Male Dominance Quotes

• Pornography incarnates male supremacy. It is the DNA of male dominance. Every rule of sexual abuse, every nuance of sexual sadism, every highway and byway of sexual exploitation, is encoded in it.

  Andrea Dworkin

  Dna, Abuse, Nuance

  Andrea Dworkin (1989). “Pornography: men possessing women”, Plume

  70 Copy quote

  Show source

• 'Beauty' is a currency system like the gold standard. Like any economy, it is determined by politics, and in the modern age in the West is is the last, best belief system that keeps male dominance intact.

  Naomi Wolf

  Self Esteem, Age, Gold

  1990 The Beauty Myth, ch.1,'The Beauty Myth'.

  25 Copy quote

  Show source

• All history attests that man has subjected woman to his will, used her as a means to promote his selfish gratification, to minister to his sensual pleasures, to be instrumental in promoting his comfort; but never has he desired to elevate her to that rank she was created to fill. He has done all he could to debase and enslave her mind; and now he looks triumphantly on the ruin he has wrought, and say, the being he has thus deeply injured is his inferior.

  Sarah Moore Grimke

  Selfish, Mean, Men

  Sarah Moore Grimké, Mary S. Parker (1838). “Letters on the equality of the sexes, and the condition of woman: Addressed to Mary S. Parker”, p.11

  60 Copy quote

  Show source

• For many women today, on a personal level, the problem is not male dominance so much as male desertion.

  Nancy Pearcey

  Males, Levels, Today

  11 Copy quote

• Radical feminist theorists do not seek to make gender a bit more flexible, but to eliminate it. They are gender abolitionists, and understand gender to provide the framework and rationale for male dominance. In the radical feminist approach, masculinity is the behaviour of the male ruling class and femininity is the behaviour of the subordinate class of women. Thus gender can have no place in the egalitarian future that feminism aims to create.

  Sheila Jeffreys

  Radical Feminism, Class, Feminist

  Sheila Jeffreys (2014). “Gender Hurts: A Feminist Analysis of the Politics of Transgenderism”, p.42, Routledge

  51 Copy quote

  Show source

• Women are a colonized people.

  Robin Morgan

  People, Oppression, Colonization

  5 Copy quote

• Masculinity cannot exist without femininity. On its own, masculinity has no meaning, because it is but one half of a set of power relations. Masculinity pertains to male dominance as femininity pertains to female subordination.

  Sheila Jeffreys

  Males, Female, Half

  36 Copy quote

• Let every woman ask herself: "Why am I the slave of man? Why is my brain said not to be the equal of his brain? Why is my work notpaid equally with his? Why must my body be controlled by my husband? Why may he take my labor in the household, giving me in exchange what he deems fit? Why may he take my children from me? Will them away while yet unborn?" Let every woman ask.

  Voltairine de Cleyre

  Children, Husband, Men

  17 Copy quote

• All the accoutrements that distinguish us from animal existence were put in place when we had a different kind of mind than we have now. We didn't have a mind that favored role specialization, and male dominance, and anxiety over female sexual activity related to feelings of male ownership. That all came later.

  Terence McKenna

  Animal, Anxiety, Feelings

  4 Copy quote

• According to our social pyramid, all men who feel displaced racially, culturally, and/or because of economic hardships will turn on those whom they feel they can order and humiliate, usually women, children, and animals--just as they have been ordered and humiliated by those privileged few who are in power. However, this definition does not explain why there are privileged men who behave this way toward women.

  Ana Castillo

  Children, Animal, Men

  7 Copy quote

• A two-parent family based on love and commitment can be a wonderful thing, but historically speaking the "two-parent paradigm" has left an extraordinary amount of room for economic inequality, violence and male dominance.

  Stephanie Coontz

  Commitment, Two, Economic Inequality

  10 Copy quote

• It is one thing to say, "Some men shall rule," quite another to declare, "All men shall rule," and that in virtue of the most primitive, the most rudimentary attribute they possess, that namely of sex.

  Mary Corinna Putnam Jacobi

  Sex, Men, Virtue

  10 Copy quote

• In any service where a couple hold down jobs as a team, the male generally takes his ease while the wife labors at his job as wellas her own.

