#like lack of sex education lack of birth control and rape

[theamazingannie]

What really confuses me about a lot of pro life people is that they just genuinely seem to think pro choice people are monsters. What’s more likely, that a whole bunch of people just love killing babies left and right for no reason at all other than their own enjoyment, or that a whole bunch of people think that everyone should get a choice in whether or not they become parents and shouldn’t be forced to be an incubator for nine months and have their body forever altered and potentially be at risk for longterm health issues and even death and then have to either raise that child to adulthood despite not wanting to or being in any way ready for it or send it through the adoption system where the child will grow up wondering why their birth parents didn’t want them all because someone else valued the “life” of an undeveloped clump of cells over the life of a fully grown person with wants and fears and feelings?

[treasure-me]

An Amateurish Text on Censorship, Sex and how nice pretending a perfect World is

Censorship is derived from fear, conservatism and the human need for things to stay the same. Any man seeking to censor an artwork, speech, symbol or practice is morally wrong. However, the manipulation, personally or societally, the lack of education and the purposeful lack of distinguished ideas in politics, and the lack of honesty in society at large, counters that statement. You cannot be free if your place of education is corrupt to a certain ideal, and you cannot be free if your system is not free. Freedom is impossible without certain aspects of moral cleanliness, and a correct moral compass, one that is wholly absolute, requires a lack of censorship. However, many people advocating for complete freedom of speech clearly are biased. A republican man in his thirties, who wishes to be able to personally insult a member of the transgender community by calling them by their birth name, for example, and then complains about "freedom of speech" when there is backlash against his actions, is an idiot. If you advocate for freedom of speech in an aim to further your ability to target a minority, the same logic applies for that minority; they should have the freedom to call you whatever they want as well. It should be noted I do not condone either side of that argument; it's simply unnecessary. The lack of respect required to insult a person purely due to your own desire to see yourself as better is shocking. It's simply just disrespectful, immature, and a clear window into a person's mindset, where their goal of protecting their own fragile ego is prevalent. However, insulting a person back is not going to make your situation any better, it will instead bring you down to your opponent's level. I digress.

For a man to be fully "free", he must not only be educated to function in a world where he must able to decide his own opinions, organize his morals, and have a fair position where he is able to choose these opinions and morals where he will not be swayed unequally, he must also be able to do, to an extent, anything. A man who is well educated, and lives in a system that is free from misogyny and toxic masculinity, and has a fair and kind environment has no reason to "do" a thing that is morally corrupt (e.g. rape, murder) for he is free to chose, and well educated enough to function, and input himself into a group of people (who are all persons are also subject to the same fair utopist environment) he is most comfortable with. If you are educated on topics that are currently prevalent in our current society, such as race theory, the concepts of fallacy, theories around sexism, ideas around freedom of choice, and ideas around bodily and mental freedom, you are not going to be in a position where you would, for example, recreate hate symbology or participate in an environment where groups and ideologies such as Nazism. However, who should get to decide what is inside or outside the realm of what is "good" or not? Much of the world of hate speech, violent crimes and more and built on fallacy, corruption and a some higher power in control, but what is considered good? Things that people experience an attraction to, such as degradation, humiliation or pain may be considered acceptable, but what if these things are purely the result of negative environments? Would these acts continue?

My answer to that, "that" being the question "if, in the conceptual and utopistic society that was described, assuming the society is transformed from what we see today as the present, modern day western (western purely because of a higher level of prevalence in S&M acceptance, and for my own ease of mind, being a person living in a western society, who also doesn't like having to stretch scenarios to the point where a computer simulation or a dose of psychedelic drugs is required to imagine a make believe world) society, would we still continue to experience, in a world where all forms of expression is free, and where peoples are well educated, sadism and masochism? would sexual deviancy be relevant?" is quite simple in my mind. Yes. A world where the youngest generation suddenly gains the traits of education, thought, freedom and intellectualism would still be affected by the older generation. Although this perfect generation would not have any trauma, negative experiences or unfair amounts of bias inflicted onto it, the very nature of fair inflictions of bias and opinion means that these people must be introduced, at least partially, to the concept of S&M. These persons would also be able to view texts, films, and documents of S&M material. These persons would also be aware of the nature of emotional impacts of degrading culture, such as rape, but there is proof that well educated and intellectual persons can still affiliate themselves with sexual cultures such as communities who enjoy consensual acts of non consensual sex. Not to mention the ideas that some fetishistic ideas are instilled either by chance, genetically or through introduction to these ideas.

This text will be updated when I remember what I was talking about. I would like to point out that my use of examples of a man, and his function in society, is because of my discussion on manipulation, misogyny, etc.. primarily purported by a male group.

"For a man to be fully "free", he must not only be educated to function in a world where he must able to decide his own opinions, organize his morals, and have a fair position where he is able to choose these opinions and morals where he will not be swayed unequally, he must also be able to do, to an extent, anything."

"Any man seeking to censor an artwork, speech, symbol or practice is morally..."

examples of my use of masculine terms. This is, again, because censorship, lack of education towards morality and corruption is largely a male issue. I will, when the topic strays from a discussion on masculinity, alter the correct terms to ambiguous and feminine, respectively.

Many thanks to @evidence-based-activism for being inspiration on writing this. Your texts are a great example of how this platform can be used, and you speak very well. Professional diction aside, you seem like a very cool person, and I agree with much, if not all of your views. I have yet to find something I do not agree with you, and that heartens me significantly.

[fuckyeahilike]

I used to take these things seriously, because the US has made sure that everybody knows how bad access to public health care is in their country. I just naturally assumed that the same was true when it came to women having access to birth control; hence the hysteria surrounding the lack of access to abortion as if abortion were the only solution (maybe in their case it is, I thought); and the blaming of men and their shitty use of the pull out method, that no rational person would ever use as a form of birth control.

So it made sense to believe that American women were helpless and had no other strategy but to put themselves in the incapable hands of men.

To my surprise a few Google searches taught me that everyone in the US has ample, unrestricted access to condoms across the entire country. It's cheap as chips and in Planned Parenthood clinics they give the stuff away for free like candy. No one ever gave me any free condoms and I never had sex any other way. I wonder how I managed it?

But, I hear you say, what about those cases where women have been raped and it's not as though they could have politely asked their rapist to at least wear a condom. I hear you. I understand most women don't go to the police or to a hospital, even though they should be immediately taking a morning after pill and the shot against the HIV virus, to make sure they don't become pregnant by their rapist or catch his HIV.

Because yes, you can avoid dying from your rapist's HIV if only you will go to a hospital in time:

But also even if you don't want to report a rape anyone can buy the morning after pill for as little as ten bucks, no prescription or age requirements. If you don't have ten bucks in the US you are homeless. Are all of these women who have multiple babies by multiple men all of them homeless people who were all raped every time, is that we're saying?

It's a big part of feminism that women are supposed to become empowered by it, namely they should come to the realization that their bodies are their own and that they should exercise total sovereignity over it and over their own sexual health and reproduction.

So, how "feminist" is the feminist movement in the US? Well, they tell young impressionable girls who have been completely let down by their communities and know nothing about how to protect themselves from men that men are the ones responsible for whether or not they get pregnant and get AIDS. And also that without abortion women apparently have nothing. Thanks for nothing, guys.

I think I'm the only person I've seen so far on Radblr who ever even brings up fundamental pillars of feminist education like sexual ed, birth control, prevention of STDs, and the fact that AIDS is the leading cause of death for women across the globe today. But then I'm not an American? So maybe that explains why I actually give a shit.

Why does it look like 4 support payments? 4 kids?? Or am I just reading shit wrong

[they-are-a-prolife-autist]

So this is my introduction.

The recent overturning of Roe v Wade has sparked- or rekindled rather - the debate about the morality and necessity of abortion (the medical removal of a human fetus from its mothers uterus.)

I’ve seen and heard many say that it’s absolutely necessary and argue for its protection in the name of children in foster care, children who suffer abuse, children who grow up in poverty, children who will be disabled, and of course… mothers who don’t want children. So I've decided to speak up about my own perspective and experience.

Hi.

I am an autistic (disabled) woman who grew up in poverty. I use they/them pronouns.

I was physically, emotionally and sexually abused as a child, and I am a survivor of incestuous rape. I have six younger brothers and sisters, most of whom were born after my mom began loosing her vision. She’s now a single disabled mother of 7 kids, whom she loves. According to the pro-choice mindset, (and I have been told this to my face,) my life isn’t worth living, and my mother wronged us and herself all by allowing us to exist.

I have been told that abortion would have “saved” me, any of my siblings, or my mom even from a miserable existence. I have been asked "how can we allow families to live in poverty? How can we allow the suffering of disabilities? Don't you want to end suffering like yours? Like your families." <- Besides the manipulative wording of questions like these in regards to abortion, the mindset that abortion would "save" us from our lives as minorities is ableist, classist, frankly sexist, and wrong. My mother is the strongest woman I know; not just because she carried, birthed, and raised 7 neaurodivergent children in a home with a narcissistic man all while gradually going blind, but because she loves each and every one of us, sees the value in all of our lives, and never once considered we would be better off not living for our sake or for hers. I will always be grateful that she knew our value as human beings before we were even born.

I find the concept that my death would have been better than my rape, my disability, or my upbringing as a impoverished child extremely offensive. I deserve better than that. Society deserves better than that. Women deserve better than that. My death would not have been preferable to my abuse or to being poor. I learned that after my first two suicide attempts.

Killing me or my siblings wouldn’t have made my mother safer or more happy, but rather would have deprived the world of 7 beautiful neurodivergent lives that are still worth living. The argument that abortion is necessary to prevent lives like mine and to protect my mom from us rather than our abuser is horrendous.

Abortion is used as the failsafe excuse to remove other options. Who needs free birth birth control when you have abortion? Why advocate for better healthcare for pregnant mothers, more protection from abusers, more resources for poor families when, better sex education, or birth control and sterilization rights when…. We can just cover up the issues with abortion. Abortion doesn’t solve any problems. It doesn’t save lives. It doesn't give women an equal seat at the table. Rather, it furthers our oppression by telling us that the only way we can succeed is to adjust our biology to be more convenient, to wage war on our children so we can have an education. This culture of death and quick fixes is a grotesque bandaid hastily plastered to the bullet wound that is our societies selfishness and lack of compassion for the truly weak and vulnerable.

Using the impoverished, the disabled, the sufferers of abuse, and children in a broken system to justify abortion in the name of lives unworth living? No. You don’t get to use people like me to justify wiping us out before we get to live. Despite my circumstances and the suffering I have experienced, my life is valuable. You really want to help us? Stop advocating for our death and advocate for real lasting change.

Or sure… you can call me a forced birther, call me sexist, throw around slurs and death threats. I will continue believing the right to live is the most important of all human rights. I will continue defending the value of lives like mine, and despising this “cure all” for all the issues that make having a family, or just EXISTING hard for people like me and my mom.

I’m Ashe. Nice to meet you.

