#really does feel like we’re going backwards when it comes to gender equality and feminism

[mellomadness]

sometimes I wonder if I should take a gender studies class just so I can bitch every day about how an imaginary boyfriend is often seen as a requirement for a woman to feel safe enough to have fun at a club, or the idea that an imaginary person with a fake “claim” over me has more influence over predatory men than my own voice saying “No, I’m not interested, get lost”

[ilikekidsshows]

I edited the ask slightly to make it clear this is about apologists making excuses for Chloé's behavior and not fans who just feel frustrated over not getting an arc they wished to see.

Anon said: I think what really annoys me is Chloe apologists that cry she’s, “just a kid she can learn to be better and outgrow her abusive tendencies” seem to gloss over or ignore that Chloe has been given MULTIPLE chances to do better for 3 seasons and at every turn she always returns to her spoiled bratty bullying ways. Especially in season 3 where she didn’t listen to Ladybug about never getting the miraculous and felt entitled to the power.

It’s just so annoying how chloe apologists act like she’s the real victim just cause her mommy doesn’t love her, news flash she’s not the only character in the show who has a bad relationship with a parent. It doesn’t give Chloe the right to degrade and abuse people. Im not sure if Chloe needs to hit rock bottom before she turn things around or this is heading towards a corruption arc. However im also annoyed when parts of her fandom claim it’s misogynistic that she doesn’t get better.

Because sometimes bad people stay bad and never get better, it would be a very powerful lesson to teach kids who are in toxic abusive relationships especially with childhood friends that sometimes you have to let them go and cut them off because they’re causing you harm. It was very powerful of Adrien to stand up to Chloe multiple times as an abuse victim and not let her drag him down to her level. All the people mad at him for queen banana don’t realize that Adrien can’t make chloe a kinder person. No one can make someone mean good.

Plus the show is chock full of actual good and kind girls with positive supportive friendships so having one or even two female characters turn out bad isn’t sexist to me. Same with people who claim Zoe is a Mary Sue and it’s wrong that she’s replacing Chloe. Which is weird because Zoe can’t replace what Chloe never was, a friend to the main cast. Chloe was never close with the class or their friend even if she tried to be involved in their projects he never tried to get along with the others.

Plus Zoe made a mistake by trying to emulate her family and be a bully but eventually realized being awful like them wasn’t worth their approval. Whether she’s a better hero or deserves the miraculous is another discussion but we’re talking about Chloe here. If she continues down the path of selfishness and hate becoming like her mother and her sister Zoe, who also comes from an abusive family, doesn’t that just means one overcame their trauma and the other didn’t.

Sorry for the rant just I’m so tired of seeing the tag be cluttered up by Chloe apologists who won’t stop crying or complaining about her character.

With what the canon actually gave us, Chloé's arc could have gone, and could still go, either way on the redemption/corruption scale. Yes, Chloé messed up royally in the season three finale, but she was under duress to a degree. While Chloé showed few signs of becoming a selfless hero, since most of the people she helped as a hero were people she put in bad situations to begin with or she helped out to get to hang out with Ladybug, she's also showed no signs of becoming a true villain the same way Lila has. We can clearly see Lila developing into a supervillain, but Chloé is very much stuck in the middle and could go either way if she suddenly got superpowers with no strings attached.

The real issue here is Chloé's civilian life. She's never been kind to her classmates and goes out of her way to make sure they have a bad time. This has never been influenced by whether or not she had a Miraculous, so obviously something not-superpowers-related needs to happen for her to see anything wrong with what she's doing.

And there's a real chance Zoé is meant to be that thing that makes Chloé see. Chloé could see how her sister was forgiven and welcomed by her classmates and realize how easy it is to stop being awful and get validation and friendship from the class that way. This realization might make her look down on the class as gullible fools, like Lila, or it might make Chloé want to belong and try to adjust her behavior, having her follow Zoé's lead.

Of course there's still a chance that Chloé will just keep swinging between sitcom arch nemesis and not-quite-a-supervillain, that she'll still be used as a civilian life obstacle for the heroes to overcome and she's not meant to be redeemed or corrupted. In this case I can see this fandom discourse continuing for years to come, since it's the uncertainty of Chloé's role that's fuelling it so much.

Crying misogyny every time your favorite female character is treated in a way you don't like, when it’s used in a way that’s clearly just a buzzword meant to manipulate people, is something I'm just so done with. In the case of Miraculous, though, it's especially misguided, with how much the creators clearly try to be feminist. It's one thing to say something they did fails at that goal and leans into sexist attitudes and another to say they're being purposefully misogynistic because the show isn’t to your tastes. Because, let’s face it, a lot of the show’s attempts at being progressive have been tone deaf, but it usually seems to happen by accident and sometimes, at least with Fei’s design, they seem to be willing to amend a mistake when it gets pointed out.

Also, because sexism and feminism are about gender politics, the thing with discussing sexism is not actually comparing a female character with other female characters, it's about comparing a female character with male characters. If a show aims for gender equality, a character's gender can't influence how they are treated. This means we need to see if we can compare Chloé's character to a male character and find equality.

And we can. Miraculous Ladybug has a male character who causes others pain on purpose. This same character has several chances to stop being awful with "not being awful" costing him nothing. He even shows a softer side in 'Style Queen', just like Chloé in that same episode, but ultimately tosses that change aside when he finds something he thinks can help him gain his goals, like Chloé does in 'Miracle Queen'.

I am of course talking about Gabriel Agreste. I have repeatedly said that Marinette and Chloé are mirrors, what the other could be if they changed how they view other people and themselves. Gabriel is a foil to Marinette, so he naturally mirrors Chloé as well. However, Gabriel's arc has a similar forwards-and-backwards beat as Chloé's does. Even Chloé Apologists recognize the similarities between the two, since I've seen them voicing concerns that Gabriel might get redeemed while Chloé doesn't, because they think Gabriel having sympathetic aspects is a sign of a redemption arc for him like it supposedly was for Chloé. Instead, they are still both firmly in the area of antagonists and villains.

