Swinging at the hornets nest here (the “sex work is work” crowd won’t like this one lol) but there was a post going around about like “if you work in hospitality and you think you see a sex worker, no you didn’t. Keep your mouth shut and let them make their money” is honestly sending me. As many of you know, one of my jobs is working front desk at a hotel and like no lads…we can’t “look the other way” at times. Yes, we know when the working girls check in (many are regulars who are open about it, plus after working their long enough you Know™️ when a woman is because you can clock the signs) and of course we can’t stop them but there are times when you literally have to say something. Here are a couple of instances that have happened on my shifts alone:
-I was checking in two girls and knew something was off and asked to see both their ID’s. Only one had a passport and her 18th birthday was literally a week ago. The other one handed me her high school student card. We had to call the police when their pimp came in and started making threats bc we refused to check them in.
-a sex worker checked in the night before and a housekeeper went into the room the next morning and found the woman in a bloody mess. There were chunks of human tissue scattered throughout the room (the housekeeper quit after that. Honestly, housekeepers are literally on the front lines of the bullshit but that’s another story)
-something about a “couple” was offfffffff at check in. The woman was standing with her hands behind her back, had her eyes glued to the floor, and wouldn’t answer questions despite her name being on the reservation. The man was answering for her. When I asked to see her ID, he hands it to me, and when I handed it to her, her arms were covered in bruises. We didn’t let them check in
-there are two properties and one of them has an agreement with a women’s shelter. I’ve checked in women into one property only to see them come in months later to the other property under the womens shelters’ reservation with bruises and broken limbs (many of whom are indigenous women).
So yeah bottom line: with the World Cup soon approaching, all of us -front desk, maintenance, housekeeping, the kitchen staff, sales, you name it all departments- have had to do extensive modules on clocking the signs of human trafficking. You can’t just look the other way because it can mean missing the underaged girl or preventing horrific violence. Yes we have our regulars and yes sometimes it is what it is but no you can’t just look the other way and let them “secure the bag” because I guarantee there’s a pimp in the lobby/parking lot who’s the one getting the bag at her expense.
this might sound terrible but I don't understand how pimps r a thing? And women just ....do what they tell them? I know many are underage but when I was underage there's no way I would have followed that, and I was really stupid and naive and came from an abusive home etc.
Also...these pimps r always so low IQ, making threats when they didn't check in the underage girls? What did he expect them to say by making threats? "Oh my bad Mr pimp, let me just check in these underage girls" like what.
It does sound pretty bad, but it's normal to be confused. A lot of people don't understand abusive dynamics and don't sympathize with victims of abuse (even when they are victims like yourself), because people aren't taught how the victims are broken down and lose control to their abusers.
Abuse victims are usually chosen for being vulnerable, such as being financially desperate, having low self-esteem, being socially isolated, having been abused before, disabled, etc. These women and girls may have been beaten and raped already by these men to break them psychologically and make them feel close to them. Abusers often start as appearing to care and offer support (lovebombing), then tighten control and make their victims feel both unable to leave and dependent on them emotionally and financially. Hence how common the "loverboy" pimp scheme is (boyfriends pimping out female partners), and how victims of trafficking and abuse in general may go back to their abusers. Leaving is the most dangerous time for victims, and so committing to it without help will be very difficult.
If you want to look further into DV, I suggest looking further into the concept of coercive control which is a major factor in abuse cases that escalate to violence and murder, and DV research in general. Some books I've read: feminist oldie "Loving to Survive: Sexual Terror, Men's Violence, and Women's Lives", "See What You Made Me Do" by Jess Hill, and Jane Monckton-Smith's "In Control: Dangerous Relationships and How They End in Murder".
Edit: oh worm did i reply to a fetish account like this... aight i guess i did that.
idk why they seek to invent different terms and categories
Psychology and sociology aren't "hard sciences", but are still theories developed from the efforts of different researchers and professionals analyzing social dynamics. Like how c/PTSD isn't an official DSM diagnosis, but the concept of childhood trauma affecting people for the rest of their lives has existed for a long time. The history of psychology is full of similar examples of the conception and terminology for psychological terms changing over time, like how hysteria is no longer a diagnosis.
