There’s a lot here and every bit is worth reading.
Better yet, just get the book. And read it. Every word.
*
from blurb for Ford’s I Don’t
“why do so many women still believe that our value is intrinsically tied to being chosen by a man?”
“Ford explains how capitalist patriarchal structures need women to believe in marriage in
order to maintain control over women’s agency, ambitions and freedom. … the insidious,
centuries-long marketing campaign pop culture has conducted in marriage’s favour; … the physical and social cost that comes with motherhood.”
_________________
from Ford’s Introduction
“… to be marrying men so incompetent they couldn’t be trusted to organise a single part of the celebration binding them together till death do they part.”
“Now saddled with an overgrown child who can’t seem to put his clothes into a laundry basket let alone a washing machine …”
“It’s a comprehensive look at how they have assumed such authority over women that we began to believe the lies they told about us, so that we would keep signing up to support the patriarchal system that works in their favour rather than fight against it.”
“Who really needs marriage? Is it the women who receive superficial economic security in exchange for a life spent cleaning, washing, cooking and generally catering to a man’s every need? Or is it the men whose lives become easier the moment they begin cohabiting with a woman, who receive tangible economic security and the promise of economic advancement as a result of this partnership…”
“[M]arriage is a system whose foundations are built on the erasure of women, and the exploitation of everything that we are and have the potential to be.”
“… men who speak out of their butthole about things they don’t understand and can’t be bothered reading up on.”
from chap 1
“if men are so
important and sacred, why are so few of them needed to ensure the longterm success of the human species?”
“Weirder still that it’s mothers and not fathers who provide the vast majority of food, care and protection for each generation until they come of age, while most male animals tend to sit around doing fuck all.”
from chap 2
“Curiously, men who argue for women’s biological compulsion to nurture have never much liked it when I’ve thanked them for agreeing we should automatically receive full custody of children on the basis of our superior ability to care.”
“But you’ll note that the more confident a man is about what women want, the less likely it is that he’s actually spoken to any to find out. He doesn’t read books by and about women, nor does he watch movies devoted to women’s stories, listen to music made by women, follow the work of intellectuals who are women or count women among his close friends.”
from chap 3
“(The fact that toys designed to vibrate on multiple different speeds offer a much higher guarantee of sexual pleasure than being ploughed for seven minutes by a man who’s watched too much porn and may or may not commit to regularly washing his own butt is apparently lost on them.)”
from chap 6
“Over the course of about a year and a half [of attending weddings], I heard countless men say exactly the same things to and about the women they had just pledged to spend the rest of their lives with. I love how supportive she is. She takes such good care of me. She’s got a great sense of humour, because she always laughs at my jokes. Not one of them seemed able to say anything they actually knew about their wife. Only that she was beautiful, and they appreciated how she made their lives better.”
“Often, the bride’s father would also stand up and say a few words. These were usually about how proud they’d been to walk their ‘little girl’ down the aisle, and how they knew Michael or Sam or Matt or Ben would ‘take good care of her’.”
“[the best man’s speech] … how great it was that he now had a wife to keep him on the straight and narrow.”
“[her dowry:] and don’t you just love the idea of having to pay a man to marry you, only to become his property?”
Yeah. That has got to be one of the most objectionable things. That a young woman is such garbage, her parents have to pay to get rid of her.
from chap 7
“Did feminism tell women they could ‘have it all’? Or was that just something the broader culture settled on to define feminism’s purpose, the underlying message designed to make it all sound a bit greedy, a bit domineering, a bit … mannish? It seems to me that feminism told women that they should have options and agency, and not be enslaved to the exploitation and demands of men. Bit different, really.”
“Nestled in suburbia, where the streets are lined with trees and every house boasts a white-picket fence, this era of ‘traditional family values’ seems to be remembered most fondly by people who weren’t there.”
“As any online historian trained in the field of Making Shit Up will remind you, this is how men and women have always been.”
“Let’s be serious: it’s not natural for women to work, just like it’s not natural for us to have body hair between the ages of whenever men start wanting to fuck us and whenever men stop wanting to fuck us.”
from chap 8
“[T]ake your pick from the bingo card of Things Men Say To Women Who Don’t Want Them.”
“Listen, if you’re the one going through the pregnancy, you should claim automatic naming rights. It’s your body that’s working hard to build an entire human from scratch. It’s your body that will be placed under enormous stress in the building of that human, and your body that risks injury, trauma and, in some cases, permanent disability in the birthing of that human. You are the one most likely to provide the majority of care to that child when they’re born, and certainly the one who’ll be held to account for any of that child’s extremely normal, childlike behaviour in public as it grows up. You’re the one who’ll handle the mental load for that child and who’ll do most of the boring shit for that child. Crucially, you’re the one whose career and earning capacity will be severely curtailed by that child and who’ll be discriminated against when you try to return to work. You’re the one people, including your husband, are more likely to say should ‘stay home with the kids’ rather than going back to work because ‘her salary barely covers the child care’—as if you and you alone have to prove economic benefit to the family as a whole in order to earn the right to return to your profession. And for all that effort and risk, you’re supposed to turn around and automatically give some guy the right to brand YOUR child with his name, just because he had a three-second dick spasm in a vagina that might now have a prolapse?”
from chap 9
“If women had the same economic opportunities as men—indeed, if women’s right to economic independence was considered as sacrosanct and vital to their self-esteem as it is to men’s—then the dream of domestic bliss with the white-picket fence would very quickly reveal itself to be as flimsy as a house of cards.”