[redvamp]

romanian women’s reproductive rights

i thought i could try to shed some light for anyone who is interested into what the lives of the women of my country were like during a time where abortion and birth control were banned, husbands were unempathetic and the risk of pregnancy was solely a woman's burden. it’s a bit of a long post so i’ll put it under a read more

for some quick background into this, abortion was first legalized in communist romania in 1957 and stayed legal until 1966, when decree 770 was signed which banned birth control, as well as abortion, in order to increase the birthrate. the only women allowed access to abortion were those above 45 and those who already had 4 children. supposedly, women who were at risk of death from the pregnancy or who were the victims of rape should’ve been granted abortions as well, according to the law, but with the general victim-blaming attitudes of romanian society it’s debatable how often this actually happened. women who conducted self-induced abortion faced 6 months to two years imprisonment and mandatory gynecological revisions and penalties for single women over 25 and married couples without children were put in place. overall 10.000 women died as a result of illegal abortions and an estimated 100,000 abandoned infants, children, and teens were left behind, for the purpose of “strengthening the economy” through a larger population. the children taken by the state were not treated well and suffered from very poor conditions in many instances, such as starvation, poor hygiene, lack of recreational activities or emotional support, as well as physical and psychological abuse

now, moving on to how it was like to navigate all of this as a woman. i was born 10 years after the revolution of 1989, but women older than me all have their own stories to tell. i’d like to translate some of the things from a good romanian article i have read on the topic, including what the romanian women who were interviewed have had to say. 

basically if you became pregnant you were obliged to keep the child, but if you were not married, your own family would deny you and treat you very badly. one woman says: "the idea we had about sex was more about fear and terror. of course, it was, in a way, about pleasure too, but it was a pleasure that had the consequences of hell” 

it was the virtue of women not to pursue their own sexual pleasure. the family code provided that sexuality was a family obligation. you would not have been able to invoke the idea of marital rape, since sex was seen as a woman's a marital duty. and the general idea was that preventing pregnancy was the woman’s job. the trauma of unwanted pregnancies and clandestine abortions has been so strong in some cases that it has been women who have decided to give up sex altogether

another woman says that if complications arose from an illegal abortion, her husband would get scared and disappear. in one such episode, the husband left her alone, with two small children, bleeding in the family bathroom. in her words: the only time she didn't have to worry about sex was when she was already pregnant

a different woman remembers that being a student, she was forced to go to a gynecological check-up, together with her female colleagues, in order to be allowed to enter the exam session. the feeling was that they were being “taken to the slaughterhouse” and the male gynecologist wanted to see and touch her breasts as well

sadly, this was an era in which a woman's body was regarded as belonging to the state. the abortion and birth control ban was lifted after the 1989 revolution but we still have a long way to go in terms of women’s safety and reproductive rights. doctors can refuse to perform abortions on “moral grounds” and sexual education is still widely inaccessible in schools; students are only granted this if they have their parent’s approval, which means very few actually get access to these classes because of the strong conservative, patriarchal mindset in our country

the article in romanian. and some other sources in english i managed to find for anyone interested: 

this is a very brief look into romanian women's struggle to manage their fertility 

ceausescu’s children  - a good article by the guardian on the children left behind

adriana baban’s study on the topic of banned abortion in which she interviewd 50 romanian women 

many romanian hospitals today still refusing legal abortions

reproductive rights still being challenged in romania

[freelyhauntedduck]

SCOTUS Opinion on Roe v Wade

Facts/What you need to know

This is not a law yet. Roe v Wade is still constitutionally upheld. If you need to receive an abortion, you can still legally do so, provided that it falls within your state's legal barriers.

This is a first draft. It might change. However, I do not believe this is likely.

Every one of Trump's SC nominees lied during their hearings when asked about their plans for Roe v Wade

There are certain states with trigger laws that will be set in place when Roe v Wade is overturned. This means that they would have an abortion ban. Other states would severely weaken our rights to abortion, restricting it to certain scenarios or circumstances.

Opinion

Fuck... I really don't know what to say aside from, my father owes me an apology for thinking I was catastrophizing Trump's election and judicial appointments. This is scary. Not just to me, but for my entire family.

A fetus is not a human being. The person carrying a fetus is. You can't claim a fetus as a dependent, and it is not viable outside the womb for a long time. I see a lot about, "But it has a heartbeat at 6 weeks!" and all that but I need everyone to understand something. Though we get up in arms over the unborn and us not having the right to commit murder, the act of murder can only be committed against a person. A person, whom we generally define as a developed human being with a conscience and a voice. A fetus is, at the stage most abortions are performed at, just an extension of the host with a lack of proper brain activity (only really capable of certain, very limited movements).

This is going to create a lot of problems for the children who exist as a result of this act. I've even heard people saying, "Well I support abortion in the case of rape," and to that I ask you. Even if the person who is getting an abortion was just being irresponsible, so what? Do you want irresponsible people made responsible for carrying and potentially raising a whole human?

And are you going to subject the child to a lifetime of being raised as an unwanted consequence of sex? Or to an already underfunded and overloaded foster care system? Sounds great for those developing brains. And don't bring Christianity into your reasoning for supporting this, because even me, a pagan-raised agnostic bitch, knows that your book of Genesis said that Adam became a man when he drew his first breath, meaning that your book (among the dozens of contradictions) has an argument for life beginning after birth.

What could potentially happen

This could (possibly) swing the midterms in the Democrats favor. I do not know if this is likely or not yet.

This could weaken the power of the Supreme Court. I say this because not only are members now guilty of lying under oath, but also that they are rescinding rights that were declared as such under the 14th Amendment. This might mean term limits, or packing the court, but I don't know what will happen.

There is also the issue of what could happen next. This could pave the way for further infringement on other rights guaranteed under the 14th Amendment such as gay marriage or birth control. It would be an easy descent of, "If we can do this, what else can we get away with?"

There is no guarantee here. People will die if this happens. Let me be very clear, we are not living in the Hand Maid's Tale. We are not yet at that level of eugenics. It does not mean that abortion would be a criminal offense under Federal Law, but it means that a person's right to an abortion would be determined depending on how Conservative their State is. Bear in mind, the conservativeness of a state negatively correlates with sex education and access to birth control.

Please stay safe.

[loudlytransparenttrash]

The Equality Act

I’ve been posting about it for years. Using gender and sex interchangeably will help radical lawmakers capitalize on the lack of distinction and introduce laws that do away with scientific, biological reality. The Democrat-controlled House just recently passed the Equality Act, which they say despite federal anti-discrimination laws already existing, is just new legislation designed to protect LGBT people from discrimination, but of course there’s much more to it, and seems to only care about the “T”.

“Sex,” the bill says, is now defined by “gender identity,” which the legislation then describes so broadly it is limited only by a person’s imagination. “Gender identity” means “the gender-related identity, stereotype, appearance, mannerisms, or other gender-related characteristics of an individual, regardless of the individual's’ designated sex at birth.” The Equality Act then treats an individual’s self-determined “gender identity” as the individual’s sex under the law, and requires Americans to do the same in virtually every aspect of civil society, including public accommodations, public facilities, public education, all federally assisted programs and employment.

“An individual shall not be denied access to a shared facility, including a restroom, a locker room, and a dressing room, that is in accordance with the individual’s gender identity.” Under the law, any biological man or boy claiming a female gender identity could access women’s and girl’s store dressing rooms, recreational centers locker rooms, or school bathrooms and there would be nothing a state, city, school board or private business could do about it. 

The Equality Act then describes that where sex is a bona fide occupational qualification, such as in cases involving intimate care of clients and customers, personal caregivers including in nursing homes and hospitals, women’s waxing and esthetician work, or chaperones, counselors or coaches, that employers must consider only the applicant’s gender identity, not their sex, as it now would mean the same thing. This means an adult man who claims a female gender identity can obtain a job involving sensitive, personal and intimate matters involving girls and women, which would normally be provided by other women, and clients will either have to shut up and accept it or face federal discrimination charges. If you don’t feel comfortable with a man who says they identify as a woman waxing you, or providing intimate, invasive care to your unwell mom or grandmother, or sharing bathrooms with you, it's very close to becoming a federal crime to object.

The bill doesn’t even require the individual to have clinically diagnosed gender dysphoria, or undertaking surgical or hormonal transition, making it that self-declared “gender identity” would be the only requirement to determine our sex under law and everyone else must play along. Anyone, at any time, could declare a change of gender identity and must instantly be recognized as such. A male athlete can declare his identity as “female” at any time, without any medical corroboration, and he instantly qualifies to compete against girls and afterwards join them in the changing rooms. The Equality Act states sports competitions and scholarship programs designated for girls and women to admit males if they proclaim a female gender identity. Studies have shown that “female identifying” athletes still hold an “intolerable advantage” over females even when they have undergone hormone treatments, yet this bill doesn’t require the male to do anything to compete against women, except say they identify as female. 

All previous single-sex facilities including shared hospital rooms or wards, jails, prisons or juvenile detention facilities, homeless shelters, overnight drug rehabilitation centers and domestic violence or rape crisis shelters would also be forced by law to welcome men who say they are female. Furthermore, the Equality Act would trump religious freedom. Remember my posts about baker Jack Phillips? In 2017, after years of fighting off attacks and lawsuits from anti-Christian activists, the Colorado Christian baker won a Supreme Court battle establishing his right to choose not to bake same-sex wedding, “gender transition” and satanist cakes? Four years later, he is still embroiled in an unending stream of lawsuits and complaints brought by radical activists who demand he does what they say. The Equality Act would take the treatment the baker has received, all because he has different views on marriage and gender, and nationalize it, forcing every religious business owner to go against their beliefs - and everyone else to go against science - and do as they’re told. 

It doesn’t end there. The Equality Act also means changes in school curricula, such as classes and text that affirm and promote gender theory viewpoints. These mandated school programs would override states that have prohibited such ideological curricula and also parents who don’t want their kids learning it. Even worse, according to the Equality Act, religious nurses, doctors, and hospitals unwilling to perform sex-change surgery on children would also be legally discriminating. Parents who don’t allow their kid to undergo puberty blockers, hormone therapy and sex changes would also be violating the law, have their parental rights removed and lose custody of their child, even though that’s already happening all over the country. 

The House already passed the Equality Act in May 2019 for the first time, but the Republican-led Senate kept the bill from going any further. The bill has again passed the House, and Biden has promised to sign it into law, leaving the Senate again as the last hurdle. With Democrats now controlling the Senate, the bill is sure to at least see the floor for debate. The question then becomes whether Democrats can get enough votes to make it federal law, and given that Democrats have so far succeeded in framing the Equality Act as a civil rights law necessary to protect all LGBTQ people (plus, who would ever vote against the EQUALITY act, you don’t believe in equality!? You enjoy discrimination!?”) the passage seems increasingly likely. If it is passed, it’s difficult to imagine how destroying our rights of conscience, reality, religious freedom, businesses, schools, privacy and sports was worth conforming to the feelings of 0.6 percent of the population. 

[annebrontesrequiem]

Femininity and Bridgerton

So 27 days ago a lovely anon said that they’d be glad to hear my thoughts on femininity and Bridgerton, and since I’m now finally free from school I decided to stop playing Genshin Impact and binging Disney movies and actually do something.

This is going to probably be very long (spoilers it’s 1,800 words long), so more under the cut.

So, a few things. Firstly I am specifically talking about Bridgerton, as the way that femininity is portrayed in media is a very complex and arduous topic. Secondly this is obviously just my opinion and you can absolutely disagree, even tell me if you do I love listening to different perspectives. Thirdly I’m talking about a show that is very heteronormative (the painter and Benedict aside as I’m focusing mostly on Daphne in this post), and presents a very specific part of straight, cis, upper class femininity. So keep that in mind as well. Also as I’m going to be talking about patriarchy, femininity, and masculinity I know that there might be a few TERFs that crawl out of the woodwork and just… don’t. This isn’t for you and while I’m at it please go read some actual feminist texts. Also I know that this is a period piece but I will be addressing that don’t worry.

Also I am going to be talking about that one scene so trigger warning I’m going to be talking about sexual assault.

Also full Bridgerton season one spoilers.

----

So, all that set up out of the way, let’s talk about femininity in the Bridgerton series.

A good deal of Bridgerton focuses on the ways in which women are often confined by their role as women in society, as well as how they subvert that role for their own gains. This is used well in some cases, such as when the Viscountess uses the network that is forged between servants and women of the upper class to subvert Daphne’s marriage to Nigel Berbrooke. Being a period piece with a (mostly) diverse cast it also allows for women of color, specifically black women, to be portrayed in a very feminine light, where in society at large they are usually not allowed to inhabit such a space. However in attempting to subvert the status that women often occupied in Regency England the show accidentally reinforces views of femininity and its value.

Let’s talk about Eloise and Daphne. Eloise is very outspoken about the difficulties that comes with being a woman in society, wishing to break out of the confines of femininity. Daphne, on the other hand, wishes to stay within the traditional woman’s sphere, get married, have children, run a household. And while in text these two women often debate the meaning of their position as women, each making very valid points about their status and how they’re confined by it, the framing makes it seem that Eloise’s position is ultimately the “better” one.

Full disclosure, Eloise is my favorite Bridgerton character. I love her outspokenness, her determination to make something out of her life, the fact that she attempts to make the oppression of the society around her explicit. However I think the way she is framed as this, for lack of a better term, “girlboss” in the making is often reductive. The show seems to have this idea that Daphne is in some ways inferior in goal to Eloise. That is, Eloise’s value isn’t that she is an ambitious person whose status as a woman hampers said ambition, but rather that she is in some ways morally and intellectually superior to Daphne by rejecting her femininity and repressing qualities that are considered less masculine and thus lesser.s It presents this idea of women’s empowerment wherein one is only empowered if they deliberately step out of traditional femininity, either in appearance or in life path, rather than confronting a society that sees femininity as inferior. Daphne’s wish to continue in the traditional sphere of womanhood is somehow lesser, and she only becomes truly empowered later in the series when she becomes more aggressive (we’ll talk about that later).

