Bonsai does not require genetically dwarfed trees but rather depends on growing small trees from regular stock and seeds. Bonsai uses cultivation techniques like pruning, root reduction, potting, defoliation, and grafting to produce small trees. [src]
Girls are treated like bonsai trees. They’re capable of as much as boys, but parents cut them down to size. It’s easy to grow a regular tree. it’s hard to grow a bonsai. This is what is meant by “it’s so hard to raise daughters.”
If you plant a bonsai tree in the grown and forego pruning and training, the tree will develop its full root system and begin growing to its full size. Bonsai trees are not a special species, instead they are full-size trees that are continually manipulated to remain small. [src]
It’s always possible to recover from femininity. Our DNA has not changed. Even after so many thousands of years of misogyny, it’s only the continual manipulation of men that holds us back. We are not broken, we are not dead, it is still possible to get roots into the ground and grow.
No matter how long a tree has been clipped and pruned and de-leafed and sliced, no matter how long it has been in a bonsai, it is still a tree. When set into soil and left untrimmed, it grows.
that sounds great! note that there’s a typo in the second quote of the original post (i wish i could have fixed it at the time) where ground is misspelled as grown.
If you plant a bonsai tree in the grown and forego pruning
terfs celebrating that the international chess federation has banned trans women from competing in women's FIDE competitions, because it's sooooooo feminist to argue that women are so biologically inferior and nowhere near as smart as men and thus can't play chess on the same level. girl that's not feminism that's literally just misogyny
I know you’re not looking for an answer but the reason chess sometimes still allows women’s only tournaments has nothing to do with women not being as good at chess, but because chess is such a predominantly boys club where men vastly outnumber women in competitions, and many male chess players are still quite dismissive of women players.
So women made their own chess teams where they could compete together but also didn’t have to worry about sexism from other male coaches and male players.
In fact, we find that gender bias inhibits women chess players; when women are told they are playing against men in online games, for example, they consistently play les aggressively, because we all still live in a sexist society and yes that even affects how we play chess. When women think they’re playing against other women they revert back to aggressive play. (And let’s not ignore the historic dismissal of female chess players by male chess players. Bobby Fischer’s “women are not so smart” quote for example)
So yes. We still allow women to have separate chess competitions, because at it turns out sometimes “equal opportunity” doesn’t actually lead to equality, even in a game like chess.
A vast majority of all chess tournaments are still open to all, coed.
"One study even found that the more men there are taking a maths test in the same room as a solo woman, the lower women's performance become. And, surrounded by men, she herself may come to grudgingly believe that women are indeed naturally inferior in maths.
The mind turns from a focus on seeking success (being bold and creative) to a focus on avoiding failure, which involves being cautious, careful and conservative. A mind that is struggling with negative stereotypes and anxious thoughts is not in a psychologically optimal state for doing taxing intellectual tasks.
Stereotype effects have been seen in women who: record their sex at the beginning of a quantitative test (which is standard practice for many tests); are in the minority as they take the test; have instructors or peers who hold sexist attitudes or have just watched women acting in air-headed ways in commercials."
Delusions of Gender by Cordelia Fine
Add to that the pressure of having to represent all women: indeed, every time a woman fails against a man it is held as proof of the unfitness and inferiority of our entire sex. I also remember a study that showed men try harder when facing a woman, they really make it a point to destroy her, because it's not just a game to them it's about maintaining their dominance. Worth noting that male chess players have been sexually harassing and threatening female chess players since the begining. You make a piss poor political commentator if you refuse to take any of this into account (or are simply ignorant of those facts) as you complain about women not wanting to compete in a male environment.
And lastly, I'll say it again, even if none of this happened, women don't need your permission to spend time together and play together and exist without men. We don't owe men our attention.
No one asked but I've been thinking about a few posts I've seen where women lament discovering radical feminism because it made their outlook on the world so depressing. And I feel for everyone who goes through this, but I think its actually much better for you to know why you're suffering.
Before I knew about feminism, everything that happened was an isolated incident. My mother's childhood abuse wasn't connected to the domestic abuse she experienced as an adult, and my friend's childhood abuse wasn't connected to the sexual abuse she faced from her peers as a teenager. Eating disorders had nothing to do with rape, and neither did cutting yourself, and neither did transitioning. Everything women go through was random, unpredictable, and unavoidable, and nobody was ever to blame.
Except, something is always to blame. Everything happens for a reason- it's all caused by something else. Humans have an innate urge to rationalize traumatic experiences and understand their cause, so that we might avoid experiencing the same pain in the future. But without the language of feminism, there is only one way to rationalize all these things. When you're a little girl, you grow up learning that male violence is the law of the land. These are the way things are, and everyone is happy with it, so if you're unhappy then you're too sensitive for this world. You need to deal with it. You rapist will sneer this at you, and so will your mom, your grandmother, and your friends. And you will believe it.