“If we believed at the most basic level of our existence that our lives belonged first and foremost to us, we’d soon see that the options presented by the patriarchy as necessary to our fundamental happiness aren’t really all that great. Marriage has maintained its vice-like grip on women because the vast majority of us have been denied the same rights to financial liberation and independence as men.”
“[I]f women with economic means can live happy, fulfilling lives all by themselves, then maybe what we need isn’t men at all. It’s money.”
chap 10
“to paraphrase Zawn Villines, men steal women’s potential in order to buy their own power”
“From wrestling sabre-toothed tigers to feed the tribe, storming battlefields for the sole purpose of protecting women and children, being Jesus, conquering new lands (which involved absolutely no violence or anything against which the men already there would possibly need to defend ‘their’ women and children) and basically inventing everything that’s every existed, the sweeping saga of Man’s Greatness is well known to us all.”
“Sign on the dotted line, girls, and men will agree to meet just enough of your most basic needs (shelter, food and a nominal promise of protection against other men) in exchange for an endless supply of domestic labour, obedience, care and sex. This is what patriarchy calls ‘providing’.”
“And the expectation that women repay men’s marginal economic investment with a lifetime of service? Well, that’s just what’s required to ‘keep up their end of the bargain’.”
And that’s not even taking into account pregnancy, birthing, and childcare.
“We bloody well provide for you, don’t we? they scream, as if somehow we’re to blame for our economic disadvantage. As if we were the ones who denied ourselves the right to an education, or to work, or to vote, or to marry who we wanted, or to not marry at all. As if we, the women who were not allowed to become lawyers or judges or even readers, were somehow responsible for writing legislation that removed all agency over our own bodies and transferred them into the ownership of fathers and husbands.”
from chap 11
“Men’s fairytales never have marriage at the core; home is only where he returns when his quest is complete.”
from chap 12
“…overgrown child who’s convinced his wife he’s a hapless twit so that she stops asking him to do things he doesn’t want to (but will undertake as a gesture of goodwill when he wants to have sex that night). How this fits with men’s valorisation of themselves as protectors and providers is anyone’s guess…”
“They invented everything—but they can’t use a dishwasher!”
“Sons learn how to dehumanise women by first watching their mother be dehumanised.”
from chap 14
‘Because I have other professions open to me in which the hours are shorter, the work more agreeable, and the pay possibly better.’ Miss Florence Watts, ‘Why am I a spinster?’, Tit-Bits magazine, 1889
“The reality men have set up for themselves is deliberately filled with these kinds of paradoxes and contradictions. Men need to be dragged to the altar, but are enraged by the thought of women not wanting to get married at all. Women are the nurturers and are better placed to do most of the caring for the kids, but fathers are equally important, especially when it comes to
custody battles. Women baby-trap men and then ruin men’s lives by leaving them. He treats her like shit, but she’s so lucky to have him. Around and around we go, with women doing everything to meet the needs of men and getting absolutely nothing in return.”
“Having been brainwashed for centuries to believe that our biological role is to nurture—which conveniently includes caring for men as if they were children—we are that much easier to coerce into marriage.”
from chap 15
“Pregnancy is dangerous. Childbirth is dangerous. Both can be navigated safely, but they’re not easy and they certainly aren’t meaningless. We shouldn’t consider it normal for women to emerge from the experience of creating life having half-wrecked their own. We shouldn’t accept as commonplace the fact that one in three people who give birth will deal with ongoing incontinence. Men have forced women into this labour for their own benefit, not for ours. To satisfy their own egos and maintain their fortunes, they created a contract that would tether women to them permanently.”
“[Our patriarchal society] claims to revere mothers, while denying us dignity, adequate health care and opportunities. It pretends to value this ‘essential work’, calling motherhood ‘the most important job in the world’ but it won’t pay us for it, because economically empowered women are a threat to patriarchy and, besides, how can you put a price on something so pure? It claims that men protect women, and protect especially the women who are carrying ‘their’ children, even as evidence to the contrary washes through like a tsunami.”
“Men are not our valiant protectors; they are our most dangerous predators. They collectively represent the biggest risk to our health and safety. And during pregnancy and postpartum, we confront the most terrifying reality of all: when we are doing what it is we are told we must do, either growing life or caring for new life, the likelihood of domestic abuse, including sexual abuse, perpetrated by our partners, our husbands, our ‘protectors’, increases. Becoming mothers places our lives most at risk not because our child could kill us accidentally—but because their father could kill us on purpose.”
“Imagine if a man’s dick exploded every time he became a father, or his sexual capacity diminished considerably or disappeared entirely. Imagine if his ability to reach orgasm was forever changed because crucial nerves needed for sexual pleasure had been permanently damaged. We’d never hear the bloody end of it.”
“Imagine if a man’s dick exploded every time he became a father, or his sexual capacity diminished considerably or disappeared entirely. Imagine if his ability to reach orgasm was forever changed because crucial nerves needed for sexual pleasure had been permanently damaged. We’d never hear the bloody end of it.”
“Imagine if a man’s dick exploded every time he became a father, or his sexual capacity diminished considerably or disappeared entirely. Imagine if his ability to reach orgasm was forever changed because crucial nerves needed for sexual pleasure had been permanently damaged. We’d never hear the bloody end of it.”
“You know, people spit the accusation man hater at me like there aren’t five billion fucking good reasons why I and any other woman with a brain have no choice but to hate them.”
