How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #1
Chip had grown up listening to his father pontificate on the topics of Men's Work and Women's Work and the importance of maintaining the distinction; in a spirit of correction, he stuck with Tori for nearly a decade. (2.192)
This is the first sign that Chip isn't as down with feminism as we think. Chip isn't with Tori for sincere reasons—he's just waging a proxy war with his dad.
Quote #2
He understood how important it was for women not to equate "success" with "having a man" and "failure" with "lacking a man," but he was a lonely straight male, and a lonely straight male had no equivalently forgiving Theory of Masculinism to help him out of this bind. (2.279)
This is the best description of misogyny that we've ever read. Ladies, keep this in mind next time he complains that you text him too much.
Quote #3
In his doctoral thesis [...] he'd written extensively about cuckolds, and under the cloak of his reproving modern scholarship, he'd been excited by the idea of marriage as a property right, of adultery as theft (2.637)
If his affair with Melissa wasn't enough to tip you off, it starts to become clear that Chip's view on gender roles are a lot more traditional than he lets on.
Quote #4
She was his baby sister, after all. Her years of fertility and marriageability were passing with a swiftness to which he was attuned and she, he suspected, was not, (3.747)
This is pretty icky, Gary—you're not only assuming that "fertility and marriageability" are Denise's number one goals, but also that you're somehow more aware of them than her. That's crazy talk.
Quote #5
He was glad Denise was taking heat again from Enid. He felt surrounded, imprisoned, by disapproving women. (3.905)
Misogyny is rooted in a fear of women. For Gary, it's even more complicated than that—he's afraid of them because he's so desperate for their approval.
Quote #6
Her stillness and self-containment, the slow sips of air she took, her purely vulnerable objecthood, made him pounce. (4.6)
This isn't even subtle. Alfred has a notoriously difficult relationship with sexuality, and the only way he can make love to Enid is if he denies her personhood.
Quote #7
Made happy in this way by pregnancy, she got sloppy and talked about the wrong things to Alfred. Not, needless to say, about sex or fulfillment or fairness. But there were other topics scarcely less forbidden, and Enid in her giddiness one morning overstepped. (4.9)
Alfred is so blinded by traditional gender roles that he lashes out against Enid for giving him financial advice—despite the fact that Enid has a much better financial mind than he does.
Quote #8
Chipper considered the life of a girl. To go through life softly, to be a Meisner, to play in that house and be loved like a girl. (4.116)
As the novel goes on, we start to understand why Chip looks at women the way he does: He's jealous. He wishes he could be as loved and pampered as he thinks girls are—but he doesn't see the whole picture.
Quote #9
Denise, when her time came, asked to follow in Gary's footsteps, but Enid didn't think that little girls and trumpets matched. What matched little girls was flutes (5.56)
Denise has been defying gender roles since she was a kid, but family pressure stopped her innocent experimentation in its track. In fact, it wasn't really an experiment at all—Denise was just being herself.
Quote #10
Becky Hemmerling had chosen the cooking life to make a political point: to be one tough chick, to hold her own the guys. Denise loathed this motivation all the more for harboring a speck of it herself. (5.315)
This dynamic characterizes the bulk of Denise's early same-sex relationships. She sees herself and her own struggles with gender roles in the women she falls in love with—which, ironically, only upsets her.