I have me brave women who are exploring the outer edge of human possibility, with no history to guide them, and with a courage to make themselves vulnerable that I find moving beyond words.
A woman reading Playboy feels a little like a Jew reading a Nazi manual.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote illustrates the conflict between one's values and the content consumed, highlighting contradictions in beliefs.
Gloria Steinem uses a provocative analogy to express the discomfort and moral conflict that arises when individuals, particularly women, engage with material that is fundamentally at odds with their beliefs or identities. By comparing a woman reading Playboy to a Jew reading a Nazi manual, she underscores the potential harm and exploitation represented in media that objectifies women, suggesting that such consumption can feel both degrading and contradictory to oneβs principles.
Themes
In practice
Example use cases
Discussing media representation during a women's rights workshop.
More from Gloria Steinem
All quotes βIf women are supposed to be less rational and more emotional at the beginning of our menstrual cycle when the female hormone is at its lowest level, then why isn't it logical to say that, in those few days, women behave the most like the way men behave all month long?
Age brings a freedom. When you're young, you're much more subject to the idea of what feminine is or how you should look or how you should behave.
All those chemicals that create empathy only work when you are in a room together.
Dreaming, after all, is a form of planning.
Obviously, there is much similarity among the challenges of transgender people and all women - from health care to harassment to discrimination in the workplace.
Similar quotes
I am convinced that the act of thinking logically cannot possibly be natural to the human mind. If it were, then mathematics would be everybody's easiest course at school and our species would not have taken several millennia to figure out the scientific method.
People have this obsession. They want you to be like you were in 1969. They want you to, because otherwise their youth goes with you. It's very selfish, but it's understandable.
Problems only exist in the human mind.
A man with a machine and inadequate culture is a pestilence.
. . . by natural selection our mind has adapted itself to the conditions of the external world. It has adopted the geometry most advantageous to the species or, in other words, the most convenient. Geometry is not true, it is advantageous.
You see, when you're middle class, you have to live with the fact that history will ignore you. You have to live with the fact that history can never champion your causes and that history will never feel sorry for you. It is the price that is paid for day-to-day comfort and silence. And because of this price, all happinesses are sterile; all sadnesses go unpitied.