adult human female in my mid 20s. USA based. Bisexual, currently in a heterosexual relationship.
Leftist — dual systems anti-capitalist and anti patriarchy
I could probably be described as a radfem or terf but I don’t really claim those labels. Mainly because people who do cannot always agree on what they mean. There’s specific things I disagree with some radfems about. I’d probably describe myself as “rad leaning” or smth.
Not a separatist, sorry. if you’re a separatist and I’ve followed you I enjoy your content and ideas but I do disagree about that aspect. I’m also not anti-religion but I do reblog some stuff criticizing it. Religion tag has multiple perspectives in it
To me the definition of radical feminism is: Patriarchy is primarily centered on the female body and its sex characteristics, sexuality, and reproduction. Anyone who agrees on that and wants to critique and fight against the most important topics facing women (male violence, rape, prostitution, transgenderism, and pornography) is a radical feminist or at least a radical-leaning feminist. I want radical feminism to be a big tent movement. If you find being rude about and nitpicking other women over their makeup and hair and whether they date men or not, then we don't agree on what a serious political action is. I reject lifestylism as any kind of political solution. If a woman has a husband and breast implants and a face full of makeup, but she's engaging meaningfully in the fight for women's rights, she's a radical feminist to me.
U’ll see me follow from my crypto main acc. Please keep discussion and comments about radfem stuff here, esp if your url or bio is blatant. Follow/DM either blog freely
As Heidi Hartmann articulated “The Left has no theory of sex. Feminism has no theory of revolution.” Addressing this is the task that lies before us and I am no coward.
my overly complex tag system thats just for me and not updated enough is below
Things I Have Tagged So I Can Find Good Ideas Ive Previously Reblogged About:
prostitution
porn
surrogacy
misogyny
women as a sex-class/sex based oppression & rights
ideas labeled “terf” and the arguments in favor of them
on trans-identified males (trans women)
on trans-identified females (trans men)
gender nonconformity
detransition
science
violence against women
rape & sexual violence
femicide and murder
sex and sexuality ** future tags = bisexuality, sexuality, and sexed
relationships
heterosexuality
women’s history
work & the workplace etc
motherhood/mothers
children & child safety
CSA
anti feminism
internalized misogyny
mental health & psychiatry
patriarchy
general feminist thought and theory
homophobia
racism
colonialism/imperialism
capitalism
on core tensions between leftists and feminists
leftist theory and also critiques of the left
against the right-wing
criticisms of where radical feminists have failed and need to do better
critiques of separatism and political lesbianism
politics in general
mass media
culture
religion
food, body image, eating disorders, beauty, etc
observations about women, femininity, and the female subject
“Europe is literally the creation of the Third World. The wealth which smothers her is that which was stolen from the underdeveloped peoples. The ports of Holland, the docks of Bordeaux and Liverpool were specialized in the Negro slave trade, and owe their renown to millions of deported slaves. So when we hear the head of a European state declare with his hand on his heart that he must come to the aid of the poor underdeveloped peoples, we do not tremble with gratitude.”
— Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (via howieabel)
jkr is literally posting upskirt photos to her social media. when will it finally get through to harry potter fans that their support makes her feel confident and correct enough to do things like this
Notice how this is a public space where this person is speaking to an audience. Notice how at about the 50 minute mark, when the camera is facing toward the speakers, you can see this guys entire thighs and parts of his ass. This is a male intentionally exposing himself to an audience and the camera.
Not only did this man chose that outfit knowing he was going to be on stage, in front of an audience and cameras, he chose to cross his legs like this and hold that position. He could have crossed his legs the normal way, which wouldn't have exposed his underwear. He could have worn a different outfit, knowing he was going to be on stage, in front of an audience. He exposed himself like that because he's a pervert who gets off on forcing other people to participate in his fetish with him.
Picture evidence of him forcing other people to participate in his fetish with him isn't sexual assault, it's evidence. TIMs just don't like being called out on their bad behaviour.
Next up someone is going to claim that the Narnia series isn't kids books.
Kids books is probably not the best way to word it, you can enjoy them at every age, including your childhood, as you get older you may find new truths in them, but they're still good for any age.