That Eloise has her own book where she presumably falls in love and gets married makes this all the more confusing. Does she then lose her intellect and her status as an empowering woman? The messages feel very mixed. In portraying Eloise as enlightened for actively resisting the woman’s sphere and Daphne as needing to learn to be more “assertive” to gain said enlightenment, the show accidentally presents femininity as inherently passive, inferior to the assertion that is more traditionally masculine. This is something that modern period dramas often fall into. Empowered women are only empowered by attempting to transcend their femininity, to become more masculine. The bottom line isn’t to present women and femininity as equal in all ways to men and masculinity, but femininity is something reductive that must be shed to truly become equal.

Since we’re talking about Daphne I want to examine her character arc within this lens as well. Daphne is adamant that she wants a love-match. She is also very aware of the importance of presentation, as well as the importance of reputation. This is a very solid foundation, as is a way where Bridgerton taps into the complexity of the role of women in regency society in a good way. However as the show goes on this complexity seems to fade in favor of making Daphne, again I’m sorry, a “girlboss”. This is made explicit in the scene in which Daphne violates Simon’s consent, as well as the way in which this act is framed.

Now you can tell immediately from the framing of the scene in which Daphne violates Simon’s consent what this is supposed to be interpretated as. From the music to the triumphant looks on Daphne’s face, this is supposed to be a moment in which Daphne has finally gained control of her life. And yet in doing this, and in presenting this whole scene as a result of Simon’s “betrayal” – and thus something his has to take the blame for – the show is making a value judgement. Daphne can only become strong by becoming “assertive” (ie aggressive) to the point of violating someone’s consent.

The topic of rape culture is a very long and arduous one which I will not be diving into, but I do wish to point to the fact that men are supposed to be aggressive, both sexually and otherwise. Men are the ones who always “want it��, who are uncontrollable, and who are willing to be aggressive to get what they want. This toxic idea of sex and masculinity is what I felt Daphne dipped into during this scene, and instead of presenting it as horrifying or a betrayal on Daphne part, it is presented as the climax of her character arc. I believe a showrunner once said that it was imperative to the “education” of Daphne Bridgerton. Thus is Daphne’s strength no longer her determination to be happy within the sphere she has been placed in by patriarchy, but her willingness to take back her life, no matter the cost. And yes this could’ve been a message about how men are also assaulted, but that is not at all what the showrunners wanted you to get out of this scene.

Lastly I want to touch on the men in the Bridgerton universe, because the devaluation of femininity also affects men no less than it does women. All the men in the Bridgerton universe are either bad people or rakes. Name me one (1) man in the Bridgerton universe who is presented as feminine, either in appearance or personality. And no femininity is not the same as being gay, the painter is not feminine. To be a man worthy of screen time or romance in the Bridgerton universe one must be as traditionally masculine as possible, and ready to make that your defining character trait.

Now I know that this is a large romance novel issue, as someone who has read three of the Outlander books I am unfortunately aware of how romance novels fall into this derivative state. But just because something is common that doesn’t mean it is any less worthy of criticism. The argument that it’s simply being “period accurate” is also something I don’t accept. Yes the regency era was incredibly patriarchal, but that does not mean that the women within it were helpless and could only break out of that helplessness by rejecting their own femininity. Jane Austen is a classic example, but I will also point to women such as Elizabeth Gaskell, the Bronte Sisters, and George Eliot in terms of English women who were highly intelligent and worthy of acclaim despite still associating themselves with their status as women in society. For a broader historical view I’d also like to present Catherine the Great and Empress Josephine who, despite being viewed in an often very derivative manner by the men around them, rose to great prominence and power.

In the end this is a larger societal issue and not one that my post will magically fix. But I will say this: we need to stop telling women and girls that the only way to get rid of patriarchy is to reject femininity. In doing so we say that masculinity is indeed the better trait, that by repressing one’s emotions and one’s femininity one can attain equality. We also need to stop telling men that the only way to ensure their own value to be aggressive, to tap into that toxic masculinity which we spoon feed them from birth. This hurts everyone, men, women, non-binary people. It makes the world a worse place and only when we stop trying to wiggle our way out of femininity and actually acknowledge its status as equal to masculinity will we achieve this.

I believe Bridgerton wanted to do that, wanted to present the complexities and anxieties of women living in a patriarchal world and the way in which they can subvert that world to their advantage. However it falls into the same trap it seems to be attempting to get out of, and at the end of the day one is left with a sense of vapidness. Though I may like Bridgerton (so much so that I binge watched the series twice and am even considering reading the books) I think that we need to acknowledge its flaws, because only then will we be able to move forward and make media that is more enjoyable, more nuanced, and ultimately better in terms of expectations and norms.

Like I said this is a very complicated topic, but I hope I got my point across well. Thank you if you read all the way through this and I hope you have a lovely day!

[theonethatwatchesalotofshows]

Ranking every Teen Drama I have ever watched

(Updated)

The Secret Life of the American Teenager

+ young Shailene Woodley and Molly Ringwald I guess

- everything else. Even Shailene Woodley's and Molly Ringwald's performances weren't that great because the writing is just oh so bad. The background music is bland and repetative and it sounds like out of some teenager's YouTube chanel. The plotlines are ridiculous and convoluted, which isn't neccessarily such a bad thing, because it is a teen drama show after all, the problem is the show seems to take itself too seriously. Other entries on this list also have ridiculously convoluted plotlines, but I'm ranking them highed because they don't take themselves too seriously and don't claim to be realistic like this show does. Seriously, from the title it suggests like this was going to be a real, uncensored look into high school but it's the furthest thing from it. Not to mention how problematic it is- God forbid someone suggests that a 14-year-old pregnant girl gets an abortion or gives the baby up for adoption without being seen as a terrible and despicable person.

Otp: Marc Molina x a job somewhere far, far away from these kids

Notps: every single pairing on this show

Best moment: literally none

Weirdest moment: "I'm such a whore!" "Well, you're my whore." What were the writers thinking??? Was this supposed to be romantic??

We Children From Zoo Station

+the aesthetic, the casting of Christiane, Detlef and Axel

-this was such a letdown. Honestly I was so hyped for it after seeing the trailer since I've read the book and didn't particularly like the movie- I feel like it's hard to fit all of Christiane's story into 90 minutes. That's why I was so excited about this show. Christiane's story covers so much, so it's easier to make it into a TV show when you don't want to ommit anything and butcher the story. But they somehow managed to do it anyway. They changed so much for no reason and completely erased Christiane's childhood trauma, which was important in the book. Now, I know you can say that it's just a loose adaptation, so it doesn't have to follow the book word for word. But I feel like if you already decided to tell her- a real person's story- you should at least do it authentically. Imo they shouldn't have tried to make the setting vague. It worked with Sex Education because the story of Sex Education is timeless. However, Christiane's story is not timeless. It's a true story set in the 1970s. If they were making a new show from scratch, I would have liked it. But this is an already existing story and they’re supposed to be just retelling it. My last issue is a nit pick but I wish the actresses playing Stella and Babsi were reversed. It just would've fit better.

Otps: all those kids x sobriety

Notp: Christiane x Detlef

Best moment: Christiane's first time in Sound was pretty true to the book

Weirdest moment: when Detlef became a gigolo because he needed money for his dog. Who tf thought of that?

Pretty Little Liars

+ makeup, style, the theme song, the drama and mystery that always kept me guessing, the cliffhangers at the end of each episode that made it so addictive, Emily's coming out story, Hanna and Spencer had some good lines

- the mishandling of some serious issues (namely eating disorders), romantization of student-teacher relationship, the timeline not making much sense, these writers seem to put more thought into the characters' outfits than the storylines

Otps: Emily x Maya, Hanna x Caleb

Notp: Ezria

Best moment: Hanna and Caleb in the shower (the sexual tension was cuttable with a knife)

Weirdest moments: Aria asking Ezra out in the middle of a make-up test (it was supposed to be cute but it was just cringy), Spencer trying to block A's text messages on a laptop, in the middle of a park (what? Spencer, you were supposed to be the smart one!)

One Tree Hill

+ Brooke, the theme song, Chad Michael Murray

- the casual drinking and driving (I mean seriously these kids play a drinking game at a party and then casually hop into a car and drive home??), too much basketball and cheerleading (that's not a bad thing per se but I just don't really care about neither of these things), it just seems too stereotypical and kinda bland?? I couldn't really get into it

Otp: Naley

Notp: Peyton x Nathan

Best moment: Naley by the dock

Weirdest moment: "I guess I'm just a riddle, wrapped in a mystery inside a bitch." It's not really a bad moment but a cringy line. I guess the writers though they were being clever but it just sounded bad.

Dawson's Creek

+ the clothes, the 90s aesthetic, the 90s soundtrack, many movie references, Pacey is a sweetheart, Jen is a feminist icon, dealing with mental health issues through Andie (it's rare to see in shows as old as this)

- the slutshaming of Jen really hasn't aged well, the storyline of Pacey being statury raped by his much older teacher was mishandled (it was either treated as scandalous, cool or in Andie’s case somehow shameful), same goes for Jen’s backstory- it was mentioned she was raped at 12 by an older man and then never brought up again, Dawson is the most unlikable protagonist ever and his friendship/relationship with Joey is codependent and possessive, the dialogue is sometimes pretentious and unrealistic, the timeline doesn't really add up- I can never tell what time of the year it's supposed to be, because it looks like it's always fall for some reason. And how did they sophomore year have two homecomings?

Otps: Pacey x Andie, Pacey x Joey (yes, both at the same time)

Notp: Dawson x Joey

Best moments: Jen helping Joey when that jerk was spreading rumours about her and then Jen and Joey locking Abby in the closet together (I love it when they stick together instead of tearing each other down), Pacey and Joey bickering

Weirdest moments: when Joey was upset because Dawson didn’t want to tell her how often he “walks his dog”, when Jen was about to have a treesome at a party and Dawson walked into the room and carried her out despite her kicking and screaming

Glee

+ funny, Sue Sylvester's iconic, great covers and a way to find new songs, the performances are aesthetically pleasing, lgbtq+ representation, tackling of serious issues, coming out story, a father who’s accepting of his son’s sexuality right away despite not really understanding it (it’s so rare to see, that’s why it’s so refreshing), the plotlines are ridiculous but at least the show doesn't take itself too seriously

-as I already said the 1st season was great but after that it just seemed like the writers made up a checklist of hard issues they should tackle and tried to tackle every single one of them while covering every single song and it just fell flat. Prime example- Quinn ending up in a wheelchair getting into a car crash to warn us from drinking and driving, singing I’m Still Standing and then suddenly being able to walk normally after. a few episodes Rachel and Finn got almost all songs, while other characters were criminally underrated and underused (Tina, Quinn, Mercedes). The teachers are questionable to put it mildly. Cringy moments- Finn singing You're Having My Baby to Quinn in front of her parents when it wasn't even his baby! Also no one except of Kurt looks like they could be in high school. And why are these cheerleaders wearing their uniforms 24/7??

Otps: Brittana, Sam x Quinn, Tina x Artie (unpopular opinion, I know), Mr Schue x unemployment

Notp: Quinn x Finn

Best moments: Quinn giving birth to Bohemian Rhapsody

Weirdest moment: Rachel's gross and painfully awkward crush on Mr Schue, Mr Schue joining the Glee club on the stage for a performance of Toxic and girls in the audience cat calling him (Ewww)

Euphoria

+ Zendaya's and Jacob Elordi's performances, tackling of serious issues such as drug addiction and overdose, anxiety and depression, abusive relationships and abortion in a better manner than most (if not all) teen dramas, the aesthetics, makeup and wardrobe, the musical number in the finale, the special episodes giving us insight into the characters' psychology, toxic relationships not being romanticized (which is sadly rare), teenagers sounding like actual real life teens (no "I reject reality" crap)

- lack of comic relief (why so serious all the time), sexualization of teen characters (I know this is something many teen dramas are guilty of but it's the most evident here), too much nudity (I know some of you are going to come at me with: "But it's realistic!" So what? It is realitic that teenagers get naked when they go into shower but does it mean we have to see it?? It seems to me like this show is trying too hard to be "boundary pushing" at times and ends up being scandalous just for the sake of being scandalous), these characters just aren't believable as high school juniors to me (they sound like high schoolers but they certainly don’t act, look or dress that way). There's no reason this show couldn't have been set in college.

Otps: Rue x sobriety, Nate x prison

Notps: Nate x Maddy, Cassie x McKay

Best moments: "You did this to me!" and the musical number in the season 1 finale

Weirdest moment: the fact that Maddy lost her virginity at 14 to a 40-year-old man being mentioned so casually because apparently she was "totally in control". Excuse me what??

