girlfishes

[girlfishes]

the original post likened this ban to the hijab ban in France which does fine women for wearing the hijab and is harmful for Muslim women in France. So I don’t think that this was proposed in the context of the Nordic model. This might just be my American sensibilities but just the “just ban it” approach should be heavily deliberated and we should always be skeptical of authoritarianism because of its side effects and unintended consequences. (I don’t consider banning prostitution to be authoritarian but controlling what the population wears certainly is.)

If radfems support the banning of hijabs and burqas to protect women from oppression, how much of a stretch would it be to ban makeup, high heels and other things that oppress women through the societal pressure (and even demand in some professional settings) to wear them?

The burqa and hijab are obviously much more extreme examples, but I think an argument could be made for eventually banning the other things I mentioned on the same principle.

Just food for thought.

🧡

[girlfishes]

One thing that bothers me about “ethical porn” (besides the obvious oxymoron) is that the people who produce it seem to think they’re solving a problem. “Porn doesn’t ‘center’ women enough, so we make some that does.” Ok but all of the other violent rape porn still exists and hundreds of millions of men are getting off to it everyday. All the “ethical porn” producers have done is try to fill a new consumer niche.

[girlfishes]

One thing that bothers me about “ethical porn” (besides the obvious oxymoron) is that the people who produce it seem to think they’re solving a problem. “Porn doesn’t ‘center’ women enough, so we make some that does.” Ok but all of the other violent rape porn still exists and hundreds of millions of men are getting off to it everyday. All the “ethical porn” producers have done is try to fill a new consumer niche.

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Well in that long response you only spared a few sentences addressing what I said, so I’ll stick to that. Plants are much less calorie dense than meat and much cheaper, so yes, you can eat more. Vegans do not have a higher rate of iron deficiency than the general population.

And yes, a lot of people do become vegans when it won’t fit their lifestyle or they’re not prepared. The veganism movement does guilt people and especially women into making decisions that aren’t right for them. I do have plenty of problems with the veganism movement. I’m not a fan of how they do things either. But the original post was going after vegan radical feminists as individuals, so this is the context in which I responded. There are plenty of healthy vegans, and there are plenty of unhealthy vegans. Blanket statements like “they’re all starving themselves” or “they’re all unhealthy” just aren’t true and come off as very dismissive of each person’s relationship with food and personal journey behind why they eat the way they do.

We never hear “you can’t be feminist and eat junk food” or “you can’t be feminist and be sedentary” , “you can’t smoke and be a feminist”or even “you can’t be obese and be a feminist”even though each of these things are by far more destructive to one’s health than a balanced vegan diet ever could be. Because all this does is alienate women from each other and make people defensive.

Why is it a controversial take to say women shouldn't prioritise a chicken's life over their own? Veganism is not feminist, full stop. I get it, I feel bad for the animals too, but the world isn't all sunshine and rainbows, and as omnivores humans need animal products to be strong and not malnourished. Women are raised to be overly empathetic to anything other than themselves. You can't buy into this self-destruction, be on an EXTREMELY restrictive diet, and call yourself a radical feminist. I thought we were fighting diet culture here.

I will go to the gym and eat a steak for every woman that diets herself into being tiny and weak and skinny, don't @ me. A female human being is not a fucking squirrel. Be in a misogynistic cult if you want to, but don't shame other women for not joining it.

[girlfishes]

If you ban something, how do you enforce it? By punishing those who break the ban? Because what in effect this would do is punish women who are still experiencing the influence of the patriarchy. Go after the culture and systems which make women change their appearance, not the women themselves.

If radfems support the banning of hijabs and burqas to protect women from oppression, how much of a stretch would it be to ban makeup, high heels and other things that oppress women through the societal pressure (and even demand in some professional settings) to wear them?

The burqa and hijab are obviously much more extreme examples, but I think an argument could be made for eventually banning the other things I mentioned on the same principle.

Just food for thought.

