Getting TERF-nazi-fascist accusations for saying the most feminist 101 thing ever is a canon experience for women of color/from developing countries. It doesn't even matter if you never said a word about trans identification or even claims to support its activism, the accusations will appear on your door sooner or later
our biggest problem is that women believe men are the people they pretend to be around women. That is not a real guy, that is his 'interacting with a woman' costume. I was reminded this for the 6897th time the other friday where not many people were in the office and the nicest young guy in the department who crochets and is very kind to all the women here was talking to a few other young guys about his girlfriend and his friends' girlfriends, and it was harrowing. What he was saying was bad enough but he and the others even stopped themselves and laughed and said "well, that's about as much as I can say in the office." like what there's MORE?
All the while I am sure his girlfriend thinks she has struck gold with her nice long haired golden retriever crochet boyfriend
I'm about to say something really mean but it does feel like most women are just insanely gullible. They can witness males' woman-hating all around them from every type man and in every aspect of society for their whole lives but their boyfriend crochets and acts like a nice guy in front of her so he must be different from all the rest of them. It's like a baby being distracted by someone jingling keys in front of their face. And yeah the men are laughing at you with their friends for falling for it. But if I told you about it, you would say no, you are wrong, bitter manhating bitch. he literally crochets
Isn't it interesting that when they made the show Interview With The Vampire, they turned Louis, a white slave owner living in wealth on a plantation, into a black man, victimised by racism.
And yet they had no problem making Louis a slave owner of women. A pimp. Who takes girls from broken homes and sells them to men. And profits from their rape. He's trying to fight racism and make it as a black man by enslaving women. And the thing is even turned into a joke.
Tells a lot about our society I think. We can't have a white slave owner it doesn't make for a good character anymore, but trafficking women is redeemable and even something we can root for. Apparently.
Another thing is that, in the books, sexual orientation is not a thing. No one's gay, straight, bi, lesbian. You could say “well that means they're all bisexual!” but not really; there's just no sexual or romantic “orientation”. It doesn't exist in this world. Nor does homophobia. Vampires, especially, are not sexually active, and they find beauty in everything. Plus their powers make sexual intercourse pale in comparison, they have no interest in it.
However in the show, to once again please a supposedly “progressive audience”, sexual orientation is clearly stated and defined, Louis is gay, Lestat is bi, it somehow matters a great deal and defines their personalities. They have sex like a normal couple, some vampires are straight, they even get blowjobs. All vampires are sexually active.
Most notably, while the word "nigger" is rejected by Louis, he's quite fond of the word "queer", in any time period.
So once again, they try to be progressive, but it ends up feeling performative and reactionary.
I applaud the show makers for making their main characters an openly gay couple, instead of simply going for the “homoeroticism” suggested in the books. And also for introducing anti-racism themes, given that Anne Rice seemed to think it was okay for a white plantation owner to be her main protagonist.
But the enslavement of women is no more acceptable than the enslavement of black people. And making sexual orientation an issue when it was intentionally made a non-issue is not progress.
Isn't it interesting that when they made the show Interview With The Vampire, they turned Louis, a white slave owner living in wealth on a plantation, into a black man, victimised by racism.
And yet they had no problem making Louis a slave owner of women. A pimp. Who takes girls from broken homes and sells them to men. And profits from their rape. He's trying to fight racism and make it as a black man by enslaving women. And the thing is even turned into a joke.
Tells a lot about our society I think. We can't have a white slave owner it doesn't make for a good character anymore, but trafficking women is redeemable and even something we can root for. Apparently.
I was watching a streamer and when he realized that he was the only male character in his team of 8 people, his immediate reaction, after pretending to feel threatened, was to say "I'm their pimp that's why!" He then proceeded to continue role playing as a pimp, a.k.a a slave master, during the entire rest of the game. The other players, who were helping and rescuing him, didn't know, but he was commenting their actions with "that's right, these are my ladies, you have to serve me, you have to protect me, I'm your pimp, who's gonna pay your bills?" I closed the stream before it got worse.