Without feminism, you internalize that all your discomfort, all your trauma, it's a consequence of your failure to adapt to reality. It's your fault, and so is everything that happens to you, and everything that happens to every woman like you. There's no deeper meaning to anything: it's Nicole's fault for marrying a psycho, it's Aileen's fault for running away from home, it's Amber's fault for not leaving sooner, and it's Ariana's fault for never visiting an ED clinic.
All these women brought it onto themselves, and so did you. You invited that man to touch your toddler body by having a vagina. You invited that boy to hold you down and rape you by talking to him. Without the language of feminism, you can only communicate through the rules of misogyny, where everything is women's fault, and men are never responsible for anything. It's a way of life that is fundamentally hostile to women, and the vast majority of women have internalized it, at a great personal cost, because they have never been offered another way to look at the situation.
Only feminism can break you free from that endless cycle of guilt and shame. Only feminism can give you the language needed to forgive yourself and all other women for how we've turned out after years of violent abuse. And only through that forgiveness- that recognition that women are largely not to blame for the sorry state of our rotten lives, can you begin to heal from your own trauma.
Feminism allows women to redefine our lives and our identities in a world where men have always had the final say. If being able to take that power for ourselves didn't matter, then men wouldn't work so hard to strip it away.
One important thing to remember in life: Do not coddle men. Do not do their work for them. Do not perform uncredited labor for them, including intellectual labor. Do not bend over backwards to help them. Do not tell them they are good at things they are bad at. Do not smile at them when you don’t want to. Do not laugh at their terrible jokes or stroke their egos or let them think they are better than you when odds are good that they are almost definitely not. Do not even deal with men whose presence bothers you when you can get away from them/when you aren’t regularly forced to be near them for things like work. Do not include men in your life who don’t deserve to be in it any time that you can avoid it at all.
Finished 'femininity and domination' and i'm just gobsmacked. in a world full of propaganda about "reclaiming femininity", it feels like resistance to remember that femininity is not a harmless collection of traits and aesthetics but a politicized value system that demands the subordination of women. femininity not only demands women be subordinate but teaches them how to be subordinate and take pleasure in their subordination. and it makes power, real power, seem dull and abstract. it's an excellent mechanism for producing docile persons
this was something i intuitively understood at a young age and which was slowly eroded after a decade of "feminist" attempts to reclaim the value system that demands our subordination. gender was and still is about power
“Sex work” contains political assumptions; that it is not a neutral term. The term endorses the idea that sex is labour for women and leisure for men, and accords men the social and economic power to act as a boss class in the matter of intercourse. The term "sex work" also implies that women’s bodies exist as a resource to be used by other people.
I'm not a linguist but mainstream feminism's total lack of respect for language and the meaning of words need to be studied
Call sex "work" but then shocked when Belgian prostitutes are being told they have productivity quotas to meet (aka treated like a worker) and can't refuse sex more than 10 times in 6 months else they may be reported to a government official.
Call "woman" anyone who identifies as woman and then shocked when a male serial rapist and murderer demands being in the female prison.
Say the job fair is for women and "anyone non binary or femme aligned" and shocked when hundreds of regular males show up.
Convinced the wishy washy-ness and boundary-lessness of feminist speech is a manifestation of women's total disempowerment in society.
In every other sphere of life- language has hard rules and definitions. When it comes to women's issues, porous, open-ended language is the trademark. It's like not even our words can say "no". No word we use must ever even imply a "no". It's sick.
And don't get me started on the concept of inclusivity itself has been pretty much been weaponized to mean "never say no".
Once you start noticing the passive voice being used for men's actions, you can't unsee it. In history class it was always "women weren't seen as equal human beings" or "women weren't able to own property or have jobs or get education" rather than men legally considered women their property and banned them from work, school, and property rights.
In the news it's always "girl raped in park" or "woman killed in home" which would make some sense if the perpetrator was unknown, but they often have already caught the culprit by the time the article comes out and it's always a man.
The amount of times I've seen a headline about a man murdering his entire family before killing himself being titled "man commits suicide after family is killed" with a nice little family photo of them is absolutely absurd.
Hell, just last night I saw an article titled, "3 kids killed after mom let ex-partner take them to get food." Her male ex took the kids to get food and murdered them before killing himself. Not only is the headline passive, but it also phrases it in a way that makes the mother somehow look guilty like she knew what he had planned or knew he was insane.