🧡

[girlfishes]

Non-heme (plant) iron is harder for the body to absorb, but you just have to eat more of it. In addition, you can’t overdose on iron from plants because the body will stop absorbing it if you have too much. It doesn’t do that for heme iron. If vegans eat a variety of vegetables and enough calories they do not have trouble getting iron. This is because they consume more vitamin C which makes absorbing plant iron easier. (Got this from WebMd). Obviously a vegan diet is more difficult to manage and requires more planning, but it’s not like this is something a capable person can’t make the right adjustments for. And taking a supplement for b 12, while not ideal, isn’t going to affect a person’s quality of life in any meaningful way. Animals get almost (yes, I was wrong, shocker I know) all of their nutrients through the plants they eat. Vegans are just cutting out the middle-man. Yes it’s different, but no where near disabling if one has the resources and knowledge to do it right. If a woman decides to run the risk of making herself slightly worse off for a cause she believes in I’m certainly not going to tell her it doesn’t make her a real feminist.

Why is it a controversial take to say women shouldn't prioritise a chicken's life over their own? Veganism is not feminist, full stop. I get it, I feel bad for the animals too, but the world isn't all sunshine and rainbows, and as omnivores humans need animal products to be strong and not malnourished. Women are raised to be overly empathetic to anything other than themselves. You can't buy into this self-destruction, be on an EXTREMELY restrictive diet, and call yourself a radical feminist. I thought we were fighting diet culture here.

I will go to the gym and eat a steak for every woman that diets herself into being tiny and weak and skinny, don't @ me. A female human being is not a fucking squirrel. Be in a misogynistic cult if you want to, but don't shame other women for not joining it.

[girlfishes]

When I was 18 I was working retail and my manager was really nice to me. He was probably late 30s, early 40s in age. He offered to buy me Starbucks (I never accepted), would never get mad when I messed up, gave me all administrative permissions and passwords, and basically let me do what I wanted all day. I probably committed so many infractions because he didn’t even tell me all the rules. He was all smiles and praise.

Then things started getting weird. First of all, he would schedule every single one of my shifts with him. And always closing, and always just the two of us.

He told me not to take the trash out myself because he said I was “the prime target for human trafficking”. Yes he said that exactly.

When I started meeting other employees I learned that he was really mean and unfair to them. He would yell and give unreasonable deadlines and make them do all his work.

After one interaction I had had enough. An elderly man hadn’t gotten enough of a food he wanted and my manager sent me to get more for him so the man didn’t have to hobble over. Reasonable enough. When I was walking to get the food I hear my manager say to him “She’s great, and does whatever I ask.” I can’t represent the tone well here but he was insinuating something to that man and that man laughed liked he understood.

The manager quit abruptly for reasons I don’t know. Looking back I know I should have quit before then but I still wasn’t aware of what was appropriate workplace conduct. I was groped last summer at work (different place) and I didn’t even realize it was a deliberate assault until I told my mom. I’m oblivious to these things when it comes to myself I guess. I tend to block out what makes me uncomfortable. I only apply to places with female leadership now.

I like to watch those courtroom footage videos, and I just wanted to share what happened in an interesting one.

This man in his 40's hired a woman probably 15+ years his junior and began dating her. He then gave her a sum of money, something like $4,000, to help her through a rough patch. She presented plenty of texts between them where she felt guilty about accepting it and offered to pay it all back in increments, and he kept flatly refusing, saying that it was a gift.

But get this: when the relationship became rocky and she dumped him, he began referring to it as a 𝘭𝘰𝘢𝘯. They got back together briefly, and once again he refused repayment. (She was really insistent and he would stubbornly refuse to accept a dime from her.) He became increasingly controlling and possessive, and so she dumped him once more, this time for good. Once he saw that she wasn't changing her mind, he reverted yet again to calling the gift a "loan" and went after her for it in court.

The judge's reaction and the commenters on the video were fascinating, because when I watched that I felt that he was just being a petty creep, nothing more. But the judge pointed out that he gave her that money and wouldn't let her pay it back to hold it over her as a form of control; if she'd have repaid it, he wouldn't be able to act as if she's beholden to him or exert pressure on her to stay in the relationship. The judge said he wasn't going to let this man use the court system to harrass and punish that woman any longer, and denied his claim.

The commenters pointed out that he probably chose a much younger woman because he felt he could more easily manipulate her, AND he was her boss - another level of control. Everything he did was calculated.

Be extremely suspicious of all the "favors" men do for you, because they all seem to have the same tiresome motive. And we know what it is.

