FeministNotSjw

my radfem side blog.

[femalegothic]

the thing about words like 'bitch' and 'cunt' is that they are, by definition, slurs against women. just because they're used in the common vernacular casually and lightheartedly doesn't change that fact. if anything it's demonstrative of how little people care about everyday misogyny.

[harp-unstrung]

I’ve heard/read people “But in some places it’s just a fun word, not a real insult!” As if that makes it better

[pure]

mods are asleep u know what time it is

i never understood why feminists get upset when people say our view of womanhood is just downright dreadful, that it’s not tea and it doesn’t eat and it’s just not the moment and it’s booooring and we make womanhood sound awful. and such and such demographic has a more beautiful view of it that we just don’t see.

because it’s true. it’s all true. they are right.

gender is the social system of female slavery that predates written history. gender was designed for this purpose and that is how it is enforced. what we call “female socialization” is really the psychological torture of the female human from birth to grave. all of these sociological terms, these analytical definitions, these cold, academic phrases protect us all from plainly confronting the horror and violence. psychological torture of women and girls becomes “female socialization,” the culturally encouraged compulsion to violate women and girls becomes “male socialization,” rape becomes “non-consenting sex,” sexual slavery becomes “heterosexuality,” and so on.

this psychological torture induces suicidal tendencies, self annihilation, and slave-like discipline and obedience into the minds of the female human. our natural fight or flight response is cruelly ground into dust due to the enforcement of gender. we are taught that self defense is inconvenient. we are violently groomed to value frailty and cowardice over strength and bravery, because femininity demands weakness. we do not eat. we put cancer causing chemicals on our faces, in our hair, in our vulvas in an attempt to fix what isn’t broken. we give ourselves infections. we punish our bodies for the crime of being female and our punishment is celebrated and rewarded. we are dying. we are taught to accelerate our own deaths for the benefit of men and civilization at large. a death cult and a slave society is forcefully installed in our minds and we are not free until death. that is what gender is.

gender transforms us into non-sentient objects, socially speaking. our social, physical, and sexual boundaries are held in contempt because they are not supposed to exist. gender maims and kills us. gender is wrapped up in god and the devil, and scripture and psychology, and religion and secularism, and it seems like we need to destroy heaven, hell and earth to be free of it. that is our impossible task.

that’s not very beautiful.

we aren’t supposed to see these things and we definitely aren’t supposed to name them. seeing the truth makes us mentally ill, naming the truth makes us bigots. i embrace our status as black sheep. we are criminals for seeing and naming. i look forward to what we will become when we move from seeing and naming and become brave enough to organize and attack. monsters? ghouls? a new kind of witch? the right wing says our rejection of men’s birthright makes us exterminators, harbingers of human extinction. that’s pretty cool. but that’s not beautiful. none of it is beautiful, and it is bereft of romance. the lovers of womanhood are right about that.

this is where we depart from our male supremacist enemies on the right and our male supremacist “allies” on the left. malcolm x spoke of foxes and wolves and they both have an appetite for our flesh as an entitlement and as a commodity, because of gender. all political movements need us to comply with our subjugation—the fascists, the communists, the anarchists, the liberals, the centrists. everyone loves gender. we must kill what they love. that’s not fun. no revolutionary goal is fun.

rejecting men’s ultimate political interest in our subjugation is very, very dreadful, and you will be excommunicated from the dominant social fabric for doing so. the wife who complains of her husband raping her too much will be banished from the village. the uterus haver whose vulva fails the moral criteria of unfettered inclusitivity will be kicked out of the queer socialist group chat. what happened to eve is simply the instructional manual for all women under patriarchy—you will be excommunicated for seeking knowledge and being disobedient.

being free sounds scary, confronting our prison sounds alienating, wouldn’t it be better to just have fun? if the slaves are conscious about their condition, they might resist, and that just isn’t beautiful. it’s not tea. it doesn’t eat. it’s not the moment.

while queers are telling us to smile a little bit more, to tap into our beautiful feminine souls and become empowered, sounding eerily similar to the christians they claim to hate so much, their right wing rivals want to abolish no fault divorce. our male comrades tell us we are counterrevolutionary for refusing to wait until they address men’s issues first. subservient leftist women who are deputized as prison wards to contain a feminist revolt are no better than tradwives. they both have chosen a specific male demographic to serve. why can’t we?

