Sara Pascoe Quotes

The sunset bled into the edges of the village. Smoke curled out of the cottage chimney like a crooked finger.

But if you flip this around, the reason women are smaller and weaker is that men weren’t worth fighting over. Hold my bag while I victory-lap.

Like water around rocks, people streamed around them as though this sort of interaction, noisy and involving foreigners, was nothing unusual.

I have decided it's my mind that's woman. It's my narrator. It's my relationship to myself, and oddly, nothing at all to do with my body.

On the end of my bed. He’s short, round and bald, with a tartan loin cloth, and what looks like a spout on the top of his head,’ Bryony said. ‘You flatter me,’ came the snide male voice. ‘But it’s a valve.

The summer sun bowing out threw slashes of colour between the buildings. London looked big, empty, and lonely. She stood in the doorway, like a cat trying to make up its mind.

Oo, I like a good cat fight – especially when it doesn’t involve me,’ Oscar said. ‘Shut up!’ Bryony and Raya said simultaneously. A hairline crack formed in the ice between them.

Even though it's only a minority of men who are violent or predatory, I don't know if men realise that girls are trained our entire lives to minimise the danger from you - and blamed if we don't.

Love is described like GOD.

Oscar looked up from his plate, and if a cat could laugh, he would have. ‘Boy, that’s ugly, even for a jinn. Looks like a cross between a rat, a frog and a bottlebrush.

What’s “ague?”‘ Raya asked. ‘Malaria.’ Oscar said. ‘Oh, great.’ ‘Hey, you want plague? They got that too.’ Raya ignored the cat.

Then Raya saw Rebecca West, the fourteen-year-old who only saved her own life by testifying against her mother, and then she saw her own face reflected in these girls – a swirl of chance, and life and sorrow.

She peeped through one of the small holes in the outer wall rising up from the walkway. The world on the outside was nothing but countryside now. Dirt roads, like chocolate ribbons, disappeared into woods or green fields in the distance.

And she was right. No matter how they tried, the two humans, with the cat but without the microchip, couldn’t connect to headquarters. Raya heard a loud popping sound in her mind, like a huge rubber band being snapped, like a glider plane released from a Piper Cub.

He thrust his shoulders back and spoke in a whisper that sounded like the hiss of a snake. ‘Yes, the very battle between good and evil, played out even in the lowliest of lives like yours. Witches killing dogs because they did not get their favourite drink.

With our beloved prairie voles the female has her ovulation induced by the smell of male urine. It’s a sure sign there’s a male nearby and so her body gets ready for mating. The exact opposite of a human female getting a whiff of urinals in a nightclub and her vagina falling off in disgust

Raya knew this type of girl – they never liked her. Usually they’d make fun of her, behind her back, but loud enough for her to hear. She was too alternative, too poor and too cynical – the foster kid – to be of any interest to these social climbers.

Normal' is a concept formed by averages but it changes with education and tolerance.

So you’re unique and unusual, well done, now pop off and eat your banana.

Any time you see the word ‘detox’ someone is trying to sell you absolute waste-of-time crap. Your

What strikes me now is why did they send the boys away? Why don’t boys get educated about menstruation? Is it because the teachers think girls will be embarrassed? I feel like the secrecy of it, the action of segregating us, sends the message that we should be ashamed. That our periods are something to hide from the opposite sex.

I am sorry for men because our culture tells them to introduce themselves to women who in the vast, vast majority don’t want to meet them.

the reason women are smaller and weaker is that men weren’t worth fighting over.

Why are boys’ feelings a girl’s responsibility? This is treating the male response as unavoidable: the problem is schoolgirls’ hemlines.

These ‘historical’ texts made us angry because they didn’t feel like a reflection of some other time, but of our own.

But I can remember how grown-up I felt then, and earlier, since about nine. Because we age one way, in one direction, every age we are is the most grown-up we’ve ever been.

What I find most troubling is the recent expectation for sudden weight loss after pregnancy. It’s perverse that the finest compliment given to a woman who has just made a person is that she looks like she hasn’t.

women’s bodies respond to all kinds of sexual stimuli not always because they want to have sex, but because sex might ensue anyway. That lubrication is not an ‘I’m turned on’ signal so much as an ‘I don’t want to be damaged’ response. And we evolved it because we had to.

