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not everyone is or would be a good parent. raising children takes a huge amount of sacrifice, patience, and responsibility that frankly a lot of people don’t have. If people were more honest with themselves about their own traits and capabilities when it comes to parenthood, the world would be a much better place.

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Also, I hate abstinence-only, and I absolutely agree that teenagers need accurate information about sexuality that isn’t shaming or meant to “scare em straight,” but I feel like social media (especially fucking Instagram) has reeeaally pushed this “hoe culture” thing that tells especially underage girls that the best way to own your sexuality, be “sex positive,” and be #empowered is to act out this really porny hypersexuality to appeal to boys. (And also to be hypersexual for boys on demand but never expect anything like emotional reciprocation in return, because that’s prudish and whiny and not what Baddies™ do.)

Even on places like tunglr.hell; of a clearly underage teen girl deepthroating a banana in front of her cheering peers at a party, and the reactions were all “yaaaaasss what a queen lmaaaooo #baddie,” with nobody really stopping to ask if maaaaybe that doesn’t really look like a really great situation, also why are you sharing a clip of a teen faking a sex act, let alone cheering it on as badass.

The only people who expressed any kind of concern were the people yelling about how “if that was my daughter I’d whoop her hoe ass and lock her in the basement.” It seems like young girls are caught between the left and right wall in a maze, one being this porny sexiness for boys, he other being this controlling and shaming insistence on “purity”, and in between are predators who know how to corner you against either of those walls

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A single woman somewhere quietly to her friend: This movie doesn’t pass the Bechdal Test. It has only a single woman character and her only line is “ok”

An unending horde of internet commentators, every fucking time: Hateful, bigoted terfs are trying to CANCEL and BOYCOTT the most important progressive cinema of the decade! Do these stupid bitches even know who Allison Bechdel is? Do they not understand that the stories of the oppressed (the real oppressed) are more important than their Sex and the City crap? These cunts clearly hate the disabled, gay, poor, Irish storytellers of the world.

Give me validation, mommy! Tell me my movie is special and best, mommy! If every woman on earth doesn’t respond to my every creation with effusive praise it is like I’m personally being infanticided by a Neoliberal White Feminist! Help, Mommy! I’m being late term abortioned!



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Too many people don’t understand that people don’t want sexual talk from random people because it’s unearned, weird and intrusive.

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There's actually a reason that the trope of making a female assassin or female warrior in a video game or comic or action series scantily clad but justifying it as "but she uses it to distract her male enemies!!" is mostly something you only see from male writers and artists and also something that's long been denounced by feminists as misogynistic and objectifying regardless of what "reasoning" is given.

Other feminist writers who actually hold doctorate degrees on feminist subjects and are actually published writers have written on this better than I ever could, but it's a patriarchal myth that women secretly hold so much power and control over men by using sex and seduction. Turning yourself into a sex object will never grant you any access to any real power

The myth that women secretly hold a lot of power and control over men by using sex and seduction is a patriarchal myth that needs to die already. It's a myth that men use as a justification for their misogyny, men who buy into that myth use it at best as a justification to be suspicious of women and at worst to be outright violent towards women.

It's also blatantly false that using nudity or sex appeal to distract men would work in IRL combat because we know that IRL men have no issue with violently murdering nude or partially nude women. Women are murdered by their boyfriends or husbands while she's not wearing any clothes all the time, her nudity sure didn't save her or 'distract' him from violently murdering her. Also think of the high rate of violence and murders against women in the sex industry, most of the women murdered in the sex industry are nude or partially nude while they're murdered by clients or pimps, and their nudity or partial nudity sure doesn't save them by being from being violently murdered by being 'distracting' to the heterosexual men who murder them.

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honestly I think no child deserves to get bullied, and I hate the trend of people going "the bullies were just normal actually" or "I deserved it." I know I didn't. was I a little shit? yeah. did I deserve it? no. like, imagine the most annoying kid you can imagine. they wouldn't deserve it either.

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being completely financially dependent on a man is quite literally dangerous and someone warning you about that when you talk about wanting to become a housewife doesn’t make the person warning you a misogynist lmao

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The reason so many people think it’s so much easier to raise boys than girls is because so many parents don’t actually raise their sons.

