Hello and welcome to my feminism and politics blog. Here you'll find reblogs, discussions, and a plethora of quotes. Expect some radical-leaning views here. If you want to talk, feel free to reblog or send me a message. I prefer not to get into yelling matches, and if you'd like to discontinue a conversation for whatever reason, let me know. Visit my about page (WIP) for more information.
I’m not watching all that but I find it interesting that she’s so male centred that she immediately assumes I’m talking just about TIMs and their makeup purchases. Yes that’s included, but I’m also talking about things like tucking/binding tape, binders, packers, trans themed merchandise, “gender affirming” merchandise, etc. Most of these are actually marketed towards TIFs, because companies saw a demographic of women who weren’t buying into femininity and found a new way to market to them. Because god forbid women not shell out money on these things.
And of course blah blah blah “gender affirming care” as if that’s not just cosmetic surgery. I’m so done with trans identified people pretending that their desire for cosmetic surgery is somehow special and different and more legitimate than everyone else’s just because they slap that label onto it. Sorry, you’re no different than somebody who wants a nose job or fake abs or whatever. “Gender affirming care” is just as much of a product sold to you preying on your insecurities as any other cosmetic surgery. Doesn’t matter what pompous name you give it.
I also find it interesting that she opens with pointing out that I’m a lesbian, and using my silly shark plush post as an example of the big bad boogeywoman: Twansphobic Lesbians™️. Why single out lesbians? Me being a lesbian has nothing to do with me making fun of your stupid lame ass shark product. It’s so weird that she combed through my blog for mention of my sexuality so she could whine about the Twansphobic Lesbians. But she and those who agree with her will never do any critical thinking about why so many lesbians seem to be “transphobic”. They’ll never listen to us about the harm their movement is doing to us. They’ll just continue painting us as horrible evil villains because they hate that we don’t play the role of the ally-by-default that they expect of us. How dare we as women and as homosexuals have opinions of our own instead of doing whatever we’re told by men and straights?
Ugh I despise the whole “um actually men can still get you pregnant thing!”. It’s so creepy and rapey. If a woman is joking about how her sexuality means she can’t get pregnant, that means her sexuality excludes dick. She doesn’t need you to come in and say “but remember you should still be fucking these special men who can impregnate you!” LEAVE US ALONE!!!!!
the people who claim to oppose “bioessentialism” will tell you that the usage of porn and the prostituting of women is normal, permissible and natural. it’s all just sexuality, after all. their sex therapist said it’s fine. their psychologist said eroticizing rape and sexual exploitation is just human nature. you wouldn’t want to be a conservative. sexual slavery is bad if it’s private, but good if it’s public, accessible to all, and socialized among the masses. 😉
the people who claim to oppose capitalism will critique every billion dollar industry on earth except for the ones that give them orgasms at the expense of millions of women and girls. suddenly, for women, consent makes exploitation permissible. you wouldn’t want to be a reactionary. communism is just for men, but the most that women can hope for is libertarianism.
the people who claim to oppose sexual violence will keep their heads down if the sexual violence results in an orgasm for the participants. strangulation is domestic violence unless someone requests it. consent makes abuse impossible, after all. you can’t abuse anyone if you garner consent before you do it. these people will claim to be “materialists.” you wouldn’t want to be a prude.
the people who engage in “media criticism” and care about “representation” fall silent when the representation of women and children in porn is a topic of discussion. suddenly, representation doesn’t matter if the representation is intended to give you an orgasm. they simply want more diversity among the sexual slaves. you wouldn’t want to be exclusionary.
i could go on lol but bottom line is it is of utmost political importance for feminists to oppose the right-wing while disentangling our political project out of the clutches of liberals and leftists. they have nothing to offer us but a prettier set of chains. they want to neutralize our attacks on male supremacy just as much as their right-wing political rivals. we cannot subsume our goals to either of them. this is not an appeal to centrism. it is an appeal for a revolutionary movement that views us as human beings. this “political spectrum” is where our movement goes to die.
