#i too indulge in unhealthy behavior just to feel the slightest bit in control of my life again
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okay but seriously all jokes aside I really do understand ivan. like having a schedule so packed and busy is so insanely draining no matter how long you've conditioned yourself to endure it. sacrificing certain things like lunch or sleep just to gain the slightest bit more time for yourself is something that feels almost essential to keeping yourself together and not feeling like you're losing yourself in the cycle completely. it's like its own little act of rebellion in a way, something along the lines of you can drown me in work and monotony but I'll keep carving these little spaces of time for what little I have for myself, even if I have to carve them out of my own chest. I will sacrifice parts of myself to ensure that I don't fully succumb to whatever you're trying to make me into. I am human, this is the proof, I will make time even if it ruins me. you know?? yeah. you get it
#man you know life is getting TOUGH when you read âskip lunch for personal timeâ on a fictional characters fictional silly interview#and then feel so empathetic and impacted by that fuckass sentence that it makes you emotional#sorry guys this is another para loser moment#its been rough man. like. i need to stop projecting seriously#âits not that deep!!!!!â you know what is though? my fucking eyebags man. ivans too i know he's hiding them somewhere somehow#anyway yeah. ivan you are so real.#i too indulge in unhealthy behavior just to feel the slightest bit in control of my life again#if ivans way of coping and keepin it together is to stare at till from across the cafeteria table and lick blood instead of lunch#well who i am to judge him man like. do what you gotta do#post of shame sorry guys im embarrassed to tag this#alnst#alien stage#alnst ivan#alien stage ivan#is this dramatic? yea. sorry#he ws just so real for that. do whatever you gotta do to cure that hashtag work life existential crisis king#PARA STOP PROJECTING CHALLENGE#para.musing
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Betrayal (G/T fluff, Reader POV)
100 GT theme challenge.
You feel the trembling of the table long before they enter the room and though normally their presence is impossible to ignore, your mind to far too focused on your current endeavor to pay them much mind. The only thing you are truly aware of is the bright flashing lights of the screen, the plastic controller in your hands (the special small one they made for you), and the slowly climbing score in the top corner.
So close. So very close.
Thought you are only vaguely aware of them standing behind you and though youâre mind remains sternly and stubbornly focused on the screen, you cannot help the growing awareness of their presence. And knowing well enough their near complete disinterest in video games of any sort â aside from solitaire which NO does not count! - you start to sense their true purpose. And once you turn the slightest bit of your attention to the large being, their acute dubiety is hard to mistake. You reluctantly pause the game, and turn your head back and up â very up â to meet their gaze.
Oh yeah. Theyâre not happy.
You smile weakly and ask, âSoâŠ? Whatssup?â
They cross their arms and raise an eyebrow and immediately you blanch and begin the mental scouring to try and figure out what you did to upset them. You cleaned up the mess you made at breakfast and even apologized, admitting that spelunking into a cereal box was not a very smart idea. Even if it was fun. Then there was the mail incident. Which you also apologized for. And it was mostly junk mail anyway!
And there was no way they knew about your super secret candy stash. So that couldnât be it either.
â...whatâd I do?â you ask instead, ducking your head a little in preparation for whatever answer your giant friend is about to give.
âWhat time is it?â they ask simply with mild accusation.
You blink and turn back to the screen. âUh, itâs 2:35.â
âExactly.â
You stare at them without comprehension. Seeing your confusion, they tap their own watch strapped to their wrist. â2:35...AM.â
âOoooooh...â
âExactly. Oh.â Youâre mind turns to your unfinished game, feeling the all too real pang of yearning. The last level before the big boss fight. They one youâve struggled and toiled and labored to reach all week. So close! SO CLOSE!
âFive more minutes,â you say to them in an urgent and clear bargaining tone. âJust five minutes and Iâll be done.â
Your friend laughs, but without humor and they regard you with a critical eye. âThatâs not gonna work on me, bucko. I am well aware how long you version of five minutes can be. Not gonna happen. Itâs bedtime.â
You watch in mounting horror as their hands reached above you towards the console. You drop the controller and latch onto their wrist, your arms just long enough to wrap around it completely and allowing you a strong hold. âNO! PLEASE, I AM SO CLOSE! I WILL GIVE YOU ALL THE GOLD IN THE WORLD!â
They snort an amused laugh, but your antics and hysterics do little to prevent them from turning the game console off with a simple solitary push of the power button. The screen flickers and turns a bright blue and then black as the screen it turned off as well. You stare with wide eyed horror as all your hard work disappears and you let your grip on their wrist loosen and you fall the short drop to land on the desk. You lay there motionless for a long moment, staring up at the ceiling in shock. Soon, the large face of your friend â saboteur! - leans into view with dulled concern.
âYouâll live,â they said. âCome on. Bedtime.â
You mumble something in despair and kick your leg.
âHuh?â Your friend leans down further to hear your small voice. âSay that again.â
âYou have murdered me,â you reply. âI am dead. Betrayed and friendless. Leave me here to waste away and die.â
Their expression is one of concern and then flat eyed amusement.
âI thought you said I murdered you?â they ask with a sardonic twist to their mouth. You feel their fingers pushed at your side, slipping under your arm and back to lift you up off the table. Unresistant, you lay limp and lifeless in the cradle of their hands as they leave the room and make way towards the bedroom. âGo on and stop with this silliness.â
âItâs not silly!â you argue with real vehemence and real emotion. Your friend pauses in their stride and they regard with with open surprise as the strength of your opposition. The edges of your eyes tingle and pool with tears and you look away from them a little ashamed. A part of you is aware that you are acting beyond childish and just because you are so much smaller and a bit younger than they are doesnât excuse such behavior. Then again, there is a part of you that doesnât care. âI worked really hard to get to that level...really hard.â
âItâs just a video game,â they tell you, but gently and perhaps a bit apologetic, but it just makes you mad. It might seem trivial to them, but it was important to you. âYou can finish tomorrow. Itâs unhealthy to stay up so late like this. You need sleep. We both do.â
Their thumb pokes your belly and you involuntarily jerk, bringing your hands over your middle to guard against the offending digit.
âYou could have at least let me save!â you shoot back with a frown, turning over so youâre sitting in their hands rather than laying. They enter the bedroom and set you down on the side table as they pull the covers up and slip into the bed. You sit sulkily on the table, trying your best to radiate your displeasure. They look at you and smile indulgently. âYou really think Iâd ruin your game?â
âI donât think,â you shoot back. âI know!â
âNever heard of auto-save?â
You blink, the simmering indignation of your churning thoughts subsiding for a moment. âI...uh, yeah.â
âAnd did you know that if you go into the console settings, you can activate said auto-save?â
â...no?â
They just stare at you patiently, waiting for the slow molasses of your thought processes catch up and you sit up straighter with a start. You eye them hopefully. âYou...you mean my gameâs not ruined?â
âNope.â They reply, a ghost of a smile on their face as they reach out and offer you their hand. âSo now that youâre assured that the world is not ending, can we please go to sleep?â
With a spring of joyous energy you leap to your feet and practically throw yourself onto the palm of their hand. âTHANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU!â
They bring you over and settle you carefully onto their chest which vibrates with their laugh. âAlright, alright. Settle down.â
Even as theyâre actively trying to tuck you in, pulling the sheet over you, you still cannot contain the relief and joy and wiggle around in a mock happy dance while still laying on their chest.
â~Iâm gonna beat the boss tomorrow, Iâm gonna beat the boss tomorrow!~â
They sigh deeply and place their hand over you to keep you still and silence your song. But even muffles, your melody chanting of â~Iâm gonna beat the boss tomorrow!~â cannot be silenced completely.
âPlease, go to sleep!â They beg in exasperation.
You stop singing and cease your wiggling, pushing at their hand to let them know youâre done and after a moment they release you. You lay there giggling and breathless for a moment before you become aware of the weariness in your limbs and the lulling pull of fatigue at the corners of your mind. Your eyelids droop and you yawn wide and loudly with a little stretch. Assured that all is right with the world once more, you turn onto your side, snuggling into the sheet and the soft warm fabric of your friendâs night shirt with a contented sigh. You feel the relaxing touch of their finger brush against your back, rubbing gently, and just as sleep overtakes you, you hear their soft voice say, âGoodnight.â
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johncoveredinjam:
eatyourpaisley:
queenofadodi:
Men had no problem violating womenâs bodies while they had on corsets, petticoats and farthingales, so what the fuck makes you think a short skirt has anything to do with it? thank you
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âAs the grandchild of Polish and Russian Jews who lost them by the Nazis, no one wants wrenching denunciations of the Holocaust produced more than I do. What Hollywood refuses to admit is that âThe Pianistâ should never have been made, regardless of its inherent value. Why? Because its director belonged in prison, not in Paris pursing his art. You donât get to do creative, fulfilling work when you skip bail ⊠you get to hide in obscurity hoping not to get caught. Or, should we start giving Get Out Of Jail Free cards to every convicted sexual offender who might potentially write the next Great American Novel, paint the next masterpiece, compose a triumphant concerto? Oh, right, this logic only extends to already-rich, currently-bankable stars. Like R. Kelly, who released album after album while paying off witnesses and settling out of court with numerous victims to avoid ever having to face rape charges. Meanwhile, girls across the country get a message: If you come forward after a powerful man sexually assaults you, itâs your rapist â not you â who will receive protection.â â Corporate mediaâs rape problem: Supporting the stars, ignoring the charges (via azspot)
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âDonât be slutty, donât have sex. But be sexy. If youâre too sexy though and you get raped, then thatâs youâre own fault because youâre not actually supposed to listen to us about being sexy, even though we tell you your value is derived from how sexy you are. If you get into a position of power, we will assume that you used your sex appeal to get there and not your brains and we will mock you even though we told you the only thing that mattered was your sex appeal. Make yourself accessible to me, but holy shit stop being so desperate and needy. Donât be a tease. If we want to have sex with you, donât friendzone us, even though we just fucking told you not to have sex.â â patriarchy proverb (via stfueverything)
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Male as protector ataulfomangos:
iambugbrennan:
Protection then becomes a pretext to violence.
Read Kathleen Barry As always, Charlotte Perkins Gilman said it best:
One new indulgence was to go out evenings alone. This I worked out carefully in my mind, as not only a right but a duty. Why should a woman be deprived of her only free time, the time allotted to recreation? Why must she be dependent on some man, and thus forced to please him if she wished to go anywhere at night?
A stalwart man once sharply contested my claim to this freedom to go alone. âAny true man,â he said with fervor, âis always ready to go with a woman at night. He is her natural protector.â âAgainst what?â I inquired. As a matter of fact, the thing a woman is most afraid to meet on a dark street is her natural protector. Singular
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bye at people who see others with plastic surgery and say âthose arenât her boobs/nose/assâ etc
um bitch yes it is
if she paid for it that shit is hers
did u knit that sweater ur wearing by yourself? no? did you purchase it?
then itâs yours bitch
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Why I Fucking Love Teenage Girls (A Personal Essay from an Almost Adult) fygirlcrush:
A few months ago, I went to a big family gathering at my grandparentsâs house and ran into a cousin of mine. She seemed much older than the last time I had seen her (oh, the passage of time), so I asked her what age she was. She replied, âOh, Iâm fifteen.â And my immediate reaction?
âOh my god, I am so sorry.â
She laughed, which gives me a little bit of hope that maybe, for her, being fifteen isnât a complete fucking nightmare. But I think she recognized what I was saying on some level. Fifteen is, without a shadow of a doubt, the worst age. Wait, maybe fourteen. Thirteen? Twelve was pretty bad, too. Fuck it, they all suck. Nothing summarizes being a young girl better than this simple quote from The Virgin Suicides: âYouâre not even old enough to know how bad life gets.â âObviously, Doctor, youâve never been a thirteen-year-old girl.â
Itâs amazing, really. I spent my entire childhood counting down the days until I could be a teenager. I planned everything out perfectly: I would go shopping with friends by myself downtown by fourteen, kissing cute boys by fifteen, losing my virginity by sixteen, driving a cute car by seventeen, and off to university to have even more amazing experiences at eighteen. My life would be a fucking commercial, starring me, my best friends, and Jordan Catalano. It was going to happen.
Until it didnât.
Now, donât get me wrong, I actually had a few of those things on my list. I drove a pretty bitchinâ baby blue VW Beetle and I did end up going to university. Iâm luckier than most. But where were the boys? Where were the cute clothes? Who took my fantasy and dumped a steaming bag of hot garbage juice on it?
We sell this idea of what youâre life is going to be to young girls from the fucking get-go. To be fair, thatâs advertising, right? Selling you the life you want, no matter the age? Well, unfortunately, little girls canât see through the bullshit. We internalize all of it. And thatâs what makes the hardships of being a teenage girl sting even more.
I was thrown into the pot of steaming dogshit pretty early. I was wearing a bra at nine, dealing with self loathing by ten, and by twelve, I was officially balls-deep in it. And it didnât go away. Between twelve and (Iâll be generous and say) seventeen, all the garbage just kept circulating in my system. It would just evolve, or die down, only to flare up at the slightest irritation. Thatâs what being a teenage girl is: youâre full of poison. Mostly, you just poison yourself over and over again, but sometimes some of it leaks out of you and onto someone else.
At twelve, most girls understand real sadness. Twelve, though it seems so young to us now, felt really old at the time. By this point, youâve already been told how to be, and realized that youâre not measuring up. By twelve, your skin is already shit, and your body is too flabby or your breasts havenât come in yet. Worst of all, when youâre a girl, by twelve youâve probably already been in a situation that made you feel threatened sexually. Let that sink in. From the top of my head, I can think of four moments in my life, before the age of twelve, when someone crossed a line with me. Four. This is not abnormal.
By thirteen, youâre already prepared to destroy yourself. When youâre a sad teenage girl, you try a lot of things out, see which ways work best for you. Itâs like you can feel the poison bubbling under your skin, all the time. I recognized this in other girls. I could see them clawing at their skin, lashing out at others, trying everything they could possibly dream up. So they cut themselves, make themselves sick, scream at their mothers, smoke, drink, send pictures to the wrong person, do things they might not want to do. Because literally anything, anything that might make things go away for five minutes, is worth it.
By fourteen, I felt like a veteran. In my mind, I had seen some shit, man. I had felt some fucking feelings. And honestly, I thought things were getting better. I was still a bit broken from things that had happen in middle school, but hey, this is high school! I had been dreaming about this forever! It has to be better, right?
At fifteen, the optimism in me had died. I woke up every day with an anchor on my chest. I went from a solid B student to barely passing. I wouldnât go out with friends, because suddenly they were branching out, meeting new people, and I didnât know how to handle that. My lifelong fear of men really didnât do me any favors with boys. When you flinch every time they move a hand too quickly, and find it nearly impossible to look them in the eye without wanting to throw up, you donât get asked out much. My mother didnât know what to do with me, so I would spend all day, every day, locked in my room. University? Fuck no, man. I could barely get my ass out of bed as a basic daily requirement, how could I possibly want to continue my education?
Sixteen was⊠different. Good and bad. I had woken up from the dead, but itâs not like things just go away. I was doing well in school, I started thinking about university again, and I even hung out with friends sometimes. But things were not great internally. I gave myself over to some extremely unhealthy behavior, which went completely unnoticed. Whatever. Itâs still kind of a blur to me. What can I say? Iâm an almost adult, Iâm allowed to not have everything figured out.
And then, like the rising sun, seventeen happened. I got better. I worked harder. I had a goal, and I was rising to the challenge. I actually enjoyed school, and sometimes, I even went to parties (and had a little bit of fun!). I gained enough control over my unhealthier behavior to start healing, even if the process has been painfully slow. I finally understood what it was like to wake up and be okay. I graduated high school and went off to the university of my choice. Not happily ever after, but Iâll save that for another time.
Now, if youâre still reading, you might be confused. Why am I listing off all the crappy shit I felt between the ages of twelve and seventeen? If you hated being a teenage girl so much, why do you love them?
Because even with every single fucking thing a teenage girl has to deal with, they still manage to do something so mind blowing, yet completely simple: love, unabashedly.
You know those girls everyone loves to shit all over? The ones who really fucking love something? Those girls, man. They take all that energy, all that circulating fire in their veins, and instead of letting it destroy them, they choose to love, ferociously. Be it a band, or a book, or a series of films. They do it to keep themselves sane, and yet we mock them for it. Teenage girls find a buoy for themselves in the sea of emotional ruin, and they hold on tighter than anyone else.
One of the most popular ways people like to hate teenage girls is to complain about their âinsaneâ crushes on boy band members. Now, let me fucking tell you something: those big dumb crushes are what helps a teenage girl develop her sexuality in a safe environment that she can control. In her world, she can listen to One Direction and hear all these songs about how great she is, and how much these cute non-threatening boys want to make her feel special. Why is this so important? Because no one is pushing them. Thereâs no fourteen year old boy shoving his clammy hands down your shirt without your consent. These fantasy boys are not convincing a girl to send naked pictures, only to show all their friends and call her a slut. In the fantasy land of boy bands, the girl has all the power. And we need to stop judging them for wanting to escape into that.
I love teenage girls because even if they hate themselves, they love other people. I remember how I felt, seeing other girls go through what I was going through. It ruined me. I wanted so desperately to help them out of the muck, but when youâre submerged yourself, thereâs not a lot you can do. Teenage girls understand, and they want to make sure no one else feels the way they do. I see it on websites like Tumblr all the time. Itâs fucking beautiful.
I love teenage girls because society loves to blame them for everything. The self-obsessed teenage girl is always the face of the âproblemâ with youth today. Apparently, these superficial teenage girls who love their iPhones too much are the issue. Not, you know, the people conditioning them to believe that their worth is tied to how many Likes they got on their last selfie. No, youâre right, letâs focus on the girls who post on Facebook too much. Great.
Iâm in film school now, so often I get asked, âWhat kind of work do you want to make?â Usually, I donât have an answer. Good work, I guess? But thinking about it, I know what I want to do: I want to make movies for teenage girls. Stories about teenage girls with agency, who rebel, who take all that energy and channel it into something, even if itâs not necessarily positive. I want to represent the girls I love so much. Because I have been one of those girls, and I will always carry a part of that with me.
So just try and talk shit about teenage girls around me. Just fucking try it.
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commiekinkshamer:
i have no problem with pointing out that anyone of any gender can be an abuser, rapist, pedophile etc because thatâs absolutely true.
but the problem with always emphasizing âyes but it happens to everyone, not just women (or people of colour, or trans* people, etc)!â is that it depoliticizes the issue.
violence is not an accident, it is reflective of social power relations that permeate society at every level
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âLike most girls, my daughter hears, âThatâs a pretty dress, did you pick it yourself?â or âWhat lovely hair you have,â or âYou have the most amazing eyelashes,â or âI like the bows on your shoes,â or âYou are so cuteâ almost every time somebody engages in conversation with her.