Skins

+ style and makeup- each character has a signature trademark (Sid and his beanie, Effy's eyeliner, Cassie's soft eyeshadow), their British accents, I'm pretty sure this is the only teen drama that follows multiple classes, teenage characters being played by actual teen actors, the characters looking like average people you meet in high school and not as if they just walked off the runway, dealing with serious issues such as drug abuse, eating disorder, parental abandonment etc (yes, some people claim the show romanticized it, but I disagree. It's not the show that romanticized it- it's the fans. The show tried to portray the dangers of drugs as well as possible. Think about it- every time characters used drugs it ended in a disaster. In the pilot they thought that Cassie overdosed and ended up crashing a car while rushing into the hospital. In later season Effy hit her friend in the head with a rock because she was having a bad trip. That's not romanticizing drugs.), Effy is iconic and honestly the first episode was enough to get me hooked

- every single teacher being a creep and having a thing for a student at some point, the show can get too dark and unncessarily dramatic at times. Did that many people have to die? Did Chris's death really have to be this graphic? Timeline doesn't really add up- are 8 episodes supposed to cover the whole year? It would've made more sense if there were more episodes in a season.

Otps: Chris x Jal, Emily x Naomi

Notps: Sid x Michelle

Best moment: ooh baby it's a wild world

Weirdest moment: Chris's graphic death

The OC

+ more grounded in reality than many others on this list, the theme song, the love stories, Seth and Summer are funny, the friendships are believable and the whole group has great chemistry

- too many unneccessary fights, Luke is the worst, everyone is way too casual about drunk driving, these parents are WAAAY too chill (I know this can be said about many teen dramas but it's the most obvious here. How did the Roberts and the Coopers let two 16-year-old girls go to Mexico alone?? With no supervision?? What?)

Otps: Seth x Summer, Ryan x Marissa

Notp: Luke x Marissa

Best moments: the “oh no, there’s only one bed” in the Mexico episode, Seth and Summer's first kiss and that kiss at the yacht, Ryan and Marissa's first date by the pool

Weirdest moment: these parents letting their teenage kids go to Mexico alone. It's irresponsible when they're 16 but apparently they let them go there and party every year. What?

Gossip Girl

+ every episode having a clever title, the style, the makeup, the 00s soundtrack, the glamour of it all (it feels like reading a very gossipy magazine!), all the scandals, this show never pretends to portray the realitic teenage experience so it can pretty much be as far-fetched as it wants to and you can’t question it, it gives you a chance to live the fantasy of being super rich, living with a penthouse, riding a limo to school and going to parties in New York City every night

- the final reveal doesn't make any sense, just like with PLL these writers seemed to have put more thought into the outfits and makeup than into the plotlines, romantization of a toxic relationship, having every two straight characters date or hook up at some point, which just felt forced, mishandling of serious issues (Blair's eating disorder, Eric's suicide attempt and Serena and Jenny's sexual assault from the pilot being brought up when it's convenient but not really dealt with and brushed off at other times), sexualization of teen characters

Otps: Dan x Blair, Serena x Nate

Notps: Chuck x Blair

Best moments: the Thanksgiving flashbacks, Blair and Serena running around New York and taking selfies in stolen dresses, Nate and Serena’s first time (although it was better in the books) and then their kiss at the white party, the sheer scandal of "I killed someone", Dan giving Blair a plastic tiara to make her feel like a princess

Weirdest moments: Chuck's father returning from the death and then dying again, by yeeting himself off the roof

Freaks and Geeks

+ probably the most realistic teen drama there is, the characters dress the way I can see actual teens dressing, funny, but also heatbreaking at times, probably the only teen show that included an intersex character, the characters being a little stereotypical but self-aware at least, young James Franco and Jason Segel

- the bullying being a bit too much at times and it's a bit unrealistic that the teachers would do literally nothing about it, too short- I will never understand why this got cancelled

Otps: Daniel x Kim, Lindsay x Nick, Amy x Ken

Notps: Sam x Cindy

Best moments: Sam breaking down at the end of Garage Door, Daniel and Kim getting back together in the rain

Weirdest moment: Cindy doing a 180 and becoming super mean when she started dating Sam.

Gilmore Girls

+ so many movie, literary and music references, the quotable lines (what a great way to learn about new movies, books and bands! It’s so unique for a TV show to make you smarter), the witty banter, the comfort of the first few seasons (it really feels like wrapping a warm blanket around yourself while holding a hot cup of coffee, I can’t explain why, but it’s such a comfort show), the quirky small town with many unique festivals, many entertaining and snappy fights where everyone has a point, characters dealing with real world problems (seriously, how often do you see a storyline about termites? Or a teenager with zit cream on a teen drama show?), this is also one of the few shows where teenagers are shown to have rules and restrictions and curfews (finally some kids growing up with strict parents representation) and doing homework and studying and not just partying and drinking and having sex all the time and that’s so refreshing

- but while it is refreshing to see teenagers waiting to have sex and not doing it behind every corner, the show is kind of sex negative. Every single time a (female) character loses her virginity it ends in a disaster. Even when she loses it after she’s married! It doesn’t make any sense, unless the writers just really hated women. Also slutshaming (”I got the good kid!”) ewww. The money and budget doesn’t make much sense on the show either and the girls seem immune to calories. I know some people might come at me for this with: “But it’s just a show!” but I think it’s harmful to show beautiful, thin women eat nothing but tons of junkfood all the time and never excersize and then fatshame people who do excersize but aren’t fortunate enough to be blessed with amazing Gilmore genes, and then throw around tactless references to eating disorders.

Otps: Lane x Dave, Jess x Rory

Notps: Lane x Zach, Rory x Dean, Lorelai x Christopher

Best moments: Then She Appeared, Rory’s valedictorian speech, Lorelai’s graduation

Weirdest moment: Lorelai and Christopher getting married in Paris at 4am. That’s not how it works in Europe. Do Americans think every single Europian country works like Las Vegas, where you can just get married whenever you decide??

[woodbrou]

Description of my Project

Summary:

After reviewing the code book from the "Addhealth Wave 1" study, I was struck by women over the age of 15 who became pregnant at an early age. I was interested in this topic because close friends after high school got pregnant and I want to know if there is any association with resistance to sex by not having a contraceptive method at the time.

                       Teenage pregnancies after high school.

Body:

After a long time of not having contact with my high school friends finally one day in the supermarket not far from my house I got to greet a friend I met in freshman year and talking to me mentioned that many of our friends had ended up pregnant and with a A quarter of the generation were already parents and some with more than 1 child.

While the number of pregnancies at an earlier age has increased, I need to determine:

“What is the relationship between pregnant women with the ability to control their behavior in the absence of contraception?”

For my code book I don’t want to leave out any variables and risk having a deficiency in the analysis so I will include all the variables related to premature pregnancy in my personal code book.

Variables:

H1RP1: Getting pregnant at this timen in your life is one of the worst things that could happen to you

H1RP2: It wouldn’t be all tha bad if you got pregnant at this time in your life

H1RP5: Imagine that sometime soon you were to have sexual intercourse whit someone just once, but were unable to use any method of birth control for some reason. What is the cance that you would get pregnant? 

H1SE1: if you wanted to use birth control, how sure you that you could stop yourself and use birth control once you were highly aroused or turned on?

H1SE2: How sure are you that you could plan ahead to have some form of birth control available?

H1SE3: How sure are you that you could resist sexual intercourse if your partner did not want to use some form of birth control?

Now we could also look at the relationship between early pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases due to poor behavioral control in situations with high sexual stress, in the case of adolescents this type of risk is tried to avoid with a sex education at an early age but the question to answer would be: 

“Is there any relation with the ability to control the behavior in a situation where contraception methods are not available with in order to avoid a sexually transmitted infection?” 

Since not only women are at risk of becoming pregnant at a very young age, both men and women are at risk of contracting diseases such as AIDS, papilloma, singles, etc. So I must determine that the control of oneself in high-risk situations is so influential because there are no control methods to prevent infections and pregnancies.

To find this relationship with the first question I must add the following variables:

H1RP3: If you got the AIDS virus, you would suffer a great deal.

H1RP4: It would be a big hassle to do the things necessary to completely protect yorself from getting a sexually transmitted disease.

H1RP6: Suppose that sometime soon you had sexual intercourse for a whole month, as often as you wanted to, without using any protection. What is the chance that you would get the AIDS virus?

H1SE4: Compared with other people your age, how intelligent are you?

According to a publication in the Graduate Journal of the Chair of Medicine today adolescents are more likely to have an unwanted pregnancy, as well as the risks involved:

Global profile of adolescents:

• There are more than a billion adolescents, 85% in developing countries. • More than half have had sex before the age of 16. • There are more than 111 million new cases of curable sexually transmitted infections in children under 25. • More than half of new cases of HIV infection-more than 7000 per day occur in young people. • Rape or incest occurs in 7% to 34% of girls and in 3% to 29% of boys. • Ten per cent of births occur in adolescents. • Maternal death is 2 to 5 times higher in women under the age of 18 than in those aged 20 to 29. • There are 4.4 million induced abortions, most at risk. • One third of hospitalizations are for complications of abortion. • Every five minutes there is suicide due to sexual and reproductive health problems.

At point two it is said that most of these young people start their sexual life at a younger age, before the age of 16 in a more general mink secondary school children are among the 12-year-old16 years and later I will present a study carried out in young adolescents that indicate that the lack of control of behavior in moments of high sexual tension is because they are not yet very aware of their thoughts and therefore do not manage to contain themselves and prefer risk.

In another journal I found that from a cross-sectional descriptive observational study in it, 418 female students from a university center in Havana, regardless of the year they were studying , constituted. The level of knowledge on sexual and reproductive health was assessed by reference to responses to a previously validated survey and the following was found:

Results: • Of the students studied, 78 had at least one unwanted pregnancy, which represented a prevalence of 18.7%, so the occurrence of seven of these events was estimated monthly. • Of the students who had an unwanted pregnancy, 57.7% (45 respondents) demonstrated an inadequate sexual and reproductive health culture. • 28.2% (22 respondents) were female students who, despite having an acceptable culture, showed that they had little control over sexual impulses, "getting carried away for the moment". • A third group, accounting for 14.1% (11 respondents), showed poor use of contraception.

Research question: To carry out the analysis of data it is necessary to generate a hypothesis in order to look for a meaning to the studied data, I would like to check with the selected data in the book "Addhealth Wave 1" the following hypothesis :

“Is there any relation to the ability to control behaviour in a situation where contraception is not available in order to prevent a sexually transmitted infection?”

Bibliographic Sources: 1. The National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (AddHealth). (1999, febrero). Codebooks - add healt. INHOME08 Pregnancy AIDS and STD Risk Perceptions.pdf Add Healt. https://addhealth.cpc.unc.edu/documentation/codebooks/ 2. The National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (AddHealth). (1999, febrero). Codebooks - add healt. INHOME09 Self Efficacy.pdf Add Healt. https://addhealth.cpc.unc.edu/documentation/codebooks/ 3. Ulanowicz, M. G., Parra, K. E., Wendler, G. E., & Monzón L.T. (2006). RISKS IN TEENAGE PREGNANCY. Revista de Posgrado de la VIa Cátedra de Medicina, 153, 13-14. https://cursos.aiu.edu/Desarrollo%20Humano%20II%20Adolescencia/PDF/Tema%204.pdf 4. Morales, E., Solanelles, A. M., Mora, S. R., & Miranda, O. (2013). Unwanted pregnancy in college students. Revista Cubana de Medicina Militar, 42(2). http://scielo.sld.cu/scielo.php?pid=S0138-65572013000200004&script=sci_arttext&tlng=en#tab1

[thoughts-of-the-unheard]

im losing my mind in 10th grade history i wrote my final essay on serbia vs the us bc serbia was the country id studied for a project and i just reread that essay bc i legitimately couldnt remember how to start my essay for my history final this year and holy shit guys 

“Taboo Topics: Serbia vs USA Differences

There are several subjects that are usually talked in hushed whispers behind closed doors with the wonderful exceptions of the few who speak out. These subjects include, but are in no way limited to, the gender pay gap, LGBT rights, rape, and abortions. With these topics, there are some very obvious differences between how Serbia and the United States handle them. Serbia deals with these forbidden matters significantly better than the United States does. 