He really circled back to misogyny lmfao what is this. “Women aren’t allowed to be masculine and butch” yeah that’s what conservatives and straight men have been saying since forever. You’re not special dude. You just hate women.
i went to a leftist festival last month and there was a panel dedicated to prostitution, why abolition is the only road to go for leftists and how to help and support prostituted women exiting the trade, and i keep thinking about that union organizer who said, "we hear more and more that 'sex work is work', but if that were true, then there'd be professional trainings leading to a qualification for prostitution, then there'd be prostitution diplomas, then high schoolers could send applications to follow those trainings and become prostitutes. but we all know that all these things don't exist, and if they did exist we would all recognize them for what they are: a grooming business encouraging pedophilia and violence against women and girls." and what she said later; "trade unions that argue that 'sex work is work' never engage in legal battles against pimps or brothel owners. they don't even recognize that pimps are the bosses of the prostitution market. "sex workers' trade unions" don't fight pimps because sex workers' unions don't represent the alleged "workers" (prostituted women), they represent the bosses: pimps."
and that made me think of what Kajsa Ekis Ekman said about the trade unions that consider prostitution to be work and prostituted women to be workers: they offer trainings about condom use and spend millions of dollars funding "worker peer education" about "safe sex".
So one again, it's prostituted women who are held responsible for the spreading and the prevention of STDs - not the johns, not the pimps. the prostituted women, many of them victims of sex trafficking. "As human trafficking expert Malka Marcovich has pointed out, this means a return to nineteenth-century ideals of hygiene, where the onus was “primarily on the women to take responsibility for the health of ‘the customer’, so diseases would not be spread to their families” (2007, p. 347)."
It's quite obvious to any trade union organizer that prostitution is not work and the sex trade can't be organized as a trade union. a few months ago, the biggest unions in my country (which included the traditional left-wing trade unions as well as students' unions) issued a paper condemning the 'sex work is work' narrative and the pimp lobbies got so mad about that because they know their strategy isn't working because leftists know what left-wing politics look like and they know women's liberation doesn't come from prostitution. Now it's interesting that the biggest voices of the "sex work is work" movement come from the USA, where the anticapitalist left doesn't exist. American liberals love to pass reactionary politics as revolutionary but not because they are stupid in their own country does it mean they should influence the actually left-wing labour movement in other countries, right?
“At a clinic in Anand in northern India, women give birth to Western children. White women’s eggs are inseminated with white men’s sperm, and the embryo is implanted in the wombs of Indian women. The children will show no traces of the women who bore them. They will neither bear her name nor get to know her. After giving birth to the children, the Indian women surrender them. They sign a contract and receive between 2,500 and 6,500 USD the moment they give up their responsibility for the child they just gave birth to. For the women, most of whom are poor and from nearby villages, the payment can be up to the equivalent of ten years’ salary. The buyers are typically American, European, Australian, Japanese, or wealthy Indians; they are childless heterosexual couples, homosexual men, and single men… With traditional surrogacy, the industry had been limited to the Western world. An Indian mother would have meant a child with Indian features. But suddenly, through the miracle of modern technology, it became possible for an Indian woman to give birth to a white child. Thus, Americans could pay two-thirds less than for surrogacy in the USA and still come home with their “own” child, even though it had spent nine months in an Indian woman’s body. Embryo transplantation also impacted on American courts’ judgments in the child custody cases. In one case from 1993, almost identical to “Baby M”—the mother had second thoughts after the birth and wanted to keep the child—the judgment was that she was not the child’s mother. She “was not exercising procreative choice, but was providing a service.” Because the egg wasn’t hers, the pregnancy wasn’t motherhood but a “service”; therefore, she had no rights to the child she gave birth to. This has now become standard practice in the USA, and even when the egg belongs to a third woman—a so-called egg donor—custody is granted to those who paid for the child.”
— Kajsa Ekis Ekman, Being and Being Bought: Prostitution, Surrogacy and the Split Self
(via invertprivileges)
Oh my God, this article brutally unpacks Lindy West's new weird ass memoir and that awkward NYT interview- such a satisfying read (it's behind a paywall, full article copied below:
All Lindy West proves in her memoir, ‘Adult Braces,’ is that she loves being treated like a child by the man she was supposed to grow old wi
Say It with Me Now: Open Marriages Never Work
All Lindy West proves in her new memoir, ‘Adult Braces,’ is that she loves being treated like a child by the man she was supposed to grow old with—and the woman who has taken her place in his bed.
By Kat Rosenfield
“If you think I have been brainwashed and I am secretly miserable, I simply do not know what to tell you.”
So proclaims the final chapter of Adult Braces, a new memoir by Lindy West that is half-travelogue, half–polyamory memoir, and 100 percent privilege-disclaiming self-deprecation of the doth-protest-too-much variety. Perhaps you recall the moment in Girls where Lena Dunham snaps, “No one could ever hate me as much as I hate myself, okay? So any mean thing someone’s gonna think of to say about me, I’ve already said to me, about me, probably within the last half hour.”