I want you to understand this. I NEED you to understand this. My mother read me the hobbit as bedtime story, and I started pushing myself to read before pre-school so I could in fact read the hobbit for myself instead of having to wait for bedtime.
I didn't do so right away but jesus wept I PUSHED myself to learn to read SPECIFICALLY so I could read The Hobbit! It is, in fact, a children's story! And children only see page count as 'there is a lot of this fun story to read!'
leftist man with stalin icon here to talk about why you shouldn’t read any work written by feminists before 2009 because their views are problematic and outdated
Transcript: Okay, I’m gonna open up this video with a content warning: I’m going to talk about Graham Platner. Oh, and sexual assault. And murder. And other bad stuff. I’ve only made one other vide…
anyways (I say this as someone who is deeply critical of the united states government, military, unchecked capitalism, police, etc) I am SICK of people treating america as if it has no cultural value or positives so….. I love u 85 million acres (bigger than italy) of national parks. I love u harlem renaissance. I love u groundhogs day. I love u sweet tea and fried chicken and jambalaya. I love u apple cider donuts and maizes on crisp autumn days. I love u 95k miles of coastlines and new england fisherman and hand knitted sweaters. I love u halloween where millions of people dress up and give candy to strangers and carve jack o’lanterns. I love u small talk and small towns and potlucks and bringing over casseroles to your struggling neighbors. I love u cowboys and ranch hands and arizonian cactus. I love u appalachian trail and dirtbikes and divebars. I love u sparklers and fireflies. I love u mark twain and toni morrison and emily dickinson and henry david thoreau. I love u rock n roll i love u bluegrass and hippies i love u jimi hendrix and nirvana and CCR and janis joplin. I love u victorian houses and jonny appleseed and john henry and mothman and bigfoot. I love u foggy days in the pacific northwest and neon signs and roadside attractions. I love u baseball and 1950s diners and soft serve. I love u native american art and pop art and poptarts. I love u blue jeans and barbecues and jazz musicians
I would genuinely love to hear what a resident of china or russia loves about their home bc I’m not a fucking bigot and I know a government doesn’t define a culture but thanks for ur exposing yourself babe xoxo
[Image ID: Tumblr reply from againstPollution reading: now imagine the reaction to someone posting shit like this about russia or china for a second ;3 americans rly think theyre poor little meow meow ls beecause some people online told them to stfu /End ID]
“Teachers are often unaware of the gender distribution of talk in their classrooms. They usually consider that they give equal amounts of attention to girls and boys, and it is only when they make a tape recording that they realize that boys are dominating the interactions. Dale Spender, an Australian feminist who has been a strong advocate of female rights in this area, noted that teachers who tried to restore the balance by deliberately ‘favouring’ the girls were astounded to find that despite their efforts they continued to devote more time to the boys in their classrooms. Another study reported that a male science teacher who managed to create an atmosphere in which girls and boys contributed more equally to discussion felt that he was devoting 90 per cent of his attention to the girls. And so did his male pupils. They complained vociferously that the girls were getting too much talking time. In other public contexts, too, such as seminars and debates, when women and men are deliberately given an equal amount of the highly valued talking time, there is often a perception that they are getting more than their fair share. Dale Spender explains this as follows: “The talkativeness of women has been gauged in comparison not with men but with silence. Women have not been judged on the grounds of whether they talk more than men, but of whether they talk more than silent women.” In other words, if women talk at all, this may be perceived as ‘too much’ by men who expect them to provide a silent, decorative background in many social contexts.”