The concept of "coercive control" too is a newer term to understand domestic abuse, looks like the theory originated from Dr. Evan Stark and looks like he published Coercive Control: How Men Entrap Women in Personal Life only in 2007, which is relatively very young. I'm not familiar with him or his work.
I can recommend Jane Monckton-Smith's In Control: Dangerous Relationships and How They End in Murder, after reading it I can pick up on controlling patterns more easily in relationships I see and when I learn about domestic violence cases. It's sad and heartbreaking to know these women being killed by their abusers are preventable but aren't, but it's also hopeful to believe these cases have a clear pattern that can be noted and disrupted if women can get help.
For centuries, people have held mistaken assumptions about the origins of male-dominated societies, writes Angela Saini.
In 1930, when London Zoo announced its baboon enclosure would be closing down, the story made headlines.
For years, "Monkey Hill", as it was known, had been the scene of bloody violence and frequent fatalities. The US news magazine Time reported on the incident that proved to be the final straw: "George, a young member of the baboon colony, had stolen a female belonging to the 'king,' the oldest, largest baboon of Monkey Hill." After a tense siege, George ended up killing her.
Monkey Hill cast a long shadow over how animal experts imagined male domination. Its murderous primates reinforced a popular myth at the time that humans were a naturally patriarchal species. For zoo visitors, it felt as though they might be peering into our evolutionary past, one in which naturally violent males had always victimised weaker females.
In truth, Monkey Hill wasn't normal. Its warped social environment was the product of too many male monkeys being placed with tragically too few females. Only decades later – with the discovery that one of our closest genetic primate relatives, bonobo apes, are matriarchal (despite the males of the species being bigger) – have biologists accepted that patriarchy in our own species probably can't be explained by nature alone.
Over the past few years, I've been travelling the world to understand the origins of human patriarchy for my book The Patriarchs. I learned that, while there are many myths and misconceptions about how men came to have as much power as they do, the true history also offers insights into how we might finally achieve gender equality.
For starters, human ways of organising ourselves actually don't have many parallels in the animal kingdom. The word "patriarchy", meaning "rule of the father", reflects how male power has long been believed to start in the family with men as heads of their households, passing power from fathers to sons. But across the primate world, this is vanishingly rare. As anthropologist Melissa Emery Thompson at the University of New Mexico has observed, inter-generational family relationships in primates are consistently organised through mothers, not fathers.
Among humans, patriarchy isn't universal either. Anthropologists have identified at least 160 existing matrilineal societies across the Americas, Africa, and Asia, in which people are seen to belong to their mothers’ families over generations, with inheritance passing from mother to daughter. In some of these communities, goddesses are worshipped and people will stay in their maternal homes throughout their lives. Mosuo men in southwestern China, for instance, might help raise their sisters' children rather than their own.
Often in matrilineal communities, power and influence are shared between women and men. In matrilineal Asante communities in Ghana, leadership is divided between the queen mother and a male chief, who she helps to select. In 1900, the Asante ruler Nana Yaa Asantewaa led her army in rebellion against British colonial rule.
The further we dive into prehistory, the more varied forms of social organisation we see. At the 9,000-year-old site of Çatalhöyük in southern Anatolia in modern-day Turkey, once described as the oldest city in the world for its size and complexity, almost all the archaeological data points to a settlement in which gender made little difference to how people lived.
"Most sites that archaeologists dig, you find that men and women, because they have different lives, they have different food and they end up with different diets," according to archaeologist Ian Hodder at Stanford University, who led the Çatalhöyük Research Project until 2018. "But at Çatalhöyük you don’t see that at all." Analysis of human remains suggests that men and women had identical diets, spent around the same amount of time indoors and outdoors, and did similar kinds of work. Even the height difference between the sexes was slight.
Women weren't invisible, either. Excavations of this and other sites dating to around the same time have unearthed an abundance of female figurines, now filling the cabinets of local archaeological museums. The most famous of these is the Seated Woman of Çatalhöyük, today behind glass at the Museum of Anatolian Civilizations in Ankara. It depicts a woman sitting upright, her body deeply indented with age and glorious rolls of fat spilling out around her. Underneath her resting arms appear to be two big cats, possibly leopards, looking straight ahead as though she had tamed them.