Although I will concede one key difference: Chloé is still way more likely to get redeemed than Gabriel.

I also think that, even if Chloé does get redeemed eventually, it’s still important that Adrien didn’t just hang on waiting for it when she spent so long proving again and again that she didn’t want to change. Because the other characters couldn’t know for sure if Chloé would change. Just like in the real world you won’t know for sure if your toxic friend will ever change, so you might have to let them go for your own sake. Even if they might get better one day, even if you’re not their target, it’s not on you to stand by them when they do things that are against your personal ethics.

[conservativetradlife]

What would you say is the biggest barrier to young women living traditional lifestyles?

Hello Anon!! Thank-you for the thought provoking question. 💕 This is going to end up being a wee bit long, so I will give you a TL;DR about how I feel, but if you want to read, I absolutely encourage you to read past the block to learn more. These are my personal opinions, and in no way reflect how other people feel about this question, but I hope it gives insight regardless.

TL;DR - The long and short of it is, I believe that three big contributors to the Traditional Barrier began with the Stigma for Women who desire a Traditional Lifestyle. The Feminist Movement was the ... kick in the sides the horse needed to get started, but its not the main cause, and its certainly not a negative in modern times, due to how many benefits it had on our Rights, however it placed a lot of pressure on women to choose a briefcase instead of a diaper bag. Finally, and most importantly The High Rates of Inflation has made surviving on a single income as a household complete with all the expenses children bring to the table. Finally, I believe that the general support of a tight knit Community, one we had not fifty years ago is no longer there. With lack of community, comes the lack of the ‘village’ children need to raise them, along with the female emotional support a lot of women need, for the trying job of child rearing makes being Truly Traditional very difficult to authentically uphold.

Thank-you for choosing to read through this, I appreciate it.  💕💕💕 I think that the Feminist Movement has been a big part in generating a barrier for women who strive to live Traditionally. That being said, its less about the blanket of Feminism and more of the expectations that all women should feel the same in regards to what they believe is their vocational role in the world.

There is a Stigma for Women, who choose to live within the Traditional Gender Roles (female the homemaker, the stay at home parent while the male is the main breadwinner, and the wife is respectful to her position at her husbands side.) After all, years of strong feminist women like Susan B Anthony, Emmeline Pankhurst (along with her daughters) and Lucy Stone, struggling through the Women’s Suffrage Movement, and yet despite all the progress, there are those who were happy in the positions they were in. How could someone betray the hard work of these Revolutionaries, by maintaining their stay at home positions? Why not take hold of your general rights, and implement them to be monetarily beneficial to yourself? Many people were under the impression that women as a whole were downtrodden and wanting change, but that obviously wasn’t the way of all women. The pressures to seize your individuality as a woman were overbearing, and it was seemingly an expectation to do so. Women who chose to stay at home were-... A step backward to those who sought to own and implement their own individual rights.

Group Peer Pressure to concede to become Career Women finding careers that would add value to their worth as women (personally, socially and economically) was expected. Rather than finding a good husband, building a home together, a family together and finding worth in being Wives and Mothers, Women were seeking occupations in increasingly competitive fields that had been previously dominated by men, and for some that was what they wanted, but not for everyone. The idea of becoming a Housewife in a Traditional Role beside your husband suddenly was viewed as a negative. Women who had previously grew up doting on their dolls and playing house, were sneered at by their peers who viewed the idea of these Domestic positions as demeaning, or less than someone who chose to be a doctor, a police woman, a scientist etc.

With the Economic Boom, its become a necessary evil for women to balance both, being a mother and being a career woman. Let not forget that its “far more profitable for a woman to purchase formula for her child while she goes to work, rather than stay home to breastfeed.” Most households in North America require more than one income to afford basic living conditions (during the Suffrage Movement in 1916, an annual income from a man would generally be rounded to around $690.00 a year, equaling in today’s economy to around $16,000. Where the median of purchasing a home in 2015 is around $177,600 versus 1916 where it costed around $3200, pretty feasible on what appears to be a small single income) general inflation has made purchasing a home on a single income nearly impossible. It is pretty much necessary to have double income to find somewhere to afford the cost of living, not including children or other expenses. The growth of the economy along with generalized inflation has made it very difficult to afford to be a housewife, and finding a career a must for survival. Some women are forced to work when they would rather be at home raising their family, due to these strict expenses to afford to survive month to month. This is pretty defining barrier for women who wish to be entirely traditional, even with minimalism, even with homesteading or other personal money making means. It’s hard to make rent, or your mortgage. You don’t have much of a choice but to work, and now you don’t have an excuse. 

Traditionalism has become stigmatized, sexualized and looked down upon as an economic burden to society. No matter what position you have, be it as a housewife or a career woman, you will be met with those who find reasons to have problems with it. If you’re a woman who has a rich husband, you’re lazy. If you need to work, and put your children in Daycare, you are a negligent parent. If you manage both, you are spreading yourself too thin, and unable to do both successfully to the best as you’re ‘distracted’ and a liability in the workplace due to unforeseen hazards of having children (getting sick, needing to pick children up from school, having limited hours due to need to be home) and if you manage to be a housewife, you’re a back step to progress. It can be... very discouraging.

In the end, the only Barriers that truly exist when it comes to Traditionalism, are in the Economy. Right now, as much as I want to blame Feminists for pressuring women to become self sufficient, for a lot of us, its unrealistic to be able to afford the dream Lifestyle we want as Homemakers in a Traditional way on a single income unless you have a spouse (or yourself) with a job that hosts an annual salary of a decent amount. Stigma and Judgement can be ignored and brushed off (as so many beautiful women in this community have done but not being able to afford the roof over your head between two people is another thing entirely. Some of us get lucky, but it can be a struggle bus for others. 

