Lift the Veil

And open your eyes

[nevver]

Off the shoulder of Orion

[wmilam-deactivated20200502]

[UCLA psychologist Neil Malamuth] found that between 16 percent and 20 percent of male students said they’d commit rape if they could be certain of getting away with it. That’s at least one in six. When he used the phrase ‘force a woman to have sex’ instead of ‘rape’, the percentage jumped to between 36 percent and 44 percent—that means for nearly two out of every five guys, the key deterrent seems to be the fear of getting caught.

this is one of the most terrifying yet unsurprising paragraphs I’ve ever read (via wmilam)

[btrtoday]

[theladydamfino]

[Picset of Aziz Ansari’s standup. Aziz Ansari: Another thing creepy dudes do… they’ll just follow women. You know what I’m talking about? Like, they’ll just see a woman, and be like, “Okay!” And just follow ‘em around for, like, a really long time.

Raise your hand if you’re a woman and you’ve ever been followed around by a creepy dude. Raise your hand high! Raise it really fucking high!

Everyone just look around and see how many hands are raised right now. Yeah, that’s way too many people. That should not be happening.]

THIS SPECIAL IS SO IMPORTANT.

[azizansaridoingthings]

Aziz being wonderful beyond belief

[alexandra-erin]

Right now, in some subreddit or circle of hell, people are looking at a screen cap of this and having the following conversation: “So? It’s not hurting anyone.” “Now the Feminazis are saying that walking on a sidewalk is rape.” “They’re literally accusing people of committing Sidewalk Rape. They’re trying to make Sidewalk Rape into a thing.” And in three weeks, someone’s going to be having a conversation on Twitter or Tumblr or a public place about how uncomfortable they are, and someone’s going to come swinging on a batline out of the corner of the screen to scream incoherently about “SIDEWALK RAPE” and no one else is going to understand what’s happening.

[lblblblblblbl]

And, just about now, somewhere in the manosphere, someone is furiously typing, “Stop whining, women over there are really suffering,” which actually means “Shut up and consider yourself lucky that we treat you as well as we do.” The idea that women’s rights are measured in terms of competition with other women is just about as sexist as something can get. It demonstrates an utter inability to imagine a world where women’s rights aren’t being traded and regulated by men.

Soraya Chemaly, ‘What Exactly Does ‘It’s A Man’s World’ Mean?’ (Role/Reboot)

[socimages]

“Man” vs. “girl”: Halloween edition.

By Lisa Wade, PhD

The practice of pairing the word “men” (which refers to adults) with “girls” (which does not) reinforces a gender hierarchy by mapping it onto age.  Jason S. discovered an example of this tendency at Halloween Adventure (East Village, NYC) and snapped a picture to send in (above).

Sara P. found another example, this time from iparty.  The flyer puts a girl and a boy side-by-side in police officer costumes.  The boy’s is labeled “policeman” and the girl’s is labeled “police girl.”

This type of language often goes unnoticed, but it sends a ubiquitous gender message about how seriously we should take men and women.

Lisa Wade is a professor at Occidental College and the co-author of Gender: Ideas, Interactions, Institutions. Find her on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.

[daughterofmulan-deactivated2018]

The Glorification of White Crime

Take a facet of crime, and then look at television shows/movies that feature those criminals as protagonists.

White mobs.

White pirates.

White serial killers.

White political corruption

White drug dealers

I mostly want to talk about this as a TV phenomenon, but pick a crime, any crime, and Western media has probably made a movie/TV series/play/etc. with a white person that romanticizes the criminal activity. No matter what, a white person can do whatever terrible crimes and still have a TV/movie fanbase that loves them.

When you see black or brown people committing crimes on screen, you are to see them thugs and criminal masterminds and people to be beat down.

When you see white people committing crimes on screen, you see a three-dimensional portrait of why someone might commit that crime, how criminals are people too, and how you should even love them for the crimes that they commit because they’re just providing for their families or they’ve wronged or they’re just people and not perfect. This is particularly a luxury given to white male characters, since there few white female criminals as protagonists.

If and of the above shows were about black or brown folks, there would be a backlash of (white) people claiming that TV and movies are romanticizing criminals and are treating them too much like heroes and that it will affect viewers and encourage violence and “thuggish” behavior. And yet fictional white criminals get to have a deep fanbase who loves these white criminals, receive accolades and awards, get called amazing television that portray the complexities of human nature. Viewers of these characters see past the atrocious crimes and into their humanity, a luxury that white characters always have while characters of color rarely do. The closest that mainstream TV has come to showing black criminals as main characters is probably The Wire, and even then, the criminals share equal screen time and equal status as main characters as the police trying to stop them.

The idea that crime can be so heavily romanticized and glorified to such a degree is undoubtedly a privilege given to white characters. The next time you hear someone talk about Dexter Morgan or Walter White in a positive way, it may be an opportunity to rethink how white people can always able to be seen as people no matter what they do, while everyone else can be boiled down to nothing but a criminal.

[winjennster]

This is true. The only exception I could come up with is “The Wire”.

[acceber74]

The Wire wasn’t the exception tho. That show got ZERO mainstream accolades (and for it being on HBO, that’s just BIZARRE).

The criminality and corruption were never glorified nor justified with “well, I got cancer”, or “I’m seeing a therapist for my emotional issues”, or "hey, it’s prohibition, let me make a buck against an unfair law", or “I witnessed my mother being dismembered when I was four.  Of course I’m a serial killer.  But my victims are criminals so it’s OK!!!”.  These shows started from a place of “empathize with these troubled souls”.