If family, friends, shop assistants, complete strangers, and even Santa only remark on how girls look, rather than what they think and do, how can we expect girls to believe that they have anything more to offer the world than their beauty?â â How To Break The Ice With Little Girls That Doesnât Involve Commenting On Their Appearance (via brute reason)
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âIf you kill a person, youâre a murderer. If you steal, no one would hesitate to call you a thief. But in America, when you force yourself on someone sexually, some people will jump through flaming hoops not to call you a rapist.â â From my latest at the Guardian, When you call a rape anything but rape, you are just making excuses for rapists (via jessicavalenti)
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Men still have trouble recognizing that a woman can be complex, can have ambition, good looks, sexuality, erudition and common sense. A woman can have all those facets, and yet men, in literature and in drama, seem to need to simplify women, to polarize us as either the whore or the angel. - Natalie Dormer
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âPornography reveals that male pleasure is inextricably tied to victimizing, hurting, exploiting; that sexual fun and sexual passion in the privacy of the male imagination are inseparable from the brutality of male history. The private world of sexual dominance that men demand as their right and their freedom is the mirror image of the public world of sadism and atrocity that men consistently and self- righteously deplore. It is in the male experience of pleasure that one finds the meaning of male history.â â Andrea Dworkin, Pornography: Men Possessing Women (via staininyourbrain)
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â17% of cardiac surgeons are women, 17% of tenured professors are women. It just goes on and on. And isnât that strange that thatâs also the percentage of women in crowd scenes in movies? What if weâre actually training people to see that ratio as normal so that when youâre an adult, you donât notice? âŠWe just heard a fascinating and disturbing study where they looked at the ratio of men and women in groups. And they found that if thereâs 17% women, the men in the group think itâs 50-50. And if thereâs 33% women, the men perceive that as there being more women in the room than men.â â Source: NPR: Hollywood Needs More Women
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âI donât have the language for this substratum of violence we refuse to name as such. I donât mean the non-rape-rape, the assaults that donât result in bruises. This article is not a repetition of the now-clichĂ© reminder that most rape isnât a stranger jumping out of the bushes. I mean the texture of 20-something heterosexual sex in America, the insidious habits and habituations that look exactly like violence except, somehow, weâve decided they arenât violent. We chalk it up to awkwardness, or kink, or just plain old misogyny that is so commonplace and inevitable that resisting it would be like protesting the weather. I find that friends who have been raped before and named that for what it was are no more willing to insist upon the inexcusability of this excused category. Nor are the organizers, the feminists with boots on the ground and the right vocabulary at the tip of their tongues. A woman is only allotted so much anger in her life. In crossing that limit she is rendered hysterical and invisible all at once. What is bad enough to cash your tokens? Weâve decided that if it isnât what we call violence, we will count our blessings and take it like a woman. (âWomen are afraid that men will kill them.â)
The ubiquitous negotiations and morning-after bruises and disappearing condoms arenât what we talk about when we talk about sexual violence.â â That bad (via brutereason)
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malesexistbehavior:
this-tragic-affair:
ok so all these guys who are like âmen have it hard too!!! weâre expected to be manly and emotionless, we have feelings!!!â do realize that itâs other men who enforce those standards on guys. literally guys created those standards to be more powerful than women. so maybe instead of getting angry at women for talking about their oppression, realize that you should be fighting with women against unfair gender expectations and inequality
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âWhen you want to fall â fall. Evaporate and condensate, but when you rain, come down as a fucking hurricane.
If the birds stop chirping, if the sunlight forgets you, if youâve got your shirttail caught in the fence of your spine, and you have no way of getting loose,
remember that I am here, that I will bail you out of your own prison, that I will lay with you the morning after you fall in love and tell you that itâs okay to love, that itâs okay to trust another human being with more than you knew you could.
I will tell you how I held you as a child, listened to your heartbeat on those sleepless nights, that I loved your small body and your pebble fists and blessed the skeleton inside of you â
that you are not beautiful because a boy tells you so, but beautiful because you exist.
And I apologize for giving you such nervous hands and a sine wave heartbeat. And when you start putting question marks after everything you say â know that
I may not always have the answers, but together, we can try to make sense of it all.
Iâll take you back to my West Virginia. My Gloucester. My honeysuckles and tool sheds. The chicken coops. The abandoned loves. Iâll show you what the August grass feels like. Iâll distract you with tree roots, with atlases, with lessons about the sea, and until your question marks are bent into arrows, I will not
stop. So shoot them blindly. Hurt and be hurt. Be the bird as much as you are the hand.
For I will stand behind you, breaking every vow that I made to protect you. When I notice your wings are peeking out from beneath your shirt collar, Iâll
tie my hands back from clipping them. I will hide every rope in the country so that the love inside of me doesnât tether your ankles to home.
You are seventeen, and you are free.
But when you want to come home, Iâll be here. In the wind chimes, in the small moths that flutter towards your light, in the way dawn still breaks the same blue eggs in every place that you decide to go,
Iâll be here. Less a ghost than the wind. Less the wind than a soft hum in the back of your throat, telling you that itâs okay to sing, that itâs okay to bray,
that your song is a song that youâll spend the rest of your life trying to understand.
That when the birds talk you into flying south, itâs okay to pick up and leave.â â "To My Daughter At Seventeen," Shinji Moon (via commovente)
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âWhat To Do When Your Boyfriendâs Asshole Best Friend Says, âHey, Never Trust Anything That Bleeds For Seven Days And Doesnât Die, Right?â OR The Only Poem Iâll Ever Write About Periods. Donât excuse him because heâs had at least three lite beers and is sweating through his black button down that his mom or exgirlfriend probably bought him. Donât excuse him because heâs been turned down by the last six girls he went on dates with after meeting them on tindr with a picture thatâs seven years old Donât excuse him because heâs usually such a nice guy because you donât want to be a bitch because you donât want to cause a scene because when you were seventeen your sister told you no one likes an angry feminist
Tell him, Hey, Asshole: Let me explain something to you. Every goddamn motherfucking month since I was eleven, a part of me tore itself to shreds ripped itself apart inside me and then remade itself.
So yes, I bleed for seven days and I donât die You know what else can do that? Gods. Immortal beings. Things of legend. Fuck, I can even create life.
So I say, never trust anything that canât bleed for seven days and not die. You know what that makes it? Weak Fallible Mortal. So letâs see, hon, What youâre made of. If you can bleed for seven days and not die.
Rip out his jugular with your teeth. And when he bleeds for seven seconds and dies, spit on his corpse and say, I thought not.â â Katherine Tucker (determined-in-slc)
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âItâs not that women shouldnât get plastic surgery; itâs that they should make every effort for that surgery to be invisible, seamless, unnoticeable. Good plastic surgery is OK, but âbadâ plastic surgery â surgery that makes itself visible â now thatâs abject.
Why? Because it shows that the work of performing ideal femininity is just that: work. And ideal femininity never illuminates itself as a construction; it must present itself as ânatural.â Which is also why it comes as such a surprise when someone like BeyoncĂ© speaks openly about the exhaustive regimen necessary to get her body into post-baby shape: It speaks truth to the lie of the effortless, immaculate, eternally young and fit female form.
Plastic-surgery shaming is thus tantamount to blaming the victims of this ideal for working so hard to achieve what weâve told them, for decades, they must do. Itâs bullshit, itâs unfeminist, and itâs just one of many ways in which society damns women for taking its ideals concerning sexuality or the body to their natural extension.â â Whatâs Really Behind The Ridicule Of RenĂ©e Zellwegerâs Face
People were cruel about her appearance for years (Iâve heard those stupid lemon-sucking âjokesâ countless times), then act shocked that she altered her appearance and criticise her for that as well. Whether you get plastic surgery or not, you just canât win.
(via fucknosexistcostumes)
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anonymous asked: As a guy in terrified. If I piss a woman off, all she has to do is falsely accuse me of rape, then my life will be ruined. I'll be labeled a sex offender and go to prison, because the judge always listens to the woman as they see her as a damsel in distress. I'm terrified. The accusations are happening more and more because of feminism. This is why we need Men's Rights.
okcreepsters answered: As a woman Iâm terrified. If I piss a man off, he might threaten, assault, rape, beat, batter, or murder me; then my life will be ruined. Iâll be labeled a âslutâ who âwanted itâ and have my character dragged through the mud, either by law officers, my friends and/or family, or the court of public opinion, because of rape culture. Violence against women is happening more and more because of men like you. We are literally being killed, tortured, and abused by male entitlement.
This is why we need Feminism.
S
okcreepsters:
yeahlikethedeliveryservice:
If judges âAlways listen to the womanâ then why is it that 97% of rapists are not punished even when they have been convicted? And although nearly one in evry five women actually does report being raped, anywhere from 54% to 90% of rapes go unreported, because women know that 94% of reported cases donât end in a conviction, they typically end in the woman being accused of being a slut, sometimes facing massive social shaming that can end in serious consequences, such as academic retaliation if you accuse the wrong boy at school, further sexual violence and even discharge from the military if you report your C.O., and the ever-present fear that a man you accuse will come after you, rape you again, beat you, possibly even kill youâand if they didnât care the first time, why would they care if it happens again?
Trust me, sweetheart. your fear is completely unfounded. Men do not need activists for their rights. Men need to wake the fuck up to the privilege and rights they already have and stop acting like scared children every time the faintest whisper of a glimmer of what it must be like to be a woman threatens to become even the faintest part of their reality.
-----------------------------------------
clarawebbwillcutoffyourhead:
"The only thing more disturbing than that paradigm is the fact that most rapists are normal guys, guys we might work beside or socialise with, our neighbours or even members of our family. Where menâs violence against women is normalised in our society, we often we compartmentalise it to fit our view of the victim. If a prostitute is raped or beaten, we may consider it an awful occupational hazard âgiven her line of work.â We rarely think âshe didnât get beaten â somebody (i.e a man) beat herâ. Her line of work is dangerous, but mainly because there are men who want to hurt women. If a husband batters his wife, we often unthinkingly put it down to socio-economic factors or alcohol and drugs rather than how men and boys are taught and socialised to be men and view women.
âŠ
What would make this tragedy even more tragic would be if we were to separate what happened to Jill from cases of violence against women where the victim knew, had a sexual past with, talked to the perpetrator in a bar, or went home with him. It would be tragic if we did not recognise that Bayleyâs previous crimes were against prostitutes, and that the social normalisation of violence against a woman of a certain profession and our inability to deal with or talk about these issues, socially and legally, resulted in untold horror for those victims, and led to the brutal murder of my wife. We cannot separate these cases from one another because doing so allows us to ignore the fact that all these crimes have exactly the same cause â violent men, and the silence of non-violent men.â
from When Will We Stop Being Shocked At How Normal A Rapist Seemed by Jill Meagherâs husband
-----------------------------------------
âFemale-assigned intersex kidsâ vaginal canal size is also assessed by doctors, to ensure that itâs long enough to fit a penis inside of it. Doctors might surgically construct or re-construct vaginas, which can result in a host of health problems and necessitate multiple, multiple surgeries. This is especially the case since most intersex kids have these surgeries very young, and when their bodies grow into their adult forms, more surgeries are necessary to keep their vagina size in proportion. Non-surgical methods are also used to increase or maintain vaginal length by regularly using medical dildos to stretch the vagina over months and years. (Itâs kind of like braces for your vagina, but much, much worse.) Just like there are no standards for how long a clitoris âcanâ be before itâs classified as a penis, there arenât absolute standards as to how long a vagina is for it to be of ânormalâ length. I had a dilation procedure performed for almost every exam I had with intersex doctors from the time I was 8 until I was 16, so that they could check how long my vagina was as I grew. I absolutely hated these procedures. I mean, imagine a man as old as your father or your grandfather, who you donât know, inserting a medical dildo into you each time you saw him, knowing that you canât question the doctorâs orders and just accept that you have to undergo these uncomfortable procedures for your health. Imagine a decade or so later, realizing that these procedures did nothing to track your health, and had everything to do with grown men feeling good about the fact that you could fuck some dude someday like a ânormal girlâ. That all those traumatizing procedures werenât actually medically relevant at all, and it actually was within my right to refuse those examinations.
I didnât know any of that at the time.
I also had no idea that I wouldnât want to ultimately have the kind of sex they assumed Iâd be having, adding yet another layer of this-was-totally-unnecessary/messed-up to my history.
Other kids shouldnât have to go through this. Other adults shouldnât have revelations some day far into the future that what was happening to them WASNâT okay, and their traumatic feelings ARE valid, and the whole system of how intersex people are conceptualized and âtreatedâ IS entirely fucked.
And itâs gotta change. Weâve gotta change it.â â Claudia at Autostraddle
I just read this article and was reminded once again how invisible the intersex community often is⊠we need to signal boost this shit to let people know that this kind of âmedical treatmentâ is NOT okay.
(via bossybussy)
when something qualifies as rape or sexual assault in any other context it should not become magically acceptable when doctors do it. Â i donât know why thatâs such a difficult concept for people to understand.
(via rapeculturerealities)
----------------------------------------
things i need white feminists to do before i will take you seriously callingoutbigotry:
eshusplayground:
so-treu:
i need you to come to terms with the way white women have facilitated some of the most unspeakable violence upon black and brown and indigenous people, bodies, and community. often in the name of white womanhood. often in the name of freedom. often in the name of feminism.
i need you to understand that you killed Emmitt Till. i need you to think about all of the black men and boys that have been murdered because either you accused them or your men took it upon themselves to defend *your* honor. i need you to look at pictures of lynched bodies and think about what role you played in it.
i need you to know the names of the women raped by U.S. military in countries we invaded, in part because feminists said we needed to save the women and/or children and supported the various invasions.
i need you to know that those reproductive rights you all are up in arms about were created via the destruction and maiming of black and brown bodies. i need you to know who Anarcha, Lucy, and Betsy are, and what was done to them. i need you to know the names of the Puerto Rican women who were lied to and who died so that The Pill could bring you your precious sexual liberation. i need you to know the central role white women played in sterilization programs that targeted black women, poor women, anyone they deemed too âfeebleâ to procreate. i need you to think about why more big name feminist organizations are up in arms about the most recent kick up about contraception than about sterilized black women getting compensated for what was done to them.
i need you to understand that at this point, itâs not about privilege. itâs not about you being able to find products that work with your hair no matter where you go. itâs about peopleâs lives. itâs about WOC lives and a centuries old disregard white women have shown for them. itâs about that fact that white women have been an active agent in the destruction of our communities, our histories, and our families. for centuries.
and WOC donât owe you a damn thing. not. one. thing.
so get that through your skulls then maybe we can work together. maybe. A good resource on the dangerous, painful, and deadly medical malpractice and experimentation inflicted on Black women for the benefit of white women is Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present by Harriet A. Washington
-----------------------------------------
In pop culture, girls who crush hopelessly on guys they canât have are painted as just that â hopeless. Over and over again, weâre taught that girls who openly express sexual or romantic interest in guys who donât want them are pitiable, stalkerish, desperate, crazy bitches. More often than not, theyâre also portrayed as ugly â Â whether physically, emotionally or both â Â in order to further establish their undesirability as an objective fact. Both narratively and, as a consequence, in real life, men are given free reign to snub, abuse, mislead and talk down to such women: weâre raised to believe that female desire is unseemly, so that any consequent shaming is therefore deserved. There is no female-equivalent Friend Zone terminology because, in the language of our culture, a manâs romantic choices are considered sacrosanct and inviolable. If a girl has been told no, then she has only herself to blame for anything that happens next â but if a woman says no, then she must not really mean it. Or, if she does, she shouldnât: the rejected man is a universally sympathetic figure, and everyone from moviegoers to platonic onlookers will scream at her to just give him a chance, as though her rejection must always be unfounded rather than based on the fact that he had a chance, and blew it. And even then, give him another one! The pathos of Single Nice Guys can only be eased by pity-sex with unwilling women that blossoms into romance!
âLamenting The Friend Zone, Or: The âNice Guyâ Approach To Perpetrating Sexist Bullshit
----------------------------------------
Six in 10 girls quit activities they love because of how they feel about their looks
Sorry that this isnât Architecture related, but this is a serious issue. I can tell you from a personal point of view that I actually quit hockey when I was younger because of my self esteem issues. Girls and boys all around the world find a sport they love, but have it cut short because they do not like the way they look.
Girls and boys need their coaches, parents, friends etc. to help them through this. They need to be told that they should focus on their love for whatever sport it is instead of feeling bad about the way they look.
Pass this on, and let people know that everybody has a chance to be who they want to be without thinking about the way they look.
------------------------------------------
When My Daughter Asks If Anyone Will Ever Love Her
writingsforwinter:
I will tell her, history is filled with ruins,
the history of love most all, and you may encounter several of them
along the way. But most of those ruins were caused by wars,
and your heart is so open and ready, so wanting,
that even a sniper would never dare to shoot it down.
I will tell her, you are skin filled with questions and bones
scored by bitten-back words, and yes, someone
will want to hear all of them one day,
no matter how long it takes to empty you
of the desire to apologize as soon as you open your mouth.
When my daughter asks if anyone will ever love her,
I will tell her, whether or not you know it yet,
someone youâve never met before is hoping
to become someone you have met before, and will continue to meet
for the rest of your life.
Will tell her, the alphabet was created for communication
but you will know when someone loves you
by the way they forget every single letter
just by looking at the back of your neck.
Will tell her, you are beautiful in each time zone-
and one day, you will find someone
who will tell you so in every single one.
And finally, to my daughter I will say:
but all of this is unimportant
unless you love yourself. ------------------------------------------------------
wondermaid:
if you think gender has nothing to do with rape you need to fucking do your research
here look iâll do some for you
99% of rapists are men 91% of victims are women no one is saying that men canât be raped we would NEVER say that. but when we are talking about the prevalence of rape culture in a patriarchal society, thatâs when we are focusing on women. and you all only ever bring up male survivors to derail discussions and further your anti-feminist (misogynist) agendas anyway. --------------------------------------------------------
mikroblogolas:
society teaches women that if they havenât been kissed by a man or had sex with a man, there must be something wrong with them. men learn that if women donât want to kiss or have sex with them, there must be something wrong with women (and possibly the government and world), not themselves. ------------------------------------------
Gender dictates our physical movement, how our walk should look, our mannerisms, how we sit, the tone of our voice, it dumbs girls down, it restricts our choice of childhood toys and teenaged sports, it chases us out of STEM subjects, it tracks us into lower paying career opportunities, it guilts us into constant caregiving, it despises us as we age, it mocks and belittles our concerns, it says we lie about rape, it prostitutes us, it marries us and beats us, it denies us control of our own bodies, it keeps our brain-dead bodies alive against our express wishes, so that the government may harvest another citizen from us, it aborts us or abandons us 10 days after birth simply because we are female.
Women and girls are oppressed on the basis of our biological sex. That oppression takes many forms. The social control system which is used to frame all of this oppression as natural and desirous is called Gender. Femininity, with all its harmful effects, is forced onto females.
â â
ppp
(via
radical-bias
) ------------------------------------------------------
modifiedmummytobe:
Instead of me having to explain why I donât like rape jokes, how about you explain why you find them funny. ----------------------------------------------------- â
Radical feminists often argue that BDSM practice is about degrading, humiliating, violating and torturing women. It is patriarchal violence against womenâwhether it occurs in your bedroom, on your computer screen, or is simulated during your lunchtime book reading.
We do not blame women who participate in it, but we will analyze it through a feminist lens.
