The Personal is Political
The Personal is Political by Ragen Ashlie Roberts is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
My friend just asked me if I am pro life shortly after asking me why I voted against repealing the death penalty, so I figured it would be good to clarify. I realize thought that this still may not make sense to some people so feel free to ask me if you do not understand.
I am pro life because I…
So really it’s not that you’re “pro-life” so much as you are pro forcing your own personal morality onto others and making them bend to your will.
You think that in some cases depending on the circumstances you personally agree with Dr. assisted suicide is acceptable and in those cases where it fits your morality you’re fine with it but when people choose actions that don’t fit your own personal concept of what is right and what is wrong regardless of any extenuating circumstances they might have they don’t deserve to live anymore or at least don’t deserve to live in this country where you also happen to reside.
And because your own personal morality is one involving a belief that fetuses deserve a right to life you are interested in forcing all pregnant people everywhere to give birth whether they want to or not. It doesn’t matter what those people’s moralities might be, it doesn’t matter what those people’s extenuating circumstances might be, it only matters to you that you’ve decided for yourself what is right and what is wrong and you think everyone else should be required to do what you think is best.
That’s not pro-life, that’s pro your morality. You don’t have the right to force other people to do what you think is best just because you believe really strongly that you’re right.
I am for the legalization of women selling their bodies for sex
I am against making buying women’s bodies for sex legal
only 10% of people arrested for prostitution are actually johns. they are the most silent and unnoticed criminal scum bags in this debate about legalization or legitimization. once again, the sex industry is about the women, not the men who are “buying” women.
johns are the ones who are raping women, beating women, killing women, using women, torturing women, dehumanizing women
as a marxist, I am for a just society where women do not need to sell their bodies to feed their families or themselves, to pay rent, to stay out of jail etc
as a marxist, I am for a just society where men view women as equal partners in life and as dignified, sovereign human beings
as a marxist, I am against all forms of violence against female sex workers. however, I am also against violence against all women under patriarchy. the sex industry is violence against all women, not just women engaged in sex work. it markets women (all women) as meat and as orifices, as your male violent fantasy to fuck on demand so long as you pay her (or even not, as so often happens when males do not pay). this adds to the most sinister lie: that women are commodities and attainable in a market, which is theoretically everywhere. men believe they can own women, that women have a price, that you can steal women or trade women or break women as if they are merchandise.
I was walking down the street this evening and saw a man following a woman who was wearing a dress and high heels and walking quickly. she was almost in tears, confused and afraid. he was following her, panting, wallet out: how much baby? how much? she’s saying, no no no. he’s following her: do you think you’re too good for me? fuck you bitch. tell me how much. perhaps this woman was a sex worker, perhaps she is just a woman walking down the street. but the violent, hostile, entitled attitude from the man was a pure result of a society that treats women as pieces of meat that can be bought, that can be yours, but most importantly, as pieces of meat, not fully human. of course this is an attitude that needs to be changed. of course this cannot be done by legitimizing, condoning, or even legalizing his hostile, violent, entitled attitude that tells him he can buy women.
Anti-prostitution from a Marxist perspective. Very interesting.
Prostitution is NOT “selling their bodies” nor is it people “buying” those bodies. Sex work is the selling of sex, it’s the selling of a service, it’s the selling of a relationship, it’s the selling of an experience. The sex worker always and forever maintains and retains hir body. The people who use sex work are not purchasing bodies, they do not gain or control or own another person’s body. They might sometimes violate those people and their bodies, they might rape, mutilate, and destroy those people and their bodies but they damn sure aren’t “buying” them and separating sex workers as people from their bodies is a pretty fucked up thing to do. Everyone NEEDS to STOP spreading this bullshit about sex workers “selling their bodies,” it’s a completely hateful, erasing, disrespectful, objectifying, misogynistic, and fucked up thing to say. You’re not helping anything when you say shit like that. In fact, you’re treating the sex workers the same way you’re accusing the johns of treating them. You’re part of the problem when you say shit like that.
Who made this? o.0
Fucking fux! I am so sick of seeing this bullshit everywhere!!! Eating at a fast food restaurant is actually a legitimate choice, there is no coercion involved in the decision making process which means the choice is freely made. Using motorized transport is seriously not a legitimate choice at all for the vast majority of people living in the world today. I don’t get to freely choose where I work or where I live. I have to work at the places that will hire me and I have to live in the cheapest places I can afford with the shitty shitty shitty pay I am begrudgingly offered by the people who profit off of my labor. This is economic coercion. I MUST use some motorized transit to get to work, it’s a requirement, it’s not something I have a choice about. It’s either use motorized transit or not have a job and thus have no income. THAT IS NOT A CHOICE!
Additionally, even for those of us lucky enough to be able to find a source of income and housing situation that does not require the use of motorized transit food is still an important issue considering it’s a biological necessity. Most of us don’t live near enough to a market of some sort to be able to get there and back with food by walking or biking or some other sort of non-motorized transportation method, especially when we factor in food deserts.
Stop being assholes and understand that economic coercion does exist, is a very real thing and is a very serious issue in the world, an issue that forces most of us to do things we wouldn’t choose if we had a choice!
