90s Bitch Quotes

“The passage out of girlhood is a journey into silence, disconnection, and dissembling, a troubled crossing that our culture has plotted with dead ends and detours.”
― Allison Yarrow, 90s Bitch: Media, Culture, and the Failed Promise of Gender Equality

“Not only do we live in a totally fucked-up patriarchal society run by white men who don't represent our interests at all, but we are in a country where those people don't care if we live or die. And that's pretty scary.”
― Allison Yarrow, 90s Bitch: Media, Culture, and the Failed Promise of Gender Equality

“When it comes to women, people are not ready to take more than a teaspoonful of change at a time”
― Allison Yarrow, 90s Bitch: Media, Culture, and the Failed Promise of Gender Equality

“Women weren't telling their own stories; men were telling the stories of women that they wanted to see.”
― Allison Yarrow, 90s Bitch: Media, Culture, and the Failed Promise of Gender Equality

“It’s about labeling. For me feminism is bra-burning lesbianism. It’s very unglamorous. I’d like to see it rebranded. We need to see a celebration of our femininity and softness,” she said.”
― Allison Yarrow, 90s Bitch: The Real Story of the Women America Loved to Hate

“Television’s ideal woman in the late 80s and early 90s was “beautiful, dependent, helpless, passive, concerned with interpersonal relations, warm and valued for her appearance more than for her capabilities and competencies,”
― Allison Yarrow, 90s Bitch: The Real Story of the Women America Loved to Hate

“In the end, the 1990s didn’t advance women and girls; rather, the decade was marked by a shocking, accelerating effort to subordinate them. As women gained power, or simply showed up in public, society pushed back by reducing them to gruesome sexual fantasies and misogynistic stereotypes. Women’s careers, clothes, bodies, and families were skewered. Nothing was off-limits. The trailblazing women of the 90s were excoriated by a deeply sexist society. That’s why we remember them as bitches, not victims of sexism.”
― Allison Yarrow, 90s Bitch: The Real Story of the Women America Loved to Hate

“Brain-imaging studies reveal that the deep attachment we feel to the music from our adolescence isn’t a conscious preference or reflection of critical listening, but the result of a host of pleasure chemicals bombarding our brains.”
― Allison Yarrow, 90s Bitch: The Real Story of the Women America Loved to Hate

“From its very conception, “bitch” was a verbal weapon designed to restrain women and strip them of their power.”
― Allison Yarrow, 90s Bitch: The Real Story of the Women America Loved to Hate

“Bitch” is a gendered insult with a long history of reducing women to their sexual function.”
― Allison Yarrow, 90s Bitch: The Real Story of the Women America Loved to Hate

“Objectification theory” explained that women and girls are “acculturated to internalize an observer’s perspective as a primary view of their physical selves.” Thus, because society values female bodies primarily for their function and consumption, women and girls are more susceptible to suffering as their bodies change, like during puberty, but also due to pregnancy, weight fluctuation, and aging. This objectification enables discrimination, sexual violence, undervaluing women, and depression, the authors wrote.”
― Allison Yarrow, 90s Bitch: The Real Story of the Women America Loved to Hate

“Women were expected to be sexual gatekeepers, required to set boundaries for going to bed, and blamed if things went awry.”
― Allison Yarrow, 90s Bitch: The Real Story of the Women America Loved to Hate