BDSM is the legitimization of domestic violence against women. Case in point: The Feminist and the Cowboy. Author Alisa Valdes wrote an erotic semi-autobiographical book about a dominant lover who violently fâked her under the guise of consensual âplayâ. After her book was released, Vales wrote a blog post detailing the real life abuse that the âcowboyâ inflicted on her. Though the abuse was framed as consensual in her book, her real life experience with the cowboy involved being raped, verbally abused, threatened, and abandoned once he discovered her pregnancy.
Similarly, during a recent BDSM play abuse session, abuser Steven Lock strangled a woman he had recently met on a dating site with a rope, chained her to his bed, lashed her 14 times, fâkd her, and then left her chained. She had to call a friend to help her escape, but Lock was cleared of all abuse charges once he claimed the assault had been âconsensualâ.
BDSM occurs in the context of patriarchal rape culture, where women always âdeserveâ the rape, violence, abuse and death that men dish out to them, and women who object to this treatment are called names, and dismissed out-of-hand.
One of the names we are called is âsex negativeâ, which as many of us know, is actually a code word for âfrigidâ where âfrigidâ, as many feminists know, is actually a pejorative referring to our refusal to please men. Radical feminists embrace our refusal to give a fâk about what men want, so we are happy to be considered prude if it means liberation for women.
We are also told that we are âslut shamingâ when we object to BDSM, even though we know that no woman is a slut, and no woman is to blame for the ways that men abuse her.
We are told that we are ânot respecting the agencyâ of women who âchooseâ to engage in BDSM when recognize that playing a submissive role in sexual situations is likely born out of Societal Stockholm Syndrome. We never, however, blame the women who participate in the practiceâ our blame sits squarely on the shoulders of men who dominate women.
In so blaming, we are told that we are âkink shamingâ the men who like to beat and sexually torture women for fun. A good example of one such man is Snowdrop Explodes who was invited as a âBDSM expertâ to talk about BDSM and abuse on the site Womanist Musings. It was revealed that this so-called âexpertâ had in the past blogged without apology about his plan to rape and murder a woman in his local park. These are the types of men we are âkink shamingâ.
Women who suffer abuse from BDSM are often blamed for having not âsaid the safe wordâ when they express discomfort about the abuse they received, which is clearly a case of blaming the victim.
Often women who report on the abuse they experience are silenced, as Vales was when her agent forced her to take down her confessional blog post, or as her new boyfriend does by thanking the cowboy for âtaming herâ.
Radical feminist are infuriated by this normalization of male abuse of women. (Just this morning I saw a copy of 50 Shades of Gray for 30% off at the local grocery store ferchrissakes). But there is one objection sometimes brought up when discussing BDSM that I havenât yet addressed. That objection is: What about the submissive men in BDSM? They consent to violent beatings and humiliation too, so how can you say BDSM is strictly violence against women?â
Firstly Iâll point out the fairly obvious: violence, humiliation, and abuse against any person is dehumanizing and wrong.
Leaving this point aside, however, Iâll note that the majority of BDSM occurs in a male-dominant/female submissive context.
In preparation for her documentary The Price of Pleasure, Chung Sun studied 50 of the 275 most popular pornographic films as noted by best-selling and most-rented list reported by Adult Video News. In the films, men being spanked constituted less than 3% of the total spankings that occurred onscreen. In fact,
âmost of the targets of physical aggression were women, who usually responded with expressions of pleasure (encouragement, sexual moans, etc) or with no change at all in facial expression or interruption of action.â (quoted from Big Porn, Inc, page 172-173)
So we know that male recipients of aggression constituted less than 3% of the on-screen spankings tallied in the study. The fact that the vast majority of recipients of violence on screen in the most rented videos tells us something about BDSM. It tells us that BDSM is an instrument of violence, and the target of that violence is women.
Obviously, the small number of male submissives will never be able to âeven outâ the harms inflicted against women in BDSM. It is never okay for women to be abused by men.
Radical feminists know that patriarchal society is set up with a sex-based hierarchy, and that hierarchy is perpetuated using gender. Masculinity is the gender males are socialized into, and it consists in valuing domination, power, invasion, and taking-up-space. Femininity is the gender females are socialized into and consists in submission, powerlessness, having no boundaries, and taking-up-as-little-space-as-possible. As Lierre Keith puts it, âGender is who gets to be human, and who gets hurtâ.
In the context of life as a man in the dominator class, a small percentage of men may wish to âtry onâ what they perceive to be a feminized role during sexual interactions. They may find themselves turned on by imagining what it might be like to be sexually terrorized. They may get a boner from temporarily adopting the submissiveâaka feminineârole. These submissive roles are often explicitly feminized, and submissive men are often referenced as âsissiesââ a word used to humiliate men by implying that they bear some resemblance to their much-despised counterpart: woman.
But radical feminists know that âtrying onâ a submissive role is the action of a supremely privileged individual, who, as a part of his Sunday-Funday-fâk-fest, wants to âspice it upâ by having his nipples tweaked. But he can always put away his ball gag and join the world of men and masculinity. We women, however, cannot escape the day-to-day sexual terrorism that he vacations in, because it is our lives.
The existence of male submissives in BDSM practice does nothing to excuse, nullify, or disprove the fact that BDSM is violence against women. We know that liberated sexuality does not follow the patriarchal model of dominance and submission, and that BDSM is the normalization of domestic violence.
â â
Liberation Collective: BDSM is Violence Against Women
--------------------------------------------------------
smoochums:
women grow hair on their boobs and their butts and their legs and their arms and their stomachs and their face and really anywhere their genetics decides to have hair and it is perfectly normal what isnt normal is men who have never touched a razor trying to shame women for not looking like a hairless baby ----------------------------------------------
shakethecobwebs:
deathexclamations:
shakethecobwebs:
boycott dudes who manipulate you into meeting their emotional or sexual needs but wonât date you 2k14 why the fuck are you interested in someone like that in the first place ? Fuck anyone who tries to manipulate you. manipulation, by its very definition, is not a choice.
so maybe you should take your victim-blaming somewhere else.
----------------------------------
âUnder the current âtyranny of slendernessâ women are forbidden to become large or massive; they must take up as little space as possible. The very contours of a womanâs body takes on as she matures - the fuller breasts and rounded hips - have become distateful. The body by which a woman feels herself judged and which by rigorous discipline she must try to assume is the body of early adolescence, slight and unformed, a body lacking flesh or substance, a body in whose very contours the image of immaturity has been inscribed. The requirement that a woman maintain a smooth and hairless skin carries further the theme of inexperience, for an infantilized face must accompany her infantilized body, a face that never ages or furrows its brow in thought. The face of the ideally feminine woman must never display the marks of character, wisdom, and experience that we so admire in men.â â Sandra Lee Bartky,
Foucault, Femininity, and the Modernization of Patriarchal Power
(via
sociophilia
) ----------------------------------------------------------
altonym:
why does EVERY thing made for male survivors have to have some part of it that goes âSEE, this happens to MEN tooâ with the implicit tone of âso there, misandrists, the dark secret you were trying to hide!!!!â
like do you really think that for every pound not spent on male survivors, another chocolate truffle gets purchased for the minibar at the womenâs shelter jazz lounge?? nobody gives a shit about survivors in general and that actually disproportionately affects women so I just donât get what the point is, and I am literally within the subset you are claiming to speak on behalf of
say âthese are male survivorsâ, say âthe abuse of men can sometimes differ in natureâ (because for some forms of abuse thatâs true) but you do nothing for us by posing male survivors as a group as some kind of anti-feminist gotcha, itâs just dehumanising, itâs clear to me that people who do that donât actually care about abuse survivors but do care about slam-dunking their angry message board reply ------------------------------------------------------
âThe point is not for women simply to take power out of menâs hands, since that wouldnât change anything about the world. Itâs a question precisely of destroying that notion of power.â
â Simone de Beauvoir
--------------------------------------------------------
herbackrowkings:
lalondes:
>teenage actressâs private nudes get leaked
>teenage actress is reviled as a slut and a whore and a bad role model
>james franco asks a seventeen-year-old girl if he can meet her in a private hotel room
>james franco gets to go on saturday night live and joke about what a silly doofus he is for soliciting sex from a girl literally half his age ------------------------------------------------------
howunpleasant:
when i was little i actually questioned why girls were supposed to cross their legs and when i was told âbecause boys will look up your skirtâ i said âthen tell boys not to look up our skirtsâ and my grandma got really angry with me but my uncle thought i was great and gave me a high five -----------------------------------------------------
âTo expose the victimization of women by men is to be blamed for creating it and for making women into passive victims. The liberals fail to recognize that womenâs victimization can be acknowledged without labeling women passive. Passive and victim do not necessarily go together. It is the liberals who equate victimization with passivity. It is they who devise this equation [âŠ] It seems obvious that one can recognize women as victims of surrogacy, pornography, and prostitution without stripping them of agency and without depriving them of some ability to act under oppressive conditions.â â Janice G. Raymond, âSexual and Reproductive Liberalismâ. (via
womentoadmire
) --------------------------------------------------------
âChildren who are victimized through sexual abuse often begin to develop deeply held tenets that shape their sense of self: My worth is my sexuality. Iâm dirty and shameful. I have no right to my own physical boundaries. That shapes their ideas about the world around them. No one will believe me. Telling the truth results in bad consequences. People canât be trusted. It doesnât take long for children to begin to act in accordance with these belief systems.
For girls who have experienced incest, sexual abuse, or rape, the boundaries between love, sex, and pain become blurred. Secrets are normal, and shame is a constant. The lessons learned during sexual abuse are valuable ones for recruitment into the commercial sex industry. As Andrea Dworkin once said, âIncest is boot camp for prostitution.â Numerous studies estimate that 70 to 90 percent of commercially sexually exploited youth and adult women in the sex industry were sexually abused prior to their recruitment. No other industry can boast of such a large correlation between early sexual abuse and future employment. Sexual abuse lays the groundwork.ïżœïżœ â Girls Like Us, Rachel Lloyd, p 65 (via
smashesthep
-------------------------------------------------------
âRape jokes are not jokes. Woman-hating jokes are not jokes. These guys are telling you what they think. When you laugh along to get their approval, you give them yours.â â Thomas Millar,
Meet the Predators
 ------------------------------------------------------
âI reject all of this stupid, boring, outdated shit. I reject your numbers. I reject the idea that my personality is a negligible variable in the equation of my happiness. I reject the implication that you understand my relationship better than I do. Do not insult my intelligence by telling me that the best way to avoid divorce is to marry a stranger when youâre too young to even know yourself. Donât try to bluff me into swallowing your lie that a world with more marriages is objectively a better world. You cannot trick me into believing that divorce is a failure of society and not a grand fucking triumph, and you will not drag me and the rest of society into the past with you.
Itâs no coincidence that the people most concerned with clapping a chastity belt on the entire earth and swallowing the key are the people currently (and historically) in power in our country. And itâs also no coincidence that the people with the most to gain by maintaining âtraditionalâ family structuresâby keeping women dependent and docile and shutting everyone else upâhave the least nuanced understanding of how actual human beings interact with one another romantically. Itâs almost as if theyâve never known what itâs like to really connect with someone as a human beingâto love a partner as an equal, not as a bank account or a body. What a pathetic, lonely life that must be.â â
Sex Is Not an âEconomyâ and You Are Not Merchandise
--------------------------------------------------------
âThe violence we teach our sons in teaching them to Be Men is the same that keeps us up at night worrying about our daughters.â â (via moeyhashy
) ------------------------------------------------------ â
Ambition is demanded of us because we know mediocrity is not an option. When society tells women that if we are just averagely good-looking, or averagely smart, or reasonably high-achieving, we will never be loved and safe, perfectionism is an adaptive strategy. We learn that if we want love and security, we have to be perfect, and if it doesnât work out, well, that means we just werenât good enough. And we know it probably wonât work out well. Girls arenât fools. They know what is being done to them. They know what means for their futures in terms of money and power.
Girls get it. An under-reported, crucial facet of the study is the extent and cynicism of girlsâ concerns about economic equality and unpaid work. A full 65% of girls aged 11-21 are worried about the cost of childcare, and while 58% say they âwould like to become a leader in their chosen profession, 46% of them worry that having children will negatively affect their career.
Girls know perfectly well that structural sexism means they canât have everything theyâre being told they must have. They are striving to have it all everyway, striving to have everything and be everything like good girls are supposed to, and it hasnât broken them yet, for good or ill. Thatâs is one reason young women still do so well in school and at college despite our good grades not translating to real-world success. Itâs one reason weâre so good at getting those entry-level service jobs: we are not burdened by the excess of ego, the desire to be treated like a human being first, that prevents many young men from engaging proactively with an economy that just wants self-effacing drones trained to smile till it hurts.
The press just loves to act concerned about half-naked young ladies, preferably with illustrations to facilitate the concern. Somehow nothing changes. And maybe thatâs the point. Maybe part of the function of the constant stream of news about young girls hurting and hating themselves isnât to raise awareness. Maybe part of it is designed to be reassuring.
It must be comforting, if youâre invested in the status quo, to hear that young women are punished and made miserable when they misbehave.
Iâve said this before, but Iâll repeat it: for all those knuckle-clutching articles about how girls everywhere are about to pirouette into twerking, puking, self-hating whorishness, we do not actually care about young women - not, that is, about female people who happen to be young. Instead, we care about Young Women (TM), fantasy Young Women as a semiotic skip for all our cultural anxieties. We value girls as commodities without paying them the respect that both their youth and their personhood deserves. Being fifteen is fucked up enough already without having the expectations, moral neuroses and guilty lusts of an entire culture projected onto this perfect empty shell youâre somehow supposed to be. Hollow yourself out and starve yourself down until you can swallow the shame of the world.
We care about young women as symbols, not as people.
â â Girl trouble: we care about young women as symbols, not as people
(via sociolab)
-----------------------------------------------------
âIt is not just sexual assault survivors who need their abortion covered. Yes, there is an added dimension of cruelty when youâre talking about denying women who get pregnant as a result of rape care and coverage. But we cannot create a hierarchy of âgoodâ and âbadâ abortions. Or of âdeservingâ women. One in three American women will have an abortion, and the circumstances behind that pregnancy is none of our businessâand it certainly should have no bearing on whether or not women can afford to access care.â â Jessica Valenti,
Please Donât Call it âRape Insuranceâ: Michiganâs Anti-Choice Bill Hurts All Women
--------------------------------------------------------
âThe messages you received from your family or your childhood experiences may have caused you to believe that assertiveness is unacceptable or even dangerous. Practice saying the following: I have the right to be treated with respect by others. I have the right to express my feelings and opinions. I have the right to say no without feeling guilty. I have the right to ask for what I want. I have the right to make my own mistakes. I have the right to pursue happiness.â â Nice Girl Syndrome, Beverly Engel
------------------------------------------------
Probably no man has ever troubled to imagine how strange his life would appear to himself if it were unrelentingly assessed in terms of his maleness; if everything he wore, said, or did had to be justified by reference to female approval; if he were compelled to regard himself, day in day out, not as a member of society, but merely (salva reverentia) as a virile member of society. If the centre of his dress-consciousness were his cod-piece, his education directed to making him a spirited lover and meek paterfamilias; his interests held to be natural only in so far as they were sexual. If from school and lecture-room, Press and pulpit, he heard the persistent outpouring of a shrill and scolding voice, bidding him remember his biological function. If he were vexed by continual advice how to add a rough male touch to his typing, how to be learned without losing his masculine appeal, how to combine chemical research with seduction, how to play bridge without incurring the suspicion of impotence. If, instead of allowing with a smile that âwomen prefer cavemen,â he felt the unrelenting pressure of a while social structure forcing him to order all his goings in conformity with that pronouncement.
He would hear (and would he like hearing?) the female counterpart of Dr. P*** informing him: âI am no supporter of the Horseback Hall doctrine of âgun-tail, plough-tail and studâ as the only spheres for masculine action; but we do need a more definite conception of the nature and scope of manâs life.â In any book on sociology he would find, after the main portion dealing with human needs and rights, a supplementary chapter devoted to âThe Position of the Male in the Perfect State.â His newspaper would assist him with a âMenâs Corner,â telling him how, by the expenditure of a good deal of money and a couple of hours a day, he could attract the girls and retain his wifeâs affection; and when he had succeeded in capturing a mate, his name would be taken from him, and society would present him with a special title to proclaim his achievement. People would write books called, âHistory of the Male,â or âMales of the Bible,â or âThe Psychology of the Male,â and he would be regaled daily with headlines, such as âGentleman-Doctorâs Discovery,â âMale-Secretary Wins Calcutta Sweep,â âMen-Artists at the Academy.â If he gave an interview to a reporter, or performed any unusual exploit, he would find it recorded in such terms as these: âProfessor Bract, although a distinguished botanist, is not in any way an unmanly man. He has, in fact, a wife and seven children. Tall and burly, the hands with which he handles his delicate specimens are as gnarled and powerful as those of a Canadian lumberjack, and when I swilled beer with him in his laboratory, he bawled his conclusions at me in a strong, gruff voice that implemented the promise of his swaggering moustache.â [âŠ]
He would be edified by solemn discussions about âShould Men Serve in Drapery Establishments?â and acrimonious ones about âTea-Drinking Menâ; by cross-shots of public affairs âfrom the masculine angle,â and by irritable correspondence about men who expose their anatomy on beaches (so masculine of them), conceal it in dressing-gowns (too feminine of them), think about nothing but women, pretend an unnatural indifference to women, exploit their sex to get jobs, lower the tone of the office by their sexless appearance, and generally fail to please a public opinion which demands the incompatible. And at dinner-parties he would hear the wheedling, unctuous, predatory female voice demand: âAnd why should you trouble your handsome little head about politics?â
If, after a few centuries of this kind of treatment, the male was a little self-conscious, a little on the defensive, and a little bewildered about what was required of him, I should not blame him. If he presented the world with a major social problem, I should scarcely be surprised. It would be more surprising if he retained any rag of sanity and self-respect.
â â From the 1947 Dorothy L. Sayers essay â
The Human-Not-Quite-Humanâ oh my god, this is from 1947. doesnât it show how much things HAVENâT changed that I read through this whole thing assuming it was from a current article or essay, until I got to the date at the end?
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kittiepawz:
Rape is the only crime in which the public strongly believe the perpetratorâs identity should be protected.
As rape is a crime which is overwhelmingly committed by men against women, policy enacted to protect the perpetratorâs identity would technically be sex discrimination.
The fact that rape is the only crime in which the victim is typically believed to be lying is due to the cultural myth that women are innately vindictive and attention seeking. This myth is so powerful that it has even filtered into the justice system; in both the UK and US it is not uncommon for detectives to assume a woman is lying about rape within the first 24 hours of meeting with her due to judgements about her sexual history or her failure to behave how a female rape victim is âsupposedâ to act. The fact that only women are placed under this scrutiny when reporting rape is sex discrimination.
The fact that women like layla ibrahim, who had copious amounts of physical evidence and testimonies from professionals confirming that she was indeed raped, was sent to prison for making a false rape allegation, is not new or even particularly unusual. In 2012 30 women in the UK were wrongly sent to prison for false rape accusations. If you want to talk about people getting wrongly sent to prison, perhaps we should take a look at these women. In almost all of the cases it was discovered that the police failed to do their jobs (failing to follow up on witness accounts, failing to either collect or process evidence, forcing a confession from the victim when they decided based entirely on their own judgements that she was lying).