Just saw Batman (aka The Dark Knight Rises) and I was really struck by how disturbingly absent women are in this film. I mean, yes, on the one hand we have two main characters who are women and who are very important to the plot and action of the movie, in fact, the movie couldn’t have happened without their characters at all. But the problem is that was it, it was just those two women. In the teaming masses thronging the streets on both sides of the battle there wasn’t a single female to be seen. Not a single one. It’s as though there were no female citizens or officers within the whole of Gotham city… or, more likely, it didn’t occur to the decision makers of this film that there could or would be any female people in any of those roles which is, of course, bullshit. In a world where something like the plot of this film was real, actually happened in real life, there would obviously be women in all aspects of the action right alongside the men because WOMEN ARE PEOPLE TOO; people who have strengths, weaknesses, fears, convictions, desires, and motivations just like everyone alive does. But the decision makers of this film didn’t see that, they see men as people and women as women, not people.
And that’s ironic considering that the point hammered home over and over again every single time the two main female characters are on screen is don’t underestimate women. Both the characters of Selina Kyle and Miranda Tate make it explicitly clear that making assumptions about women is an ultimate fail. The decision makers of this film obviously understood that fact because those characters drove that point home literally each time they were present in the action of the movie. The juxtaposition of making the point that we shouldn’t be underestimating women while at the same time having all the decision makers of the movie completely underestimate women in real life, making ridiculously biased assumptions about people just because they happen to be women is astounding and ultimately upsetting on a visceral level.
It’s upsetting because it’s not at all surprising that this issue played out as it did. It’s not surprising because while this appears to be a contrast (women shouldn’t be underestimated but yet they are being underestimated at the same time) it actually isn’t a contrast at all, it’s just two sides of the same misogynistic coin. While they were pointing out that underestimating women is dangerous that’s the only point they were making. They weren’t acknowledging that women are people, people who can and do have skills, strengths, motivations, and abilities all their own just like all humans do. They were saying that occasionally a Special Snowflake (TM) female will appear when you least expect it and fuck everything up because she doesn’t “act like a girl.” Selena Kyle and Miranda Tate are presented as exceptions, as fantastical exceptions. They’re ultra-rare, they’re mythical, they’re unicorns, they’re different from all the other women on the whole entire planet and no matter what they do or what they accomplish they will still always, at the end of the day, be women, not people, no matter what. And it is that extreme rarity of women (not people) like Selena Kyle and Miranda Tate that kept women out of every single other aspect of the whole entire film and that’s just fucked up.
this is a reminder: radscums reduce all women down to their genitals and biology, you are essentially seen as an animal.
this is not how you feminism.
wow did you just blindly ignore everything i said to you to make this ignorant post? acknowledging biology is “reducing women to their genitals” but being called a uterus-bearer (basically a walking uterus) is perfectly okay? what is wrong with you?
also scum is in itself a plural, you don’t need to add an ‘s’
If saying women having certain organs is reducing them to those organs, is saying humans have legs reducing them to their legs?
are legs all what makes a human a human? because in radscum’s mind a vagina is the only thing that makes a woman a woman. nice try being blissfully unaware.
No, to radical feminists, being female makes one a woman. Saying having XX chromosomes makes you female does not mean that you are defined by having XX chromosomes. That doesn’t mean women are only valuable for being female or that all they are is female. Saying having certain characteristics makes you part of a group does not mean that those characteristics are all you are.
“nice try being blissfully unaware” does not make sense. Am I trying to be blissfully unaware? What?
Ok, it’s time for an education. It’s not entirely your fault you’re utterly ignorant since the medical industrial complex AND the hatefilled society in which we all live both actively seek to reinforce the binary at any and all costs and purposefully keep people ill-informed and misinformed about the realities of biology. But after I take valuable time out of my evening to educate you on how utterly biased and flawed the modern concept of “biological sex” is you no longer have an excuse and choosing to continue to cleave to your bullshit will officially become proof that you are nothing more than a bigotted asshole.
So let’s take a look at some true facts courtesy of Dr. Anne Fausto-Sterling who is a biologist and geneticist with a PhD, you know, a doctorate, in science, that thing you seem to be so obsessed with, that thing you seem to think is absolutely “objective” and always right all the time. There are 5 specific measures of biological sex according to modern medical science.