I believe that Community has become something truly rare in our modern society. Where before the neighborhood watched out for one another, church groups, play dates between children, at hand baby sitting and additional support in casserole dinners, we now are closed off, distant, and afraid of reaching out to become close to others, be that because of the neighborhood you can afford or a lack of feeling able to identify and socialize with other women. With this lack of community support, I believe a secondary barrier exists in that we feel so disconnected from one another that we are afraid to ask for help (after all, we’re supposed to be Strong Independent Women who can handle anything) and if we were able to do that again? I believe there would be a lot of changes to what is and is not a barrier to managing a Traditional Lifestyle between our sisters.

I hope that answers your question, thank-you for reading, God Bless. 💕

EDIT: I want to say thank-you again really quickly for giving me this question. I know I’m likely to get a lot of flack for mud slinging the Feminist Movement and I want to say now that I don’t vilify Feminism. It has allowed women to have a voice in our country, and have given us a lot of things we take for granted nowadays. That being said, with power comes responsibility, and with responsibility, expectations for everyone. Not all Feminists believe it is a bad thing to be a stay at home mother, a Homemaker, a Traditionalist, but there are those who have very negative toxic opinions of those who want to have those lifestyles. In general the Feminist Movement opened the door for feminine progress into the modern era, but it does come with its thorns.

[red-diaper-babies]

Reclaiming Red Pill

Online, a person who has “accepted” certain traditionalist myths about men and women and the roles they ought to play in society is said to have “take the red pill” or are “redpilled” (a reference to that scene from The Matrix). The Red Pill presents itself as a complex philosophy that is brutally honest about the nature of sexual relationships between men and women and the countless dangers of feminism which have conspired in scores of unhappy men and women. Most of it is just rehashed biological essentialism, with perhaps a touch of postmodern nihilism.

Thanks to my morbid curiosity, I’ve been exposure to this ugly, misogynistic subculture through it’s now “quarantined” home on Reddit and the several watchdog/satire subreddits, such as r/thebluepill, that keep an eye on it and the several related internet subcultures it has spawned (incels, Men Going Their Own Way, etc.). These online communities are known collectively as “the manosphere.”

Red Pill evangelicals insist that their movement is about male self-improvement, which is a fascinating angle for a women-hating philosophy to adopt, but upon further inspection it makes perfect sense that they lead with this. Proto- and Crypto-Fascist ideologies (and The Red Pill absolutely is one of these) are extremely opportunistic; they seize upon important and emerging fissures in society and supplant a critical materialist explanation with reactionary dogma and, as always, use this dogma to prescribe as a fix both wanton cruelty and a return to a Golden Past that is distorted or nonexistent. They sell a vision of a time when a man could sit comfortably on a couch in a clean house after a hard day of work, well behaved children out of earshot, homemade meal in his stomach, and awaiting the delivery of a cold beer from his grateful wife, and feel like he deserved this, that he'd earned it. They sell a fantasy.

Why does the fantasy appeal to so many heterosexual, cis-men? What fissure has this ideology grown out of? Men in Western society, and perhaps particularly in America, find themselves in a crisis of identity. The roots of this crisis are primarily economic, and as complex as they are, can be simplified in this way: as the rate of profit has steadily fallen in the postwar era, more and more social labor is required from families (or per individual), and less and less net pay it making its way into the family's checking account. By social labor, we mean labor done outside the home that is traded for wages. As we know, real wages are stagnant and prices are rising; preserving a standard of living requires bringing in more income. The natural consequence is that dual income households have become more common (and necessary), from the working poor all the way through the upper-middle class, for the last five decades. A notable side effect is that, as the presence of women in professional careers has been normalized, women are more often finding themselves the primary breadwinner in the family, supplanting a host of traditional expectations about familial roles. Fifteen years ago this tension was a favorite source of material for stand-up comics and sitcoms; now it's passe to even comment on, but the insecurities and dislocation persist.

Heterosexual, cis-men's traditional and patriarchal role in the family, which was often imbued with the power to unilaterally direct the family's resources, was tightly interwoven with their prescribed role as "provider." The social order of the day was at the time tasked with preserving this status quo; putting up glass ceilings, limiting access to higher education, permitting rampant sexual harassment/assault, legalized discrimination, on and on. This is not to say that women haven't always worked, especially in the working class, but by and large they had access only to a few professions and were otherwise capped at lower wages and lower ranks. 

To whatever extent this role was actually realized by men of previous generations, it seems this has been turned upside down. This has been very disorienting for many men, not least of all because they are also finding themselves expected to do more and more of the "reproductive labor" that used to be taken care of by a stay-at-home spouse (or servant) just a generation or two ago. By reproductive labor, we mean the labor that maintains the workers themselves and provides for the nurturance of the next generation of workers. Reproductive labor is often referred to as household labor.

It will come as no surprise to many women that, as their share of social labor has increased, they nonetheless continue to perform the majority of reproductive labor, both globally and domestically. Those figures get even more stark if you factor in emotional labor and the facilitation and managerial tasks we've come to call "mental load." This strip by French cartoonist Emma demonstrates the significant weight of mental load, and the repercussions it's inequitable distribution has had on women and Heterosexual marriages. 

Indeed, Red Pillers acknowledge this inequity right off the bat. They gleefully ridicule other heterosexual cis-men for being irresponsible, lazy, selfish, gluttonous, and unattractive. They see it as an unfortunate norm that fathers are directed by wives on where to go, what to do, what to wear, or are altogether left out as the woman goes about the business of running a family while simultaneously pulling a full-time job. They bemoan the "Homer Simpson-ification" of the western man, who has, we're to believe, been transformed by feminism and mainstream media into an extra child that the wife/mother must care for, instead of the "captain" that she needs and truely desires (the Nazi's promised each man would be the "Fuhrer" of their household). Their diagnosis is based on biological essentialist dogma; their prescription is based on an idealist return to a time that never really existed; but the problem they identify is a real one. Men by and large struggle with relating to their families in positive ways, particularly as their role has shifted, and we on the Left, particularly we cis-men in Heterosexual relationships, must address this problem ideologically, through our political work, and in our own lives.