[girlfishes]

I see both of your points. I think that women often try to bear a larger burden than they can handle from a misplaced sense of guilt and responsibility, as we’ve been conditioned to because this can disadvantage us. However this doesn’t mean that this empathy itself is wrong. Maybe it means that men should have more of it.

I was vegetarian for two years because of ethical and environmental reasons. However, I have chronic health issues and an otherwise restricted diet and I decided that I was doing more harm to myself than I was helping anything else. If I had tried to go vegan it would have been much worse. If I had chosen to be vegetarian because someone guilted me I would be rightfully upset.

But other people can go vegan without too much trouble, and even to some benefit if they do it right. There is no nutrient or vitamin or fat we can get from an animal that we can’t get from any plant. So if one has the resources, veganism can be as good or better than a “normal” diet. In addition, the resources to create the food from one cow could make countless more plants. Meat is expensive and environmentally costly, which does come back to harm us later.

If I make substantial progress with my condition I will try to go vegetarian again and if that works go vegan or something close to it. I also heavily second the statement that we can live in support of more than one cause.

I would like to rephrase OP’s original statement in a way that I can get behind. Vegans can be radical feminists, but those who take advantage of a woman’s empathy for their cause/ to her detriment are not radical feminists.

Why is it a controversial take to say women shouldn't prioritise a chicken's life over their own? Veganism is not feminist, full stop. I get it, I feel bad for the animals too, but the world isn't all sunshine and rainbows, and as omnivores humans need animal products to be strong and not malnourished. Women are raised to be overly empathetic to anything other than themselves. You can't buy into this self-destruction, be on an EXTREMELY restrictive diet, and call yourself a radical feminist. I thought we were fighting diet culture here.

I will go to the gym and eat a steak for every woman that diets herself into being tiny and weak and skinny, don't @ me. A female human being is not a fucking squirrel. Be in a misogynistic cult if you want to, but don't shame other women for not joining it.

[girlfishes]

One thing that bothers me about “ethical porn” (besides the obvious oxymoron) is that the people who produce it seem to think they’re solving a problem. “Porn doesn’t ‘center’ women enough, so we make some that does.” Ok but all of the other violent rape porn still exists and hundreds of millions of men are getting off to it everyday. All the “ethical porn” producers have done is try to fill a new consumer niche.

[girlfishes]

if you don't like the term "cisgender" being used for you, why?

• it's more like a slur

• it's female erasure

• it's an insult

• it's an insult sometimes, but if it just means what they say it means, I'm fine with it

• other

• im cis and I don't care if somebody calls me cis

• I'm trans/see results

[girlfishes]

Growing up as a Christian child I heard this all the time. “Those who leave the faith were never believers to begin with”. I believe CS Lewis said something to this effect too.

Smartest TRA 💀💀💀

[girlfishes]

Pour one out for banger posts that would dox you

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Fr. Men need to stop hiding behind an acronym and say what they really mean.

because they are misogynists

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I want to take a break from discourse for a moment. Reblog or reply with a way a woman in your life is awesome.

I’ll go first. My mom is the most determined person I know. I’ve never seen her give up on anything and she always keeps a cool head when solving problems. She knows when to take a break and has impeccable work/life balance, but when she is working on something she is completely focused and always the most useful person in the room.

[girlfishes]

I don't feel like I've seen any of the random ai slop things you're talking about but I only follow a handful of radfems. Do you have an example?

Sure

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It makes me SICK when i see people talking about women who suffered a lot on history, and they mention Marie Antoinette. Like, "Oh poor Marie, she said sorry to the man who was going to execute her for stepping on his foot" or "poor her, her infamous phrase was not actually said by her." Like, are we forgetting that she was a queen? An oppressor of the working class?? She was an arch conservative, just like her husband. Her death was not due to misogyny. Stop pretending like she was one of the biggest victims in women's history. Stop pretending she was sweet. Feminism without class consciousness that pretends that rich women suffer the same way that working class women are USELESS.

[girlfishes]

Too many radfem accounts are reblogging the ai spam slop. It’s a bad look, and it clogs up my dashboard. Please read something through and ask “does this have a coherent point from start to end” before you reblog. Also, look for that little gif banner on the end of the post that most of the spam posts have.

(If there’s a legit reason people are doing this I’d like to know but I can’t really think of one)