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Often, when I meet a brilliant but exhausted woman, I wonder who she would be if she wasn't stuck taking care of a man.

Husband, father, son, boss, friend, whatever. How much more could she be for herself without spending her energy on him?

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The first female astronaut Valentina Tereshkova greets the American communist and women's rights activist Angela Davis, 1970s

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“The Driver” by Jordan Bolton

My first book ‘Blue Sky Through the Window of a Moving Car’ is out now! Order it here - https://smarturl.it/BlueSky

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"Mother of Voices" - Psychedelic Art by Pam Coultes.

(from"The Seed", Vol. 2, No. 2 - Feb., 1968).

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Art by Rebeca Fleur, Spanish

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Jenna Gribbon (American, b. 1978, Knoxville, TN, USA) - Shared Warmth, 2022, Paintings: Oil on Linen

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I can just imagine saying “lobotomies are bad” in like 1949 and having someone say “you’re wrong, the science is settled, lobotomies are the best way to treat mental illness” and guess what? In 1949 I might be the unpopular and socially wrong one. The person with the backwards, conservative thinking. That is the year that António Egas Moniz won the Nobel Prize for lobotomies.

Lobotomies are still bad, but a lot of people have now understood that it’s a deeply harmful and anti-human practice. It was often performed on women (60% of cases were women in the US, a study in Ontario put women patients at 72%) and on gay men. Societal mores have changed on what is psychiatrically appropriate—many of these women were depressed and repressed housewives, or were not naturally submissive to their husbands and considered “combative”.

Many lobotomies were called “ice pick lobotomies” because they involved inserting an ice pick through the eye to sever the part of your brain that feels emotions. There were different techniques, largely dependent on which surgeon you saw. Norbert Wiener said in 1948, "Prefrontal lobotomy... has recently been having a certain vogue, probably not unconnected with the fact that it makes the custodial care of many patients easier. Let me remark in passing that killing them makes their custodial care still easier."

In 1944, the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease ran an article saying, “The history of prefrontal lobotomy has been brief and stormy. Its course has been dotted with both violent opposition and with slavish, unquestioning acceptance."

Walter Freeman called the practice “surgically induced childhood”—he specialized in lobotomies and performed them until 1967, so he found this to be a good outcome. In fact, he worked on an “assembly line” process where he could lobotomies 20 people a day, and even did a surgical procedure face-off with another doctor in 1948 to compete in an operating theatre to show an audience of doctors that his technique was superior. The other professor was a professor at Yale, William Beecher Scoville, another famous lobotomist known for proliferating the procedure. They called it a miracle cure, and the gold standard for psychiatric treatment.

Scoville’s most famous patient, Henry Molaison, was a 7-year old boy with epilepsy after a fall from his bike. Scoville couldn’t find the problem, so he just destroyed all three regions of Henry’s temporal lobes. Afterwards, the surgeon noted memory loss “so severe as to prevent the patient from remembering the location of the rooms in which he lives, the names of his close associates, or even the way to the toilet or the urinal.”

Scoville’s wife sought psychiatric care after her husband cheated on her and she had a breakdown. Her husband lobotomized her himself.

In the 1960s, when schizophrenia became a radicalized charged diagnosis that was often used against Black people, especially those involved in the civil rights struggle. Walter Freeman did several pushes to lobotomize Black people, including as young as five, for “hyperactive and aggressive behavior”.

The practice continued in some places until the 1980s. It was used to treat schizophrenia, affective disturbance (mood disorders and people reacting in non-mainstream ways like being an opinionated woman or gay), and OCD, chronic neurosis (anxiety), psychopathic disorders, and depression, among other things. You may notice the old names for these things—things that we might not consider the same way now. Being gay was a mental disorder. Women who wanted independence or respect were often diagnosed. Not fulfilling your traditional societal role was a good way to end up institutionalized.

It was considered, at time of invention, to be an humane alternative to insulin comas and shock therapy (ECT). Many people considered it lifesaving and gold standard treatment for mental illness. Some reports believe that about a third of patients found the procedure beneficial. Others faced dementia, death, incontinence, inability to speak, paralysis, and other effects. Many people were unable to ever leave care again afterwards, though they were more complacent.

