Women Born In The 1970s

"A lot of my generation think it’s politically incorrect to like beautiful things. They’re into camp, but it’s not for me. Working on The Age of Innocence spoiled me, because everything I looked at was a work of art."

"There is an assumption when you’re young that things don’t mean as much or aren’t as painful. But first love is the most devastating of all. Society will always look down on teenagers – parents and teachers don’t seem to pay enough attention to kids when they are at their most painful age. Most of the great writers were outcasts, especially the beats. That’s why Lawrence Ferlinghetti is such a hero, because he was the first person to get those artists published."

"[My parents] are my favourite people. They were so admirable in the sense of what they chose to do, as opposed to what they could have done. They were very educated, they could have taken jobs and settled down, but they followed their hearts. They did what they loved. Writing together. Running the museum. Activism. I really revere them. Also, they are archivists, and I definitely inherited that gene."

"Everyone evolves – except for maybe Beetlejuice maybe... He's like endgame for me. I totally want them [Beetlejuice and Lydia] to be truly together! It's [makes a gesture indicating "crazy"] I know, but..."

"The [[Julia Gillard|[Julia] Gillard]] amendments imposed the biggest game of wilful pretend imaginable on women and girls, now forced to suspend their reality and believe that a 'penis-owner' is a woman, because he says so. This would be laughable if it was not so serious. On ABC radio recently, Gillard asked "why aren’t we further along?" with respect to gender equality. She blames the vile sewer of social media and women's difficult balancing act of work and family life. No mention at all of the alarming and increasing impact of her government’s amendments to the SDA [Sex Discrimination Act 1984]."

"Despite ample evidence demonstrating almost all children with distress about their natal sex resolve this during puberty, experimental medical interventions rather than "watchful waiting" are being baked into law and policy as the solution. We are sterilising a generation of gay and lesbian children by turning them into profit-centres. Yet those hiding behind the credibility of the Pride flag have the audacity to attack those raising the alarm as "homophobic" and "transphobic"."

"We didn't want this culture war either. Neither does anyone else, but when women were erased as a legal class, dissenters were punished, and the gender botherers came for our children, we would not be silent."

"The Minister for Equalities must now report to parliament on what steps will be taken to ensure those at the government-funded Rape Crisis Scotland, who presided over the unlawful introduction of males within their single-sex service, are accountable for their part in this damaging dereliction of duty to service users."

"If you even think for one second, you cannot possibly drive prostitution underground. If you had a lot of women in underground cellars with a locked door, how would the punters get to them?"

"But what I will say, whilst this legislation, which is deeply unpopular with the Scottish public, is blocked for now, what I would like to see is that this legislation is withdrawn and I would like to see the Scottish Government say they will never implement this bill."

"[Representing the pressure group Save Women’s Sport Australasia] Women have fought for decades to have access to similar resources (as male sport), similar media coverage, pay parity in professional sports — and now that we are actually starting to gain some ground, that's all being put at risk [by the admission of transwomen to women's sports]."

"[Asked why transwomen should be admitted to women's sports] Because the feelings of addled and entitled men are far more important than the inescapable, lived reality of little girls, teenage girls, young women and older women."

"Where there is a contradiction or a conflict we have to give consideration to the rights of women based on sex in these specific circumstances. In the letter I named a few — for example women in prisons, shelters from victims of violence."

"We have seen numerous instances in which the presence of just one male on a female team is enough to knock women and girls off the podium. Moreover, allowing athletes born male to compete in women’s and girls’ sports also dramatically heightens the vulnerability of female athletes to injury. Regrettably, the fear of experiencing such harm can and does result in women and girls choosing to self-exclude themselves from participation."

"What I was saying was that there is no right — and I repeated that again and again — to self-ID and that self-ID also, when it is so unregulated, leads to negative consequences for specific groups of women based on their sex."

"[N]ot only disappointed but also very concerned about this dystopian ruling ... which distorts key concepts like sex and discrimination while dodging Australia's international human rights obligations vis-à-vis women."

"[It] would potentially open the door for violent males who identify as men to abuse the process of acquiring a gender certificate and the rights that are associated with it. [...] This presents potential risks to the safety of women in all their diversity (including women born female, transwomen, and gender non-conforming women)."

"Amendments that could have prevented those on the sex offenders register from obtaining a gender recognition certificate (GRC) and strengthened the law on single sex prison allocation were voted down or withdrawn."

"[The proposals] do not sufficiently take into consideration the specific needs of women and girls in all their diversity, particularly those at risk of male violence and those who have experienced male violence, as it does not provide for any safeguarding measures to ensure that the procedure is not, as far as can be reasonably assured, abused by sexual predators and other perpetrators of violence."