As we know, the relatively gender-blind way of life at Çatalhöyük didn't continue forever. Over thousands of years, social hierarchies gradually crept into this broader region, which spans modern-day Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. Thousands of years later, in cities like ancient Athens, entire cultures had developed around misogynistic myths that women were weak, not to be trusted, and best confined to the home.
The big question is why.
Anthropologists and philosophers have asked whether agriculture could have been the tipping point in the power balance between men and women. Agriculture needs a lot of physical strength. The dawn of farming was also when humans started to keep property such as cattle. As this theory goes, social elites emerged as some people built up more property than others, driving men to want to make sure their wealth would pass onto their legitimate children. So, they began to restrict women's sexual freedom.
The problem with this is that women have always done agricultural work. In ancient Greek and Roman literature, for example, there are depictions of women reaping corn and stories of young women working as shepherds. United Nations data shows that, even today, women comprise almost half the world’s agricultural workforce and are nearly half of the world’s small-scale livestock managers in low-income countries. Working-class women and enslaved women across the world have always done heavy manual labour.
More importantly for the story of patriarchy, there was plant and animal domestication for a long time before the historical record shows obvious evidence of oppression based on gender. "The old idea that as soon as you get farming, you get property, and therefore you get control of women as property," explains Hodder, "is wrong, clearly wrong." The timelines don’t match up.
The first clear signs of women being treated categorically differently from men appear much later, in the first states in ancient Mesopotamia, the historical region around the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in what is now Iraq, Syria and Turkey. Around 5,000 years ago, administrative tablets from the Sumerian city of Uruk in southern Mesopotamia show those in charge taking great pains to draw up detailed lists of population and resources.
"Person power is the key to power in general," explains political scientist and anthropologist James Scott at Yale University, whose research has focused on early agrarian states. The elites in these early societies needed people to be available to produce a surplus of resources for them, and to be available to defend the state – even to give up their lives, if needed, in times of war. Maintaining population levels put an inevitable pressure on families. Over time, young women were expected to focus on having more and more babies, especially sons who would grow up to fight.
The most important thing for the state was that everybody played their part according to how they had been categorised: male or female. Individual talents, needs, or desires didn't matter. A young man who didn't want to go to war might be mocked as a failure; a young woman who didn't want to have children or wasn't motherly could be condemned as unnatural.
As documented by the American historian Gerda Lerner, written records from that time show women gradually disappearing from the public world of work and leadership, and being pushed into the domestic shadows to focus on motherhood and domestic labour. This combined with the practice of patrilocal marriage, in which daughters are expected to leave their childhood homes to live with their husbands’ families, marginalised women and made them vulnerable to exploitation and abuse in their own homes. Over time, marriage turned into a rigid legal institution that treated women as property of their husbands, as were children and slaves.
Rather than beginning in the family, then, history points instead to patriarchy beginning with those in power in the first states. Demands from the top filtered down into the family, forcing ruptures in the most basic human relationships, even those between parents and their children. It sowed distrust between those whom people might otherwise turn to for love and support. No longer were people living for themselves and those closest to them. Now, they were living in the interests of the patriarchal state.
A preference for sons is still a feature of traditionally patriarchal countries today, including India and China, where the bias has led to such high rates of female foeticide that sex ratios are grossly skewed. The 2011 Indian Census showed it had 111 boys for every 100 girls, although data suggests these figures are improving as social norms change in favour of daughters.
Exploitation of women within patriarchal marriages continues. Forced marriage, the most extreme version of this, was designated a form of modern-day slavery by the International Labour Organization in its statistics for the first time in 2017. The most recent estimates, from 2021, indicate that 22 million people globally live in forced marriages.
The lasting psychological damage of the patriarchal state was to make its gendered order appear normal, even natural, in the same way that class and racial oppression have historically been framed as natural by those in power. Those social norms became today's gender stereotypes, including the idea that women are universally caring and nurturing and that men are all naturally violent and suited to war. By deliberately confining people to narrow gender roles, patriarchy disadvantaged not just women, but also many men. Its intention was only ever to serve those at the very top: society's elites.