- Chromosomes (men = XY, women = XX)
- Genitalia (men = penis, women = vulva and vagina)
- Gonads (men = testes, women = ovaries)
- Hormones (men = high testosterone, low estrogen, low progesterone; women = high estrogen, high progesterone, low testosterone)
- Secondary Sex Characteristics (men = large amounts of dark, thick, coarse body hair, noticeable facial hair, low waist:hip ratio, no noticeable breast development, rough skin; women = fine, light colored body hair, no noticeable facial hair, high waist:hip ratio, noticeable breast development, smooth skin)
The thing is, in real life, very few people actually match up with all five categories. There are, of course, genetic differences that account for a decent percentage of human births like XXY, XXX, XO, and XYY (apx 1:500 births though it could easily be more than that since we don’t do genetic testing for all people and even at that ratio if there are over 6 billion people in the world 1:500 means there are a whole lot of genetically intersex people out there) but it goes far beyond that. There are people out there who have XX chromosomes, a vulva and vagina, ovaries, male secondary sex characteristics and male hormones patterns. There are people out there who have XY chromosomes, a penis, testes, female secondary sex characteristics and female hormone patterns. There are even people out there with XY chromosomes, testes, a vulva, a vagina, female secondary sex characteristics, and male hormone patterns and there are even people with BOTH male and female secondary sex characteristics at the same time and people with BOTH male and female hormone patterns at the same time regardless of their genes, gonads, and genitalia
And the thing is those people, the people with the “opposite” and/or “blended” secondary sex characteristics and “opposite” and/or “blended” hormone patterns are technically intersex assuming that the two sex system is absolutely true all the time. If there are only two sexes and there can only ever be two sexes and that’s it then all those hairy women and all those men with breasts and all those men with no noticeable body or facial hair and all those women with massive muscles and all that testosterone don’t actually count as “real” women/men and they are treated by the medical industrial complex and society alike as freaks, as anomalies, or as though they don’t actually exist because their existence breaks up the binary. In order for the binary to exist, to be real, all people everywhere must necessarily match up on all 5 markers of sex all the time. That’s not what happens in real life. In real life literally millions of people have bodies that are in some way contrary to the biological concept of the two sex system. Millions.
Millions.
And since there are millions of people out there who’s very existence defies the biological concept of a two sex system we have legitimate proof that the concept of biological sex is a social construct. Biological sex is a social construct. BIOLOGICAL SEX IS A SOCIAL CONSTRUCT. Seriously, biological sex is a social construct. It’s not real. It’s NOT something that is objective or unbiased or “natural.” The concept of biological sex is just as biased, UNobjective, and utterly flawed as the concept of gender is. Humans created biological sex just like they invented everything else. It’s a category that humans created and as such cannot be objective, can only be biased. It’s a category that humans created so they could categorize and control the world around them and when they started to discover people that didn’t fit into their idea of the way the category should function, when they started to discover trans* and intersex people they decided to hide those people, to erase those people, to ignore those people, to murder, destroy, pathologize, lock up, mutilate, and deny the very existence of those people. Rather than simply admit that the categories are wrong, are flawed, aren’t even real they chose instead to rigidly reinforce those categories at all costs even when the cost is the lives and well-beings of people.
So the next time you sit there and claim that biological sex is a real thing, is an objective thing, is an unbiased, immutable, unchanging, innate, natural thing remember that you are actively contributing to the persecution of every single person on this planet who doesn’t “fit” the way they’re “supposed” to. Remember that and think about what you’re doing. Remember that and think about the fact that trans* people and intersex people are PEOPLE, people who deserve the same rights and respect that all people deserve. Remember that biologcal sex isn’t even real, that the only reason you’re a woman and he’s a man is because some person somewhere arbitrarily decided to create the two sex system, a system that’s not real, has no basis in reality, a system that was socially constructed to help control people and their lives. Every time you hate on trans* people and try to claim that trans* women aren’t really women or that trans* men aren’t really men you are doing the same thing all those other people have done to you. You are arbitrarily creating socially constructed concepts and then using them to control people and their lives. You are being oppressive, you are instituting, perpetuating, and exploiting a power inequity. You are just as bad as all the patriarchal assholes you bitch about every single day of your life and, in fact, you are using their system - the system they created to oppress you - to oppress people in ways similar to the ways they’ve been oppressing you. You are not better than them and it could be said that you’re actually worse since you know first hand how shitty it feels to be oppressed like that and you’re so unsympathetic and blind that you’re actually willing to do it to others.
(via alcindora)
So according to Victoria’s Secret I can love my body if my waist is the size my thigh currently is, if I am 5’ 9”, if I have long slightly wavy brown or blonde hair, and if I am either white or one very specific shade of brown. Thanks for that, I’ll log that away.
Well the VS thing is just gross and offensive… The obvious problems are obvious so I clearly don’t need to point them out. Instead I’m going to point out the objectification going on here. In the VS add the women are all clearly posing for one specific purpose - the male gaze. They aren’t standing like that because it’s comfortable or because they want to. They’re standing like that because some ad jackass figured out that treating them all like sexy hangers for the lingerie would make them more appealing to the gaze of others. Meanwhile the people in the Dove ad are actually interacting with each other and while they’re clearly posing they don’t actually appear to be actively posing specifically for the purpose of attracting the gaze of someone outside of themselves. If anything they seem like they’re displaying their bodies in the way they want to, in a way that pleases them regardless of whether or not it pleases an other. This is subjective posing, subjective photography, it’s not creating the models as objects. That’s a really really really important difference.
also, all those white girls in the VS ad look exactly the same, like… are we sure they’re not all just the same model? Because they look like they really are the same model…
(via karnythia)
by Tim Kreider
If you live in America in the 21st century you’ve probably had to listen to a lot of people tell you how busy they are. It’s become the default response when you ask anyone how they’re doing: “Busy!” “So busy.” “Crazy busy.” It is, pretty obviously, a boast disguised as a complaint. And the stock response is a kind of congratulation: “That’s a good problem to have,” or “Better than the opposite.”