"Violent sex offenders have no place in the women's estate. Women's single-sex spaces for privacy, safety or therapeutic purposes are enshrined in the Equality Act 2010. These important protections will be impossible to uphold when anyone can decide they are a woman and have a GRC to prove their legal status."

"There’s an idea that I wanted to put to you. It’s not my idea but the group that came up with it have said that we should be using it in the campaign. And it’s the idea of a ‘readiness thermometer’. I don’t know if anyone’s seen that idea yet. So, the idea is you can have an actual installation which is a readiness thermometer. We could put it up in Glasgow or in Edinburgh, and it can be outside and it has a dial on it that moves. So when we’ve made all the plans for the currency for instance, or we’ve set up how we’re going to do something to do with defence, or whatever it is, that dial will move and it will inch forward. And the media can look at it, everyone can look at it, and it builds that confidence with the public so that when we get up to the 100 per cent, everybody in Scotland knows we’ve solved all these problems."

"I think it’s welcome, I’m disappointed that unfortunately the Scottish Government has got itself into this mess to begin with, it didn’t have to do that."

"This was a train wreck that derailed into the ocean where it was attacked by a shark and electrocuted before being hit by an asteroid."

"It is never a good idea to underestimate a mob of angry moms."

"Parents scared of losing their child will always outspend, outwork, and outvote gun rights extremists scared of losing their guns."

"Greta Gerwig: Made a critically acclaimed, culturally profound, feminist movie about Barbie and the patriarchy that made a billion dollars at the box office. Oscar nomination goes to … Ken."

"On a surface level, this pairing of Trump's open disregard for basic marital morality with [[J.D. Vance|[J.D.] Vance]]'s sanctimony is just an extension of the larger incoherence that characterizes this year's Republican National Convention. It's certainly whiplash-inducing to be here, where attendees swing wildly between showy displays of Christian piety and vulgar and even threatening language toward fellow Americans who disagree with them politically. The shame that usually accompanies hypocrisy was abandoned years ago by this crowd. But perhaps that's because it's not really hypocrisy that drives the MAGA movement. It's an attachment to traditional hierarchies that allow such appalling double standards to flourish. Violence from Republicans, such as on January 6, is acceptable because it's enforcing the social order they support. But the attempted murder of Trump is beyond the pale because it's an assault on the only leader they accept as legitimate. In that light, it's not hard to see what holds Vance's seemingly disparate views together. It's not a faith in marriage, but an allegiance to male domination."

"Cats love to have you around, but won't come unglued if you're not around to clean up after them for a few hours. If only more men could be like cats!"

"No one should be surprised that it was men, especially white men, who handed [[Donald Trump|[Donald] Trump]] this election. It's been exhaustively established that the majority of white men in this country are consumed with resentment at being expected to treat women and racial minorities as equals, though of course some liberal journalists — usually white men themselves — kept valiantly trying to claim that it was "economic insecurity" that somehow drove the most prosperous group of Americans to kick angrily at those who objectively make less money and have less status than they do."

"Trump's behavior may have been on the high end of the shitty male behavior spectrum, but it still falls within the parameters of what a lot of people are socialized to accept, especially when the bully is rich and powerful like Trump. He, like many men who behave the way he does, gets away with it because far too many people believe that being a bad-tempered thug is just what being a man is about."

"Gun-owning is a largely male phenomenon in the US. Forty-five percent of American men own guns while only 15% of women do. Sixty percent of adults with guns in America are white men, even though white men are just one third of the US population. Despite some attempts by gun lobbyists and marketers to try to sell more guns to women, the fact of the matter is that gun-owning isn't really about "safety" and "crime", so much as it's a very costly form of identity politics."

"People like [[Richard Dawkins|[Richard] Dawkins]], [[Michael Shermer|[Michael] Shermer]] and [[Sam Harris|[Sam] Harris]] are the public face of atheism. And that public face is one that is defensively and irrationally sexist. It's not only turning women away from atheism, it's discrediting the idea that atheists are actually people who argue from a position of rationality. How can they be, when they cling to the ancient, irrational tradition of treating women like they aren't quite as human as men?"

"[T]here’s a thriving online community of people who live to harass not just women, but female atheists in particular, trying to drum any women out of the movement who want to be included as equals instead of as support staff for the male stars. Feminists like Rebecca Watson and Greta Christina, who upset the image of atheism as a “guy thing," are subject to a relentless drumbeat of abuse through social media by people who prefer an atheism that’s a little more like fundamentalist Christianity, where women know their place."

