womanstudiesforwomen

[womanstudiesforwomen]

These cookies may have been used for ritual purposes

[womanstudiesforwomen]

internally noting that women are more likely to be better at budgeting than men because of the insane pay gap, the insane standards (look good, makeup, clothes, shaving, just really crazy grooming) and period products that all have to somehow fit together

it's a genuine observation around me, my male relatives are more likely to spend a lot and then go broke (and spend more) than my female relatives

[womanstudiesforwomen]

Being a successful Cool Girl is a surefire gateway to absolutely hating men. Wannabe Cool Girls, the women and girls who keep trying to be the Cool Girl but don’t quite get there, don’t realize that the Cool Girl endgame is men genuinely assuming that you’ll be down with misogyny and letting you see things that will traumatize you forever. I was a good Cool Girl for a very brief period, and it’s absolutely what radicalized me. I wish every woman knew the shit that men said to me and in front of me about them. I tried to find all the girls I had names for online to tell them the truth, and I still feel guilty, 6 years later, about the ones I couldn’t locate.

A guy proudly sent me dozens of different nudes that he was secretly screenshotting from Snapchat with some sketchy app. “How is a fat girl like a bicycle? It’s fun to ride until your friends see.” Did you know that nearly every man uses some degree of incel terminology to talk about women? “Bros before hoes” isn’t a joke - men have the strongest class solidarity I’ve ever seen in my fucking life; a man will defend another man that he hates, another man that he’s never even met, over pretty much any woman. Most men genuinely believe that women think totally differently than they do, that women are confusing liars and that’s why relationships don’t work out. Your “feminist ally” male friends and coworkers are calling you a feminazi cunt while they drink beer, and it means nothing to them. Men discuss porn like they’re phD art historians analyzing the design of a Renuar.

Most importantly, the very, very few men who aren’t like this, who didn’t actually say sexist things or talk shit about women - they never stood up to the other men. Ever. When men are alone with their bros and the Cool Girls, the “good men” still don’t say a fucking word in defense of women. If you’re the Cool Girl and you say something, you’re immediately excommunicated forever, and the “good man” texts you later to say he agreed and he’s sorry, but he doesn’t stand up for you. He knew the whole time that the moment you opened your mouth all the other men would add you to the hatable female category, and he’s not gonna risk it happening to him. And guess what? Even before you say anything, even when you’re still the Cool Girl, the guys are talking about you the same way they talk about other women when you’re not around. I heard them do it to the other Cool Girls.

[womanstudiesforwomen]

Being and Being Bought by Kajsa Ekis Ekman

[womanstudiesforwomen]

What are some of your favourite acts of micro feminism ?

[womanstudiesforwomen]

“I like to show women who exist in solitude but do not suffer. They are not depressed or crying. Rather [they] are safe, exalting in the sense of enjoying the company of just herself.”

Postmodern Loneliness is a series by Mexico-based artist Idalia Candelas.

[womanstudiesforwomen]

my feminist brain cannot shut up while i’m playing a horror game or watching a horror movie bc im wondering why women are always the target and why is it so fun to have them naked or in little clothing before their gruesome deaths…. cuz let’s talk about it…….really

[womanstudiesforwomen]

From The Female Man by Joanna Russ (1975).

[womanstudiesforwomen]

daughter guilt is so real. one moment i'm laughing with my friends, the next i'm thinking about my mom who's home alone and wants to laugh with someone too

[womanstudiesforwomen]

"Not every woman has a scary story about men."

I have yet to meet one that doesn't.

[womanstudiesforwomen]

I’m gonna depress the hell out of all of you. ready? ok go

so, that “stop devaluing feminized work post”

nice idea and all

but the thing is, as soon as a decent number of women enter any field, it becomes “feminized,” and it becomes devalued.

as women enter a field in greater number, people become less willing to pay for it, the respect for it drops, and it’s seen as less of a big deal. it’s not about the job- it’s about the number of women in the job.

observe what happened with biology. it’s STEM, sure, but anyone in a male-dominated science will sneer at the idea of it being ‘for real,’ nevermind that everyone sure took it more seriously when it was a male dominated field. so has happened with scores of other areas; nursing comes to mind

so the thing is, it’s not the work or the job that has to be uplifted and seen as more respectable. it will never work out, until people start seeing women as respectable

but there’s a doozy and who the fuck knows if it’s ever happening in my life time

[womanstudiesforwomen]

No matter how much of a feminist ally you think your boyfriend is, always remember that he would have no problem with women's treatment in society if you weren't there holding him accountable. If women didn't have the freedom to express their disdain for patriarchy and the way it hurts us, he would go about his life happy as a clam, completely unbothered by women's place in society.

I've never met a man that came to feminist conclusions on his own. They don't see any problem with objectification. For fucks sake with my every boyfriend I've had in the past, I had to break it down for them why sexualizing teen girls is wrong. They dont have an internal moral compass when it comes to the mistreatment of women. That should tell you everything you need to know about men. You should never ever forget that men only clean up their act when there are consequences for refusing to.