  Anita Loos

  Jobs, Couple, Team

  Anita Loos (1974). “Kiss Hollywood good-by”, Viking Adult

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Every man who is not for us in this prolonged struggle for liberty is responsible for the present degradation of the mothers of the race. It is pitiful to see how few men ever have made our cause their own, but while leaving us to fight our battle alone, they have been unsparing in their criticism of every failure. Of all the battles for liberty in the long past, woman only has been left to fight her own, without help and with all the powers of earth and heaven, human and divine, arrayed against her.

  Elizabeth Cady Stanton

  Mother, Struggle, Fighting

  Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan Brownell Anthony, Ida Husted Harper, Matilda Joslyn Gage (1902). “History of Woman Suffrage ...: 1883-1900”

  41 Copy quote

  Show source

• Women themselves condition their daughters to serve the system of male primacy. If a daughter challenges it, the mother will generally defend the system rather than her daughter. These mothers, victims themselves, have unwittingly become wounded wounders. Women need to attack culture's oppression of women, for there truly is a godlike socializing power that induces women to "buy in" or collude, but we also need to confront our own part in accepting male dominance and take responsibility where appropriate.

  Sue Monk Kidd

  Mother, Daughter, Women

  5 Copy quote

• It is not coincidental that for so-called religious fundamentalists - whether they are Western or Eastern, Muslim or Christian - rigid male dominance and "holy wars" are priorities. Or that competing sects of the same religion, such as Sunni and Shia, are at each other's throats. In these cultures, women are rigidly controlled by men.

  Riane Eisler

  Christian, Religious, War

  Source: www.psychologytoday.com

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• Beauty' is a currency system like the gold standard.

  Naomi Wolf

  Gold, Currency, Standards

  Naomi Wolf (2009). “The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women”, p.12, Harper Collins

  10 Copy quote

  Show source

• Obviously, untangling sex from aggression and violence or the threat of it is going to take a very long time. And the process is going to be greatly resisted as a challenge to the very heart of male dominance and male centrality.

  Gloria Steinem

  Sex, Heart, Aggression And Violence

  Gloria Steinem (2012). “Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions”, p.339, Open Road Media

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• There is a collective force rising up on the earth today, an energy of the reborn feminine... This is a time of monumental shift, from the male dominance of human consciousness back to a balanced relationship between masculine and feminine.

  Marianne Williamson

  Women, Masculine And Feminine, Rising Up

  Marianne Williamson (2013). “A Woman's Worth”, p.39, Ballantine Books

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

• I sometimes try to imagine what would have happened if we’d known the bonobo first and the chimpanzee only later—or not at all. The discussion about human evolution might not revolve as much around violence, warfare and male dominance, but rather around sexuality, empathy, caring and cooperation. What a different intellectual landscape we would occupy!

  Frans de Waal

  Caring, Empathy, Intellectual

  Frans de Waal (2006). “Our Inner Ape: A Leading Primatologist Explains Why We Are Who We Are”, p.41, Penguin

  21 Copy quote

  Show source

• Male dominance in society always means that out of public sight, in the private, ahistorical world of men with women, men are sexually dominating women.

  Andrea Dworkin

  Mean, Men, Sight

  Andrea Dworkin (1983). “Right-wing women: the politics of domesticated females”

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• The bonding of women that is woman-loving, or Gyn/affection, is very different from male bonding. Male bonding has been the glue of male dominance. It has been based upon recognition of the difference men see between themselves and women, and is a form of the behaviour, masculinity, that creates and maintains male power… Male comradeship/bonding depends upon energy drained from women.

  Sheila Jeffreys

  Men, Differences, Energy

  15 Copy quote

• Rap comes from the humble beginnings of rebelling against the status quo. Now, rappers have become the status quo themselves. You can't rebel against the Queen and then become the Queen yourself. I attribute much of the blame to testosterone-male dominance and patriarchy.

  Chuck D

  Queens, Rap, Humble

  Interview with Antonino D'Ambrosio, progressive.org. July 20, 2005.

  39 Copy quote

  Show source