Female Quotes

“The development of cognition, motivation, and self-regulation does not end with adolescence; indeed, personality traits do not reach their maximum stability until the third or fourth decade of life. This suggests that life history strategies are partially open to revision for a large portion of the life course -possibly depending on factors such as success in mating and reproduction, major environmental fluctuations, or unexpected changes in health, wealth or status.”
― Marco del Giudice, Evolutionary Psychopathology: A Unified Approach

“Human vocabulary size may have evolved through the same sexual selection process that favored enormous song repertoires in some bird species. But whereas only male birds sing, both men and women use large vocabularies during courtship, because courtship and choice are mutual, and because unusual words work as reliable displays only if their meanings are understood.”
― Geoffrey Miller, The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature

“Language lets us learn about potential mates much more efficiently and interactively than any other species can.”
― Geoffrey Miller, The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature

“Verbal courtship continues for months after people first meet, and it becomes the bedrock of human intimacy and love.”
― Geoffrey Miller, The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature

“If we prove boring during the conversation after the film, our dates may say they had a lovely time, but let's just be friends. You can't buy love. You have to inspire it, partly through humor, the premier arena for advertising your creativity.”
― Geoffrey Miller, The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature

“People act differently when they're in love with different people. We tend to match our expressed interests and preferences to those of a desired individual.”
― Geoffrey Miller, The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature

“During the months of winter and spring King Casmir looked only twice at the infant princess, in each case, standing back in cool disinterest. She had thwarted his royal will by coming female into the world. He could not immediately punish her for the act, no more could he extend the full beneficence of his favor.
Sollace grew sulky because Casmir was displeased and, with a set petulant flourishes, banished the child from her sight.
Ehirme, a raw-boned peasant girl, and nice to under-gardener, had lost her own infant son to the yellow bloat. With an amplitude of both milk and solitude she be came Suldron's wet-nurse”
― Jack Vance, Suldrun's Garden

“I won’t play the game—I don’t bake cupcakes and make cooing noises over pictures of everyone’s kids. If a man doesn’t bake cupcakes and make cooing noises, you know what they call him? Senior Partner. Ben hasn’t made cupcakes once. But men expect you to be more thoughtful than they are—softer, more accommodating. And when you are paid less than your peers, or assaulted on a date, or lose a promotion, they’ll tell you it was your fault—you were too soft, too accommodating.”
― Elizabeth O'Roark, The Devil You Know

“In the context of male provisioning and multigeneration resource transfers (both pre-existing features of the human adaptive complex), wealth accumulation becomes especially significant for men as an extended form of parental and/or nepotistic effort. For this reason, selection on behaviors favoring the acquisition of prestige and wealth through technical skills must have been significantly stronger in men than in women.”
― Marco del Giudice, Evolutionary Psychopathology: A Unified Approach

“Anxiously attached people find it very difficult to break up with their partners, and, when they do, they often leave open the option of getting back together. Accordingly, elevated anxiety does not predict relationship dissolution in longitudinal studies. While attachment anxiety causes tension between partners and lowers their romantic satisfaction, it also contributes to keep them together, thus acting as a stabilizing factor as fas as long-term investment is concerned. For this reason, a small to moderate amount of anxiety is probably not inconsistent with slow strategies, especially in women.”
― Marco del Giudice, Evolutionary Psychopathology: A Unified Approach

“The sexual competition model of eating disorders has two interlocking components. The first component is based on the universal male preference for a nubile -hourglass- body shape and the fact that women tend to accumulate body weight as they age, with the result that relative thinness is a reliable cue of youth and reproductive potential. The second component is specific to modern societies: as fertility declines and the age of reproduction shifts upward, women tend to retain an attractive nubile shape for longer, which increases the importance of thinness as an attractive display. At the same, a number of converging trends contribute to intensify real and perceived mating competition among women, especially for long-term partners. Specifically, socially imposed monogamy reduces the number of available men; urban living dramatically increases the number of potential desirable competitors; and the media paint a visual landscape full of unrealistically thin, attractive women. The net outcome of these social changes is a process of runaway sexual competition that leads to an exaggerated desire for thinness in girls and women. Ironically, the process is largely driven by female intrasexual competition rather than direct male choice, and the resulting -ideal body- may be too thin to be maximally attractive to men.”
― Marco del Giudice, Evolutionary Psychopathology: A Unified Approach

“Mortality in Eating Disorders is partly caused by the medical complications of starvation and bingeing-purging, but suicide risk is also elevated. Suicide accounts for about 20% of deaths in anorexic patients; unsurprisingly, the risk is higher in AN-Bingeing/Purging than in AN-Restricted.”
― Marco del Giudice, Evolutionary Psychopathology: A Unified Approach

“The sexual division of labor refers to women and men making different and complementary contributions to the household economy. Though the specific activities of each sex vary by culture, the gendered division of labor is a human universal. It is therefore assumed to have appeared well before modern humans started spreading across the globe sixty thousand to seventy thousand years ago.”
― Richard W. Wrangham, Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human

“A jury will label a distressed female as shrill or hysterical for the exact same behaviors they’d term righteous indignation in a man.”
― Elizabeth O'Roark, The Devil You Know

“Men will vilify you for enjoying sex, and they’ll vilify you for using it to get ahead…but they’ll punish you if you don’t enjoy it, if you don't use it to get ahead.