Now imagine this moment, and those two sentences, somehow stretched to encompass a 336-page work of literature—an endless hellscape of millennial self-loathing, with no way out except through a minefield of weaponized vulnerability stretching as far as the eye can see—and you will have some idea of what it was like to spend the weekend reading Adult Braces.
I imagine West would object to this characterization, much as she objects to the notion that she might be unhappy in her marriage—which, contrary to her original desires, now contains three people instead of two. West wanted to be monogamous, whereas her husband wanted to (and did) sleep with other women. She describes the heartbreak of this at length, repeatedly, and in excruciating, objectively sympathetic detail. Then, she pulls the rug out from under the reader by insisting that actually, if you really think about it, she was the one being selfish and unreasonable and—worst of all—conservative in her expectations of what her marriage should be.
“In many ways, my side of the story is easier to understand than Aham’s—mine hews to cultural norms about heterosexual love and relationships while his challenges them,” she writes, in one of the book’s more standout instances of cad apologia. West, who is something of a celebrity in the world of fat activism, now insists that her desire for monogamy is simply a form of false consciousness, developed in response to societal narratives about how no man would ever want someone who looks like her. The way she felt about the idea of her husband sleeping with other women was fruit of this same poisonous tree. But she knows now where the fault lies, and no, it’s not with her cheating husband. It’s with herself, for being scared and selfish; it’s also society’s fault for making her that way. And it might be your fault too, dear reader, if you’re still wallowing around down there in the unenlightened pits of not wanting your spouse to screw other people: “Monogamous people don’t just project their relationship insecurities onto nonmonogamous couples—they’re afraid of us.”
For millennials like me (elder, nominally feminist, and terminally online), West is something of a household name. I remember when she first came on the scene as a blogger; there was an angry theater-kid quality to her writing that made it both highly recognizable and extremely well-suited to what was at the time still a new medium, short-form bursts of prose characterized by zany overconfidence mixed with aggressive self-deprecation, all-caps for emphasis, and lots and lots of parenthetical side notes. (JOKES! Am I right, ladies?)
There was also, increasingly, a cult of personality coalescing around West herself. She was brash, ballsy, and opinionated; she was vulnerable and funny and full of rage; she was very fat, very pretty, and apologetic about neither. She was also, somehow, always at the leading edge of whatever feminism-of-the-moment. A blogging gig at Jezebel turned into a column at The Guardian turned into a 2016 memoir, Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman—adapted as a Hulu series starring Aidy Bryant—which ended with West’s marriage to musician Ahamefule Oluo. It seemed at the time like a happily-ever-after. Adult Braces, releasing Tuesday, complicates that happy ending in ways that you need not read it to find out, because the book’s big reveal was spoiled in advance by none other than the author herself. In a wildly viral New York Times interview released a week before Adult Braces hit bookstores, West explained that the fairy-tale coupling she always thought she wanted is now the throupling of her dreams: “It feels like I customized marriage to the specifications that are fun and fulfilling to me.”
More on those specifications in a moment—but the fact that West felt compelled to give this interview reminds me of nothing so much as my own behavior at a recent dinner party where I was painfully aware that I’d badly oversalted the beef Wellington, a fact for which I began preemptively joke-apologizing a full hour before it came out of the oven. (Any mean thing someone wanted to say about my beef Wellington, I had already said to me about my beef Wellington, etc., etc.) Whatever your project, be it a pastry-wrapped filet or a marriage memoir, it does not bode well if you are managing people’s expectations before they’ve even had a chance to taste it.
Even so, the unpalatability of Adult Braces still manages to shock. There’s one especially eye-popping moment early on, when West suggests that as a white woman married to a black man, her desire for monogamy could be reasonably construed as a desire to own him—as in, like a slave—and surely, I thought, this was just memoir craftsmanship, the kind where an author makes categorically insane assertions on purpose in order to set up some down-the-line payoff in which she realizes the error of her ways. By page 177, when West asks the reader, “Is it possible that the ongoing project of global white supremacist imperialism and white people not being able to dance are symptoms of the same thing?” I had long since stopped scanning the horizon for signs of rescue.
