keep trying.”
― Hanne Blank, The Unapologetic Fat Girl's Guide to Exercise and Other Incendiary Acts

“Our culture often expects women in general, and fat women in particular, to confine and limit themselves. We are often discouraged, in many different ways, from moving freely, playfully, and happily in the world. We’re not supposed to take up space and be visible and spontaneous and dynamic, colorful or loud or boisterous or rambunctious. Heaven knows we’re not supposed to be fierce, physically unafraid, and fully aware of our own physical power.”
― Hanne Blank, The Unapologetic Fat Girl's Guide to Exercise and Other Incendiary Acts

“The Virgin Mary is both a major medieval legacy and a complicated, messy mixed bag.”
― Hanne Blank, Virgin: The Untouched History

“Fat is an everyday thing, a bodily organ and a biochemical substance without which we would not be able to survive. It is as mundane and ubiquitous and as much a part of our nature as blood and bone. But you’d never know it by the way we talk about it, the obsession we have with getting rid of it, our conviction that it is inimical not just to a good life, but to life itself.”
― Hanne Blank, Fat

“Women's issues, and particularly issues pertaining to women's sexual and reproductive lives, are routinely pushed to the bottom of international political and social agendas”
― Hanne Blank, Virgin: The Untouched History