Notice it isn’t generally people pulling back-to-back shifts in the I.C.U. or commuting by bus to three minimum-wage jobs who tell you how busy they are; what those people are is not busy but tired. Exhausted. Dead on their feet. It’s almost always people whose lamented busyness is purely self-imposed: work and obligations they’ve taken on voluntarily, classes and activities they’ve “encouraged” their kids to participate in. They’re busy because of their own ambition or drive or anxiety, because they’re addicted to busyness and dread what they might have to face in its absence.
Almost everyone I know is busy. They feel anxious and guilty when they aren’t either working or doing something to promote their work. They schedule in time with friends the way students with 4.0 G.P.A.’s make sure to sign up for community service—because it looks good on their college applications. I recently wrote a friend to ask if he wanted to do something this week, and he answered that he didn’t have a lot of time but if something was going on to let him know and maybe he could ditch work for a few hours. I wanted to clarify that my question had not been a preliminary heads-up to some future invitation; this was the invitation. But his busyness was like some vast churning noise through which he was shouting out at me, and I gave up trying to shout back over it.Even children are busy now, scheduled down to the half-hour with classes and extracurricular activities. They come home at the end of the day as tired as grown-ups. I was a member of the latchkey generation and had three hours of totally unstructured, largely unsupervised time every afternoon, time I used to do everything from surfing the World Book Encyclopedia to making animated films to getting together with friends in the woods to chuck dirt clods directly into one another’s eyes, all of which provided me with important skills and insights that remain valuable to this day. Those free hours became the model for how I wanted to live the rest of my life.
The present hysteria is not a necessary or inevitable condition of life; it’s something we’ve chosen, if only by our acquiescence to it. Not long ago I Skyped with a friend who was driven out of the city by high rent and now has an artist’s residency in a small town in the south of France. She described herself as happy and relaxed for the first time in years. She still gets her work done, but it doesn’t consume her entire day and brain. She says it feels like college — she has a big circle of friends who all go out to the cafe together every night. She has a boyfriend again. (She once ruefully summarized dating in New York: “Everyone’s too busy and everyone thinks they can do better.”) What she had mistakenly assumed was her personality — driven, cranky, anxious and sad — turned out to be a deformative effect of her environment. It’s not as if any of us wants to live like this, any more than any one person wants to be part of a traffic jam or stadium trampling or the hierarchy of cruelty in high school — it’s something we collectively force one another to do.
Busyness serves as a kind of existential reassurance, a hedge against emptiness; obviously your life cannot possibly be silly or trivial or meaningless if you are so busy, completely booked, in demand every hour of the day. I once knew a woman who interned at a magazine where she wasn’t allowed to take lunch hours out, lest she be urgently needed for some reason. This was an entertainment magazine whose raison d’être was obviated when “menu” buttons appeared on remotes, so it’s hard to see this pretense of indispensability as anything other than a form of institutional self-delusion. More and more people in this country no longer make or do anything tangible; if your job wasn’t performed by a cat or a boa constrictor in a Richard Scarry book I’m not sure I believe it’s necessary. I can’t help but wonder whether all this histrionic exhaustion isn’t a way of covering up the fact that most of what we do doesn’t matter.
I am not busy. I am the laziest ambitious person I know. Like most writers, I feel like a reprobate who does not deserve to live on any day that I do not write, but I also feel that four or five hours is enough to earn my stay on the planet for one more day. On the best ordinary days of my life, I write in the morning, go for a long bike ride and run errands in the afternoon, and in the evening I see friends, read or watch a movie. This, it seems to me, is a sane and pleasant pace for a day. And if you call me up and ask whether I won’t maybe blow off work and check out the new American Wing at the Met or ogle girls in Central Park or just drink chilled pink minty cocktails all day long, I will say, what time?
But just in the last few months, I’ve insidiously started, because of professional obligations, to become busy. For the first time I was able to tell people, with a straight face, that I was “too busy” to do this or that thing they wanted me to do. I could see why people enjoy this complaint; it makes you feel important, sought-after and put-upon. Except that I hate actually being busy. Every morning my in-box was full of e-mails asking me to do things I did not want to do or presenting me with problems that I now had to solve. It got more and more intolerable until finally I fled town to the Undisclosed Location from which I’m writing this.
Here I am largely unmolested by obligations. There is no TV. To check e-mail I have to drive to the library. I go a week at a time without seeing anyone I know. I’ve remembered about buttercups, stink bugs and the stars. I read. And I’m finally getting some real writing done for the first time in months. It’s hard to find anything to say about life without immersing yourself in the world, but it’s also just about impossible to figure out what it might be, or how best to say it, without getting the hell out of it again.
Idleness is not just a vacation, an indulgence or a vice; it is as indispensable to the brain as vitamin D is to the body, and deprived of it we suffer a mental affliction as disfiguring as rickets. The space and quiet that idleness provides is a necessary condition for standing back from life and seeing it whole, for making unexpected connections and waiting for the wild summer lightning strikes of inspiration — it is, paradoxically, necessary to getting any work done. “Idle dreaming is often of the essence of what we do,” wrote Thomas Pynchon in his essay on sloth. Archimedes’ “Eureka” in the bath, Newton’s apple, Jekyll & Hyde and the benzene ring: history is full of stories of inspirations that come in idle moments and dreams. It almost makes you wonder whether loafers, goldbricks and no-accounts aren’t responsible for more of the world’s great ideas, inventions and masterpieces than the hardworking.