Adult Braces is structured around a monthlong road trip that takes West across the country, the rare travelogue in which the author is utterly, belligerently incurious about the people she encounters. Her judgments are reflexive, contemptuous, and not infrequently racist. The tourists around her in the Florida Keys are all white (as is she, of course, but whatever), because “what white people really want is to vacation in white-majority places where the other people being served are white and the government is white.” The Wyoming men in pro–Second Amendment gear from whom she buys a jar of homemade honey are “absolutely certainly virulent racists” who “probably [have] really bad views on abortion.” A chat with the guard at the border of a Sioux reservation prompts her to fantasize “that white people in RVs had been evil to him all day.”
You’d be forgiven for wondering why West bothered to drive all the way across the country just to sneer at every suspected Trump voter she sees, a thing she could have just as easily done from the comfort of her own home—except that if she had been at home, she would have been interrupting her husband’s polyamorous honeymoon period with his new girlfriend, a woman named Roya.
Which is, of course, the only thing this book is really about.
We’re told that this is a great thing. Sure, West was heartbroken at first—not to mention humiliated at having learned about Aham’s dalliances from a friend who saw him kissing another woman in public. Sure, Aham has a major medical emergency and ends up hospitalized less than 48 hours after West has begun her road trip, resulting in a bizarre situation where Roya steps in as his primary caregiver while West keeps driving east, putting more and more distance between herself and her marriage. Sure, the day before West comes home, her husband briefly decamps to another city—to meet his girlfriend’s parents.
But it’s great!
West is adamant about this: You mustn’t see this story as a tragedy, nor its author as a victim. Paradoxically, this only makes you feel worse for her—or at least, it only made me feel worse. It’s not just the frankly offensive notion that monogamy is boring and immoral and maybe even somehow slavery-adjacent, or the frantic insistence that all of this, every anguished bit, is actually a radical act of self-care (West has dedicated this book to herself and thanks herself first in the acknowledgments). It’s the way it begs the reader to be complicit in the story West is determined to tell, the way the narrative requires external validation not to collapse under the weight of its own sadness, like a child who has begun to discern the truth about Santa Claus pleading to be reassured that he’s real.
As for the aforementioned specifications of her relationship, the end of the memoir finds West living with Aham and Roya, still a throuple, in a log cabin outside Seattle. The cabin has been in her family for many years, and holds many memories, including from her formative years. It’s blissful, she says: “Every day, I wake up and someone has made coffee and someone has done the dishes and two people are happy to see me instead of one.”
But waking up to discover the coffee already made and the chores already done is made possible only by the fact that West mostly sleeps alone in a guest room—“with my audiobook playing while hugging my stuffed cat, Esmerelda.” The stuffed cat is one of a rotating menagerie; the audiobook, a means of drowning out the sound of her husband and Roya having sex down the hall. Sometimes she joins them, or at least she used to; this book contains fewer explicit references to group sex than you might imagine, but there are a couple. One gets the sense, though, that these encounters aren’t happening lately. There are stated reasons for this, including that West has an even more complicated relationship with her carnal appetites than her culinary ones, and that she’s back on antidepressants with the usual libido-killing side effects. But there’s another reason, one rather uncomfortable, even unspeakable, but also blazingly obvious: that she has retreated not just from the role of wife, but from the responsibilities of being a grown-up.
Of her two partners, West writes: “I love sleeping in the guest room and crawling into bed with them in the morning. I love when they tuck me in and leave me to play on my phone as late as I want.”
She loves, in other words, being treated like a child by the man she was supposed to grow old with—and the woman who has taken her place in his bed. And do I think West is secretly miserable? No; I think it’s worse than that. I think she’s been drinking poison for so long that she’s started to believe she likes the taste.
Before you get on anti-depressants, try not letting your husband fuck his 120lb gf in the main bedroom of the house you own while you listen to audiobooks and doom scroll.
I think that should be the first line of treatment before you break out the prescription pills. Idk.
isupportforcefem and the white trans problem, or: bringing up black people to look less like a rape culture advocate
note: before you say anything know that this post was written by a black woman who is not going to take your hit dog hollering seriously
one thing myself and others have noticed from isupportforcefem is a bizarre inclination to shoving "and black people" where it isn't at all required. issues that directly affect transfems have an "and black people" tacked on to make the reader consider that not only is what being discussed transmisogynistic, but potentially racist, and wouldn't that just be terrible? The constant juxtaposition comes across as though isff believes accusations of transmisogyny to not be serious enough, whereas beefing such discrimination up with potential racism makes others more liable to consider it "real".
take these two posts:
these posts are based on a false premise: the idea that, in tandem with trans people being constantly falsely accused of rape, black people are also constantly falsely accused of rape.