The belief that false rape accusations are incredibly common and women are very likely to falsify claims is sexism and, because of the fact that this sexism has real life implications for these women, it is discrimination. The fact that this point is proven over and over by legal professionals, academics and actual living proof of the countless women who have experienced this discrimination and yet people still choose to ignore the facts is willful ignorance.
Sexism is alive and well in 2013, and the fact that people who contribute to this discrimination can even attempt to deny that fact is truly astounding. ------------------------------------------------------------
âIt can be said, quite credibly, that excessive consumption of alcohol is connected to a wide array of health and behavioral problems. It can also be said â credibly again â that the incapacitation caused by extreme intoxication makes women more vulnerable to sexual assault.
But hereâs the thing: the first kind of connection is sustained by mere biology; the second is not. The nausea, the headache, the loss of concentration, the risk of addiction â all these ills are connected to excessive drinking because of the effects of alcohol on the human body, and they give men as well as women some excellent reasons to practice moderation.
But the special risk that drunkenness poses to women â thatâs due to a social climate that tolerates sexual predation. When we tell young women to stay sober in order to avoid getting raped, we send the message that we do not intend to change that social climate, that we have chosen to regard misogyny as inevitable.â â
Advising Women Against Drinking Also Sends a Dangerous Method - Room for Debate - NYTimes.com
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brutereason
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âA false accusation of rape is, indeed, a fearsome prospect. But the likelihood of being falsely accused of rape are no different from that of being falsely accused of any other crime. And women are far more likely to be raped than men are to be falsely accused. The insistence on treating the two as equally prevalent issues is âŠ.an entitlement.â â
5 ways sexual assault is really about entitlement - Salon.com
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brutereason
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âA woman from the audience asks: âWhy were there so few women among the Beat writers?â and [Gregory] Corso, suddenly utterly serious, leans forward and says: âThere were women, they were there, I knew them, their families put them in institutions, they were given electric shock. In the â50s if you were male you could be a rebel, but if you were female your families had you locked up.â â
Stephen Scobie, on the Naropa Instituteâs 1994 tribute to Allen Ginsberg  (via thisisendless) Absences of women in history donât âjust happen,â they are made.
(via queereyes-queerminds)
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cunicular:
Your first time is NOT supposed to hurt
You are NOT supposed to bleed
If you bleed, that is NOT your hymen being âpoppedâ, it is a tear due to lack of sexual arousal and natural lubrication.
This is all a MYTH perpetrated by men so they donât have to make sure you are comfortable and sufficiently aroused enough before you have sex with them. It is an excuse to disregard and hurt you.
I just really want women to know this. --------------------------------------------------------
âWhen we talk about feminism we must also talk about race, because they are inextricably linked. What women of color go through is very different from what white women go through and you canât ignore that when talking about feminism.â â April Householder (my feminist film professor)
------------------------------------------------------------ "Yes" doesn't always mean "yes" when you haven't created a situation in which your partner feels comfortable saying "no."
veeisagenderneutralname:
I feel like this should be obvious. But every time I see someone say âyes means yes; no means noâ I cringe a little. Consent isnât always that simple -----------------------------------------------------------
â[TW RAPE JOKES]
So hereâs the real reason that rape jokes are troubled territory -
Because rape victims say so.
They get to say that. They get to feel that way. On this, they get to set the cultural rules.
Itâs not about right or wrong, or logic versus emotion, or arguments of over sensitivity or hypocrisy - you have the free speech to make whatever jokes you want or talk about rape in whatever way you feel is illuminating. But they get to be upset about it. And call you on it. And be hurt by it.
But consider this:
You get to not be a rape victim.
They, however, are not afforded that luxury. Ever again.
â â Chuck Wendig (via
vickiexz
) --------------------------------------------------------
âAnd you tried to change, didnât you? Closed your mouth more. Tried to be softer, prettier, less volatile, less awake⊠You canât make homes out of human beings. Someone should have already told you that. And if he wants to leave, then let him leave. You are terrifying, and strange, and beautiful. Something not everyone knows how to love.â â
Warsan Shire, For Women Who Are Difficult To Love
(via
coyotegold
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âSo if you want to be helpful, stop it. Stop it right now. Stop telling us we need to be less sensitive, or need to learn to take a joke. Stop explaining abusive behaviour to us. Stop implying feminists like being offended. Stop telling me youâd listen to women if we werenât so angry.
Because I am angry and Iïżœïżœm sorry if anger makes you uncomfortable but for me, itâs a relief to realise after years and years of being quietly defeated, just how angry I now find I am. The anger reminds me that buried beneath the worthless, self-loathing teenager who whispers âit wasnât rape,â whispers that I misunderstood, and that she will protect me by staying invisible, thereâs another voice. That voice is tired of being told to shh. She knows it was rape. She always knew it.â â
An open letter to gaslighters on triggers, trauma, and womenâs anger | The Fementalists
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brutereason
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âGirls, adults are afraid of your sexuality. The moms who are teaching their boys that youâre nothing but a seductress if you dare go braless or post a selfie where your [gasp] shoulders are exposed are terrified. Iâm not sure what makes them afraid. Itâs possible that they think their sons will burn in eternal hell, that theyâre worried youâll knock on their door pregnant one day soon or something thatâs less easy to identify. Just know that adult women who are concerned about teenage girls not wearing bras are fearful women. Know that women (and men) who are operating out of fear have no advice to give thatâs of any value.â â
FYI: An Open Letter to Teenage Girls Who Donât Always Wear a Bra | Jessica Gottlieb A Los Angeles Mom
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âThe strong black woman is a complicated cultural myth. On one hand, she is a deeply empowering symbol of endurance and hope. Her unassailable spirit is uplifting. Her courage in the face of seemingly insurmountable adversity emboldens black men and women when facing their own life challenges. But in her perfection, the strong black woman is also harmful. Her titanic strength does violence to the spirits of black women when it becomes an imperative for their daily lives. When seeking help means showing unacceptable weakness, actual black women, unlike their mythical counterpart, face depression, anxiety, and loneliness. The strong black woman is not meant to be Pollyanna. Rather, she is expected to show negative emotion, but that emotion is anger, not sadness. The neck-rolling, finger-snapping, tooth- sucking demands of an angry black woman are entirely consistent with the myth of strength. But this no-nonsense, take-no-prisoners woman offers no expectation that the black woman is supposed to be happy, content, or fulfilled. Her sometimes explosive anger is part of what distinguishes her from the ideal of white femininity. This right to own and express anger is among the more potentially powerful psychological and political elements of the construction of black womenâs strength. That the black woman is not denied an angry voice within an authentic definition of her femininity makes her a powerful ally for both black men and white women in their political struggles.â â Melissa Harris-Perry, Sister Citizen
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fuckingrapeculture:
iradescent:
Can You Tell The Difference Between A Menâs Magazine And A Rapist?
stfueverything:
Well, this is upsetting. According to a new study, people canât tell the difference between quotes from British âlad magsâ and interviews with convicted rapists. And given the choice, men are actually more likely to agree with the rapists. Thereâs a picture of an FHM cover at the link so that may not be safe for work.
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âWhen you are hurting, there will always be people who find a way to make it about themselves. If you break your wrist, theyâll complain about a sprained ankle. If you are sad, theyâre sadder. If youâre asking for help, theyâll demand more attention. Here is a fact: I was in a hospital and sobbing into my palms when a woman approached me and asked why I was making so much noise and I managed to stutter that my best friend shot himself in the head and now he was 100% certified dead and she made this little grunt and had the nerve to tell me, âWell now you made me sad.â
When you get angry, there are going to be people who ask you to shut up and sit down, and theyâre not going to do it nicely. Theirs are the faces that turn bright red before you have a chance to finish your sentence. They wonât ask you to explain yourself. Theyâll be mad that youâre mad and that will be their whole reason alone.
Here is a fact: I was in an alleyway a few weeks ago, stroking my friendâs back as she vomited fourteen tequila shots. âI hate men,â she wheezed as her sides heaved, âI hate all of them.â
I braided her hair so it wouldnât get caught in the mess. I didnât correct her and reply that she does in fact love her father and her little brother too, that there are strangers she has yet to meet that will be better for her than any of her shitty ex-boyfriends, that half of our group of friends identifies as male - I could hear each of her bruises in those words and I didnât ask her to soften the blow when she was trying to buff them out of her skin. She doesnât hate all men. She never did.
She had the misfortune to be overheard by a drunk guy in an ill-fitting suit, a boy trying to look like a man and leering down my dress as he stormed towards us. âFuck you, lady,â he said, âFuck you. Not all men are evil, you know.â
âThanks,â I told him dryly, pulling on her hand, trying to get her inside again, âSee you.â
He followed us. Wouldnât stop shouting. How dare she get mad. How dare she was hurting. âItâs hard for me too!â he yowled after us. âWith fuckers like you, howâs a guy supposed to live?â
Hereâs a fact: my father is Cuban and my genes repeat his. Once one of my teachers looked at my heritage and said, âYour skin doesnât look dirty enough to be a Mexican.â
When my cheeks grew pink and my tongue dried up, someone else in the classroom stood up. âYou canât say that,â he said, âThatâs fucking racist. We could report you for that.â
Our teacher turned vicious. âYou wanna fail this class? Go ahead. Report me. I was joking. Itâs my word against yours. I hate kids like you. You think youâve got all the power - you donât. I do.â
Later that kid and I became close friends and we skipped class to do anything else and the two of us were lying on our backs staring up at the sky and as we talked about that moment, he sighed, âI hate white people.â His girlfriend is white and so is his mom. I reached out until my fingers were resting in the warmth of his palm.
He spoke up each time our teacher said something shitty. He failed the class. I stayed silent. I got the A but I wish that I didnât.
Here is a fact: I think gender is a social construct and people that want to tell others what defines it just havenât done their homework. I personally happen to have the luck of the draw and am the same gender as my sex, which basically just means society leaves me alone about this one particular thing.
Until I met Alex, who said he hated cis people. My throat closed up. Iâm not good at confrontation. I avoided him because I didnât want to bother him.
One day I was going on a walk and I found him behind our school, bleeding out of the side of his mouth. The only thing I really know is how to patch people up. He winced when the antibacterial cream went across his new wounds. âI hate cis people,â he said weakly.
I looked at him and pushed his hair back from his head. âI understand why you do.â
Here is a fact: anger is a secondary emotion. Anger is how people stop themselves from hurting. Anger is how people stop themselves by empathizing.
It is easy for the drunken man to be mad at my friend. If he says âHey, fuck you, lady,â he doesnât have to worry about whatâs so wrong about men.
Itâs easy for my teacher to fail the kids who speak up. If weâre just smart-ass students, itâs not his fault we fuck up.
Itâs easy for me to hate Alex for labeling me as dangerous when Iâve never hurt someone a day in my life. But Iâm safe in my skin and his life is at risk just by going to the bathroom. I understand why he says things like that. I finally do.
Thereâs a difference between the spread of hatred and the frustration of people who are hurting. The thing is, when you are broken, there will always be someone who says âIâm worse, stop talking.â There will always be people who are mad youâre trying to steal the attention. There will always be people who get mad at the same time as you do - they hate being challenged. It changes the rules.
I say I hate all Mondays but my sister was born on one and sheâs the greatest joy I have ever known. I say I hate brown but itâs really just the word and how it turns your mouth down - the colour is my hair and my eyes and my favorite sweater. I say I hate pineapple but I still try it again every Easter, just to see if it stings less this year. Itâs okay to be sad when you hear someone generalize a group youâre in. But instead of assuming theyâre evil and filled with hatred, maybe ask them why they think that way - who knows, you might just end up with a new and kind friend.â â By telling the oppressed that their anger is unjustified, you allow the oppression to continue. I know itâs hard to stay calm. I know itâs scary. But youâre coming from the safe place and they arenât. Just please ⊠Try to be more understanding. /// r.i.d (via inkskinned)
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âWhat is interesting, is that the Frida Kahlo venerated by American feminists is a very different Frida Kahlo to the one people learn about in Mexico, in the Chicano community. In her country, she is recognized as an important artist and a key figure in revolutionary politics of early 20th century Mexico. Her communist affiliations are made very clear. Her relationship with Trotsky is underscored. All her political activities with Diego Rivera are constantly emphasized. The connection between her art and her politics is always made. When Chicana artists became interested in Frida Kahlo in the â70s and started organizing homages, they made the connection between her artistic project and theirs because they too were searching for an aesthetic compliment to a political view that was radical and emancipatory. But when the Euro-American feminists latch onto Frida Kahlo in the early â80s and when the American mainstream caught on to her, she was transformed into a figure of suffering. I am very critical of that form of appropriation.â â Coco Fusco (via plastickitten)
American feminists also rarely talk about her mode of dress as revolutionary in and of itself. It gets talked about as exotic and Mexican and unique, but in Mexico itâs always made very clear that she dressed the way she did as an expression of cultural pride that was not widely acceptable for her class and time. Her dress was revolutionary, anti-imperialist, and helped launch a resurgence of pride and awareness of Mexican culture that had been subjugated by centuries of imperialism.
(via pretended)
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resized:
youre-bey0nd-beautiful:
angrymuslimah:
âGulabi Gangâ is a gang of women in India who track down and beat abusive husbands with brooms. Thatâs not all they do - theyâve got more information on their website.
What else they do that is awesome:
Stop child marriages Persuade families to educate girl-child Train women in self-defense Oppose corruption in administration Create awareness about the evils of dowry Register FIRs against sex-offenders and abusive husbands Publicly shame molesters Encourage women to become financially independent
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I'm Not Like Other Girls. andthatlittleblackdress:
âIâm not like other girls, you know?â she tilts her head back and smiles strangely at me like sheâs inviting me in on a little secret sheâs been waiting to tell me âIâm different.â
When I ask her exactly what does she mean by that she shrugs rolling her shoulders up and down nonchalantly âjust that - Iâm just not like the rest. Iâm smart. I actually eat I donât wear make up - Iâm just not like them.â
So youâre saying every other girl is stupid and every other girl never eats and every other girl wears make up every other girl is a mile high billboard six feet tall with photoshopped skin and a waist roughly the size of your ankle.
You see one of these girls in the mall and you turn your nose up at them sneering â how silly they are how stereotypical they are Iâm not like them Iâm better than them.
But in reality other girls donât actually exist other girls is something told to us from the day we first learned that pink was our color and make up was our thing and our boyfriends are supposed to hold our purses and wait for us outside.
âOther girlsâ much like Snow White and much like Cinderella is a bed time story told to you every single second of every single day; you grew up learning to hate every other girl you grew up on the idea that what has been assigned to your gender - by a society and a media that wants to make money off of you - is something to be sneered at you grew up on the notion that pretty and thin are synonymous with stupid and vapid
But isnât that they want us to be? Isnât that what theyâve been telling us to be? Because if weâre not pretty and thin then weâre not worth anyoneâs time but then if we are pretty and thin weâre turned into a joke.
A joke â like a 23 year old woman whoâs been producing and writing her own music since she was sixteen years old being reduced to nothing more than the sum of her boyfriends a joke â like a 22 year old man whoâs been producing and writing his own music since he was sixteen years old who is applauded and respected and even that boils down to other girls - other girls date your favorite boy band member other girls are pretty and thin other girls are âsluts.â
Other girls are the enemy pretty girls are the enemy because weâve been taught that pretty girls get every thing so much easier but this is only true in the sense that they get the burdens that we all must face handed to them on a silver platter instead of on a wooden plank and is it so much better after all?
What is it that you hate so much about your own gender that compels you to separate yourself and claim yourself as above them? Donât you see that when you divide us into ranks we create an enemy on the inside while the real enemy gets stronger?
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the fact that breast feeding in public is up for discussion
the fact that the sexualization of breasts has gotten to the point where it getâs in the way of itâs sole fucking purpose Â
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âYes, false rape accusations happen. Run the protocol anyway. Iâve heard that perhaps the military has the highest number of âem. True or not, RUN THE PROTOCOL ANYWAY. Because in 15 years of investigating rape accusations, I can count those that panned out as false on one hand. Meanwhile, the one time I almost skipped the protocol, the one time I almost didnât believe a petty officer, because I was naive as an investigator and a young woman, because her commanding officer described her as âa party girl, always late, always out drinking, donât bother with this oneâ, she turned out to be the victim of one of the most brutal assaults Iâve ever investigated. She shouldnât have still been -alive-, let alone up and making the accusation. So let me repeat: five false accounts in fifteen years. And one time I almost failed a woman âcause of the bullshit way itâs normal to talk about us. Take your shipmatesâ word, and then run the protocol. Every. Single. Time.ââ JAG lawyer, speaking to my husbandâs plant during Sexual Assault Prevention Month
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Women who served in Iraq were more likely to be raped by a fellow soldier than killed by enemy fire.
23-28% of women serving in the military will be sexually assaulted over the course of their service. And those numbers are rising.
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Too many young girls donât know how to act when someoneâs being inappropriate with them. They giggle or they try to brush it off. Donât do that. Tell them to go fuck themselves - be a bitch. If someoneâs being disrespectful to you, be disrespectful right back. Show them the same amount of respect that they show you.
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âI raped that test in math claââ No.
âI raped that game earliââ Stop.
âThe other team totally raped us todââ Shut the fuck up.
Do you see what youâre doing?
YOU ARE MAKING RAPE SOUND LIKE A POSITIVE ACTION.
YOU ARE EQUATING SEXUAL VIOLENCE WITH ACHIEVEMENT.
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FOR DEFENSE OF RAPE JOKES:
To all those who donât think the rape joke was a problem, or rape jokes are a problem.
I get it, youâre a decent guy. I can even believe it. Youâve never raped anybody. You would NEVER rape anybody. Youâre upset that all these feminists are trying to accuse you of doing something or connect you to doing something that, as far as youâre concerned, youâve never done and would never condone.
And theyâve told you about triggers, and PTSD, and how one in six women is a survivor, and you get it. You do. But you canât let every time someone gets all upset get in the way of you having a good time, right?
So fine. If all those arguments arenât going anything for you, let me tell you this. And I tell you this because I genuinely believe you mean it when you say you donât want to hurt anybody, and you donât see the harm, and that itâs important to you to do your best to be a decent and good person. And I genuinely believe you when you say you would never associate with a rapist and you think rape really is a very bad thing.
Because this is why I refuse to take rape jokes sitting down-
6% of college age men, slightly over 1 in 20, will admit to raping someone in anonymous surveys, as long as the word ârapeâ isnât used in the description of the act.
6% of Penny Arcadeâs target demographic will admit to actually being rapists when asked.
A lot of people accuse feminists of thinking that all men are rapists. Thatâs not true. But do you know who think all men are rapists?
Rapists do.
They really do. In psychological study, the profiling, the studies, it comes out again and again.
Virtually all rapists genuinely believe that all men rape, and other men just keep it hushed up better. And more, these people who really are rapists are constantly reaffirmed in their belief about the rest of mankind being rapists like them by things like rape jokes, that dismiss and normalize the idea of rape.
If one in twenty guys is a real and true rapist, and you have any amount of social activity with other guys like yourself, really cool guy, then it is almost a statistical certainty that one time hanging out with friends and their friends, playing Halo with a bunch of guys online, in a WoW guild, or elsewhere, you were talking to a rapist. Not your fault. You canât tell a rapist apart any better than anyone else can. Itâs not like they announce themselves.
