Bitch Doctrine Quotes

“It is not elitist to look fascism in the face and reject it. It is not anti-democratic to carry on believing in a society where there is space for everyone. Fighting for tolerance, justice and dignity for women, queer people and people of colour is not frivolous or vain. Who decided that it was? Who decided that only those who place fear over faith in their fellow human beings are real, legitimate citizens whose voices matter? That’s not a rhetorical question. I want to know. Give me names.”
― Laurie Penny, Bitch Doctrine: Essays for Dissenting Adults

“Patriarchy, it turns out, is prettiest when it's on fire.”
― Laurie Penny, Bitch Doctrine: Essays for Dissenting Adults

“Feminism is active. It's not something you are; it's something you do. It's what you fight for that matters. Feminism is not an identity but a movement, a way of living. And feminism isn't just about women - it's about liberating everyone from gender oppression, but since women are most oppressed by modern gender norms and laws, and since the movement has always been driven by women's politics, 'feminism' is an appropriate name.”
― Laurie Penny, Bitch Doctrine: Essays for Dissenting Adults

“Every so often I wonder why I didn’t become a restaurant critic. They get free dinners. Being a feminist journalist, I get free death threats.”
― Laurie Penny, Bitch Doctrine: Essays for Dissenting Adults

“Because if the women don't win, nobody wins. If queer people and marginalized people and freaks and outsiders cannot live free, freedom is an empty word.”
― Laurie Penny, Bitch Doctrine: Essays for Dissenting Adults

“It has been noted that many of the soi-disant ‘disruptive’ products being marketed as game changers by Silicon Valley startup kids are things that women thought of years ago. Food substitutes like Soylent and Huel are pushed as the future of nutrition while women have been consuming exactly the same stuff for years as weight-loss shakes and meal replacements. People were using metal implants to prevent pregnancy and artificial hormones to adjust their gendered appearance decades before ‘body hackers’ started jamming magnets in their fingertips and calling themselves cyborgs.”
― Laurie Penny, Bitch Doctrine: Essays for Dissenting Adults

“every groundswell of idealism has salesmen scampering in its wake.”
― Laurie Penny, Bitch Doctrine: Essays for Dissenting Adults

“I’m sure that Trump wants to sit in a shiny chair in the Oval Office and have people tell him all day that he’s the most powerful and impressive man in the world, and I’m just as sure that he doesn’t want to be bothered with the actual business of government.”
― Laurie Penny, Bitch Doctrine: Essays for Dissenting Adults

“Accepting that you're going to be called a bitch isn't about acquiescence. It's about choosing freedom.”
― Laurie Penny, Bitch Doctrine: Essays for Dissenting Adults

“To write and speak and think about the world is to act on it.”
― Laurie Penny, Bitch Doctrine: Essays for Dissenting Adults

“All politics are identity politics, but some identities are more politicized than others.”
― Laurie Penny, Bitch Doctrine: Essays for Dissenting Adults

“Sanity is socially and politically determined and when politics change, the definition of who is well and unwell, who is sane and who is sick, tends to change with it. The traits of good mental health, of the supposedly well-balanced individual, are often suspiciously similar to those of the compliant citizen, the obedient worker, the dutiful woman - whatever those traits might be, depending on the mood of the world and the whims of the powerful. Those who oppose the existing order can count on being labelled as deranged, as irrational, especially if they make the mistake of showing emotion in a power regime that considers all emotions weakness, all feelings laughable - except the rage of the ‘white working class’, as long as this is properly harnessed in the service of vested interests.”
― Laurie Penny, Bitch Doctrine: Essays for Dissenting Adults

“Donald Trump is a bloviating freakshow of the id whose job it is to articulate the ugliest parts of the modern psyche with enough pomp and gumption that it sounds like truth.”
― Laurie Penny, Bitch Doctrine: Essays for Dissenting Adults

“We’ve come to expect this. Trump wears hypocrisy as proudly as he wears his shocking hairdo.”
― Laurie Penny, Bitch Doctrine: Essays for Dissenting Adults

“Men, particularly nerdy men, are socialised to blame women – usually their peers and/or the women they find sexually desirable – for the trauma and shame they experienced growing up. If only women had given them a chance, if only women had taken pity, if only women had done the one thing they had spent their own formative years being shamed and harassed and tormented into not doing. If only they had said yes, or made an approach.”
― Laurie Penny, Bitch Doctrine: Essays for Dissenting Adults

“At seventy-one, when I met her, she was small and delicate and dangerous, like a cupcake full of razors.”
― Laurie Penny, Bitch Doctrine: Essays for Dissenting Adults

“Take Steinem’s concern that if ‘sex work’ becomes the accepted terminology, states might require people to do it in order to access welfare services. Of course, this is a monstrous idea – but it assumes a laid-back attitude to states forcing people to do other work they have not chosen in order to access benefits. When did that become normal? Why is it only horrifying and degrading when the work up for discussion is sexual labour?”
― Laurie Penny, Bitch Doctrine: Essays for Dissenting Adults

“The comments section is now alive and chewing at the heart of Western democracy.”
― Laurie Penny, Bitch Doctrine: Essays for Dissenting Adults