Highly recommend this book to anyone who speaks and is a feminist it's so good and I truly learned so much (without just having a ton of dry facts being spewed). I definitely liked the earlier chapters more, but overall, I think the book was really engaging and informative!

Some of my favorite facts/quotes:
-Women are systematically linked to sugary, fruity items like tarts and cupcakes, as opposed to more substantial “masculine” parts of the meal, like beefcakes. More pointedly, the desserts women are associated are always, as Hines describes, “firm on the outside, soft or juicy in the middle, and either able to be cut into more than one piece (cherry pie, pound cake) or conceptualized as one (snatched) serving of an implied batch (crumpet, cupcake, tart).” You never see women compared to ice cream cones or chocolate mousse because speakers, whether they realize it or not, recognize the rules of the “piece of ass” metaphor and adhere to them. They understand and comply: women, like tarts, are sweet, single-serving items meant to e easily snapped up.
-Linguistic studies show that many gender-neutral job titles (cardiologist, construction worker) are still usually interpreted as men’s jobs, no matter what words you use to describe them.
-Cameron found that when women use female as a noun, as opposed to woman, it’s often in explicitly negative contexts.
-Analyze a few hundred transcripts of dude-on-dude chatter and you’ll usually find a dominant speaker who holds the floor, and a subordinate waiting for his turn. it’s a vertical structure. but with women, the conversation is frequently much more horizontal and malleable; everyone is an equal player.
-people confuse women’s use of certain softening hedges like just, I mean, and I feel like as signs of uncertainty, but research shows that these words accomplish something different: instead, they’re used to help create trust and empathy in a conversation. As Coates explains, hedges like these “are used to respect the face needs of all participants, to negotiate sensitive topics, and to encourage the participation of others.”
-Coates has found that when men ask each other questions (which they do just as frequently as women, though they’re never accused of insecurity for it), it’s typically to request information and seek answers, but with women, questions serve a different function. Women’s interventions are to welcome each participant onto the conversational floor and keep the overall flow moving.
-Fretting over the amount of creak in your voice or the number of times you apologize are the linguistic equivalents of worrying if your forehead is shiny or if you’re spilling out of your Spanx.
-by comparing her to things like storms and seas, “woman is symbolic of the conflict between nature and civilization, tempting men with her beauty, attracting men with her charms, but dangerous and therefore in need of conquest.” Woman is a continent to colonize, a fortress to siege… a nation’s government is labeled as having “founding fathers,” while the land itself (“Mother Nature,” “virgin territory”) is perceived as a feminine entity.
-As the legendary Betty White once said, “Why do people say ‘grow some balls?’ Balls are weak and sensitive. If you wanna be tough, grow a vagina. Those things can take a pounding.
-Ta-Nehisi Coates was asked how he felt about white people using the “reclaimed’ version of the n-word when reciting song lyrics, and he made the point that because our relationship to loaded words depends on our relationship to the oppression associated with them, not every reappropriated slur gets to belong to every group. Coates said, “The experience of being a hip-hop fan and not being able to use the word ni**er… will give you just a little peek into the world of what it means to be black. Because to be black is to walk through the world and watch people doing things that you cannot do.
-Simone de Beauvoir’s famous 1949 quote, “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman,” implies a clear understanding of the culture vs body discrepancy, even though nowhere in it does the word gender appear.
-I put “preferred pronouns” in quotes because many nonbinary folks see it as a misnomer. The argument is that pronouns aren’t preferred or unpreferred—they’re either correct or incorrect. To a nonbinary person, being referred to with a gendered pronoun would be just as inaccurate as someone using the word he to describe my mom. It’s not a preference thing; it’s an accuracy thing