Just thought it was interesting that, when outnumbered, a man still feels like a king. He'll even make up a scenario in his head in which he owns the women around him. It's incel logic isn't it?
I'm reaching, maybe. But I do think men don't feel threatened as long as women are around. No matter how numerous. They feel threatened when women are not accessible ; when we're numerous AND out of reach. It has to be both. Otherwise, men just keep on imagining that they matter.
a male classmate was watching mother x child porn. during class. gave me flashbacks to middle school where boys were watching porn during breaks and showing it to each other, laughing about it. it starts early. this world is sick and doomed bruh
Jesus fucking Christ. I heavily suspect that a lot of the sexual harassment I experienced in MS was based on the porn the boys/my bullies were consuming (lots of references and terms I used to not understand), but "at least" I never had to suffer them watching porn nearby. The perk of the internet arriving on phones when I was halfway through HS ig.
It was the same in 2001. The first time I saw porn was because of the boys at my school. They were all in the playground, conglomerated around something, laughing like they were having the best time ever. It got me curious. I was 12 and they were around my age. The school bell rang, and they all ran in a hurry, still laughing, and dropping the magazine page they were looking at on the ground. I picked the page up.
It was a close up of a woman's face surrounded with penises. Her face was covered in semen. I had no idea what it was at the time, it looked like glue, it was absolutely repulsive, extremely graphic, but I didn't fully understand what I was seeing. And yet, the image is buried in my mind to this day.
I knew I shouldn't be looking at this. But I didn't know what to do with the page, felt like holding something illegal, something I shouldn't be caught with and something no one else should see. So I went outside the school, folded it and dropped in a street corner. Arrived late in class. Never talked about it.
The boys at my school were routinely sexually assaulting girls, by the way, it was considered normal, it had a little nickname called "passer une main", which means to "slip a hand", and that was boys touching, caressing or grabbing girls' butts, especially in crowded spaces, in corridors or in the stairs. It was a daily thing, it started in primary school, when we around 7 I guess.
womyn who have overcome depression or are currently trying to do so, what has helped you most? i'm having a very hard time right now and could use some insights from the community.
journaling or other mindfulness practices
reading about other women's experiences
art or music
exercise
drastic life change ex. new job, moving
medication
therapy
other (answer in tags/replies)
womyn who have overcome depression or are currently trying to do so, what has helped you most?
Medication can give you the stability to do the rest. There are some good supplements as well.
Writing down your thoughts and feelings helps to clarify it, and also helps with rumination, because once it's on paper you don't need to go over it again and again in your head. It also helps to write down what we're grateful for, as we often focus on the negative. Even the small things: I have a roof over my head, my pet is healthy, I ate a nice meal.
Therapy, if you find someone trustworthy and with a modern approach to therapy, it can help you see things from another angle, point out your patterns, triggers, and validate your feelings. Also, it helps to talk to someone respectful, quite simply.
Drastic life changes like cutting ties with toxic people, including family if needed, toxic workplaces, or simply workplaces that give you nothing to look forward to. Moving to a new place. Or sometimes just moving all the furniture around, decorating, throwing away all the crap or studying something new. It's never too late to be a student again, or start a new career, or change everything that needs changing.
Creativity, do something for the sake of it and let your mind wonder. Write a short novel. Draw. Grow plants. Decorate. Do something with your hands especially. Join a club, a course, a community, if you want. Or do it alone and enjoy this time for yourself. Make something.
Explore. Humans are not meant to live such tedious lives. Repetitiveness kills our spirit. So explore your city, explore nature, take a different route, visit a museum, go see a spectacle, try a new restaurant, check out a forest, go hiking, go camping, explore, explore, explore. Cultivate your curiosity.
Exercise, just 10 minutes of soft gym every day in your bedroom makes a difference. Do it enough times and you'll start to feel a need for it. Makes you stronger, lifts your mood, creates a connection to your body, grounds you in the present. Find something that you like. Don't do something just because others do it. Yoga, swimming, climbing, body building, running, cycling, dancing, boxing, hiking, volleyball and some sports I've never heard of. It's cool if you can mix exercise with something else too. Like you can mix exercise with creativity = dancing. Exercise + exploration = hiking. Exercise + self-confidence = boxing or swimming.
