Boys Will Be Boys Quotes

“Not all men!" isn't just a mating call for the lazy and aggrieved, it's also a diversionary tactic used to shift attention away from the substantial issues of discrimination and oppression that impact women's lives and channel it instead into men's feelings.”
― Clementine Ford, Boys Will Be Boys: Power, Patriarchy and the Toxic Bonds of Mateship

“Stop marrying men and taking their names as a matter of course. It isn't 'choice' when it's mostly going one way. Before you argue that 'it's just your father's name anyway', stop for a moment. It's your name. You were born with it, just as men were born with theirs. The difference is that our patriarchal society still treats women as if our names are on loan from one man until we find another to claim us and gift us with our new and true identity, while men get to own their names from the start and claim their destinies for themselves. I'm not saying you're wrong for doing it, I'm just saying think a bit more deeply about the fact that women are expected to do it all. And if you say it's because you wanted to have the same last name as your children, just ask yourself why women for the most part do all of the work of growing and birthing children only to turn around and give naming rights to men who did barely anything at all.”
― Clementine Ford, Boys Will Be Boys: Power, Patriarchy and the Toxic Bonds of Mateship

“It doesn't matter how politically progressive your household is when it comes to aspirations outside the home and the limitless capabilites of women; if it's made clear within those four walls that it is the responsiblity of women to perform the unpaid labour of domesticity, this is the value system that children will internalise: boys are born to rule the world, and girls to clean up after them.”
― Clementine Ford, Boys Will Be Boys: Power, Patriarchy and the Toxic Bonds of Mateship

“Ah yes, the meritocracy. Isn't it amazing how so many of the 'best people for the job' always happen to be white, cis-het, middle-class men? It couldn't be that structural inequality and hierarchal privilege allows for such people to succeed by making their path to power smoother and more accessible than anyone's else's.”
― Clementine Ford, Boys Will Be Boys: Power, Patriarchy and the Toxic Bonds of Mateship

“What I'm suggesting is that your impulse to assign meaning to something as arbitrary and functional as genitalia is born out of a cultural imperative to affix labels where none are necessary, and that individual participation in these rituals enforces a larger pattern of collective gender stereotyping that ultimately proves harmful for everyone.”
― Clementine Ford, Boys Will Be Boys: Power, Patriarchy and the Toxic Bonds of Mateship

“Boys will be sensitive. Boys will be soft. Boys will be kind. Boys will be gentle. Boys will respect girls. Boys will be accountable for their actions. Boys will be expressive. Boys will be loving. Boys will be nurturing.

Boys will be different from everything the world has so far told them they have to be in order to be a man.”
― Clementine Ford, Boys Will Be Boys: Power, Patriarchy and the Toxic Bonds of Mateship

“Embrace sensitivity. Don't let a world that's frightened of soft men succeed in breaking you. We have too many broken men. We need men like you, men whose strength comes from being gentle.”
― Clementine Ford, Boys Will Be Boys: Power, Patriarchy and the Toxic Bonds of Mateship

“Sharing your emotions isn't a sign of weakness--it's a sign of strength.”
― Clementine Ford, Boys Will Be Boys: Power, Patriarchy and the Toxic Bonds of Mateship

“Far from the accepted belief that unfounded allegations will ruin a man's career--that indeed, as Trump tweeted, "There is no recovery for someone falsely accused"--the exact opposite is true. Men's careers recover all the time following accusations of abuse and/or sexual violence against women. Hell, men's careers recover following convictions for these things. Male power has always been valued and protected more than women's bodies, no matter what level of abuse they may have been accused of.”
― Clementine Ford, Boys Will Be Boys: Power, Patriarchy and the Toxic Bonds of Mateship

“The world is awash with women who would have blossomed into something had they not, as Caitlin Johnstone put it, "collided with rape culture". But this collision does occur, and it continues to do so at alarming levels because we are yet to reach a point where the promising futures of young girls are considered every bit as important and precious as the promising futures of young boys.”
― Clementine Ford, Boys Will Be Boys: Power, Patriarchy and the Toxic Bonds of Mateship

“Commenting on Brock Turner's case on one of my Facebook posts, a woman named Louisa curry sharply observed, "I see a pattern emerging in rape culture that suggests women have a past, while men have a potential.”
― Clementine Ford, Boys Will Be Boys: Power, Patriarchy and the Toxic Bonds of Mateship

“Never forget that a woman's right to say no to sexual contact disintegrates each time she invokes her right to say yes.”
― Clementine Ford, Boys Will Be Boys: Power, Patriarchy and the Toxic Bonds of Mateship

