I hate to tell this to the woman, they're behind the fact, they're a little behind the fact. They haven't figured out that women may be in certain ways much better than men. But I don't want to say that because I will get myself in trouble with men. But they haven't figured this out yet but that's OK.

Women tell men things that men are not very likely to find out for themselves.

The real joke that history played on American women is not the one that makes people snigger, with cheap Freudian sophistication, at the dead feminists. It is the joke that Freudian thought played on living women, twisting the memory of the feminists into the man-eating phantom of the feminine mystique, shriveling the very wish to be more than just a wife and mother.

Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them.

Men do not understand how women think, and vice versa; each tries to make the other act more like a member of their own sex.

Let me tell you a secret. There is a difference between men and women, a little, tiny one that, I’m afraid, has probably made most of your adult life miserable and will probably continue to make it so till you die. The difference is simply that women have only really been treated, by that bizarre, Derkheimian abstraction, “society,” as human beings for the last—oh, say sixty-five years; and then, really, only on the moons; whereas men have had the luxury of such treatment for the last four thousand. The result of this historical anomaly is simply that, on a statistical basis, women are just a little less willing to put up with certain kinds of shit than men—simply because the concept of a certain kind of shit-free Universe is, in that equally bizarre Jungian abstraction, the female “collective unconscious,” too new and too precious.

The women said they were afraid of being beaten, raped, or killed by men. She then asked a group of men why they felt threatened by women. They said they were afraid women would laugh at them.

We can say the brotherhood of man, and pretend that we include the sisterhood of women, but we know that we don't. Folklore has it that women only congregate to bitch an absent member of their group, and continue to do so because they are to well aware of the consequences if they stay away. It's meant to be a joke, but like jokes about mothers-in-law it is founded in bitter truth.

…We’re starting to have those conversations and it’s messy, because it’s stuff that we haven’t reckoned with, ever…Like, everyone has always known not to grab an ass, or to not say point blank, ‘You’re a woman – you’re not fucking funny.’ But even just 10 years ago, no one would have talked about a cultural problem in comedy.

Only a man can see in the face of a woman the girl she was. It is a secret which can be revealed only to a particular man, and, then, only at his insistence. But men have no secrets, except from women, and never grow up in the way women do. It is very much harder, and it takes much longer, for a man to grow up, and he could never do it at all without women. This is a mystery which can terrify and immobilize a woman, and it is always the key to her deepest distress. She must watch and guide, but he must lead, and he will always appear to be giving far more of his real attention to his comrades than he is giving to her. But that noisy, outward openness of men with each other enables them to deal with the silence and secrecy of women, that silence and secrecy which contains the truth of a man, and releases it. I suppose that the root of the resentment — a resentment which hides a bottomless terror — has to do with the fact that a woman is tremendously controlled by what the man’s imagination makes of her — literally, hour by hour, day by day; so she becomes a woman. But a man exists in his own imagination, and can never be at the mercy of a woman’s. — Anyway, in this fucked up time and place, the whole thing becomes ridiculous when you realize that women are supposed to be more imaginative than men. This is an idea dreamed up by men, and it proves exactly the contrary. The truth is that dealing with the reality of men leaves a woman very little time, or need, for imagination. And you can get very fucked up, here, once you take seriously the notion that a man who is not afraid to trust his imagination (which is all that men have ever trusted) if effeminate. It says a lot about this country, because, of course, if all you want to do is make money, the very last thing you need is imagination. Or women, for that matter: or men.

I have never known why women believe the things men tell them – or vice versa.

There's no such thing as friendship between men and women, if it's not the girl who's excited, then the guy's the guy who's excited, if someone says they both don't have feelings, there's bound to be someone who denies it, pure friends of the opposite sex are bullshit.

Yes, people of both genders pop up at events to hold forth on irrelevant things and conspiracy theories, but the out-and-out confrontational confidence of the totally ignorant is, in my experience, gendered. Men explain things to me, and other women, whether or not they know what they’re talking about. Some men. Every woman knows what I’m talking about. It’s the presumption that makes it hard, at times, for any woman in any field; that keeps women from speaking up and from being heard when they dare; that crushes young women into silence by indicating, the way harassment on the street does, that this is not their world. It trains us in self-doubt and self-limitation just as it exercises men’s unsupported overconfidence.

Women actually have a fantastic sense of humour, better than men. Men tend to have crass and predictable humour. Women see human foibles and minute details, and they can laugh at eccentricities and peculiarities. They are also more understanding. Go ahead and quote me and let me make some enemies.