But, hereâs the thing. Itâs very likely that in some of these interactions with these guys, at some point or another someone told a rape joke. You, decent guy that you are, understood that they didnât mean it, and it was just a joke. And so you laughed.
And, decent guy who would never condone rape, who would step in and stop rape if he saw it, who understands that rape is awful and wrong and bad, when you laughed?
That rapist who was in the group with you, that rapist thought that you were on his side. That rapist knew that you were a rapist like him. And he felt validated, and he felt he was among his comrades.
You. The rapistâs comrade.
And if that doesnât make you feel sick to your stomach, if that doesnât make you want to throw up, if that doesnât disturb you or bother you or make you feel like maybe you should at least consider not participating in that kind of humor anymoreâŠ
Well, maybe you arenât as opposed to rapists as you claim.
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âImagine youâre at a party. A guy offers you a drink. You say no. He says âCome on, one drink!â You say âno thanks.â Later, he brings you a soda. âI know you said you didnât want a drink, but I was getting one for myself and you looked thirsty.â For you to refuse at this point makes you the asshole. Heâs just being nice, right? Predators use the social contract and our own good hearts and fear of being rude against us. If you drink the drink, youâre teaching him that it just takes a little persistence on his part to overcome your âno.â If you say âReally, I appreciate it, but no thanksâ and put the drink down and walk away from it, youâre the one who looks rude in that moment. But the fact is, you didnât ask for the drink and you donât want the drink and you donât have to drink it just to make some guy feel validated.â
Why canât you take no for an answer?â is one of the most powerful questions you can use in a social situation: suddenly, itâs your harasserâs manners on trial, not yours.
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âGentlemen. This is what rape culture is like:
Imagine you have a Rolex watch. Nice fancy Rolex, you bought it because you like the way it looks and you wanted to treat yourself. And then you get beaten and mugged and your Rolex is stolen. So you go to the police. Only, instead of investigating the crime, the police want to know why you were wearing a Rolex instead of a regular watch. Have you ever given a Rolex to anyone else? Is it possible you wanted to be mugged? Why didnât you wear long sleeves to cover up the Rolex if you didnât want to be mugged?
And then after that, everywhere you go, there are constant jokes about stealing your Rolex. People you donât even know whistle at your Rolex and make jokes about cutting your hand off to get it. The media doesnât help either; it portrays people who wear Rolexes as flamboyant assholes who secretly just want someone to come along and take that Rolex off their hands. When damn, all you wanted was to wear a nice watch without getting harassed for it. When you complain that you are starting to feel unsafe, people laugh you off and say that you are too uptight. Never mind you got violently attacked for the crime of wearing a friggin time piece.
Imagining all that? It sucks, doesnât it.
Now imagine you could never take the Rolex off.â â
The Wretched of the Earth: [TW: rape] On Rape Culture
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âThe trouble is that, for women, being âniceâ often translates into putting up with things we should never put up with. How many times has some creep sat uncomfortably close to me on the bus and stared me down, yet Iâm too afraid to just get up and move, lest I offend him?
We smile when weâre harassed on the street or hit on by jerks. We laugh at sexist jokes. We learn that when we have strong opinions, weâll be called bitches and that if we get angry, weâll be called hysterical. When we say what we want, weâre called pushy or aggressive.
Part of learning âladylikeâ behavior is about learning to smile politely when someone is being crude. Femininity has long been attached to passivity and to being docile. Men fight, women giggle and fume silently.â â
Women And Girls Donât Need To Be Told To Be Nicer | xoJane
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âDonât be too loud, too demanding, too nagging. Youâll scare boys awayâ or the dreaded âIf he messes with you, its his way of showing youâ. We equate harassment with attraction.
So you essentially leave male sexual autonomy with them, but female bodily autonomy is also menâs. We create a world where sex in its whole form is a manâs playing field, where male desires supercede. Where men get to be aggressive and chavinistic and theyâre just victims to their male tendencies and should be synpathized with because âboys will be boysâ.
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next time you read about a man committing an atrocity against a child, count the seconds before someone says:
"but where was the childâs mother?"
"why didnât the mother prevent this from happening?"
"honestly I think the mother deserves most of the blame here"
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because it would make more sense to unload a gun than to wear a bulletproof vest, but patriarchy exists ---------- I wonder how many rape victims have been told âI know you want itâ and worked towards recovery only to have their rapistâs words spat back out at them over the radio in the form of a âsexyâ pop song --------------------- âpeople ask, âWhy did she go over that late?â and not âWhy did he invite her over that late?â It asks âwhy didnât she fight back?â and not âWhy didnât he stop?â It asks âWhy did she drink so much?â, and not âWhy did he give her doubles all night?â It asks âWhat has she done with boys in the past?â, and not âWhy did he pick her?â It asks âWhy didnât she call the roommates for help?â, and not âWhy would she want them to walk in to see her naked and being raped?â It asks âWhy did she do nothing?â and not âHow scary that must have been, being raped by a friend?â.â â
Sexual Assault in Mormon Patriarch
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âFeminists have always been accused of hating men because it is a very effective way of silencing a very threatening movement. In a society where womenâs value is based on our ability to please men, and where men hold almost all the cards, the worst possible thing we can do is hate them. So when feminists point out and object to the oppression, abuse and discrimination perpetuated by men against women, this is framed as man hating in an attempt to silence us, in an attempt to ensure that we are vilified and ignored by the rest of society, so that male oppression of women and male privilege can continue unchecked.
No matter how we frame our arguments and no matter what kind of image we seek to project, as long as we highlight, object to and fight misogyny, feminists are going to be called man haters.
So Iâm not going to waste my time trying to prove that Iâm not.
â âMan haters?â by Laura on The F Word blog
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Why rape happens/why we have a rape culture:
1) The Myth of Fragile Masculinity.
From early boyhood, men are taught that their masculinity must be protected above all else, or else it will be lost. Men who have lost their masculinity are objects of contempt, derision and violent abuse, and have lost the right to be loved or respected by their fellow men and by their fathers.
Boys are also taught that masculinity is fragile and high-maintenance; you work to get it and to retain it, and the slightest slip can cause it to be altogether lost. You can slip instantly, with no transition, from the most popular boy in the room to the butt of everyoneâs jokes: all it takes is a momentâs lapse in which you say or do anything that can be interpreted as feminine.
This is essential: Masculinity is fragile. The man who has lost his masculinity is, in the eyes of male culture, less than nothing, worse than dead. Therefore, force in defense of masculinity â like beating up a boy who accuses you of being a faggot â can feel to boys and men like a form of self-defense.
Masculinity is defined by what it is not. Being masculine means avoiding the feminine. Being feminine, even for an instant, means risking loss of masculinity. Empathy, in our cultureâs warped conception, is feminine; thinking about other peopleâs emotions is feminine. Boys are taught to avoid empathy.
Masculinity is also defined by power-over. The man who is overpowered by others is less then a man; the man who has power over others is a man among men. Remember, masculinity is fragile: if you donât have power-over someone, youâre in danger of losing your manhood.
Once boys become teens, masculinity is additionally defined by the absolutely crucial task of getting laid. Once again, masculinity is fragile: he who isnât getting any isnât a man.
Masculinity comes wrapped around a sense of entitlement. Men donât feel grateful when the women in their life (mothers, wives, maids) prepare meals, make beds, or whatever: in our societyâs warped view, the women are just doing what theyâre supposed to, and men are just getting what theyâre entitled to.
Statistically, environments which tend to have the most rape â middle and high school, frat houses, prisons â are also the environments which most emphasize masculinity, and where boys and men have the most reason to fear losing masculinity.
2) Low regard for women.
The fact is, women arenât respected as equals, by and large. To some degree this is a self-perpetuating cycle: why arenât women in more of public lifeâs highest-respected positions (Presidents, CEOs, Senators, etc.)? Because women arenât seen as capable of holding societyâs highest positions. Why arenât women seen as being as capable? Well, just look around: there are almost no women are doing those things.
Womenâs lower pay is both a cause of and a result of the low regard in which our culture holds women. That the huge amount of unpaid caretaking work our society requires to get by is overwhelmingly done by women, and accorded almost no respect (âstay at home moms just sit around watching TV all day, right?â), is both a cause of and a result of the low regard in which our culture holds women.
Women get paid less. Women get promoted less. Women get out of the house less. The work that women do is worth less.
Why do men rape women? Itâs not because they hate women. Do hunters hunt because they hate animals? No, they hunt because hunting is fun, because they like the meat, and maybe because hunting is a way of male-bonding, They donât hate the animal; they just consider empathy for the animalâs feelings irrelevant, less important than their desire for meat or fun.
This is why the ârape isnât about sex, rape is about violenceâ analysis falls short. Itâs not true and it denies the true horror of the situation. Rapists rape because they want sex; they donât consider the womanâs feelings at all, because a womanâs feelings arenât worth considering. Theyâre just women, after all.
3) Sexuality is something possessed by women, which is given to (or taken by) men.
Thatâs our societyâs view of it. Look at the magazines on the racks ïżœïżœ itâs pretty obvious why menâs magazines, wanting to sell copies with a sexy cover, usually use photos of mostly-undressed women. But why do womenâs magazines do the exact same thing? Because to do a sexy magazine cover, you generally have to show a photo of a woman. Women are sexualized.
Thatâs also why women are taught to wait to be asked for a dance or a date, while men are taught to do the asking. Women have it; men ask for it.
This connects to the first point, too â the fragility of masculinity. Men who have lost their masculinity are, in our cultureâs view, less than men, less even than women. They are the lowest of the low. One way to lose your masculinity is to be unable to âgetâ sex from a woman. This also breeds resentment of women (in much the same way that poverty can sometimes breed resentment of rich people): âhow dare women not give something to me that I need so desperately? How dare women withhold from me the masculinity that Iâm entitled to?â
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ââSlutâ is attacking women for their right to say yes. âFriend Zoneâ is attacking women for their right to say no.â
And âbitchâ is attacking women for their right to call you on it.
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I am extremely, EXTREMELY tired of âreal men have beardsâ/âreal women have curvesâ posts and any variant of them.
You know what ârealâ people ought to have? Respect for other people regardless of gender identity/presentation, body type, and grooming choices.
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fun fact: dead rapists canât become repeat offenders
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Donât shame the girls who sent pictures of themselves half-naked to their significant others as a way to express eroticism which is healthy and naturalâŠgive the people hell who think itâs okay to destroy someoneâs trust and distribute those images simply for entertainment purposes.
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"big strong boy" vs "cute little girl"
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âIf youâre a ânice guyâ to a girl up until you realize she doesnât want to date you, then go on about how sheâs a cold shrew that friendzoned you and how no girls date nice guys, like, nah mate, girls do date nice guys. You just arenât a nice guy. Youâre a passive aggressive beta with internalized misogyny and a serious victim complex.â
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âDoes your boyfriend or brother spend a lot of money on skin and hair care products? Does your dad spend much time at the hairdresser or beautician?
In your cityâs daily paper do most of the political news items feature women? Are most of the stories in the business section written by and about women? Is there a special âMenâs Sectionâ filled with celebrity gossip, fashion and beauty tips?
When you watch a big sporting event on TV, are the athletes usually women? When you watch female sporting teams are there hot guys in tiny outfits cheering for them on the sidelines?
Do girls you know talk openly about getting off while watching porn? Do they boast about their sexual conquests?
When youâre at the food court, do your female friends happily gobble down a large burger and fries combo while your male friends pick at a salad and sip diet coke?
Do the majority of the fathers you know spend most of their time at home washing, cleaning, cooking and taking care of their kids? Do you often hear mothers refer to looking after their own kids as âbabysittingâ? Have you heard women talk about earning brownie points for cleaning their own house and washing their own clothes? Are you sick of men going on about how hard it is to balance work and parenthood?
Are your male friends afraid to walk on their own at night? Do they avoid drinking too much in case they get raped? Do they dress to protect themselves from attack and always carry their keys poking through their knuckles? When they complain about all this do your female friends shrug and tell them thatâs just how the world is?
If the answer to all of these questions was yes, wouldnât that mean something was wrong? Is that still true if the genders are reversed? Does it matter?â
â Opening from Emily Maguireâs âYour Skirtâs Too Short: Sex, Power, Choiceâ
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âLabeling women as âcrazyâ is a way of controlling them. It may not be something planned or pre-meditated, but the ease with which men call women âcrazyâ says a lot about them. Calling a woman âcrazyâ is quick and easy shut-down to any discussion. Once the âcrazyâ card has been pulled out, women are now put on the defensive: the onus is no longer on the man to address her concerns or her issue, itâs on her to justify her behavior, to prove that she is not, in fact, crazy or irrational. Men donât even have to provide any sort of argument back â itâs a classic catch-22; âthe fact that you donât even see that youâre acting crazy is just proof that itâs crazy.ââ
On Labeling Women âCrazyâ | Paging Dr. NerdLove - Part 2
See also: âYouâre overreacting.â
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Nothing pisses me off more than a guy who has no respect for women but suddenly becomes the overprotective father or brother when they share the same last names. -
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âWhen women scream you wonder whatâs wrong with them. When men yell you get afraid about what theyâre going to do.â
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ââŠIf your first concern on reading about hundreds of self-reported attempted and completed rapes is whether the research supports the proposition that most men are in the clearâŠyou need to get your head screwed on straight. Women worrying that you might be a rapist is not a bigger problem than women getting raped.â âLyndsay, in a comment on â
Meet the Predators
" Â ----------------------------------------------------- â
What if all women were bigger and stronger than you and thought they were smarter
What if women were the ones who started wars
What if too many of your friends had been raped by women wielding giant dildos and no K-Y Jelly
What if the state trooper who pulled you over on the New Jersey Turnpike was a woman and carried a gun
What if the ability to menstruate was the prerequisite for most high-paying jobs
What if your attractiveness to women depended on the size of your penis
What if every time women saw you theyâd hoot and make jerking motions with their hands
What if women were always making jokes about how ugly penises are and how bad sperm tastes
What if you had to explain whatâs wrong with your car to big sweaty women with greasy hands who stared at your crotch in a garage where you are surrounded by posters of naked men with hard-ons
What if menâs magazines featured cover photos of 14-year-old boys with socks tucked into the front of their jeans and articles like: âHow to tell if your wife is unfaithfulâ or âWhat your doctor wonât tell you about your prostateâ or âThe truth about impotenceâ
What if the doctor who examined your prostate was a woman and called you âHoneyâ
What if you had to inhale your bossâs stale cigar breath as she insisted that sleeping with her was part of the job
What if you couldnât get away because the company dress code required you wear shoes designed to keep you from running
And what if after all that women still wanted you to love them.
For the Men Who Still Donât Get It, written 20 years ago by Carol Diehl. -------------------------------------------------
women are considered fragile but Iâve never seen anything as easily wounded as a manâs ego
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You know why women often say ânothingâs wrongâ when something is definitely bothering them
Itâs because men have been belittling, minimizing and mocking our emotions forever
And we are socialized to be as passive and undemanding and selfless as possible, and not to run any risk of bothering or angering a man lest he abandon or hurt us Itâs not passive aggression, it is fear
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Some scary controlling people will tell you over and over how important consent is to them. They will tell you that they want to respect your boundaries, and that if anything makes you uncomfortable, they will stop. They will say this over and over, apparently sincerely.
Until you actually say no.
And then, suddenly, they create a reason that it wasnât ok, after all, and that youâre going to do what they wanted anyway.
They will tell you that it *would* be ok to say no, and that of course theyâd respect it, but you said it wrong. And that you have to understand that it hurts them when you say it that way. (And that you should make it better by doing what they wanted).
Or they will tell you that of course they donât want to do anything that makes you uncomfortable, but you said yes before. And that this means that either itâs really ok with you, or that you donât trust them anymore. And that you have to understand that it hurts when you withdraw trust like that (and that you should make it better by doing what they wanted.)
Or that they have a headache. Or that they just canât deal with it right now. That maybe when they feel better or arenât tired or grumpy or had a better day it will be ok to say no. (And that meanwhile, you should fix things by doing what they wanted).
Or that by saying no, youâre accusing them of being an awful person. And that theyâd never do anything to hurt you, so why are you making accusations like that? (And, implicitly, that you should fix it by doing what they wanted.)
If this kind of thing happens every time you say no, things are really wrong.
No isnât a theoretical construct. In mutually respectful relationships, people say no to each other often, and itâs not a big deal.
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See, what you need to understand is that âNot all guys like thatâ is never going to work. Because youâre answering an entirely different conversation than what women are actually saying.
You think women are saying âEvery man is a predator and a danger to me.â And youâre replying, âBut Iâm not like that.â
But women arenât saying that. Theyâre saying âThere are too many situations where women have to worry about their safety,â and youâre saying âThatâs not important.â Theyâre saying âWomen are constantly told itâs their fault if something bad happens,â and youâre saying âDonât worry about it.â Theyâre saying âToo often, women find their trust violated by men,â and youâre saying âBut you should trust me!â
Theyâre saying âSo many men have decided that what they want is more important than anything about a woman.â And youâre replying âIâm exactly like that.â
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âPrinceton University psychologist Susan Fiske took brain scans of heterosexual men while they looked at sexualised images of women wearing bikinis. She found that the part of their brains that became activated was pre-motor - areas that usually light up when people anticipate using tools. The men were reacting to the images as if the women were objects they were going to act on. Particularly shocking was the discovery that the participants who scored highest on tests of hostile sexism were those most likely to deactivate the part of the brain that considers other peopleâs intentions (the medial prefrontal cortex) while looking at the pictures. These men were responding to images of the women as if they were non-human.â â The Equality Illusion Â
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âAs a Muslim feminist woman of color, I cannot relate to Slutwalks as it caters mostly to the definition of emancipation set by white women. Slutwalks deviate in terms of delivering the message against sexual assault. It turns a blind eye to women of cultures where flimsy clothes donât necessarily lead to rapes. Muslim women get raped too. Nassim Elbardouh is right. âDo Not Rapeâ Walk sounds better. This isnât to say that I donât support Slutwalks. I simply canât relate to a liberating movement that does not liberate nor acknowledge me. Western feminism, despite its undeniable achievements, still perpetuates the image of a white woman as the liberated one. If these feminists do claim to represent all women, they need to understand the dynamics of the cultures other women hail from. Donât care if youâre wearing a thong or burka, no one has the right to rape you. Burka clad brown Muslim women get raped too. Represent us. I want a movement that represents me regardless of my color and creed. End victim blaming and rape culture by representing everyone.â â
Mehreen Kasana
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Why is it men always want to turn the extra room into a man-cave?
Screw you Iâm turning that room into a lady cave. Iâm going to go in there and read romance novels, crochet, preform witchcraft, scrap book, pet a cat, worship satan, and complain to my friends that youâre not satisfying me sexually. You can go fuck yourself.
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âObjectification is the opposite of empathy. While we talk about its effects on girls, the way it erodes their confidence, their self-awareness, their sense of security, we rarely actually discuss what the effects of sexually objectifying women are on boys and their psychological or sexual development. Itâs not minor. It encourages them to think of girls and women as body parts for pleasure and use â literally, as âthingsâ that donât have autonomy or self-determination and whose permission is irrelevant. Things that are fungible and are violable. Things that should be silent.â â Soraya Chemaly,
Why naked pictures arenât harmless
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The problem is not that our society has taught girls to not feel beautiful; the problem is that weâve taught them that this means theyâre not worth loving, not worth being, that they are somehow lesser because of it.
