Not Being Feminine Quotes & Sayings

I wanted more than anything to be something I will never be - feminine, and feminine in the worst way. Submissive. Dependent. Soft spoken. Coquettish. I was no good at all at any of it, no good at being a girl; on the other hand, I am not half bad at being a woman. — Nora Ephron

Be passive. In your passivity, God comes. Be feminine. In your femininity, God comes. Have you not watched it? Buddha looks very feminine, Krishna looks very feminine. Why? - because it is simply a metaphor. They have been depicted as feminine, graceful, to show that that is their inner quality - receptivity. When you are doing something you are being aggressive. When you are not doing anything you are non-aggressive. And God cannot be conquered; you can only allow him to conquer you. — Rajneesh

But then, she wonders,just what kind of man would ever give her the courage to marry at all- to overcome that dreadful fear of death that seemed always to accompany the very thought of love? It was illogical, idiotic and childish. And yet the child was with her always; and always she would be afraid unless someone could place a light down there inside that dark and chilly heart of hers and chase all the ghosts away - the ghosts of Katherine Howard, of Jane Seymour and, not least, that of her own poor mother. They accompanied her always, those spirits - especially at this kind of time, a time of being alone, of being feminine and reflective. They would all gather round to whisper in her ear and warn her - so that even as she looks up once more into her mirror she almost expects to see them there, ranged behind her shoulders, their faces full of concern and anxiety. Never trust them - never trust the men, for they will betray you always the moment you surrender to them! — Robert Stephen Parry

I love photo shoots where I can be like a pinup, not myself. Where I can be feminine, glamorous, dark not like in real life. I hate it when you go in and they want you to be 'natural,' to be yourself. I just hate it. I love having fun. When they ask you to smile, I hate it. Of course I smile in my real life, but to do it on cue, that's not spontaneous. I'd rather do something that's like a little movie, like a little story, rather than just me, I feel naked. — Eva Green

I run my company according to feminine principles, principles of caring, making intuitive decisions, not getting hung up on hierarchy or all those dreadfully boring business-school management ideas; having a sense of work as being part of your life, not separate from it; putting your labor where your love is; being responsible to the world in how you use your profits; recognizing the bottom line should stay at the bottom. — Anita Roddick

THE HOLE The hole is something which longs to be filled. The small child is drawn as if by magic to holes. He can not restrain himself from putting in his finger or his whole arm. He makes a symbolic sacrifice of his body to cause the void to disappear and a plenitude of being to exist. The fundamental tendency of human beings to stop up holes persists throughout life, symbolically and in reality. And only from this standpoint can we understand why the feminine sex is obscene. It is obscene because it is a hole and because it sends out an appeal for a plenitude of flesh. A woman also senses her condition as such an appeal, such an enticement. Thus every hole becomes something obscene because it is an obscene expectation. — Jean-Paul Sartre

Call me old-fashioned, but I thought the one battle we feminists won fair and square was to convince at least those left of centre that gender roles are made up. They are not real. We play at them. We develop traditional masculine or feminine traits by being indoctrinated, not because we are biologically programmed to behave in those ways. — Julie Bindel

She had not been conferred with a practical sense of how one went about this strange and all inverted business of being a girl, where seemingly natural stuff like going on about all the great things you just learned about Siberian tigers on National Geographic was suddenly weird, but totally weird stuff in and of itself like drawing around your eyeball with a pencil became normal, and it impressed to no end that it was a product of meticulous effort that made the twins seem so perfectly and effortlessly feminine. — Brian McGreevy

Femininity doesn't always relate to being a woman and masculinity doesn't always relate to being a man; it's a quality of being-ness. Women have to portray the quality of masculinity; society wants it to be like a man; not necessarily male, but like a man. If that makes sense ... In nature itself, there's yin and yang, there's masculine and feminine. — Hamid Drake

Breaking our silence is powerful. Whether it comes as a whisper or a squeak at first, allow that sense of spaciousness, of opening, allow yourself to trust the bottomlessness, and lean into the dark roar which will light up every cell.

