I don't think this is an appropriate response to an article about South Asian farmers losing their teeth because temperatures are now reaching 45 Celcius.
After I suspected a climate connection to tooth decay, I conducted systematic saliva pH testing across my patient population and documented
okay so i think i found the article op's (and me in my tags) talking about. being exposed to over 40 celsius (120 farenheit or so) for the whole day means youre sweating a LOT (the article says rashid- the farmer at the centre of the text- drinks around 17 liters a Day. humans usually only need 3, so i presume the rest is mostly used for sweat). so much so that the organizm reroutes water from other parts of itself to not die of heatstroke - salivary glands included, which means that 1. they have very little saliva in comparison to a healthy human being 2. what little their bodies DO produce is incredibly acidic, falling to ~5.5 ph from the ideal of 7ph. Teeth dissolve. Quickly. There's a mention of someone losing 8 teeth in two years
im not reading the whole article now (headache -_-), but later on the author of the article says about 30 million people (employed in agriculture) are at risk for extreme dental health problems. 30 million people at risk of not being able to eat solid food. 30 million people at risk of not being able to find work. being able to marry. being able to be part of their community. being able to speak clearly
this is. fucking horrible feels like an understatement, but it is the best i have. this exceptionally, terribly inhumane, and the pakistan goverment's lack of a plan to adress this is embarassing
if you're about to reblog this post seeking approval for shaving your legs, please close the tab containing this post and go watch a gillette ad or smth cause you're not gonna get it from me
patriarchal revanchism is a term i have been considering for the "cycle of feminism" feminist writers have noted in their retrospective writings. every time women gain some ground in our struggle for our human rights, every time feminism gains a foothold, there is a period of time shortly after in which the patriarchy seeks to reassert dominance and reclaim lost "territory" (our bodies). learning about this cycle is really eye opening with regards to our position today as compared to twenty years ago.
it seems like things are getting worse because they are, but that is not a reason to lose hope. this has happened before, and feminism did not die then, nor will it die today, tomorrow, or twenty years from now. this miserable time period we find ourselves in is patriarchy in crisis. they want you to believe there is no hope. but patriarchs are paper tigers. beneath all of these renewed, aggressive moves to reestablish power and control lies fear, because we have demonstrated before, and will demonstrate again, that our resistance cannot be stamped out, and that feminist progress will march on with or without their permission. don't be discouraged by patriarchal revanchism. take courage in the knowledge we have survived this. we will survive it again. the oppressor fears nothing more than the indomitable spirit of the oppressed.
âfeminist progress will march on with or without their permissionâ
Important to note that this is on us to actively do, donât fall for the fallacy of progress as a linear passive system always trending upwards. We are all responsible for keeping the movement alive and pushing forward even during times of repression and backlash. This is on us.
studying history is like. here's to another beautiful day of not being pregnant and of having no obligation to ever be. thank you women who fight for abortion and contraception and independance from men for another beautiful day of not being pregnant and of having no obligation to ever be
Susana Trimarco disguised herself as madam and walked into brothels across northern Argentina, searching for her missing daughter among women trapped in sexual slavery and in the process, she sparked a movement that would free over 3,000 sex trafficking victims. It began in April 2002, when her 23-year-old daughter, MarĂa de los Ăngeles VerĂłn, left for a doctor's appointment in their city of San Miguel de TucumĂĄn and never returned home. Frustrated by a police investigation she believed was deliberately sabotaged by corruption, Trimarco obtained the names of known pimps and sex traffickers from police files and launched her own search. She posed as a buyer interested in purchasing the captive women and girls - some as young as 14, who could be traded for about $800. One rape victim told her she had seen MarĂa drugged, with swollen eyes, in a trafficker's home that doubled as a holding place for newly abducted women. But by the time Trimarco could follow the lead, her daughter had been moved. Though MarĂa was never found, Trimarco's relentless pursuit transformed her into one of Argentina's most powerful human rights activists and forced sex trafficking onto national agenda. "The desperation of a mother blinds you," she says. "It makes you fearless." Through this dangerous work, Trimarco