[womanstudiesforwomen]

Prostitution, Trafficking, and the Global Sex Industry, by Janice Raymond

[womanstudiesforwomen]

The English words related to tool follow the patriarchal dichotomy of sex-based task assignment: the inside of a house, the female realm, and the outside, male sphere of activity. Housework, tasks performed inside a house, are "women's work," while tasks performed outside are "men's work." This division of labor is meaningful to English speakers even though they may not be conscious of its existence. Men use tools, instruments (with the exception of a few musical instruments), implements, machines, and gizmos outside. Women use utensils, appliances, and gadgets inside. In English, we speak of kitchen utensils, kitchen appliances, and kitchen gadgets—used by women, they are not considered tools. A search of the tools listed in Roget's International Thesaurus (1977) reveals only a few items stereotypically used by women (tweezers, nail file, bread knife, scissors), but numerous names for equipment reserved to the male sphere specifying types of drill, clutch, saw, plane, hammer, and wrench. Recently, though, KitchenAid has begun to advertise one of its mixers as a POWER TOOL, a tactic that blurs the boundary between the two experiential domains. Its actual effect, however, reenforces the barrier. Because women are leaving their interior domain for the male domain of "real" work, the ad imports the [+ male] phrase, power tool, and applies it to the equipment women use in a kitchen. Nothing has to change but the label applied to the objects women use; our "domain" remains the kitchen.

Man, the anthropologists tell us, distinguishes himself from other animals by his use of tools. Any object restricted to male use and ownership is a "tool," whether it's language, a hammer, or a penis. Men speak of their penises as tools, and describe their activity in heterosexual intercourse as "screwing," "nailing," "banging," "reaming," "drilling," and "hammering." So intense is the male obsession with their "tools" and females as containers or holes they penetrate that any two objects suggestive of that description, for example, electrical outlets and plugs, nuts and bolts, will have the metaphor imposed upon them. The essential distinction of PUD [Patriarchal Universe of Discourse] is the one which identifies the FUCKER and the FUCKEE.

-Julia Penelope, Speaking Freely: Unlearning the Lies of the Fathers’ Tongues

[womanstudiesforwomen]

Sometimes I think about this woman I knew when we were both around 19. I can't remember her ever taking a guy seriously even once. She surrounded herself entirely with female friends, and when a man would address her she'd get this bemused look on her face and say something snarky, and then turn her attention back to her friends. She used to come up with hilarious nicknames for all the guys who interacted with us, and that's all she referred to them as in our private conversations. I have no idea if she was a lesbian or just wasn't interested in men, but she clearly understood that they were totally absurd creatures who were unworthy of her time and only there to poke fun at.

I always wonder where she is now and I hope she kept that same energy throughout her life.

[womanstudiesforwomen]

Having men in your life feels exactly like being one of those people who has a dangerous exotic animal as a pet. You may marvel for years at how unusually sociable and well-behaved and cuddly your tiger is, but one day out of nowhere the tiger is going to shock you with something really horrific

[womanstudiesforwomen]

Reducing women to objects in pornography is a precondition to make the violence they endure look acceptable. When women stop being people, acts of violence against them stop being harmful, as objects cannot be harmed. The legitimation of VAW in pornography is also supported by two latent assumptions. First is the idea that pornography is a “distortion, reflection, projection, expression, fantasy, representation or symbol” (MacKinnon, 1984, p. 326) of reality and, therefore, not real. Yet, “fantasy expresses ideology” (MacKinnon, 1984, p. 327); it expresses the reality of the subordination of women entrenched in the way we understand sex, in and out of pornography. In fact, the second assumption that legitimizes VAW in pornography– that is, that “women enjoy sexual mistreatment” (Dines, 2010, p. 64), consent to their own humiliation, and never say “no” to degrading acts– shows how eroticization and women’s subordination are strictly connected, with the latter becoming “socially real” through its enactment in pornography (MacKinnon, 1984, p. 327). The illusion of consent covers the sexist nature of these acts and allows the refusal of sex not only to become indistinguishable from the desire of sex, but also normalized and eroticized. In pornography, even women’s “no” is part of the fantasy, and force is no longer seen as force “because it is inflicted on women and called sex” (MacKinnon, 1984, pp. 340–343). Under this pretense, almost everything becomes justifiable, including degrading and violent acts such as shoving a woman’s head down the toilet, gagging her, or making her ingest her own vomit. While women become powerless in pornography—as willing actors who ask to be acted upon—men become powerful and always obtain as much sex as they want, how they want it. For a short time, men “get to see what life would look like if only women unquestionably consented to men’s sexual demands” (Dines, 2010, p. 63).

— “I Don’t Hate All Women, Just Those Stuck-Up Bitches”: How Incels and Mainstream Pornography Speak the Same Extreme Language of Misogyny (Alessia Tranchese and Lisa Sugiura)