Listen,
It does not matter what you say. As a woman, as a woman of color, as a woman of size, as a woman with large breasts or no breasts and a lifetime of experience with bucketloads of passion. It does not fucking matter.*
Because unless there is a white guy backing you up, you are an angry bitch. Uppity, spirited, “that girl,” the femanazi, the super-libber, the PC chick, the conspiracy theorist…
I just wish my own experiences were enough. That the experiences of fellow women were enough. But we must always come with backers. We must always have a few men nodding along behind us in the crowd. And at the very least if we’re going to be so bold as to bring up racism or sexism in polite company then we better be willing to quote reputable studies that have been widely recognized by the psychological and sociological communities.
If we lack this armor we are just drama. Dramatic or… wait for it… psycho bitches who think everybody is out to rape them or thinks they must be, “Like, soooo attractive to be hit on so much and totally, probably, like, thinks like a victim.”
This is so dangerous because I believe it teaches us not to trust our own judgments. Sadly, in this world, that can be life or death. When that guy hits on you for the third time at the club we should just get over it. He wasn’t being that creepy. “Oh no, girl, don’t talk to the bouncer about him, that’s just drama. Just have a good time.” I complained anyway but nothing was done.
And hey, when he tries to attack you while leaving the club—which happened to me and a friend in June of this year—the police may ask you why you didn’t complain “more than once” to security. I shit you not.
Because it is never good enough. It’s always a teachable moment from man to woman. So listen up, child, because that’s exactly what you are. At least until a white man comes to back up your claims. But I don’t have to tell you that. You already know. The trick is for this argument not to be dismissed outright by some dude in a Quicksilver t-shirt because the fact is, he has final say on the veracity of our claims.
via PersephoneMagazine (via soydulcedeleche)
(via trubr0wn)
There are exactly three countries on Earth that do not provide guarantees for paid maternity leave. Papua New Guinea and Swaziland are two of them. Care to guess the third?
(via bonjoursex)
Here’s a friendly reminder:
-You cannot be sexist toward men. Sexism is based on a system of oppression. You CAN be discriminatory, rude, inconsiderate, and/or prejudiced against men but you CANNOT be sexist toward them.
-You cannot be racist towards white people. Racism is based on a system of oppression. You CAN be discriminatory, rude, inconsiderate, and/or prejudiced against white people but you CANNOT be racist toward them.
This is not difficult.
My anons don’t understand this. That’s why they can’t have nice things.
Men Can Stop Rape’s new College Bystander Intervention campaign.
Actual good anti rape campaign posters! They don’t shame victims, they ask people to examine their own actions and inactions and protect their friends. And not in a gross excuse for chivalry either, just as people keeping people safe.
I like this.
Yep I agree. I also like how it’s not tying a man taking action around rape to some imaginary alpha male/hypermasculine sort of thing. Like a real man would do such and such.
Hey look! It’s an anti-rape campaign based on being a decent human being! In all seriousness, this is marvelous. I bolded the above for emphasis.
(via cosmopolitan-fascist)
Let’s examine this:
Miss is a word for a woman that has not been married.
Mrs. is an abbreviation of the word Mistress, used as a title for a woman that is married or widowed.
Ms. is a title used for a woman whose marital status is unknown or irrelevant (as in business).
The letters Ms. are not an abbreviation of a word, they are an amalgamation drawn from the letters of Miss and Mrs.
On the other hand, a man is just a mister (Mr.)
You see men don’t have to determine their sexual availability like women.
Laila Alsabahi (via faineemae)
(via thelittlekneesofbees)
Romance and Sex Questions in an Airport [x]omg
John Green yet again proves what I have been saying for years: he is the most awesome man to ever awesome. Never, ever change John.
he is brilliant and wonderful
Ah, John Green. :’) You wrote some of my favorite books that I read as a teenager. Please don’t turn out to be one of those seemingly good people who says oppressive things, like Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert.
(via thelittlekneesofbees)
How is it radical to insist that certain traits are the sole domain of one gender.
This reminds me of something that happened in my Health class last month. I think the topic that day was relationships, including domestic violence and sexual abuse. Somehow, one of my male classmates went off on a tangent about how although men cheat in relationships, women cheat worse, and so women are just so much more terrible for cheating that way (whatever “cheating worse” even means). I can’t remember what exactly he was saying anymore, only that I quickly grew tired of his sexist, misogynist bullshit and yelled at him, “Stop being sexist!” Of course, he protested by asking how he was being sexist when it’s true that women cheat so much “worse” than men do and blah blah blah insert more bullshit here. Not that he was being radical by spewing his hateful words to the class—contrarily, he was just echoing things I’ve heard or read before—but I still wanted to say this.
