Fatima Mernissi Quotes

Men have always detested women's gossip because they suspect the truth: their measurements are being taken and compared.

Women are frightening. If you get to 41 as a man, you're quite battle-scarred.

Men's need to dominate women may be based in their own sense of marginality or emptiness; we do not know its root, and men are making no effort to discover it.

The only men who aren't in fear of women's reactions are usually men who aren't born or who are dead.

For the several thousands of years before they became firefighters and physicians, women were sirens, enchantresses, snares. At times it seems as if female powerlessness is male self-preservation in disguise. And for millennia, this has made for a zero-sum game: A woman's intelligence was a man's deception.

Powerful women intimidate men. If she's a really well-known woman, she has a career, she's famous - in that case, men are really afraid.

I realized early on that I always hated girls who used their femininity to get what they wanted.

Man's constant need to disparage woman, to humble her, to deny her equal rights, and to belittle her achievements — all are expressions of his innate envy and fear.

Being in a heterosexual relationship for a woman is always implicitly a little bit humiliating.

I had to live through being a woman who thought men always had a one-up... I knew I didn't like it. I thought that's how it was.

Show me a frigid women and, nine times out of ten, I'll show you a little man.

The sight of women talking together has always made men uneasy; nowadays it means rank subversion.

Most women seem to be required to pit themselves against men in dramatic situations, and the men got to pit themselves against ideas or God.

The most mediocre of males feels himself a demigod as compared with women.

I think masculinity is bravado against the mystery of the universe of women. It's just a fear of not knowing what women have that's so powerful. It's this shield they put up to try to get closer.

I would argue that something dark is lurking between the sexes, and that it is seeping out into cinema.

Women want mediocre men, and men are working to be as mediocre as possible.

Black men don't like to be called 'boys,' but women accept being called 'girls.'

There is no such thing as a dangerous woman; there are only susceptible men.

Most women are wise to the fact that lots of men love a cat-fight, and thus go out of their way not to give them one.

When you are a strong woman, you will attract trouble. When a man feels threatened, there is always trouble.

I'm not denyin' the women are foolish. God Almighty made 'em to match the men.

What interests me is why men think of women as witches. It's because they're so fascinating and exasperating, so other.

I'll do shoes for the lady who lunches, but it would be, like, a really nasty lunch, talking about men.

Strong women only marry weak men.