Wolfgang Willrich, The Aryan Family (1930)

The answer, of course, lies not in moving society backwards, but forwards. An inequitable division of labor, particularly founded on the oppression of women, is unacceptable. So to is a world that enforces strict gender role conformity and uses a division of labor to drive a wedge between men and women. In everything we do, we must assert the scientific truth: all major differences between men and women in ideology, ability, and behavior are acculturated or perceived, not biologically determined. We must be self-critical about the assumptions we make about who should do what and how much/how often. We should promote a vision of fatherhood and parenthood which is dedicated, affectionate, nurturing, disciplined, collaborative, and as communal as our society allows. We should invest our mental and emotional energy and time as dutifully at home as we do at work. We should hold each other accountable (gracefully and supportively). And we must do this as much for our activist spaces as well as our social and work spaces.

I’ve always been salty that the right has appropriated “red” in this instance. Red should belong to us. The real Red Pill reveals a world full of ideological justifications for the exploitation of women and the infantilism of men, and once you see it, it's impossible to unsee. Women really can do it all, perhaps not all the time or forever, but they do it everyday; the question is, who does this benefit? Men's discomfort with their changing role in the world suggests that we are beginning to see the danger in our own dependency (as opposed to interdependency) and increasing irrelevance, all because we lack the imagination necessary to break out of the outdated patterns and expectations and weave new kinds of bonds with our wives and children. 

So whatever the color, it’s time for men to swallow whatever pill is necessary to see our responsibilities towards domestic life for what it is, and what it could be. This is not about making men “men,” again, but about being an adult. Are we full, equal, responsible participants in the managing of our homes and the rearing of our children? The order of the day is partnership, and this is a good thing, for the liberation of women and the formulation of a new, positive identity for men. 

[mikhalsarah]

Why I don’t need Feminism

I really like hiking. Today’s “short” hike with my hiking and camping buddy turned into a 4.5 hour loop along the Bruce Trail that involved crossing three town boundaries and as many waterfalls. Clearly we are a bad influence on each other. Do you want to do just do this little bit more before we turn back? Sure, we could do that...

The plan today was, however, for me to invite said friend along on a “waterwalk” hike around the Bay that I found on Facebook. It seemed like a nice Thanksgiving thing to do...be thankful for water, and beautiful local places, contemplate the tragic pollution of said waters and network with others looking to make a difference and we hadn’t hiked those trails together yet. So, I hit the interested button. For two weeks I then received updates from the event.

Not one of the updates suggested there was a “religious” dimension to this hike.

And then suddenly the evening before the hike comes the instructions. “Bring tobacco for an offering” and “People who identify as female please wear skirts.”

I’m not even going to get into the tobacco and where I’m supposed to get that at the last minute without going to a corner store and buying monoculture-farmed-stuffed-chock-full-of-pesticides-and-laced-with-arsenic crap cigarettes sold by giant corporations that don’t give a fuck about the health of humans or the environment....which would really seem to defeat the purpose of a valuable thank-you gift to offer to Nature.

No, I’m going to rant about the latter instruction. I had no need to go to a store last minute and buy a skirt. I already own several skirts. I like skirts, especially in the hot summer.....but I don’t necessarily feel SAFE in skirts, or treated well.

I don’t feel safe because the last time I was raped, I was wearing a long skirt.

I don’t feel safe because the last time I was sexually harassed at work I was wearing a long skirt.

I don’t feel safe because a skirt, especially a long one, hampers my ability to move quickly at need, or run, without risking falling. I certainly could not even remotely defend myself in a skirt, in the event I should ever be attacked.

I have frequently been treated in a dehumanizing and patronizing manner. as child-like, ignorant, incompetent and stupid, while wearing skirts and dresses, and can’t think of any time I’ve been treated like that while wearing pants.

Therefore I am very choosy about who I wear a skirt around at the best of times. Only people I believe to be of high morals and ethics and respectful get that privilege. Given how the Left has treated me as a woman, any event organized by or appealing to Leftists is somewhat suspect in its personal skirt friendliness.

Oh, and I also suffer from migraine-related vertigo/dizziness, which can strike at any moment, without warning. I was hit by a bout during today’s hike on a particularly vertical bit of Bruce Trail. Fortunately I was wearing proper hiking boots, stretchy yoga pants and merely a slightly longish sweater for modesty, because what sort of lunatic wears a tea-length skirt on a hike?!!!

The bayside trails aren’t as steep,  but there are plenty of hills, slippery bits and muddy portions (it rained yesterday), as well as fallen logs, sharp rocks and brambles to catch excessively flowing garments on, which pose a tripping risk.

And why were “those identifying as women” supposed to put themselves at risk of tripping like this? Because this ”hike” is apparently an Indigenous ceremony which women need to be “respectful” about by covering their bodies. The same female  bodies the Creator was not too ashamed of to create. Men, seemingly, do not need to be respectful. They can show up in their grungy old jeans, with their Merrills caked in mud, and T-shirts with inappropriate cartoons. But heaven forbid a woman show up in attire appropriate for hiking.

According to the modern Left, we women need to be “tolerant” of the cultural practices of others....apparently even if those cultural practices break our ankles or worse. Isn’t it convenient how all these cultural practices we have to tolerate only ever inconvenience and put women at risk, and never men? I suspect that if they impacted Liberal and Leftist men even a smidgen as much, all talk of “tolerance” would be yeeted out the window at lightning speed to be replaced instantly with talk of the need to make principled stands on issues.

And laughably, even as indigenous people are speedily “decolonizing” themselves from the god-awful alien Western philosophy that is Feminism, they are as equally quickly adopting the discourse of Trans activists. Is that not equally alien and Western? And the fact that “skirt shaming” is now an ongoing event in Indigenous communities at religious ceremonies when they supposedly value non-interference and respect? How much do you want to bet that traces back not to any true Indigenous values, but to the alien, Western philosophies of Christianity and Victorian prudery that were forced upon them? No rush to “decolonize” that either, I see. 