we are caught between two competing male supremacist movements that seek to extract resources from women’s labor, wombs, vulvas and flesh. that is what “Politics” is. that is what the real gender binary is. the global war between the older patriarchy of traditional feudal-agrarian societies and the modern patriarchy of liberal industrialized nations. they are competing over how the woman is regulated—through prostitution or through marriage? as birthing people or as surrogates?

it is too late to remove this knowledge from written history, so the modern patriarchy of liberal, industrial capitalism seeks to obfuscate these sexed patterns instead. we can’t name what we can’t define. it’s just too complex and too sophisticated and you need to be intersectional. if you still manage to name it after cutting through all of these distortions, excommunication awaits. we are all at risk of becoming eve for looking patriarchy in the eye and gouging it out. we must band together as vagrants and refugees.

but let’s not get distracted here. we are on no side of this war. excuse me for being ugly, and dramatic, and offensive, and boring. i like doing fun things. maybe the buzzkills will figure out what fun and beauty are all about one day. until then, the accusations are all true. our assessment will resonate with women as they see their position in our civilization for what it is, and we will not stop naming it until we have freed ourselves from it. i’m tired of us complaining too. we need to wrap this stage of history up and put it to sleep, for good.

[honeyapplebutterfly]

One thing that led me to detransitioning was the realization that I hated being a woman, I didn’t hate being female. I hated being made to be quiet, being always less than my male peers and male friends and brother, being sexualized from a young age. I hated being forced to wear feminine clothing that made me feel horrifically uncomfortable, I hated the idea that I HAD to be interested in sex especially sex with men, I hated never being listened to or seen as intelligent, I hated not being safe to enjoy the things I enjoyed (nature hiking, comic book conventions, etc). I just wanted to be seen as HUMAN. Unfortunately no pronouns will ever make the world see female human beings as actually human. But I don’t hate being female. My female body connects me to other female people, as a sister and a friend and a lover. My body serves me. My body is able to create fucking human life. My body cleanses my insides every month to protect me from infection. My body is a fucking marvel of nature. It never needed to change. I never needed to change.

[kragehund-est]

people don't like to acknowledge that the "heh LUCKY, where was she when i was in school?" reaction to female teachers predating on male students is primarily because those men are sexist towards women.

yes, she is the abuser and the student is the victim. yes, it is also sexist and gross that they would assume young boys have those sexual feelings towards their abuser. so the RESULT of those comments is harm towards the victims and defense of the abuser.

but the SOURCE of those comments is less that they can't see boys as victims and more that they think women are sex objects, so how could a boy be victimized by a sex object? you can see that because mentions of the victim are always throwaway lines and projection like "eh, he probably liked it anyway" and the mentions of the abuser are rants about how hot the teacher is and how bad THEY want her.

they KNOW boys can be victims, you can see that when there's a male perpetrator. but to those people, it's the same as if you'd said the boy was given a free cheeseburger to eat or a sports car to drive. this is not to defend the abusers in any way at all. this is to explain my analysis of where these comments from come from, and what the result is.

[radfemyjasdottir]

It’s funny and quite ironic that there’s this whole “new” concept about men’s rights surfacing, that goes, “if a man speaks and cries about his abuse then it must be true! Because men are silenced!”

What makes this humorous, is that it’s not new in the slightest. Men have been crying wolf against their wives for centuries.

“My wife is demonic, she needs to be imprisoned and punished for witchcraft!” “My wife is insane and hysterical — she needs to be locked up and lobotomized!” “My ex is crazy — she needs to be humiliated on social media and ostracized from her community!”

What makes it even better, is that now social workers and psychologists are aware that men do this. It’s taken with a grain of salt when men cry abuse over a woman, because they lie about it so much to paint her as the villain. When in reality, it’s probably reactive abuse.

[apportioned-abortion]

I am a social worker and a few years ago, I went to this amazing seminar on reactive abuse. Now, often in trainings and seminars, the speakers will twist themselves into pretzels to be as 'inclusive' as possible and include every fringe case so as to not upset anyone.