Let me tell you, despite what magazines and makeup companies and fashion moguls would have you believe, there is NO - I repeat - there is NO woman in the world whom everyone agrees is beautiful. Not a single one.
That would be impossible, not only because âbeautyâ means different things to different cultures (did you know some cultures like their women fat as a general concept of beauty?), but because each PERSON is different. Women all like different things - tall, short, lanky, bulky, hairy, waxed⊠why do we assume males only go for one archetype? Because itâs been constructed for us as the ONE GOLDEN IMAGE OF BEAUTY to strive for (and even achieve, if we just buy ENOUGH of the RIGHT products - how convenient).
The reality is, no matter what you look like, *there will always be people who think youâre ugly* (ask Megan Fox, Angelina Jolie, etc.). So the issue is not that females in our society feel ugly - they ARE, to someone. I guarantee, no matter WHAT you look like, there will be people in the world who think you look like a cow. And - whatâs more - no one ever made history just for being beautiful, no matter how good-looking they were (ok, Helen of Troy, but she was fictional, and she was also the daughter of a God, so good luck), so why are we so enthralled by the idea of being beautiful?
Instead of worrying about why we as a society make girls feel ugly, maybe we should worry about why our society thinks that being ugly MATTERS SO MUCH.
â @CallMeCalliope
--------------------------------------------------- âGirls and women of the world, could we stop apologizing for wanting and eating food? Because this is one of the most ridiculous things that we do collectively as lady-people, and not only does it annoy the shit out of me personally, but it is also INCREDIBLY SAD. Could we stop feeling âguiltyâ for wanting an effing brownie? Or a plate of fries? Could we stop actively seeking permission from our friends to go ahead and âbe badâ and order the cheesecake? Could we all just go ahead and order whatever it is that we feel like eating, instead of saying, âOh, I feel like a pig, you guys are just getting saladsâ?
Becauseânow I know this will come as a shockâWOMEN EAT. We get hungry. We get hungry for pizzas and Double Stuf Oreos and nachos and ice cream and giant French-toast breakfasts, and you know what? WE DONâT NEED TO FEEL BAD ABOUT THAT.
â â an excerpt from this beautiful article that everyone should read (x)
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History is not a long series of centuries in which men did all the interesting/important things and women stayed home and twiddled their thumbs in between pushing out babies, making soup and dying in childbirth.
History is actually a long series of centuries of men writing down what they thought was important and interesting, and FORGETTING TO WRITE ABOUT WOMEN. Itâs also a long series of centuries of womenâs work and womenâs writing being actively denigrated by men. Writings were destroyed, contributions were downplayed, and women were actively oppressed against, absolutely.
But the forgetting part is vitally important. Most historians and other writers of what we now consider âprimary sourcesâ simply didnât think about women and their contribution to society. They took it for granted, except when that contribution or its lack directly affected men.
This does not in any way mean that the female contribution to society was in fact less interesting or important, or complicated, simply that historyâthe process of writing down and preserving of the facts, not the facts/events themselvesâwas looking the other way.
â â Tansy Rayner Roberts
---------------------------------------------------- âHereâs the thing. Men in our culture have been socialized to believe that their opinions on womenâs appearance matter a lot. Not all men buy into this, of course, but many do. Some seem incapable of entertaining the notion that not everything women do with their appearance is for men to look at. This is why menâs response to women discussing stifling beauty norms is so often something like âBut I actually like small boobs!â and âBut I actually like my women on the heavier side, if you know what I mean!â They donât realize that their individual opinion on womenâs appearance doesnât matter in this context, and that while it might be reassuring for some women to know that there are indeed men who find them fuckable, thatâs not the point of the discussion.
Women, too, have been socialized to believe that the ultimate arbiters of their appearance are men, that anything they do with their appearance is or should be âfor men.â Thatâs why womenâs magazines trip over themselves to offer up advice on âwhat he wants to see you wearingâ and âwhat men think of these current fashion trendsâ and âwow him with these new hairstyles.â While women can and do judge each otherâs appearance harshly, many of us grew up being told by mothers, sisters, and female strangers that weâll never âget a manâ or âkeep a manâ unless we do X or lose some fat from Y, unless we moisturize//trim/shave/push up/hide/show/âflatterâ/paint/dye/exfoliate/pierce/surgically alter this or that.
Thatâs also why when a woman wears revealing clothes, itâs okay, in our society, to assume that sheâs âlooking for attentionâ or that sheâs a slut and wants to sleep with a bunch of guys. Because why else would a woman wear revealing clothes if not for the benefit of men and to communicate her sexual availability to them, right? It canât possibly have anything to do with the fact that itâs hot out or itâs more comfortable or she likes how she looks in it or everything else is in the laundry or she wants to get a tan or maybe she likes women and wants attention from them, not from men?
The result of all this is that many men, even kind and well-meaning men, believe, however subconsciously, that womenâs bodies are for them. They are for them to look at, for them to pass judgment on, for them to bless with a compliment if they deign to do so. They are not for women to enjoy, take pride in, love, accept, explore, show off, or hide as they please. They are for men and their pleasure.â â
Why You Shouldnât Tell That Random Girl On The Street That Sheâs Hot » Brute Reason
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things girls are made to feel ashamed of-
having periods choosing what they want to wear on their body wanting to/not wanting to have sex putting boys in the âfriendzoneâ standing up against misogyny ruining a boyâs life by telling the police that he raped her i could go on ----------------------------------------------------- âI will teach my daughter not to wear her skin like a drunken apology. I will tell her âmake a home out of your body, live in yourself, do not let people turn you into a regret, do not justify yourself. If you are a disaster it is not forever, if you are a disaster you are the most beautiful one Iâve ever seen. Do not deconstruct from the inside out, you belong here, you belong here, not because you are lovely, but because you are more than that.ââ â Azra T. âYour hands are threads, your body is a canvasâ (via
thatkindofwoman
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Remember that intimate conversation you had with your son? The one where you said, âI love you and I need you to know that no matter how a woman dresses or acts, it is not an invitation to cat call, taunt, harass or assault herâ?
Or when you told your son, âA womanâs virginity isnât a prize and sleeping with a woman doesnât earn you a pointâ?
How about the heart-to-heart where you lovingly conferred the legal knowledge that âa woman doesnât have to be fighting you and you donât have to be pinning her down for it to be RAPE. Intoxication means she canât legally consent, NOT that sheâs an easy score.â
Or maybe you recall sharing my personal favorite, âYour sexual experiences donât dictate your worth just like a womanâs sexual experiences donât dictate hers.â
Last but not least, do you remember calling your son out when you discovered he was using the word âslutâ liberally? Or when you overheard him talking about some girl from school as if she were more of a conquest than a person?
I want you to consider these conversations and then ask yourself why you donât remember them. The likely reason is because you didnât have them. In fact, most parents havenât had them.
â âThe Conversation You Must Have With Your Sons | Carina Kolodny
-------------------------------------------------- âHow is a woman supposed to win? If she primps, sheâs capitulating to the patriarchy and not celebrating her true self. If she goes natural, sheâs an ugly hag. If she sometimes wants to add a cool filter to her picture, sheâs lying about how she looks and who she is: even though Instagram as a service was designed with the filters as its core, and theyâre a huge part of how Instagram works and how the feeds are presented. This idea that women now need to exhibit perfection with a #nofilter tag is just as pointlessly oppressive as insisting that women get made up just to walk down the driveway to the mailbox.
Sharing photographs is supposed to be fun, not a constant battle with yourself and the people around you. When people have to stress out about the judgmental comments theyâll get on their selfies, it doesnât really create an incentive for them to post them, and it definitely undermines their sense of worth and pride in themselves. Taking selfies can be incredibly empowering, but not when itâs emotionally fraught.â â Must Women Always Be Perfect? | this ainât livinâ
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the stereotype that women talk more than men is infinitely amusing to me because men are literally incapable of shutting the fuck up i hope this post gets popular enough that i hurt a manâs feelings
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âThese girls. I remember them. They happened. They were there with me. They had red hair and bright red lipstick and they wore Boston Red Sox hoodies and they loved Russian literature and they had big, wily pet dogs and they spent the night.
I talked to them at parties or met them in the dorms freshman year or they were friends of friends who stroked my hair and said, âI just think everyoneâs a little bit bisexual, donât you?â
I loved them. They were real and they shared themselves with me and we spent time together at thrift shops and in classes and at bars and at friendsâ dinner parties. We held hands while other couples passed around a joint. We buried our faces in each otherâs soft necks under the covers. These were relationships. These were people I was with.
âI want us to be monogamous,â men say. âBut you know, obviously girls donât count.ââ âGirls Donât Count | Thought Catalog
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Characteristics of male power include the power of men:
1. to deny women [our own] sexuality
[by means of clitoridectomy and infibulation; chastity belts; punishment, including death, for female adultery; punishment, including death, for lesbian sexuality; psychoanalytic denial of the clitoris; strictures against masturbation; denial of material and postmenopausal sensuality; unnecessary hysterectomy; pseudolesbian images in media and literature; closing of archives and destruction of documents relating to lesbian existence];
2. or to force it [male sexuality] upon them
by means of rape (including marital rape) and wife beating; father-daughter, brother-sister incest; the socialization of women to feel that male sexual âdriveâ amounts to a right,(15) idealization of heterosexual romance in art, literature, media, advertising, and so forth; child marriage; arranged marriage; prostitution; the harem; psychoanalytic doctrines of frigidity and vaginal orgasm; pornographic depictions of women responding pleasurably to sexual violence and humiliation (a subliminal message being that sadistic heterosexuality is more ânormalâ than sensuality between women)];
3. to command or exploit their labor to control their produce
[by means of the institutions of marriage and motherhood as unpaid production; the horizontal segregation of women in paid employment; the decoy of the upwardly mobile token woman; male control of abortion, contraception, and childbirth; enforced sterilization; pimping, female infanticide, which robs mothers of daughters and contributes to generalized devaluation of women];
4. to control or rob them of their children
[by means of father-right and âlegal kidnappingâ;(16) enforced sterilization; systematized infanticide; seizure of children from lesbian mothers by the courts, the malpractice of male obstetrics; use of the mother as âtoken torturerâ(17) in genital mutilation or in binding the daughterâs feet (or mind) to fit her for marriage];
5. to confine them physically and prevent their movement
[by means of rape as terrorism, keeping women off the streets; purdah, foot-binding; atrophying of womenâs athletic capabilities; haute couture, âfeminineâ dress codes; the veil; sexual harassment on the streets, horizontal segregation of women in employment; prescriptions for âfull-timeâ mothering; enforced economic dependence of wives];
6. to use them as objects in male transactions
[use of women as âgifts,â bride-price; pimping; arranged marriage; use of women as entertainers to facilitate male deals, for example, wife-hostess, cocktail waitress required to dress for male sexual titillation, call girls, âbunnies,â geisha, kisaeng prostitutes, secretaries];
7. to cramp their creativeness
[witch persecutions as campaigns against midwives and female healers and as pogrom against independent, âunassimilatedâ women;(18) definition of male pursuits as more valuable than female within any culture, so that cultural values become embodiment of male subjectivity, restriction of female self-fulfillment to marriage and motherhood, sexual exploitation of women by male artists and teachers; the social and economic disruption of womenâs creative aspirations;(19) erasure of female tradition];(20) and
8. to withhold from them large areas of the societyâs knowledge and cultural attainments
[by means of noneducation of females (60 percent of the worldâs illiterates are women~; the âGreat Silenceâ regarding women and particularly lesbian existence in history and culture;(21) sex-role stereotyping that deflects women from science, technology, and other âmasculineâ pursuits; male social/professional bonding that excludes women; discrimination against women in the professions]
Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence Adrienne Rich
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Male journalists, who are undoubtedly in the majority when it comes to rock journalism, are quite simply sick to the back teeth with women banging on about something men really donât prioritize. Effectively (in conjunction with the managing editors and publishers of the music pressâmost of whom are male) they control which topics are covered, which bands are featured and how a magazineâs overall journalistic style is determined. Most editorial positions are taken up by men, as are most freelance positions, and despite half-hearted claims by certain editors about redressing the balance on their papers and magazines, women continue to find themselves marginalized.
No doubt this is why male journalists feel they can afford to declare the gender issue dead and buried. For them, it isnât really an issue. It merely challenges their authority in a world where they know whatâs what and whoâs calling the shots. Even in this supposedly enlightened, post-feminist age, men still feel profoundly threatened by women.
â âGirls Will Be Boys: Women Report on Rock, Liz Evans
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âWomen are sick of being typecast, stereotyped, and pigeonholed. They are not sick of being women.â âGirls Will Be Boys: Women Report on Rock, Liz Evans
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You are not a bad person for getting abortion, it doesnât matter if:
you were assaulted your birth control failed you werenât on birth control at all there is a medical issue you donât want children you already have children and canât handle another you arenât ready you donât want to be pregnant You are never a bad person for needing an abortion. There is nothing wrong with you. Donât ever let anyone tell you otherwise.
You are not alone.
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kaninchenzero:
"he deserves the presumption of innocence"
fuck that. this is not court, social opprobrium is not equivalent to the armed might of the state.
the only way to ensure every person accused of sexual violence is presumed to be innocent in every circumstance is to assume that every victim is always lying.
presuming the accused to be innocent is setting the standard for prosecution in criminal courts. the people deciding the case must begin by assuming the accused is innocent.
ONLY THE PEOPLE DECIDING THE OUTCOME OF THE CRIMINAL CASE MUST PRESUME THE ACCUSED IS INNOCENT BEFORE TRIAL BEGINS.
no one else.
we cannot apply the rules of criminal courts to every human interaction. they are designed to have artificially high standards because the state has an enormous amount of power over nearly everyone.
a victim of sexual violence does not have that kind of power over their assailant. victims of sexual violence only very rarely can invoke the armed might of the state on their behalf and risk further violence and humiliation if they do.
to move towards any kind of justice we â those of us who are not involved in criminal proceedings â must presume an assault has taken place and the victim can reliably identify their assailant.
otherwise we maintain the status quo where perpetrators of sexual violence can act in the near certainty they will never be even mildly inconvenienced for their sins. ------------------------------------------------------------ â
Does your boyfriend or brother spend a lot of money on skin and hair care products? Does your dad spend much time at the hairdresser or beautician?
In your cityâs daily paper do most of the political news items feature women? Are most of the stories in the business section written by and about women? Is there a special âMenâs Sectionâ filled with celebrity gossip, fashion and beauty tips?
When you watch a big sporting event on TV, are the athletes usually women? When you watch female sporting teams are there hot guys in tiny outfits cheering for them on the sidelines?
Do girls you know talk openly about getting off while watching porn? Do they boast about their sexual conquests?
When youâre at the food court, do your female friends happily gobble down a large burger and fries combo while your male friends pick at a salad and sip diet coke?
Do the majority of the fathers you know spend most of their time at home washing, cleaning, cooking and taking care of their kids? Do you often hear mothers refer to looking after their own kids as âbabysittingâ? Have you heard women talk about earning brownie points for cleaning their own house and washing their own clothes? Are you sick of men going on about how hard it is to balance work and parenthood?
Are your male friends afraid to walk on their own at night? Do they avoid drinking too much in case they get raped? Do they dress to protect themselves from attack and always carry their keys poking through their knuckles? When they complain about all this do your female friends shrug and tell them thatâs just how the world is?
If the answer to all of these questions was yes, wouldnât that mean something was wrong? Is that still true if the genders are reversed? Does it matter?
â â Opening from Emily Maguireâs âYour Skirtâs Too Short: Sex, Power, Choiceâ Â
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âDonât marry a man unless you would be proud to have a son exactly like him.â
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Reminder: You are under no obligation to look pretty. Â
fandomsandfeminism:
Not when you are laying around the house, not when you go to the grocery store, not when you sit in a classroom, not when you go to the gym. You are never obligated to get dressed up just so you are pretty for others.
Pretty is not the rent you pay to exist in the world as a woman. ----------------------------------------------------------
âThe reason women are turning you down for casual sex seems to be that, for one thing, a lot of you are calling them sluts afterward. Also, a lot of you arenât bothering to try to be good in bed.â â Terri Conley, professor of psychology and womenâs studies at the University of Michigan (link
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Why is it not helpful to say ânot all men are like thatâ? For lots of reasons. For one, women know this. They already know not every man is a rapist, or a murderer, or violent. They donât need you to tell them.
Second, itâs defensive. When people are defensive, they arenât listening to the other person; theyâre busy thinking of ways to defend themselves. I watched this happen on Twitter, over and again.
Third, the people saying it arenât furthering the conversation, theyâre sidetracking it. The discussion isnât about the men who arenât a problem. (Though, Iâll note, it can be. Iâll get back to that.) Instead of being defensive and distracting from the topic at hand, try staying quiet for a while and actually listening to what the thousands upon thousands of women discussing this are saying.
Fourthâand this is important, so listen carefullyâwhen a woman is walking down the street, or on a blind date, or, yes, in an elevator alone, she doesnât know which group youâre in. You might be the potential best guy ever in the history of history, but thereâs no way for her to know that. A fraction of men out there are most definitely not in that group. Which are you? Inside your head you know, but outside your head itâs impossible to.
This is the reality women deal with all the time.
â â #NotAllMen: How Not to Derail Discussions of Womenâs Issues
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âYou think Iâm not a goddess?
Try me.
This is a torch song.