“How do we know that she consented? Because Johns says so. And if a man says sex was consensual, nothing a woman says to the contrary will ever be enough to convince people determined to protect his reputation and preserve his entitlement.”
― Clementine Ford, Boys Will Be Boys: Power, Patriarchy and the Toxic Bonds of Mateship

“There are always people willing to defend men accused of rape by arguing that consent was in place, even though their conviction is based on nothing other than the say-so of the man involved. A gang rape becomes group sex, the rape of an unconscious woman a case of 'next-day regret'--and the truth is whatever the man being defended by the public and/or his immediate community says it is.”
― Clementine Ford, Boys Will Be Boys: Power, Patriarchy and the Toxic Bonds of Mateship

“Consent is a language that has many thousands more words than just 'yes' and 'no', but it's these two that everyone fixates on when determining the strength of a rape complaint. Perhaps she didn't say yes--but she didn't say no, either. It's a thought process that overwhelmingly favours the men most likely to be accused of rape, and the degree to which it will be used to protect them varies according to how much prestige and status their privilege affords them.”
― Clementine Ford, Boys Will Be Boys: Power, Patriarchy and the Toxic Bonds of Mateship

“Watching the trial progress, it seemed to me the question was never "are these men rapists?, but always "is this woman a liar?”
― Clementine Ford, Boys Will Be Boys: Power, Patriarchy and the Toxic Bonds of Mateship

“Rape culture has succeeded in convincing the general population that rapists never look like men you know, and, therefore, the men you know can never actually be rapists.

Supporters (conscious or otherwise) of rape culture are extremely invested in maintaining the fiction about what properly defines a rapist. A rapist isn't the man you work with or the one you drink beers with at the pub. He isn't the man you train with at the gym or the one you play football with on the weekend. He isn't the nice young lad who lives in a college dorm while studying engineering. A rapist isn't married with children, nor does he have parents or siblings or a network of people who've known him all his life. He isn't the bloke who fixes your car, the one who holds the door open for stragglers, the man who sells you veggies at the greengrocer or that nice guy who reads the weather on the evening news. He isn't your brother, your son, your boyfriend or your husband. He's certainly never wealthy or even from a moderate middle-class background, and his class--especially when combined with white skin--protects his actions from ever being liked to those of a real rapist.

Real rapists, as everyone knows, are those antisocial, itinerant Shadow Men who live in the walls and bear no resemblance to other men at all. Real rapists exhibit openly misogynistic attitudes, which is how you can tell the difference between them and men whose misogyny is carefully cloaked in more complex contradictions, the men who are 'really good blokes' who, at worst, have 'just made a mistake' and at best are being hounded by vengeful women after fame and money.

Listen, it would certainly be a lot easier if rapists were easy to identify by the five-pronged tail growing out of their butts. If we could clock rapists in both public and private spaces, we could better protect ourselves from their choices. Unfortunately, life isn't that simple. Rapists aren't accompanied by the piercing smell of rotten eggs, nor is their skin covered in thorns. Rapists do indeed look just like everyone else.

Why, some of them probably even look like men you know.”
― Clementine Ford, Boys Will Be Boys: Power, Patriarchy and the Toxic Bonds of Mateship

“It's how we should start reframing the dialogue around sexual violence. Discussion that fixates on the victims and survivors only succeeds in erasing the perpetrators. If the majority of perpetrators are known to their victims, it stands to reason that they move in the same communities we do. And if university students in particular are at risk of being sexually assaulted (which they are), then the question is an essential one: Which one of you raped us?”
― Clementine Ford, Boys Will Be Boys: Power, Patriarchy and the Toxic Bonds of Mateship

“People are allowed to find you gross and threatening according to the nature of the free speech you choose to defend.”
― Clementine Ford, Boys Will Be Boys: Power, Patriarchy and the Toxic Bonds of Mateship

“Our 'sensitivities' are treated as evidence of our incapacity to participate in a grown-up sphere, even as the men angrily lashing out against them are framed as ideological defenders of free speech and the open exchange of ideas.”
― Clementine Ford, Boys Will Be Boys: Power, Patriarchy and the Toxic Bonds of Mateship

“It's easy to think of toxic male bonding and abusive, harmful behavior happening either on the fringes of society or among people who lack influence and power. But the truth is, power is where this all stems from.”
― Clementine Ford, Boys Will Be Boys: Power, Patriarchy and the Toxic Bonds of Mateship

“Just over 93 percent and four fifths of Fortune 500 chief executive officers and board members, respectively, are men, both undeniably significant figures even for people like me who believe that feminism's goals must extend well and truly beyond the success of a small number of privileged (mostly white) women within a capitalist patriarchy.”
― Clementine Ford, Boys Will Be Boys: Power, Patriarchy and the Toxic Bonds of Mateship

“But, we are told repeatedly, it should all be about merit.