 In fact, as far as I can tell, Feminism is the ONLY Western philosophy they’re in an all-fired rush to jettison out the nearest airlock. Clearly Feminism rustles the jimmies of somebody who currently holds power in Indigenous communities in a way nothing else does. So much for all the crap online about how the Haudenausee were doing Feminism so much better before the white man came and so don’t need it....cause they’re sure as fuck not doing it now. Well, we can just add them to the ever-growing list of religions/philosophies that have sold me a bad bill of goods on that account. 

But it’s also now lied to me about valuing personal choice in spirituality and non-interference in other peoples lives... posing a religious ceremony as a public nature walk and then foisting your religious rules and gender roles on unsuspecting potential participants at the last moment does NOT, in my book, constitute respecting personal choices or non-interference. It smacks of the sneakiness, manipulativeness and coercion I have sadly come to expect from religion, most notably from so-called “liberal” religions. At least when I studied with the ultra-Orthodox they were totally upfront about who they were...and ALSO told me that they didn’t expect me to follow all their rules about tzniut (modesty), just to be generally respectful and modest. Because I was a respectful adult who was CHOOSING to study with them, I did my best to fit in. They didn’t surprise me or blindside me, nor did they put me in awkward situations, because it is a mitzvah not to embarrass anyone publicly, or put them in a situation where it’s likely to happen (putting a stumblingblock before them). Ditto for when I decided to go to Jumaah prayers at a local mosque to show support for them in the wake of someone trying to burn it down earlier in the week. I educated myself on the protocols and upheld them when I entered THEIR personal prayer space.

At that is the issue here. Indigenous women don’t need me to rescue them, they seem to be doing a fine job of speaking up on their own within their culture, and even if they weren’t, and were all totally great with the status quo, the issue is that I wasn’t given the heads up from go about the situation. And I most certainly don’t have to tolerate THAT, or listen to idiot liberals who are effectively anti-feminist and anti-woman tell me I need to be tolerant of it. If you want to have a  Native ceremony, then go have a Native ceremony, just don’t hide what it really is and invite boatloads of non-Native people to it on Facebook and then suddenly spring your religious rules on them knowing full-well that some non-Natives will find being asked to follow them awkward or offensive to their strongly held beliefs. I’d be right pissed off as a Jew (bad Jew that I currently am) if I were invited to a dinner party and accepted only to be told the day before that I was expected to be “respectful” and recite the Lord’s Prayer or a Christian Grace over  a ham supper with everyone. I’d be even more livid if other Jews were telling me I needed to be more “tolerant” about this sort of thing and not be disrespectful or Christophobic. I wasn’t CHOOSING to come to an Indigenous religious ritual that day, I was choosing to go on what was presented to me as a hike at which all were welcome. Very different situations.

Currently in our society we’re rushing to accomodate the rights of those with XY chromosomes to take up the social role and clothing of women, even as our society is still literally FORCING and COERCING people with XX chromosomes to injure their feet, legs and backs with high heels and to participate in torturing small animals like rabbits and beagles by wearing make-up (or spend even more outrageous sums purchasing make-up not tested on animals), which are frankly among the least of the indignities foisted on women. People are bending over backwards to give “choice” and “respect” to one group while ignoring, downplaying and minimizing the way choice and respect are being denied to others. Even people who are devout or convert to Christianity (today) generally understand why people who were forcibly converted in days of yore might have been less than enthusiastic about it. 

The little things they always hang around The little things they try to break me down The little things they just won't go away The little things made me who I am today -Good Charlotte, “Little Things”

Men get their own share of shit foisted on them which they shouldn’t get, and there are certainly worse things to have going on in one’s day than the first world problems of the right to wear appropriate hiking attire (as I well know since many of them have happened to me personally), but it would be right fucking nice if from time to time a woman is allowed a rant about the things which plague her without being handed a laundry list of other people/groups’s troubles that require her to sit down, shut up, and put others first as she was so carefully socialized to do. Sometimes, as Good Charlotte sang, it is the neverending parade of “little things”, of living “inside a system of humiliation from which there is no escape” that break you down and make you who you are, more so than the much rarer traumatic things, which are a good deal less rare than one might wish. After 50 years it’s like Chinese Water Torture, every drop is small but eventually the constant drumming on the nerves becomes intolerable.

This is the “tyranny of tolerance” under which women are raised from the day they draw breath and someone “assigns” them to the female gender....as ridiculous a phrase as I have ever been forced to endure. I don’t “identify as female” any more than I walk around “identifying” as brown-eyed, or “identifying” as 168 cm tall. I was not “assigned” to being female at random in some sort of perinatal gender lottery. I have two X chromosomes and my vulva developed normally, as a result my sex was OBSERVED and correctly noted at my birth. What I was assigned to was a gender ROLE.

But as others before me have pointed out, if women’s gender ROLES were identical to the natural gender expressions of women, why do so many societies have to spend so much time and energy violently enforcing them? Or guilting and coercing women into them. I had a dog years ago. I never had to train him to be a dog and do naturally doggish things. What I DID have to spend time training him to do was things that are NOT natural for dogs to do....walk on a leash, sit and stay on command, don’t growl at me when I sit on the couch beside you because that’s shared territory and if you want to be alone you have a crate with a mattress that’s more bloody plush than mine so go lie there. If it were natural for women to smile constantly like Walmart greeters or people who’ve dropped acid, random men would not need to keep exhorting them to do so.