This speaker was straight up "when discussing domestic violence, nearly all cases are men perpetrating against women, so that is the language we will be using. This is not to say that same sex couples cannot commit domestic violence or that men are never victims of women, but to portray this as an equal issue is disingenuous. If anyone has any particular questions about different dynamics, I will answer those at the end."

It was so refreshing to actually name the problem! The seminar focused on coercive control and reactive abuse, and the ways that the system punishes women and mothers for not keeping themselves and their children safe while doing basically nothing to infringe on an abuser's right to abuse them.

I wish I could remember more details about the presenter to share the information.

[diana-lostandfound]

It's not wrong to have a healthy fear of men and it's nothing to "work on getting over." Men are cruel and dangerous and avoiding them is the mark of a smart, sane, self-respecting woman. Refuse to pathologize your own intuition and intelligence.

[thesweetscentofbooks]

The cognitive dissonance men need for this!

[catholicmasculinitymanual]

A Common Theme, from Gentlemen: “It’s obvious girls & women get attacked all the time, they should constantly be on their guard in public, guys get women way too drunk on purpose as ‘a move’, don’t ever let a woman walk alone at night- but I personally don’t know any predatory men whatsoever.”

[nansheonearth]

It’s not dissonance. Men actively benefit from a society where women are in constant fear of sexual harassment/rape. They prefer the way we are socialized because of it. And they prefer the bar being so low for ~nice guys~ to be the bare minimum of decent human beings. This type of society is more important than the safety of individual women in their life.

[kiefbowl]

wait ok genuinely kind of interested in your opinion on porn now......... if only because those big 3 you mentioned are always the reasons i see people throwing out so id love to hear a deeper take than that

I'm genuinely surprised anyone could follow me and not know my stance on porn, but that's okay. simplified and in no particular order and in no means exhaustive:

porn creates perverse incentives

porn normalizes the purchase of women as sexual objects for men to use

porn is often called "rape on tape" by feminists, which I mostly agree with in the sense that if a woman would otherwise not have had sex except that she is being paid, then she is not consenting. you cannot purchase consent, the consent is not meaningful then.

additionally, you can not verify if you are watching people be raped in any other way. porn sites are filled with stolen videos, coerced videos, actual minors, aggressive rape that was filmed with or without the victim's knowledge, and other videos of this nature. there is no way to verify this at all from videos that are somehow not these things. things like "amateur" are often just marketing by the porn company or pimp, or they're stolen videos.

porn creates a social script for sex. this social script is least of all - boring and predictable. it also reinforces the long standing conservative gender understanding (see 2). porn also reinforces ideas of homophobia and racism under the guise of "taboo." porn is literally so conservative, but because it's considered "shocking" to "puritans" (religious men watch porn all the time), people talk like it's this liberal fantasy. porn is constantly reestablishing the status quo in the most perverse ways.

it's been demonstrated that people who are porn addicts very quickly escalate to more violent porn, and that this plays out in their sex lives with their (often vulnerable) sex partners.

the violence that happens in porn is real. the idea that it's a "fantasy" is marketing by porn website and pimps. if a man slaps a woman across the face, that really happened. why does it matter if she says "yes" to it - that's her "job" so how can she say no? (see 3 and also 4).

there is so much evidence and testimony by porn stars of the absolutely awful and terrifying conditions in which they work, even in the quote unquote "real" industry. drugs, alcohol, violence, coercion, exposure to STIs, homelessness, pimping, prostitution, mental illness, suicide, lack of benefits. It's bananas that anyone would be surprised by this when it's pointed out, we're talking about an industry that films sex on video. The majority of people in the sex industry want out. It ruins their lives, and once in it's very hard to leave and lead a normal life. The idea that the industry needs regulation to be "fixed" is bizarre and just seems like pimp and porn industry marketing to get people to look the other way.

Poverty creates porn. Social welfare for the poorest of our women would prevent them from entering the industry in the first place. Women go into porn out of need, not desire. social media pushes that porn stars loooove their jobs is 1. porn site and pimp propaganda 2. literally marketing because men want to believe this.

I am not religious, I don't believe in god. I love sex and masturbation. it's the most natural thing in the world and people don't actually need to "learn" how to do it - it's innate within us. Porn is just one more way to humiliate women in a misogynist society that requires women to be fearful of sex and rape constantly, and uneducated in their own sexual desires and boundaries.