I do not know any people, black or nonblack, cis or trans, who have been falsely accused of rape. the idea that false rape accusations are 1. a source of discrimination that these specific groups face and 2. a commonality between them requires you to believe that
false rape accusations are commonly made, and
for some reason trans people and black people are constantly accused of this
this requires you to align yourself with the misogynistic belief that false accusations of rape are constantly weaponised against the accused. the premise requires you to believe that there are squawking harpies constantly accusing innocents of rape, and that they must not be believed. pokeballvictimized's entire blog for the last few days has been trying to get you to believe that "actually who gets to determine what rape is?" is a line of logic a true transfeminist would follow and not logic imported straight from seething incels on 4chan.
the related "and black people" thing here is white transfems knowing a basic concept - that, in countries where we are minorities, black people are incarcerated at disproportionate rates; that we are more likely to be falsely accused of crimes; and that racially-based accusations of sexual assault and rape have, in cases, been weaponised against black men - and mixing these into a finely blended soup to run away with it. black people as a whole are similar to transfems because we are constantly accused of rape. black transfems are constantly accused of rape. where did they get that? don't worry about it, just know it's happening. the woman who confessed to choking a woman unconscious in a parking lot and complained about how mean people are being for bringing up that she choked a woman unconscious in a parking lot (highly recommend searching "anonsee" on bluesky to see what people have said about storyweavingspider, serial boundary violator during sex who tries to frame these assaults as just being part of kink!) is in support of it, and she's our token black woman, so it's all good. 👍
if you see yourself as someone who cares about women, who cares about victims of sexual violence, and who does not ally themselves with those who perpetrate sexual violence, you must see these posts for what they are: people who assume that everyone else is constantly being "falsely" accused of sexual harassment dragging black people into it because they need to look better. the idea of ubiquitous false allegations of rape and sexual assault is something coined by misogynistic men. no useful transfeminist analysis can operate under the assumption that waves of innocents are being falsely accused of rape while not addressing what this says: that malintentioned vile creatures are doing the accusing, that they are lying, that whatever assault or rape they report is an attempt to have someone unpersoned and socially murdered. you must also see it as an inherently racist act to bring up black people solely to go "a-and it's not just me, black transfems i mean uh people get this too!"
if you are surrounded by people constantly accused of rape it would do you good to assess exactly what sort of company you are keeping. "My friends are constantly accused of rape" is a line only people like Bret from the frat house, iignoremissingstairs86 from IRC and John Politics the senator should be capable of saying, because these are the types of people who would keep accused rapists in their company. false accusations of sexual violence form a very small fraction of total accusations, and these false accusations are usually vague accusations with no named perpetrator. the idea that a specific group of people are constantly targeted by false accusations of sexual violence flies in the face of what we know to be fact about sexual violence reporting and statistics.
again, consider: what benefit do these people derive from going "and black people" when talking about issues very specific to them and their online circles of people who seemingly constantly engage in behaviour worthy of being accused of sexual violence? they want you to connect the struggle that black people have in proving our innocence when accused of crimes with their struggle: being ostracised from communities for behaviour ranging from sexual harassment to outright sexual assault. they want you to equivocate these struggles because they earnestly believe that systemic discrimination against black people is equivalent to their former friendcord's self-policing.
this is something that only someone racist is capable of. make no mistake about it. there is nothing innocent about bringing up black people in an exaggerated defense against "false" accusations of sexual violence. they want you to feel guilty because you, the reader, know that systems are stacked against black people, and they want you to feel that their "struggle" - being constantly accused of sexual assault, something they attempt to paint as normal for trans people - is equivalent. do not believe them. it is transphobic and racist rhetoric and these people should be shamed.