To top it off, people get really uncomfortable if you stop using the passive voice for this stuff. They start squirming if you straight up say "men wrote laws banning women from voting" even when that is literally what happened. BOTH men and women act this way. It's like we're all just supposed to pretend that rape, enslavement, murder, and other human rights violations against women just fell from the sky.
Okay. Imagine a woman who was overweight, but never really thought about it much. Never felt a huge need to lose it. Now imagine she starts to get comments every month or so, asking her if she’s on a diet, or if she’s worried about her weight. Imagine those comments start to happen every week or two. Maybe she is underage, has had trouble making friends before. Maybe she starts to follow online creators who talk about their weight loss journey online. Maybe she had once been sexually assaulted, and the idea of having smaller boobs and less shapely hips appeals to her. Maybe she finds a community of people online who are funny, relatable, and all take extreme measures to diet. Do you see how she could be persuaded to self harm via an eating disorder? How the threat of health complications may eventually not be enough to convince her otherwise? How even if she eventually starts to feel judged for her decision, it will only further solidify she is doing the right thing?
Now imagine a woman who is gender non-conforming, who has short hair, who is attracted to women, who wears masculine clothing, but has never thought about it much. Never felt bad about it, or wondered if she wasn’t a women. Now imagine if every once in a while, people start to ask her pronouns, while they don’t for anyone else. Then it becomes every week or two, people wonder if she’s actually a man or nonbinary. Maybe she is underage, and has had trouble fitting in her whole life. Maybe she was one sexually assaulted, and the idea of no longer having womanly proportions is appealing. Maybe she sees her genitals as the reason this assault happened, even subconsciously. Maybe she starts to follow online creators who talk about their journey transitioning, who make videos talking about all the fun outfits they could wear after having a double mastectomy. Maybe she finds a community of fun, interesting people online who also identify as transgender in some way. Do you see how she could be persuaded to transition? Do you see how the threat of health complications may eventually not be enough to convince her otherwise? How even if she eventually starts to feel judged for her decision, it will only further solidify she is doing the right thing?
Things typically made for women (ex. high heels, bikinis, mini skirts) are designed to be impractical and humiliating btw. I don't think most people realize how demeaning they look, because we are so used to seeing them on women. We are so used to seeing women in the tiny micro thongs at the beach, having to be careful not to move around too much so that they don't accidentally flash everyone. All while men get to wear the comfortable, covering shorts, that allow them to move as much as they want, climb up rocks, and run without having to double-check whether their fucking balls are hanging out. The comparison looks ridiculous. Just another example of women having to perform in every aspect of their life, even when doing activities as innocent as swimming.
Also compare women and men’s underwear. Thickness, construction, durability, coverage; women’s underwear is lingerie every time. Even comparing little kids’ underwear the girls’ underwear is thin as hell with very small seams and waistbands that of course fall apart quickly and are uncomfortable, leaving red marks on the skin. They’re not meant to be worn. They’re meant to be looked at. By men.
All of women’s underwear is a joke. And to call any women or girls’ underwear that creeps 1% into actual clothing territory “boy shorts” is insulting and horrible.
Just so you know, pedography is simply not tolerated in France. Even if it’s "fiction", even if it's "just drawings", of "fictional characters", even if "no real minor is harmed by this", any website pedography related can and will be taken down in 24 hours. Because it has been proven, and it is recognized, publicly and legally, that representation of pedography will cause pedos to eventually act on it. And even if it was a minority acting on it, it was deemed as too much of a risk, to let people keep their online "fantaisies"/kinks.
But somehow no one can make the connection between violent porn and violence against women.
So the government can do it. Fight against sexual violence. They have the means. They just don't want to.
If I told a man he had to cook, clean and take care of children all day with no pay, he’d think that’s being a domestic slave. But if I told him a housewife would do it for him it would be totally fine.
If I told a man he had to be bound and gagged naked while being whipped and penetrated, he’d be shocked, of course it’s inhumane abuse. But that same man may very well go home that night and masturbate to that very thing done to a woman on a porn site.
Exploitation, inequality and abuse are only taken seriously when it is a man on the receiving end. On both ends of the spectrum, subjugation is the natural state of woman.