You want to say Hi to the cute girl on the subway. How will she react? Fortunately, I can tell you with some certainty, because she’s already sending messages to you. Looking out the window, reading a book, working on a computer, arms folded across chest, body away from you = do not disturb. So, y’know, don’t disturb her. Really. Even to say that you like her hair, shoes, or book. A compliment is not always a reason for women to smile and say thank you. You are a threat, remember? You are Schrödinger’s Rapist. Don’t assume that whatever you have to say will win her over with charm or flattery. Believe what she’s signaling, and back off.
If you speak, and she responds in a monosyllabic way without looking at you, she’s saying, “I don’t want to be rude, but please leave me alone.” You don’t know why. It could be “Please leave me alone because I am trying to memorize Beowulf.” It could be “Please leave me alone because you are a scary, scary man with breath like a water buffalo.” It could be “Please leave me alone because I am planning my assassination of a major geopolitical figure and I will have to kill you if you are able to recognize me and blow my cover.”
On the other hand, if she is turned towards you, making eye contact, and she responds in a friendly and talkative manner when you speak to her, you are getting a green light. You can continue the conversation until you start getting signals to back off.
The fourth point: If you fail to respect what women say, you label yourself a problem.
There’s a man with whom I went out on a single date—afternoon coffee, for one hour by the clock—on July 25th. In the two days after the date, he sent me about fifteen e-mails, scolding me for non-responsiveness. I e-mailed him back, saying, “Look, this is a disproportionate response to a single date. You are making me uncomfortable. Do not contact me again.” It is now October 7th. Does he still e-mail?
Yeah. He does. About every two weeks.
This man scores higher on the threat level scale than Man with the Cockroach Tattoos. (Who, after all, is guilty of nothing more than terrifying bad taste.) You see, Mr. E-mail has made it clear that he ignores what I say when he wants something from me. Now, I don’t know if he is an actual rapist, and I sincerely hope he’s not. But he is certainly Schrödinger’s Rapist, and this particular Schrödinger’s Rapist has a probability ratio greater than one in sixty. Because a man who ignores a woman’s NO in a non-sexual setting is more likely to ignore NO in a sexual setting, as well.
So if you speak to a woman who is otherwise occupied, you’re sending a subtle message. It is that your desire to interact trumps her right to be left alone. If you pursue a conversation when she’s tried to cut it off, you send a message. It is that your desire to speak trumps her right to be left alone. And each of those messages indicates that you believe your desires are a legitimate reason to override her rights.
For women, who are watching you very closely to determine how much of a threat you are, this is an important piece of data.
an excerpt from Phaedra Starling’s “Schrödinger’s Rapist: or a guy’s guide to approaching strange women without being maced” (via lostgrrrls)
(via thelittlekneesofbees)
Everything makes me grumpy.
THIS IS MY LIFE
life stories, they are everywhere on the interwebs.
The woes of being (and staying) informed.
[Content includes descriptions of anti-choice verbal abuse and harassment in #1, as well as domestic/sexual violence in #2]
- Clinic “protesters” are not exercising their 1st amendment rights. They’re engaging in emotional terrorism, slander, and harassment. Their goal is to inflict damage. Clinic employees, interns, and volunteers who are harassed sometimes daily should be able to take out restraining orders against them. They should be able to take out restraining orders on whole organizations, ideally, as well as individuals. Massachusetts is lucky enough to have a sort of legally-mandated “buffer zone;” protesters need to stay a certain number of feet away from the clinic’s door, but they get up in your face as you walk down the street and they are more than happy to yell to you right up until you make it inside.
- “Parental notification” or “parental consent” laws are bullshit. Nobody under the age of 18 gets an abortion without telling their parent(s) unless there is a damn fucking good reason. Minors with abusive parents who might withhold medical treatment as “leverage,” minors who were actually knocked-up by their legal guardian in the first place, minors who aren’t in contact with their parents (and who have reason to fear violence or abuse if they DO get back in touch), and minors with anti-choice parents who would medically/reproductively abuse their child by forcing them to carry a pregnancy to term—all of these people are the ones who get hurt by these laws. The white, middle-class, kindly, heterosexual, cis parents with the wayward daughter who runs off and gets an abortion before her parents have a chance to tell her about her options? The ones lawmakers are constantly referencing when they pass these kinds of bills?? The ones who “have the right to know”??? They know. If they have shown themselves to be safe people, their kid will come to them. Few people make this decision lightly. Very few people will actually pass up the chance to be supported in this by the non-abusive people in their lives (especially their fucking parents).