They love their sons, they coddle their sons, they spoil them as best as they can and shield them from consequences, but they don’t actually parent them or raise them. Don’t teach them manners or self control. Don’t do any of the actual hard parts of parenting like teaching manners and respect or enforcing boundaries or teaching them their words and actions actually have consequences and other people’s feelings and well being matter too.

They think it’s so much harder to raise daughters and make “ooff good luck with that haha” comments at parents expecting a girl because parents actually do all that shit for their daughters, and yeah what do you know it’s hard! Because being a parent is really hard when you actually do it right!

And this is why you get so many teenage boys and grown men out there in the world who perpetually behave like overgrown spoiled toddlers always throwing a big tantrum when they don’t get their way or GOD FORBID actually have consequences for their words or actions, because like a lot of boys they weren’t actually fucking raised at all, actually parented while they were growing up.

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I've encountered a strangely large number of stories online of single men who decide to test the theory that married men are inherently more desirable to women by buying a fake wedding ring and wearing it. They usually report that this works miraculously, women are far friendlier and more approachable, which is immediately interpreted as flirting. The conclusion they draw from the data is that women are inherently cruel, selfish and greedy, because clearly they don't want the man unless they think they're stealing from some other woman.

I wonder how many of these women in these experiments actually just thought they don't need to be wary about this man mistaking friendliness for flirting, since clearly he's not looking to date as he's already making someone else miserable.

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“I’ve spent the past year interviewing married or cohabiting heterosexual mothers across the United States about the distribution of child-care labor in their home. Most of them did the lion’s share of the work and were angry with their partner. Yet many of them told me they were “grateful.” Over and over again, I heard women complain that they were doing more than their partner, only to then insist that they were lucky to have any help at all. 

Take Andrea, a full-time marketing professional in Portland, Maine, and the mother of an elementary-school-age child. Although she sometimes feels that her husband, Patrick, who works for a health-insurance company, is “right there with her,” Andrea says he behaves like her junior apprentice in child-rearing. (These aren’t their real names. I granted my subjects anonymity in exchange for candor.) 

“We had it out the other night, and then what did he say this morning? ‘I’m so sorry I can’t help you more. I feel so guilty about that.’ He’s helping me, instead of, like, ‘We’ve got to set up the conditions for both of us to be successful.’ But still, I have so many friends whose husbands have never put their child to bed, because it’s her job because she’s the mom. When I hear things like that, I feel really grateful.” 

Andrea’s misplaced gratitude is not only common, but also an impediment to the elusive goal of equity in the home. 

The number of mothers in the labor force who have young children hit its peak and leveled off two decades ago. So, too, did the parenting contributions of men. For the past 20 years, research by the Bureau of Labor Statistics has consistently found that women employed outside of the home shoulder 65 percent of child-care responsibilities, and their male partners 35 percent. 

Studies have also found that fathers who work long hours have wives who do more child care, while mothers who work long hours have husbands who sleep more and watch lots of television; that working mothers with preschool-age children are two and a half times as likely as fathers to get up in the middle of the night to tend to their kids; that men with babies spend twice as much weekend time engaged in leisure activity as their female partners do. Mothers remain more likely to miss work to tend to sick kids, to spend time with kids in the absence of another adult, and to maintain overall responsibility for managing the details of their children’s lives. 

In 2017, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development called the uneven distribution of unpaid labor between men and women in the home one of the most important gender-equality issues of our time. And the problem isn’t going away; it afflicts even relatively young parents. “Millennial Men Aren’t the Dads They Thought They’d Be,” read a 2015 New York Times headline. MenCare, a fatherhood campaign working toward child-care parity in 45 nations, estimates that at the current rate of change, it will be another 75 years before women achieve gender equality in the home —a more optimistic figure than the 200 years the United Nations International Labour Organization predicted in March, on the eve of International Women’s Day. 

Reports of the modern, involved father have been greatly exaggerated. As the social psychologist Bernadette Park has put it, any change “is more in ‘the culture of fatherhood’ than in actual behavior.” The so-called marriage-between-equals discourse, ever present in certain corners of the country, bears little resemblance to what really goes on in the home. Even among couples who say they’ve achieved equal partnership, studies find that their mutual decisions tend to favor the needs and goals of the husband much more than the wife. 