Feminism, reading about other women's experiences is useful because it makes you feel vindicated. And you understand that you're not the problem, and that you're part of a collective, a community, a class. And you can be yourself.
Take care of your health, of your sleep, do the blood tests, all the exams, make the appointments, don't let it linger, take your body seriously.
And remember life isn't a race, we all get there in the end. And each path is different depending on the person. Don't try to emulate someone else, or society's idea of what a real life is, we're all different and so are our needs and aspirations.
Melissa York meets the pioneering pals who designed their own housing co-op for the over-50s — no men allowed. Ten years since New Ground op
A group of female friends are gathered on a balcony covered in purple wisteria. Laughter echoes around the communal garden as 96-year-old Hedi Argent, the eldest of 26 residents, poses for our photographer below.
“The price label is still on!” yells her neighbour, Angela Ratcliffe, 92. Another woman rushes out to snip the tag from the back of Argent’s top as teasing cries of “Who are you wearing?” and “How much?” ring out.
This is no ordinary housing development. It is Britain’s first all-female cohousing community for older people. Ten years ago, 26 women ranging in age from their early fifties to their mid-eighties moved into this three-storey brick block, which they had co-designed on the site of an old convent school tucked behind the local high street.
New Ground housing development in High Barnet, north London, is not an old people’s home — the women like to say they “look out for each other, not look after each other”. Twenty-one of the original 26 still live here today. They come from vastly different walks of life but are united by one radical idea: what if we didn’t have to grow old alone but were able to share a home with our friends?
“Most women say it,” observes Argent, a former social worker who is Jewish and fled to Britain from Vienna to escape the Nazis when she was ten years old. “Men a little less, I think. But women very much say, ‘Wouldn’t it be lovely to live together? We’ll buy a big house…’ ”
“ ‘… and we’ll have a kitchen in the middle and we’ll always have wine,’ ” Jude Tisdall, a 74-year-old resident, pitches in.
“But very few people are able to realise it,” Argent finishes.
All of female life is here: about nine different nationalities, workers and retirees, people who left school at 15 and people with a PhD. Some of the women are widowed after happy marriages, some are divorced after unhappy ones. There’s a lesbian couple sharing one apartment, a few who are dating or have long-term partners and others who prefer to stay single.
Men are allowed to visit — there’s a guest suite for friends and relatives — but they cannot own or rent a home here.
“It’s about taking control of our individual lives. It’s not a rejection of men,” Tisdall says.
The seeds of New Ground were planted in 1998 by Maria Brenton, now 80, who at the time taught a master’s course in women’s studies at Cardiff University. In the late 1990s she had visited North America, Denmark and Holland with a grant from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, a policy research organisation working to end poverty, to find out how different countries looked after older people.
“I was able to stay in a fantastic cohousing group of older women overlooking a canal in the middle of Amsterdam,” the academic recalls. “Holland was contemplating the ageing of its society in an inspiring, progressive way that the UK wasn’t back then and, let’s be honest, still isn’t today.”
With an ageing population and higher female life expectancy, about 2.7 million women aged 65 and over live alone in the UK, compared with 1.5 million men.
In the late 1990s, in contrast to the UK, the Dutch government was already allocating grants to help the 55-plus generation plan ahead and live communally.
One warm June day in 1998 in a pub in King’s Cross, Brenton shared the findings from her trip with a group of women from various feminist and housing networks she was involved with. She’d circulated an advert for the event around the different groups and in newspapers.
A core of women who attended that meeting became fixated on the idea of living together as they aged. One of them was north Londoner Shirley Meredeen, a former journalist, teacher, feminist activist and divorcee with two grown-up sons, who was part of a movement called Growing Old Disgracefully (GOD).
