Clementine Ford > Quotes

“Boys are given the universe in which to carve out their identities, the promise of infinite space for them to expand into and contract upon. Girls are allowed only enough room to be stars, and they must twinkle, twinkle if they want anyone to pay attention to them.”
― Clementine Ford, Fight Like a Girl

“My voice is strong and imposing, and my legs are powerful enough to hold up its weight. I wake up every day assured of my right to not only participate in the world as an equal part of it, but to loudly reject the narrative that keeps trying to tell me to pipe down, fold in, shrivel up, simper, apologise and slink my way through life so as not to offend or upset anyone with the complicated, beautiful mess that is me. I have fought the odds to get here, empowered by the knowledge that every single woman who has come before me has fought her own battle in order to survive. We fight like girls. This is how we prevail. And this is why we're still standing.”
― Clementine Ford, Fight Like a Girl

“If history bothered to document our stories, there wouldn't be enough paper in the world to bear witness to all the women who've been imprisoned because our emotions proved too inconvenient for men to handle and too terrifying for them to ignore.”
― Clementine Ford, Fight Like a Girl

“You know the drill "don't wear revealing clothes,don't drink too much, in fact don't drink at all. Don't talk to strange men, but don't ignore men who are probably just trying to have a conversation with you. Can't a man even have a conversation with a woman these days without being accused of being a rapist? How dare you unfairly malign all men with your paranoia and man hating, don't you know that 99% of men are good and decent and would never harm a woman? What do you mean you let him walk you home? What were you thinking? Don't you know how dangerous that is? You girls have to learn to take better care of yourselves. You can't just go walking around with strange men it's not safe. You never know what might happen. You'll give them the wrong idea. What do you mean you won't let me walk you home? But I'm just trying to get you home safely, I'm not a threat to you. How dare you make me feel like I might be a threat to you. You know you're the reason men are giving up on even trying to be polite to women anymore. . . .”
― Clementine Ford, Fight Like a Girl

“We are so used to feeling the gaze on ourselves that we learn to look at each other with men’s eyes.”
― Clementine Ford, Fight Like a Girl

“I was too selfish to have a child before I was ready for one, and there's no shame in admitting that. Women should be selfish about our choices, for as long as we have the privilege of being selfish. Selfishness in women isn't the great crime that people like to pretend it is. We are as entitled as men to prioritise ourselves and our desires, and we are as capable as men of knowing what's best for us. Why is everyone so pathologically terrified of selfish women? The word is thrown around like an insult, as if the worst thing a woman could possibly do (aside from being fat, having sex with whomever she pleases and whenever, swearing, having an abortion, drinking alcohol, standing up for herself and being a working mother) is to decide that her life matters.
But women are allowed to be selfish. It shouldn't be considered a 'privilege' to be able to control our own bodies nor should it be treated like a favour done to us by the state. It's a right that, by and large, has been stolen from us and used to keep us in thrall to a paternalistic body that pretends to know what's best for us but is really only interested in maintaining the order that has proved best for them.”
― Clementine Ford, Fight Like a Girl

“-no matter what we do, we'll never succeed in attaining the 'perfect' body or the 'perfect' face. This isn't just because perfection is an unattainable goal; it's because capitalism relies on people being constantly unhappy so it can keep selling us the promise that consumerism will make our lives better.”
― Clementine Ford, Fight Like a Girl

“It shouldn’t be considered a ‘privilege’ to be able to control our own bodies nor should it be treated like a favour done to us by the state. It’s”
― Clementine Ford, Fight Like a Girl

“Not all men!" isn't just a mating call for the lazy and aggrieved, it's also a diversionary tactic used to shift attention away from the substantial issues of discrimination and oppression that impact women's lives and channel it instead into men's feelings.”
― Clementine Ford, Boys Will Be Boys: Power, Patriarchy and the Toxic Bonds of Mateship