“The goal of the future is full unemployment, so we can play. That’s why we have to destroy the present politico-economic system.” This may sound like the pronouncement of some bong-smoking anarchist, but it was actually Arthur C. Clarke, who found time between scuba diving and pinball games to write “Childhood’s End” and think up communications satellites. My old colleague Ted Rall recently wrote a column proposing that we divorce income from work and give each citizen a guaranteed paycheck, which sounds like the kind of lunatic notion that’ll be considered a basic human right in about a century, like abolition, universal suffrage and eight-hour workdays. The Puritans turned work into a virtue, evidently forgetting that God invented it as a punishment.
Perhaps the world would soon slide to ruin if everyone behaved as I do. But I would suggest that an ideal human life lies somewhere between my own defiant indolence and the rest of the world’s endless frenetic hustle. My role is just to be a bad influence, the kid standing outside the classroom window making faces at you at your desk, urging you to just this once make some excuse and get out of there, come outside and play. My own resolute idleness has mostly been a luxury rather than a virtue, but I did make a conscious decision, a long time ago, to choose time over money, since I’ve always understood that the best investment of my limited time on earth was to spend it with people I love. I suppose it’s possible I’ll lie on my deathbed regretting that I didn’t work harder and say everything I had to say, but I think what I’ll really wish is that I could have one more beer with Chris, another long talk with Megan, one last good hard laugh with Boyd. Life is too short to be busy.
Tim Kreider is the author of “We Learn Nothing,” a collection of essays and cartoons.
OMFG! Did I just see some privileged prat imply (or perhaps actually outright declare) that working 3 minimum wage jobs is a fucking choice?! Is that what just happened?
Look at paragraph 2 up there. The author points out the kinds of things that make people feel “busy” and says that it’s all “self-imposed” and “voluntary.” One of the things he includes in this “voluntary” busy-ness is working 3 minimum wage jobs. FUCK YOU! NOBODY chooses that life, NOBODY does that shit voluntarily, NOBODY!!!! There isn’t a single person on this earth who wants to work 60, 80, 100 hours a week and those people damn sure don’t want to work all those hours in shitty, dead end, mind numbing, soul draining jobs. That’s not “self-imposed,” that shit is socially imposed. That hell is imposed by a society that refuses to value those workers and their work, that refuses to make a living wage the minimum wage, that refuses to acknowledge that class warfare is real and that everything out there is so against poor people that we actually have a system in place set up specifically to reinforce and perpetuate poverty as an endless cycle from which escape is virtually impossible.
That shit is not a “choice.” Nobody chooses poverty, people don’t work 3 minumum wage jobs because they like it or they think it’s a good idea. The people working three minimum wage jobs aren’t making the same kinds of choices as a parent who puts hir kids into three different and time consuming after school activities. Overworking in shitty jobs isn’t about “enrichment” or “enjoyment” it’s about fucking survival. That’s economic coercion and coerced choices aren’t choices at all. People can’t volunteer for things they’re coerced into doing.
Think positive as best you can.
I get the point behind stuff like this and I get that positive thinking is important and whatnot but fucking fucks! When people say shit like this in completely unqualified ways as though it’s actually the reality for all people all the time is so fucking erasing and marginalizing I can’t stand it! Positive thinking doesn’t help people with disabilities accomplish stuff that they literally cannot do. Positive thinking doesn’t help People of Color combat everyday racism. Positive thinking doesn’t help pregnant people for whom the nearest abortion doctor is 300 miles away obtain the necessary medical care they bloody well deserve to have reasonable access to. Positive thinking doesn’t stop LGBTQ people from getting bullied, beat up, and abused. Positive thinking’s great and all but it’s damn sure not powerful enough to change reality and walking around telling people with serious hindrances to just think positive is the worst sort of bullshit. People really need to stop passing this shit around as though it’s the wisest most universal gospel truth. It’s not and the people who don’t actually have the power to change their realities are sick of that nonsense.
(via itscandidlycara)
This just popped up on my dash and it sparked an important memory in me that I thought I’d share (not reblogging bc I don’t want to talk over the OP or detract from the importance of hir story, it’s important all by itself!)
When I was just entering puberty, when I was sort of 11, 12, and 13 I too read Seventeen religiously and to this day I honestly think it was one of the most important things I ever encountered during my development and I think without it the entire trajectory of my life would have been very different. I’m a female presenting person and I’m female sexed (depending upon how you choose to define it but that’s another story…) but my secondary sex characteristics are absolutely male/masculine. I’m covered in thick, black, coarse body hair, most notably all around my nipples and on my chest and stomach. When I was first starting to develop it made me feel weird, like I wasn’t a girl, like there was something very very wrong with me, like I was gross and disgusting and awful, and it made me really nervous and embarrassed, so embarrassed that I couldn’t bring myself to talk about it with anyone.