“I don’t think she would have minded me saying that she was a bit of a battering ram, which is exactly what the project needed,” Brenton says in a new book, Our Later Years, which documents what the women achieved in their own words.
Meredeen joined forces with Madeleine Levius, another feminist activist, counsellor and teacher, to form the Barnet-based Older Women’s Co-Housing group, or OWCH, because they “loved the idea of being a thorn in the side”, with the aim of developing accommodation with shared facilities, which they would control.
The women spent 12 years searching for a suitable site in London close to hospitals, public transport links and shops. Time and again they were disappointed. When the group turned down one site on a busy crossroads early on, they were labelled “difficult” by some in the housing sector.
But with the help of Hanover Housing Association, a non-profit provider of accommodation for older people, they eventually found an ideal plot: St Martha’s, a former convent school in Union Street, an easy walk from the shops and cafés of High Barnet high street.
Hanover was prepared to finance the purchase and build upfront. But then came a five-year planning battle with Barnet council. Argent recalls how, initially, planning officers said there were already “too many old people” in the borough and that they were worried this new project, which was attracting interest from women across London, would overburden their social care services.
Also, she says, the local authority “just didn’t understand” why the women wanted eight out of the 25 proposed flats to be for social housing tenants. “The women who started this didn’t want it to be seen as a place of privilege just for women who could afford to belong to this kind of community,” explains Tisdall, who had experienced living in a squat when she first moved to London from Dublin in 1971.
Including social housing in the project created a logjam that took eight years to break. But the women stuck to their guns. A London-based charity, Housing for Women, came on board. Hanover covered the £7.4 million development costs. OWCH lined up 17 women who were willing to sell their homes to buy flats for themselves. The remaining eight were sold to Housing for Women, to rent out for social housing.
Funding came close to unravelling on a number of occasions, but the project was thrown a lifeline with a grant of about £1 million from the Tudor Trust, a charitable organisation with a history of supporting equitable housing projects.
Hanover allowed the women to choose the architects. They went with the London-based Pollard Thomas Edwards (PTE), who armed them with disposable cameras to explore the local conservation area, noting roof angles, tile colours and brick types to inform the design. The women remember that PTE thought gathering 26 opinions might be like “herding cats” — but the group had already spent the best part of a decade honing their ideas and had chosen two of their number to liaise with PTE.
They settled on a design of 25 apartments with their own kitchens and “wet room” bathrooms, connected via corridors and walkways to a shared common house with a kitchen, a large table for communal meals, a screen for movie nights and plenty of bookshelves. When I visit, a work-in-progress puzzle is out on a table overlooking the walled garden — a riot of wildflowers around a sun-drenched pergola.
The whole place was future-proofed with extra-wide doorways and automatic doors to accommodate wheelchairs should they be required as the women aged.
The women moved in over two days in December 2016. Madeleine Levius was not among them: she died aged 78 in 2005 and never saw her project finished. Maria Brenton chose not to live in the development she inspired, preferring to move on to other projects. Shirley Meredeen was able to enjoy six years living in the home she fought to create before she died in 2022. There is a prominent plaque by the front door in her memory.
“Right up until her dying day she said to me, ‘You’ve got to keep this going. You’ve got to encourage the next generation of women,’ ” Tisdall says. “We want them to use our experience and to take this over one day.”
This wish is a big part of the reason why the women of New Ground wrote Our Later Years — a manifesto but also a collection of incredible personal stories.
One resident, Lida Mansourian, 65, was a political activist in Tehran who survived the notorious Evin Prison. She later escaped Iran on a camel to reach the Afghan border before seeking asylum in the UK.
Ann Beatty, the youngest resident at 60, was raised in West Hampstead, north London, by an illiterate father and a mother with bipolar disorder. She left school at 15, had a daughter at 18, moved to Sierra Leone to set up a safe house for 65 young girls and now serves as the chief executive officer of an international educational charity.
The corridors that link the apartments are decorated with personalised art, including a huge mosaic of the Thames made from pottery found by 86-year-old Rachel Douglas, a keen mudlark. Another is artwork by 74-year-old Hilary Vernon-Smith, who spent 28 years in charge of set painting at the National Theatre. The postboxes in the mail area are painted in the suffragette colours of green, purple and white.
