haashtarot

[haashtarot]

Why would you want women to have more power in an unjust system? Because the unjust systems are the only ones available. Because the exclusion of women from power is one source of this injustice. Because women gaining power is a prerequisite for them to become free. “Why would you want women to have more power in an unjust system?” isn’t a bad question. But it raises another one: Just how perfect does the world have to be before women will deserve to take their equal place in it?

[haashtarot]

The problem with men is that they see their own crimes as inexorable forces of nature. That's why they can make heartfelt art about the exploitation of women that... exploits women. They look at sex crimes like they look at death. Just a fact of life that we need to accept. Sure it can be the worst thing that ever happened to you but also it happens all the time, it's natural, and even beautiful in the right context like a greek tragedy 😌😌😌😌

[haashtarot]

"In recruiting subjects for their study, they sought out three different groups of women in intimate relationships: emotionally and physically abused, emotionally abused only, and non-abused. However, cluster analysis of their data revealed that, among women with live-in heterosexual partners, there were no distinct abused and nonabused groups. Rather, male-female relationships were described by a continuum of abuse. ALL male-female relationships were more or less abusive. Even among dating couples Graham, Foliano, et al. (1990) found that 42 percent of the women in the sample, mainly college freshman, had experienced at least some physical abuse in their current relationship. Seventy-eight percent had experienced at least some emotional abuse in the same relationship. One third of this sample had been dating six months or less!

Bart (1983; Bart and O’Brien 1985) has identified a heterosexual sex-rape continuum. At one end is consensual sex (both parties equally desire sex). At the other is rape. In between are altruistic sex (one party submits out of guilt, duty, or pity) and compliant sex (one party submits because the consequences of not submitting are worse than those of submitting).

Using Bart’s conceptualization, Kelly found that most women “felt pressured to have sex in many, if not all, of their sexual relationships with men” (p. 56). Yet she found that women perceived sex as coercive only when physical force or the threat of physical force was used. An event usually was not called rape by women unless the perpetrator was a stranger, it happened at night and outdoors, physical force was used, and they resisted. Moreover, Scheppele and Bart (1983) found that women tended not to define nonphallic rape (for example, digital penetration) as rape. These findings reveal that most women strongly resist perceiving an event which happened to them as coercive or rape, but that most of the sexual experiences of most women involve altruistic or compliant sex."

- Loving to Survive

[haashtarot]

Women do not simply have faces, as men do; they are identified with their faces. Men have a naturalistic relation to their faces. Certainly they care whether they are good-looking or not. They suffer over acne, protruding ears, tiny eyes; they hate getting bald. But there is a much wider latitude in what is aesthetically acceptable in a man's face than what is in a woman's. A man's face is defined as something he basically doesn't need to tamper with; all he has to do is keep it clean. He can avail himself of the options for ornament supplied by nature: a beard, a mustache, longer or shorter hair. But he is not supposed to disguise himself. What he is "really" like is supposed to show. A man lives through his face; it records the progressive stages of his life. And since he doesn't tamper with his face, it is not separate from but is completed by his body—which is judged attractive by the impression it gives of virility and energy. By contrast, a woman's face is potentially separate from her body. She does not treat it naturalistically. A woman's face is the canvas upon which she paints a revised, corrected portrait of herself. One of the rules of this creation is that the face not show what she doesn't want it to show. Her face is an emblem, an icon, a flag. How she arranges her hair, the type of makeup she uses, the quality of her complexion—all these are signs, not of what she is "really" like, but of how she asks to be treated by others, especially men. They establish her status as an "object."

—Susan Sontag, “On Women.”

[haashtarot]

Terfs saying the jeopardy lady has an advantage over "real women" because men can push buttons faster is so fucking funny

[haashtarot]

two rules to live by:

1. if you create a sacred caste of men who cannot be questioned or accused, abusers will do whatever they can to join this caste

2. if you create a group of women it's acceptable to shit on, even when there are valid critiques to be made of said women, men will take that criticism and apply it as viciously as they can to as many women as they can get away with

[haashtarot]

this collusion does not save the daughter from the mother's fate.

[haashtarot]

immune to misogyny simply because i don't take anything a guy says seriously knowing part of his chromosomes fell off

[haashtarot]

what men call “logic” is really just a lack of empathy

[haashtarot]

"The suffragettes are instructive. Their tactic of choice was property destruction. Decades of patient pressure on the Parliament to give women the vote had yielded nothing, and so in 1903, under the slogan 'Deeds not words, the Women's Social and Political Union was founded. Five years later, two WSPU members undertook the first militant action: breaking windowpanes in the prime minister's residence. One of them told the police she would bring a bomb the next time. Fed up with their own fruitless deputations to Parliament, the suffragettes soon specialised in 'the argument of the broken pane', sending hundreds of well-dressed women down streets to smash every window they passed. In the most concentrated volley, in March 1912, Emmeline Pankhurst and her crews brought much of central London to a standstill by shattering the fronts of jewellers, silversmiths, Hamleys toy shop and dozens of other businesses. They also torched letterboxes around the capital. Shocked Londoners saw pillars filled with paperthrowing up flames, the work of some activist having thrown in a parcel soaked in kerosene and a lit match.