Still, many mothers, well schooled in the importance of sugar, spice, and everything nice, resist protest. They don’t give public voice to their sense of injustice. Instead, “when a dad comes” to a mommy-and-me class, “we clap,” reported Jay Miranda, a mother and blogger in Los Angeles. 

Women’s gratitude is doubtless a result of the well-known, deeply felt fact that while domestic labor isn’t equal now, it was even less equal before. The 65/35 division is certainly better than the 80/20 women lived with in the 1970s and ’80s. One family-studies professor I spoke with told me that her mom is always telling her how lucky she is: “She’s comparing my husband to my father, who did nothing, but I’m comparing him to me, and I know I do way more!” Yet she said she “hit the jackpot” when she found her husband.

Men perpetuate the notion that women should keep in mind the extremely unequal past, or perhaps other people’s extremely unequal present, and not focus on their less unequal lived experience. Laura, a New York City business owner and mother of a 4-year-old, is married to her child’s father, but told me she feels like a single parent. When she tries to address the imbalance with her husband, his standard response is “I do a lot more than other men.” Laura doesn’t disagree. Further discussion is quashed. These conversations transform her vivid anger into lukewarm appreciation. 

One Oklahoma City mother, a court bailiff, broke it down for me in the starkest terms: “He thinks he should bring home a paycheck and do nothing else, but it could be worse. He doesn’t beat me. He doesn’t drink excessively.” The possibility of an ever-lower bar only highlights how nonsensical such gratitude can be. 

Although appreciation goes a long way in a marriage, that doesn’t make it a positive or even a neutral force if there’s a legitimate grievance. Misplaced gratitude, by supporting a couple’s unequal status quo, can help destroy rather than maintain a romantic relationship. Women who report that they do more child care than their husbands are 45 percent less likely to describe their marriages as “very happy” than women who say responsibilities are shared. Studies in the past decade in the United Kingdom, Sweden, and the United States have all found that couples with low levels of male-partner participation in domestic chores are more likely to separate than couples in which men do more. 

Social psychologists commonly distinguish between “benevolent” and “hostile” sexism. Benevolent sexism flatters women while also undermining their ambition and autonomy. Hostile sexism devalues them altogether. One study out of Germany exposed women to either benevolently sexist statements (“Women have a way of caring for others that men are not capable of”) or to hostile ones (“When women work together they often get into catfights”). Later, the women who’d read the benevolent statements were significantly less likely than the others to say they would participate in social action to rectify gender discrimination. 

Gratitude is a brand of benevolent sexism, a force that repels change. To offer thanks for whatever contributions men happen to make reinforces the implicit idea that parenting is women’s work, that 65/35 is a very fine place to stop. For too long, women have paid for this imbalance with their well-being—financially, emotionally, existentially. Only once gratitude is relinquished for righteous anger will gender rules in this realm be rewritten. Then we can land somewhere different: not grateful, only glad.”   

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“What little girls learn is not the desire for the other, but the desire to be desired.”

Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth

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you say you would sacrifice yourself to save your wife, you say you would kill someone to defend your children, etc. you'd do any sort of grand gesture for your loved ones. but what about in the mean time?

would you mildly inconvenience yourself? would you take them time to actually bond with them? would put effort into remembering their likes and dislikes? would you re-evaluate your beliefs? would you try to see an argument from their point of view? would you keep your voice level instead of raising it to intimidate them?

would you dedicate a few seconds every day instead of pledging one massive push at a hypothetical point in your life?

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i was not made for hookup culture. love me for an eternity or do not touch me at all

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"A new report from the United Nations is taking the tech industry to task on its lack of diversity, in part criticizing smart speakers and AI programs for being gendered as female and perpetuating gender stereotypes. The report finds a number of reasons for this, including the fact that women are not well-represented on the teams working on helper AI, and because gender stereotypes lead those teams to assume that female voices are more appealing to users.

. . .

The result is that “constantly representing digital assistants as female gradually ‘hard-codes’ a connection between a woman’s voice and subservience.” All four of the leading voice assistants from Amazon, Google, Apple, and Microsoft launched with only female voices, and in almost all cases, the female voice is the default."