#radfem book

[balkanradfem]

religion to women: you need to be servants >:(

religion to m*n: you deserve servants :D

[radtoken]

"Our conditioning to be ashamed of being women begins when we are barely out of babyhood (. . .) Shame is a tool men use to rule females. Men are not susceptible to it in the same way. Men don't believe that they should be ashamed of themselves as a sex for being responsible for 90 percent of the crime in the world, making wars, killing women, molesting children. They know they are men, hence they are inherently "worthy.""

— Zsuzsanna Budapest, "Grandmother Moon" (p. 214-215)

[fembrie]

i can't put into words how succinctly kim jiyoung, born 1982 pinpoints the experience of womanhood in the 21st century and tears a fucking hole right through it. it's people who point to laws and gender equality committees and mandatory hr sensitivity trainings who need to read this book the most - women already know that our suffering looks like realizing you've been trained to put other people first your whole life, knowing men live more freely because they do not. we know that our oppression is not just men's violent outbursts, but the slow and steady lifelong culmination of excessive responsibility, pressure and routine injustice. i used to wonder whether it's even possible to communicate experiences so familiar to one sex and alien to the other across these lines. pay gaps are easy to talk about because they're quantifiable, but how do you communicate the cruelty of making us choose between having children and our ambitions? how do you express the frustrations of toeing the line between fellow human and consumable sex object in the eyes of men? how do you explain the ways in which cycles of unassuming acceptance of our place in society, rebellion and defeat mould, contort, disfigure our beings? and is it even worth trying? fwiw, i think cho nam-joo has come as close to succeeding at this as you can

[bluebelltohell6]

[femmesandhoney]

being a woman means asking for gifts that aren't conventionally feminine gifts and being gifted conventionally feminine gifts because others think that's what you "really" wanted or needed underneath your obviously fake and stupid real wants that cannot possible be satisfactory enough for you, a woman.

[fluffytimearts]

Jaden from Lease bound if she bothered to research and learned about others instead of being close-minded.

[crazycatsiren]

Please don't follow me if you're a Harry Potter fan. I'll just block you.

My trans friends mean the world to me. I simply won't stomach anything to do with that transphobic bitch.

[balkanradfem]

Do you ever think about how sad and messed up it is to grow up in this world as a little girl who likes to read. Because you are a child, and you don't get that there's a difference in who writes the books, you read everything you like, you read the adventures and the fantasy and the mysteries and the traumatic stuff and if you're also very isolated and lonely, these books build your worldview. Because why wouldn't they? They're written by humans, so they have the attitudes, opinions, perceptions, morals and spirits of human beings in them, they're telling you what humans think and feel about things, how they go about situations, what they imagine, what they desire. What your role in all this is, or what it could potentially be.

But, since you are not capable of differentiating the material, and you just read what is available to you, you end up reading a lot of books written by m*n. You also have to go thru the required reading at school - 90% written by m*n. And so slowly, since young age, without even socializing or learning it thru interaction, you find yourself in a world shaped by minds who do not have empathy for women, especially not for little girls. You find yourself relating to the male protagonists, but you also find out that girls only play a passive role in their stories. You find that m*n problems are centered, made important, their suffering and violence critical points in the story, while women are cast aside as helpers, servants, givers, caretakers, and generally just exist in the background, not a thought given to what they are going thru.

You learn thru books written by m*n, that your experience is secondary. Even if you cast yourself as the adventuring, immensely important and struggling protagonist, even then the other women in your mind end up being just background characters, caregivers who do not need a thought spared for their suffering.

Books written by m*n, even for children, will trivialize female suffering to the point where they shape the child's mind into one that looks at the world from a male perspective. Where women either don't matter, or are capable only of giving and aiding, to be cast aside for more important matters, such as male aspirations for their own lives.

Thinking back, I understand why I felt myself unimportant and trivial in any social setting - I understood my role from the written word, and I knew adults found me trivial, secondary, only a background figure to someone else's adventure or mission. As much as I could fight it in my fantasies, and make myself the main character, it felt like a pipe dream, like something that was incredible self-indulged and selfish and would never translate to reality.

I wish it had been different. I wish I had been introduced specifically and only to books written by women, for women. I wish I had found empathy for myself in those books. I wish I had found myself standing on high ground, equal ground, with other women, our desires centered, our lives translated into tales of epic importance - because that's what they are. I wish I had been born into a world where female perspective is available from the start, not after years of growing up and finding feminist literature and having to re-write my own role in my brain, from all of those years of reading male perspective as the default.

