womanstudiesforwomen

[womanstudiesforwomen]

It's not progressive to say "women are oppressed so they should be brutalized in films for the sake of realism". Hate to break it to you, but most men are sadistic towards women, not empathetic. The male film director who recycles the violent pornography he’s consumed isn’t challenging anything. He's only desensitizing an entire audience to cruelty against women.

[womanstudiesforwomen]

To the people claiming there were no signs of who Neil Gaiman really was, I have to ask, what would have been one? If writing an essay in defense of child pornography isn't a huge red flag, what is? If writing about young girls happily marrying adult men (Stardust), and adult men fantasizing about kissing young girls (Neverwhere), and young girls being demons who seduce and rape adult men, which is graphically described (Snow, Glass, Apples) doesn't make you even a little suspicious of the author, what would?

Like, you can say you didn't see the signs! That's fine! There are always signs that get missed! If none of them did, no predator would ever get a chance to victimize. And it doesn't make you a bad person to have missed them!

But the number of people insisting there were no signs with Gaiman and that everybody pointing out his depictions of women and girls now are doing so disingenuously is sending me. I think there other men who depict women and girls in similar ways and you don't want to be suspicious of them now, so you're ignoring it when this should be a wake up. Genuinely missing the signs doesn't necessarily say anything bad about you as a person, but wilfully ignoring them does.

[womanstudiesforwomen]

“In the secular world, women are also credited with having a sense of good that is intrinsically female, a sense of good that men do not have. This is a frequent feature of contemporary environ mentalist or antimilitarist movements. Women are seen to have an inborn commitment to both clean air and peace, a moral nature that abhors pollution and murder. Being good or moral is viewed as a particular biological capacity of women and as a result women are the natural guardians of morality: a moral vanguard as it were. Organizers use this appeal to women all the time. Motherhood is especially invoked as biological proof that women have a special relationship to life, a special sensitivity to its meaning, a special, intuitive knowledge of what is right. Any political group can appropriate the special moral sensibility of women to its own ends: most groups do, usually in place of offering substantive relief to women with respect to sexism in the group itself. Women all along the male-defined political spectrum give special credence to this view of a female biological nature that is morally good. However this premise about a biologically based morality is used, the woman-superior model of antifeminism is operating to keep women down, not up, in the crude world of actual human interchange. To stay worshiped, the woman must stay a symbol and she must stay good. She cannot become merely a human in the muck of life, morally flawed and morally struggling, committing acts that have complex, difficult, unpredictable consequences. She must not walk the same streets men do or do the same things or have the same responsibilities. Precisely because she is good, she is unfit to do the same things, unfit to make the same decisions, unfit to resolve the same dilemmas, unfit to undertake the same responsibilities, unfit to exercise the same rights.”

— Andrea Dworkin, Right-Wing Women

[womanstudiesforwomen]

My mother is regularly torn between being herself and being my mother.

The Seas by Samantha Hunt

[womanstudiesforwomen]

We talk a lot about how it’s homophobic to tell lesbians that they need to be open to dating males.

But by focusing on on how harmful this is to lesbians, we leave bisexuals behind.

Many trans people have an attitude of “If lesbians/gay men don’t want me, at least bisexuals do.” And that’s just not true, and not fair to bisexuals. It leads to a culture of expecting bisexual women to be okay with any configuration of biological sex, hormonal status, and body parts.

Bisexuals are therefore framed as a group of women who are supposed to be available as a potential partner for anyone who wants them.

So it’s not just homophobic, it’s part of rape culture. Because it aims to teach (mostly) women that they’re not allowed to form their own feelings about their sexuality and their attraction. It teaches women that their sexuality isn’t for them. Their sexuality is a political statement, and there is a right and wrong statement to make.

The fact of the matter is that no one has to date someone they’re not attracted to. No one has to try to develop attraction for someone they’re not innately interested in. No one has to “examine their preferences” when it comes to who they want in their bed. This includes bisexuals.

Yes, women standing up for ourselves does lead to a lot of lonely mtfs who can’t get dates. No, that is not women’s problem.

This affects all of us, but it affects bisexuals in a unique way that’s worth talking more about.

[womanstudiesforwomen]

Sex ed from a douyin account

English added by me :)

[womanstudiesforwomen]

This was an interesting read. Surprisingly nonpreachy given the subject; and well worth the time.

[womanstudiesforwomen]

One turning point in my feminism journey was learning the truth about the adoption industry in the United States, and how many layers of propaganda we're exposed to.

Layer One - "Adoption is beautiful! So many babies need homes!"

Most people figure out that this one is false - that there aren't thousands of babies completely free for adoption, and that adoption is rarely an uncomplicated, beautiful thing. But then we get to:

Layer Two - "Adoption is wonderful but challenging! Thanks to birth control and abortion, there are fewer babies available for adoption than there used to be, but many children and teenagers still need loving homes! And there's always international adoption!"

