Lynn Flewelling Quotes

I feel that women and men should free themselves up. It took me a while to get over my dysphoria about shopping in the men's section, trying on men's clothes, but when I was thinking about my life and the kind of woman I wanted to be, it was never just this by-the-book feminine thing.

I feel like it's too easy to just say, "We'll just change the name of this male character to a female, but have her do all the same things that a male does." I don't believe in that. I think there's something else. I think there's more to women than that.

Being in drag for three months - I now have an idea of what women go through. At least maybe a little.

Some people look gender non-conforming because they want to look that way - they don't want to conform to society's expectations.

If I have smashed the traditions, it was because I knew no traditions.

People look at me, they know I've appeared in costume dramas and they automatically assume I must be a Tory, I must be a certain type of person. Not a lot of people would think that I spent most of my early years totally rebelling against anything I could, getting suspended from school, going on demonstrations. I was a pretty difficult teenager.

There's such a stereotype about men and women. Obviously, people think men are faster and stronger and all these other things, and I don't want people to get sucked into that anymore. I want them to realize that the women are out here and doing just as awesome things. They can be just as great, too.

I want to play the mean girl one day - or the mean gay!

I am not one to go for traditional female roles, because I don't think traditionally female characters are very interesting, and I don't think they represent real life.

It's not often you get female characters who don't fit into a box.

I've struggled with gender norms my whole life, always feeling like I wasn't black-and-white; I was in this gray area, and gray areas really scare people because you can't define them.

There are so many rules about how you make a film and so many conventions that you can and can't do. I think people have forgotten that they are just rules that were invented for convenience - sometimes it is more convenient not to obey the rules.

No one has ever seen me as feminine.

That's one of the things I really respect and admire about 'Doctor Who', is that they're always thinking out of the box with the characters they write and the actor they employ to portray them. They're always challenging the stereotypes and peoples' way of thinking.

One of the things I love about the character development in 'Power' is Courtney A. Kemp's subversive use of stereotype.

I've done that my whole life - I've taken the way people think and turned it on its head.

I don't think I present as gender-conforming on screen, but some people need a little extra information.

We never thought of ourselves as a girl band. We dressed like blokes.

I think the world is kind of catching on that gender roles aren't so necessary and becoming a lot less defined and starting to become a lot more about the individual and character of that person.

I did take some cooking classes in high school. Boys weren't really supposed to take them. I had to risk being made fun of.

I think there's still a lot of room in 'Riverdale' for that. Asexuality is not one of those things, in my research, that is so understood at face value, and I think maybe the development of that narrative could also be something very interesting and very unique and still resonate with people and not step on anyone's toes.

That's what we're all doing: paving the way, finding the roles that have the complication instead of the one that's always got it together or the dedicated housewife or the wild one who smokes cigarettes and sleeps with anybody.

Maybe if I'd agreed to do the debutante thing like she wanted. Or taken up pageants instead of riding jump bikes with a bunch of grungy boys. I'd always tell her, why can't I do both? Who says you have to be either smart or pretty, or into girly stuff or sports? Life shouldn't be about the either/or. We're capable of more than that, you know?

It was so fascinating to be a part of this, because as the women took on these central roles that had all the good lines, therefore all the good laughs, all the great moments- the men, who had joined us to sit on stage, started squirming rather uncomfortably. And got really bored. Because they weren't used to being the supporting cast. It was fascinating to feel their discomfort, to discuss it with them afterwards when they said, 'It's boring to play the girl role.' And I said, 'Yeah. Yeah, ya think? Welcome to our world.'

To say anything about women and men without marking oneself as either feminist or anti-feminist, male-basher or apologist for men seems as impossible for a woman as trying to get dressed in the morning without inviting interpretations of her character. Sitting at the conference table musing on these matters, I felt sad to think that we women didn't have the freedom to be unmarked that the men sitting next to us had. Some days you just want to get dressed and go about your business. But if you're a woman, you can't, because there is no unmarked woman.