I don't think any little girl should be exposed to literature that shape her world as a place where she doesn't matter. I don't think books written by males and shaped by their worldview should be allowed into children's literature, or teenage or for young adults. Girls should not be learning from fiction that their most important value is empathy and understanding for male problems, and their second, to be desired and/or helpful to them, all while being treated as nothing but service and background noise until you're desired for something. We need to open books and find out that we matter too. That our lives can be the center of our existence, rather than being in the service of someone else's life.

[sweetstarcollector]

Just watched a video of someone reading that “My Shadow is Purple” book. The basic premise is there’s a kid, and the kid has a mom with a pink shadow, a dad with a blue shadow, and the kid has a purple shadow. Why is this kid’s shadow purple? The book explains that this kid enjoys playing with girl toys and boy toys, enjoys dancing (with the pink shadows) and playing sports (with the blue shadows), so therefore the kid can’t be just pink or just blue. There’s one page where I think the author realized what they were implying and threw in a “also pink shadows can be strong and blue shadows can have emotions”, but the very next page is the kid saying that they must not be pink or blue because they like “sports, dancing, trains, ponies, glitter, and engines”. Not a single comment on this video was even slightly critical. Tons of people saying it described them as a non-binary person, that they wanted to read it to their kids. It’s so bizarre, it’s gender roles 2.0 being packaged as progressive. I remember when the push was for there to be no “boy toys” or “girl toys”, to the point some stores stopped separating them like that. Now, we’re telling kids that not only do “boy toys/activities/interests” and “girl toys/activities/interests” exist, but that the separation is so important that which ones you partake in literally determine your identity. It’s not just this book that does this either (Hello, “Jack not Jackie”). It’s just so strange.

[whocookedthelastsupper]

“Yet some would say, why women's history at all? Surely men and women have always shared a world, and suffered together all its rights and wrongs? It is a common belief that whatever the situation, both sexes faced it alike. But the male peasant, however cruelly oppressed, always had the right to beat his wife. The black slave had to labor for the white master by day, but he did not have to service him by night as well. This grim pattern continues to this day, with women bearing an extra ration of pain and misery whatever the circumstances, as the sufferings of the women of war-torn Eastern Europe will testify. While their men fought and died, wholesale and systematic rape-often accompanied by the same torture and death that the men suffered — was a fate only women had to endure. Women's history springs from moments of recognition such as this, and the awareness of the difference is still very new. Only in our time have historians begun to look at the historical experience of men and women separately, and to acknowledge that for most of our human past, women's interests have been opposed to those of men. Women's interests have been opposed by them, too: men have not willingly extended to women the rights and freedoms they have claimed for themselves. As a result, historical advances have tended to be "men only" affairs. When history concentrates solely on one half of the human race, any alternative truth or reality is lost. Men dominate history because they write it, and their accounts of active, brave, clever or aggressive females constantly tend to sentimentalize, to mythologize or to pull women back to some perceived "norm." As a result, much of the so-called historical record is simply untrue. For example, Joan of Arc was burned not for heresy but for wearing men's clothes, as were other women right up to the eighteenth century. Florence Nightingale was never called "the Lady with the Lamp," but "the Lady with the Hammer," an image deftly readjusted by the war reporter of the Times since it was far too coarse for the folks back home. Far from gliding about the hospital with her lamp aloft, Nightingale earned her nickname through a ferocious attack on a locked storeroom when a military commander refused to give her the medical supplies she needed.”

-Rosalind Miles; Who Cooked the Last Supper? The Women’s History of the World

[disillusionedmonster]

I read Sylvia Plath's "The Bell Jar" for @letters-from-x reading challenge and I loved it. I loved the way it felt like Plath was musing through her character but also like she was speaking to me. I loved listening to her reflect on childbirth and the nature of men. She had so many good things to say. And I felt so gripped by her exploration of her mental health and I felt rage at how she was treated. Plath completely sucked me in with her writing and how natural the progression of the book felt. I seriously enjoyed it. Some of my favourite lines in no particular order:

There was also this part where she had this metaphor about a fig tree and her life being wasted, which she commented on a couple pages later saying that musing was caused by her hunger which made me laugh.

[daremna]

"As if anger could be a kind of vocation for some women. It is a chilly thought. The heart is dead since infancy. Unwept for let the body go."

- The Glass Essay, Anne Carson

[gendiebrainrotreceipts]

[countessdankula]

r@dfems keep tawaif culture critique out of your mouth, there are many many things to criticise bhansali about in re heeramandi but do not try to use this advocate for anti-SW practices

courtesan culture in the subcontinent has been linked to etiquette, high culture, and arts for centuries. do not speak about what you don't know.