Bullshit.

It's so easy for lazy people to believe that those privileged most by gender, race, sexuality, and class are somehow judged separately from the benefits these attributes bring. Our culture doesn't view women (or people of colour, or disabled people, or gender diverse people, or anyone who isn't a white man, basically) as being inherently meritorious. Imagine--just imagine--what the public's reaction would be if the majority of politicians elected to government were women. If the majority of newspaper columnists, TV commentators, and CEOs were chicks. Think of the outcry if our talkback radio stations (which are currently wall-to-wall white men, because 'no one wants to listen to women' on the wireless) were suddenly overrun by bloody sheilas.

Merit? No, that wouldn't be merit. That would be 'cultural Marxism'. That would herald the start of matriarchy and the end of the world. It would be a witch-led conspiracy. Women? Running things? UNFAIR.

In fact, the 'merit' argument is little more than a convenient retort to anyone who tries to point out the workings of the deeply flawed systems we live in. It's telling that those who defend the merit system often present themselves (as Trump has done most egregiously) as supporters of women's rights.

If you believe that women are as capable of performing in positions of responsibility as men, it logically follows that we shouldn't see these structures of power being dominated by men. On the other hand, if you defend the current and historical imbalance of power as being due to nothing more than the application of 'merit', it doesn't matter how loudly you profess your feminist credentials -- what you quite obviously believe is that white, middle-class, heterosexual men who have always held all the power are the only ones capable of doing so. It means you inherently think these people are better than everyone else.

You can't have it both ways.”
― Clementine Ford, Boys Will Be Boys: Power, Patriarchy and the Toxic Bonds of Mateship

“It's astonishing how frequently grown women are undermined and infantilised simply for the act of standing up for ourselves.”
― Clementine Ford, Boys Will Be Boys: Power, Patriarchy and the Toxic Bonds of Mateship

“How frustrating must it have been for the most qualified candidate in US history to lose to a man so incompetent, dangerous, and cartoonish that he is living satire. That enough people in the right places preferred an ignorant, racist, misogynist, dangerous imbecile (not to mention an accused rapist) to a woman with decades of political experience is proof of how much further we have to go. Hillary Clinton has endured a lifetime of abuse about her looks (they were even blamed for her husband's infidelities), her 'shrill' personality, her mannishness, her hawkishness, her sensitivity (heaven forbid a person be seen to cry once in a while) and her general 'lack of appeal'. People still seem to be baffled by the idea that a woman could be powerful in her own right rather than have it bestowed on her by the male gaze. I'm not saying she's above critique or that none of it is fair -- I'm saying there's a flavor to it that is purely do to her being a woman that isn't found in critiques of men with similar political leanings.”
― Clementine Ford, Boys Will Be Boys: Power, Patriarchy and the Toxic Bonds of Mateship

“But anger belongs to men, and so Dr. Blasey Ford could not appear before the world and show what the rage of abuse and trauma really looks like. That was a privilege reserved for Brett Kavanaugh, like so many of the privileges he's enjoyed before it.”
― Clementine Ford, Boys Will Be Boys: Power, Patriarchy and the Toxic Bonds of Mateship

“But this is how men like Trump and those who model themselves on him operate. Despite insisting that it is women who cannot rein in our emotions and maintain rational perspective, it's the furious guardians of power who froth and spit at anyone they perceive to be a threat, whether actual or just ideological.”
― Clementine Ford, Boys Will Be Boys: Power, Patriarchy and the Toxic Bonds of Mateship

“There is nothing and no one privileged white men won't do and fuck over to affirm their power. Their depth of entitlement should no longer be astonishing, yet it continues to stun in its audacity.”
― Clementine Ford, Boys Will Be Boys: Power, Patriarchy and the Toxic Bonds of Mateship

“Again, not every spurned man will respond to his own unexamined rage by grabbing a gun or a knife or even just a well-organised online harassment squad and slaying whichever women has pissed him off that day. But enough of them do for us to know that it's a problem. We don't stop by isolating them from each other and passing their deeds off as a result of mental illness or depression. We understand it by recognising it as part of a culture of learned entitlement in which the logical endpoint for falling short is violence and retribution.

We change it by going back to the beginning, and starting again.”
― Clementine Ford, Boys Will Be Boys: Power, Patriarchy and the Toxic Bonds of Mateship

“It's not an overstatement to characterize the toxic teachings of men like Yiannopoulos as being central to the radicalisation of today's young white men, and marginalised people (which includes women, but certainly isn't limited to us) do not have to negotiate with terrorists to secure their rights to live peacefully.”
― Clementine Ford, Boys Will Be Boys: Power, Patriarchy and the Toxic Bonds of Mateship