I am a modern lady, a cutting-edge, very recent woman. And yet the only menstrual blood I have ever seen is my own. Is that weird? I can see sex on all the movies and TV programmes, I can watch murders being enacted and people pretending to shit themselves in the street, yet no periods.

This is adulthood,’ I thought. ‘Being grown-up means watching people get stoned and not crying when they put on videos of aggressive sex.

I have money now, I never have to speak to anyone I don’t want to, and I love it. What money has bought me is freedom, and I never forget it.

Birds are monogamous because their young require the input of two parents. This isn’t romance, it’s evolutionary necessity.

This is why it’s a mystery … why have a big penis? If it doesn’t aid conception, what the hell IS it doing?

There’s a range of pills that claim to help men create more semen. Why? WHY? I stared at my computer; why would anyone want more of the sticky annoying bit?

We’re descended from the watching-his-every-move, spreading-rumours-that-he’s-impotent, accusing-him-of-flirting-with-his-mum, jealous bitches.

Fear and arousal is not just a great band name, they predispose our deepest, most subconscious emotional needs.

But maybe all of us understanding more about why bad things happen can help us stop them?

women who’ve had breast enlargements are two to three times more likely to commit suicide than women who haven’t.

It’s perverse that the finest compliment given to a woman who has just made a person is that she looks like she hasn’t.

I guess this combination of ‘birth is the most natural thing in the world’ and ‘birth is agonising and dangerous and can kill everyone involved’ is difficult for us to absorb.

You cannot give somebody permission to force you to do things, any more than you can allow yourself to be overpowered.

Do you think it is better to be punched in the face by someone you like?

I think all human beings should be free to use their body however they want … unless that involves buying sexual access to another person. Then I think they should have a wank and shut up.

There is no fate, there are no souls or stars crossing or ‘The Ones’. Our powerful emotion is an inbuilt survival tactic. It’s a primordial glue, sticking us together to continue the species.

Our culture has trained us all to interpret males as active and females as passive, but in almost every species I have read about it is the female that initiates sex. They do this with pheromones and scents and behaviours and they get males excited and then yes, sometimes she’ll have him follow her around for hours or kick and bite him, but that’s to ensure that he is fit for purpose.

Even though it's only a minority of men who are violent or predatory, I don't know if men realise that girls are trained our entire lives to minimise the danger from you - and blamed if we don't.

When looking for evolutionary explanations it can seem like we’re seeking to excuse behaviour, to justify it. But I do not think there is any excuse or justification. Evolutionary pressures are not a defence.

If you would like some chat to ruin any party’s vibe, research dowry deaths and bride burning. Thousands of women are murdered every year because the father who ‘owns’ them does not pay enough to their new keeper.

The most important lesson of adulthood might be that just because you feel something, that doesn’t mean someone intended you to feel it. That applies to both the women in LinkedIn photos and the men making comments.

When studies examining gender differences don’t reflect my experience I sigh to myself, ‘Must be a man then, what with my masculine reaction,’ rather than remembering that it’s only ever a small sample being extrapolated from.

I can’t imagine a young man being told not to dress a certain way because a homosexual person might find them sexy. In those instances, the target of the attraction would never be blamed. Responsibility would rest with the feeler of feelings.

To be a woman is to occasionally feel, thanks to a few men, as if you are a shop – a department store with orifices on every level. It can feel like persecution. You’re trying to check a bus timetable or call your mum, while simultaneously advertising sex without meaning to.

a meta-study of developing and developed world nations found that the presence of a maternal grandmother was more beneficial for the survival and health of children than any other relative except a mother – that, statistically, kids are better off with a grandma around than a father.