Then I remember very vividly reading an issue of Seventeen where the “confessions” section included a girl talking about her nipple hair. She was at a sleepover with her friends and she told her friends about her nipple hair and her friend’s brother overheard which made her really embarrassed. This was the first time I’d ever heard of other people having nipple hair and it was just so huge for me. It made me feel less weird, more normal, less gross, more comfortable in my won skin and my own body and, more importantly, it made me feel less alone. It was just such a huge deal for me, I really can’t express how important this was to me back then and still is at the age of 28.
To this day I’ve never actually heard anyone else talk about nipple hair and I’ve honestly never even seen a picture of a person or anyone in real life who has nipple hair. I think if it hadn’t been for Seventeen publishing that confession and me reading it when I did I might still be plagued with all of those awful feelings about myself. It is still something that I struggle with but I don’t feel like a “freak” or like there’s something “wrong” with me because I know that I’m not the only person out there who has this and that simple knowledge has made all the difference in my world.
Being anti femme does not make you radical, it means you’re controlling women just like the rest of society.
Also: it is surprisingly easy to hate a culture that sets an expectation that women (and only women) will wear high heels or makeup or have cosmetic surgery while accepting that there will always be people (mostly women) who genuinely choose to do those things. It’s the expectation, not the action, that’s repugnant.
In case you missed it:
It’s the expectation, not the action, that’s repugnant.
It’s the expectation, not the action, that’s repugnant.
It’s the expectation, not the action, that’s repugnant.
It’s the expectation, not the action, that’s repugnant.
Reblogging for the accurate as fuck commentary! We don’t hate people making their own choices, being the agents of their own lives and bodies. We hate living in a society which sets certain standards on “acceptable” and “unacceptable” choices and then expects and requires everyone to always only ever make the “acceptable” choices while simultaneously punishing anyone and everyone who chooses to make “unacceptable choices.” Lay off the straw man bullshit, it’s getting old.
(via thatcaliber)
That Is Not Feminism: Women in Science and Art
Marie Curie: Discovered Radon.
Rosalind Franklin: Gathered all the data which Crick and Watson stole to publish a paper on the structure of DNA.
Barbara McClintock: Discovered transposons (jumping genes), and altered the entire field of genetics. She won a Nobel Prize for her work.
Dorothy Hodgekin: Improved the X-Ray crystalography process and revealed the structure of many important biological molecules. She also received a Nobel Prize.
And let’s not forget Jane Goodall, who is famous for her work with primates.
This is just a small fraction of the contributions of women to science.
There are many artists such as Georgia O’Keeffe (known for painting flowers), Sally Mann (known for her awesome photographs), and Elisabeth Vilgee-Le Brun (who painted many portraits of Marie Antoinette).
There are many great female novelists also. Sylvia Plath, Jane Austin, the Brontee sisters, Mary Shelly, J.K. Rowling. Many of these women had to use pseudonyms at some point because of anti-female bias. This is despite the fact that, at the advent of the novel, reading fiction was seen as a womanly pursuit.
This is just a random sampling of women from each of these catagories, but I think I get the point across.
As a woman studying Neuroscience with the intention of going into research, it bothers me when people say that women haven’t contributed to science.
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Don’t forget Virginia Woolf! And yay for fellow neuroscience people!
As a human being it really bothers me that this list is nothing but white women. Are we supposed to once again universalize the white experience and just pretend like the experiences and achievements of white women count for all women? Or is it perhaps that you simply don’t think about Women of Color as being important enough to include? Afterall, all those women you mentioned probably came right off the top of your head, probably didn’t require any research, it was easy to just pull those names out of your head. Including Women of Color would have taken time, effort, energy since you don’t actually have any of their accomplishments close enough to the forefront of your thought for them to be pulled right off the top of your head. And let’s be honest, this post wasn’t about women, it was about you. It’s about you having people you can look up to, you can feel proud about, you can emulate. It’s not about women, it’s about you, and the women you chose as shining beacons of capability and accomplishment are all white. Next time you want to “help” I suggest you check your privilege and look at what you’re really doing.
TW - Privilege Denying Racism
So because I’m white I’m not allowed to converse about racism? I can’t even discuss a topic I care about because of my skin color? I can’t share my experiences with bigotry because your experiences with bigotry mean more? Okay, white people aren’t really oppressed (although, you know, women are fucking oppressed and I am one of those) so anytime someone is prejudiced and rude and horrible it doesn’t make any difference?
To get involved in a dialogue people have to share their experiences. Talking about my experiences with racism isn’t “making it all about me”, it’s offering background for a conversation. I am open to listen and learn and be quiet, but I want to listen and learn and be quiet in the face of something that isn’t bigoted. Being bigoted while talking about having experienced bigotry is a beautiful sort of irony, but it also shows that you’re just as prejudiced and petty as anyone else.
If you want any kind of real change, ALL FUCKING RACISM has to go away. If you want change, you have to be the change. If you want to eliminate bigotry from the world, eliminate it from yourself first.