—
PBS: Language as Prejudice - Myth #6: Women Talk Too Much (via misandry-mermaid)
Every EVERY women’s studies class I’ve been in has had this problem and failed to address it.
occasionally, we all need to do some internal reality checks. step back from ideals and activism for a few minutes to actually see and understand the women in the world – the housewives who will never leave their husbands, the lesbians who don’t have a single activist bone in their bodies, the women who can’t understand the point of separatism, the women who swear that they’re happy doing what they do, the old women who spent their entire lives with a man and are therefore too boring for you, the women who never want to work a job, the women who will never have time for activism because they do nothing but work a job, the women who are “stuck in their ways,” the women who have distanced and isolated themselves from any of the other women in their lives…
the world isn’t made up of ideologically pure women or noble, flawless victims of the patriarchy who are damaged but do no damage themselves. the world isn’t split into good, interesting, politically active women & bad women who you can ignore (unless you feel like making fun of them). the world is primarily composed of women who do not already agree with you. and they’re still worthwhile women who deserve to be liberated as much as the ones who do agree with you.
also! just a reminder that the cherry picking post (tra receipts 1) is always updating, so check the notes every now and then to see if it’s got any recent additions
It’s not really a masterpost but still a good like to have when we’re talking about radfem facts. The link to the Swedish study that found trans suicide increases after transition
Also @auntiewanda used the BITE model to analyze the trans community
I also have a Google doc with a tonnnn of radblr links grouped/categorized/organized by topic (TRA Receipts, sex based oppression, beauty industry, anti porn.. to name a few) as well as bunch of my own fave posts I’ve made. I started making it out of frustration over tumblrs joke of a search function but it’s gotten so big
Millions of Indian women have never used their husband's name - it's a way of showing respect for him. But campaigners are now urging some of them to change their ways.
Millions of Indian women have never used their husband’s name - it’s a way of showing their respect for him. The tradition is strictly observed in rural areas, though much less so in cities. Now, however, some campaigners are urging women in villages to give it up too.
What’s in a name? A lot, if you’re an Indian wife and the name in question is your husband’s. I learned this early on in life.
My parents were married for 73 years until my father died last year. At the time of their wedding, my mother was less than 11 and he had just turned 15.
In the decades they were together, first in a tiny village in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh and later in Kolkata (then Calcutta), she never called him by his name.
When speaking to us children, she always referred to him as “babuji” - the Hindi word for “father” that we used. When addressing him directly, she always said “Hey ho”, which means roughly “Hey you”.
As teenagers when we became aware of the fact, we made fun of her. We tried to trick her into saying his name just once. But she never did.
All the other women in my home and neighbourhood also avoided saying their husband’s name. So did tens of millions of women across India, regardless of their religion or caste.
The husband is considered equal to god so he has to be worshipped
A R Vasavi, Social anthropologist
That’s because in traditional Indian society, the husband is equated with god and a woman is taught from a young age that she must respect him.
She is told that naming her husband could invite bad luck and shorten his life. Often the ban extends to other members of his family too - and the consequences of breaking it can be serious.
One woman in the eastern state of Orissa faced retribution that was swift and harsh.
“One day my sister-in-law asked who was sitting outside. I named all the men who were there, including my husband’s uncle,” Malati Mahato says in a film produced by Video Volunteers, a pressure group.
The sister-in-law complained to the village council, which ruled Mahato’s words “reprehensible” and she was banished, with her children, to a home on the edge of the village. For the past 18 months she has been ostracised by the other villagers.
“The patriarchal hierarchy is enforced at many levels,” says social anthropologist, Prof A R Vasavi.
“The husband is considered equal to god so he has to be worshipped. In traditional matches he’s generally from a higher caste and economically supports the wife so he’s the yajman - the owner. And he’s generally older, so has to be respected on that count too.”
How Indian wives address their husbands (without using his name)
Women may use “father of so-and-so” or refer to their husband’s profession, eg “doctor sahib” or “vakil (lawyer) sahib”
They may just say “hey you”, or “you”, “will you please listen”, or “are you listening?”
In some Indian languages it is common to say “brother”, “elder brother”, “hello” or “owner”
Video Volunteers has now begun a campaign in some rural communities in an attempt to change patriarchal traditions.
Last October, Rohini Pawar, a volunteer in a village near the western city of Pune decided to raise the issue of naming husbands at a women’s discussion group in her village.
But before doing so, she decided she had better try it herself.
Pawar told the BBC that she was married at 15 and that in 16 years of marriage had never called her husband Prakash by his name.
“Earlier I’d call him ‘baba’, because his nephews called him that. Or I’d just say ‘aaho’ (‘you’ in the local Marathi language) to grab his attention.”
