As a kid, I was always mad – just noticing the women at Thanksgiving, running around the kitchen, while the men were watching football. For one, I don’t want to cook, and for two, I hate football. I was stuck in the middle.
BETH DITTOI 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.
More Beth Ditto Quotes
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I was always being told off at school. The teachers would say: ‘Everyone’s talking, but you’re the one I can hear.
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I love sad songs. They say so much. I love country music but even the happy songs sound really sad.
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I never went to college and I was raised in Arkansas so there wasn’t a lot of academic language being thrown around my house.
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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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Why wear pants when you can wear a muumuu?
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When you get a certain amount of media attention, I think people are like, “Where’s your other album?”
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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 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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Life is not about creating an unreal existence. People should be challenged to find something cool about the mundane.
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I have a lot of feminist idols. My favorite thing about growing up in Arkansas – well, not favorite but something I’ve always felt grateful for – was that I really had to dig for what I could. There was no Internet. There wasn’t tons of feminist literature floating around.
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I’m on a diet. It’s very strict: all hot dogs. Just sausages, constantly. It’s working out – I’ve gained fifteen pounds!
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I have been 130 lbs. as well as 215 lbs. I have had blond, strawberry blond, green, pink and purple hair, and none of that has ever exempted me from having lewd comments flung at me in the street.
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Aretha Franklin was a teenage mom, a musician who came from an incredible Christian background, and where there was a lot of love, which is really inspiring in a feminist way.
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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 said to my teacher, ‘I can’t be a singer because I’m not pretty enough, and I’m fat.’ And she looked at me and said, ‘Tell that to Nell Carter, babe.’ That changed my life forever!
BETH DITTO