Plus, the definition of “racial slur” on dictionary.reference.com is “a derogatory or disrespectful nickname for a racial group, used without restraint”. So cracker is a racial slur. All racial slurs need to be eliminated. I am not attacking you, I am not being self-centered, I am respectfully pointing out that while your message is good your methods are flawed. If you want white people to listen and change, don’t attack them. It might be deserved, but it’s also ineffective. Talk about your experiences. Use anecdotes and horrible examples and shit that will make people think and feel guilty, but do it without it obviously being a “Hey you suck let me guilt-trip you.” Because it won’t help. If this movie is just designed for poc’s to bond with each other over how much white people suck, then I’m sorry, very sorry, for interrupting and I recant all of my statements. If it’s designed to raise awareness and open a discussion and make people think, then I am not sorry and I will never be sorry for offering another perspective.
Ok, let me tell you why that’s bullshit. For starters, Using the dictionary definition for a sociological issue is fucking ridiculous. But most importantly of all do you have no understanding of how power dynamics work?! Or are you just so fucking arrogant and self-involved that everything must be about you all the time no matter what?
Let me spell it out for you since you seem to be unable to grasp this on your own. White people have the power within the socially constructed system of race that governs are daily lives in a manner similar to how men hold the power in the socially constructed system of sex that governs our daily lives. It is seriously impossible for a white person to experience “bigotry” because it’s just not possible for a white person to be in a position that isn’t powerful when it comes to race. Yes, white people can still completely experience discrimination and oppression. White people can be women, can be gay, can be poor, can be all kinds of other things that intersect in varying ways which bring oppression into the mix. But none of those things, not the femininity, not the lack of heteronormativity, not the poverty, not anything else, nothing can erase the privileges a person has. If a person is white that person will ALWAYS have white privilege NO MATTER WHAT because our society values, empowers, and privileges whiteness over “non-whiteness.” Our white supremacist society has decided that whiteness is better than everything else and thus has created a complex system of privileges and oppressions set up specifically to keep white people in power while simultaneously disempowering all People of Color.
So if you act like an asshole and when people call you out on it your feelings get hurt maybe you should sit there and think about why that is. Take a good, long, hard look deep within yourself and see if you can figure that out.
- Is the real reason you’re upset because your power and your privilege have just been challenged and you don’t like it?
- Are you really upset because what those people are saying when they call you out on your bullshit is actually true and you don’t want to admit to yourself that you’re secretly just as bad, just as culpable, just as awful as all those overt/obvious racists you’ve pointed to all your life and said “I’m not like that so I must not be racist” just to make yourself feel better about your own internalized whiteness and racism?
- Are you really upset because you don’t like being called out on your bullshit and as a white person you’ve been privileged enough to have the power to avoid being called out all your life and you feel entitled to keep on living that way?
- Are you really upset because for once what you say, think, and feel isn’t the most important thing, because all of a sudden the voices, thoughts, and feelings of People of Color are more important than yours and that’s just not something you can handle since you’ve been raised to believe that you should always be at the top no matter what because as a white person you simply are more important and you’re entitled to have people act that way?
- Are you really upset because even though you’re a woman you’re white which automatically makes you “better” than all the People of Color out there and you really just can’t handle admitting to yourself that you’ve internalized that heinous poison?
- Are you upset because when People of Color use words like “cracker” they’re stepping out of their “place” and trying to gain some power for themselves, because they’re rising up, claiming their own agency, breaking the silences that have been forced upon them from birth, and that scares the hell out of you because if they can actually manage to succeed in becoming the agents of their own lives, voices, histories, selves and can actually manage to take their share of power that’s been so long denied them you fear that they’ll use that power the way white people have used their power for millenia by oppressing the white people who have so used and abused them for so long?
- And since that scares the hell out of you and you really are afraid that if People of Color can manage to finally gain some power for themselves in the world they’ll turn on you you feel the desperate, clawing need to stomp on them and grind them down as far as you possibly can so you can keep that ultimate fear from ever being realized and you don’t want to admit that, can’t handle admitting that so you project all of your awful onto everybody else and cower behind your bullshit whining an hurt feelings, using them as a worthless shield for your oppressive behaviors.
Seriously, think on that for awhile and get back to me. I’ll wait.
I guess one of the main reasons I hate all of these activist and butt-hurt people on tumblr is because I am the exact opposite way. I don’t see how a joke about your race, sex, culture, ethnicity, height, weight, social class, predicament, etc.. could ever offend you, because I could not be offended by a joke. Its a joke. Just that. I’m a woman who relies on a man for everything. And even jokes about women being worthless and needing a man or “go make me a sandwich” jokes could never in a million years offend me. Ever. A joke is a joke. And humor is more important to me than anything. So if you can’t laugh at yourself, your existence will be really sad.
Stop looking for things to be offended about.
Just. Stop.
Wow, you really are an asshole. Let me see if I can break this down for you - your opinions, your thoughts, your perspective, your beliefs, your intentions are NOT more important than other people’s and just because you think something does NOT mean that other people should think that way to or that there’s something wrong with the way other people think. You are not entitled to try and force your bullshit on other people. You are not entitled to have your opinions and perspective on life be the most important thing or the only important thing. That’s not how it works. Other people have feelings and it’s your job to respect that. It doesn’t fucking matter if you think somebody shouldn’t be offended by something. If someone is offended that’s how they feel and the “intentions” behind whatever shitty joke you put out there don’t erase those intentions.