I will conclude this with another post from isupportforcefem shoving black people into unnecessary hyperonline transfem discourse:
note that again black people are brought up where we are irrelevant. the gun that kills transfems And Black People. because us black people are constantly hurting others, you see, just as transfems are constantly hurting others - but don't worry, we aren't worth ostracising, even if we do constantly hurt people. you have to include us for our mistakes. said mistakes may range from being racist to being a rapist. but please forgive us. social ostracisation is on par with murder after all.
note the final post that would make Brock Turner proud: "accountability is a lie made to hurt underprivileged members." the concept of recognising the missing stair is, to people like isff, a form of oppression in itself: to warn people about someone's past behaviour is as good as pulling the trigger on them yourself. accountability of any form, including accountability as minor as no longer being allowed to participate in a community with someone you have harmed, is a falsehood - because by doing this to protect others you are hurting the feelings of someone who has done wrong, and transfems And Black People Btw who are more likely to do wrong somehow will be really hurt :(
i see two anime girls kissing and i feel nothing, this isnt a win for wlw, these things are barely human and they represent women as much as green M&M does
When you look into this topic, you repeatedly see themes of dissociation and disembodiment; fetishizing lesbians, Asian women, and little girls; and paraphilias like autopedophilia. It’s very much a transracial Buffalo Bill situation in which men wish to escape themselves and project onto a fantasized version of the submissive racial-sexual Other. Asian women have discussed white men’s “Yellow Fever” issue for years, and the AGP-anime connection is just one of its more recent variations.
Sources:
Japanese Cartoon Porn Helped Me Understand My Trans Identity by Samantha Riedel
Masculinity, anime, and gender dysphoria by SocialJusticeWizard
The Year When My Husband Started to Act Like a Tsundere Teenage Girl to Get My Attention by Anonymous
Just How Damaging Is Hentai?: A response to "The Year When My Husband Started to Act Like a Tsundere Teenage Girl to Get My Attention." by Katharine Dee
When Sons Become Daughters, Part V: The Links Between Trans Identity, Gifted Minds, Categorical Thinking—And Anime by Angus Fox
Hentai and the Pornification of Childhood by Gail Dines and Mandy Sanchez
White Sexual Imperialism by Sunny Woan
Why Guys Like Asian Girls by Anna Akana
Seeking Refuge in Idiosyncratic Sexual Identities (And Yaoi) by Eliza Mondegreen (yaoi/autoandrophilia)
i know so many women who have implants and they nonchalantly tell me stuff like they can’t feel their nipples anymore or they can’t perform certain motions with their arms anymore or they had complications and had to spend several thousand dollars to get them fixed like oh my god and for what? it’s for nothing
google search “mold inside breast implants” and prepare for your gorge to rise and your heart to break. cosmetic surgery is evil, cosmetic surgeons are evil.
i’m sure plenty of breast cancer survivors, trauma patients, wounded warriors, and battery victims would beg to differ with you on that statement
surgery to “correct” differences of appearances/visual distinctions that are treated as ugly, shameful, disfiguring, or disgusting by patriarchy position surgeons as patriarchal, medicalized authority figures of who is ugly and abnormal enough to cut into. living with visual difference, especially visual difference that resulted because of trauma is extremely difficult in a world that hates & punishes you for it. i don’t blame women in general for wanting cosmetic surgery and i won’t deny that some cosmetic surgeries will make it easier for them to navigate an awful appearance based world. i blame cosmetic surgeons for breaking the Hippocratic oath. putting someone under anesthesia and cutting them, where there is always a risk of death, because you have the medial authority to say “you are ugly and i will fix it” is not doing no harm.
I hate that breast cancer survivors in particular are trotted out as a “gotcha” example for why women ought not to criticize cosmetic surgery because in my experience breast cancer survivors often are some of the only women given any dignity whatsoever in being given information about the serious risks of breast surgery, and some of the few women for whom this decision is treated with any gravity. This isn’t to say that this is universal, and certainly women who have had cancer treatment- or prevention-related mastectomies are under tremendous pressure to “fix” their extremely stigmatized, newly atypical bodies; often reconstructive plastic surgeons are part of the suite of doctors performing cancer care and a woman may feel pressured to seek reconstruction just because it is an expected part of a cancer treatment sequence and part of showing her proper “recovery”. But woman-focused media, especially peer-created resource networks, about breast reconstruction are one of the few places where I have seen the risks and benefits of cosmetic surgery being discussed at all, and sometimes brutally and honestly weighed. Compare the materials on two very mainstream major American medical association websites: the American Cancer Society’s webpage on What to Expect After Breast Reconstruction and the American Society of Plastic Surgeons’ webpage on What are the Risks of Breast Augmentation? Hint: there is more information in the “after” section alone of the ACS’s pages on considering breast reconstruction than in the entire ASPS material on breast augmentation surgery.
