I think that Shakespeare had his male side and his female side extremely well developed. And this was a great quality of the Elizabethan, all-around Renaissance man. They were not afraid of their male side and their female side co-existing. This somewhere along the line got lost. And then it got misunderstood.
Even the things we are certain about are only an illusion. We are born with a female side and a male side, and these two sides are always fighting and challenging each other. This is why anything we want to do, we have the other side of telling us not to do it, to be careful about it.
Your body can be very female, which is something you can do nothing about, but then you can have the soul, the mind and the spirit of both male and female. The women friends I am closest to somehow have this masculine side to them, they shove their hands in their pockets when they walk: I love that side.
On the question of women's sexual freedom or female independence, there are still issues that haven't been worked out. There's an aura of traditional gender roles that is not talked about that really permeates these conversations. There is this vacillation between a desire for independence and having the kinds of sexual freedom that men have and, on the other side, issues about female vulnerability and susceptibility to male aggression and violence. We need more honesty about the actual conditions in which sex is happening.
I feel like male patriarchy generally has been about repressing female sexuality because it's "scary."
All my experience of the world teaches me that in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred the safe side and the just side of a question is the generous side and the merciful side.
I think I present a different side of a male character: a side that is not John Wayne-like, a side that is, in fact, destructible. To some people, that is refreshing, and to other people, especially if they don't know me, it may be disturbing.
I think the biggest misconception about me is people really don't know who I really am. They see the party side of me, they see the crazy side of me. But I also have a laid-back side. You know, I'm chill, down to earth. If you want to grab a cup of coffee and just talk about life, I can do that.
Women and men grow up with both sexes. Our mothers and fathers mean a lot to us, so it's just a question of finding a balance between their influences. I've found mine. And it tends to be more on the male side. I mean male side the way we understand it in the West.
In the African matrilineal society, the lineage of the bloodline comes down through the female side. The Arabs who invaded East Africa and other parts of Africa reversed it to the patrilineal where everything comes down through the male side and the woman has no basic rights except that which the male is willing to grant her.
The chances are you've never seen the other side of me. You've seen the event side of me when I'm on stage. But there is another side of me. If you evoke that side, you won't like it. It's a nasty side. You don't want to see that side. You're not missing anything by not seeing it.
A Christian woman's true freedom lies on the other side of a very small gate...humble obedience...but that gate leads out into a largeness of life undreamed of by the liberators of the world, to a place where the God-given differentiation between the sexes is not obfuscated but celebrated, where our inequalities are seen as essential to the image of God, for it is in male and female, in male as male and female as female, not as two identical and interchangeable halves, that the image is manifested.
I have probably four or five male friends who have a real strong masculine side but some degree of a feminine side, too. They're pretty rare, whereas I think women with a masculine side are much less rare.
Being a female director become as professional as your male colleagues and forget the whole question about being female. You are female anyway and it is going to work in your favor. The scope of female professional superiority can be understood by so few men that mostly they do not miss it.
I was at a book convention, in a cab. On one side of me was Arthur Schlesinger; on the other side was William Manchester - real heavyweights. All they were doing was asking me about Charles Manson. The only thing that enables me not to be bored is the people talking about it - they're so interested.
In Judaism, there are a lot of rules - everything from which fingernail you cut first to which side you sleep on in bed, to the way you get dressed in the morning, to actual ideas, like ideas about being chosen people or ideas about female/male and how to interact with people from the opposite sex.