[prissypixipea-deactivated201704]

Not surprising though, this is exactly how the treat white criminals in real life. White man shoots 9 people in a church and we hear his entire life story, see pictures of him as a kid looking innocent. He’s called just a kid. White man shoots up school we hear about his good grades and sad former teachers talk about how he was a good, quiet kid with a bright future ahead of him until this tragedy happened and ruined his life, the tragedy being that he went and murdered a bunch of people in cold blood but that’s never what they say. And ofcourse, he is a child also dispite being well into hs 20’s. We are always expected to sympathize with with white criminals.

[amoisthobo]

Damn this a good post

[themistakeof91]

Great analysis

[think-progress]

CEOs Have Millions More Stashed Away For Retirement Than Their Workers

The pay gap between what CEOs make and what they pay their workers is pretty well known. A new report released on Wednesday illuminates a different gap: that between what CEOs have stashed away for retirement and what their workers have been able to amass.

The report from the Center for Effective Government and the Institute for Policy Studies looks at the retirement accounts among CEOs at Fortune 500 companies and finds that on average they have $49.3 million saved. By contrast, Americans have just $2,500 saved at the median.

[jericosilvers]

[lacigreen]

lather, rinse, repeat yall <3 

[questionall]

[hauteproportions]

this might be my favourite joke ever

[micdotcom]

Here’s what politics looks like if you take out the men 

Out of the 22 people running for president in 2016, only two of them are women. Elle U.K. is confronting this imbalance directly through the magazine’s #MoreWomen campaign, launched on Oct. 1 to celebrate women’s global power. Their eye-opening launch video shows how easy it is to make full rooms seemingly sparse.

[thesociologicalcinema]

“Don’t blame those who have no money & no power, question the actions of those who have all the money & all the power”

Photo credit: Does anyone know where this took place, when it took place, or who took the photo?

[your-uncle-dave]

Howzabout it, liberals?  Fair?

[geekandmisandry]

Just a question, how many people have been killed by vaginas? How are people made unsafe by proximity to vaginas?

A little girl was killed the other day because a little boy shot her with a vagina. Oh wait, no, sorry, he shot her with a gun. Not a vagina.

So, it seems that vaginas are not actually deadly weapons and this comparison is genuinely awful.

[theroguefeminist]

People bad mouth women who fucked their way to the top but no one criticizes the men in positions of power who compromise their integrity by handing out favors for the fucking. No one condemns these men for abusing their positions of power to get laid.

People demonize women who fuck their way to the top, but no one mentions how it’s almost always women having to resort to using their bodies to get more power from men who wield it. No one talks about how it’s men with all the power in the entertainment industry and women at their mercy.

Everyone has something to say about women who fuck their way to the top, but no one has anything to say about the fact men are the ones with the keys to the top, and women have to scramble to get them.

[babycrawlingveryfast-deactivate]

Advertisers must convince young women that they are in need of constant improvement—largely to get and keep boys’ attention—without threatening young women’s views of themselves as intelligent, self-directed, and equal. Buzz words like “empowerment,” “self-determination,” and “independence” are sprinkled liberally across their pages. But this seemingly progressive rhetoric is used to sell products and ideas that keep girls doing gender in appropriately feminine ways, leading them to reproduce, rather than challenge, gender hierarchies. An ad for a depilatory cream, for instance, tells girls that they are “unique, determined, and unstoppable,” so they should not “settle… for sandpaper skin.” Feminist demands for political and economic equality—and the refusal to settle for low-wages, violence, and second-class citizenship—morph into a refusal to settle for less than silky skin. Pseudo-feminist language allows young women to believe that they can “empower” themselves at the checkout counter by buying the accoutrements of traditional femininity.

Amanda M. Gengler, Selling Feminism, Consuming Femininity. (via sukoot)

[unconsumption]

Transformation Textiles provide the emerging generation of young women in rural Africa high quality, affordable feminine hygiene products to ensure their education isn’t disrupted by puberty and menstruation management.

Transformational Textiles began by providing reusable sanitary towels made from scraps and off cuts from textile factories. These then grew into a more holistic offering: the Dignity Kit, which includes two pairs of underwear, two waterproof shields, six reusable pads, a bucket, soap, a draw string bad and a booklet containing information on menstruation and explaining how to use and care for the products.

(via Scraps of fabric bring dignity to young African women going through puberty | Design Indaba)

— rw

[micdotcom]

Here’s what politics looks like if you take out the men 

Out of the 22 people running for president in 2016, only two of them are women. Elle U.K. is confronting this imbalance directly through the magazine’s #MoreWomen campaign, launched on Oct. 1 to celebrate women’s global power. Their eye-opening launch video shows how easy it is to make full rooms seemingly sparse.

[brutereason]

This how sexism tends to work. Very rarely does someone just come right out and say that women should shut up and talk less. Instead, they come up with a lot of irrelevant reasons for women to feel self-conscious about their voices. Most people who lodge these complaints likely don’t mean to bully women into shutting up. It’s often a sense of vague irritation, which they pin on the women themselves, instead of wondering if it’s just that they themselves have been trained to resent it when women are the ones holding the floor.

The war on female voices is just another way of telling women to shut up (via brutereason)