Though it may start softly, we build in confidence and skills, we realise we do not need to wait for permission before we open our mouths. We do not need to wait for others to make space for us, we can take it. We do not need to read from others' scripts or style ourselves in weak comparison. We do not need to look to another's authority because we have our own. Down in our cores. We have waited so long for permission to know that it was our time, our turn on stage. That time is now. Our voices are being heard into being. They are needed. — Lucy H. Pearce

Whenever you are feeling isolated and weary, feel the present moment as if it were a woman. Feel like you are embracing a woman, physically. Feel the front of your body as if it were pressed against the front of a woman's naked body, being filled with the delight of her feminine softness and liveliness. Feel her breasts and belly against you. Breathe deeply as if you were inhaling her intoxicating fragrance. And, while inhaling, receive deeply into your body not just her scent, but the very essence of feminine deliciousness, as if it were nourishing food for your masculine soul. — David Deida

In the cafe there was a lot of stylized cattiness, but this was never unkindly meant. Nothing at all was meant by it. It was a formal game of innuendos about other people being older than they said, about their teeth being false and their hair being a wig. Such conversation was thought to be smart and so very feminine. It was better, I need hardly say, to seem like a truly appalling woman than not like a woman at all. — Quentin Crisp

If we did not have a feminine being within us, how would we rest ourselves? — Gaston Bachelard

I found the world of the Little House books to be so much less confusing, not just because it was "simpler," as plenty of people love to insist, but because it reconciled all the little contradictions of my modern girlhood. On the Banks of Plum Creek clicked with me especially, with its perfect combination of pinafores and recklessness. (I will direct your attention to the illustration on page 31 of my Plum Creek paperback, where you will note how fabulous Laura looks as she pokes the badger with a stick; her style is casual yet feminine, perfect for precarious nature adventures!) At an age when I found myself wanting both a Webelos uniform and a head of beautiful Superstar Barbie hair, On the Banks of Plum Creek was a reassuring book. Being a girl sometimes made more sense in Laura World than it did in real life. — Wendy McClure

We have castrated society through fear and intimidation. Its manhood exists only in combination with a feminine outward appearance. Being so neutered, the populace has become docile and easily ruled. As all geldings in nature, their thoughts are not involved with the concerns of the future and their posterity, but only with the present toil and the next meal, — Harold Wallace Rosenthal

In Somali culture hyper-masculinity is the most desired attribute in men. Femininity signifies softness, a lightness of touch: qualities that are aggressively pressed onto young girls and women. When a woman does not possess feminine traits, it is considered an act of mild social resistance. This applies equally to men who are not overtly masculine but the stakes are considerably amplified. If a Somali man is considered feminine he is deemed weak, helpless, pitiful: The underlying message being that femininity is inherently inferior to masculinity. — Diriye Osman

Today, many of us are trying to understand just what male and female energies are, since we are calling old rigid stereotypes into questions. There is a risk of replacing such stereotypes with even more politically correct rigid stereotypes. The destructive aspect of the masculine has been emphasized in recent years, but both the feminine and the masculine have destructive sides. (The evil witch in fairy tales is an example of the destructive feminine.) Love is the ultimate nature of everything; it is not just the feminine that is loving. We tend to think of female energy as nurturing because it is undirected - it includes everything - but perhaps one could say that the feminine loves and nurtures in a being way, and the masculine does so in a doing way. We are each capable of loving in both ways. — Shepherd Hoodwin

Women should never be ashamed to be feminine. Strength comes from conviction, not from acting like a man. Being feminine doesn't mean you're weak, it just means you're proud to be a woman. — Steven James

All women have a complicated relationship to beauty, but as a transgender woman it's a bit more complicated. There's a lot of pressure to appear feminine. When I was younger, I was most insecure about my size, my angular features, my feet, my hands . At the end of the day, it's about being comfortable in your own skin, and being able to walk down the street and not have people question your gender - and, for me, being perceived as a woman. — Andrej Pejic