I don’t think any scientist who tells you that science is settled is a good scientist. I think that treatments that target people who don’t fit the mold of society, people who are countercultural, and people from marginalized groups should be especially criticized. Psychiatry is a very new field. Part of the phasing out of lobotomies had to do with the development of the first medications for psychiatric use—which in turn have had their own social, political, and ethical conundrums and misuse. Many could consider Valium (“mother’s little helper”) the spiritual successor to the lobotomy.

But in 1949, if I said lobotomies are bad—I might have been met with “Do you hate mentally ill people?” “It works great for most people!” “Without it, she will just be depressed and kill herself” or “My friend did it and all her problems seem better now”.

Lobotomies were bad the whole time.

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“Make up isn’t about men! It’s for me!”

Make up is how we assure men they’re the default. Every default setting is reserved for men. Everything default in humans is the boy version of things now. A resting face is male. A smile is female. Textured skin is male. Flawless skin is female. Small, normal eyes are male. Big eyes are female. Colorless lips are male. Colored lips are female. Bushy eyebrows are male. Shaped eyebrows are female. Plain clothing is male. Pants are male. Good quality is male. Cotton is male. Covered up is male. Costumes are female. Skirts are female. Poor quality is female. Polyester is female. Naked is female.

Responsive is male. Quiet is female. Alive is male. Inanimate is female. Active is male. Passive is female. Curious is male. Stupid is female. Wanting is male. Desire-less is female. Self interested is male. Discontented from self is female.

Everything about masculinity can be summed up as “what is normal and neutral for all humans.”

Everything about femininity can be summed up as “marking women as ‘other’”

The entire point of gendered differences is to mark men as the default. Their thoughts, feelings, perspectives, health symptoms, needs, perceptions, and priorities are the default. Even when a woman recounts a story a man wasn’t present for, his account of it is seen as more reliable. Because he is who we default to. She is “other.” Toilet paper is provided because it’s needed by men. It’s default. Pads and tampons, just as important, are luxury or personal items. If anything, annoying to have to see because they don’t represent the default state. The presence of something female that doesn’t please a man is seen as something out of place that needs to be cleaned up and removed to restore life to its default, male state.

Make up isn’t about beauty. It’s about men hating the idea of women being as naturally occurring as they are, and having a right to our own realities. It’s deeper than looking pretty. It’s deeper than sex. It isn’t about whether your make up is natural looking, either.

When a man says he likes a natural looking woman, he means, “Textured skin and dullness and natural eyebrows are MEN’S THING a woman who has those is broken.”

It doesn’t matter if you’re a goth or you’re typically feminine. The point is that you don’t resemble the men.

In countries where a veil is required for women, does it matter if her hijab is kind of ugly? Is that the point? No. Most women aren’t wearing luxury fabrics or brand new hijabs. They’re wearing whatever they have. The point is that they are identifiable as female so men can treat them differently and not accidentally like equal humans.

When women aren’t required to wear dresses anymore, we start being required to wear make up. We are always required to do SOMETHING. Look at the Elf on a Shelf type dolls where they put lipstick on the girl ones. No matter what, the boy version of things is always the natural, unchanged, normal default. And if they make a girl version it’s that. There’s an elf. And there’s a girl elf. We are a spin off of men. That’s how they see us.

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dichotomy? more like dyke hot 2 me #feminism

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Yonic

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Two butches playing pool, from Sophia Wallace's "Girls will be Bois" series, 2002–2007.

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Jupiter in the Guise of Diana Seducing Callisto, ca. 1650. Gerard van Honthorst (Dutch, 1592-1656)

Diana and Callisto, ca. 1745. Jean-Baptiste Marie Pierre (French, 1713-1789)

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Very pro weird girl. Not budging on that.

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makeup rarely looks good. shaved armpits and legs look weird. high heels make you walk funny. like none of this shit is inherently attractive we’re just conditioned to imagine the ideal woman as a caricature of an actual human being.

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lesbian dating is so hopeless because you'll go on the apps and be faced with five dudes, endless ""kinksters"" and a billion married women and then you close the app and give up and go ***

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Women fighting for healthcare and abortion rights in the 1960s.

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*hits feminist blunt*: wearing makeup isn't empowering, it's a mask of the patriarchy. It's so weird that you'll watch men and women at formal events and the men get to have their natural face with accents (fresh haircut/trim, maybe an eyebrow marked if they're "zesty") and a woman is only considered suitable for the event once she has 3 layers of clown makeup on. But yeah, makeup is empowering.