Prakash was relaxed about it but most other villagers weren’t happy. Some ridiculed the couple.
The women in the discussion group, however, were delighted with the idea.
He told her that if she ever dared to say his name again, he would give her a solid beating
Rohini Pawar, Activist
“We had great fun. We laughed a lot that day. For the first time in our life, we were shouting out our husbands’ names,” says Pawar, laughing.
“We decided to make a video and asked the women to say it in three different ways - happily, with anger, and with love.
“One of the women got carried away. She went home giddy with excitement and as soon as she saw her husband, she screamed out his name - and he slapped her.
“He told her that if she ever dared to say his name again, he would give her a solid beating.”
In Indian cities, over time, it has become common for wives to name their husbands. With growing female literacy, more and more women joining the workforce, and love marriages often replacing arranged ones, the tradition began to seem out-of-date.
When I married, my husband was a work colleague. I had called him by his name for years, so it would have made no sense to stop after the wedding.
But A R Vasavi says this still only applies to a “very small segment” of Indian households.
“It’s the educated, assertive woman in big cities who calls her husband by name,” she says.
“It’s unthinkable for tens of millions of women in rural India and even in conservative urban homes. If a new bride tries to go against the tide, she’s swiftly admonished by her mum-in-law or other elderly women.”
Rohini Pawar says the hostile response from many in her village has only strengthened the resolve of the women in her group to continue challenging patriarchal traditions.
“You see, change is not easy. People ask us why is it so important for us to use their names - what’s the big deal?” she says.
“I think, until you confront the small issue, how will you challenge the larger, more important issues?”
It may seem like a small step, but it’s the first step, she says, and the first step is always a big one.
TIL that prostitution was widely legal in the United States up until the early 1900’s, when the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union lobbied against it. This was the same union that was a driving force behind Prohibition in the 1920’s.
I do not know if this was just a pithy response, but responses like this pissed me off so much I thought I was going to start spitting blood when this Reddit thread first came around a few years back, and every time this issue comes back. I tried to go to sleep. But this kept running through my head, so here we are.
And this is addressed to all the redditors with the hot take that these women were, indeed, just fun-hating, jealous prudes:
You really have no theory of mind when it comes to women. You think they are just reactionary, shrieking, brainless, pearl-clutching harpies who hate fun and are only ~jealous~ of their husbands going to prostitutes. Marital rape was an oxymoron and the husband was within his legal and physical bounds to do whatever he wanted, whenever he wanted, to his wife and children. The women had no rights to property, to keep their own wages, to hold a bank account, and there were few jobs for women other than domestic and prostitute. Schoolteachers and nurses, aside from requiring education working class women could not access, were paid a pittance, and in the former case were required to be unmarried in many places. So the husband was well within his rights to drink his family wages and leave his wife and children to starve in a slum tenement, and beat them when they complained. Divorce was no practical option, especially with children. The entire economic system was, and always was, set up so that women could not survive on their own, to force them into providing sexual access and domestic labor to men in exchange for sustenance.
This was the era before antibiotics. Condoms were of poor quality and rarely used. (As if they could force their men to wear them in the first place; it would be a dreadful inconvenience for their poor dicks.) There was no cure for STDs like syphilis. These STDs were not only ultimately fatal, in many cases, but caused untold misery the whole way, and birth defects. And who is caring for the disabled child on top of her other children? The woman. (Oh, and banish the thought of a safe abortion, or a way for the woman to control her fertility. She was constantly bred because the husband either wanted those children or wanted sex and there was no effective birth control.) The husband would carry STDs from the whorehouses and give them to their wives. Stopping their husbands from frequenting prostitutes was not merely an issue of jealousy—it was a matter of existential survival for these women. Or a way of preventing themselves from becoming penniless widows. And they knew that most of the prostitutes were not ~independent working women~ in that era but exploited women, the worst thing you could become. What awaited you if you stepped out of line. They thought making prostitution illegal would liberate these poor creatures.