The gender pay gap has been a popular topic for a few years now. Women are always paid less than men for the same work. In certain workplaces, women are actually less likely to be hired than a man even if she has more experience or better credentials, not always but quite often. The Boston Symphony holds blind auditions. There was a point where they had to make everyone who auditioned take off their shoes because the judges were hearing the women’s heel click against the floor and unconsciously judged against them. Bias against women is a very common and, unfortunately, normal thing to see is every country for quite a few centuries. It wasn’t always this way. We were all equal once. Now, we have male sports teams getting paid thousands for losing and female teams not getting paid at all. As of 2018, women in Serbia are paid 16% less than her male coworkers for the same job (Serbian Monitor). In the lovely United States, white women get paid 19% less then her white male coworkers. That is a three percent more difference than Serbia, which is bad enough but hispanic women are paid 39% less than her white male coworkers for the same work (iwpr). The three fifths compromise ended in the 1860s, and yet. This is the worst gender bias. People who love their job are the lucky ones. Most people now work a job, or several, just to stay afloat. Everyone deserves to be able to afford at least the bare minimum; food, water, housing, healthcare, and education. When women are paid a lesser wage than men when the wages are already insufficient, they have to pick and choose. To pay a woman less just because she wasn’t born a white man is telling her she isn’t worth as much. 

LGBT, which stands for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, rights is, for some reason, a very taboo subject. People all over get killed for being part of the LGBT community. Many religions are very against anything related to the LGBT community. A lot of people think they are “confused” or straight up sinners. It should not matter what people think. If a person is a person no matter how small then a person is a person no matter their gender or sexual orientation. Serbia is very good with that. “In June 2017, Ana Brnabić became the Prime Minister of Serbia, as the first woman and first openly gay person to hold the office, and the second female LGBT head of government overall (after Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir of Iceland). She was also the first Serbian Prime Minister to attend a pride parade.” (Wikipedia). America is not even ready for any female in such a high position of power while Serbia is making a bunch of firsts for women and the LGBT community. Serbia does not recognize same-sex marriages unless they are foreign but it is not illegal, either. Just in 2015, same-sex marriage was legalized in America. Millions of people were told they were not allowed to feel how they were feeling for centuries. Love was illegal. It took so long to legalize because many people in America were so freaked out about the potential risk of an LGBT person raping them or their child or infecting them or it was against their religion.

Weirdest thing is that, in the same America, when non-LGBT people rape anyone, they are less likely to go to jail than any other criminal, even murderers. According to Rainn, Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network, 995 out of 1000 perpetrators in America will walk free. With 38.6 cases of rape for every 100,000 population, as of 2015, that is a lot scarier than the bisexual girl that lives down the street who has no interest in her friend in the same way that she wouldn’t if she was straight. LGBT people are not the problem. Rapists and the morally gray judges who let them walk without so much as a smack on the wrist because it was only one person and they don’t have a history of this sort of thing, are. The victim is never the issue. Ever. People are terrified to tell anyone they were raped because they could lose their friends and even their job. The victim. The victim who was brave enough to speak out against a violation of their body and mind. They have a higher chance of losing their job than their rapists does of going to jail. They have a higher chance of dying from whooping cough, which has a 0.52 death rate in America, then their rapist has of going to jail. Statistically, in America, someone is sexually assaulted every 92 seconds (RAINN).  An estimated 63% of sexual assaults are not even reported. Very largely, in part to the low incarceration rate. In 2010, America was ranked first in 117 countries for number of rapes. Serbia was 45th. One was 1177 times more likely to get raped in America than in Serbia. As of 2015, the Serbian rate of rape cases per 100,000 was 0.7 (Knoema). Serbia is 55 times safer in these terms. They have an astronomically lower rape rate than the United States does. 

Serbia has a very high amount of abortions. Taking into consideration that Serbia severely lacked even a decent sex education system to inform their people about safe-sex. Approximately 12% of sexually active women were using condoms in the 1970s and 1980s (Wikipedia). Because of the awful education, abortion was the leading method of birth control. Serbia allows abortion up to ten weeks of pregnancy for a regular case. Twenty weeks is allowed for special cases such as “rape, incest, psychological trauma and socioeconomic reasons” (Women on Waves). Unheard of in America, abortions in Serbia “can be obtained for free as it is covered by the healthcare.” (Women on Waves). The United States does not have nearly as high of an official abortion rate because every woman, and even some men, get verbally harassed for walking into a place that happens to give abortions even if they are there for any other medical reason. Recently though, Ohio, Georgia, Mississippi, and Kentucky have all passed heartbeat bills that make abortion illegal after six weeks. Most women do not realize they are pregnant until almost halfway through their first trimester. Six weeks pregnant is two weeks late on a woman’s period. Texas, Florida, New York, Missouri, Louisiana, South Carolina, Illinois, Virginia, West Virginia, Tennessee, and Minnesota plan on also passing the heartbeat bill this year. Alabama has made a near-total ban on abortion. Birth control, IUDs, and similar things are going to be banned in Ohio. Birth control could stop a fertilised egg from implanting in the uterus and will be considered an abortion, which is already banned. Birth control has about six other uses that have nothing to do with preventing pregnancy. Georgia will prosecute women who plan to leave the state to get an abortion in a state where it is legal. This follows people out of Georgia. This makes women property of the state. Ohio is currently forcing an eleven year old girl, who was raped, carry her rapists child to delivery. Ohio, one of the free states of America, in 2019, is forcing a child, who is in fifth or sixth grade, to carry the child of the man who raped her, for nine months and then give birth. Childbirth is one of the most painful things ever and Ohio is forcing a literal child to go through it. 

Serbia may, on a governmental level, be a mess but at least their people are treated well. Despite Serbia being a conflict magnet country and America being “the land of the free”, Serbia generally has less restrictions and more acceptance with these choice issues and maybe -probably- even more. Serbia has a lesser pay gap, an openly gay, female prime minister, less chances of being raped, and abortion is legal and free because of healthcare that makes sense. Serbia is far from perfect but it is undoubtedly closer than America.”

[they-are-a-prolife-autist]

a lot of pro choice people are advocating for free birth control, better sex education, contraceptives, etc. but they’re also advocating for abortion as an option when everything else fails. no one wants to get an abortion. but until birth control and contraceptives are free and easily accessible and sex education drastically improves, we still need a last resort (which, in this case, is abortion).

i don’t like the idea of abortion either but i’m pro-choice bc if it’s not my body, i’m not gonna say what you can do with it. as an autistic, disabled, trans man, i am all for bodily autonomy and freedom of choice. being forced to have a baby would kill me, but apparently to most “pro-lifers” that’s okay. almost every pro-lifer i have discussed with has told me that my life is not as important of that of a fetus, a child not yet born, that a life that does not yet exist is somehow more important than my life. i don’t ever intend to have kids or end up in a situation where i could have kids, but sometimes things happen. assault happens. and if i’m in a situation where suddenly i’m pregnant, i’m choosing my life over some cells that don’t even have a heartbeat yet.

i agree, we should live in a world where rape isn’t a thing, birth control and contraceptives are free and accessible to everyone, and comprehensive sex education is available. but, we’re not going to be there for a long time. we need a failsafe. people like me, who will die without access to an abortion if needed, need a failsafe.

normally, this debate about abortion isn’t just about abortion, it’s normally just about controlling bodies of uterus-havers. and that’s not okay. i’ve heard many pro-life politicians say that we don’t need birth control either and that there’s no problem with rape or sexual assault, just that we need to learn to “not dress provocatively” and “not to put ourselves in those situations”. those people are not talking about abortions, they’re about controlling our bodies. because when i was assaulted, i was wearing sweatpants over basketball shorts and a long sleeve shirt under a hoodie. nothing provocative about that, yet i reported it, i was told that i should not have been dressed in any provocative way. those people making these laws and trying to overturn roe don’t care about anyones lives.

if they cared about our lives, they would be stopping rapists, putting laws in place to prevent mass shootings, keeping criminals in jail. they would be charging people for hate crimes and assault, not dismissing the people reporting the crimes as “crazy” or “delusional” or saying that they “deserved it”. they don’t care about people’s lives. they just want to control people’s bodies.

First of all let me just say THANK YOU so much for being respectful in this ask. You have no idea how much I appreciate the lack of “fuck you”s 😅♥️♥️♥️

I love that there’s prochoicers REALLT advocating for the other choices, I just absolutely hate that this “last resort” is what the major majority content themselves with and fight life and limb to defend. I think it’s exactly what the men in power want. We’re down here fighting for this scrap- this bandaid non-solution that ultimately benefits more men then women, meanwhile dealing with the the real issues gets postponed again and again. Think about it. Workplace discrimination still happens and people get to say “well she chose to keep it. It’s on her.” Fathers get to walk off scot free without taking any responsibility for their kids because “she chose to keep it.” This is dehumanizing for women and puts this impossible choice on her shoulders, to suck it up and deal with the injustice, or to abort her baby to continue existing in a man’s world. I recently wrote a post about why Amazon was coming out in support of abortion. It’s not because they care about womens rights and freedom, are you kidding? It’s AMAZON! It’s because somebody is hugely benefiting from women NOT being mothers. The abortion industry is at its heart, a product of capitalism.

I’m sorry prolifers have said those awful things to you. I know there’s a many people in the community who are definitely delusional, misogynistic. I’ve found that typically the loudest people in every group are the most hateful and the least correct. I think your life has value and i have a number of friends who’s very lives would be in danger if they got pregnant. I definitely don’t believe that one life is more or less valuable than the other and I will always hold that every effort should be made to protect and preserve both lives. I do know that in cases where two lives are simultaneously at risk, doctors already focus effort and priority onto saving the most viable patient. In pregnancy cases, the priority always has been and always will be the parent. This was a truth before roe too. Anyone who wishes differently, is foolish and not an acceptable representative of the Prolife community.

(I’m personally a Christian but I definitely recommend Students for life, secular Prolife, or Prolife feminists, for a more accurate representation of what the majority of us stand for.)

As far as having a failsafe, again I think abortion as a “last resort” is a distraction that was put in place intentionally because it forces women into this place with no good options and her only choice is to submit to the corrupt status quo, all the while believing she has won because she can just end a pregnancy. I think it’s incredibly devaluing and hateful towards the female anatomy. Society really does despise people with uteruses and ESPECIALLY people the capacity to have children. Abortion isn’t the solution.

I genuinely believe with all of my heart issues like rape, domestic abuse poverty accessible sterilizing services and birth control aren’t just for one group or another to solve because they either reject or accept abortion. I think we all need to stand together and DEMAND better. I really think it’s time to quit acting like abortion is fixing these issues and I think it’s time for people to stop saying “if you don’t want me to have abortion, fix these problems.” We’re contenting ourselves with a last resort to a scenario that shouldn’t exist. I think we as a society can do more and can do better.

As far as “a clump of cells with no right.” I won’t get into it but the following references illustrate the fact that a new human embryo, the starting point for a human life, comes into existence with the formation of the one-celled zygote:

That is from princeton.edu and those are only a few sources listed there. Science has irrefutably concluded that a pregnancy involves a whole distinct human in utero. That’s all I’ll say about that. Again, I don’t think one human life trumps another.

