Quotes

Cinderella never asked for a prince. She asked for a night off and a dress.

The story of Cinderella has always struck me as the most incomprehensible of all the moral fables known as fairy tales. Here is a plain, depressed slave of a girl, beaten and maltreated y her family (her stepfamily, actually—as is usual with these matriarch-oriented narratives, the father is absent), whose miserable life consists of cleaning pots, waiting on tables and sleeping on straw, who suddenly finds herself magically transformed into a radiant, opulently dressed beauty, sought after by the Prince of the Kingdom, and who three times flees the palace where she is the belle of the ball to return to the hole in a corner of the house where she is a virtual prisoner. And she can’t decide which place to choose? (In the anodyne Perrault version, she is forced to be back by the stroke of midnight, or be exposed as the fraud she is, but in the Grimm version it is her choice.) It takes an accidental circumstance to solve her problem: she loses a slipper, leading the prince to find her and take matters in his own hands. But what exactly is her problem? No one in five hundred—plus years has given a plausible explanation of her indecisiveness until Lapine came along with a startling solution: Cinderella doesn’t lose her slipper, she deliberately leaves it behind. She knows she’s an impostor and doesn’t want willingly to mislead the Prince (and the world). She figures that if the Prince really cares to see her again, he’ll follow the clue she has left. She doesn’t want an accident of fate to fix her life, she wants to be loved for herself. Viewed in this light, the story makes more sense; not only that, it explains the universality of its appeal and why, more than any other fable, it exists in every culture.

Listen to me, your body is not a temple. Temples can be destroyed and desecrated. Your body is a forest—thick canopies of maple trees and sweet scented wildflowers sprouting in the under wood. You will grow back, over and over, no matter how badly you are devastated.

76% of negative feedback given to women included personality criticism. For men, 2%. The study speaks to the impossible tightrope women must walk to do their jobs competently and to make tough decisions while simultaneously coming across as nice to everyone, all the time.

There is a reason that most fanfiction authors, specifically girls, start with a Mary Sue. It’s because girls are taught that they are never enough. You can’t be too loud, too quiet, too smart, too stupid. You can’t ask too many questions or know too many answers. No one is flocking to you for advice. Then something wonderful happens. The girl who was told she’s stupid finds out that she can be a better wizard than Albus Dumbledore. And that is something very important. Terrible at sports? You’re a warrior who does backflips and Legolas thinks you’re THE BEST. No friends? You get a standing ovation from Han Solo and the entire Rebel Alliance when you crash-land safely on Hoth after blowing up the Super Double Death Star. It’s all about you. Everyone in your favorite universe is TOTALLY ALL ABOUT YOU.

I started writing fanfiction the way most girls did, by re-inventing themselves.

Mary Sues exist because children who are told they’re nothing want to be everything.

Does the Mage’s College have a football team?

We’ve been coming up on six years of existence and we don’t have a use of force on our unit. Which means we never tased anybody. We’ve never shot anybody. We’ve never hit anybody with [a baton]. But patients, talking to them, we get the result we want in the end. And we don’t have to force it on them.

After reading about gender-bias and conversation dominance in the classroom, I asked for a peer to observe a physics class I was teaching and keep track of the discussion time I was giving to various students along with their race and gender. In this exercise, I knew I was being observed and I was trying to be extra careful to equally represent all students―but I STILL gave a disproportionate amount of discussion time to the white male students in my classroom (controlling for the overall distribution of genders and races in the class). I was shocked. It felt like I was giving a disproportionate amount of time to my white female and non-white students.

Even when I was explicitly trying, I still failed to have the discussion participants fairly represent the population of the students in my classroom.

This is a well-studied phenomena and it’s called listener bias. We are socialized to think women talk more than they actually do. Listener bias results in most people thinking that women are ‘hogging the floor’ even when men are dominating.

32,975