discovered the full scope of sex trafficking and corruption within the police and judiciary that kept women trapped in forced prostitution. "The police would hand [the trafficked women] back to the criminals," she recalls. "They used to say: 'Don't leave me. Take me with you.'" Trimarco ended up becoming the personal guardian to 129 survivors of sex trafficking, sheltering them in her home and helping them reunite with their families. Trimarco's relentless advocacy forced change at highest levels. Her work helped lead to first law, passed in 2008, making human trafficking a federal crime; the subsequent reforms have led to thousands of people being rescued from sex traffickers. These successes, however, have come with high personal cost to Trimarco: she has suffered many reprisals over the years including countless death threats, having her house set on fire, and several attempts to run her over in street. As more trafficking survivors and families of trafficking victims reached out to her for help, Trimarco says, "It came to a point where I just did not have capacity to help them all. That is when I decided to open a foundation." In 2007, she founded FundaciĂłn MarĂa de los Ăngeles, a non-governmental organization focused on helping people escape from trafficking and lobbying for legislation to prevent it. Her efforts focused on her daughter's disappearance eventually resulted in trials for 13 people, including several police officers, in 2012; all 13 were acquitted, a ruling that prompted outrage by many and led to impeachment proceedings against three judges. In December 2013, TucumĂĄn Supreme Court reversed acquittals and convicted ten of defendants, who received sentences ranging from 10 to 22 years in April 2014. But despite it all, Trimarco still hasn't found out what she wants to know most: what happened to her daughter. Some witnesses say she was murdered - although her body has never been found and others say she was taken overseas. Twenty-three years later, Trimarco's work continues in her daughter's name and for all survivors. Her foundation remains at the forefront of the country's fight against human trafficking, recently helping to dismantle trafficking rings in 2024 and 2025. In recent years, the foundation has expanded its role as a legal plaintiff in trafficking cases, ensuring survivors have representation throughout the judicial process. Now in her seventies, Trimarco remains internationally recognized for her work, though her search for answers about MarĂa's fate has never ceased. "Every woman I help somehow helps MarĂa," she reflects. "They represent hope in this new life of mine."
"A man rose at the back of the hall with a pencil and paper in his hand. "You say that over 2000 women are raped every day in this country. I did some quick figuring. That makes about 40,000 a day worldwide." Significant pause. Then he exploded: "That's the number of children who starve to death every day! Think about that!" And he plopped down in his seat with a smug, duty-done look on his face. At that point, another man, encouraged by his colleague's outspokenness and impeccable logic, arose and pointed out that no matter how bad incest is (he called it "child abuse" since he was apparently unable to face the implications of "incest"), he was furious at my saying that what happens to females in incest is far worse than anything that happens to men in wars. How could I be so insensitive? How do I think he'd felt, leaving the blasted bodies of his buddies strewn all over Vietnam's battlefields? Didn't I have any conception that men were being tortured even as we sat there, in El Salvador, for instance?
What they were saying to me was very clear. As long as any male, anywhere is suffering, women are selfish to mention that they are suffering, too.
I'm sure neither of those men realized the woman-hatred behind their feeling that everything and everyone should come before women. I pointed out quietly that in every country where children are starving, women are starving also. In every country where men are being tortured, women are being tortured also. I was insensitive enough to point out that Vietnam is also strewn with the blasted bodies of women, and that many, many of those bodies were not simply blown up, but were also sexually abused-raped, gang raped, used up in prostitution, tortured. No matter when or where or what men suffer, women's suffering is on some totally different, more exquisite, plane.
But no one wants to hear that women are suffering. Men's ordeals are recounted and described and depicted in every conceivable way in every medium on earth, and have been from earliest history. We are always asked and expected to look at and listen to and understand and sympathize with men's pain and suffering, and we have always done it, all of us, men and women. But women's agony at the hands of men must never be revealed. If women steadfastly and courageously began to tell the truth and would not stop, would not be co-opted, would not become afraid, the truth of our enslavement would be undeniable, and the jig would be up.