[youthagainstrape]

Sex Education:- A must need for future generation

Meaning:- 'Sex education' simply means the introduction of concept regarding sexual reproduction and sexual feelings'. It is a systematic study of the gradual development of body, sexuality, and relationships in school. It aims to help young people to communicate and make the correct decision regarding sex and their sexual health. Need:- Our schools teach our children everything they need to know to succeed – right? Intensive classes, exams to help them get into the best universities in India and abroad, and even extra out-of-school tuition so they can compete with their global peers. What is the need to teach our kids' sex education? If anything, it will distract them from their studies and put wrong ideas in their heads. Well, actually, when we watch our children, what we see is a safe, simple world – our kids go to school, study, and do their extracurricular activities. In reality, there is a lot of turmoil going on inside the adolescent mind. Take an average adolescent girl in India – she gets little information on her menstrual cycle so feels confused and embarrassed every month on her period, regularly gets harassed on the street, and then goes to school and does not know if it’s ok or not ok to talk to the boy she likes in class. If she faces some sort of sexual abuse from her teacher, she’s scared that she will get blamed if she speaks up – and she does not even have the words to say what has happened to her. It’s a similar situation for the average adolescent boy. In addition, he is usually consuming a lot of pornography, shaping his perceptions about girls and women. Adolescents these days are actually battling deep insecurities, facing challenging social situations with no easy answers, and getting a flood of vulgar, sexist, and misleading information from the media, which is usually their only source of information about how to interact with the world. All of these factors are having a deep effect on our kids, and shaping them into the adults they will be in the future. How do we combat this to create young adults who are confident in who they are, understand how to interact with each other in healthy and respectful ways, and are staying safe? It’s hard to have these conversations with kids because we do not know exactly what they are facing or what to say to them. Contrary to what people think, that is exactly what sex education is. It is not about teaching children how to have sex – it is about informing them about what is happening in their bodies and also teaching them to make safe, healthy choices as they grow up. It is also about helping them understand that the messages that they are getting from Bollywood or pornography are not realistic and can be harmful. Instead, it is about helping them come to their own conclusions about what it means to be a successful, interesting boy or girl. Roles of Parents and Schools in Sex Education In this era, rapes are increasing daily. One of the reasons for it can be a lack of sex education. In India, we are not getting sex education as awkwardness and ignorance from parents as well as from school. Information regarding sex, pregnancy, and contraception should be provided to children and adolescents in an age-appropriate manner from parents and schools. For children, it is necessary to understand the difference between good touch and bad touch. Sex education is a complex topic so it has to be handled with care. And in this process schools can play a very vital role. Teens go to school to get an education and school is a huge factor in growing their mindset and shaping their future. So, if they got to know about sex education from their growing stage the whole scenario of rape in India can change. As they know what is wrong and what is right. Also, the family atmosphere is very important as children adopt many things from their homes. Parents have to listen to them and make them understand what it is and why we required it. Parents have to look after their child’s life what they are facing. Also having healthy talks with them and let them understand is important. Schools can have a special sex educator and conducting seminars can create a huge change. Kind of sex education to different types of age group Awareness The pediatrician should encourage early parental discussion with children at home about sexuality, contraception, and Internet and social media use that is consistent with the child’s and family’s attitudes, values, beliefs, and circumstances. •Gender wise type. Diverse family circumstances, such as families with same-sex parents or children who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, or questioning, create unique guidance needs regarding sexuality education. •Stabilize Converse. Modeling ways to initiate talks about sexuality with children at pertinent opportunities, such as the birth of a sibling can encourage parents to answer children's questions fully and accurately. Parents and adolescents are encouraged to receive information from multiple sources, including health care providers and sexuality educators, about circumstances that are associated with earlier sexual activity. Adolescents are encouraged to feel empowered through discussing strategies that allow for practicing social skills, assertiveness, control, and rejection of unwanted sexual advances and cessation of sexual activity when the partner does not consent. •Proper Use- Discussions regarding healthy relationships and intimate partner violence can be effectively included in health care visits. Pediatricians are encouraged to acknowledge that sexual activity may be pleasurable but also must be engaged in responsibly. •Regulatory- Specific components of sexuality education offered in schools, religious institutions, parent organizations, and other community agencies vary based on many factors. The pediatrician can serve as a resource to each Ages wise- Age 2-5, in this age group parents can do like telling them about bad touch and good touch. Saying like this is not good and awarding them. Age 6-8, you as a parent should discuss with your child that how to use a digital world. Also, make them aware of the pornography world so that they don’t miss understand anything. Age 8 and 12, children often worry whether they're "normal" — particularly when it comes to penis size and breast size. Explain what happens during puberty for both boys and girls. Teenage, If you’ve established yourself as open to discussing those topics, “your kids are probably going to feel more comfortable talking to you and asking you questions,” says Thornhill. At this age, you should start interacting more with your child so that he/she can be on a good path with the help of sex education. Offer reassurance that children of the same age mature at different rates. Puberty might begin years earlier — or later — for some children, but eventually, everyone catches up. You might want to share experiences from your own development, particularly if you once had the same concerns that your child has now. Each thing has its own pros and cons. Similarly, sex education also has both. Let us look into it. Pros:- Sex education can also become the answer to many hormonal changes, which happens in the body. Sex education can also help to solve child sex abuse, as they will be aware of good touch and bad touch. It is good to teach them in school, as they will be having a guide, which can make them understand. If they are aware of it then they will not do any immature thing or the wrong thing. Cons:- Right now the teachers who are teaching at many schools they are not expert in this field. So there is a high risk, that students will get things wrong. And the wrong thing can be very much harmful. If sex education is not teaching properly, then a student can take it for granted or just not follow it. In most of the school sex education is not yet the primary subject so that’s also a reason, students won’t consider it to learn. Conclusion Helping kids understand that they have a gut, an inner voice, and they can and should listen to it, is a big part of what sex education is about,” says Silverberg. At the right time and in the right way sex education can be very helpful. It is necessary to keep a healthy conversation between parent and child. In addition, schools have a vital role as well. “Sex Education is as necessary as education and morals, for a better future.”

[carsieblanton]

SOMETIMES THE PERSONAL ISN’T POLITICAL

How data made me a revolutionary

I’ve been going to church occasionally, with a friend of mine and her granddaughter. I wasn’t raised in the church and I am not a believer, but I am beginning to understand the value of gathering with some of your neighbors once a week, reflecting together and singing some songs.

It’s too bad, I now realize, that this version of church is so muddied up with all those other versions of church: the one where the church is a platform from which to manipulate great swathes of people into voting against their own interests, for example; or the one where the church is used as a battering ram against women and LBTQ people; or the one where the church turns out to be a massive pedophilic child abuse ring.

From the pew of my little church in New Orleans, I see the version of church that people love so dearly. I can see that it’s possible for the same idea to be at once a force for good in our private personal worlds, and a force for evil in our shared political world. 

Some of our personal convictions work a lot better if they remain personal. When we try to make them political (i.e., attempt to apply them to society as a whole), they don’t achieve what we hoped and intuited they would, and sometimes they even hurt, instead of helping.

I think many of my liberal readers already embrace this idea, when it comes to Christian Republican convictions (”one man, one woman!”, “it’s a child, not a choice!”, “thoughts and prayers!”). But strap in, Lib Dems, cus I’ve got a piece for you, too. 

THE ABORTION RATE DOESN’T CARE ABOUT YOUR FEELINGS

To further illustrate the concept, let’s talk about abortion.

If you really hate abortion, and you’ve never read any data on the topic, I can see how you might think that making abortion illegal is a good way to drive down the abortion rate. 

Alas, it has been tried a number of times, and the data has revealed that it is not. The real-world result of banning abortion is not fewer abortions, but more dangerous abortions. 

So truly noble-hearted pro-lifers (I’ve met some!) should face the fact that abortion bans are not good legislation. They are supposed to result in fewer abortions, but they don’t. Instead, they kill a bunch of pregnant women (which, I hope we can agree, is pretty anti-life).

Similarly, “abstinence education” does not result in fewer teen pregnancies, “thoughts and prayers” does not result in fewer mass shootings, and “building a wall” will not result in more jobs or less crime.

All of these ideas are “political” only in that they are being used successfully to manipulate voters. None of them is (or can become) a successful policy, according to our hardworking and underappreciated friend, data. 

For contrast, here’s some data that could be really useful in policy-making, if anyone bothered to read it:

Countries with more restrictions on abortions tend to have higher abortion rates. When countries with legal abortion provide women with access to free birth control, on the other hand, the abortion rate plummets by AS MUCH AS SEVENTY-FIVE PERCENT. 

Legalizing sex work has been shown to decrease reported sexual assault and rape by THIRTY PERCENT OR MORE. Providing safe online venues for sex workers to find clients (the opposite of the recent SESTA and FOSTA bills) has been shown to REDUCE THE FEMALE HOMICIDE RATE BY 17%. (Read that again. It’s insane. Now read this. Or, if you don’t feel like reading, just listen to this podcast.)

There are six times as many vacant houses in the US as there are homeless people, and it costs a ton of money to police the homeless population for nonviolent offenses. Why don’t we just give them houses?

Isn’t data cool?!???

This is why it’s a good idea to craft legislation and political strategies based on data, rather than on what feels intuitively or emotionally "right”. When we are unwilling to examine that distinction, we run the risk of 1) turning our adorable private beliefs (thoughts! prayers!) into ineffective, counterproductive, or dangerous political policy, and 2) ignoring data that can actually save lives, in favor of continuing to debate ideas that are politically pointless (eg: “is abortion right or wrong?”). 

PLASTIC DOESN’T CARE ABOUT YOUR FEELINGS, EITHER

But guess what other ideas are personally adorable and politically pointless? “Don’t use straws”. Also “go vegan”, “buy organic”, “reduce, reuse, recycle”, and “impeach Trump”. Regardless of their intuitive or emotional impact, none of these ideas has a snowball’s chance in hell of addressing the problems they aim to address, and thus, as political strategies, they are more or less “thoughts and prayers”. Here’s why:

Worldwide plastic production is projected to increase by 400% by 2050. 

Organic food still has a conspicuous lack of conclusive evidence for its benefits to health or the environment. 

Despite the fact that vegetarianism and veganism appear to be trending in the U.S. and Canada, global meat consumption is on the rise and is projected to continue rising steeply (76% by mid-century).

That’s because the entire populations of the U.S. and Canada make up only 4.75% of the total world population (and dropping), with the world population expected to double by 2074.

(And, y’all, I hate to remind you, but impeaching Trump (almost certainly) gets us President Pence: an equally insane demagogue who is poised to enact possibly-even-more-terrifying policies.)

I’m not arguing that these ideas have no impact, or that they are bad ideas for you to apply to your personal life (e.g. if you have a Trumpian psychopath living in your household, you should certainly kick him out). I’m arguing that their impact on the problems they aim to solve is so immeasurably, impossibly small, that they will never get within a mile of the ballpark of solving them. 

And that therefore, going vegan or eschewing plastic straws is in fact not a political act, but a personal one; like going to church, or getting a pedicure. 

I’m not saying this to bum you out, or to judge you (I literally just got a pedicure). I’m saying it because when we pretend that “don’t use straws” is a political strategy, and will help us to address the life-threatening global crisis of ocean pollution, I think we are perpetuating a kind of confusion which could perhaps inhibit our ability to engage with these problems on the level of reality.

Which is, unfortunately, where most of us will have to continue living.

SCALE IS CONFUSING

The difference between political ideas and personal ideas is scale. The ocean, for example, is not a pool in your backyard (which you can simply refrain from filling with plastic). It’s a body of water which covers the entire planet, and is affected by all human activity. And “all human activity”, although it is made up of a bunch of individuals doing individual activities, cannot be accurately portrayed by the phrase “a bunch of individuals doing individual activities”. It’s better described in terms of human systems: institutions, governments, militaries, cities, countries, corporations and industries.

To approach these massive, complex, ocean-polluting systems as though they are a collection of individual people sipping beverages through straws is an ineffective tactic. So ineffective, it really can’t be called a tactic at all.

One way to determine whether something is a good tactic is to ask yourself: if this project was 100% effective, what would be the measurable result? Eg:

If 100% of humans stop using straws: ocean pollution will decrease by up to .025%

If 100% of humans switch to organic food: the environmental benefits will be mixed, and we will grow 25–34% less food.

That’s not to mention the fact that it is probably impossible to achieve a 100% effectiveness rate with ideas like these, because so far they are available to only a small subsection of people in a few very wealthy countries.

So, no matter how intuitively correct they may seem, at the scale of the entire globe (the scale where the oceans and the atmosphere exist), these ideas have roughly the same impact that “thoughts and prayers” have on mass shootings: they make a lot of people feel better about the fact that they are doing nothing to address a looming, life-threatening crisis. 

If you ask me, we like to think that these ideas are politically effective for exactly that reason: because otherwise we will have to face the coming apocalypse of climate change, and the fact that humans on-the-whole are doing approximately jackshit about it. 

And I understand why you’d want to avoid that! It’s fucking terrifying.

But my hunch is that we should instead admit that we’re doing jackshit about climate change, that the straws and the veganism and the potential impeachment were a waste of political energy, and that we are all absolutely terrified.

If we need to calm our nerves after that, we can go get pedicures. 

And then perhaps, with a clearer head and calmer nerves, we can work on creating some actual political strategies. 

YOU CAN’T CHANGE THE WORLD BY YOURSELF

Out here in terrifying reality, large-scale problems require large-scale solutions. And although it is intuitive to think that large-scale solutions are made up of lots of small-scale solutions (stop each person from using each straw!), it is sadly untrue. Complex systems – countries, economies, organisms – just don’t behave like a collection of small parts. 

Similarly, major societal changes aren’t really made of a bunch of individual people making a bunch of individual changes. They are made of large-scale, long-term, coordinated applications of science, money, propaganda, and strategic organizing.  

The right wing seems very clear on this fact, and uses it to great political effect (for example, we are still debating the “rightness” of abortion, despite its total irrelevance to policy-making, because they realized in the 1970s that debating abortion gets more people to vote Republican). 