This is where most people get stuck. On the surface, it makes sense. It matches the "facts" we think we know about the birthrate in the United States, and it acknowledges that adoption takes work and effort from the adoptive parents. But this is still a lie. Those stories about how easy adoption was in the 1950s? Those babies were stolen. International adoption in the 1980s, 1990s, 2000s? Those babies were trafficked. Mothers who carry unwanted pregnancies to term typically do not voluntarily give those infants away - but they can be coerced, tricked, and pressured into doing so by relatives, societal convention, and economic need. Paperwork was forged, mothers were lied to about "open adoptions", and in an international context, the entire premise of adoption was misrepresented in some cases as temporary, while adoption brokers profited financially from these abuses of power.

Layer Three: "Okay, so there aren't that many children available for adoption. But you can adopt from foster care if you're patient!"

So, you're rooting for children to be permanently separated from their parents for your benefit? And you think you can be an ethical parental figure while rooting for something that will cause them measurable trauma and harm? You feel like you have the right to be a parent? The needs of a child who has been separated from their parents are distinct from the needs of a child without that type of trauma - you say you're trauma-informed, but are you really? Can you accept a permanent power imbalance between yourself and your adopted child? Can you adjust the structure of your life to accommodate those complex needs?

I'm not unsympathetic to people struggling with infertility, I'm really not. But they've been sold a set of lies about adoption and foster care, and the mythology of both is so dense that in most spaces where "prospective adoptive parents" gather, you aren't allowed to even discuss this reality. There are dozens of posts a day in these online spaces from "prospective parents" -

"Just got my homestudy completed in [State]? How long did you wait before getting your first placement?"

"In [State] looking to adopt, don’t know how to get started …"

"Delete if not allowed, I need to vent and I feel like this group will understand the most. My husband and I are completely heartbroken right now. We've decided to end our adoption process and close out our application. We've been trying to do a state adoption here in [State] for the past 2 and half years. We chose state adoption because private adoption/adoption agencies are unaffordable for us. We did absolutely everything DFPS has asked, I mean everything. After all this time we still haven't heard an approval or denial. They always told us we just need to redo certain things (classes, inspections etc.) because things would lapse/expire due to them sitting on our application. We never even got to the approval or denial part of it. Today they informed us that a new agency will be taking over DFPS here where we live, and when that happens we'll have to start from scratch. Two and a half years down the drain. We decided to stop trying to adopt altogether, it's taken too much of an emotional toll on us. I'm just really lost right now."

Those are all real posts.

No one is willing to tell these people the truth. There aren't freely available babies, or even children, for adoption.

There were stolen babies, decades ago.

There are traumatized children now, who need professional-grade caretaking and continuous re-evaluation of the level of access they want/need with their immediate and extended family members.

I'm not claiming that there aren't abusive and neglectful parents. There absolutely are. The children of these parents still aren't available for adoption, as a whole. They have beloved aunts, grandparents, family friends, neighbors, and older siblings.

Dr. Anne Flitcraft and Dr. Evan Stark were a spousal research team who first applied a sociological understanding of family violence to a medical context. Together, they introduced the first screening criteria for doctors to identify potential victims of domestic violence.

I need to do more reading about Anne Flitcraft's stance on this, but Evan Stark (a sociologist like me) later in life regretted this. He argued that in the decades since the screening criteria was introduced, women and mothers that were being abused by men were reframed by the medical and legal systems as accomplices instead of victims, that willful misunderstanding of child abuse had allowed abusive fathers and male partners to further abuse women and mothers. He identified most cases of "child abuse" as, in reality, cases of "coercive control" - the abuse of children to control and abuse the mother. That where a doctor or judge saw a "dysfunctional relationship" and "abusive parents", in reality, there was almost always an abusive father or male partner using the threat of violence against a woman's children to control that woman, to deny a family access to basic resources in a way that gets recoded as neglect, or using the threat of violence to coerce a woman's children into acting abusively towards their mother. And the doctors and the judges played into this. These men knew that involvement in the legal system would benefit them and harm these women. They leveraged it like another weapon of abuse.

There are not thousands of free babies or children available for adoption. There are not hundreds. There might be a handful of cases where a woman is genuinely interested in relinquishing her child into the care of strangers. But there also might not be any. There likely aren't any. Everything we know about mothers and their children suggests otherwise.

Understanding that as the reality of adoption is a matrix-shattering moment. We've been lied to, and those lies hurt mothers, and they hurt children.

[womanstudiesforwomen]

Here are some books I recommend for women who are interested in journaling:

Life Before Man and The Edible Woman by Margaret Atwood

Yes Please by Amy Poehler

Little Weirds and Lifeform by Jenny Slate

The Women's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets by Barbara G. Walker

I recommend these because they contain turns of phrase and ideas that you, yourself, have likely had, and they plant seeds in your mind that grow into fruits that you can chop up and put into the tart fruit salad of your journal entries.

