Laura Bates Quotes & Sayings

When we suggest victims can stop rape, we also (however unintentionally) imply that rape is an inevitable aspect of life rather than an action deliberately carried out by a perpetrator. — Laura Bates

Rape is not a sexual act; it is not the result of a sudden, uncontrollable attraction to a woman in a skimpy dress. It is an act of power and violence. To suggest otherwise is deeply insulting to the vast majority of men, who are perfectly able to control their sexual desires. The — Laura Bates

One of the cleverest and most insidious twists in the whole sorry tale is the way women are double bound by a gender-biased definition of professionalism and the threat of being labeled "whining. — Laura Bates

Why do we assume that educating a criminal is merely helping him commit more sophisticated crimes? Why can't we assume that an education can give this person the tools to make more acceptable choices? — Laura Bates

Nothing has emerged more clearly from the Everyday Sexism Project than the urgent need for far more comprehensive mandatory sex-and-relationships education in schools, to include issues such as consent and respect, domestic violence and rape. It's not just girls who need it so desperately. For boys porn provides some very scary, dictatorial lessons about what it means to be a man and how they are apparently expected to exert their male dominance over women. It is as unrealistic to expect them, unaided, to instinctively work out the difference between online porn and real, caring intimacy, as it is to demand the same intuition of young women. According — Laura Bates

Women are silenced by both the invisibility and the acceptability of the problem. — Laura Bates

Girls showed up in leggings to protest the sexist policy, bearing placards asking ARE MY PANTS LOWERING YOUR TEST SCORES? — Laura Bates

As long as we as a society continue to belittle and dismiss women's accounts, disbelieve and question their stories, and blame them for their own assaults, we are playing right into the hands of those who silence victims by asking: "who would believe you anyways?". — Laura Bates

The incidents that go unwitnessed definitely help to keep sexism off the radar, and unacknowledged problem we don't discuss. But so too do the regular occurrences that hide in plain sight, within a society that has normalized sexism and allowed it to become so ingrained that we no longer notice or object to it. Sexism is a socially acceptable prejudice and everybody is getting in on the act. — Laura Bates

You can trace an entire childhood in sexism through the entries sent in to the Everyday Sexism Project. The flashes of realization and first, painful moments of learning a woman's place. Often the memories are so vivid women carry and are shaped by them for the rest of their lives. I've been asked in countless interviews what has shocked me the most since starting the project. I think journalists expect me to tell them that it's the stories of rape, or the most appalling accounts of violence. Those stories have certainly angered and devastated me, of course, but nothing has shocked me more than the thousands and thousands of entries from young girls under the age of eighteen. When I started the project, I thought adult women would share their stories. The torrent of harassment, abuse, violence and assault being faced by children was a horribly unexpected surprise. People — Laura Bates

...this pattern of casual intrusion whereby women could be leered at, touched, harassed, and abused without a second though, was sexism: implicit, explicit, commonplace, and deep-rooted, pretty much everywhere you'd care to look. — Laura Bates

Sexism is often an invisible problem. This is partly because it's so frequently manifest in situations where the only witnesses present are victim and perpetrator. — Laura Bates

We met three years prior, in 2003, when I created the first-ever Shakespeare program in a solitary confinement unit, and we spent three years working together in that unit. Now we have received unprecedented permission to work together, alone, unsupervised, to create a series of Shakespeare workbooks for prisoners. Newton is gesticulating so animatedly that it draws the attention of an officer walking by our little classroom. He pops his head inside. "Everything okay in here?" he asks. "Just reading Shakespeare," I reply. He shakes his head and walks on. "That is crazy!" Newton repeats, his head still in the book. A record ten and a half consecutive years in solitary confinement, and he's not crazy, he's not dangerous - he's reading Shakespeare. And maybe, just maybe, it is because he's reading Shakespeare that he is not crazy, or dangerous. — Laura Bates

The more stories I heard, the more I tried to talk about the problem. And yet time and time again I found myself coming up against the same response: Sexism doesn't exist anymore. Women are equal now, more or less. You career girls these days have the best of all worlds - what more do you want? Think about the women in other countries dealing with real problems, people told me - you women in the West have no idea how lucky you are. You have "gilded lives"! You're making a fuss about nothing. You're overreacting. You're uptight, or frigid. You need to learn to take a joke, get a sense of humor, light up...