It is notable that when she is not condemned for being too bold and masculine, Cleopatra is taken to task for being unduly frail and feminine. — Stacy Schiff

She loved hockey. Loved the speed, the agility. The fights. The men. Brawny, sweaty, messy. They let their hair grown, though no one would ever accuse them of being feminine, not with perpetual five o'clock shadow and bulging muscles. They skated with the grace of ballet dancers and fought at the drop of a glove. — Stephanie Julian

One day, you're in a physical landscape you share with this bizarre and fundamentally alien creature, not alien because she's female but alien because you're a fool in love and there's nothing not alien about that. And then when she's gone, you're alone and all the strangeness and wonder have gone out of the landscape and you're still a fool but now nobody notices how many days in a row you wear the same socks and cleaning the shower doesn't make the girl smile anymore so everything smells a little worse and doesn't get fixed when it breaks. I missed the feminine touch - not just hers, but mine. I missed being half-boy, half-girl, part of a whole. Now that I was male in a male environment, it was harder to manifest her physical chick presence, no matter how many of her MAC lipsticks I set out on the coffee table in a basket like so many M&Ms. — Rob Sheffield

True feminine beauty is not a complicated formula involving hundreds of rules to remember. It is not something that requires spending two years at finishing school or being groomed as a beauty pageant queen. It is the natural byproduct of a young woman who has emptied herself, given up her own life, and allowed God's Spirit complete access to every dimension of her inner and outer life. — Leslie Ludy

It's still feminine, but not in a romantic way. It's all about masculine and feminine, and being strong. — Miuccia Prada

The first time I taught a writing class in graduate school, I was worried. Not about the teaching material, because I was well prepared and I was teaching what I enjoyed. Instead I was worried about what to wear. I wanted to be taken seriously. I knew that because I was female, I would automatically have to prove my worth. And I was worried that if I looked too feminine, I would not be taken seriously. I really wanted to wear my shiny lip gloss and my girly skirt, but I decided not to. I wore a very serious, very manly, and very ugly suit. The sad truth of the matter is that when it comes to appearance, we start off with men as the standard, as the norm. Many of us think that the less feminine a woman appears, the more likely she is to be taken seriously. A man going to a business meeting doesn't wonder about being taken seriously based on what he is wearing - but a woman does. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Because of the womb being a central phenomenon in the feminine body, the whole psychology of woman differs: she is non-aggressive, non-inquiring, non-questioning, non-doubting, because all of those things are part of aggression. She will not take the initiative; she simply waits - and she can wait infinitely. — Rajneesh

There's always been something about Jeffrey Tambor, not only as an actor but as a person, where his ability to embody a sort of very dignified feminine way of being just - this was just very clear to me. — Jill Soloway

Women are no longer required to be chaste or modest, to restrict their sphere of activity to the home, or even to realize their properly feminine destiny in maternity. Normative femininity [that is, the rules for being a good woman] is coming more and more to be centered on women's body - not its duties and obligations or even its capacity to bear children, but its sexuality, more precisely, its presumed heterosexuality and its appearance. . . . The woman who checks her makeup half a dozen times a day to see if her foundation has caked or her mascara has run, who worries that the wind or the rain may spoil her hairdo, who looks frequently to see if her stockings have bagged at the ankle, or who, feeling
fat, monitors everything she eats, has become, just as surely as the inmate
of Panopticon, a self-policing subject, a self committed to a relentless self-surveillance. This self-surveillance is a form of obedience
to patriarchy. — Rosemarie Tong

Ultimately, I see the Goddess as incorporating the full spectrum of existence, not just what we call 'the feminine.' The latter is actually a construct of a culture that divides existence into compartments, and in particular into the dualities with which we are so familiar: light/dark, female/male, mind/body, earth/spirit and so on.

