"Women are obviously much more discriminated against than men in many ways"
About this Quote
The bluntness is the tell: “obviously” isn’t evidence, it’s a pressure tactic. Ann Beattie isn’t trying to litigate sexism with footnotes; she’s mimicking the weary conversational move of someone who’s said this a hundred times and is tired of acting like the baseline reality needs to be re-proved. That single adverb carries a whole history of being asked to justify your perception in a room that treats inequality as an opinion topic, not the weather.
“Much more” is doing a different kind of work. It’s comparative, even faintly apologetic, as if the speaker anticipates the predictable counter: what about men? Beattie grants the comparison only to shut it down. The line doesn’t deny male hardship; it refuses to let male hardship be used as a rhetorical trap that drags every discussion back to “both sides.”
Then there’s the careful hedging of “in many ways.” It’s not a retreat; it’s an admission that discrimination isn’t a single headline-grabbing act but an ecosystem: pay, safety, credibility, domestic labor, sexual policing, professional gatekeeping. The phrase keeps the statement broad enough to describe lived reality across class and workplace without collapsing differences among women into a single story.
Coming from a literary writer associated with close observation of everyday power dynamics, the intent is less manifesto than diagnostic. The subtext is impatience with debate-as-delay: if the injustice is “obvious,” the moral question isn’t whether it exists, but what you’re going to do with that knowledge.
“Much more” is doing a different kind of work. It’s comparative, even faintly apologetic, as if the speaker anticipates the predictable counter: what about men? Beattie grants the comparison only to shut it down. The line doesn’t deny male hardship; it refuses to let male hardship be used as a rhetorical trap that drags every discussion back to “both sides.”
Then there’s the careful hedging of “in many ways.” It’s not a retreat; it’s an admission that discrimination isn’t a single headline-grabbing act but an ecosystem: pay, safety, credibility, domestic labor, sexual policing, professional gatekeeping. The phrase keeps the statement broad enough to describe lived reality across class and workplace without collapsing differences among women into a single story.
Coming from a literary writer associated with close observation of everyday power dynamics, the intent is less manifesto than diagnostic. The subtext is impatience with debate-as-delay: if the injustice is “obvious,” the moral question isn’t whether it exists, but what you’re going to do with that knowledge.
Quote Details
| Topic | Equality |
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