That this might indeed happen is terrifying to most people. It would stand the whole world on its head. This is why any time women say, "Look at what is happening to us!" someone invariably rises up on the spot (as patriarchy has trained us all so well to do) and shouts, in order to divert us, to frighten us, to remind us of our vulnerability and danger: "But what about men?"
I explained to the distraught man whose buddies lie in fragments all over the corpse of Vietnam: ''You are performing this function here tonight. May I interrupt this well-rehearsed performance to point out that we have given men 5000 years of undivided attention." (Is it any wonder they have remained spoiled little boys?) As Pauline Bart points out: "We are not allowed, even now, to speak of women's suffering without someone saying, 'and men, too,' although we have always spoken of men's suffering without adding 'and women, too!'" Patriarchy has worked hard to make women's experience appear so trivial and so invisible that it is inconceivable to most people that we warrant any attention at all. Otherwise, it would not be so maddening to them to have to listen for a whole hour to a speech about women, though they listen willingly day after day, year after year, to talks by and about men. For many hundreds of years they have heard about nothing but men: their wars, their ideas, their art, their politics, their science, their blah, blah, blah, ad nauseam."
This past Sunday marked the 98th annual Academy Awards (@theacademy). Breaking the troubling pattern of the last two years, none of the women nominated for Best Actress or Best Supporting Actress depicted prostituted women.
The winners for Best Actor and Best Supporting Actor have consistently depicted a variety of characters, such as nuclear physicists, architects, musicians and government leaders. In the history of the Academy Awards, no man has ever been nominated or won for portraying a prostituted individual.
If Hollywood keeps pedaling stories of prostituted women and the sex trade, what message are they pushing out? What are they instilling in women and girls, what are they showing society values about women and girls?
from Coalition Against Trafficking in Women International
Reblogging again now that Russell Brand's ugly mug is back in the news to remind everyone that in the 2023 Times expose on his abusive behaviour, Daniel Sloss was the only male comedian willing to be named and quoted like "yeah that dude's a scumbag and women have been warning each other about him for years."
"It you are sick of the narrative thats currently going on about men, feel free to change it." Godddd, this. To every man who has ever said "not all men!" what exactly have you done to make that a reality? Because just sitting there saying "well *i* never raped anyone" isnt enough. That doesn't cut it. That is NOT changing the narrative.
The narrative about men is only going to change if men step up and fucking change it.
Call out your mates when they make sexist comments. Put a stop to the bad behaviour of your male friends.
And the other part of this video i want to highlight is the part where he said "if you think this doesnt affect the women in your life, its not because its not happening to them. Its because they dont trust you enough to talk to you about it."
What are you as a man doing to let the women in your life know that youre safe to talk to about this shit? What are you actively doing to prove in advance that youre a trustworthy man?
I remember when MeToo had its brief moment before Hollywood and the media shut it down. Men were saying "psh, these statistics are all so overblown. I dont know a single woman who has been assaulted, but the stats are claiming practically every woman has." And then people told those men to go home and speak to their wives. To ask their daughters if anything like that had happened to them. To phone their sisters and mothers and ask if theyd ever been harassed or assaulted by a man. To check in with their female friends and ask the same questions.
And some of those men went and asked the women in their lives. And any man who did was shocked to their fucking bones to learn that almost every single woman they know has faced some form of sexual harassment or assault. That in fact for women, this shit is fucking constant.
If you are unaware of the sexual harassment/assault that the women in your life have gone through, its not that they havent experienced it. Its that they dont trust you enough to talk to you about it. So what are you going to do to change that?