Touch me and youâll burn.â â Margaret Atwood, from âHelen of Troy Does Countertop Dancingâ
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âOnce discovered he sought to justify and minimise the situation by one-sided arguments that ranged from - âitâs just guysâ stuff, a bit of fun, all guys look at porn, hey, get real - itâs the way the world is now.â The implication being that I was a prude, over-reacting and out of date. âIt was just âfantasyââ, he said, and therefore not related to the real sex that we shared. My reply: âitâs obvious fakery for the women - you can see thatâ was met with âno, no, you have that wrong, they are genuinely enjoying it.â He knew. So it wasnât fantasy then? I was supposed to believe it was just a mild diversion, when for the women it had to be real. Any suggestion though of the reality that women were coerced or treated badly was dismissed. They were fine, they were well paid. Self-delusional and ambiguous arguments ran amok. He seemed to have gone to a different place; to comment about the women in porn and me in a cold and detached way, to say things about womenâs bodies, about sexual acts which came out of his mouth with swingeing bluntness. A layer of empathy had been ground away.â â Caroline (pseudonym) 2012 âThe Impact of Pornography on my Lifeâ in Bray, A. and Tankard Reist, M. (eds)
Big Porn Inc: Exposing the Harms of the Global Porn Industry
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âSo, I ask to the women who are still not sure about rape culture, patriarchy, or male supremacy, if you see the problem behind a culture in which ânoâ is punishable, but where failure to say ânoâ makes any violation of your personhood your own fault. When you sit back for a moment and think to yourself that surely you can say no to men, and that I am blowing things way out of proportion, then at least do this test within your own life: Start saying No more often when No is what you really want to say. Establish firm boundaries with men and do not let up. See if the male you are saying no to immediately stops and respects your boundary, or if his automatic response, reflexiveâas though heâs been learning how to do this since he was a boy, as though he sees no other response more logical than thisâis to attempt to do what you have just asked him not to do to you. Notice how you feel when telling a man ânoâ as well. Do you feel butterflies in your stomach? Do you feel guilty (denying him his right of access to you)? Do you feel mean? Do you feel unsure at all as to whether or not you have the right to tell him no? It is very easy to feel that men are not so bad when you are still making sure to give them what they want.â â Looking Male Supremacists Dead in Their Dead Eyes (The Boner Busters Takedown)
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âThis is hard to explain. Girls ⊠" He trailed off, frowning in thought and rubbing at the bridge of his nose, then started over. "Boys insult each other by calling each other ânancyâ or âqueerâ or âpoofterâ, and those things are insulting because they suggest you want to be a girl â and being a girl is bad, right? Thatâs the implication. If someone loses or gets tricked, theyâre âfuckedâ. Girls get fucked, and boys do the fucking. Boys come out on top, and being on the bottom is weak. Bad. Girly. It says something rather awful about what we really think of girls, doesnât it? God forbid any boy should give up his boy-ness to be a girl.â â Excerpt From: Minisinoo. âAorist Subjunctive 04 - Past Present.â [x] (via hoodiecap)
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toebesity asked: I've asked before and maybe you didn't see it, or if you think this is repetitive/a stupid question, please tell me so I won't add to your inbox. I understand that marriage is a patriarchal institution and partaking in hetero marriage especially is not a feminist act, but is it an anti-feminist act? Also, do you have any suggestions for further reading about feminist perspectives of heterosexuality? I can't find many myself (maybe I'm just not looking in the right places?). Thank you!
evilfeminist answered: The following was written by feminist Michele Braa-Heidner.:
If heterosexuality was expressed in a non patriarchal, male dominated scenario, heterosexuality may have merit, but as it stands, existing within the confines of patriarchy, we must question it completely. Why do women want to be with men knowing what we know about men? Knowing that all men disrespect and hate women most of the time? Seeing the devastating results of male violence against women historically and currently? Seeing men dominate, oppress, violate and murder women? We must ask ourselves is our heterosexuality healthy or is it an adapted survival behavior in response to male violence against females? Since we donât have any frame of reference for healthy heterosexuality where women and men are both respected free and equal human beings, we cannot say with any conviction that patriarchal heterosexuality is normal, healthy or natural. Since we donât have any frame of reference of a type of heterosexuality that exists without the component of male violence against women, we cannot come to the conclusion that patriarchal heterosexuality is normal, healthy or natural.
When women against all logic and evidence, continue to have relationships with men, regardless of how they treat us, we must conclude that there is another mechanism in play here. When we begin to question heterosexuality, I mean really question it and dismantle it within the patriarchal confines, we expose the insanity of women âchoosingâ to be with men on male merit alone because the hard truth of the matter is that men donât deserve women on merit alone. Consequently, this insane need for women to be with men begins to reveal itself as a symptom or reaction to the conditions of female enslavement and victimization. A means for surviving male violence. This becomes even more evident when you read the symptoms of oppressive/dominant relationships and how the behaviors of subservience are exactly the same behaviors as femininity. That even men display âfeminineâ behaviors when they are being dominated. What if women have adapted to male domination and violence by âsleeping with the enemyâ? By getting close to their captors in an effort to be able to control their environment or to curtail male violence? We need to start asking ourselves these questions so that we can begin to analyze our relationships with men if we ever want to have healthy ones or further, decide not to.
If we do this, analyze our desire to be with men, we may find that there is no good reason. That our relationships are not based on reciprocal respect, but instead based on our own terror. Our individual man could be to us, a life preserver amongst a sea of potential male predators. We may find that on the surface we kid ourselves into believing that we need them or want them but underneath this surface level, we see that this is just a band-aide covering up our terror from the inherent memory, cell memory, of our violent enslavement at the hands of men. There is ample evidence that connects feminine behaviors especially in our relationships with men that mimic the behaviors of victims of Stockholmâs Syndrome.
Another factor involved here is that most male violence against women including rape is done by the men that women know or have relationships with, not by strangers. The nuclear family is the playground for male violence due to the isolation of women under the roof and control of individual men. We are constantly inundated with threats of violence from male strangers, but the truth is this compared to non stranger male violence is rare. I believe the reason for this that patriarchy has a stake in keeping women terrified of the strange man out there, outside our safe homes, because this terror keeps women in their place, within the confines of the nuclear family, the individual man and of patriarchy on a societal level. Women then cling to their âmenâ in an effort to stay safe from the strange violent malesâout there. Women stay in abusive relationships because they have Stockholmâs syndrome, not because they are stupid or because they like it. She is merely trying to survive violence in the best way she knows how.
Women learn to see themselves as inferior and men superior because they must put themselves in their captors shoes to be able to feel safer to be able to figure out when an if he will be violent and try to curtail his violence. This is why women tend to dislike themselves and other women because they are seeing themselves through the dominant male eyes. Women then see themselves and other women as weak, stupid, petty and deserving of male punishment, yet another reason why women tend to like men over women. And this is also why women tend to compete with other women when it comes to male attention. Patriarchy teaches women this lie, that men are important and women are not; therefore, to be important, women must be with men thereby getting attention or importance through osmosis. All of these factors play into what we know as âheterosexualityâ and all of these factors also play into the reasons for why we think heterosexuality is necessary. If we take these factors and or reasons out of the equation, would we be heterosexual? Would women want to be with men?
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I care about the problems of men. I care that the patriarchy tells men that they have to be stoic beasts incapable of emotion. I care that the patriarchy tells men that they are lust-filled monsters incapable of controlling their own libidos. I care that the patriarchy tells men that they cannot be raped or assaulted because the patriarchy believes women are too weak and inferior to be dangerous.
Feminists did not do this to you, other men did.
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âStop apologizing to men for not wanting to sit with them, drink with them, dance with them, go home with them. You have not been put on this earth for their pleasure, their entertainment, to help them feel a little less lonely at night. If you do not want someone, are not interested in someone, donât apologize. You do not have to be forgiven for the sake of someone elseâs feelings. All you have to worry about is your own.
If youâre dating someone and they cheat on you with the girl sitting across them from the bar, or anyone for that matter, do not ask their name, why they did it, and if it was worth it. Just leave. Do not swear your revenge, or that you find the one who broke your relationship because the person who broke your trust is sitting right in front of you. The person who ruined what you had is the one who promised that they never would. Do not fixate yourself on what you should have or could have done, but what you will do, which is leave. You gave them a chance and now they can see it walk out the door.
Youâre going to make mistakes and thatâs inevitable, but what isnât is making those same mistakes twice. You are supposed to learn from the pain, supposed to take it into your hands, hang it on your wall to remind yourself that you will never let it happen again. Itâs hard stopping others from repeating their tragedies, but when it comes to your own, you are in control.
Love as many as you want. Kiss as many as you want. Fuck as many as you want. But when you do these things do it with all of you. Do it because you know it will show you something, help you with something, make sense of things. Never do a task that was assigned by someone else if you are not interested, not comfortable, unwilling. You can do anything you want to do as long as you know that there is only understanding and truth behind it. Never settle, never give in and never do anything that you donât want to just because you feel bad.
Learn to say no. Learn to fight. Learn the difference between love and lust and learn to love yourself. If you love yourself, when youâre alone, you wonât need the presence of another just to make you feel at ease. Youâll have the power of healing in your very own body. Youâre beautiful, remember that, write it down, scream it out loud and never forget. You have the entire world inside of your hands and the only thing you truly need to know to push through these trying times is that you can do anything. Now do it.â â "Tips for girls who are still growing up" Colleen Brown
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imreallybad:
imreallybad:
i wish men understood that when women are talking about feminism and rape culture and shit, itâs not just a political conversation. itâs not about being a âsocial justice warriorâ or whatever. itâs about our actual lives being shaped by misogyny since childhood, and the daily reality of living in fear of violence. this isnât a fucking game or philosophical debate. this is our fucking lives.
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âWhen 12-year-old girls are watching something like the CWâs long-running campy drama One Tree Hill (which aired from 2003-2012), in which actors like 25-year-old Hilarie Burton played 17-year-old cheerleader Peyton Sawyer, theyâre not seeing an accurate portrayal of their future on screen. Theyâre seeing a glamorized vision of some executiveâs idealized version of high school instead. When a real 16-year-old cheerleader flips on the CW and sees fellow pompom shakers who look like Burton or costar Sophia Bush, also well beyond her high school years, theyâre looking at themselves at wondering why they donât look like that in their uniform. Hereâs the secret: they didnât when they were 16, either.â â Samantha Wilson, Why Teenagers Need to Play Teenagers On Screen (via thunderboltandlightning)
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âBefore you say yes, get him angry. See him scared, see him wanting, see him sick. Stress changes a person. Find out if he drinks and if he does, get him drunk - youâll learn more about his sober thoughts. Discover his addictions. See if he puts you in front of them. You canât change people, baby girl. If they are made one way, it doesnât just wear off. If you hate how he acts when heâs out of it now, youâre going to hate it much worse eight years down the road. You might love him to bits but it doesnât change that some people just donât fit.â â inkskinned, âMy fatherâs recipe for the man I should marryâ Â (via seaglassnserendipity)
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âBefore I am your daughter, your sister, your aunt, niece, or cousin, I am my own person, and I will not set fire to myself to keep you warm.â â 1/? Things To Remember (via egracely)
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âBeing born a woman is an awful tragedy. Yes, my consuming desire to mingle with road crews, sailors and soldiers, bar room regularsâto be a part of a scene, anonymous, listening, recordingâall is spoiled by the fact that I am a girl, a female always in danger of assault and battery. My consuming interest in men and their lives is often misconstrued as a desire to seduce them, or as an invitation to intimacy. Yet, God, I want to talk to everybody I can as deeply as I can. I want to be able to sleep in an open field, to travel west, to walk freely at night.â â Sylvia Plath
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unclefather:
why does my dad have to give me away at my wedding? my dad doesnât own me. thatâs funny because one time when i was 13 my dad wouldnât take me to get italian ice so i hit him in the back of the head with my flip flop and he took me. so technically, i own my dad and i should give him away at his wedding.
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âthereâs a special place in hell for men who convince women their intuition is insecurity to protect their duplicity.â â dream hampton  (via locsnlyrics)
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âi donât imagine my princesses in the same way others do, either kissing their husband and in marital perfection or the cynical version where they are drunk in the kitchen, living out their happily ever afters in a haze of poor decisions, no, i think cinderella becomes a fashion designer, i think she stops smoking and takes back her name and ends up making money and being a spokesperson for abuse victims, i think right now if ella was alive sheâd be laughing over a pumpkin-spice latte and her empire is the most body-inclusive in fashion
i think snow-white becomes an activist, i think she studies genetics and i think she will allow no person with a disability to go homeless, i think whenever someone makes a joke about seven small men, she whips around and asks them what exactly their problem is because there is nothing wrong with any of her friends
i think aurora is a sleep disorder doctor and a psychologist, she uses hypnosis to help people who canât quite escape the thicket inside of their brains and i think sheâs working on developing a pill for people with chronic insomnia even though everyone still teases her about that one bout of narcolepsy and one day she admits she actually was awake for most of it and just studying
i think ariel has shut down marine life poaching in as many parts of her country as she can, i think that sheâs got teams working to clean up oil spills and sheâs building windmills in her backyard because sheâd rather have the âeyesoreâ than know someone is drilling in her home, i think she has degrees in environmental science and marine biology, i think sheâs got a side project for scuba divers and oceanography and is devising a way for mermaids to visit her land without giving up their tails
i think belle is a veterinarian and runs her practice out of her fatherâs house where his inventions have saved the lives of at least ninety dogs and i think that she is a teacher in her free time and has raised gastonâs eight kids to be nothing short of polite and well-mannered and i think that she takes frequent trips outside of her little quiet town but always comes home again
i think jasmine is a feminist in every aspect, i believe she works with shelters and soup kitchens and makes sure nobody starves in her city ever again, i think she sets up homes for homeless women, i think she marches in rallies and has a school specifically for gifted girls that were almost married off to strange men
see, i think when we cast these women as only a prize to be won and that their life stops as soon as the credits roll, i think when we joke about how everything went south right after it all, weâre telling girls, âyou will regret that you ever fell in love or believed in magic when you were small,â see you can believe in happy endings, but believe too in the princesses themselves, believe that marriage isnât the only goal a girl can set for herself,
believe that if these girls fought to stay alive when an evil queen was chasing them, if they fought to give up their nature for the chance of more adventure, if they fought the sultan himself and societyâs expectations: something tells me that their happily ever after isnât resting on their laurels, something tells me theyâd seek just a little more, something tells me that theyâd keep fighting until there is a happy ending for every single little girl
believe in yourself, princess, and know that even if you want a career and husband and twelve happy children, you are not deluding yourself of anything. it is completely possible to actually have everything
it is okay for you to want a job and a home and a family and a kingdom. you are strong enough. you would handle it.
please donât let anyone tell you different.â â sit tall today, my love. your dreams are valid and you are always good enough. // r.i.d (via inkskinned)
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âThink about the first name you were ever called, and then think how long it took until you got called a pussy or a slut, or a bitch, or a whore, all of which are words that fall too close to âgirl.â Think about the first time you got called a âgirlâ and they said it with a sneer. Like it was a bad thing.
For a boy, it is the lowest degradation to get called a girl. For a girl, it is the lowest degradation to get called a girl.
Remember, black widow spiders and female praying mantises eat their partners after intercourse. Remember, itâs the lionesses who hunt. They come back with bloody muzzles, dragging bloated carcasses as the alpha lion strides around with his mane puffing out. Remember, itâs only the female mosquitoes who drink blood. Weâre the ones who do the necessary work, dirty our hands, fuck or fight or both. Weâre often the smaller sex, which makes us a harder target as we slink close and sink our teeth in.
Remember: weâre deadly.
You should be proud to be called a girl.â â 'Most Female Killers use Poison,' theappleppielifestyle. (via birthdaybaby)
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âAll too often women believe it is a sign of commitment, an expression of love, to endure unkindness or cruelty, to forgive and forget. In actuality, when we love rightly we know that the healthy, loving response to cruelty and abuse is putting ourselves out of harmâs way.â â bell hooks (via memoriasconsazon)
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âThirteen? And itâs even worse because Bill Cosby has the fucking smuggest old black man public persona that I hate. Pull your pants up, black people. I was on TV in the â80s. I can talk down to you because I had a successful sitcom. Yeah, but you raped women, Bill Cosby. So, brings you down a couple notches. I donât curse on stage. Well, yeah, youâre a rapist, so, Iâll take you sayinâ lots of motherfuckers on Bill Cosby: Himself if you werenât a rapist. âŠI want to just at least make it weird for you to watch Cosby Show reruns. âŠIâve done this bit on stage, and people donât believe. People think Iâm making it up. âŠThat shit is upsetting. If you didnât know about it, trust me. You leave here and google âBill Cosby rape.â Itâs not funny. That shit has more results than Hannibal Buress.â â Hannibal Buress, calling the shit out of bill cosby [x] (via bluemoonofkentucky)
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âWhen I was a freshman, my sister was in eighth grade. There was a boy in two of her periods who would ask her out every single day. (Third and seventh period, if I remember correctly.) All day during third and seventh she would repeatedly tell him no. She didnât beat around the bush, she didnât lie and say she was takenâshe just said no. One day, in third period, after being rejected several times, he said; âI have a gun in my locker. If you donât say yes, I am going to shoot you in seventh.â
She refused again, but right after class she went to the principalâs office and told them what happened. They searched his locker and there was a gun in his backpack.
When he was arrested, some of my sisterâs friends (some female, even) told her that she was selfish for saying no so many times. That because of her, the entire school was in jeopardy. That it wouldnât have killed her to say yes and give it a try, but because she was so mean to him, he lost his temper. Many of her male friends said it was âgirls like herâ that made all women seem like cockteases.
Wouldnât have killed her to say yes? If a man is willing to shoot someone for saying no, what happens to the poor soul who says yes? What happens the first time they disagree? What happens the first time she says she doesnât want to have sex? That she isnât in the mood? When they break up?
Years later, when I was a senior, I was the only girl in my Criminal Justice class. The teacher, who used to be a sergeant in the police force, told us a story of something that had happened to a girl he knew when she was in high school. There was a guy who obviously had a crush on her and he made her uncomfortable. One day he finally gathered up the courage to ask her out, and she said no.
The next day, during an assembly, he pulled a gun on her in front of everyone and threatened to kill her if she didnât date him.
He was tackled to the ground and the gun was taken from him. When my teacher asked the class who was at fault for the crime, I was the only person who said the boy was. All the other kids in the class (who were all boys) said that the girl was, that if she had said yes he wouldâve never lost it and brought a gun and tried to kill her. When my teacher said that they were wrong and that this is what is wrong with society, that whenever a white boy commits a crime itâs someone elseâs fault (music, television, video games, the victim) one boy raised his hand and literally said; âBut if someone were to punch me and I punched him back, who is at fault for the fight? He is, not me. Itâs self-defence. She started it, so anything that happens to her is in reaction to her actions .Itâs simple cause and effect.â
Even though he spent the rest of the calss period ripping into the boys and saying that you are always responsible for your own actions, and that women are allowed to say no and do not have to date them, they left class laughing about how idiotic he was and that he clearly had no idea how much it hurt to be rejected.
So now we have a new school shooting, based solely on the fact some guy couldnât get laid, and I see men, boys, applaudin him, or if theyâre not applauding him, theyâre laying blame on women as a whole. Just like my sisterâs friends did. Just like the boys in my Criminal Justice class did.
This isnât something thatâs rare. This isnât something that never happens, or that a select group of men feel as if they are so entitled to women that saying no is not only the worst possible thing a woman can do, but is considered a form of âdefenceâ when they commit a crime upon them (whether it be rape or murder-as-a-reaction-towards-rejection).
Girls are being killed for saying no to prom invites. Girls are being killed for saying no to men. They are creating an atmosphere where women are too scared to say no, and the worst part is? They are doing it intentionally. They want society to be that way, they want women to say yes entirely out of fear. Even the boys and men who arenât showing up to schools with guns are saying; âWell, you know, I wouldnât do that, but you have to admit that if she had just said yes âŠâ
If you are a man and you defend this guysâ actions or try to find an excuse for it, or you denounce what really happened, or in any way lay blame on women, every girl you know, every woman you love, has just now thought to themselves that you might lose your shit and kill them someday for saying no. You have just lost their trust. And you know what? You deserve to lose it.â
âcry laugh feel love peace panic: Â
âWouldnât have killed her to say yes? If a man is willing to shoot someone for saying no, what happens to the poor soul who says yes? What happens the first time they disagree? What happens the first time she says she doesnât want to have sex? That she isnât in the mood? When they break up?" -vampmissedith.tumblr.com
THIS IS MANDATORY READING!
