Latest Stephen Marche Quotes from Interviews

Quotes about:

• Marriage is this black box which is the key to all social and political problems; the family is the unit.

  Stephen Marche

  Keys, Political, Black

  Source: www.macleans.ca

• Marriage is an an inherently contradictory state. It involves the fusion of two people into one thing. And it's also love, and it's a lot of work, and it's got glory in its drudgery.

  Stephen Marche

  Two, People, Fusion

  Source: www.macleans.ca

• Marriage is not one point of view: it's a constant back and forth over different perspectives - a healthy marriage, anyway.

  Stephen Marche

  Views, Perspective, Healthy

  Source: www.macleans.ca

• The easier sex gets, the less intimate every sexual act gets. In the Victorian period, a kiss was like a f - k. And now, you know, when actual sexual acts become so easy, their intimacy declines and their meaning declines.

  Stephen Marche

  Sex, Kissing, Intimacy

  Source: www.macleans.ca

• Whenever I read a book about a marriage, I always feel I'm being lied to.

  Stephen Marche

  Book, Being Lied, Lied

  Source: www.macleans.ca

• As you get closer to equality, you get more pornography. True patriarchal societies like Saudi Arabia do not allow pornography because women are not allowed to turn their bodies into a commodity; women are chattel.

  Stephen Marche

  Arabia, Body, Commodity

  Source: www.macleans.ca

• The division [between how much housework men and women do] is declining across all advanced economies - not for the reasons that people want, which is men are doing more, but because women are doing less of it, but even then, the trend is getting towards equality.

  Stephen Marche

  Men, People, Division

  Source: www.macleans.ca

• One [paradox] is that pornography follows in that wake of women's liberation. The first instances of hard-core pornography were in late 18th-century in France, "the Golden Age of Women." The next wave in the 20th century comes from Sweden, one of the first countries where women voted. Then Germany, again, at the forefront of progress. Then America in the '80s, when women were closing the pay gap. And Japan, same thing.

  Stephen Marche

  Country, Pay Gap, America

  Source: www.macleans.ca

• Men are not taking women's job, which are good jobs. Being a nurse is an excellent job.

  Stephen Marche

  Jobs, Men, Nurse

  Source: www.macleans.ca

• Men who define themselves as breadwinners are going to have to leave the traditional iconography of masculinity behind if they want to be breadwinners.

  Stephen Marche

  Men, Iconography, Want

  Source: www.macleans.ca

• I cannot imagine why a woman would ever call herself anything but a feminist. But a man calling himself a feminist, what does that mean? The answer is he wants to be taken as a good guy. Your choice is between saying you're a feminist and raising a flag at a "Take Back the Night" rally and being a men's rights activist, which is basically the only two ways men have of talking about gender right now, I mean that's just ridiculous. That's just two extremes that are totally useless.

  Stephen Marche

  Taken, Mean, Night

  Source: www.macleans.ca

• The economy is changing everything. And men need to deal with that. Our response to it has been rage, stupidity and conscious avoidance of dealing with what the reality of being a man might be outside of empty concepts from ancient history.

  Stephen Marche

  Men, Reality, Stupidity

  Source: www.macleans.ca

• I don't really mind it when Trudeau calls himself a feminist because, you know, he did the half-female cabinet; that's something to be proud of. On the other hand, when you look at that recent Russian spousal abuse law or attacks on abortion in the U.S, you have to say that's a human rights issue, and feminism is just human rights.

  Stephen Marche

  Law, Issues, Rights

  Source: www.macleans.ca

• I'd never call myself a feminist, and that the world doesn't need male feminists.

  Stephen Marche

  Feminist, Males, Needs

  Source: www.macleans.ca

• To me, there's two definitions of feminism. One is that you believe that women are equal human beings; that's not really a philosophy, it's just obvious. And the other is that you're actually fighting for women: you're promoting women and working towards the betterment of women.

  Stephen Marche

  Philosophy, Believe, Fighting

  Source: www.macleans.ca

• What we're seeing now is not just a backlash against feminism. When you look at guys like [Jesse] Helms in the '80s or even Reagan and Bush, there was a real political backlash against feminism. This is different. This is a parodic recreation of the destruction of traditional masculinity. Look at these hollow men. Look at Steve Bannon who wears sweat pants, who doesn't shave. Or Yiannopoulos who is just a clown. This is toxic masculinity. It's new. To see it as a return to the past is a mistake. It's the breakdown of traditional masculinity, rather than its retrenchment.

  Stephen Marche

  Real, Mistake, Men

  Source: www.macleans.ca

• One thing you can say about Trump is that he is not a traditional patriarch. He has a wife who's not even in the White House. And you could say the same of Duterte in the Philippines and of Putin. They're parodies of masculinity. They're hyper-masculine, but they're also totally unsure of their masculinity, and they parade it around.

  Stephen Marche

  White, Wife, House

  Source: www.macleans.ca

• Look at the fact Donald Trump cannot tie a tie. My father took me aside and taught me how to do this when I was eight. He can't shake hands. These are the basic building blocks of traditional masculine style, and he's a parody of it.

  Stephen Marche

  Father, Block, Hands

  Source: www.macleans.ca

• You have two things happening: You have the cultural and economic reality of men falling apart and traditional masculinity falling apart.

  Stephen Marche

  Fall, Men, Reality

  Source: www.macleans.ca

• We're in Trump times - we're in the time this misogynist hate clown is the leader of the free world, and when Putin has made abusing your wife legal, and transgender bathrooms have just been disallowed in school. There are all these political setbacks. And there's no question that those setbacks are very real and need to be treated as civil-rights issues.

  Stephen Marche

  Hate, Real, School

  Source: www.macleans.ca

• The research points pretty clearly to the rise of companionate marriage, and I just think it's going to keep being popular, for the very simple reason that it's basically the only way to afford a family life in the 21st-century in advanced economies. It's one of the major reasons for the spike in income inequality. Surgeons used to marry their secretaries. Now they marry other surgeons.

  Stephen Marche

  Simple, Thinking, Way

  Source: www.macleans.ca

• Culture is always the echo of economic realities; that's what Marx teaches. Feminism is a clear example of that.

  Stephen Marche

  Reality, Echoes, Feminism

  Source: www.macleans.ca

• In economies in which women work, men and women in relationships make about the same amount of money, or women make more. Women are 40 percent of breadwinners in America, and that number's been rising.

  Stephen Marche

  Men, America, Numbers

  Source: www.macleans.ca

• The more money women make, the less violence, the less sexual crimes against women. Everything horrific and misogynistic declines. But then what you're dealing with here is "What does it mean to be in love with people who are your equals?" And that's a very beautiful thing that we should cherish, but it's also incredibly tough in some ways.

  Stephen Marche

  Beautiful, Mean, People

  Source: www.macleans.ca

• You cannot have an advanced economy while holding women back from the workplace.

  Stephen Marche

  Workplace, Economy

  Source: www.macleans.ca