The true nature of existence, including true human nature, I believe, is not so split. Acting and living from the integration of all these components is what I call spirituality. Thus, the Goddess represents a unity and wholeness which is the birthright and potential of every human being. All of us, all of existence, are the Divine. In order to complete this whole by bringing back that which has been denied, I name the Divine the Goddess. — Hallie Iglehart Auste

My letters seeking a job, though truthful, diminished the full truth. Face would blanch if the facts had been complete: "Dear Sir," I thought. "Do you have a position for a journeyman burglar, con man, forger and car thief; also with experience as armed robber, pimp, card cheat and several other things. I smoked marijuana at twelve (in the 40's) and shot heroin at sixteen. I have no experience with LSD and methedrine. They came to popularity since my imprisonment. I've buggered pretty young boys and feminine homosexuals (but only when locked up away from women). In the idiom of jails, prisons and gutters (some plush gutters) I'm a motherfucker! Not literally, for I don't remember my mother. In my world the term, used as I used it, is a boast of being hell on wheels, outrageously unpredictable, a virtuoso of crime. Of course by being a motherfucker in that world I'm a piece of garbage in yours. Do you have a job? — Edward Bunker

Male pride is not really about pride. It's about fear - the fear of being seen as feminine. And that's why "girl stuff" is so dangerous. And as long as most men remain deathly afraid of it, they'll continue to take it out on the rest of us. — Julia Serano

Bond came to the conclusion that Tilly Masterton was one of those girls whose hormones had got mixed up. He knew the type well and thought they and their male counterparts were a direct consequence of giving votes to women and 'sex equality.' As a result of fifty years of emancipation, feminine qualities were dying out or being transferred to the males. Pansies of both sexes were everywhere, not yet completely homosexual, but confused, not knowing what they were. The result was a herd of unhappy sexual misfits
barren and full of frustrations, the women wanting to dominate and the men to be nannied. He was sorry for them, but he had no time for them. — Ian Fleming

Izz spoke with a magnanimous abandonment of herself to the situation; she could not be - no woman with a heart bigger than a hazel-nut could be - antagonistic to Tess in her presence, the influence which she exercised over those of her own sex being of a warmth and strength quite unusual, curiously overpowering the less worthy feminine feelings of spite and rivalry. — Thomas Hardy

Being a woman, I have found the road rougher than had I been born a man. Different defenses, different codes of ethics, different approaches to problems and personalities are a woman's lot. I have preferred to shun what is known as feminine wiles, the subterfuge of subtlety, reliance on tears and coquetry to shape my way. I am forthright, often blunt. I have learned to be a realist despite my romantic, emotional nature. I have no illusions that age, the rigors of my profession, disappointments, and unfulfilled dreams have not left their mark.

I am proud that I have carved my path on earth almost entirely by my own efforts, proud that I have compromised in my career only when I had no other recourse, when financial or contractual commitments dictated. Proud that I have never been involved in a physical liaison unless I was deeply attracted or in love. Proud that, whatever my worldly goods may be, they have been achieved by my own labors. — Joan Fontaine

I would return home to la maison, feminine where, as likely as not, I would go to my room, la chambre, where I would settle to read un livre masculine, until supper. During the masculine meal, feminine food would be eaten. After my hard, productive masculine day, I would rest during the feminine night. At one time, for a few days, I even took an affected aversion to being in the kitchen, la cuisine. — Yann Martel

Not long ago, I reread Marguerite Yourcenar's Memoirs of Hadrian. I was amazed to discover what she had written in her note about the difficult composition of the book
which had taken her many decades:
Another thing virtually impossible, to take a feminine character as a central figure ... Women's lives are much too limited or else too secret. If a woman does recount her own life she is promptly reproached for no longer being truly feminine.
We all struggle with this
still. The woman who chooses to write disguised as a male character is hoping to avoid the problem. But you cannot avoid the problem of being a woman. — Erica Jong