[fairy25]

I’m relieved everyone is roasting him in the comments but good lord

[kiefbowl]

by the way, yes this is financial abuse. he has trapped her to be financially dependent on him and I guarantee the "she never told me about her credit card debt!" is a twisted version of the truth. I'm sure he knew on some level. Look at the sentence "We chose a place together and she should have picked something she could afford better not make me pay more in the future" - of course they chose a place together, this is his wife! But then he argues "she should" have picked something she could have afford - absolving him of any responsibility of where they chose to live together. And then the piece de resistance: "make me pay more in the future". The reversal, this was by design by her of course, this is actually her abusing him. She's making him pay more by her choice of living space, which he was not responsible for. This is how you know this man is a manipulative abuser.

This sort of post on reddit is the abuser trying to frame the story in such a way to gain online sympathy so that they can 1. sooth their ego and 2. give "evidence" to their spouse that she is wrong and he is right. some abusers over shoot and get roasted because their ego and self importance and loose relationship with facts means they're over-confident in their own bullshit arguments and drop the ball on their manipulation of strangers. However, lots of reddit posts like this don't over-shoot, and many abusers do garner sympathy. Imagine if he had said something more along: "My wife insisted we get this apartment and has suddenly started arguing that I should pay more because I make slightly more! But I've just learned she's been hiding her credit card debt from me!" Perhaps that would have been truthful, but how do you know for sure it isn't an abuser reframing facts for his benefit.

[kiefbowl]

some women do not have any patience for abused women and women in abusive situations, and I see it on radblr all the time. it’s unfortunate. what gets me is that they’re very willing to dissect every decision the abused woman made, but seem unwilling to believe in the intentions of his actions. women should know the red flags, but men aren’t responsible for the red flags, those just happen spontaneously. she shouldn’t have trusted him, but anything that happened that gained her trust was a spontaneous phenomenon not something he did intentionally. it’s as if up until the moment of abuse, he’s an amorphous blob who just accidentally explodes into abuse. he’s featureless, but his arms swing randomly. her money ends up in his account due to his oafishness, not insidiousness. when they started dating, he must have been a passive actor - not perusing her with the specific hopes of dominating her once all opportunities align.

Men are responsible for their actions, and not only their abusive actions. They’re responsible for the roses they send, too.

[lostandfem]

the weird thing about tims that transition after having a wife and kids is that a lot of tims will also cite that they couldnt be men because they failed at 'being men', ie failing the male gender role

but one of the criteria for succeeding at that gender role is having a wife and kids so... idk smths not adding up

not saying this in support of gender roles btw just pointing out an inconsistency

[drbased]

Women and our interests have always been associated with conservatism, it seems. The concept of 'pearl clutching' is an allusion to women being offended over modern and liberal sensibilities.

I suspect this is because whenever men want to reduce the damage of their rape and violence, they don't know how to do it outside of highly restrictive societal construction. As they are incentivised to ignore the root of the problem, they will always 1. project it onto women, 2. deflect with scapegoats, and 3. create strict social rules in the hope that they can at least make the violence happen elsewhere, or have it hidden from view, so they don't have to look bad, or feel bad, about what they are doing to women en masse.

Conservatives, for example, oppose pornography because they, like the pornographers, believe that sex 'corrupts' women, and they don't want their own female relatives to be corrupted. Meanwhile, feminists oppose pornography because of the material violence committed by men against women within it. But men cannot percieve that women have our own reasoning, so they assume we must align with the male 'conservative' viewpoint. They do the same thing the conservatives do and deflect a male problem - belief that sex, interchangeable with rape, is sinful - onto women, who recognise that there is a difference between consent and rape and simply wish to not be raped.

Women's recognition of moral horrors and our desire to minimise them/be shielded from them is considered 'pearl clutching' because men do not take our claims or morality seriously. They have decided that the violence is a necessary evil, and that morality is not simply a recognition of material harm, but some ethereal and symbolic 'greater good'. The horrific damage caused by men is a nuisance that must be stratified and organised. When this damage is criticised by women, it is understood to be a roundabout way of addressing the same concerns that the conservative man has - and the very fact that women care about actual harm, and therefore we have an emotional investment in the topic, is used as further proof that we are frivolous, unserious, and incapable of making the hard decisions required for leadership. Men, you see, already know that their violence is a problem, and conservativism has its ideological solutions, so everything women say and get upset about is not only redundant but either hysterical or manipulative. The idea that women simply care is never taken into account - because we're all raised to conceptualise the world from a male point of view.