On the liberal left, though, I think there is some confusion about it. “The personal is political”, “think globally, act locally”, and “be the change you want to see in the world” get thrown around a little too frequently, and usually as advertisements for water bottles. 

How quickly we forget that when Gandhi said “be the change” (which, by the way, he didn’t), he was probably referring to organizing millions of his countrymen in revolutionary acts of civil disobedience, towards a specific and well-defined political goal. He was not talking about buying a glass water bottle.

A relevant term to introduce here might be “phase transition”. A phase transition is when a system suddenly jumps from one phase to another. Boiling water is a good example: as you gradually turn up the heat on a pot of water, it just becomes gradually hotter water, until you get to 100C. Then, all at once, it becomes boiling water. And boiling water (in order to release the gas that the water is transitioning into) behaves very differently from hot water.

What we need to survive on this planet is not incrementally fewer straws and more Priora, it’s a global phase transition into an entirely different societal structure. And the individual consumer approach (“ask everyone to stop using plastic straws, then ask them to stop driving SUVs, then ask them to stop eating beef…”) is not just devastatingly slow, it is doomed to ineffectiveness. 

It’s like trying to boil a pot of water by doling it out into Dixie cups and asking your friends to breathe hot air onto each individual cup. Intuitively, it seems like it might eventually work (the water is getting hotter, right?), but alas. No matter how good a job we each do with our little paper cups, the water will never boil.

If we want to boil the water, we need to pour all our cups into the same pot. 

CANADA IS NOT THE WORLD 

“But Canada is banning single-use plastic!”, you say. “Isn’t that a large-scale solution?” 

Again, and unfortunately, it is not. Although “all the straws in Canada” is a lot more straws than “that one straw you’re using now”, it is still not even in the neighborhood of enough straws. The scale of plastic straw usage in Canada, when compared to the scale of plastic pollution in the oceans that span the planet earth, is just one more lukewarm Dixie cup. 

The idea that Canada’s plastic ban is “a big win for the environment” only illustrates how resigned we are to losing. We are so resigned, we aren’t even capable of thinking about the problem at the appropriate scale. 

If the Canadian single-use plastic ban has a 100% success rate, the oceans will continue to be 100% fucked by plastic. 

That’s partly because there just aren’t that many Canadians. It’s also because consumer plastics are mostly not what ocean pollution is made out of (just like personal cars are mostly not what climate change is made out of).

And finally, it’s because everyone is not going to stop using plastic. Everyone is also not going to stop using petroleum-burning vehicles, or cows, or rice paddies. Everyone is not going to stop doing anything, unless and until the global industrial system allows us to do so. 

We are still using petroleum not because we haven’t yet convinced each individual person to stop, but because the entire world economy is based on petroleum, and every powerful government on earth includes or is influenced by representatives of the petroleum industry. We are still using petroleum because the petroleum industry has its own lobbyists and politicians and spies and assassins and propagandists and governments. 

We are still using petroleum because, at this point in history, the petroleum industry has a lot more influence over us than we do over it.

This may seem like bad news. But here’s the good news: we are not a bunch of individual people, facing a bunch of individual problems. We - the humans - have just one big problem. Our problem is that we have created a world where the petroleum industry is more powerful than any person, idea, government, or country. And so is the banking industry, and the tech industry, and the pharmaceutical industry, and the prison industry, and the war industry. 

And all of these industries share one goal, to the exclusion of all others: profit. 

Which means that most of the major societal changes happening on the planet are determined not by data, or democracy, or cute social media campaigns, or the pursuit of the greater good; but by the pursuit of profit, for each company, in each quarter. 

And these companies and industries are so committed to that narrow goal - hogtied to it, really - that they are willing to hijack elections and start wars and crash the global ecosystem to pursue it. And all of us who share the planet with them - the humans, and the animals, and the oceans - are at the mercy of that pursuit.

The shorthand for this problem is “late-stage capitalism”. 

When we are thinking on the global scale - which, again, is the only scale where we can have a measurable effect on the global phenomena of oceans and atmosphere - it becomes clear that the only way to tackle climate change at this point (having failed to do jackshit so far) is to fundamentally change the way the world works. 

We need a phase transition.

But you don’t have to take it from me; take it from this team of independent scientists in their report to the U.N.

WE ARE ALL IN THIS TERRIFYING THING TOGETHER

If you’re a person who thought buying organic was a political act, I apologize. You’ve been duped. But it’s not your fault! The idea that our personal consumer choices have an impact on the global economy is not an accident. It is, in fact, a feature of capitalism.

It is good for capitalism when we believe that our personal choices are political choices, because it keeps us from focusing on large-scale problems and organizing to solve them (which, at this point in history, cannot be good for capitalism). Consumer-level environmentalism creates lots of new markets, while having no negative impact whatsoever on the industries that actually run the planet and profit off of its devastation. 

If we want to start making political choices, we need to stop thinking of ourselves as heroic individuals, able to single-handedly stop climate change by buying a different phone case. We are part of the world, which is a small place, entirely and inseparably interconnected, and has one very big problem, which we can only solve together.

The big problem thrives when we believe that we are separate people facing separate problems. It thrives when we worry about ourselves, and our beliefs, and what kind of water bottle to buy. It thrives by keeping us distracted, divided, and self-interested.

The truth is, banning straws will not solve our problem, because our problem is bigger than straws. It’s bigger than plastic, and styrofoam, and carbon emissions. It’s bigger than AK-47s and abortion bans. Impeaching Trump won’t solve it, because our problem is bigger than Trump; in fact, our problem is even  bigger than “men”.

There is only one man, his name is capitalism, and he’s got us all by the pussy.

SOME COOL DATA ABOUT SOCIALISM

I am a socialist, which means I think we ought to organize our societies around some motives other than profit. I don’t buy that the profit motive is particularly sacred or efficient (except at making profit - it’s very efficient at that), and I prefer almost all the other motives: creativity, kindness, lust, humor, fun. 

I dream of a highly democratic post-capitalist society wherein politically-invested citizens make collective, data-driven decisions about how to allocate the resources of this one small planet that we share.

Before we get to the data, a few clarifying points:

I have scoured the internet for months, and I’ve finally found the best and most succinct summary of the difference between capitalism and socialism. Thank you, comrade Teen Vogue.

If you’re an American, you might’ve inadvertently ingested a bit of data-averse anti-communist propaganda in your lifetime. Just to check, read this fascinating and brief history of U.S. anti-communism (which, somehow, doesn’t even mention COINTELPRO). 

And finally: no, the Nazis were not socialists.

“Socialism has never worked.” 

According to the World Wildlife Fund, there is only one country in the world which is currently “sustainable” in terms of both human development and environmental footprint: Cuba. 

Here is a comprehensive comparison of health outcomes for socialist vs. capitalist countries, using data from the 1970s and 80s. It finds that Cuba made significantly more gains than its neighbors in all available health indicators (life expectancy, literacy, infant mortality and employment), as did China (as compared to India) and the Soviet Union (as compared to West Germany and Austria). Cuba currently has the lowest infant mortality rate in history and one of the highest literacy rates in the world.

All of this is to say that “has never worked” is the kind of blanket statement that is designed to shut down conversations. In my opinion, there is a more productive conversation to be had by asking questions such as “in what ways has socialism worked and not worked? What about capitalism?”

“Authoritarianism! Gulags! Freedom!”

The United States (a capitalist democracy) currently has the highest incarceration rate in the world, with starkly disproportionate incarceration of black Americans. Currently, about 80% of U.S. prisoners are incarcerated for nonviolent crimes, and 22% of U.S. prisoners are awaiting trial (they have not been convicted or sentenced).

Israel is a capitalist democracy and a close ally of the U.S. In May, Israeli forces murdered 16 peaceful protesters and wounded 65, including children and paramedics. Exactly one year before, they killed 65 peaceful protesters and wounded 2,400. (For the record, I am a Jew, and there is nothing anti-Semitic about acknowledging the fact that Israel is currently engaged in a number of human rights violations.)

Then, of course, there’s slavery, the holocaust, the Trail of Tears, The Troubles, the Tuskegee Experiments, and compulsory sterilization, to name just a few. All of these acts of violence were carried out within capitalist societies, under the direction of capitalist governments. Is it possible that we are biased against the failures of socialism not because they are worse than those of capitalism, but because capitalism is the dominant paradigm? Is it possible we are experiencing just a touch of Stockholm Syndrome?

“Innovation! Entrepreneurship! Freedom!”

Cuba just invented the world’s first cancer vaccine, without a speck of venture capital. Actually, public (government) funding gave us most of the vaccines we use today (unless we are Jessica Biel); along with the internet, most of our aviation and space technology, the cameras and touch-screens on our phones, and even Google and Tesla.

About 30% of research worldwide is currently funded by public money (mostly government grants). Private money is not inherently more “innovative” than public money; the thing that spurs innovation is access to money, period.

And of course, there is the dark side of privately-funded innovation: the rising cost of insulin, the $750 pill, the possibility that a single company may one day own the entire food chain, and the likelihood that when it comes to research, there is a relationship between funding source and conclusion.

“But people are lazy! And there’s not enough food! And Soviet bloc housing is ugly!”

It doesn’t matter if people are lazy, we have robots. An Oxford study recently found that 47% of U.S. jobs (and around 13% of jobs worldwide) may be “lost to automation” over the next two decades. And many of our jobs are already bullshit: polls have found that 37% of full-time workers in the UK and 25% in the US are “quite sure that their job makes no meaningful contribution to the world”. Let’s step back a moment and consider the phase “lost to automation”; why is this a “loss” at all? Why aren’t we thanking the robots for allowing 47% of Americans to go ahead and be lazy? (The answer, my friends, is capitalism.)

We have more than enough food. Hunger is caused by inequality, not scarcity.

Speaking of inequality, I believe this line of panic stems from a gross misperception about just how much wealth the world has already stockpiled. The U.S. (for example) has quite a lot more money than Russia did in 1917; if we divided all the wealth evenly, each American household would have $760,000. That’s not to say we should do exactly that, it’s just to illustrate that this number is enough to provide quite a high standard of living for everyone - way higher than most of us are currently accustomed to. If the U.S. were to transition to socialism, there is no reason we couldn’t live in style with free healthcare, gorgeous homes, and delicious petri-dish meat.

So what is the actual objection, here?

REVOLUTION: A PRACTICAL, DATA-DRIVEN POLICY IDEA

What all this data says to me is that capitalism has outlived its usefulness. More than 3 billion people on this planet already live in poverty; tens of thousands of children are dying each day from hunger and preventable diseases; we are currently seeing a global refugee crisis of unprecedented proportions, and it’s likely that 1 billion more people will soon be displaced by climate change. 

The only political idea I’ve come across that will allow us to respond to so many crises of such magnitude is to stop doing capitalism. And I believe that a massive, strategic, well-organized movement of many millions of people can make that phase transition happen.

I know it seems impossible. But in the words of my late hero, Ursula K. Le Guin:

“We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings.” 

Our only hope, at this late date, is to pour all our water into one pot. That’s what “organizing” is; that’s what Gandhi and Martin Luther King and Fred Hampton were doing, and that’s what we all need to start doing. I don’t think this blog post will launch a revolution (sorry, trolls), but I think it was worth writing, because it’s my opinion that American liberals - a huge voting bloc with a ton of money - will be considerably more useful to the revolution if we stop wasting our breath, time and political energy on straws.

If you agree, go make friends with your local socialists (I recommend PSL). Give them your folding money to spend on organizing, instead of blowing it at Whole Foods (so Whole Foods can turn around and spend it on union busting). Commit to educating yourself and others about how capitalism works, what it’s done so far, and what the alternatives are. 

All of these activities will have more political impact than going vegan, AND you get to eat bacon.