âThey asked me to tell you what it was like to be twenty and pregnant in 1950 and when you tell your boyfriend youâre pregnant, he tells you about a friend of his in the army whose girl told him she was pregnant, so he got all his buddies to come and say, âWe all fucked her, so who knows who the father is?â And he laughs at the good jokeâŠ. What was it like, if you were planning to go to graduate school and get a degree and earn a living so you could support yourself and do the work you lovedâwhat it was like to be a senior at Radcliffe and pregnant and if you bore this child, this child which the law demanded you bear and would then call âunlawful,â âillegitimate,â this child whose father denied it ⊠What was it like? [âŠ] Itâs like this: if I had dropped out of college, thrown away my education, depended on my parents ⊠if I had done all that, which is what the anti-abortion people want me to have done, I would have borne a child for them, ⊠the authorities, the theorists, the fundamentalists; I would have born a child for them, their child. But I would not have born my own first child, or second child, or third child. My children. The life of that fetus would have prevented, would have aborted, three other fetuses ⊠the three wanted children, the three I had with my husbandâwhom, if I had not aborted the unwanted one, I would never have met ⊠I would have been an âunwed motherâ of a three-year-old in California, without work, with half an education, living off her parentsâŠ. But it is the children I have to come back to, my children Elisabeth, Caroline, Theodore, my joy, my pride, my loves. If I had not broken the law and aborted that life nobody wanted, they would have been aborted by a cruel, bigoted, and senseless law. They would never have been born. This thought I cannot bear. What was it like, in the Dark Ages when abortion was a crime, for the girl whose dad couldnât borrow cash, as my dad could? What was it like for the girl who couldnât even tell her dad, because he would go crazy with shame and rage? Who couldnât tell her mother? Who had to go alone to that filthy room and put herself body and soul into the hands of a professional criminal? â because that is what every doctor who did an abortion was, whether he was an extortionist or an idealist. You know what it was like for her. You know and I know; that is why we are here. We are not going back to the Dark Ages. We are not going to let anybody in this country have that kind of power over any girl or woman. There are great powers, outside the government and in it, trying to legislate the return of darkness. We are not great powers. But we are the light. Nobody can put us out. May all of you shine very bright and steady, today and always.â
Female socialization is a process of psychologically constraining and breaking girlsâotherwise known as "grooming"âto create a class of compliant victims. Across history, this breaking has including so-called "beauty practices" like female genital mutilation and foot binding, as well as the ever-popular child sexual abuse. Femininity is really just the traumatized psyche displaying acquiescence. In its essence, it is ritualized submission.
-Lierre Keith, "The Girls and the Grasses" in Female Erasure
#we dont use honorifics in my first language so whenever i have to select options (usually for flights) im always so confused#like what is actually the difference between miss and ms#i like miss bc it sounds more historical and im a historian so
"Miss" means an unmarried woman. "Mrs." means a married woman. (both of these have origins in the word "mistress" as in "mistress of the house".)
"Ms." - prounounced MIZ, btw - is a third option popularized by gloria steinem in the 70s - mainly through her feminist magazine Ms. - which is meant to be a neutral term, usable for any and all women regardless of marital status (hence the soul destroying irony of the tags above). it gained wider general acceptance when geraldine ferraro, the first woman to be nominated as VP on a national major party ticket, started using it widely to avoid confusion, since she was married but used her maiden name professionally. eventually over the years it came into common use though i do think the brits are a little more critical of it than americans (as far as i'm aware lol)
"obscure facts only a tumblr user would know" and it's one of the most influential institutions of second wave american feminism. PLEASE open the schools
Hi. I'm an unmarried woman in her forties. I use Ms. and pronounce it "miz", though I don't correct people who accidentally use a soft S. I use Ms. because it's no one's business but my own whether I'm married, to a man or anyone else, and that's what Ms. means. It means fuck off, my marital status is irrelevant, just as it is for every man who uses Mr.
I've had people (usually children) ask me at work if I'm a missus or a miss. I have replied that I am a miz, full stop. And when they pressed for which one I was REALLY, I have replied, "Why? Are you going to treat me differently depending on whether there's a ring somewhere?"
That's what Ms. is for. That is its linguistic function. It says, "This is an adult woman," and nothing else. Nothing else is necessary, and in my case, nothing else is desired.