[womanstudiesforwomen]

Women have been instilled with a fear of backlash, and so many women fear the merciless response when they finally snap and become “unkind”. For many women kindness is the last bastion of safety, a begging to play by some semblance of rules. Men make the rules to keep us obedient and in return pretend to play by them- women adhere to these rules because they believe that keeping men pretending is the last hope they have.  And women are afraid of the cost of retaliation. What happens to you when you become violent and cruel, when you can’t find solace from your oppression in inner peace and offbrand versions of male spirituality? What happens when you lose the sense of worth you get from taking the high road, the comfort of feeling like you’re building a better world by being the change you want to see? How will you live with yourself when you can’t find worth in feeling “good”? A woman who isn’t “good” is a bitch- she’s garbage. So even women who fight the good fight all the time are scared of meanness and biting back, bound by a male ideas of where their value comes from, how change is achieved, and what’s worth doing. 

[womanstudiesforwomen]

A man tells me I have the single trait required to be a good mother: I know how to give until I am empty. And by this, he meant I am very good at breaking my soul into pieces for everyone I love. I will hurt myself in the process of protecting everyone around me and I am good and quiet at being taken for granted. Can you blame me? I come from a legacy of women who were raised to be useful rather than joyful. Once upon a time, even my grandmother was just a little girl. She loved flowers and had a laugh as free as a cascading waterfall. That was before she was made to carry the weight of a crumbling family on her back. How can I look at the skies with hope and think that I would not have to carry them too? Every woman I have loved has been Atlas. Holding the heavens on her shoulders, giving and giving until she is devoured.

- Nikita Gill

[womanstudiesforwomen]

It’s actually crazy that we live in a society that is both sex crazed and sex repulsed at the same time

[womanstudiesforwomen]

I always wanted to know if the gender neutrality of the language is a problem for english-speaking [radical] feminists. because for me, a russian-speaking woman, such a feature seems more of a problem than an advantage.

even though feminitives (I don't know if you have such a word. in general, this is a change in the form of a word to a feminine one to indicate that you are talking about a woman, not a man. like god =goddess and so on) .are not actively used in our country and most of them are met with disgust rather than enthusiasm, I love them very much and I am very glad that I can use them. I like that words have a female gender and that I can use the female gender in them to highlight women in my speech. I love the visibility of women. I love the feeling of women around me. I love to feel the linguistic presence of women.

but the existence of women was erased [and is erased] even in our language too.

despite the impossibility of a neutral gender in russian, the male gender continues to be considered as such: women are addressed with male words at work, in the news, in scientific articles, even in fiction and often in colloquial speech, especially by people with conservative views.

feminitives exist and have existed for many centuries. they are not new to us, the constructions for their formation appeared a very, very long time ago. they don't contradict the rules of the language, they are orthographically correct, but the linguistic patriarchal community continues to pretend that they're not normal..

and now, because of that, feminitives are practically absent from dictionaries and for those who have not used them before, they sound inappropriate.

moreover, all verbs in sentences, even if we are talking about an unknown or abstract person ("someone"), are used in the masculine gender: "someone said [=male]", not "someone said [=female]"; "when you did [=male]...", not "when you did [female]...", and so on.

this is why radical feminists emphasize the importance of referring to women through language. the importance of using female words.

because language is a part of our culture. we think in it, we communicate in it, we write in it. it is the main means of transmitting information, so to speak. and if the language is androcentric, patriarchal, we will never get rid of the oppression of women.

I mean, despite the general aversion to the female gender in language, we, radical feminists, use it and use it very actively. many women (me too), whom I read, listen to or know personally, prefer to use the female gender as a neutral one, thereby responding to all the above-mentioned centuries-old androcentrism. we like to do it and over time it comes naturally, as if it was always meant to be said that way.

and I can't imagine neutral words. neutral sentence constructions. their existence simply doesn't fit in my head. I don't like that my feminist views aren't visible through the words I use.

I really like to love women through language and the absence of such an opportunity, replacing this visibility of women with their absence and complete mixing with men, seems more like hell on earth than salvation from inequality.

upd: and often the creation of new, not yet existing, feminitives becomes a truly creative process that unites women, because we have a large number of endings for words (like -ness in english, but more variations) and I really like to think which one would be suitable for a particular word. we can ask in public which ending is better to use, we can discuss it with our friends and really talk about it for a long time. you know, due to the lack of feminitives in official dictionaries and the simultaneous absence of not very strict rules for their creation, you have a lot of opportunities. like, you can even use the same word in different forms (example: авторка, авторша, арвторица, авторесса) and no one will forbid you.

[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.