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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Secondly, you can spend your whole life being a story that happens to somebody else. You can twist and cram and shave down every aspect of your personality that doesn’t quite fit into the story boys have grown up expecting, but eventually, one day, you’ll wake up and want something else, and you’ll have to choose. Because the other thing about stories is that they end. The book closes, and you’re left with yourself, a grown fucking woman with no more pieces of cultural detritus from which to construct a personality. I tried and failed to be a character in a story somebody else had written for me. What concerns me now is the creation of new narratives, the opening of space in the collective imagination for women who have not been permitted such space before, for women who don’t exist to please, to delight, to attract men, for women who have more on our minds. Writing is a different kind of magic, and everyone knows what happens to women who do their own magic - but it’s a risk you have to take.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Without courage, our generation is doomed to another decade of political disenfranchisement and shit music.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“The engine of capitalist patriarchy runs on the dirty fuel of women’s shame.”

“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.”