But with 26 people living together, surely it can’t have been harmony and laughter all the time? “It’s not utopia,” Tisdall says. “It’s not always easy to live with 25 other women. We deal with ageing, illness and disagreements. We’re not Stepford Wives, we have to work at it and negotiate.”
Disagreements can occur over issues as small as whether a wall should be painted pink or green, or sensitive topics such as the selection of new members.
To help them with decision-making, the women underwent formal conflict resolution training. All decisions are made by consensus and if that cannot be reached, there is a vote requiring an 80 per cent majority to pass. If a decision is blocked, the opposing group has one month to present a workable alternative.
The women share responsibility by volunteering for task groups based on their skills, and they handle everything including finance, building maintenance, gardening, housekeeping and communications. There’s an annually elected committee of seven members who report to a monthly meeting attended by all New Grounders.
They employ a managing agent on a flat annual fee, solely to handle health and safety and building regulations, and to collect the service charge, which is set by the residents.
Women wait years for a flat to become available, so the group runs a non-resident member system where those interested can spend time at New Ground.
Over ten years, only five of the flats have changed hands. Two women died; one moved to the coast to be closer to her sister; another resident became too ill and moved to a care home nearby (but still joins the women for days out); and one simply “decided it wasn’t for her”.
“I have friends who hate the sound of this, but they can see why it works for me,” says Anna Watkins, 72.
Some of the women have regular carers, but there’s no hard-and-fast rule that determines when someone is too ill to live there independently. It’s an ongoing discussion, usually with family and friends.
However, there is a “health buddy” system: small groups of three or four who agree to do the shopping or pick up a prescription if their “buddy” is feeling unwell. When Sue Tubb, 79, fell and broke her hip, her neighbours waited with her for five hours until an ambulance arrived.
Another resident had heart surgery and needed no professional aftercare because her neighbours helped her. The group estimates this saved the NHS about £5,000. This is ironic considering the local authority’s initial scepticism about building new senior housing. “I’m quite certain that we have asked less from the local council than an equivalent number of women living alone,” Argent says.
There are only 31 established cohousing communities in the UK and just a handful designed with older people in mind, according to the UK Cohousing Network.
By 2065, 46 per cent of people in England will be aged 50 or older, the Centre for Better Ageing predicts, yet only about 3 per cent of the country’s total housing stock is built for senior living. Instead of waiting for somebody to ask them how they wanted to live, the women of New Ground built this place for themselves. “I don’t think we ever thought of it as a problem to be solved,” Argent says. “We thought about it as an exploration of what was possible.”
Eris has been living in another person's hoarded, unsafe, and remote house because of very limited options for quite some time. For years she's had no hot running water (seriously, imagine no hot showers or baths), no free access to a kitchen, food insecurity, compromised privacy, and a whole set of frightening, erratic, and unpleasant housemates. Despite this, she's gotten and stayed sober, is working on a degree, and hasn't given up.
Eris is ready for a new start and is willing to make the brave decision to leave and transfer schools to pursue this new opportunity we're creating together. No one should have to live the way she's been living with very few options other than homelessness/living in a shelter. The new place is in a walkable area that has excellent human services, job opportunities, a local college, HOT WATER, food, and most of all friends who care about her.
This fundraiser (goal of 1k) will cover her flight and transport to the airport (which should be 300-500 dollars), the first few months of housing/bills contribution while she gets on her feet, making sure her phone stays on, and medication costs. any more raised over goal will be used by her to rebuild her life (wardrobe, furnishings, many other quality of life improvements) and regain a sense of normalcy.
Eris has done such a good job with such a horrible hand dealt to her. Together, we can change her luck. Thank you so much for reading & supporting the individual women that make up our women's community. Women together are not women alone.
all transportation is arranged, countdown has begun! further donations will help with prepaying housing contributions ($250 a month) & all the other costs that come with moving & rebuilding your life
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