"The council did find one exception to the rule: Childless couples who said they were committed to equality did split chores evenly. But when baby came, the women in these once-balanced relationships got a raw deal; not only did New Mom do more domestic work than New Dad, but New Dad did five fewer hours of housework per week than before he became a father. The implications are clear: When faced with the pressures of raising a family, couples backslide into traditional gender roles."

"I did worry that last week's column, when I suggested that Rishi Sunak may be on the brink of making an extraordinary comeback, wasn't going to age particularly well. [...] Following Nigel Farage's resurgence and the Prime Minister's disastrous decision to leave the D-Day commemorations early, it’s fair to say that my column now looks about as prescient as David Icke."

"Rather than a Tory wipeout and Labour landslide, Starmer's floundering could lead us to another Theresa May 2017 situation, with himself as the emperor without clothes. Everyone laughed when Sunak first suggested a hung parliament. But the momentum building behind "no overall majority" shows the Tories are having a much better campaign than Labour."

"[[Rishi Sunak|[Rishi] Sunak]]'s decision to call a snap general election on July 4 is fast being vindicated as a rare example of sound strategic political thinking from the PM. Not only did it catch Reform off guard, but it has also caught Sir Keir Starmer with his socialist pants down."

"[Asked if Isla Bryson should be able to identify as trans] I think any trans person should be able to get the gender recognition certificate that they seek, that recognises, in law, something that the rest of us just take for granted."

"[It was suggested Bryson was posing as trans to avoid serving their sentence in a male prison] Well we do'’t know that was the only motivation that Isla Bryson chose to do that [...] Isla Bryson is a trans woman ... it’s very very clear that we cannot let single cases determine the entire legislation that we're talking about here."

"The Scottish Greens stand in solidarity with Rape Crisis Scotland, Edinburgh Rape Crisis, survivors of gender-based violence, Mridul Wadhwa, and trans people across Scotland. Rape Crisis Scotland and rape crisis centres across the country provide vital, life-saving support, therapy and advocacy for survivors of gender-based violence."

"[After her interviewer had asserted no human had ever changed biological sex] I'm not actually sure we can say that because we don't have the chromosomal make-up of every single human being. We don't know that. Do you know what your chromosomes are? I've never had mine tested, I don't know what mine are."

"Why do male politicians get this so wrong? Unfortunately, the answer is simple: because they believe what they are saying. Galloway, [[Todd Akin|[Todd] Akin]] and [[Craig Murray|[Craig] Murray]] represent the tip of an iceberg of resentment and base sexism."

"All too often, the media pretends that feminism’s work is done. This week shows us what so many male politicians really think about consent, and sex, and the rights of a woman to withhold it, or attach conditions to it. There is a long way to go."

"It is [[George Galloway|[George] Galloway]] that is bankrupt of meaning: rape is when a woman does not consent. Because she is, for example, asleep and unconscious. Sexual consent is not football; you can’t buy a season ticket."

"I wonder whether our frameworks are more the hangups of our pre-liberal parents than we realise. In the patriarchal, restricted and desperately sexist world that came before, one can imagine that a woman without children may have been a object of concerned pity – because the old gendered denial of career paths, educational opportunities and independent incomes meant that beyond partnership and parenthood there weren't so many other fulfilling experiences for women on offer. Our biological destiny isn't to reproduce – remember? It's just to die, and find ways to meaningfully occupy our time before we do."

"As the owner of a little place on the Isle of Wight, I should declare an interest. Some 80 per cent of properties in my seaside village are second homes, making it difficult for local shops to survive the winter."

"Most of us understand, at least in theory, that marriage is not an achievement but a choice. We have learned to value ourselves apart from the value the dating market puts on us. We own our power and, in some cases, our apartments. We try not to go around saying things like "all the good ones are gone.""

"Now we sat in silence over the prawns and cheese, listening to them arguing. She was telling him The Sunday Times was investigating a tip that he had dodged a driving ban for speeding by pretending she had been at the wheel. He was telling her to keep her mouth shut. The recording finished and she switched off the machine, looking up expectantly."

"For reasons that have never been clear to me, the call centre for my insurer – a policy bought through a broker in Dubai, regulated in the Channel Islands, and falling under the umbrella of one of the biggest insurers in the US – is located in Scotland, ensuring that the man who picked up my call had to strain as hard as I did to pretend this situation was normal."

"[P]opulists offering easy answers hate nothing more than the long, boring, mercilessly exposing business of trying to put them into practice. If the biggest risk to Reform is being shut out of power, then the second biggest might be winning it."