Things like drinking and smoking make it worse – I had always known this but not understood why; your liver balances the hormones in your blood (or tries to) and when it’s working on stored alcohol (which it has to if you drink more than one unit per hour) then the hormones can become more unbalanced. Interesting, huh? And annoying, because downing wine and hoping it will make everything better is one of my favourite nonsensical behaviours.

in the future, the theory of evolution is proved to be a massive prank by the Christian God to test our faith I’ll be the first to apologise and beg to get into heaven. I want to live forever

If a female student says no to an offer of sex or visiting a stranger’s apartment, it’s not automatically a reflection of low libido, but an assessment of danger. Males are bigger and stronger than females; in scientific terms, humans have a body-size dimorphism of around 1.1 in the male’s favour. This isn’t accidental, it’s the result of male competition. In species where males compete for females the strongest are more likely to win and share their big genes with the next generation. This worldwide physical advantage has historically been used to justify the superiority of men, justify why they should be respected and obeyed, and paid more in virtually all vocations.* But if you flip this around, the reason women are smaller and weaker is that men weren’t worth fighting over.

I googled ‘monkey brothel’, had an existential crisis, and eventually found the details I wanted in a New Yorker article titled ‘Monkey Business’.

This wish to ‘protect’ women from ‘exploitation’ is built on our cultural morality that sex without love is bad, that there is something precious about sex which means anyone having it outside of a relationship is ‘broken’. We don’t view the men in porn that way, even though they’re there too and BEING PAID EVEN LESS.

If sex is just an activity, can you do it with your parents, like tennis or ju-jitsu? No, because incest was selected against in our evolution. It causes genetic malfunction, it reduces the health and ability of offspring.

A porn actress is flagrantly violating two of our inbuilt ‘rules’ – sex in private and fidelity for paternity certainty – hence my unbidden unease about her profession.

1) Be wary of men from new tribes 2) Pair with a male who can protect you 3) Only copulate hidden from view in order not to excite/incite unwanted males

Plus we’ve had female students missing school,’ the teacher added, ‘because they’re in hospital with anal injuries.’ Straight into the top ten Worst Sentences I’ve Ever Heard.

Men get a dose of the hormone prolactin after orgasm and this acts as a sedative.

This sex difference in post-coital response – the male quick to relax and fall into slumber, while the female remains alert, perfectly able to have more sex (and more orgasms BY THE WAY) – is theorised to be down to multi-partnering in our evolution. At least it gives the female the option, whereas the male gets stimulated, orgasms and is spent.

It never occurred to me that it might take bravery to speak to a stranger, to risk rejection. That the offer of a drink was a socially acceptable way of saying, ‘May I enter your life? Might we have fun together?

Women who have chosen to pay their mortgage by being looked at are suddenly being told that how they feed themselves and their kids isn’t appropriate any more. It is ‘at odds’. It is not believed ‘appropriate’.

there was a recent experiment where men on stag dos were separated from the group and asked about their night. The majority of men individually said they weren’t enjoying themselves but were doing it for the others!

a study where women rated the attractiveness of pictures of men. They found that if they put a man next to an expensive car he was judged more handsome.

Kalinda made a fascinating point in her dissertation about the gender pay gap being easily bridged by how much more money men are willing to spend on sexy women than women are willing to spend on sexy men.

As our physical evolution (big brain + small hips = earlier baby) made child-rearing increasingly difficult, our species evolved stronger familial bonds in response. A closely knit, helpful, supportive family increased our offspring’s survival chances – hence the genes for putting up with caring about relations were selected for.

Being more compact means the body can stay warm using fewer calories. It’s why people who have evolved in harsher climates like the Arctic are shorter and squatter, while people on the equator are lither and leggier.

In hunter–gatherer societies, pre-religion and getting sacked from work, the reason we evolved to conceal our sex was that other people might want to join in. And if they are stronger than you, you might not be able to stop them.

Top of my head – Lot’s daughters all trying to get off with him, and two entire cities wanking and bumming so much they had to be destroyed

the caller could ask hot questions like ‘What are you wearing?’ and the sex phone operator would answer something sexy like ‘Sexy pants.

Scientists can ascertain the promiscuity level of every species by the size of the male gonad.

Small balls = small competition between males for females. Big balls = big competition. Chimpanzees have massive testicles because their females copulate with multiple males.

A woman who remains pair-bonded but has sexual encounters on the side is genetically spread-betting. If we take all morality and social conditioning out of the equation, it is the best mating strategy for females. She has the support and resources to raise her young, yet the opportunity to diversify and upgrade.