 But we have to tolerate everyone else’s idiocy with a smile, or random male idiots will, indeed, walk up to us unbidden and instruct us to smile like it’s any of their business what our faces are doing. Boys snapping your bra straps? Boys will be boys, you have to tolerate them. People judging your housekeeping skills but not those of the other grown-ass adult living in the house who doesn’t lift a finger but brings home every interesting random bit of junk he finds and fills the house to bursting with it? Gotta tolerate that. Idiot married Boomer men thinking it’s cute and flirty to pat a 35 year old women’s head so that the brim of her hat shoves her glasses down into her nose and bruises it? Same idiot Boomer leering and making sexual comments at a 12 year old girl? Oh, he’s harmless, gotta tolerate that. Leftist men who sexually harass or rape women? But he does good work and would suffer so in jail because he’s a POC/bisexual/pacifist whatever so gotta tolerate that. Have to smile. Have to be nice ALL THE FUCKING TIME. Even if it fucking kills you...or just makes you go ass over tip off a trail and into a large body of water in 10 degree autumn weather in front of total strangers.

By the time you get to my age your cup runneth over with all the bullshit you’ve had to tolerate and you start to tell people to go boldly back up their own asses and fuck themselves. Which is one of the reasons society loves to take continual potshots at women of a “certain age”. Oh, it’s “the menopause” making them cranky, smirk smirk...so no need to take them seriously of anything. Jeez what a “Karen” complaining and asking for the manager. (I worked in retail, middle-aged women have nothing...NOTHING....on middle aged men when it comes to complaining, arguing and asking for managers. In fact that seems to be the crux of the problem, that middle age women are behaving less like reticent and “nice” young women and more like....GASP...men!) Given that the women in my family go into it very late, and I haven’t even hit perimenopause yet at nearly 50, I’m pretty sure my complaints are purely bullshit-related, not endocrine. But even regarding women who do have a little hormanal testiness, if the hormones were the cause then middle-aged women should be losing control across the board....road rage incidents over bad driving by others, smacking their grandchildren over misbehaviour, frothing at the mouth over the long covid lineups at the Service Canada kiosk, Yet by and large 50ish women are not randomly lashing out over every annoyance. What they are specifically annoyed about is being treated disrespectfully. At best the hormones are giving added oomph to the well of silent seething women keep a lid on for decades.

So, what do I want as a woman, anyway?

I want the same rights men have. Simple everyday rights.

I want the right to choose clothing that is physically and psychologically “safe”. I want the unquestioned right to wear clothing that is appropriate to the activity I am to engage in. I want the right to not have my clothing uniquely policed in a way men’s is not. I want not to be blindsided by religious events masquerading as public events for everyone that suddenly demand I change my wardrobe to fit their morality.

And I want to be able to claim those rights AS A WOMAN WHO DESERVES SAFE, PRACTICAL, APPROPRIATE CLOTHING SIMPLY BECAUSE SHE IS A HUMAN FUCKING BEING.

 I don’t want to be put into the position of having to “identify as male” to enjoy those simple rights. 

I don’t want to be put in a position to be judged as religiously disrespectful or racist, or a “NOT NICE” bitch, simply because I don’t want to go arse over teakettle into the freezing waters of the Bay. Nor should I have to come, hat in hand, to organizers of an event pleading that I have been raped and am sometimes uncomfortable in a skirt, or having to detail my health concerns with people, unless I damn well choose to reveal those aspects of my personal life. Now I happen to be relatively free with that info but that is not the point. That’s MY CHOICE to be free with it, or not, as I please. And ALL women, including those who are shy or private, should have that choice.

Not ONE SINGLE man was impacted by the instructions given regarding “religious respect” (In fact they simply weren’t addressed at all), or put in a position of having to come “explain’ why they can’t or won’t comply by revealing details of their personal lives like a child explaining to a teacher why their homework isn’t completed. Not one man was put in that humiliating, infantilizing, and dehumanizing position. Why is it too much to fucking ask that I have the same right to respect and privacy, and the right to simply exist without constant unnecessary scrutiny of my body?

The Left today and Libfeminism have nothing to offer me here except to tell me to be “tolerant” of being treated like crap, endlessly policed, and put in no-win situations day in and out. That’s why I don’t need Feminism. I suspect I need Radical Feminism. And it’s surprising new allies in centrist, libertarian and moderately conservative men don’t hurt either....because NO, I DON’T hate men. I hate the system that needlessly deprives me of enjoying the same rights as men due to Bronze Age superstitions. And I hate a Left and “intersectional” Libfeminism that continues to apologize for that system whenever it happens to be a person who isn’t a White Christian European enforcing their superstitions and morality on me...but who, when I wore long skirts voluntarily, attacked me constantly, accusing of me of doing my part to bring about the downfall of western civilization as we know it...(eyes roll) as if I’ve never heard that kind of hysterical “women will destroy everything with their poor clothing choices” rhetoric from the religious Right. So it’s ok to wear skirts when somebody “Brown” forces or coerces me, but it’s not ok when I choose to. When you get around to making up your fucking minds and having a consistent belief structure, don’t call me. I have no more patience for your bullshit. 

[vox]

Why feminism didn't lose in 2016

Donald Trump’s presidential election victory, and Hillary Clinton’s loss, was a devastating blow to feminism. America had a choice between its first woman president and an alleged sexual predator; between “women’s rights are human rights” and “grab ’em by the pussy”; between telling our daughters they can do anything they want, and telling them that anything can be done to them by powerful, entitled men.

We know which option America chose. We also know it would have chosen differently if “one person, one vote” were anything but a cruel joke under our Electoral College system — but that’s beside the point now.

“However freakishly contingent [Trump’s] triumph, it forecloses the future feminists imagined at least for a long while,” Michelle Goldberg argues at Slate. “We’re going be blown backward so far that this irredeemably shitty year may someday look like a lost feminist golden age.” 2016, Goldberg writes, might go down as “the year the feminist bubble burst.”

In some ways, it’s hard to argue with her conclusion. Federal policy on women’s issues is likely to become a train wreck over the next four years — from Congress defunding family planning services, to civil rights enforcers shrugging at rape on college campuses, to labor agencies dismantling the few protections there are against gender-based discrimination in the workplace.