I also use miz for other women unless and until they express a preference for something else because I don't magically know everyone else's marital status when I meet them. That's a courtesyâI'm declining to assume marital status and allowing them to decide whether they wish to declare it.
Also, I've taught English and worked as an editor for twenty years. I am quite literally the grammar police. This use of Ms. is a standard construction. If you didn't learn it in school, someone failed you.
On how 'mothers vs girlbosses' devalues everything women do
According to [new/old/even older] research, [Gen Z/Millennial/Gen X] women have had it with going out to work. At long last, weâve realised that the feminist movement conned us with its myth of [Girlboss/career woman/shoulder-padded ballbreaker] empowerment. Turns out proper work â the kind of stuff men do â isnât the Barbie-with-a-briefcase fantasy we thought it was. Alas, being the kind of idiots whose brains can only manage âpottering about a bit with babies while doing a bit of dustingâ, we let ourselves be brainwashed into viewing said âpottering aboutâ as oppression. Honestly, what are we like?
Earlier this week I spotted a tweet announcing that âGen Z women are officially done chasing the âgirlbossâ grindâ:
âA new poll shows 47% of Gen Z aspire to be a tradwife â married, with kids and the husband as the top earner.
Girlboss ranked 2nd, digital nomad 3rd, and a strong 14% aspired to be a trophy wife â the classic MRS degree.
The biggest lie women were told is that success comes from the workplace. Success is expanding humanity for its survival. The joy of motherhood is indescribable and better than any job title.â
Hear that ladies? Youâve all been lied to! Having babies is the best!
I feel I have been seeing variations of this argument my whole life. I was born in 1975, into a not-very-feminist family. I benefited from second-wave feminismâs fight for improved workplace conditions for women, without having to do any of the fighting myself. The backlash to this was ever-present. Itâs never gone away, yet it always seeks to portray itself as something new.
Growing up, I noticed how men treated women who âdidnât workâ (or rather, did work, but not for any pay, or for lower pay than the men). I saw the way the disrespect extended to âhousewivesâ was matched by that extended to âworking mothersâ (parasite or bad mother, either way you were morally inferior, especially if there was no man around). I watched all the âcareer women are bitches whoâll regret neglecting their kids, or become extra-bitchified by not having kids at allâ films that emerged in the late eighties and early nineties â Fatal Attraction, The Hand that Rocks the Cradle, Baby Boom, Immediate Family, Working Girl â that Susan Faludi takes apart in Backlash. The US-imported âmommy warsâ â supposedly pitching stay-at-home mothers against âworking mothersâ â always seemed a pretty transparent way of telling mothers (and women in general) they were their own worst enemies, whatever they did.
When I started university in 1993, my dad commented on what a waste it was to see so many female students as âtheyâll all go off to have babiesâ (I was never sure whether I counted as a âwasteâ. In any case, male students still outnumbered female ones in my college â which only started admitting women in 1980 â by three to two). In 2007, pregnant with my first child, I read Susan Douglas and Meredith Michaelsâ The Mommy Myth, which warned of the rise of âthe new momismâ â âa highly romanticized and yet demanding view of motherhoodâ â and sought to pitch this as âtrueâ choice and liberation for women:
âCentral to the new momism, in fact, is the feminist insistence that women have choices, that they are active agents in control of their own destiny, that they have autonomy. But hereâs where the distortion of feminism occurs. The only truly enlightened choice to make as a woman, the one that proves, first, that you are a ârealâ woman, and second, that you are a decent, worthy one, is to become a âmomâ and to bring to child rearing a combination of selflessness and professionalism that would involve the cross cloning of Mother Theresa and Donna Shalala.â
Is this sounding at all familiar? Oh look â doing exactly what women did before (in 1950s adverts, at least) is the real feminist choice! And no, itâs not taken Gen Z women looking at their exhausted Gen X mothers to ârealiseâ this. Gen X and Millennial women have been told this all their adult lives, too. And still we keep getting paid jobs, as if we need money, and maybe even careers, as if thereâs other stuff weâre interested in or good at, like the idiots we are.