If you’re still confused about the difference between material that respects a woman’s humanity and body autonomy and material that focuses on selling her a solution to the distress she has about her atypical appearance, i.e. material that is woman-focused versus material that is plastic surgeon-focused, compare also the ASPS website about breast reconstruction, which has videos about the “empowerment” of having a reconstruction-focused fashion show, but which does not contain factual information about what it actually feels like for a woman to undergo surgery for and then have breast implants after a mastectomy. The ASPS and The Plastic Surgery Foundation jointly sponsor a page promoting breast reconstruction which does mention some of the serious and life-altering risks of having reconstructive surgery and some of the permanent changes to a woman’s body that occur with mastectomy and various reconstructive techniques; however, the tone is patronizing, referring to surgical nerve damage as merely “unfortunate” and the benefits of surgery being named as “regained wholeness and femininity” and not having to wear a “cumbersome” prosthesis. (Permanent, irreversible nerve damage is less than cumbersome, apparently, even though it can cause severe and disabling chronic pain or other neuropathies, and is one of the most commonly lamented problems with both cancer-related mastectomies and cosmetic breast surgeries. No worries, though, there are plastic surgeons offering peripheral nerve surgery to stop you from feeling anything at all in your breasts should you experience this.)
Respecting women who have been left with so-called disfiguring body changes after medical treatments or surviving accidents, disasters, or violence means respecting that there are medical risks to surgery, that full and total functional restoration of body parts is not technologically possible, and that cosmetic restoration usually actually comes with functional losses. It means recognizing that women may feel traumatized not only by what initially led to their bodies being abnormally altered (like cancer, a disaster, war, or domestic abuse) but that afterwards a woman must face an awful decision in how to deal with being reminded of this trauma through the cruel medium of others’ reactions, a decision that continues to put her suffering body on the line and one that others will condone (or not) based on the very same cruelties pushing her to a decision about surgery. It means at bottom seeing women as full human people with memories and histories who must continue to live in their bodies after a reconstructive surgery, both having experienced their initial trauma and whatever consequences surgery has had for them, neither of which can be erased by the fact that their bodies merely appear aesthetically more pleasing or “normal”. Women live in there, you know.
As @kittyit notes there is something inherently frightening about dealing with an authority figure who believes “you are ugly and i will fix it”; any woman who wants reconstructive surgery has to pass through the literal gloved hands of someone who believes this and who makes a living from magnanimously rearranging the flesh of people that he or she has deemed to be both ugly enough to deserve fixing but also worthy of being restored to the dignity of appearing “normal”. The value judgments these doctors not only make as a matter of daily practice but that they literally profit from are terrifying. Like Kitty I don’t blame any woman (or otherwise female person) who seeks cosmetic surgery or who believes that they really did benefit in some way from it. If you spend a few minutes reading the very pink and very sponsored https://www.breastreconusa.org website it should be clear that it is the medical industries and doctors that are to blame here; they are not only exploiting women’s distress directly but trying to manufacture increased opportunities to be distressed, and trying to make it difficult for a woman to make the decision to handle her distress without surgery.
Women deserve better. Vaguely referring to women who have undergone serious reconstructive surgery as if they simultaneously do not experience any of the negative consequences of these surgeries and what they do experience conveniently vindicates the existence of a predatory industry is disgusting. The female experience goes far beyond factoids and snippets that support the (male) interests of those already in power. I’m tired of female experience being a void that is filled up with projections and suppositions. There is a reality to cosmetic surgery and it is by and large women who have to live it.
Breast cancer survivors report a horrifying culture in which their desire to go flat is challenged or outright ignored.
women who get mastectomies because of cancer and don’t want implants are often pressured into them too. it’s like plastic surgeons think they’re a captive audience and in some ways they are, so they try their “best” with these women and this is still the outcome
it pisses me off so much that we have been knowing this since the fucking 70s
but each generation of women is still struggling with becoming aware of this shit, getting sucked in and messed up by it
and now the finest minds of gen z are also being waylaid all over again through the trans bullshit, which is just the latest iteration of postmodernism, just this time for bodies.
a 25 year old friend looking me in the eye and saying with complete sincerity that no man would take advantage of the trans doctrine to invade women’s space, like, wake the fuck up, have you met MEN?
men love to be like “nobody could have ever imagined or predicted this, but somehow its happened and we finally need to sound the alarm” about things feminists have talked about for decades. if i went back in time and said “in 2025 there are pornography cults of suicidal losers” andrea dworkin would have just nodded
the context for this, to be clear, is the pornography cult of suicidal losers. nothing about which, i feel, is hard to believe for anyone who’s been critical of pornography for more than five minutes
Loneliness, porn’s next frontier, and the dream of endless masturbation
he did indeed. you can read robert jensen’s book Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity on a pdf here
^ from jensen’s article Why Are Men So Obsessed With Pornography? which you can read on substack here or on a pdf here . i do recommend, it’s a quick read and from just this year.