“When there are so many people willing to degrade women so horrifically just for having the nerve to express an opinion, it doesn’t take long for us to regress into silence.”
― Clementine Ford, Fight Like a Girl

“We know how unsafe the world is for us. We are like cliffs staring down at a raging sea, battered by winds and salt and spray and unable to wrench ourselves away from the supposed inevitability of it all. But though we may recede under the relentless thrashing, still we stand tall. The world and all its angry currents cannot break us, no matter how hard it tries. Still, this erosion of the spirit is a bitter pill to swallow.”
― Clementine Ford, Fight Like a Girl

“Stop marrying men and taking their names as a matter of course. It isn't 'choice' when it's mostly going one way. Before you argue that 'it's just your father's name anyway', stop for a moment. It's your name. You were born with it, just as men were born with theirs. The difference is that our patriarchal society still treats women as if our names are on loan from one man until we find another to claim us and gift us with our new and true identity, while men get to own their names from the start and claim their destinies for themselves. I'm not saying you're wrong for doing it, I'm just saying think a bit more deeply about the fact that women are expected to do it all. And if you say it's because you wanted to have the same last name as your children, just ask yourself why women for the most part do all of the work of growing and birthing children only to turn around and give naming rights to men who did barely anything at all.”
― Clementine Ford, Boys Will Be Boys: Power, Patriarchy and the Toxic Bonds of Mateship

“A significant driver of opposition to abortion is the social construction of the Ideal Woman. In a culture that rarely, if ever, allows women simply to be people, value is ascribed based on a woman's relation to something other than herself. A woman on her own is like a bit of driftwood floating in the ocean. She is a broken object with no purpose, waiting either to wash up on the shore and be put to use as part of something else, or to sink and be forgotten forever.”
― Clementine Ford, Fight Like a Girl

“These women who love and adore the men in their lives and recognise the potential for goodness that exists in all men might still feel like crying sometimes, because for all the love they offer the world’s men, the hate those men are capable of offering back can be heartbreaking and soul-destroying. Instead”
― Clementine Ford, Fight Like a Girl

“Because Not All Men, right? I mean, we'd hate to make them feel bad.

If men are genuine allies to women - if they are genuinely invested in our liberation and equality - why should they feel entitled to any kind of acknowledgement or reward? More to the point, why do we feel constantly pressured to give it to them?

The roots of patriarchy run very, very deep. Some feminists fear that if we don't mollycoddle sympathetic men, they'll throw a tantrum and go home.

But doesn't this urge to placate and flatter simply replicate the same power dynamics that underpin our oppression in the first place?”
― Clementine Ford

“For me, feminism isn't just about gender equality as an end goal, because that implied that the structures we live under currently are the correct ones and the only problem with them is that women do not experience equity beneath them. I disagree. I am in favour of reimagine what out societies should look like, including the ways in which masculine ideas of power and leadership are absorbed as natural and normal. Feminism is also about liberating women from the expectation that we behave in a certain kind of way in order to be taken seriously or given any kind of power at all, however nominal it might be.”
― Clementine Ford, Fight Like a Girl

“If you’ve never experienced anxiety, you might find it difficult to understand what that feels like. I can throw any number of clichés and similes at you: it’s like trying to find your way out of a dark and dense forest, only to keep circling back to the same point you started from; it feels like being caught in a washing machine, disorientating and dizzy-making and like you’re always on the precipice of drowning; it’s like a carnival tent full of distorting mirrors, and you’re too terrified to look into any of them because you’re afraid your own reflection might assume a life of its own and start to mock you. It’s like all of these things at once and that’s an easy way to visualise it. But the simple and most universal truth is that anxiety just makes you feel incredibly, desperately alone. I”
― Clementine Ford, Fight Like a Girl

“A friend of mine once said to me that feminism helped to figure out a way of being a girl that doesn't hurt.”
― Clementine Ford, Fight Like a Girl