It’s also a massive blow to morale, Goldberg argues, when an obviously qualified woman loses the presidency to such an obviously less-qualified man — a blow that “can’t help but reverberate through the culture, changing our sense of what is possible for women.” Goldberg says her nightmare scenario is a new anti-feminist backlash of the kind we haven’t seen since the Reagan years. She fears the dawn of an era in which men who have been “stewing about political correctness” can start mistreating women with even more impunity.

Part of me shares those fears. Backlashes to social progress are real, and they happen with depressing regularity. But, honestly? I have a hard time seeing this particular nightmare — men feeling any more entitled to women’s bodies than normal, or feminism being any more credibly blamed for all of women’s problems than normal — coming to pass.

Yes, feminist hopes have been dashed — but feminist efforts haven’t failed. The only “bubble” that’s been popped is the one that had some people convinced misogyny was already over, or at least well on its way out the door.

There were some deeply painful losses in the ongoing battle for women’s rights and equality this year. There’s no way around that. But Trump’s victory didn’t vanquish feminism. It just clarified the challenges that feminism is really up against — even now, still, in America in 2016. And the important part is this: 2016 proved that feminism is up to the challenge. And it’s steadily winning battles in a very, very long war against something even bigger than Trumpism.

2016 was still a year of reckoning for men who act with sexual impunity

2016 did, sadly and predictably, keep up humanity’s thousands-year trend of men committing sexual violence against women or otherwise behaving badly. Jezebel has a whole list of “Men Who Got Away With It in 2016,” where “it” ranges from criminal mischief to domestic violence to genocide, and where the men in question are all famous and still basically doing just fine for themselves.

But some of them didn’t get away with it, at least not entirely. And the reasons for that are reasons for feminists to be optimistic. It’s getting a little easier for victims of sexual violence to come forward, it seems, and it’s getting a little harder for perpetrators to escape consequences.

Former Fox News CEO Roger Ailes became “former,” not to mention “disgraced,” thanks to the determined efforts of Gretchen Carlson — the former Fox anchor who sued Ailes for sexual harassment, secretly taped his advances (which Ailes still denies making) for a year, and inspired numerous other women to go public about similar experiences with him.

There were limits to this feminist victory. Carlson may have gotten a $20 million settlement and an apology from Fox, but Ailes got a $40 million golden parachute. Carlson faced public skepticism from her colleagues and attacks on her character, like so many women who go public about sexual misconduct. And how are ordinary women with ordinary support networks supposed to feel about coming forward when even a popular TV personality like Carlson is only vindicated after a year of dedicated groundwork, and only after an even more famous colleague (Megyn Kelly) also comes forward to back her up? (We may have a gender wage gap of 80 or so cents on the dollar — but when it comes to public perceptions of sexual violence, we’ll be lucky when a woman’s word is worth 80 percent of a man’s.)

Nonetheless, Ailes was one of the most powerful men in media. He made Fox News what it is today. It was never, ever a foregone conclusion that he could be taken down at all by something like this, much less that he’d lose his job over it.

Other high-profile cases of sexual misconduct in 2016 came with similarly mixed, but still powerful, feminist victories. Bill Cosby’s accusers were ignored for years until a malecomedian said something in 2014 — but in 2016 Cosby faced criminal charges (which he may or may not be convicted of, but there’s damning evidence against him), and his reputation is in the toilet. Former Stanford student and convicted rapist Brock Turner only served three months of his six-month jail sentence — but after his victim’s eloquent plea for justice went viral, his light sentence became a national scandal.

As for Donald Trump, well, he won the election. But while many voters were able to overlook his blatant misogyny, that doesn’t mean they liked or approved of it. The Access Hollywood tapes, and the many women who came forward after that to accuse Trump of sexual assault, dealt a huge blow to his campaign — one that only the last-minute chaos of FBI Director James Comey’s letter about Hillary Clinton’s emails could really help him recover from.

All of these major stories have one thing in common: women’s voices, amplifying and being amplified by other women’s voices. One woman speaking out, inspiring a dozen others to follow suit because they know they’re not alone. One woman speaking out, and changing the story we tell about a powerful man — in public, instead of the usual whispered warning to other women behind closed doors, or the usual ashamed silence.

More women are speaking out, and more people are listening to them. This is a new normal that can’t easily be reversed.

Perhaps more than ever, 2016 was the year of women both speaking out and being heard. This doesn’t seem like too much to ask for, but it’s also not something we can take for granted.

In just the past decade or so, feminism has become mainstream, culturally hip, and politically savvy. Beyoncé, for instance, has made feminism both appealing (think the FEMINIST sign at the 2014 Video Music Awards) and challenging (think the proud black feminism of her 2016 album Lemonade) to mainstream audiences.

In 2016, women’s magazines like Cosmopolitan and Glamour ran election stories that any other outlet would consider major scoops. And some people on the internet seemedshocked — shocked! — that Teen Vogue would feature hard-hitting coverage of the 2016 election and not just beauty tips.

But none of this is surprising, as Sady Doyle explained for Quartz: The rise of feminist blogs during the George W. Bush years ended up “training an army of female journalists and editors” who now write for major outlets like the New York Times, or who have found their home at successful new digital publications. Even though it still gets dismissed and made fun of, feminist news coverage has gone mainstream.

No wonder then, perhaps, that decades of rape allegations against Bill Cosby didn’t even begin to catch up with him until late 2014, or that this year featured a broader cultural reckoning on sexual assault, or that Hillary Clinton decided to vocally embrace her gender and feminist values in 2016 after having done the opposite in 2008.

Social media has also given women huge platforms and communities to discuss problems they might otherwise have stayed silent about — or that they may never have found the words for until someone gave it a name.

When Trump’s “pussy” tape inspired author Kelly Oxford to tweet about her first sexual assault, and encourage other women to do the same, she was inundated with responses at the rate of at least one per second for at least the next day. And when I wrote about her tweets, women I know started telling me about experiences they’d kept to themselves for years.

There are many reasons — stigma, shame, trauma, and so on — why women might not talk openly about assault, even though it’s so common. But we’ve also been raised to expect that this kind of thing happens all the time. That it’s no big deal if a guy casually gropes you at a bar, or that it’s flattering if he gives you a kiss you weren’t expecting. That the sick, hollow feeling you might get about it afterward is your problem.