I look back at my high school experience, the way I was there in the Gay Straight Allience club right at the moment where things started to veer off the rails and into gender / split attraction model insanity (club renamed to a really generic queer/gender related title lol) and it makes me so sad. I watched it unfold real time as a 13/14 year old and swallowed everything hook line and sinker (as did my friends, they almost all adopted trans identities one by one) because it was our older peers we looked up to doing presentations on pansexuality and being a demiboy and how to use pronouns for a bigender person and how you could romantically only like women but sexually only like men since romance and sexuality are two totally separate axes but really the only moral sexuality is pansexuality so when we go around in a circle sharing what our sexualities are everybody better say pan haha just kidding etc… I was so so close in time to getting to experience what it would have been like before, but I just came a little too late.
I know I’ve said it before but I really feel like my entire generation (+/- like 10 years on either side as the ideology started to spread) has been just royally fucked by this nonsense beyond all repair. I’ve spoken about it before but i have never met a masculine female around my age who didn’t identify as male. Think about that!!! Like multiple generations of butch lesbians and masculine bi women and even straight tomboys nearly totally wiped out and put on the path of cross sex hormones and the major body-part altering surgery instead. Maybe it sounds dramatic but I will never stop grieving this. For my peers lost inside this and also because even if it might sound selfish to say, I think I would have understood myself a lot sooner than I did (very late) if this wasn’t the reality I grew up in. The rhetoric you’re immersed in as an adolescent really shapes your brain and understanding of the world in ways that even years of critical thinking and feminist analysis didn’t entirely uncover for me for many many many years.
On December 6th 1989, fourteen young women, many of them engineering students, were murdered in the mass shooting at Montreal’s École Polytechnique that was prompted by the killer’s hatred of women and what he said was “fighting feminism”.
On December 6, the National Day of Remembrance and Action on Violence Against Women, we remember:
Geneviève Bergeron
Hélène Colgan
Nathalie Croteau
Barbara Daigneault
Anne-Marie Edward
Maud Haviernick
Maryse Laganière
Maryse Leclair
Anne-Marie Lemay
Sonia Pelletier
Michèle Richard
Annie St-Arneault
Annie Turcotte
Barbara Klucznik-Widajewicz
Her persistence in rejecting him led Melodia, together with more than a dozen companions, to plan Viola’s abduction and rape, with the assumption that the law was behind him. As a matter of fact, at the time Article 544 of the Italian criminal code recognized a kind of marriage, the matrimonio riparatore, that would forgive the abuser for his crime and restore to the “damaged” victim her honor and that of her family. [...]
She was held captive for eight days and repeatedly raped by Melodia, who told her she would have to marry him so she would not become a “dishonored” woman. On January 2nd 1966, after one week, Franca Viola was released, and the kidnappers arrested. As expected, Filippo Melodia offered Franca a rehabilitating marriage. [...]
Knowing she had her family’s support, Franca publicly refused Melodia’s proposal, thus acting against a long-standing common practice in the Sicilian society of the time. Franca Viola became the first Italian woman to publicly reject a rehabilitating marriage. Not only that, but she went so far as to take her abductor to court, accusing him of kidnapping, carnal violence, and intimidation. It was not an easy thing to do: she and her family were threatened, ostracized and persecuted by most of the people of Alcamo, to the point of having their vineyard and barn burned to the ground.
These events and the following trial had a wide resonance in the Italian media, and the Parliament itself was directly involved, as it became obvious that part of the existing code clashed with the public opinion. Melodia’s lawyers tried to portray Viola as a willing participant of the so-called fuitina (elopement, a runaway to get married in secret) rather than a victim of kidnapping, but in May 1967, Melodia was finally found guilty. [...]
Article 544, allowing a rapist to marry his victim to extinguish his crime, was not repealed until 1981. In Italy, sexual violence became a crime against the person (instead against “public morality”) only in 1996. In 2014, Franca Viola was awarded the title of Grande Ufficiale dell’Ordine al Merito della Repubblica by President Giorgio Napolitano in a public ceremony to mark International Women’s Day.