There should be more choices left to me than either slut or prude.”
― Elizabeth O'Roark, The Devil You Know

“Woman is not like a flower
Woman is not like Moon
Woman is not like stars
Woman is not like ocean or river
She is like you human being with soul, feelings, emotions, choices, decisions, self-respect so respect her in that way”
― Mohammed Zaki Ansari, "Zaki's Gift Of Love"

“I made a silent pact with the house in those nights, that beautiful old whorehouse with suicide in its walls, as damaged and bruised as myself. If it kept me, I would keep it, and we would be like sisters to each other. I would do what it took to protect her, always, and liked to think that she would do the same for me.”
― Camilla Bruce, In the Garden of Spite

“...while both parents may contribute to provisioning, women disproportionally engage in childcare in every single society that has been studied.”
― Marco del Giudice, Evolutionary Psychopathology: A Unified Approach

“In all likelihood, pair bonding in our prehuman ancestors originally involved polygynous unions between a male and multiple females. Today, about 80% of human societies allow polygyny; however, even in polygynous systems most marriages are monogamous, and only a minority of men actually have more than one wife. In constrast, polyandry (a woman marrying multiple men) is extremely rare and limited to marginal, resource-poor ecological contexts.”
― Marco del Giudice, Evolutionary Psychopathology: A Unified Approach

“Sex differences are also apparent at the level of narrower ability facets. For instance, women outperform men in memory for object location -likely as a result of selection for gathering skills- and tend to use different strategies for spatial navigation and wayfinding. Another major axis of sexual differentiation is that of mechanistic versus mentalistic cognition. In general, females perform better in mentalistic tasks as decoding nonverbal behavior, interpreting emotional expressions, and attributing beliefs and other states of mind. This advantage in mentalizing -especially in one-to-one and small-group interactions- is likely due to the higher demands posed by the complexity of female competition, and women's primary role in caregiving.”
― Marco del Giudice, Evolutionary Psychopathology: A Unified Approach

“On average, men are more unrestricted and show higher-risk and sensation seeking; they are also lower in agreeableness, honesty-humility, and disgust sensitivity, particularly in the sexual domain (in constrast, there are only minor sex differences in impulsivity and conscientiousness). The reason is that these traits are crucially involved in the mating-parenting tradeoff, and males tend to invest in mating effort more than females even net of individual differences in life history strategies.”
― Marco del Giudice, Evolutionary Psychopathology: A Unified Approach

“In modern societies, for example, the media expose people to a relentless stream of images of unrealistically attractive "competitors" -an artificial, evolutionarily novel kind of social stimulus. It has been hypothesized that such exposure hyperactivates the evolved mechanisms that regulate female competition for attractiveness and status, thus contributing to the rising incidence of eating disorders.”
― Marco del Giudice, Evolutionary Psychopathology: A Unified Approach

“Disorders in the psychosis spectrum (schizophrenia spectrum disorder and dipolar disorder) have similar prevalance in males and females (with slightly higher male risk for schizophrenia), while men are more likely to be diagnosed with NPS (narcissistic personality disorder) than are women.”
― Marco del Giudice, Evolutionary Psychopathology: A Unified Approach

“Finally, eating disorders (EDs) tap into sex-specific aspects of female physiology and psychology and are overwhelmingly more common in females. Not coincidentally, ED risk in males is strongly associated with non-heterosexual orientations.”
― Marco del Giudice, Evolutionary Psychopathology: A Unified Approach

“Runaway competition for thinness generates an evolutionary mismatch, which drives up the risk of maladaptive eating symptons; in particular Abed suggested that AN arises as a direct consequence of competition for thiness, whereas BN may stem from attempts to maintaina nubile body shape.”
― Marco del Giudice, Evolutionary Psychopathology: A Unified Approach

“Androgens in Eating Disorders show an intriguing pattern: while anorexics tend to have low testosterone, there are indications that bulimia is associated with exposure to high levels of prenatal androgens. In addition, polycystic ovarian syndrome (PCOs, a condition caused by elevated androgens) has been associated with increased BN risk but decreased AN risk.”
― Marco del Giudice, Evolutionary Psychopathology: A Unified Approach

“Social anxiety plays an important role in status competition as a behavioral defense against rejection and defeat. Intense social anxiety is especially adaptive for subordinate or unattractive individuals who need to avoid further status losses. However, excessive or misplaced anxiety may interfere with the acquisition of status and mates, and potentially lead to self-reinforcing circles of low self-esteem.”
― Marco del Giudice, Evolutionary Psychopathology: A Unified Approach

“A better understanding of eating disorders and their symptons can be gained by considering the nature of two self-reinforcing cycles that may be labeled the self-starvation and bingeing-purging cycle.”
― Marco del Giudice, Evolutionary Psychopathology: A Unified Approach

“Ferguson and colleagues also reviewed that thin models in the media have comparatively small effects on body dissatisfaction, and mainly on women with preexisting weight concerns and/or high neuroticism. Instead, the largest and most consistent effects are those of mating competition in the peer network -that is, the number of attractive and available women in one's inmediate social environment (for example, friends and colleagues).”
― Marco del Giudice, Evolutionary Psychopathology: A Unified Approach

“The pubertal surge of sex hormones plays a major role in the onset of eating symptoms in females, as shown by the fact that the heritability of Eating Disorders increases sharply at mid-puberty in girls, but not in boys. In particular, binge eating is strongly modulated by the interaction of estrogens and progesterone acrosss the menstrual cycle, consistent with the role played by these hormones in the regulaion of hunger and feeding. Both the frequency of bingeing and its heritability peak after ovulation, in tandem with rising progesterone levels.”
― Marco del Giudice, Evolutionary Psychopathology: A Unified Approach