“It doesn't matter how politically progressive your household is when it comes to aspirations outside the home and the limitless capabilites of women; if it's made clear within those four walls that it is the responsiblity of women to perform the unpaid labour of domesticity, this is the value system that children will internalise: boys are born to rule the world, and girls to clean up after them.”
― Clementine Ford, Boys Will Be Boys: Power, Patriarchy and the Toxic Bonds of Mateship

“I learned about 'patriarchy', which is the overriding system we all live under whereby men are privileged and generically imbued with the power of dominance.”
― Clementine Ford, Fight Like a Girl

“What I'm suggesting is that your impulse to assign meaning to something as arbitrary and functional as genitalia is born out of a cultural imperative to affix labels where none are necessary, and that individual participation in these rituals enforces a larger pattern of collective gender stereotyping that ultimately proves harmful for everyone.”
― Clementine Ford, Boys Will Be Boys: Power, Patriarchy and the Toxic Bonds of Mateship

“Ah yes, the meritocracy. Isn't it amazing how so many of the 'best people for the job' always happen to be white, cis-het, middle-class men? It couldn't be that structural inequality and hierarchal privilege allows for such people to succeed by making their path to power smoother and more accessible than anyone's else's.”
― Clementine Ford, Boys Will Be Boys: Power, Patriarchy and the Toxic Bonds of Mateship

“Not purposefully contributing to the oppression felt by people already marginalised by the system doesn't make me a champion of human rights.

I might not be actively making things worse for another human being, but that doesn't mean I'm doing anything to make things better.

What it might mean is that I maintain a conscious neutrality on the social circumstances which make their lives harder while enjoying the benefits that come my way simply because those systems are designed in my favour.”
― Clementine Ford, Fight Like a Girl

“we must also remember that the bar for what most women will consider a suitable partner is buried deep beneath the earth's crust, so the fact men manage to burrow even further down is quite an impressive feat.”
― Clementine Ford, I Don't: The Case Against Marriage

“There is evidence that I have survived this before, that I will go on surviving.
There is love. There is love. There is love.
Maybe the Cheshire cat was right. Maybe we are all a little mad. And if we are all in this together, then none of us are truly alone. That means me. But it also means you.
Across these pages, I reach out to you, dear one whose heart feels so alone.
This too shall pass.
And we will all be okay.”
― Clementine Ford

“The mark of my love lies in how willing I am to let it go.”
― Clementine Ford, How We Love: Notes on a life

“Capitalism will always come after us.”
― Clementine Ford, Fight Like a Girl

“An inability to deal with emotions in healthy ways is what toxic masculinity is all about. And, in most cases, what this really stems from is fear. They're afraid of the world changing, because then they might have to actually work a bit harder to be seen as important within it. So they shit on women and people of colour and anyone else fighting for political equality alongside them and screech about 'SJWs' and feminism being 'cancer' and think this is enough to mask the stench of fear that rolls off them in waves. But as any true Star Wars fan can tell you, fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering.”
― Clementine Ford, Boys Will Be Boys: Power, Patriarchy and the Toxic Bonds of Mateship

“It's impossible to examine the conditioning that leads boys and men to exhibit some of the more harmful aspects of the 'boys will be boys' mentality later on in life without critiquing the mindset and practice from which this evolves.”
― Clementine Ford, Boys Will Be Boys: Power, Patriarchy and the Toxic Bonds of Mateship

“Far from the accepted belief that unfounded allegations will ruin a man's career--that indeed, as Trump tweeted, "There is no recovery for someone falsely accused"--the exact opposite is true. Men's careers recover all the time following accusations of abuse and/or sexual violence against women. Hell, men's careers recover following convictions for these things. Male power has always been valued and protected more than women's bodies, no matter what level of abuse they may have been accused of.”
― Clementine Ford, Boys Will Be Boys: Power, Patriarchy and the Toxic Bonds of Mateship