A Quote by Leila Slimani

I think maternal instinct is a male construct that has been used for centuries to keep women in their place, at home. — © Leila Slimani
I think maternal instinct is a male construct that has been used for centuries to keep women in their place, at home.
The bar is the male kingdom. For centuries it was the bastion of male privilege, the gathering place for men away from their women, a place where men could go to freely indulge in The Bull Session.
The bonding of women that is woman-loving, or Gyn/affection, is very different from male bonding. Male bonding has been the glue of male dominance. It has been based upon recognition of the difference men see between themselves and women, and is a form of the behaviour, masculinity, that creates and maintains male power… Male comradeship/bonding depends upon energy drained from women.
Our main reasons for fearing males having sex with males is that you really had to construct a more powerful social role to keep men in their place than you did to keep women in their place.
What I see is not a world of male oppression and female victimization, but an internation conspiracy by women to keep from men the knowledge of men's own frailty. A strange maternal protectiveness is at work.
We know that babies develop as well in nonmaternal as in maternal care, as long as the care is of good quality. The issue is not who gives the care but the quality of that care,... The guilt trip is, in my view, a hangover of another era and of unacknowledged tactics to keep women in their proper place--at home full-time.
Power has for so long been a male construct that it distorted the shape of the first women who tried it on, only to find themselves in a sort of straitjacket.
Maternal instinct, merely as an instinct, is unworthy of our superstitious reverence.
I suppose it is easy for an actress to act maternal at any age, since all women have a nurturing instinct after 20, perhaps even earlier.
I absolutely adore and idolise women. All women. I think they are all amazing. The female musicians I've met have been far more inspiring than the male ones. Women tend to be much more creative and ambitious. I think I may have been a woman in a past life.
My mother used to tell me that when push comes to shove, you always know who to turn to. That being a family isn't a social construct but an instinct.
The culture of suppressing women composers and performers goes centuries back in Germany and other countries. Just think of Fanny Mendelssohn and the struggles she and many other women had to endure to get their music recognized. How many women's compositions were left to languish in attics, only to be thrown out by future generations! So much has been lost over the centuries.
It's rare to see women in a film who are not somehow validated by a male or discussing a male or heartbroken by a male,or end up being happy because of a male. It's interesting to think about, and it's very true.
I think women don't see themselves and their sexuality as wholesome. And yet men's sexuality is everywhere. We experience it as a culture in stadiums, thousands of raging fans of male sexuality, screaming, "Kick the ball over the goal post. Get the ball in the hoop. Score a home run." Male sexuality lives in that prowess of the scoring, of conquering, of getting, of that beautiful male energy of domination, aggression, and the competition.
I think as women we've always been very used to growing up reading and identifying with male protagonists, especially in fantasy. There's a saying in publishing that girls will read about boys, but boys will only read about boys, and it's important to give women strong heroines.
The maternal instinct is in me.
Men ruled the roost and women played a subservient role [in the 1960s]. Working wives were a rarity, because their place was in the home, bringing up the kids. The women who did work were treated as second-class citizens because it was a male-dominated society. That was a fact of life then. But it wouldn't be tolerated today, and that's quite right in my book... people look back on those days through a thick veil of nostalgia, but life was hard if you were anything other than a rich, powerful, white male.
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