You’re sitting here trying to get everyone else to respect your opinions and to see things from your perspective when you are literally refusing to do the same for them. Do you not see how completely self-centered, entitled, and fucked-up that is?! You are sitting here saying that you honestly believe that “humor” is more important than anything else. You have just admitted to caring more about your own personal brand of oppressive bullshit masked as humor than you do about other people’s feelings. Those people’s feelings are so irrelevant to you that a “joke” and your desire to hear/tell it is more important. That kind of logic is sociopathic. That kind of logic is fucking disgusting. If you honestly can’t manage to empathize with people who’s feelings have been legitimately hurt and you honestly can’t manage to get past your completely selfish desire for “humor” to actually care about another human being who has been hurt then you are absolutely a terrible person.
There’s this advert running for some travel company (can’t remember which one) that includes a scene in which a wizened Crone says “We will turn the pool boy into a pool man.” Every time I see this commercial that scene upsets me and my initial reaction is always that sexual harassment is never acceptable under any circumstances and it’s fucked up that anyone would think it is. Seriously, the fact that people are willing to use women harassing men in tv and film in any sort of positive (or non-negative) way is disgusting and despicable. It enrages me to see that shit and it happens all the damn time.
But today when I saw that commercial I had another thought. It’s only ever older women who are doing the harassing, it’s never (or rarely ever) young women. So what’s up with that? And then I thought about how the “dirty old grandma” is so prevalent these days I think it might actually count as a Trope. Most notably I can point to Cloris Leachman, Betty White, and even Mother Winslow on Family Matters and there are definitely plenty of examples out there in our current socio-cultural zeitgeist. What we have here is certain kinds of women for whom it is not only acceptable but also desirable to behave in sexually licentious ways. These women are positively rewarded and encouraged to take charge of their sexualities in a first-person/agentic way AND to display them overtly for all the world to see. This is just something we don’t see happening for anyone else. Typically women are required to both deny their sexualities and to only ever experience their sexualities in a third-person way ONLY through the desires of their male partners. These are the only acceptable relationships women in general and younger women in specific are permitted to have with their sexual selves, anything else engenders instant slut-shaming and public policing - sometimes violently.
So, again, what’s up with this? What is it about older women that causes our society to allow and encourage their agentic sexual expressions in a way that is diametrically opposed to the way all other women are treated and expected to behave? And then I thought about how slut-shaming actually works, most notably with the intersection of race. With white women slut-shaming typically happens with they behave as the agents of their own sexualities. But with Women of Color that’s not the case. With Women of Color simply existing in a female presenting and/or perceived body that isn’t white is enough to engender intense slut-shaming and public policing - often violently. Part of the cause of this all-Women-of-Color-are-automatically-sluts-no-matter-what thing is the overriding fear of the reproductive capabilities of Women of Color thanks to white supremacy. Since Women of Color are capable of creating more people of color white supremacy requires that their sexualities be constantly shamed and constantly controlled no matter what because even in “socially acceptable” (for white women) contexts (like in a marriage for the pleasure of a husband) that sexuality is still capable of producing more People of Color which white supremacist bullshit just can’t handle and won’t accept.
So what if that’s the key here? What if the only women who are allowed to be the agents of their own sexual expressions, desires, and behaviors are women who are incapable of producing children? Within this framework birth control methods are obviously still unacceptable because that’s something that allows a person to control hir own sexuality; abortion is still unacceptable because that also allows a person to control hir own sexuality; and then the only people who are allowed to to actually be their own sexual agents are men (who can’t get pregnant) or obviously post-menopausal women (who also can’t get pregnant) because those are the only people we can know just by looking at them that they’re incapable of reproducing. I really feel like the ability to reproduce here is key and that’s so fucked up I honestly don’t want to think about it anymore so I’m going to end my analysis here and pick it up another time…
armor that doesn’t have boob cups
second version of this i’m reblogging today but whatever DAMN GIRL
hot.
Ok so I like kstew sure but I’m like normally not attracted to her. But there is something about a really badass lady in practical armor that gets me all tingly.
The armor! The practical armor! It’s so beautiful.
yes omg i almost cried when i saw her armor negl
unf tbh
The more I see of this movie, the more I am developing a complete crush on Kirsten Stewart.
….yeah, okay. This kind of solidifies it for me. I’m going to see this movie.
I was already going to see this for Chris Hemsworth with long dirty hair, but the practical armour (and I assume shoes!) has won me over.
I’m so fucking sick of people shitting on Kristen Stewart for having “no facial expressions” - LOOK AT THESE GIFS! Do you see all the emotion there?! In her eyes, in her face, in her every nuanced movement about the stage and these are just gifs! People need to stop being such sexist shit heads about her! It’s not her fault she played a shitty character who’s emotional range was virtually non-existent and basically resembled that of a potato. Bella Swan is a shitty character and, frankly, I think it’s damn impressive that an actor with such a stunning range and ability to convey emotion was able to convincingly play the one-dimensional robot that is the Twilight “heroine” so well that people actually believed it wasn’t acting at all.
