By telling my own story, I hope to help remove the stigma. It never should be something to hide.
Say you're a sex worker and your partner knows you're a sex worker, but you're not out to your family. That could be very dangerous, particularly in an unhealthy relationship, where it could be a recipe for conflict, for something potentially violent that could lead to someone going to jail. There's so much pressure because of the criminalization and stigma. If we lifted that, it's only going to benefit more women.
When I was growing up, everybody smoked, including me. When I was 14, I started. We all did it. That was just the way it was. And nowadays there's a stigma attached to it. It's a big shift.
I think with the success of, like, every summer there has been a couple R-rated comedies that have done so well; I think it is so nice to see that people are turning out to see these movies, and it doesn't seem to be as big a stigma with the studios anymore.
I don't care if you call it AO for Adults Only, or Chopped Liver or Father Goose. Your movie will still have the stigma of being in a category that's going to be inhabited by the very worst of pictures.
The stigma of the straight-to-DVD thing is over.
There's so much stigma around HIVAIDS. It's a challenging issue, and the people that already have been tested and know their status find it very, very hard to disclose their status, to live with that virus, and to even seek out the kind of information they need. This experience of going to South Africa a decade ago really woke me up to the scale of the HIVAIDS pandemic in sub-Saharan Africa, how it was affecting women and their children. I haven't been able to walk away from it.
I started really young, like 12 or 13, and then I started doing school plays. We had a really good drama department, so the kind of drama-geek stigma wasn't really there in my high school.
Theres a stigma on the word therapy. People relate it to big problems. Thats something we have to change. Going to therapy can be very healthy. It can change the way you see things and treat others.
There’s always a stigma attached to the word ‘ambition’ and women. I’ve embraced it. Ambition is NOT a four-letter word and women have to embrace that.
Generally, the greater the stigma or revulsion, the better the bargain.
While there may have once been a stigma to making money, high-earning women actually have an advantage in the dating-and-marriage market.
To be gay and out of shape is almost as much of a stigma as just being gay used to be.
I'm more critical of my songwriting than anybody, but I've worked really hard in the last five to 10 years to improve. I didn't take it all that seriously when I started. It was a little bit of a stigma to being a songwriter or a folkie back then. I did a lot of send-ups of sensitive singer-songwriter stuff when I was starting out, which limited my development as a songwriter in a way. I wasn't really fully given license to explore that until the mid-90s. I'm still working on it; I'm a little bit of a late bloomer.
I don't want there to always be this stigma of the "female" artist. "Oh, what does it feel like to be a female doing something?" That hurts me.
I think there's a stigma to some degree about the outer boroughs and Jersey, and whether their stories are worth telling.
Baldness is visually enough of a stigma as it is without a big sweaty bloke on stage pointing it out.
I don't have any stigma attached to my body. When I'm in my own private space, I have very little on.
But there was something psychological happening there that was just a little bit different. And the other thing was, there was no stigma. Kids weren't going into the 'Center-for-Kids-That-Need-More-Help' or something like that. It was 826 Valencia.
My struggle has allowed me to transcend that sense of shame and stigma identified with my being a Black gay man. Having come through the fire, they can't touch me.