Like Monkey Hill at London Zoo in the 1920s, then, this is a warped system, one that has fostered distrust and abuse. Movements for gender equality across the world are symptoms of the social tension humans have been living with in patriarchal societies for centuries. As the political theorist Anne Philips has written, "Anyone, given half a chance, will prefer equality and justice to inequality and injustice."
As daunting as the struggle against patriarchy may feel at times, though, there is nothing in our nature that says we can't live differently. A society made by humans can also be remade by humans.
*Angela Saini is a science journalist and author of four books. This essay is based on her latest, The Patriarchs: How Men Came to Rule, which was recently shortlisted for the Orwell Prize.
I’ve been to many concerts and one thing has become progressively clearer. For women, musical talent is not enough, they have to be a performer, a stripper, an exotic dancer, a dancer, a comedian, among many other things.
I love fall out boy, I’ve been to their concerts twice the past year. Do they have costume changes? No. Do they have choreographed dance routines? No. Do they have to talk a lot and share anecdotes with the crowd? No.
Taylor Swift does. Haim does. Megan Thee Stallion does.
I also love Interpol, also been to them twice in the last year. They do ZERO talking in their sets, have ZERO stage presence, and yet their shows are crowded and their fans are appeased
The Yeah Yeah Yeahs fronted by Karen O has to dance, shake her butt, and is screamed at to take her top off. A women’s talent is not talent, it’s an extra workaround to her fuckability.
For male artists, their talent is enough. For female artists, their talent and efforts will never be enough, because they are women.
Men get to make music, women are required to be extensive, multifaceted performers and even then are hated and criticized more ferociously. No woman is allowed to sit on stage playing guitar, she won’t get anywhere without a schtick (Chappell Roan). We continue to fail all women, even the most famous, because they are women.
you guys aren't calling out FEMALE music fans, which are part of the problem. women are shilled the big popstars with expensive visuals and care more about visuals, so performers have to follow suit. then also the gay male superfans (imo an influential part of female musical performer's core fanbase) really care about visuals. i think because gay male superfans see them as a kind of ideal they can self-insert/escape into; which female superfans also do, but gay men can do it with male expectations and specific fantasies (even more hypersexual, etc.)
look at kpop, which has gained popularity as music for girls and young women to listen to. music can be of varying quality, but a huge part of the appeal is the visual aspect, in the costumes, dances, and branding. to the point that some members are there as "visuals"/dancers primarily, whereas western pop groups never had members like to the same extent.
dance is cool and i love watching music videos. the eras tour concert from taylor was a once in a lifetime experience, it was so awesome. but yea it sucks that in order to get big women have to fall into this popstar role. seeing pinkpantheress going through this, shifting her branding and image does make me a little sad because i thought it was cool she was more known for production before. but that vibe never got big, the way she's found success with branding her new mixtape Fancy That. same with Chappel Roan, Sabrina Carpenter, and Zara Larsson, they've also been releasing music for years but without a clear brand image they weren't marketable enough.
Does it strengthen the movement? There's the whole meme of leftists are boring and wordy, and rightwingers are short and snappy so they come across as winning. I don't think the culture becoming even more anti-intellectual is better for the left, ultimately. This reliance on flimsy evopsych kind of arguments seems like a route towards easy dismissal and echo chambers. You filter in those who agree and won't question, and filter out those who do. And when you bring in psuedoscience (which plenty of evopsych arguments are, you get more bullshit and talk about how women biologically are soft and nice mommies. Lack of scientific literacy is a serious issue for the progression of women's quality of life. Looking at all the pipelines to rightwing thinking from these types of paths as people stop critically examining all they're exposed to. Do deeper healthier communities form, or women circling around figureheads and pushing out those who disagree?
I don't think content that encourages more shallow "misandry" without full depth really does much good. It encourages the kind of heteropessimism but still stuck in the cycle of dating men unhappily represented by Sabrins Carpenter's music (she's said some nasty shit, but no, because of those things I do think she represents the current state of heterosexuality well).
The internet went from forums encouraging longer discussion with lots of context and argument to echo chambers of snippets that filter people in and out. With this shift came more shallow discussions and trends towards conservative thinking again. Again, losing nuance and detail leads to relying on assumptions and shorthands that tend towards conservative thinking.