(via feminist-space)
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âWhy for example, does a twenty-two-year-old man pursue a sixteen-year-old adolescent? Because he is stimulated by her? Obviously not. They are at completely different developmental points in life with a dramatic imbalance in their levels of knowledge and experience. He is attracted to power and seeks a partner who will look up to him with awe and allow him to lead her. Of course, he usually tells her the opposite, insisting that he wants to be with her because of how unusually mature and sophisticated she is for her age. He may even compliment her on her sexual prowess and say how much power she has over him, setting up the young victim so that she wonât recognize what is happening to her. Even without a chronological age difference, some abusive men are drawn to women who have less life experience, knowledge, or self-confidence, and who will look up to the man as a teacher or mentor.â â Why Does He Do That? Inside the Minds of Angry and Controlling Men by Lundy Bancroft (via tszarina)
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barber-butt asked: Would is possible to give your views on the harassment video, more importantly the post you re-blogged about the people saying hello. I've always been a fan of your views and respected your ability to speak out on things.. personally i think the ones saying hello are perfectly fine when done in a respectful way.. even telling a woman they look nice, providing its done correctly.. i think the video was great and it called out cat calling, and rude ways to approach or comment on people
chescaleigh answered: Not sure what else I can add, as I think locksandglasses summed it up perfectly. No, saying âhelloâ isnât automatically harassment, but in my experience, men arenât randomly saying hello to other men on the street. Itâs behavior thatâs specifically geared towards women, and more often than not itâs used as a way to strike up a conversation in hopes of it turning into something more.
Hereâs the thing. When a guy says hello to me on the street and I say hello back, they almost always take it as an invitation to follow me and try to continue a conversation or get my number. If I donât respond, Iâm an âugly nappy headed bitchâ. This has happened to me with guys of all ages and all backgrounds. Even the old guy who looks like somebodyâs grandfather has called me a ârude bitchâ because I felt uncomfortable when he said hello to me late at night as I was walking home from the train. So itâs damed if you do, damned if you donât.
But as mentioned in the previous reblog, when your entire day is filled with guys trying to talk to you, itâs hard not to perceive every interaction as threatening or uncomfortable. A woman in NY recently had her throat slashed by a guy because she didnât want to talk to him. Over the summer another woman was beaten to death because she wouldnât give a guy her number. Now on the surface, asking for someoneâs number doesnât sound like harassment right? Ignoring someone shouldnât provoke anyone to violence right? But for these guys, our mere existence is meant to validate them. So saying no or saying nothing at all is somehow a threat. But what was even more terrifying were the scores of men on social media insisting the victim shouldâve just given the guy her number, or that women donât know what itâs like to be ignored. Most men donât realize what itâs like to be afraid to walk a few blocks to your own home because you have to walk past a group of guys and you donât know if you should speak or ignore them.
Iâve been threatened numerous times (once had to call the police) and even had a guy try to run my car off the road because I wasnât receptive to âhey girlâ and âyou look nice todayâ. Once a guy told me to smile and when I ignored him he said, âcareful bitch or Iâll make it so you canât smileâ. I have no doubt those men thought they were being ârespectfulâ because they didnât hiss or make lewd comments about my body. I donât want to push for a world where we canât say hello or give compliments to strangers, but I think people need to respect the fact that this kind of harassment is a constant issue and as a result, many of us arenât trying to be rude, weâre just trying to protect ourselves and get through the day alive.
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flash-thunder:
Women make up 45% of the gaming community and 0% of the protagonists of the 25 biggest games of the year.
"Yes, but thatâs still a minority! If more women played video games, there would be more reason to have female protagonists!"
Men make up 35% of the cinema audience and 84% of the protagonists of the 25 biggest movies of the year.
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some boy:stop generalizing all men some boy:as a guy, i have to say, this is just how guys are, this is what the bros are like, im just saying whats on every guys mind, if your man says differently he's lying, real men don't ____, im a piece of shit
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âIâm meeting boys who like Charles Bukowski and they all want to do brutal things to my body. They tell me they buy a bottle of whiskey whenever they get one of his books and donât stop reading till theyâve gone through a pack of cigarettes. They blow smoke in my face and say, âHe was the outcast king of L.A. Did you know that, huh?â âYeah, yeah, I know.â I say. âHeâs great.â A boy gives me a worn copy of On the Road and thinks heâs being original. âWe should explore the road together. Would you like that, baby?â I take a sip of my water and look away. Yes, Iâd like that, I think. But heâs drunk and imagining himself sixty years earlier, in the back of a bar, sweating to the sound of live bop. Still, I prefer him to the hungry boy that devoured my shirt and said, âYou have a tattoo? Whatâs it say?â âmad to live?â What, are you angry about living? Aw, Iâm just kidding, come here, let me take off that bra.â The next boy I kiss doesnât read. I ask him to come to a bookstore with me and he stays outside, sighing. He has no interest in words. He has no interest in me. I am thankful for him. For a few weeks, I am able to shed my habit of thinking obsessively and become a duller, rougher version of myself. I dump him when my fingers start turning imaginary pages in my sleep.
I go on a date with a boy who knows I like to write. He calls himself a fan of mine and swears heâs read every word Iâve put down. âYouâve got this voice thatâs very modern, but also so classic.â I choke on my water as he says, âI read you to fall asleep.â I listen to him pant metaphors and compare my mouth to the sea. One day, he stumbles across my journal, and finds nothing about himself in it. âYou donât really love me, do you?â I shake my head. There is no use pretending anymore. He has read my poems about the boys I want to drown in me. His goodbye leaves my hands covers in ink. He wanted me so badly to be the sea, when all I am is a girl who writes poetry. I try my best to become poetry. I take a bath and stain the water with black ink. I cut my hair in a motel sink. I cry for people I have never met. I start smoking cigarettes. I use words like âpresumptuouslyâ and talk about âpost-modernist new wave.â I walk the streets at 4 a.m. and smile at people coming home from a rave. I wear sunglasses indoors. I carry a 500 page volume of poems wherever I go. I drink coffee instead of water. I talk about the âadvantages of using film and listening to records.â But no matter how hard I try, I am not the sea. I am a sunken ship that has drowned in everyone who touched me.â â Lora Mathis, âI Am Not the Seaâ (via flythevinyl)
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âBlack women wake up in the morning, look in the mirror, and see Black women. White women wake up in the morning, look in the mirror, and see women. White men wake up in the morning, look in the mirror, and see human beings.â â Michelle Haimoff, on privilege  (via purityhole)
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tarsussfour asked: Yo, I don't mean to disrespect your views or change your mind. Just pointing out that hating the opposite gender is what brought along sexism in the first place.
womxxn answered: If you arenât trying to change my mind then why are you even talking to me about this? Â Stop lying about your motives both to yourself and to me.
My hatred is reactionary, my anger is reactionary, my grief for my female sisters is reactionary.  I am reacting  to thousands of years of abuse and subjugation. Â
My hatred and my anger will not stop until men stop raping, murdering, and abusing us.  My hatred will stop when there is no longer a widespread need for crisis centers for women because our boyfriends, fathers, husbands, and even strangers feel like our body is their property to rape or knock around.  My anger will stop when little girls arenât being groomed for motherhood and  for dating men before we are old enough to tie our own shoes.  My hatred will stop when teenage girls no longer have to fend off the gaze and touch of middle aged men.  My anger will stop when women are no longer forced to sell their bodies for food, their sense of selves for a place to sleep.  My hatred will stop when men stop trying to force their way into our spaces, when men recognize that they have been enforcing and maintaining a system that knocks women to their knees so that they can feel tall.
My hatred, my anger, it is reactionary. Â Male hatred, that is unfounded.
Spend your time telling them to not âfight fire with fireâ or telling them that âhate breeds hateâ. Â
I am fighting fire with the only thing available to me, go tell men to stop fucking lighting the fires, then we can talk.
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anonymous asked: if you and your partner enjoy kinks that do not harm either of you AND do not involve anyone else what's wrong with that? i can see how non consensually it's oppressive and harmful, but when you trust someone in a relationship you should be able to have sex however you want. comparing a couple with sadist kinks to an abusive person in a relationship is a really serious accusation.
luaren answered: there is absolutely no good reason for participating in sex acts that mimic the trauma of others
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âThe fact of the matter is that a comment like ânice assâ feels crude and unpleasant and threatening, because extended from ânice assâ is something slimy and threatening and gross, something sinister. Something claiming that ass as public property. Itâs hard to articulate how this feels to someone who doesnât get it on a visceral level â someone who hasnât, say, walked down a dark alley in San Francisco on a quick shortcut, only to hear a low, rough voice saying something about your breasts, or your body, or your ass, or some other part of you. That voice isnât complimentary. Itâs asserting ownership, reminding you that you are vulnerable, reminding you that as someone with a body like yours, you are considered to be an object belonging to the public commons.â â âWhy canât you just deal with it?â âItâs a compliment!â | this ainât livinâ (via brutereason)
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âIn San Francisco last year, a man stabbed a woman in the face and arm after she didnât respond positively to his sexually harassing her on the street.
In Bradenton, Fla., a man shot a high school senior to death after she and her friends refused to perform oral sex at his request.
In Chicago, a scared 15-year-old was hit by a car and died after she tried escaping from harassers on a bus.
Again, in Chicago, a man grabbed a 19-year-old walking on a public thoroughfare, pulled her onto a gangway and assaulted her.
In Savannah, Georgia, a woman was walking alone at night and three men approached her. She ignored them, but they pushed her to the ground and sexually assaulted her.
In Manhattan, a 29-year-old pregnant woman was killed when men catcalling from a van drove onto the sidewalk and hit her and her friend.
Last week, a runner in California â a woman â was stopped and asked, by a strange man in a car, if she wanted a ride. When she declined he ran her over twice.
FUCK YOU if you think that street harassment is a âcomplimentâ or âno big dealâ or that itâs âirrationalâ of us to be afraid because âwhatâs actually gonna happen.â Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you some more.â â Street Harassment: Is a Man Running Over a 14-Year Old Girl for Refusing Sex Serious Enough? | Soraya Chemaly (via qek)
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liesthepatriarchytoldme:
courtneyrael:
archmasterjazzy:
realjusticewesteros:
nietzschesghost:
liesthepatriarchytoldme:
The patriarchy told me that male rape victims are just as important as female ones.
(submitted by anonymous)
Editors note: Male rape victims arenât less important than female ones? However,⊠Male victims (of both rape and domestic abuse) are often laughed at by authority. No one believes them, and if they do believe them, they donât care because âtheyâre a manâ. People expect men to want sex under any condition, and to be impervious to violence, neither of which are true. Now, imagine knowing that telling authorities about your abuse would result in being laughed at and dismissed. A lot of male victims choose to handle their abuse on their own because no one takes them seriously. Maybe if we took it seriously, we could all see that it is much more common than we think. Maybe rather than separating male and female victims of rape (and domestic violence) we should focus on the larger problem, of abuse in general, regardless of sex/gender of the abused and abuser. You want to talk about being laughed at and dismissed? Letâs go.
Female rape victims are often laughed at by authority, too, and more often, because men are much larger perpetrators of rape and rape culture than women. Meaning more women are raped. You think only men donât report rape for fear of mockery but women donât? Puh-lease. If the female victim is overweight theyâre told at least they âgot some,â if theyâre thin theyâre told, âyou wanted it anyway,â if theyâre wearing revealing clothing theyâre told, âyou were asking for it,â or better, âyou deserved it.â This happens CONSTANTLY AND CONSISTENTLY. And not just by the police. By their friends, by doctors, professionals, teachers, etc.
There are literally millions, MILLIONS, of rape kits sitting in police stations across America (and perhaps other countries) that will never even be reviewed by authorities because rape isnât taken seriously by the US Justice System.
And like this user stated in a reblog about this ask, âAbolishing rape culture, which is primarily focused on women, will also reduce and/or eliminate male (and other gendered) rape.â
You focus on the MAIN issue, it lessens the smaller issues, and once that is solved, you focus on the smaller cases (which are lesser because youâve focused on the main oneâŠahduh). Itâs common sense.
And letâs be clear, weâre not focusing on âabuse,âweâre focusing on rape.Ya know, what this post is about. Makes me wonder if you even bothered reading the full post before barging in with your very wrong and uneducated male-centric MRA-style opinion.
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âWhen we discover that women are the objects of oppression and appropriation, at the very moment that we become able to perceive this, we become subjects in the sense of cognitive subjects, through an operation of abstraction. Consciousness of oppression is not only a reaction to (fight against) oppression. It is also the whole conceptual reevaluation of the social world, its whole reorganization with new concepts, from the point of view of oppression. It is what I would call the science of oppression created by the oppressed. This operation of understanding reality has to be undertaken by every one of us: call it a subjective, cognitive practice. The movement back and forth between the levels of reality (the conceptual reality and the material reality of oppression, which are both social realities) is accomplished through language.â â Monique Witti, One Is Not Born A Woman (via seebster)
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âThere is no great stigma attached to being a rapist. Of course, itâs not a word anyone wishes to see applied to themselves. Weâd all hate to be called rapists, just as weâd hate anyone close to us to be accused of rape. But when it comes to committing rape - actually having sex with someone who is not consenting? It seems a lot of us are totally cool with that. Go ahead, rape away, just make sure no one calls it by that name.
A 2010 survey reported by Sky News revealed 46 per cent of men aged 18 to 25 do not consider it rape if a man continues to penetrate a woman after she has changed her mind. Last week a survey conducted by Rape Crisis and Reveal magazine showed a third of women do not believe a rape to have taken place if an alleged victim did not fight back. Itâs only eight years since a poll by Amnesty International suggested 8 per cent people believe a woman to be totally - thatâs totally - responsible for rape if sheâs had many sexual partners. The truth is, an alarming number of people are very comfortable indeed with the idea of rape in certain circumstances. Like George Galloway, they merely see it as âbad sexual etiquette.â Rape doesnât horrify them, not a bit; rape accusations do.â â There is no great stigma attached to being a rapist (via evilfeminist)
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âItâs the Belle Knox brand of feminism. It says that if an individual woman consents to â or even enjoys â performing in pornography, it must be ok. It says that if an individual woman likes pornography, it must be ok. And not just ok, but potentially empowering. I have no idea why we would assume that only menâs sexualities can be shaped by porn or why, simply because a womanâs fantasies have been shaped by porn that means those fantasies and that pornography is necessarily feminist. I donât give a shit how many people like porn. I donât give a shit if you say you like performing in porn (most women donât, for the record, but there are exceptions to every rule that youâre sure to find if you look). That changes absolutely nothing about what porn is and how it impacts our lives and society as a whole.â â Feminism is the new misogyny: On âBelle Knox feminismâ and the new backlash Â
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âSo why do I overreact more egregiously to criticism from women, when all of my childhood bullies were boys? The answer, I think, has less to do with the boys who bullied me, and more to do with the well-intentioned adults who tried to âhelpâ me through that bullying: When I was a nerdy kid, adults regularly assured me that the abuse I suffered was acceptable because one day I would be entitled to constant positive sexual attention from women.
If you were a computer-loving male child who took a lot of shit from your peers, I suspect you heard something similar from the adults in your life. Maybe it was âSure, things are bad now, but when youâre a little bit older, women will LOVE guys like you!â Or maybe it was âThat kid who makes fun of you now will be working at a gas station when you run a big fancy computer company and marry a supermodel!â If you were once young, nerdy and male, it is not unlikely that your future sense of self-worth was funded with a non-consensual IOU from the worldâs women.â â Matt LeMay, What (Else) Can Men Do? Grow the Fuck Up. (via sparkamovement)
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âMale survivors charge that feminists see rape as a âman vs. womanâ issue⊠The distinction is that while many women, and some men, are victimized by rape, all women are oppressed by it, and any victimization of women occurs in a context of oppression most men simply do not understand. For myself, I donât need for rape to be gender neutral to feel validated as a male survivor. And I certainly donât need to denigrate women, or to attack feminists, to explain why I was abused by the (male) police, ridiculed by my (male) friends, and marginalized by the (male dominated) society around me. It is precisely because we have been âreducedâ to the status of women that other men find us so difficult to deal with. It was obvious to me at the police station that I was held in contempt because I was a victim- feminine, hence perceived as less masculine. Had I been an accused criminal, even a rapist, chances are I would have been treated with more respect, because I would have been seen as more of a man. To cross that line, to become victims of the violence which works to circumscribe the lives of women, marks us somehow as traitors to our gender. Being a male rape survivor means I no longer fit our cultureâs neat but spacious definition of masculinity, as one empowered, one always in control. Rather than continue to deny our experience, male survivors need to challenge that definition.â â Fred Pelka, âA Male Survivor Breaks His Silenceâ
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ptrslbrmn:
instead of proclaiming that every girl in the world is sexy no matter what why donât we start talking about how it doesnât matter whether or not youâre sexy because sex appeal is irrelevant and is used as a tool for male dominance
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âwho taught you that the value of a woman is the ratio of her waist to her hips and the circumference of her buttocks and the volume of her lips? Your math is dangerously wrong her value is nothing less than infinite.â â âGreater thanâ by Della Hicks-Wilson (via bighappybeauty)
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âAfter all, if youâre going to call yourself a feminist, you should be willing to back that belief up with facts, right?
And if youâve got all the facts, it should be easy enough to convince him, shouldnât it?
And after all, how is he supposed to understand anything if you wonât educate him?
He just wants so badly to understand.
If you donât mind, could you start by providing him with some kind empirical data that women continue to suffer from systematic oppression? He doesnât care about the past, and doesnât want a history lesson. He wants to talk about the here and now. And from what he can see in the here and now, women are doing pretty well. After all, look at you! Smart, well-educated, pretty. What about your gender could you possibly imagine has ever held you back? If anything, itâs probably done you a few favours!â â âWhy Wonât You Educate Me About Feminism?â | The Belle Jar
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âI discovered that TED and TEDWomen have never featured a talk on abortion. âŠWhen I asked around, the consensus was that the omission was simply an oversight. But it turns out TED is deliberately keeping abortion off the agenda. When asked for comment, TED content director and TEDWomen co-host Kelly Stoetzel said that abortion did not fit into their focus on âwider issues of justice, inequality and human rights.â
âAbortion is more of a topical issue we wouldnât take a position on, any more than weâd take a position on a state tax bill,â Stoetzel explained. She pointed me to a few talks on womenâs health and birth control, but this made the refusal to discuss abortion only more glaring. In the last three years, the United States has seen more abortion restrictions enacted than in the entire previous decade; the United Nations has classified the lack of access to abortion as torture; and Savita Halappanavar died in Ireland because a Catholic hospital refused to end her doomed pregnancy. Just how is abortion not an issue of âjustice, inequality and human rightsâ?â â The Empowerment Elite Claims Feminism, my latest at The Nation (via jessicavalenti)
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âWhat if the cure for cancer is trapped inside the mind of the baby youâre considering aborting?â what if the cure for cancer is trapped in the mind of a kid born in poverty, who now lacks access to things like good nutrition, good education, a safe environment in their neightborhood, good medical care, and other things that help a childâs mind really grow to be everything it could be? What if itâs in the mind of a child who is denied all of those things but also has to face racial prejudice?
alternately, what if the cure for cancer is trapped in the mind of a 16-year-old girl who, due to a lack of support services and/or access to contraception and abortion, is now stuck working two fast-food jobs to support her and her kid instead of continuing in school?
(what if the cure for cancer would have eventually developed inside the mind of a teenage girl who made a mistake and was forced to drop out of school and never receive an education in order to raise a child she did not want?)
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