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It is fashionable these days to believe not just in the legal equality of the sexes, but in their total interchangeability. Women are increasingly viewed not as something distinct from a man, but little more than a man in different clothing. However, the wisest figures in human history have not taken this view. As such, their opinion is worth revisiting.
That men and women are different is an obvious truth to anyone who has ever known either. To observe this is not to denigrate either. Indeed, to force a phony interchangeability between the two is the real insult to the dignity of each.
Understanding the duality and difference between men and women provides a great deal of insight not only into sexual dynamics, but into the world in which we live. Men and women both bring their qualities to life in the world around us. We can see it manifested in everything that human hands have touched.
What’s more it is the tension between men and women that makes interpersonal relationships so interesting. It is our difference — not our sameness — that creates sparks between the two. And without those sparks there’s not a lot of excitement in life.
Here are some of our favorite quotes regarding the duality of sex and why it is important.
Quotes About Gender and Gender Roles
Timothy Leary
“Women who seek to be equal with men lack ambition.”
Barbara De Laere
“A strong woman can do anything by herself. A strong man doesn’t let her.”
Eleanor Roosevelt
“A woman is like a tea bag – you never know how strong she is until she gets in hot water.”
Karl Lagerfeld
“I have a terrible loathing of ugly short men…women can be short but for men it is impossible. It is something that they will never forgive in life…they are mean and they want to kill you.”
“If I was a Russian woman I would be lesbian. Russian men are not good looking.”
Iris Apfel
“A woman is as old as she looks – but a man is never old until he stops looking.”
Lady Gaga
“Some women choose to follow men, and some women choose to follow their dreams. If you’re wondering which way to go, remember that your career will never wake up and tell you that it doesn’t love you anymore.”
Katherine Hepburn
“I have not lived as a woman. I have lived as a man. I’ve just done what I damn well wanted to, and I’ve made enough money to support myself, and ain’t afraid of being alone.”
George Carlin
“Men are from Earth, women are from Earth. Deal with it.”
Dorothy L. Sayers
“Wherever you find a great man, you will find a great mother or a great wife standing behind him — or so they used to say. It would be interesting to know how many great women have had great fathers and husbands behind them.”
Emma Watson
“Both men and women should feel free to be sensitive. Both men and women should feel free to be strong…it is time that we all perceive gender on a spectrum not as two opposing sets of ideas.”
Edith Wharton
“Intelligent and cultivated people of either sex will never limit themselves to communing with their own households. Men and women equally, when they have the range of interests that real cultivation gives, need the stimulus of different points of view, the refreshment of new ideas as well as of new faces. The long hypocrisy which Puritan England handed on to America concerning the danger of frank and free social relations between men and women has done more than anything else to retard real civilisation in America.”
– Edith Wharton, French Ways and Their Meaning
Simone de Beauvoir
“Misogynists have often reproached intellectual women for ‘letting themselves go’; but they also preach to them: if you want to be our equals, stop wearing makeup and polishing your nails. This advice is absurd. Precisely because the idea of femininity is artificially defined by customs and fashion, it is imposed on every woman from the outside…The individual is not free to shape the idea of femininity at will.”
“On the day when it will be possible for woman to love not in her weakness but in her strength, not to escape herself but to find herself, not to abase herself but to assert herself–on that day love will become for her, as for man, a source of life and not of mortal danger.”
“One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.”