At this juncture I should probably tell you how important my kids are to me and how being a mother is indeed the most important thing in my life etc. etc. (as Douglas and Michaels emphasise, âwe adore our kids [âŠ] The smell of a new babyâs head, tucking a child in at night, receiving homemade, hand-scrawled birthday cards, heart-to-hearts with a teenager after a date, seeing them become parents â these are joys parents treasureâ). But thatâs just a bit insulting, isnât it? Yes, I am quite aware a spreadsheet doesnât love you back but honestly, why does this need saying? There is an enormous legacy of feminist work on how we can value motherhood more, and improve the experience of it more (I have a Fairer Disputations piece coming out on this soon), and it is incredibly frustrating to see generation after generation ignore this work and its recommendations in favour of âweâll just tell women how lovely it is when your baby smiles at youâ. Like we couldnât have worked that out for ourselves!
There is so much to say about changing workplace, economic and family structures in order to make mothering better and easier. But what I think is often unsaid, but increasingly obvious to me, is the way in which the drive to push women out of the workplace â or at least out of jobs that men might want for themselves â trivialises and undervalues what women do as paid workers in much the same way that the work of mothers is undervalued and trivialised. Itâs not so much that âwomenâs workâ or âmotherworkâ is devalued â itâs that anything women are doing isnât classed as ârealâ work. Thatâs why infantilising caricatures of women playing at being workers, strutting around being âgirlbossesâ or barging others out of the way with their shoulder pads, have been so enduring. As if men still do the real work but women, having had a major tantrum in the mid-70s, are being humoured and itâs time for them to give it up.
This is the story we are told: feminists â who invented feminism to compensate for their lack of properly feminine qualities such as maternal instinct and the desire to be soft and decorative â told other women â who apparently hadnât ever worked outside the home before â that having a career would totes be empowering and fun. Alas, these other women â who did have properly feminine qualities, which included being stupid â let themselves be duped into going along with this, with many of them forgetting to have babies. These women then found that being a worker, far from being like Carrie Bradshaw in Sex and the City, was really hard, and often quite boring. They hadnât realised this because 1) men never, ever moan about work, being the superior creatures they are, and 2) women are eternal children, for whom âliberationâ is nothing more than some teenage âwhen I grow up, I can do whatever I like, and no one can stop me!â. Therefore itâs best they only have actual children for company, lest they go getting ideas (as an added bonus, being at home with babies and cooking for men, in addition to being the entire meaning of life for women, is also a piece of piss, so men donât have to be particularly grateful for it or work out a system of rewards that grants stay-at-home mothers the same levels of financial freedom or social status).
It is true that when you are young, you might think that because adults have more choices, and because you wouldnât make the same rubbish choices as the adults around you, growing up will be a wheeze. Youâll get your own place! Youâll earn your own money! Youâll show them all! The Girlboss Idiot narrative treats women as though they never grew out of it, while supporting the idea that 1950s imaginary housewives were pampered children who didnât know how good they had it. Weâre like petulant kids who decided to leave home, got to the bottom of the road, hung around getting cold in an attempt to save face, then eventually slunk off back to Mummy (and Patriarch Daddy).
I, too, find adult life is not exactly how I imagined it would be when I was five. Like absolutely everyone, I find adult life full of compromises I didnât always anticipate, some of which might be remedied by making the kind of structural changes feminists (including maternal feminists) have been requesting since forever, and some of which are inevitable because you have to close some doors to go through others. When I look at the survey results triumphantly shared on X, it strikes me that I wouldnât mind if my partner suddenly got a massive pay rise that made him âtop earnerâ â not because I strive to be subordinate him, but because weâd have more money (I wouldnât mind if I got a massive pay rise, either). I wouldnât mind having fewer mundane tasks to do â the kind of life where I could cherry-pick which bits I did and didnât do. I wouldnât mind having âa wifeâ, as Judy Brady Syferâs classic essay put it. I wouldnât mind things just being easier.