Men have said that prostitution is bad because it corrupts women, so 'swerfs' must secretly agree. Men have said that maleness and femaleness are inherent essences and that the 'feminisation' of society will cause its downful, so 'terfs' must secretly agree. Women are denied a voice at every turn, always assumed to be parroting a much more emotional, manipulative and hysterical version of what men have always said.

[themothwhisperer]

//Spoilers ‼️ for the movie Obsession//

Nikki being the victim in this movie is literally not up for debate btw.

Bear f*cked up big time. He paid the price, sure, but not before causing a lot of damage and trauma around him. Especially to Nikki.

There are two key moments for me that clearly highlight how Bear is truly not a good guy and never was. At all.

Firstly, and most importantly, when Nikki asks him to kill her as her possessed self is sleeping and unaware of their interaction. This is Bear’s first very straightforward opportunity to fix his mess. If he truly cared about her and her wellbeing, he would take immediate action. Like kill himself. Sucks, but gotta do what you gotta do, man. But no, of course. Bear takes personal offence into the idea that she’d rather die than forcefully be with him. It’s pathetic and enraging. Let’s remind ourselves here that Bear is regularly r*ping her (and forcing other forms of intimacy on her as well), enslaving her mind and quite literally stealing her entire life from her. The notion of consent is simply nonexistent and he’s actively okay with that. Before everything spirals into total chaos, he just wants to alter his wish, not erase it fully. He still wants that control over her, whether she is happy or not. She pleads for liberation from this curse and Bear decides to victimize himself, be selfish again and then he walks away. Ruining his ultimate chance.

Secondly, the suicide scene. Here’s the thing… It’s too late at this point. He missed out on several opportunities to make things better and he kept on prioritizing his power over Nikki. It led him to a point of no return where his life is irreparably turned upside down, his two closest friends were killed (because of him) and Nikki’s possessed self represents a very real danger for him (all his fault, once again). There is only one way out of this: He needs to die. Even with this unavoidable truth, Bear manages to fail again. He swallows all the pills and a few seconds later, he cowardly tries to undo his actions. The storyline leads to him overdosing and dying regardless, but this moment is decisive to represent his true character. It still wasn’t enough, somehow, for him to end it all. Truth be, it was unfortunately too late for Nikki one way or the other. The trauma was just too massive with the murders and the self-harm. He ruined her entirely.

If you ask me, the title is about him being horrendously obsessed with her, not the other way around. His obsession led him there. He refused to take a risk and potentially get in the friendzone. This was unthinkable and impossible to accept for him.

And also, that sickening story she presents at the party… It’s not just to generate a deeply uncomfortable and eerie atmosphere, it’s not just to shock the audience with its content. It’s about them. It’s literally them. She mentioned feeling a sibling-like connection with him. Nikki is being abused and tortured by someone she considered a brother. This is a tale about his cruelty. This is her cry for help. And it breaks my heart.

Masterpiece of a movie, truly.

[ashortcuttomushrooms]

Some thoughts I have on Obsession that I haven't yet seen discussed too much in the tags (or I have, but I just want to express them in my own words):

While it's somewhat played up for comedic purposes, the scenes in which Bear asks Not Nikki to stop doing something and she just goes "Okay! :D" stick out to me so much. She was very willing to hear him out when he complained about her behavior (at least sometimes) but it was never going to be enough anyway. When he was telling her that hiding in the corner and watching him sleep made him uncomfortable, she seemed genuinely worried about having made him feel bad, something he never once did for her or the real Nikki (made even more heartbreaking by the "I can be anything you want me to be!" line)

A lot of people are focusing on how Bear first asks to alter his wish and only asks to cancel it once he's told it can't be altered (understandably, it's a great and very important scene), but do not forget that after he buys more One Wish Willows, the first thing he tries to do is wish for Nikki to "only love him as a friend." Even when he's trying to revert things back to "normal" he still feels entitled to having her in his life. And at first I thought "well that's still not good but it's a little better" but then I thought about it for more than five seconds and no, that's not a little better, because after everything he put her through she would never want to have anything to do with him ever again. To try to ask for her to still be in his life is also extremely selfish of him

