Laurie Penny Quotes & Sayings

There comes a time when you have to decide whether to change yourself to fit the story, or change the story itself. The decision gets a little easier if you understand that refusing to shape your life and personality to the contours of an unjust world is the best way to start creating a new one. There — Laurie Penny

The fact that 'attention seeking' is still considered a slur says much about the role of women in public life, on every scale. — Laurie Penny

The problem is capitalism. The problem is that in order to sell seven billion people on the necessity of globalisation, we've created a moral universe where people who do not work to create profit are considered less than human, and used as surplus labour to drive down the cost of wages. — Laurie Penny

If you're a woman and somebody calls you 'attention seeking', that's a sure way to tell you've made an impact. — Laurie Penny

Only by remembering to say 'no' will the women of 21st century regain their voice and remember their power. 'No' is the most important word in a woman's dialectic arsenal, and it is the one word that our employers, our leaders, and quite often, the men in our lives would do anything to prevent us from saying. No, we will not serve. No, we will not settle for the dirty work, the low-paid work, the unpaid work. No, we will not stay late at the office, look after the kids, sort out the shopping. We refuse to fit the enormity of our passion, our creativity, and our potential into the rigid physical prison laid down for us since we were small children. No. We refuse. We will not buy your clothes and shoes and surgical solutions. No, we will not be beautiful; we will not be good. Most of all, we refuse to be beautiful and good. — Laurie Penny

Girls are better at this sort of labour, often called 'emotional labour', not because there's anything in the meat and matter of our living cells that makes us naturally better but because we're trained for it from birth. Trained to make other people feel good. Trained to serve the coffee, fill in the forms, organise the parties and wipe the table afterwards. Trained to be feisty, if we must, but not strong. To be bubbly, not funny. You must at no stage appear to have a body that functions in a normal human way, that pisses and shits and sweats and farts and falters. Decorate the prison of your body. Make yourself useful. Shut up and smile. — Laurie Penny

Femininity itself has become a brand, a narrow and shrinking formula of commoditised identity which can be sold back to women who have become alienated from their own power as living, loving, labouring beings. — Laurie Penny

Me, I believe in monogamy in much the same way as I believe in, say, cheese on toast. I'll eat it, but only for very special people, and not for every meal. There are other interesting and delicious toast options out there, and I support people's right to investigate those options without being punished. — Laurie Penny

If all women on earth woke up tomorrow feeling truly positive and powerful in their own bodies, the economies of the globe would collapse overnight. — Laurie Penny

The engine of capitalist patriarchy runs on the dirty fuel of women's shame. — Laurie Penny

One sure test of social privilege is how much anger you get to express without the threat of expulsion, arrest, or social exclusion, — Laurie Penny

Almost every time I speak to teenagers, particularly young female students who want to talk to me about feminism, I find myself staggered by how much they have read, how creatively they think and how curiously bullshit-resistant they are. Because of the subjects I write about, I am often contacted by young people and I see it as a part of my job to reply to all of them - and doing so has confirmed a suspicions I've had for some time. I think that the generation about to hit adulthood is going to be rather brilliant.
Young people getting older is not, in itself, a fascinating new cultural trend. Nonetheless the encroaching adulthood and the people who grew up in a world where expanding technological access collided with the collapse of the neoliberal economic consensus is worth paying attention to. Because these kids are smart, cynical and resilient, and I don't mind saying that they scare me a little. — Laurie Penny

I'm not here to tell you how to be a feminist, or whether you should be one at all.
I call myself a feminist fo fuck with people, and because it's a great way
to weed out the creeps in bars, but feminism isn't an identity.
Feminism is a process. Call yourself what you like.
The important thing is what you fight for. Begin it now. — Laurie Penny

Public 'career feminists' have been more concerned with getting more women into 'boardrooms', when the problem is that there are altogether too many boardrooms, and none of them are on fire. — Laurie Penny

Without courage, our generation is doomed to another decade of political disenfranchisement and shit music. — Laurie Penny