On paper, Iâm someone who âleft it lateâ to have her third baby at forty, but I wanted a third child long before then (having two children full-time at nursery got us into debt, and made us put off having other children, for years. One of us staying at home would have made matters worse). Iâm also someone who was ârecklessâ when getting pregnant with my first child (not married, partner on a temporary contract, newly estranged from my family, so new to my own job I didnât qualify for maternity pay). For women â particularly women who benefit from things that were not available to previous generations â the âmaking it up as you go alongâ aspect of life is all too often recast as, well, was it the perfect choice? If not, blame feminism! But itâs never the perfect choice.
When everything women do is cast in this way, it masks the actual contributions women make, not just to their families, but in the wider world. Male workers are seen to deserve higher pay because they nobly commit themselves to hard graft (and being noble hard grafters is so integral to their identities, itâs selfish of women to take âtheirâ roles). Women, meanwhile, see work as a kind of accessory, like a new lipstick. Men work to provide for their families; women work instead of caring for their families (despite the fact that it is men who spend more on themselves). Whatever women do, they donât âdeserveâ as much as men. Either youâre outside the home, doing something contrary to your âtrue natureâ (so you canât be doing it as well as a man), or youâre in the home, doing something that comes so naturally it isnât really work.
Even if âthe joy of motherhoodâ is âbetter than any job titleâ, mothers donât just coast around on maternal joy, just as female employees donât just coast around in a state of perpetual gratitude at being âallowedâ to work (or pretend-work, when itâs something the men want to do themselves). These are things women give, not postures we adopt. Whatever choices and compromises we make, itâs about time they were recognised as such.
The uncritical use of the term âgirlbossâ by feminists â whether to celebrate women in particular kinds of roles, or to denigrate them as bad feminists â has really bothered me in recent years. While Iâm quite aware that the âfeminismâ of Sheryl Sandberg hasnât exactly helped things, âgirlbossâ is such a patronising way of describing any female worker, one that feeds into the idea that women are just playing at it. Itâs all very âlook at you, with your big, important job! Totally girlbossing it today!â It sounds like a lipstick shade (actually, there are several âgirl bossâ lipsticks, although there seems to be some disagreement on whether it should be deep red, dusk pink or a range of shades with a âno-budge, matte finish for a killer poutâ).
It reminds me of terms such as âmanageressâ, âWPCâ and âcoedâ, words given to women in places or roles that âoriginallyâ belonged to men. âGirlbossâ covers anything a bit important â so a whole range of roles and positions where men are just managing or leading or whatever it is that important men do. It makes the women in question seem unnatural, babyish, self-serving all at once. [...]
Obviously there is much to criticise in actual Lean In-style feminism (one woman making it to the boardroom is not a victory for all women, and isnât the most pressing issue facing most women today). Still, the criticism of âgirlbossesâ offered by edgelord feminists such as Lewis reminds me of their criticism of âKarensâ, and the way these criticisms end up merging with those of the kind of people whoâve always wanted women to sit down and shut up. Like the right-wing woman who makes a career of telling other women they shouldnât have careers, there seem to be a lot of white, middle-class feminists who want white, middle-class women to be quiet (but not them) and not to have jobs which might rely on the labour of lower-paid women (which academic and journalistic careers totally donât, if you discount all the times in which they do).
In my own career, I am probably not important enough to have ever counted as a girlboss. I know that wherever Iâve worked there are fewer women the further up the hierarchy you go, and the most senior women tend to have fewer children (which isnât true for the men). I donât know the particular sacrifices and priorities of each woman. What I do feel is that regardless of whether I like an individual woman or not, none of them could be described as people who swanned into the office to âgirlbossâ it. Describing female colleagues like that honestly reminds me of male relatives in the 1980s bitching about âlady driversâ â these entitled, inappropriate space-stealers. Iâd really welcome an end of its use.
oh Andrea we're really in it now @gynocchi - Tumblr Blog | Tumgag