Still on the previous point, when he asks Ian to wish for him to have never made a wish. There's a lot to say about this scene, but one of the things that sticks out to me is that phrasing. Don't wish for Nikki to have her autonomy back, just make a wish that will make me feel like I fixed my mistake and might turn things back to how they were before my wish (aka, with Nikki still liking me, even if just as a friend)

One more thing about that scene, when he tells Ian that "he can be with Nikki". Of course he says that he "didn't mean it that way", and I sort of believe him, but it's impossible to ignore that he immediately thinks bringing up Ian's attraction to Nikki will make him agree to go along with his plan, the same way his own attraction to Nikki made him make his wish

Maybe this is just me, but when he's in the car with Sarah and he questions her on whether she thinks he should be with someone "like you?", he doesn't seem upset like I assume someone would be if they're in a committed relationship and another person suddenly suggests they should be with them instead. He seems very open to the idea, despite never once having been shown to have feelings for Sarah (in fact at the beginning of the movie he outright tells Nikki he doesn't like her like that), like he just wants to be loved by a woman and now that a "normal" one is showing interest in him he's very willing to abandon Not Nikki despite literally wishing for her, just because she's not exactly what he hoped for and is causing him problems

This is more so just praising Inde Navarrette's acting skills, and I know the point is that Not Nikki is the exact opposite of Nikki, but one notable difference between the two is their crying, and now that I think about it their screaming too. Not Nikki cries and screams in a sort of childish way, and it reminds me of the way some men want their girlfriends to act, like a child that needs them for comfort (maybe minus the screaming). It doesn't work with Bear, it comes off as a bit of a tantrum and just annoys and freaks him out, but despite obviously being how she really feels, with the fact that he literally wished her into existence, I can't help but feel that even the way she expresses pain is geared towards making him like her. But Nikki screams like a regular, horrified adult woman. When she cries in the final scene, there's no high-pitched whining to it, just pure horror and despair. Man I hope Inde Navarrette gets tons of awards for her performance

I really want to rewatch this movie, it's been 24 hours and I can't stop thinking about it

[rad-dworkin]

Do people live in an alternate universe where J.K Rowling is a misogynist misanthrope who creates her books out of malicious intent, or are they just dense? I'm leaning towards the latter.

[lenalenouilleisblogging]

The mass psychosis surrounding JKR is getting increasingly funny because at the end of the day the real issue is that there is a group of people who does not have the maturity to admit that a woman they dislike might have any talent or redeeming quality, so they have to invent all these problems and grasp at straws to retroactively try to strip her of all her accolades. (It's especialky absurd in this case, you'd have to have no reading comprehension to seriously believe Hermione Granger isn't meant to be relatable and likable) They're all former fans and they're very salty about it.

Isn't it interesting how cancelled male artists don't get this treatment. There's no viral thinkpiece about how actually, everything Gaiman ever wrote was bigoted garbage. Food for thought maybe

[evenlesssentimentaltranslator]

Meanwhile Gaiman apparently straight up wrote a paedo story

[feral--bog--witch]

Stephan King as well.

[gothhabiba]

if the Hunger Games were real you know you'd have liberals saying things like "it's so cool how the Hunger Games allow anybody a chance to win, it's so democratic" and "it's great to have some District 12 representation amongst the winners of the Hunger Games" and "we need to make sure that young girls receive just as much Hunger Games combat training as young boys #feminism"

[servin-terf-haha]

trans "girls" would be all the rage for the sects/Districts who want to win bc you get two boys (on in a skirt) for the price of one to maximize odds :)

[pjharvey]

post metoo post amber heard and there are posts going around on this site by “feminist” bloggers about how “believe survivors” is a dumb phrase that oversimplifies the Complex issues about how false allegations happen all the time… no they don’t. they literally do not we have countless statistics to back this. and you know why they don’t? bc if you tell someone you have been sexually assaulted they view you as a Victim forever. the people whose lives are most ruined by SA allegations as a rule are the people who come forward