The women I knew in those days liked the fact that I had a feminine streak, that I seemed to be sensitive and caring, that I didn't know the names of any NFL teams, that I could make a nice risotto. A lot of straight women love a female sensibility in a man, an enthusiasm that goes right up to, but unfortunately does not quite include, his being an actual woman. — Jennifer Finney Boylan

Girls have long been evaluated on the basis of appearance and caught in myriad double binds: achieve, but not too much, be polite,but be yourself, be feminine and adult; be aware of our cultural heritage, but don't comment on the sexism ... Girls are trained to be less than who they really are. They are trained to be what the culture wants of its young women, not what they themselves want to become. — Mary Pipher

Much popular self-help literature normalizes sexism. Rather than linking habits of being, usually considered innate, to learned behavior that helps maintain and support male domination, they act as those these difference are not value laden or political but are rather inherent and mystical. In these books male inability and/or refusal to honestly express feelings is often talked about as a positive masculine virtue women should learn to accept rather than a learned habit of behavior that creates emotional isolation and alienation ... Self-help books that are anti-gender equality often present women's overinvestment in nurturance as a 'natural,' inherent quality rather than a learned approach to caregiving. Much fancy footwork takes place to make it seem that New Age mystical evocations of yin and yang, masculine and feminine androgyny, and so on, are not just the same old sexist stereotypes wrapped in more alluring and seductive packaging. — Bell Hooks

I do not suppose she had ever really cared for her husband, and what I had taken for love was no more than the feminine response to caresses and comfort which in the minds of most women passes for it. It is a passive feeling capable of being roused for any object, as the vine can grow on any tree; and the wisdom of the world recognises its strength when it urges a girl to marry the man who wants her with the assurance that love will follow. It is an emotion made up of the satisfaction of security, pride of property, the pleasure of being desired, the gratification of a household, and it is only by an amiable vanity that women ascribe to it spiritual value. It is an emotion which is defenceless against passion. — W. Somerset Maugham

I'm not doing it to pander to people. I just always knew what I liked versus what I don't like. I never liked things with too many zippers or spikes and stuff. That weirds me out. I like things that are pretty. And I think it's great to be pretty. I like being feminine. I think it's good to be feminine. We don't need to look like men or dress like men or talk like men to be powerful. We can be powerful in our own way, our own feminine way. — Zooey Deschanel

The male dares to be different to the degree that he accepts his passivity and his desire to be female, his fagginess. The farthest out male is the dragqueen, but he, although different from most men, is exactly like all other dragqueens; like the functionalist, he has an identity - a female; he tries to define all his troubles away - but still no individuality. Not completely convinced that he's a woman, highly insecure about being sufficiently female, he conforms compulsively to the man-made feminine stereotype, ending up as nothing but a bundle of stilted mannerisms. — Valerie Solanas

I'm just being myself. There is not an ounce of me that believes any of that crap that they say. We can't be feminine and be feminists and be successful? I want to be a f-king feminist and wear a f-king Peter Pan collar. So f-king what? — Zooey Deschanel

As a result of 50 years of emancipation, feminine qualities were dying out or being transferred to the males. Pansies of both sexes were everywhere, not yet completely homosexual, but confused not knowing what they were. The result was a herd of unhappy sexual misfits ... the women wanting to dominate and the men to be nannied. — Ian Fleming

Straight women love a feminine sensibility in a man, but that love only goes up to, and unfortunately does not quite pass, the fact of his being an actual woman. — Jennifer Finney Boylan

I had great femme mentors, I had good role models of gentle men, I found ways to be a butch that did not require being an ass in public, ways of masculinity that were not misogyny - which is what I see more often than I used to these days, this way of butches distancing themselves from any and all things feminine by embodying the worst excesses of men, from relatively harmless ones like spitting on the street and wearing too much cheap cologne to behaving as though women were an entirely separate species of second-class citizen, the objects of jokes and derision. — S. Bear Bergman