Resources and suggested readings:  

The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein

Why Socialism? by Albert Einstein

Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism by Kristen Ghodsee

The Dispossessed by Ursula Le Guin (if you prefer fiction)

Sorry to Bother You (if you prefer movies)

[wintertidewater]

Large topics/issues

It's a task to stay informed so here are some interesting topics worth reading up on. Summary: poverty/third world, women's rights, minorities/systemic oppression

Fast fashion (clothes not made to last, generates lots of waste), technological paradigm (devices having an expiration date), the build up of this waste in other countries. How this influx of free/cheap clothing has destroyed their textile industries. The chemicals that leak into the land from the waste. Harmful/misguided charity- infrastructure > donations. Fishing pole > fish

Prisons: population (USA's compared to other countries is huge), should it act as punishment or rehabilitation? School to prison pipeline (being treated as a "bad kid" makes kids more likely to have run ins with the law), healthcare, private prisons profiting off of prisoners and cutting corners with money, prisoners being paid pennies for their labor, children being tried as adults and getting decade+ sentences. Black and white sentence additions (a gun being involved in any way even if you weren't aware of or the one using it can automatically add something like 15 years). Three strikes law

Women and girls in countries such as India losing hours per day and week fetching water. Hinders their education and job opportunities Less bathrooms for women & girls means they're bound close to home. Menstruation taboo/ignorance. Without bathrooms, can't change pads so stay home (changing in open leads to fear of rape). Seen unholy/dirty during period. In some places women are sent into menstruational huts, which are unsanitary. Girls prioritized second for education. Water sanitary problems, parasites, water pumps in small villages, not clean. Need treatment centers, lack of sanitation responsible for large percentage of disease. Also hinders education.

Racism in the USA, police relying on racial profiling, unarmed murders, Native Americans, African Americans, Asian Americans- wage gap, can intersect with sex wage gap as well. Land being taken from Native Americans, missing people (often women), oil pipelines (check out Canada too, government bullies reservations), immigration policies fearful of people from other places and of dark skin tones (often Mexican people), the stigmatization and criminalization of marijuana due to associations with African American community. Marijuana industry now white dominated while many African American people continue to sit in jail for weed charges. Race fetishes dehumanizing people

China and India mainly, female feticide (killing of fetuses or babies due to misogyny/emphasis on sons). Lack of women and girls in those countries, treated as second class.

Sex pay gap. Women dominated industries valued less as a whole. Women paid less than coworkers. Talk to coworkers, be informed about wages. Women less respected, overqualified women losing positions to underqualified men. Discrimination based on sex

Corn industry subsidies, already wealthy wealthy corporations being paid millions, billions more by government. Subsidies originally meant for small farmers- family apple farm for example. Started in ~1930s/Great Depression. Now corrupt system lining pockets of rich. Obesity and poverty + malnutrition linked heavily. Access only to bad foods can result in simultaneous malnutrition and overweight

Access to birth control, abortions, resources for mothers (many abortions due to poverty, if true pro life, help support mothers! Not strip away rights to abort which will leave many more kids in bad situations), the "husband stitch", doctors reluctant/refusing to tie tubes/preform hysterectomy on women because "what if you/your husband want(s you) to have kids one day?". Women mistreated in medical field. Female animals not used for testing (medication). Female props not used in car crash simulations. Leads to increased risks of injury

Sexualization of women & girls. "Sex sells". Objectification. Makeup, tight/harmful/impractical/limiting clothing acting as restraints. Women who don't wear makeup paid less, discriminated against. Pedophelia culture, look at Millie Bobby Brown, younger kids starting to be groomed into being sexualized. Bdsm rise. Normalization of choking (which is never safe) and degradation. Self harm through others with harmful sex. Hookup culture of causal emotionless sex harms

Religion being patriarchal- Christian marriage vows used to have women promise to obey men, women can't be priests/bishops/archbishops/pope/deacons, Muslim women seen as sexual beings/property, have to cover up to "not tempt" men. Buddhism seeing women not as people but as temptations/not pure

Female Genital Mutilation (Check Out Africa) , forced/arranged marriage, honor killings (India largely), rape, femicide (look at Brazil), acid attacks (men feeling entitled to women, lash out, danger), etc etc etc...

Gangs fueled by poverty. Poverty increases rates for dropping out, substance abuse, this bad environment leads kids to seek family elsewhere (gangs), that increases violence, hard to leave, check out Homeboys Inc (program based in LA to help gang members reintegrate into society, tattoo removal, jobs,)

Exploitation 💵 - Disappearing middle class, money hoarded, poverty worsening, research food deserts 🌵, minimum wage not livable wage (used to be higher in proportion), CEO to avg worker ratio now way larger. Research relative poverty (poverty in USA vs poverty in Mexico)

Domestic abuse/spousal abuse, can you tell what is healthy, unhealthy, and abusive? Learning to set boundaries, mutual respect, trust, what is intimacy? Ability to be vulnerable with each other, not just sexual/physical. Healthy relationship standard

How effective is the UN? Can't trust countries to intervene on own accord, must be pressured by people to take action. Political movements. Look at the Rwandan Genocide which took place in 1994. Nonviolent movements higher success rate than violent counterparts

Please add on! All topics from Sudan to climate change welcome.

[feministstruggle]

Abortion is a Woman’s Fundamental Right

https://feministstruggle.org/2019/05/20/abortion-is-a-womans-fundamental-right/

Our world is crying out as abortion bans are in sweeping through conservative parts of the country, particularly the southeastern United States, the historical site of much slavery and the largest African American communities, as well as a stronghold of white Christian patriarchy. While some women in the liberal northeast and west coast may never experience these bans, Black and U.S. Native American women (groups who researchers say have the highest risk of dying in childbirth) as well as poor, young, and rural women (who cannot as easily access affordable health care) will be primarily impacted by these bans. In addition, the Journal of Perinatal Education states that unintended pregnancies -- which abortion would allow us to stop -- are associated with increased likelihood of risk factors causing death in childbirth, which also happens to vary by state. Women will always attempt to perform abortions, whether or not the abortions are legal. Women die from both unintended pregnancies and attempted unsafe abortions all over the world, and lack of access to safe abortions (caused by outlawing abortion) puts them at risk. Therefore, the bans on abortion amount to the state-sanctioned murder of women, especially those of less social privilege. All of the country is ablaze with fury and apprehension, and we are seeing even women who were previously apolitical now come forward to speak with their families and communities on the right of a woman to abortion.

The male supremacist right wing sees women as vessels to produce the working class, soldiers to uphold their various patriarchal nationalisms — and not as full human beings unto ourselves! As radical feminists, we vehemently reject this ethos. These are the hateful convulsions of an anti-abortion movement that knows many of these bans are nearly impossible to enforce. This round of bans are purposely unconstitutional, designed to force a Supreme Court case that (they hope) would overturn Roe v. Wade. But we women won’t let them. We have a vast number of sympathetic medical personnel nationwide and can end unwanted pregnancies privately during the first 9 weeks with the medications misoprostol and mifepristone.

Abortion rights have been whittled away, step by step for decades, starting with the Hyde Amendment. Because legislators couldn’t take abortion away from us immediately, they have been doing it slowly. Parental Consent & Notification laws, TRAP laws, mandated sonograms/guilt trips/”waiting periods” — an astonishing array of laws designed to deprive us of our bodily autonomy. When Donald Trump took office, his Supreme Court picks were specifically for overturning Roe v. Wade, and one of his first executive orders was an attack on abortion. As Planned Parenthood Action Fund states: “The global gag rule was first introduced by President Ronald Reagan in 1984. On January 23, 2017, in one of his first acts as president, President Donald Trump reinstated and expanded the global gag rule. … The global gag rule prevents foreign organizations receiving U.S. global health assistance from providing information, referrals, or services for legal abortion or advocating for access to abortion services in their country — even with their own money.”

Trump’s executive order, which was essentially an imposed sanction on women’s bodies around the world, severely hampers women’s ability to obtain abortions and other sexual health care, regardless of legality in their own countries. It even prohibits health care providers’ ability to treat AIDS, a crisis which Trump boasted about attempting to fix. The terrible impact is felt “especially in places where maternal deaths, HIV rates and unmet need for contraception are unacceptably high. Communities have lost access to essential life-saving services such as HIV testing, antiretroviral medications, nutritional support, birth control and pregnancy care,” says Dr. Leana Wen, President of Planned Parenthood.

It’s a United States tradition for the ruling elite to practice human rights abuses overseas before bringing them home. This year, we are seeing a wave of abortion bans. The New York Times (pdf) has the rundown. As of May 2019, Georgia, Ohio, Kentucky, and Mississippi severely limited abortion rights to the first trimester. Alabama eliminated abortion rights entirely, even in cases of rape and incest. Utah, Arkansas, and Missouri all reduced abortion rights farther back into the 2nd trimester, away from the Roe v. Wade holding.

The bans are being met with fierce resistance. Kansas just added abortion protection to its constitution. New York enacted a law that will preserve access to abortions, protect medical professionals who perform abortions from being criminalized, allow medical professionals who are not doctors to perform abortions, and allow abortions to be performed after 24 weeks if the fetus is not viable or to protect the life of the woman. Vermont is about to pass a bill allowing abortions with “zero” limits, as a “fundamental right”, and prohibits government entities from interfering with or restricting access to abortion, “ensuring that any pregnancy may be terminated for any reason at any time”. Some Democrats called it “too far“! And this isn’t the first time Democrats started sounding like Republicans: in New Mexico, eight Democrats crossed party lines to defeat a pro-choice bill. Nor is it simply a matter of going “too far”. A milder law comparable to New York’s was proposed in Virginia by Kathy Tran, who immediately faced death threats, and the Republicans spread fake news that the bill was about legalizing “infanticide”. The Virginia bill removed some restrictions on abortion in the third trimester of pregnancy, allowed abortions during the second trimester to take place outside of hospitals, and made it so only one doctor would be needed to determine that pregnancy threatens the woman’s life or health.

We’ve never had full abortion rights. All the ways that the patriarchy nitpicks a woman’s right to abortion into “trimesters”, “medical” necessity, conditions of rape, harsher restrictions in some regions, etc, only serve to divide women and distract us from the fundamental right that women have to abortions on demand without apology, without approval, and without being treated as criminals.

Feminists in Struggle insists on ABORTIONS ON DEMAND with zero questions asked. The only condition should be the consent of the woman who is pregnant. We also demand an end to the petty restrictions and code regulations (TRAP laws) that specifically discriminate against pregnant women and abortion clinics. We won’t stop there. We demand safe abortion access for women both in the United States, where we are based, and everywhere else. But because patriarchy divides women, the women’s liberation movement is divided into various camps. The Democratic party soaks up most of women’s political energy, preventing us from experiencing our full potential as a movement.

You must be wondering: what can radical feminists do? What can WE all do about this? Especially while we are still living out the war on feminism by dominant forces in the transgender movement, positioning radical feminists as underdogs in any discussion on feminism? Ridiculous rhetoric we’ve been peddled about “pregnant people” instead of “pregnant women” is becoming “abortions for people” instead of “abortions for women”. We consider abortion a right of the female sex, but for us to say that in progressive circles will bring controversy and distractions that women can’t afford.

As radical feminists, we can utilize our position as the radicals and underdogs to push harder and farther than anyone else will. Our hearts are with the everyday woman. We will do what the long arm of the Democratic party would never do. We will demand ABORTIONS ON DEMAND WITHOUT CONDITION. Not to mention, free health care that includes abortions. And… END THE GLOBAL GAG ORDER!  100% of unwanted pregnancies are caused by MEN, yet no one holds the men responsible for the life-threatening condition of pregnancy!

If you join us at Feminists in Struggle, we will be able to organize marches for abortion rights and pressure legislators to secure abortion as women’s fundamental right. We can all strategize together. However, because our organization is young, what we want and what is feasible are two different things. We call for united mass action on the streets. We call for civil disobedience. We call for all women to speak up about abortion. We call for you and us to join the larger marches and apply pressure there for people to take up more radical positions.

We call for teaching women en masse how to use and smuggle the abortion pill, and perform menstrual extractions. We call for you, if you live in a state that protects abortion, to consider taking direct action to provide safe harbor for women seeking out of state abortions. Bring back the Jane Collective. We want to educate women about women’s self help groups who work to keep women’s health in women’s hands. Educate yourself and others on the use of plan B, a medication you can buy at the pharmacy that is effective in preventing pregnancy if taken within 48 to 72 hours following unprotected sex. Educate yourself and others on misoprostol and mifepristone, which can end unwanted pregnancies privately during the first 9 weeks. Educate women on preventing pregnancy and obtaining safe abortions. Spread the word to women affected by these bans not to sign any waivers when they get an abortion. You can also agitate and get previously apolitical women involved in the broader struggle. And of course… Join us as a member in F.I.ST’s Feminist Assembly!

Women are half the population. Women have the numbers. We will prevail! We have a few suggested chants and slogans: “Our bodies, our spaces, our sex based rights.” “My body, MY CHOICE!” “Keep your rosaries off my ovaries! “Women’s bodies are not incubators!” “It’s not a womb, it’s a WOMAN” “Abortion on demand, NO APOLOGY!” “Birth must be voluntary. Abortion is health care. Health care is a human right.” “Free Abortion on Demand!”