- Many reproductive-health-focused organization contribute directly to trans healthcare disparities. I volunteered at the clinic for a year. I had to sign each patient in individually, and I would talk with them before they got called in my a doctor or nurse. I never saw one person who didn’t at least pass as cis (including “passing” as cis on paper, too). There probably were individual cis-passing trans people who came, who were misgendered, and who did not receive the full scope of treatment/education/respect that their cis counterparts did. But trans people—men, women, and people who are both/neither—are disproportionately under-represented and under-served at the expense of our health as a community.
- Abortion is not our only fight. Abortion access is so, so important. But the vast majority of reproductive health organizations/clinics recognize that prevention, education, and empowerment are vital. Abortion is not its own isolated example of a single privilege/oppression dichotomy. Instead, it’s one crucial piece of an over-arching, multi-focused conversation about sexual and domestic violence, misogyny, sexual health, trans rights, youth and childrens’ rights, white supremacy, ableism, nationalism, and capitalism. Losing this focus obscures the broader picture and pushes aside very goals we should ultimately be working in service of.
(Source: queasyfemmeproblems, via cosmopolitan-fascist)
“It’s a Girl, a film being released this year, documents the practice of killing unwanted baby girls in South Asia. The trailer’s most chilling scene is one with an Indian woman who, unable to contain her laughter, confesses to having killed eight infant daughters.
The statistics are sickening. The UN reports approximately 200 million girls in the world today are ‘missing’. India and China are said to eliminate more female infants than the number of girls born in the US each year. Lianyungang in China has the worst infant gender ratio on record with 163 boys born for every 100 girls. Taiwan, South Korea and Pakistan are also countries in which unwanted female babies are aborted, killed or abandoned.
Gendercide in South Asia takes many forms: baby girls are killed or abandoned if not aborted as foetuses. Girls that are not killed often suffer malnutrition and medical neglect as sons are favoured when shelter, medicine and food are scarce. Trafficking, dowry deaths, honour killings and deaths resulting from domestic violence are all further evils perpetrated against women. This femicide has led the Geneva Centre for Democratic Control of Armed Forces to report in ‘Women in an Insecure World’ that a secret genocide is being carried out against women at a time when deaths resulting from armed conflicts have decreased.
The brutal irony of femicide is that it is an evil perpetrated against girls by women. The most insidious force is often the mother in law, the domestic matriarch, under whose authority the daughter in law lives. Policy efforts to halt infanticide have been directed at mothers, who are often victims themselves. The trailer shows tragic scenes of women having to decide between killing their daughters and their own well-being. In India women who fail to produce sons are beaten, raped or killed so that men can remarry in the hope of procuring a more productive wife.
It is an oft-made argument that parental discrimination between children would end if families across south Asia were rescued from poverty. But two factors particularly suggest that femicide is a cultural phenomenon and that development and economic policy are only a partial solution: Firstly, there is no evidence of concerted female infanticide among poverty-stricken societies in Africa or the Caribbean. Secondly, it is the affluent and urban middle classes, who are aware of prenatal screenings, who have access to clinics and who can afford abortions that commit foeticide. Activists fear 8 million female foetuses have been aborted in India in the last decade.
The Chinese cultural bias towards male children is one exacerbated by the birth control policy. India, however, poses a more complex problem where the primary cause is a cultural one.
Activists attribute a culture of valuing children by their economic potential to South Asia’s patriarchal social model in which men are the sole breadwinners. Sons both carry the family name and work from a young age. Daughter, on the other hand, impose the burden of a dowry before leaving the home upon marriage. Strict moral codes, onerous cultural expectations and demanding domestic responsibilities are all forces that further subjugate women.”
Feminism is about WOMEN’S RIGHTS. Why must we take the burden of ALL social justice, thus not fulfilling our main goal? My feminism will be about women’s rights, or it will be bullshit. There’s an anti-racism movement, there’s a LGBT movement, there’s a vegetarian/vegan/animal rights/environmental rights movement, and these movements do not include anything about women’s rights, so why must feminism accomodate all of them to not be deemed “useless”?
WHY ARE WE DEVIATING FROM OUR MAIN OBJECTIVES? I understand women may be oppressed by their race and sexual orientation and many other things, BUT, feminism is designed to grant them political and social equality based on their sex, and does not need to be perfect in every other way. I’m so sick of the political correctness, the constant “omgz you’re so transphobic”, the “my feminism will be intersectional” and the “omg, if we don’t involved this marginalised group, and that one, and that one and that one and all of them, feminism can’t exist!!!!!!!!”
Let me reiterate. FEMINISM IS ABOUT WOMEN. It must stay this way to be effective and must not get caught up with trans politics and other issues, because they have their own platforms in which you can be active. We must bring back radical feminism. We’re all too fucking afraid to offend someone by being politically incorrect to make a global change. The only case in which this is acceptable is when one’s dealing with abuse and rape victims, in which it is absolutely disgusting to trigger someone.
Hey look everyone.