Similarly for human males, the most effective mating strategy is to be pair-bonded but enjoy some extrapair copulations with other partners.

After a separation of several days males were treating their partner to sperm at the top end of the motility range, especially if she’d been around other men. THIS IS HUGE. This means that the male body is subconsciously aware that its sperm might have to outswim some other dude’s.

Experimenters popped some fake semen in the fake female, thrust away with the fake male and measured which dildo displaced the most. The smooth one removed the least, around 35 per cent, but both ridged fellows got out over 90 per cent.

Chimp intercourse lasts about fifteen seconds and they’re not facing extinction. Could our species’ thrusty sessions be about sperm removal? Getting that ridge deep inside and having a good clear-out?

from adolescence onwards, the female body maintains a CONSTANT STATE of fertility signalling. Our breasts and bums don’t swell up to say ‘Hey, I’m fertile, come on over’ on a cyclical basis. Instead they stay swollen up, saying that All. The. Time.

a woman’s life can be an assault course of avoiding male attention. I’ve encountered this as much as any city-dwelling woman, but as for the reason it happens – I’d never really got past ‘men are pigs’. NOT ALL MEN.

Our species does not have a set of triggered physical signals to create sexual interest, and that has resulted in constant sexual interest.

They asked participants what colour top they had on and when their last period was, and then got slapped for asking personal questions calculated how likely participants were to be ovulating. They found 40 per cent of the ‘likely fertile’ group were wearing red or pink versus only 7 per cent of the rest, which is CRAZY but needs to be replicated with more people before I’ll be completely convinced.

men prefer the smell of ovulating women – their odours were rated more pleasant – and, even more astonishingly, that men’s testosterone levels were raised by sniffing the sweat of women mid-cycle, but not at other times.

One possible benefit, which would have powerfully shaped the social aspect of our species, is that if multiple males have mated with a female, they might all be willing to contribute resources and protection to the child. This means more food and increased safety, both for mothers and for their young.

It’s an unhelpful paradox that a person is at their least sexy when sexually frustrated. It’s particularly difficult to seduce someone when you’ve snot running down your face.

75 per cent of men agreed to sex. Just like that. Come on a date? Erm … Come round my house? I’ll think about it. Wanna have sex? COUNT ME IN. Can you guess how many of the female students agreed to the sex question? Zero. Big fat none.

Beatings, invasions of privacy, restricting access to a phone, money and other freedoms – these are mate-guarding behaviours and in evolutionary terms can be linked to males’ lack of paternity certainty.

If sex was all about reproduction, how could so many individuals be aroused by a practice that works against them? Why has our species evolved so many sexual practices that are unconnected with the continuation of the species?

Porne is a Greek word referring to a female slave, literally meaning a woman purchased for the purpose of prostitution

What’s happening is that someone doesn’t enjoy what they’re feeling, whether it’s an erection during Ramadan or arousal provoked by a much younger person. The feelings make him feel ashamed and the focus of those feelings is blamed.

To be clear, 83 per cent of images in the porn image section of Usenet were pornographic. That means 17 per cent of the images in the porn groups were not pornographic, and I’m sorry, that is far more intriguing. What were they? Cats? Birthday cakes?

By masturbating every few days a man keeps his sperm fresh and energetic, vital for sperm competition. New studies also suggest that masturbating reduces the chances of getting prostate cancer and lowers stress, so it’s an all-round great way to spend your time.

psychotherapist Richard Sipe discovered through probing interviews that of course they do. And yet again there was a sex difference. He reported that priests masturbated more than nuns.

We have to be careful with language because it creates the world.

we ensure our own survival at all costs, but survival has always involved each other. Empathy is a muscle that can be improved if you work at it.

Just like a male’s large size being a strength in polygynous species, the ability to bond with sexual partners and their offspring is a strength in ours. And the more our ancestors bonded, the better they did. The more they loved each other, the harder they worked to provide and keep everyone alive and stop baby falling in the river and things like that.

but for me, my very definition of sex is a meeting of equals. When it is not that, it is something else.