You really need to learn to take a compliment. — Laura Bates

Our experiences of all forms of gender prejudice - from daily sexism to distressing harassment to sexual violence - are part of a continuum that impacts all of us, all the time, shaping ourselves, and our ideas about the world. To include stories of assault and rape within a project documenting everyday experiences of gender imbalance is simply to extend its boundaries to the most extreme manifestations of that prejudice. To see how great the damage can become when the minor, "unimportant" issues are allowed to pass without comment. To prove how the steady drip-drip-drip of sexism and sexualization and objectification is connected to the assumption of ownership and control over women's bodies, and how the background noise of harassment and disrespect connects to the assertion of power that is violence and rape. — Laura Bates

Eighty percent of the reviewers and authors of reviewed books in the New York Review of Books in 2013 were men, as were almost 80 percent of the 'notable deaths' reported in the New York Times in 2012. — Laura Bates

Intersectionality means being aware of and acting on the fact that different forms of prejudice are connected, because they all stem from the same root of being 'other', 'different' or somehow 'secondary' to the 'normal', 'ideal' status quo. — Laura Bates

It is not our conscience that torments us over our image; that is our ego tormenting us. Our conscience torments us when we behave in ways that are contrary to our values. When you look in the mirror and cringe as a result of your shame, it is conscience. When you look in the mirror and cringe as a result of how people think of you, it is ego. (Larry Newton) — Laura Bates

This is not a men vs women issue. It's about people vs prejudice. So — Laura Bates

A slut isn't a person, it's in the eye of the beholder. Like beauty, or an annoying eyelash. We decide who a girl is based on something she's done (or even just rumoured to have done) and then brand her with it as if it's a permanent part of her identity. Guys, on the other hand, get to wear their relationships and 'conquests' like medals or badges of honour, which are much easier to take off, and hurt a lot less. — Laura Bates

Women who lead, read — Laura Bates

I quickly learned, however, that a university education is not a prerequisite to reading Shakespeare. After all, his original audience was not college-educated. Neither was he. — Laura Bates

Each time a girl sees science toys under a 'boys' sign, she is told science is not suitable for her. — Laura Bates

The very fact that it is necessary in the twenty-first century to explain why it's not okay to publicly debate whether or not women are "asking" for sexual assault is mind-boggling. — Laura Bates

Newton led a discussion of Hamlet's observation that, to those who see it that way, all the world is a prison. HAMLET: — Laura Bates

Disbelief is the first great silencer. — Laura Bates

You really need to learn to take a compliment....And it wasn't just men who took this view; is was women, too--telling me I was getting worked up about nothing, or being oversensitive... — Laura Bates

...I think a lot of my misery was me hating me, and hating me made me hate everyone else. I felt like such a punk, I felt so weak. I really was a coward. I never stood up for myself. I mean, I stood up for myself as we associate standing up for yourself -- fighting and violence. But that's not standing up for yourself. I mean standing up for myself like thinking for myself. Now, I feel more ok with myself. I'm feeling stronger in my abilities every day, and the world just opens up. You really can do anything, you can shape your life any way you want it to be. Because prison isn't the great prison. Prison is being entrapped by those self-destructive ways of thinking. — Laura Bates

Meanwhile London Mayor Boris Johnson 'joked' that women only go to university because 'they've got to find men to marry' (hilarious, no?) and — Laura Bates

When you look in the mirror and cringe as a result of your shame, it is conscience. When you look in the mirror and cringe as a result of how people think of you, it is ego. Which of the two is more prevalent in your life? — Laura Bates

There are never any victims who don't matter, because this isn't about men versus women. — Laura Bates

Girls are not only being denied access to scientific and adventurous toys, they're also presented with such a narrow range of options that domesticity and stereotypically "female" duties are shoved down their throats before they've even reached the age of five. — Laura Bates

Kevin, the only prisoner in the group who was not serving a murder sentence, summed it up by saying, "What a child experiences between the ages of seven and ten will determine his actions as a teenager and an adult. — Laura Bates

. . . there are two outlets for the frustration of that powerlessness: insanity and violence. — Laura Bates

One day, in the very early months of the project, I read several entries in a single week from girls who had been subjected to leering and shouting from men in the street while walking home from school in their uniforms. Dismayed, I posted a question on Twitter: Surely, I asked, this couldn't be a common occurrence? By the end of the day, a deluge of hundreds of tweets had confirmed that the experience was not only common but almost ubiquitous. — Laura Bates

Awareness of multiplicity of interpretation is the key to reading Shakespeare. — Laura Bates

This combination of ageism and sexism was also blatant in the Boston Herald's treatment of sixty-three-year-old Elizabeth Warren, whose 2012 Senate bid it sought to undermine by repeatedly dubbing her "Granny" in its pages, as if to imply that an older woman could not possibly be trusted with political responsibility. — Laura Bates