It’s like the quintessential STFU Fauxminists post.
SO BASICALLY FEMINISM IS JUST ABOUT WHITE, CIS, ABLE BODIED BIGOTED ASS WOMEN.
COOL, CHECK. THIS IS WHY NOBODY WANTS YOUR FUCKED UP MOVEMENT ANYWAY.
HAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHHAHAAH
@hedonisticparadise: If feminism is about women’s rights, and women come in all races, ethnicities, genders, classes, and abilities, etc., then why wouldn’t it account for all of the racism, (cis)sexism, classism, and ableism that affect women who are not white, cis, middle-class, able-bodied/able-minded, etc.? I identify as a feminist, but you can’t expect me to set aside my Chinese heritage just so I can participate in feminism without “deviating from [your] (white, cis, middle-class, able-bodied/able-minded) main objective.” The fact that I am a Chinese American female, that I am a woman of color in a white-dominated patriarchy, will always affect my feminism. I don’t expect you to be able to empathize (since you’re not Chinese American, but even if you were, not all people of color will necessarily feel the same way on a subject), but I do expect you to have respect for people who want to participate in feminism.
To quote Flavia Dzodan, MY FEMINISM WILL BE INTERSECTIONAL OR IT WILL BE BULLSHIT.
(via cosmopolitan-fascist)
And people laugh when I tell them women are still invisible in this world.
Things I did not know, but should.
(via elfgrove)
(via ultralaser)
They put up some awesome billboards in austin a few months ago showing the signs of a heart attack that women will feel. And I know they were effective because I was in the car when mando saw the billboard and said “Man I had no idea women had different symptoms for heart attacks!”
Way to go city of mine :)
Even better? A woman having all the “classic” (read: male) symptoms of heart attack is more than twice as likely to be sent home from the ER than to be checked out, EKGed, and examined.
Because we’re just hormone-addled hysterics. :-(
(via undercovernun)
i do not endorse feministing but factual quote.
(via baddominicana)
wat
(via sazzlepops)
Imagine this in a less ciscentric/binarist way and yes.
(via flapjackstate)
So, so important. This is life-saving information that so few people know.
(via loveintheshadowsistheonlykind)
Hey, remember when i blogged about the fact that women are experiencing heart attacks differently from men back in September 2010? And how this (or, rather institutional ignorance of that difference) is likely responsible for the fact that Myocardial Infarction (heart attack) and heart disease kill more American women than men every single year and pose more of a threat to American women than the combined threat of every form of cancer?
I’m glad this information is finally getting some of the attention it deserves. I wish the data were more clear about the etiology of the difference—figuring out where these difference come from and how they might affect trans and intersex patients (so far not included in heart studies!) is obviously something that needs to be figured out.
(via fuckyeahgenderstudies)
(via cosmopolitan-fascist)
AntiBigots, Reddit
“Men are afraid women will laugh at them. Women are afraid men will kill them.”
~ Margaret Atwood
(via librariesandlemonade)
Creep shaming. Bahaha. Baha. BAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHA.
Here’s teh thing, cis dudebros.
Stop raping us in disproportionate numbers and stop assuming we’re your sexual property. Also, stop cat-calling.
And we’ll magically stop ‘creep shaming’ you.
It’s funny how I don’t creep shame guys from my church as they are comfortable with the mode of physical contact I am and they treat me like (gosh) a human being, not a vagina. (I realize that not all churchdudes are like this, I’m just citing mine).
(via howtfoldlaundry)
hey
hey
Let’s be reasonable here for a moment, reddit guys. think about it this way: women have a 1 in 4 chance of being raped.
You have a much smaller chance of dying in a car crash, or getting some disease that you get a vaccination for, or of being struck by lightning, or dying in a plane crash, or getting killed in a terrorist attack.
And yet, we still take precaution against all of these things— things that literally hold chances that are less than even a single percentage. We screen people in airports, we put on seatbelts, and we dont swim in bodies of water in the middle of a storm. But when it comes to rape, which has a staggering 25% chance, no, it’s totally not okay for women to want to proactively protect themselves, right?
And of course, in the face of these ridiculously horrible odds, the first group to blame is women. Not, oh, I don’t know…the men who constitute the majority of rapists— the people actually doing this.
(via fromonesurvivortoanother)
Yes, blame the victims of your creeping instead of examining your behavior to learn why it makes them feel uncomfortable/endangered and how to stop being a creep. After all, I am obviously forcing men to act creepy merely by existing and doing as I please! /sarcasm.
Some people really need to check their privilege and learn to fix their own behavior instead of pinning the blame on the victims.
(Source: reddit.com, via fromonesurvivortoanother)
via Smile! (Your face is making people unhappy)
(Source: andibgoode, via inkflowers)
