"There isn't a religion on earth that isn't damaging to the human race because every one of them is patriarchal and every one eliminates more than half of the human race - women. They are all oppressors of women"
About this Quote
Powter isn’t offering a nuanced comparative-religions take; she’s throwing a cultural Molotov cocktail designed to expose what she sees as the central hypocrisy of “spiritual” institutions: they sell moral authority while structurally excluding the people they most police. The absolutism - “isn’t,” “every one,” “all” - is the point. It’s courtroom rhetoric, not seminar rhetoric, meant to force listeners to stop granting religion the usual deference of complexity.
The line works because it collapses religion’s many doctrines into a single measurable outcome: power. “Patriarchal” here isn’t a descriptive adjective so much as a verdict. By saying religions “eliminate” women, she frames exclusion not as tradition or theology but as erasure: who gets to speak for God, who writes the rules, who is treated as fully human. The subtext is that sexism isn’t a side effect; it’s the operating system.
Context matters. Powter’s celebrity was built on blunt, body-forward self-help in a late-80s/90s media ecosystem that rewarded clean villains and motivational certainty. She’s channeling second-wave feminist critique for a mass audience: less footnotes, more confrontation. That’s also the vulnerability of the quote. Its sweeping “every” invites easy rebuttals (women clergy, feminist theology, progressive congregations), but even that functions as a dare: if your faith is the exception, prove it with power-sharing, not platitudes.
The line works because it collapses religion’s many doctrines into a single measurable outcome: power. “Patriarchal” here isn’t a descriptive adjective so much as a verdict. By saying religions “eliminate” women, she frames exclusion not as tradition or theology but as erasure: who gets to speak for God, who writes the rules, who is treated as fully human. The subtext is that sexism isn’t a side effect; it’s the operating system.
Context matters. Powter’s celebrity was built on blunt, body-forward self-help in a late-80s/90s media ecosystem that rewarded clean villains and motivational certainty. She’s channeling second-wave feminist critique for a mass audience: less footnotes, more confrontation. That’s also the vulnerability of the quote. Its sweeping “every” invites easy rebuttals (women clergy, feminist theology, progressive congregations), but even that functions as a dare: if your faith is the exception, prove it with power-sharing, not platitudes.
Quote Details
| Topic | Equality |
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