I think these kinds of spaces and articles encouraging questioning of patriarchal norms is good, but there's the unspoken rhetoric in this where women are mothers and have kids and exert control and provide value through that role... and I worry because motherhood as means of power and control is also present in high control, religious conservative patriarchal societies. I note this as a South Asian woman, where mothers play an active role in grooming their daughters and brokering them into forced marriages.
Gabrielle Blair, in her bio, is a mother of 6 and I believe also still identifies as Mormon. Very likely struggling with the cognitive dissonance of navigating conflicting beliefs, like I've seen with liberal Muslim types. This type of writing reminds me of other rhetoric being stopgaps in development of feminist thought that improved women's lives, but I think at our current stage in history, this kind of rhetoric can be more harmful than lead to deepened understanding of our society.
Dizzying how much you have to dehumanize someone before the idea of "friendzoning" as a slight even makes sense. You don't want a sexy friend who will never fuck you but finds your attraction to her tolerable if not outright enjoyable? You're fucking stupid. You can feel her breasts when you hug.
feels like there's a strong discomfort in the comments because if this is supposed to be from a female/female or lesbian context, then the situation is completely different than with a friendship between OSA women and men, where the concept of "friendzoning" is focused on and men are socialized towards sexual entitlement.
in a heterosexual context with a friendship between a man with a crush and woman who does not reciprocate, there is next to no female "friend who will never fuck you but finds you r attraction to her tolerable". women often and understandably pull back emotionally and physically, and many aren't going to hug their male friends anymore; some will even end the relationship out of discomfort. and men with the crush might be uncomfortable or not want to enage in platonic touch themselves becausetheir sexual interest in their female friend is uncomfortable for him and/or her.
it's kind of crazy, the "friendzoning" complaint used to be a whole big thing like a decade or more ago online when the internet monoculture seemed more male-dominated, before eventually women also en masse got online and the internet monoculture broke down sequestered bubbles in the larger online social ecosystem. now young people have fewer friendships, are dating less, and porn consumption is normalized... so these situations happen less because most people develop heterosocial friendships in school environments when young.
So I just listened to a 3 hour essay about historical Cinderella stories, by Babbity Kate, while sewing. And something clicked in my mind I never connected before.
The oldest written versions of Cinderella come from Asia, I thought the names sounded chinese. And the culmination of the story is that only she can fit her foot into the tiniest shoe.
I always thought the shoe thing was odd, because surely someone else wears the same size? Why is it so important that her foot is the smallest, what does it matter?
And it hit me today. This is about chinese foot binding. They glorified tiny feet. Maybe that's what the story is for, making it seem positive, making it a difference between becoming a princess and living in poverty.
I thought I never heard about the oppressive custom of harming women's feet until I read about it in the feminist literature, but it was in a fairy tale I knew forever, documented in a way I wouldn't recognize what it meant. It was there all along.
beauty and the beast was a novel for adults based on a folktale. the "animal bridegroom" stories were popular at the time, and that kind of story has kind of always been around, like with Cupid and Psyche, where a woman is paired with a mysterious husband and must learn to trust or love him
however, in the 1700s "The Beauty and the Beast" was published in a book for children that was explicitly pedagogical, aimed at aristocratic girls being prepared for arranged marriages. its purpose was to groom them into accepting being married off to ugly old men, and it's persisted ever since.
the romanticization of heels rarely shows women standing straight in them. usually walking or posing.
this obsession with looking tall and long legs (Ye Olde Horny, so boring now it's a joke for children's cartoons), yet you really look it's so weird looking. she looks like she's going to fall over, how sexy sexy. sheesh.
Is this too sensitive or is it not that deep... the met gala is feeling like a humiliation ritual for women. I mean so much of the media industry already is, but this adds the layer of WOMEN more explicitly making fun of other women. Women (and the few men who care or benefit from pretending they do) will aimlessly say "men suck for their boring tuxes", but the real pointed fixation and derision is for women who didn't try or failed to dress well in their eyes.
This is on top of the usual body fixation and derision women in the public eye receive. I think ~fashion~ can be interesting but then all this other shit comes up and I'm like this is grossing me out.
Not that I think all marriages are doomed but when deciding who to marry you should ask yourself “is this someone I’d want to divorce?” As in, is this someone I believe would be mature and fair, even when they’re upset and don’t particularly like me at the moment. Is this someone I could continue to trust while going through an adversarial process? And if the answer is no, don’t marry them.
