Unspeakable Things 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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“The sort of feminism that sells is the sort of feminism that can appeal to almost everybody while challenging nobody, feminism that soothes, that speaks for and to the middle class, aspirational feminism that speaks of shoes and shopping and sugar-free snacks and does not talk about poor women, queer women, ugly women, transsexual women, sex workers, single parents, or anybody else who fails to fit the mould.”
― Laurie Penny, Unspeakable Things: Sex, Lies and Revolution

“This is one of the reasons why women, and particularly young women, have adapted particularly well to the way in which social media and the capitalisation of the social realm requires everyone to apply the logic of branding to our own lives in order to gain followers. We have always been encouraged to understand femininity as a form of branding, albeit one burnt into our flesh at birth.”
― Laurie Penny, Unspeakable Things: Sex, Lies and Revolution

“Work, beauty and romance, then marriage, mortgage and kids: that definition of total freedom has been allowed to conquer our imaginations, leaving no space for any other lives. But what if you want something else? Is that still allowed?”
― Laurie Penny, Unspeakable Things: Sex, Lies and Revolution

“It is important that everyone understands how sexism affects women and thereby impacts on all human beings. Women are subject to stricter rules of behaviour: how to act, what to say, what to want. What to wear, what to eat, where to shop, how to behave at work, when not to text him back, when to fuck, how to fuck, what colour to put in your hair when he leaves you.”
― Laurie Penny, Unspeakable Things: Sex, Lies and Revolution

“We’re encouraged to feel sympathetic only towards the people who have traditionally held power in society – men, white people, straight people, the upper classes – for graciously giving away a tiny bit of their privilege, scraps of opportunity for the rest of us to share. We’re told that equality on paper, equality in a court of law, is enough in a society whose laws have always been applied unfairly and pursued unequally. Most of all we’re told that this is enough. There can be no better world than the one we’re living in now. We learn that equality, social opportunity and personal and sexual freedom are luxuries that society can’t afford. But it’s not true. Liberty cannot be crafted in a court of law alone. This isn’t the sexual revolution we were told was over and done with. This isn’t where feminism finished. This is where it starts. ”
― Laurie Penny, Unspeakable Things: Sex, Lies and Revolution

“Fake tiaras and fashion handbooks play into the collective fantasy that one day, if you are beautiful and good enough, you too can marry the inbred great-great-grandchild of some bloodless aristocrat whose distant relations were better at murdering huge numbers of peasants than some other bloodless aristocrat.”
― Laurie Penny, Unspeakable Things: Sex, Lies and Revolution

“There is a princess in all our heads: she must be destroyed.”
― Laurie Penny, Unspeakable Things: Sex, Lies and Revolution

“What we don’t say is: of course not all men hate women. But culture hates women, and men who grow up in a sexist culture have a tendency to do and say sexist things, often without meaning to. We aren’t judging you for who you are, but that doesn’t mean we’re not asking you to change your behaviour. What you feel about women in your heart is of less immediate importance than how you treat them on a daily basis. You can be the gentlest, sweetest man in the world and still benefit from sexism, still hesitate to speak up when you see women hurt and discriminated against. 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

“Loneliness is a fearful thing. But a life lived grasping for another person to make you whole is just as fearful.”
― Laurie Penny, Unspeakable Things: Sex, Lies and Revolution

“...women who have grown up learning that they were failing on a basic level if they could not command the love & commitment of men.”
― Laurie Penny, Unspeakable Things: Sex, Lies and Revolution

“Some of us may have loosened the vice of religious misogyny, but we still find ourselves on our knees.”
― Laurie Penny, Unspeakable Things: Sex, Lies and Revolution

“Human love is radical & it is devestating.”
― Laurie Penny, Unspeakable Things: Sex, Lies and Revolution

“When bigotry is forced to see itself through the eyes of another, the reaction can be grotesque.”
― Laurie Penny, Unspeakable Things: Sex, Lies and Revolution

“The trouble is that in this society, 'he said' is almost always more credible than 'she said,' unless she is white & he is not.”
― Laurie Penny, Unspeakable Things: Sex, Lies and Revolution