Meanwhile: consider that time is a weapon. — Laurie Penny

This, however, is OKCupid, the vast, weird pink-and-blue toned jungle of the id masquerading as a dating site, where rare birds of modern romance flutter amongst the night-terrors of human loneliness and despair and the suspicious skin irritants of late-night hook-uppery. — Laurie Penny

In this nominally freer and more equal world, most women end up doing more work, for less reward, and feeling pressured to conform more closely to gender norms. — Laurie Penny

I watched the young naive middle-class women and men of the twenty-first century learn the true nature of the world they live in. I watched all this happening, and I believe there is hope. I believe that if anything can save us in this fraught and dazzling future, it is the rage of women and girls, of queers and freaks and sinners. I believe that the revolution will be feminist, and that when it comes it will be more intimate and more shocking than we have dared to imagine. — Laurie Penny

Those who are so eager for women and girls to go back to the kitchen might think again about just what it is we might be up to in there. You can plan a lot of damage from a kitchen. It's also where the knives are kept. — Laurie Penny

Stories matter. Stories are how we make sense of the world, which doesn't mean that those stories can't be stupid and simplistic and full of lies. Stories can exaggerate and offend and they always, always matter. — Laurie Penny

There is a princess in all our heads: she must be destroyed. — Laurie Penny

Feminism has never just been about liberating women from men, but about freeing every human being from the straitjacket of gender oppression. — Laurie Penny

Sexual objectification doesn't get oppressive until it is done consistently, and to a specific group of people, and with no regard whatsoever paid to their humanity. Then it ceases to become about desire and starts to be about control. Seeing another person as meat and fat and bone and nothing else gives you power over them, if only for an instant. Structural sexual objection of women draws that instant out into an entire matrix of hurt. It tells us that women are bodies first, idealised, subservient bodies, and men are not. — Laurie Penny

That's how oppression works. Thousands of otherwise decent people are persuaded to go along with an unfair system because changing it seems like too much bother. The appropriate response when somebody demands a change in that unfair system is to listen, rather than turn away or yell, as a child might, that it's not your fault. Of course it isn't your fault. I'm sure you're lovely. That doesn't mean you don't have a responsibility to do something about it. — Laurie Penny

Everyone who was ever told a fairytale knows what happens to women who do their own magic. — Laurie Penny

Sometimes you have to decide between doing what you love and being loveable, and the decision is always painful. — Laurie Penny

Men grow up expecting to be the hero of their own story. Women grow up expecting to be the supporting actress in somebody else's. As a kid growing up with books and films and stories instead of friends, that was always the narrative injustice that upset me more than anything else. I felt it sometimes like a sharp pain under the ribcage, the kind of chest pain that lasts for minutes and hours and might be nothing at all or might mean you're slowly dying of something mundane and awful. It's a feeling that hit when I understood how few girls got to go on adventures. I started reading science fiction and fantasy long before Harry Potter and The Hunger Games, before mainstream female leads very occasionally got more at the end of the story than together with the protagonist. Sure, there were tomboys and bad girls, but they were freaks and were usually killed off or married off quickly. Lady hobbits didn't bring the ring to Mordor. They stayed at home in the shire. — Laurie Penny

The reason the word Feminism has power is because the concept has power and the reason it has power is because people are still afraid of it. — Laurie Penny

We can have everything we want as long as what we want is a life spent searching for exhausting work that doesn't pay enough, shopping for things we don't need and sticking to a set of social and sexual rules that turn out, once you plough through the layers of trash and adverts, to be as rigid as ever. — Laurie Penny

This is stupid. There's work to be done. Tomorrow tens of thousands of us are going to take to the streets and demand fair access to education, and my smashed little heart shouldn't matter. But it does. The whole world is changing, and I just want to be the kind of girl who gets taken in somebody's arms. — Laurie Penny

The best way to stop girls achieving anything is to force them to achieve everything. — Laurie Penny