If you get enough women in a room to talk about this, though, they might start realizing they all have the same “problem.” They might give that problem a name, like “sexual assault,” and decide there’s no good reason to put up with it anymore.

They might even start naming and stop tolerating some of “the small indignities that make even the most privileged female lives taxing,” as Goldberg put it — like “mansplaining” (a man condescending to a woman on a subject she knows better than he does) or “manspreading” (when men take up too much space on a subway, e.g., and crowd others out).

Can this get a little ridiculous or trivial? Perhaps. Then again, it’s not like sexism saves itself for the really weighty, serious issues. Sometimes misogyny is actually so ridiculous, so absurd, that the only sensible response is blowing raspberries and laughing in its face. Lord knows we’re all going to need a little levity under Trump.

Systemic sexism depends on silence — people who will look the other way, or who will shut up those loud women who don’t have the courtesy to shut themselves up. But once silences are broken as widely and deeply as they have been for women this year, this decade, it’s very hard to put all of that back in the bottle.

In 2016, loud women fought off an extreme abortion ban in Poland, led a fierce fight against the Dakota Access Pipeline, and smacked down the idea that women should ever be embarrassed about their periods. Loud women planned a massive March on Washingtonfor the day after Trump’s inauguration that could be the largest-ever mobilization of its kind.

Women just aren’t shutting up, and it’s hard to see why they would start now.

The near future of feminism will be local and decentralized. That doesn’t mean it won’t be effective.

It’s important to remember that women still made historic national electoral gains despite Hillary Clinton’s loss; the number of women of color in the Senate is about to quadruple, from one to four. Plus, the symbolic milestone of Clinton’s campaign — the first woman presidential nominee of a major party, who won the popular vote by about 3 million votes — really does matter despite her loss, and is in some ways a feminist triumph.

Of course, a majority-Republican Congress and a Trump-Pence administration don’t bode well for advancing women’s health or rights at the federal level. But there’s tremendous opportunity and energy for progressives and feminists to make some serious gains at the state and local level in the meantime — which also happens to be a much better long-term organizing strategy than obsessing over presidential politics.

2016 was the best year yet in a promising fight to pass paid sick and family leave at the state and local level. The United States is the only developed country that doesn’t have national paid maternity leave, and the momentum to change that — at least locally, as long as Congress does nothing — is strong. Three states, one county, and 10 cities passed laws in 2016 that require workers to be able to earn paid sick days, and New York State and Washington, DC, both passed very generous family leave insurance programs.

And amazingly, reproductive rights may actually be on the upswing — in spite of everything, including a promise from Trump to appoint “pro-life” Supreme Court justices who could overturn Roe v. Wade.

The Supreme Court’s decision this summer to overturn two Texas abortion laws was a sweeping pro-choice game-changer; it’s already been used to strike down abortion restrictions in other states, and more court victories will probably follow in the near future. That decision also makes it much less likely that the Court would overturn Roe v. Wade in the near future — at least not unless and until Trump gets to appoint two or three new conservative justices.

Collectively, states also proposed about 300 bills that would expand, rather than restrict, women’s health and rights, including better access to contraception and better maternal health care. It’s a promising avenue to shore up women’s health at a time when comprehensive coverage under the Affordable Care Act could be in jeopardy.

There’s also at least one interesting, and very promising, state and local side effect of Hillary Clinton’s loss: She is reportedly inspiring a massive surge of interest among women in running for local political office. Driven by shock, fear, and anger over Trump’s win, many women say they want to be the change they want to see in government.

That’s incredibly important: Research shows that women’s political ambition, or lack thereof, is one of the biggest hurdles to getting more women in political office and working toward equal representation in government. Some women are qualified and driven, but have just literally never considered running for office as a serious possibility. Others feel intimidated by fears of sexism on the campaign trail, or don’t feel supported by their political establishment.

Either way, there’s a lack of qualified women in the pipeline to advance in political office. And if more women run and win, especially at the state and local level, they will not only set themselves up for more powerful offices later — they’ll also change how their government works.

With someone like Trump in office, it’s much harder to argue that sexism is a thing of the past. That’s a good thing.

It’s tempting to think of these developments as the start of a sea change — the last stand of the “good old boys” who used their power to abuse women with impunity and trust that everybody else would look the other way, for instance. But we shouldn’t start writing rape culture’s obituary just yet.

Younger generations may be more liberal than older ones in general, but research suggeststhat they’re not necessarily more progressive on issues related to gender equality and sexism. While there’s been some progress on these issues, the sexism that remains can actually be more dangerous — because people will be less prepared to believe it really exists, and thus less equipped to deal with it.

In a 2013 Pew survey of Americans, for instance, millennial men were the most likely demographic group to say that all necessary changes have already been made to bring about gender equality in the workplace. That’s nuts: Women face workplace discrimination in almost every imaginable way, from the very real gender wage gap, to pregnancy and parenting discrimination, to unequal representation in leadership, to America’s complete lack of any national paid maternity or family leave.

But complacency in the face of all of that could be tougher when your president is the kind of guy who thinks his own daughter should just change jobs if she were ever sexually harassed at work.

I think of the status quo on sexism, racism, and other forms of bigotry as like living in a town built on top of a toxic waste dump. The barrels aren’t as well-sealed or deeply buried as people think, and your kids are still getting sick, and still only certain kinds of crops will actually grow in that soil. But city officials insist everything’s fine — and really you should count your blessings, because in the next town over everybody has to wear gas masks.

But then one day, Hurricane Donald comes along. It roars through and rips up the grass and soil, and all the barrels bob to the surface and ooze toxic black goo everywhere, the stuff you thought and hoped was long buried.

It’s a much bigger and more obvious mess, and nobody’s happy. But at least nobody’s fooling themselves anymore, and you know just how much hard cleanup work is still ahead.