What were women to do? Speak about their sovereign rights? To speak plainly about the remedies—economic sovereignty, sexual freedom, the right to divorce and custody and education and standing—would get them laughed at by men already pissed they had just gotten the vote. So they had to focus on proximate causes: get rid of the alcohol, get rid of the whorehouses. A paltry, palliative measure, but what else could they do? They had to dress their concerns in the raiment of religion, one of the few acceptable fields women were allowed. Women were tasked the stabilizing force in society, the ones to marry off unstable, angry young men, absorb their violence, ‘settle’ them and force them to work a job, and produce the next generation of labor. And with that came their tasking to be the civilizing force, at that time inextricable with Christian morality. But there was a material reason behind their proselytizing—there always is, if you look closely enough, behind *anybody’s*. Sure, there were holy-roller true believers, but I bet the majority of women (and I must so bet, as history has seen to it their voices are lost) just wanted the beatings to end and food on the table, and relative safety from debilitating disease. I bet this because I see women as rational agents. Humans in an impossible situation, with no voice, living with their captors.
The factory jobs available to men were miserable, back-breaking labor, and hardly paid. This was the tail end of the era of radical labor rights movements, but there was a lot of misery, and those movements were eventually shut down, especially with the economic desperation of the depression. As it leads to drug use now in desperate, hollowed-out, post-industrial communities, so it led to drinking then. And disenfranchised groups have always found a group even lower on the social ladder than themselves to take out their anger. Women were always the punching bag and social safety valve. And a drunk, drugged population is not in much position to organize politically. There were few diversions – no television, no sports games, no entertainments – to mollify the working classes after their drudgery, so the bar was an incredibly attractive option. Oblivion was preferable to going back to the slums with screaming children underfoot in a filthy, tiny shack and a pissed off wife. Her anger may have been justified, but in the guy’s mind, she was just the shrew waiting to make his day worse. And, to those guys with a shred of decency, there was the shame in being reminded of how poorly his wages kept his family, how desperate and pointless the struggle, how they were running to stay in the same desperate place with no hope of advancement. Ashamed, depressed men lash out, even against those who they feel they have wronged.
The dispossessed men take it out on their women. This always, always, always happens.
Prohibition did not work. We know that now, with the power of hindsight. And the social fabric is utterly different, now: while women are by no means liberated, they can hold property, they can keep their own wages and assets, they have rights to their children, they can obtain education and jobs. Divorce from an alcoholic husband without landing in the gutter is a possibility. But to advance the narrative that prohibition was started by a bunch of fuddy-duddy no-fun busy-bodies who hated the idea of anybody having a good time is monstrous and shows only your contempt for women. You cannot know the fear and desperation of being trapped with a violent, alcoholic husband, several children, pregnant every year from marriage to menopause, and listening to your children crying with hunger while waiting for your husband to come back from the bar. And then you must approach him and ask for money. And you have nowhere to run. I wager you have never had to bury your own children dead of starvation and the diseases of poverty. There was nowhere for them to turn without you - orphanages a joke, these masses of children from these women who had no power to control their own fertility seen as labor at best and excess humanity, vermin, by most of society. And their alcoholic father would leave them to die while he drinks himself to death. So it’s you or nobody.
What do you do? The possibilities on the outside for you, a fallen, divorced women, would be prostitution or penury. But you have one bit of power, now - you can vote. And women as a class share your interests. You would be shut down campaigning for full human rights, but if you dress your concerns up in religion, there is a chance.
Of course, a hundred years in the future, men will use this as an example of how as soon as women are able to vote, they ruin everything.
Andrea Dworkin’s Right-Wing Women is a brilliant and deeply-researched work on the phenomenon of the religious, conservative woman, and addresses why women are often the enforcers and lieutenants of religious morality and social conservatism, when it benefits them least. It is not because they are small-minded cunts with small spirits, any more than men on the average. There is a material and strategic reason, and the temperance movement is a perfect example of this. They are making a bargain within the confines of the tiny shred of power they are given.
And ask, always, before you condemn a group of women as a bunch of no-fun brainless shrieking reactionaries because they want to take away your toys: what material, rational reason might here be? Give them at least the dignity of being considered rational agents before you condemn.