Good point. I don't get why people feel cynical about bringing up divorce when it's roughly around half of marriages end in divorce, and women NOW and HISTORICALLY have been unable to pursue divorce for financial and social reasons. The institution of legal marriage is a subpar system to handle finances between couples and households.
People also change up and hide a lot. Women should try to ensure they have a support system apart from their partner, and financial resources to leave if needed, before entering a marriage.
It's hard to find open divorced women on the internet but I feel like more women are being open now, I encourage other women to follow and hear their stories; from those that are mostly amicable to the more concerning cases that involve abuse. There's a lot that can happen behind closed doors in relationships.
I have never seen a clearer argument for female drug addiction as an intentionally weaponized gateway to being sex trafficked
I could not more strongly recommend reading the entire article, it’s absolutely devastating but it’s a very important read. It’s a chilling indictment of the way drug addicted women are horrifically mistreated, exploited, and so often forgotten about if not further victimized by the very people who claim to want to help them
Just saw this post in a FB playlist group I’m in. I can’t really properly articulate everything I hate about this. Radfems who know more about feminism, any comments ?
I'm a year late but I think this is interesting to consider. But first here's the albums/songs (both for myself and any readers):
Top Left: song called Mother from an artist named Ve'ondre, who is a Black transwoman, with a fake pregnancy photoshoot as a cover image (I found this from google image search, didn't know this artist; specificed the fake pregnancy photo shoot because I hate how gay men with drag see the female body as an accessory....)
Top right: unknown song from Megan Thee Stallion's Traumazine (I do listen to her music regularly)
Bottom Left: song called Peggy by Ceechynaa (another reverse image search, don't know her music)
Bottom Right: WAP by Cardi B featuring Megan Thee Stallion (I don't listen to it regularly)
So I'm going to analyze Ve'ondre's mother separately from the other three songs since it's from a man.
Regarding the inclusion of the three songs from female Black artists, it comes across as "not-like-other-girls" behavior, treating these songs like they are all that represent womanhood and you are rejecting it/have nothing in common with women who feel like this. But to dig deeper, if this is a non-Black person (note: I am not Black myself), it also racist undertones of dehumanizing/othering the women here and not seeing how they are possibly similar to them. If a Black TIF was listening to these I assume there is still NLOG-ism, but more complex and not something I have the personal background or knowledge to discuss with regards to how they feel about their experience being a Black woman.
So with regards to a non-Black person using these songs to take T, imo it implies othering and not seeing complexity in Black women who use hypersexuality in their songs to express themselves. We don't know what Traumazine (top right album) song she's listening to but that album has a lot of messages about MTS's pain along with songs about being confident like "HER". There's PLENTY of popular music by women singers of all ethnicities all over the GLOBE about being confident, the four songs coming up here being from black artists using hypersexuality in their music is noteworthy. Like I have to wonder, does this TIF think these women and yourself have nothing in common? Do you see them as people expressing themselves, or caricatures and only see them as these songs?
When it comes to not seeing Black I like female rap artists because they can go from a range of very hypersexual to very dark and raw topics, Cupcakke is an artist I really enjoy. But she ends up boxed up and only noticed for her hypersexual viral songs that people make remixes of, and not so much for the rest of her talent and songs with other messages.
IMO how these blurbs are written in a passive tense ("are forced into", "are made to gain weight", etc.) obscures perpetrators, who are usually the victim's family or community. These types of systematic familial abuse are epidemic in high-control patriarchal cultures, where girls are groomed for marriage since birth.
the most annoying kind of comment you’ll ever get as a terf is “how are you a lesbian and transphobic?”
“how is a tlou fan transphobic?”
“how do you like mcr and you’re transphobic?”
these people cannot fathom having individuality at all. it’s like they exist in a hive mind where liking a game or band means you have to support certain things or else it just can’t possibly make sense
terfs/radfems/gc women are vigorously deplatformed and scorned BECAUSE they are in reality similar to other women in tra-majority (fandom) communities. most of us were formerly pro-trans and became against it. the apostate is often treated as more of a threat to religious groups than outsiders.