Militancy was at the core of suffragette identity: 'To be militant in some form, or other, is a moral obligation, Pankhurst lectured. 'It is a duty which every woman will owe her own conscience and self-respect, to women who are less fortunate than she is herself, and to all who are to come after her.' The latest full-body portrait of the movement, Diane Atkinson's Rise Up, Women!, gives an encyclopedic listing of militant actions: suffragettes forcing the prime minister out of his car and dousing him with pepper, hurling a stone at the fanlight above Winston Churchill's door, setting upon statues and paintings with hammers and axes, planting bombs on sites along the routes of royal visits, fighting policemen with staves, charging against hostile politicians with dogwhips, breaking the windows in prison cells. Such deeds went hand in hand with mass mobilisation. The suffragettes put up mammoth rallies, ran their own presses, went on hunger strikes: deploying the gamut of non-violent and militant action.

After the hope of attaining the vote by constitutional means was dashed once more in early 1913, the movement switched gears. In a systematic campaign of arson, the suffragettes set fire to or blew up villas, tea pavilions, boathouses, hotels, haystacks, churches, post offices, aque-ducts, theatres and a liberal range of other targets aroundthe country. Over the course of a year and a half, the WSPU claimed responsibility for 337 such attacks. Few culprits were apprehended. Not a single life was lost; only empty buildings were set ablaze. The suffragettes took great pains to avoid injuring people. But they considered the situation urgent enough to justify incendiarism - votes for women, Pankhurst explained, were of such pressing importance that we had to discredit the Government and Parliament in the eyes of the world; we had to spoil English sports, hurt businesses, destroy valuable property, demor-alise the world of society, shame the churches, upset the whole orderly conduct of life. Some attacks probably went unclaimed. One historian suspects that the suffragettes were behind one of the most spectacular blazes of the period: a fire in a Tyneside coal wharf, in which the facilities for loading coal were completely gutted. They did, however, claim responsibility for the burning of motor cars and a steam yacht."

- How to Blow Up a Pipeline, pg 40-42

[haashtarot]

male castration anxiety is so funny like imagine if nobody ever tried to control your ability to reproduce so you just had to make shit up to be upset about

[haashtarot]

Old Misogyny: “She was asking for it”

New Misogyny: “We need to critically examine the notion that all women are victims under a monolithic patriarchy and stop assuming that women need to be protected from sex and that they can’t make their own choices and be empowered by [prostitution/porn/surrogacy/statutory rape/bdsm], women who consider themselves victims need to take accountability for the choices they had.”

[haashtarot]

I don't support any social theory that says women aren't allowed to say no to men

[haashtarot]

“It is humiliating to even have to say this: that women matter more than fetuses or embryos, that a frozen cell in a petri dish is not a human being, but we are. It is an absurdity to make this argument, an exhausting waste of our time, a degradation. That, too, is part of the point.”

- Moira Donegan in The Guardian

[haashtarot]

still thinking of this paragraph from what was the girlboss?

[haashtarot]

“The Adam and Eve myth, possibly the single most effective piece of enemy propaganda in the long history of the sex war, had other crucial implications. It performed the essential task of putting man first in the scheme of things; for in all the father god religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, God creates man first: woman is born after man, framed of an insignificant and expendable lump of his bony gristle, and taken out of him like a child from its mother. Essentially this is just one of the countless attempts of womb-envious men to usurp women's power of birth: with a swift piece of patriarchal prestidigitation, God reverses biology and stands nature on its head with the birth of his man-child, in defiance of evolution, where men and women evolved together, and of life itself, where woman gives birth to man. God now assumed the power of all new life—all the monotheisms taught that God alone created and breathed life into each fetus, using the woman in whom he lodged it simply as an "envelope," in the Islamic phrase.”

-Rosalind Miles, Who Cooked the Last Supper?

[haashtarot]

Loneliness, when experienced by women, is treated like a joke. The stereotypical image of the crazy cat lady, the spinster, the old maid, has been mocked for centuries. A warning to other women not to be too selective, too cautious, too discerning, too demanding, or else you'll end up like her. A laughing stock.

But when men are "lonely" (ie. when women become more aware as a class and won't engage with manchildren), suddenly it's an epidemic- a crisis requiring analysis by sociologists and psychologists and hundreds and hundreds of articles dissecting why these poor men are so lonely, as though their loneliness reaches some special depth unknown to women.