The absolute fucking agony and misery of trying to find posts about feminism that have any teeth and deal with reproductive health and the ways that the (in)ability to bear children has shaped the history of women is like walking through a trying to walk through a beautiful garden but the ground is covered in rakes, and the rakes absolutely HATE trans people.
the answer to why you’re having difficulty locating any feminist rhetoric that isn’t radical (which you deem to be trans-hating) is actually in your own post: misogyny is a form of sex-based oppression that targets women for our physical difference. however, acknowledging the reality of sex-based oppression has been framed as transphobic by liberal feminists, whose analysis relies not on class but on individual choice, and by queer activists who see biological sex as a construct. these beliefs are fundamentally incompatible with radical/anti-patriarchal feminism, which understands misogyny as the oppression of female people based on various culturally stigmatized aspects of our sex-based differences from men, most notably our ability to bear children and menstruate.
i mean … i don’t know how to tell you this, but if you’re having these thoughts and noticing these patterns, you’re already a radical feminist, op. and that’s completely fine, because radical feminism isn’t a fringe hate group, it is a diverse and well-established ideology. radical feminism has been maligned in recent years, during this latest anti-feminist backlash, because our movement produces one of the only discourses which still interrogate the patriarchy systemically and center women as a class. some of us, like me, are partnered to trans people, and most of us, also like me, are non-white women. radical feminism is the feminism of the global south, it is the feminism of lesbians, it is the feminism of women with gender dysphoria, it is the feminism of csa and rape survivors, not because we hate trans people (?) but because radical feminism is the only ideology that acknowledges the material reality of misogyny. and that makes it a threat to other, competing ideologies which refuse to de-center men and destabilize patriarchy.
Jürgen Rudloff’s chain of ‘wellness spas’ sold sex as a health service for men. But his business model was fatally flawed – as his trial for aiding and abetting trafficking revealed
Jürgen Rudloff (left) in the Stuttgart courtroom on the day of his sentencing. Photograph: Sebastian Gollnow/ dpa/Alamy
Rudloff is now serving a five-year sentence for aiding and abetting trafficking. His trial laid bare the misery and abuse of women working as prostitutes at his club who, according to court documents, were treated like animals and beaten if they didn’t make enough money. His imprisonment has dismantled the idea of Germany’s “clean prostitution” industry and raised troubling questions about what lies behind the legalised, booming sex trade.
Prostitution – legalised in Germany in 2002 – is worth an annual €15bn (£13.4bn), and more than a million men visit prostitutes every day. The change in the law led to a rise in “super brothels”, attracting tourists from countries where such establishments are illegal.
Rudloff’s empire – a chain of Paradise brothels – was founded on the idea that sex could be sold as a health service for men, on an almost industrial scale.
The five-storey club is billed as a “male wellness centre”, where customers pay €69 to cover entry, a meal, drinks and a Turkish bath. Sex costs an additional €50 for half an hour. Men wear bathrobes and shower shoes; women are naked aside from high heels.
In 2008, as Rudloff was growing his business, investigators in Augsburg, Bavaria – a hundred miles from Stuttgart – received a tip-off that gangs from the city were trafficking women from eastern Europe, and sending them to work in Paradise. (While prostitution is legal in Germany, pimping and sex trafficking are not.) There was still no clear connection to Rudloff at this point. Then in 2013, a trafficking investigation into a brothel in Augsburg uncovered further links with Paradise.
Among the witnesses at his trial was Ibrahim “I”, a former member of the Hell’s Angels and a close friend of Rudloff’s. Ibrahim admitted forcing women into prostitution at Paradise, setting them a daily target of €500 a day and beating them if they didn’t bring enough money home. He would hit them on the head, rather than the body, he explained, so that no one would see the bruises. He also tattooed his name on to women’s bodies and ordered women to undergo breast enlargement surgery.
Một phụ nữ làm việc tại Paradise nói với tòa án rằng cô đã nhìn thấy những phụ nữ trẻ khóc sau đêm đầu tiên làm việc ở đó. Một người khác nói rằng cô đã chứng kiến các thành viên băng đảng đối xử với phụ nữ “như động vật”.
Jürgen Rudloff’s chain of ‘wellness spas’ sold sex as a health service for men. But his business model was fatally flawed – as his trial for
German authorities have no data on the number of women who work in the domestic sex trade, but conservative estimates suggest 400,000. According to Sporer, more than 90% of these women come from south-east Europe and Africa, and half are under 21.
It’s not just migrants at risk of exploitation. Sandra Norak, 29, has never worked at Paradise, but spent six years working in brothels across Germany after meeting a man on the internet while she was still at school.
Norak’s boyfriend threatened her with violence, forcing her to work at a brothel where she had to sleep with up to 500 clients a month. She kept none of the money for herself. Now an activist for changes to Germany’s prostitution laws, Norak claims her exploitation was replicated for the majority of the women she met, most of whom were pushed into the trade by pimps or traffickers.
It was not until 2014 that she was able to get herself out of the sex trade and complete high school.
The experience, she says, is a “kind of destruction of your identity”. “[Some of the women] could have got away from the guy exploiting them but didn’t have the strength or the belief to find their way back to a respectable life.”
Sandra Norak, a former prostitute who now campaigns for the introduction of the ‘Nordic model’ in Germany. Photograph: Leif Piechowski/ Lichtgut/The Guardian
