We weren’t idiots, but I didn’t have that access to academic feminism. I had to realize, on my own, that feminism is not just about how far ahead you can get in a job and it isn’t about not wearing makeup. It isn’t about not watching your waistline. I had to recreate the world entirely.
BETH DITTOThe thing about being on the majors, from the beginning, going into this, I was like, “I’m not going to be treated like a factory,” because that’s never the way it was done before.
More Beth Ditto Quotes
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I thought to be feminine was to give in to straight culture, or the beauty standard, but in my heart I had a flair for fashion and style. They were passions I kept secret because I didn’t understand I could love clothes and hair and makeup and still like girls.
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You know how people love to glamorize poverty? There’s nothing glamorous about it. But it did make me really creative. Those days, I was literally taking t-shirts in the day and sewing them back together to make dresses for the night.
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Life is not about creating an unreal existence. People should be challenged to find something cool about the mundane.
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I’m naturally a mousy blonde, so I dye my hair, and my eyebrows would disappear if I didn’t get through at least a pencil a month.
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I worshipped Ethel Merman and I worshipped Ethel Merman a lot. It’s incredible – Ethel Merman was a conventional singer. Her naming her child Ethel Merman, Jr., was, to me, one of the coolest feminist things.
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My size has helped make me an amazing performer too. The cliche of the Funny Fat Friend: I absolutely was that character – I am that character… It’s a complicated bag of tools I acquired, and I’ve put them all to work onstage.
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I’ve had people ask me in interviews what it’s like to have money, but that’s not how it is. I have a middle-class life. I have a room in London but not a house, nor a BMW.
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I don’t love the word luxury because it feels Bougy to me.
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I have no control over what people think of me but I have 100% control of what I think of myself, and that is so important. And not just about your body, but so many ways of confidence. You’re constantly learning how to be confident, aren’t you?
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When I moved out of my mom’s house at 18 I was almost as sad to leave her sewing machine behind as anything else.
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Someone told me once that Lucinda Williams takes six years between albums, and that’s what stuck to me; it’s like, you really are a factory. You don’t do things to make them, on your own time.
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We have to stop this idea that we have to be a certain shape.
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I’ve belched a lot more since I had gall bladder surgery. I don’t know why.
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I think if the world were a fair and just place, there wouldn’t even need to be a gay label.
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I was born fat and have always been, which was just fine and even healthy and cute until I turned ten or so. Puberty hit like a hurricane and brought a new set of rules. All of a sudden it was my fault I was chubby.
BETH DITTO