Cats and feminism

A blog dedicated to cats and feminism. And all other cute and/or awesome things.

[fisadeepforestgreen]

I still don’t think female and male are opposite sexes. They are definitely two different, distinct sexes. That’s biology. But opposite? That’s cultural. That’s patriarchal. That’s an interpretation of facts, facts arranged into a hierarchy and forced into dualisms. To call female and male opposites is to gender biology. It reeks of Descartian and Freudian thought, but it has as little to do with reality as the trope that somehow positions cats and dogs as each others’ opposites.

[notcisjustwoman]

probably one of the most insightful things I’ve ever read on this site.

[tejuina]

I’m not meeting patriarchal standards of womanhood by having a vagina, I’m subjected to patriarchal standards of womanhood because I have a vagina, and I’m punished whether or not I meet those standards because I have a vagina

[actual-ex-radfem]

Social Construct Masterpost

I was inspired to make this post because of the mass confusion on tumblr about what social constructs are and how they function. I will start with a simple example:

This is a one dollar bill. It is an excellent example of a social construct. This piece of paper represents a specific amount of spending power in the society that it exists in (the USA). An individual person could decide personally that it represents 1000$ worth of spending power, but it would not matter because like all social constructs, the collective agreement between individuals in society is what determines the meaning of the construct. There are laws on the books about currency but it doesn’t stop society from changing the meaning of a dollar; after all, in times of scarcity a dollar is a much more valuable asset than in times of plenty. The exact value of a dollar is something that fluctuates in tune with other factors, including things like consumer confidence- meaning, how consumers feel about the economy. Social constructs can change based on changes of opinion in the population. 

One way to test if something is a social construct is to remove it from its native society and see if it retains the same functionality. The US dollar is accepted in some foreign countries, but in other places, it is just a piece of paper. 

Another way to test if something is a social construct is to remove people from the picture entirely and see if it retains its functionality. Without people to give a dollar meaning it simply becomes paper. 

Contrast the attributes of a dollar with say, biological sex.

Male humans produce sperm and much higher levels of testosterone than females. Females produce ova and offspring if their eggs are fertilized and implanted. Individuals who are sterile still have either male or female anatomy which serves sexual functions for the individual. Virtually everyone on earth qualifies as one sex or the other, with or without malfunctioning or variations. Is this binary a social construct?

Does the collective agreement of society give male and female organs their functionality? Absolutely not. Humans did not always have an understanding of how pregnancy happened, and yet it happened anyway. Individuals who don’t know about or understand reproduction can and do get pregnant via sex. No matter how many people got together and decided that females inseminate males there would be no change in the function of testes or ovaries. 

The functionality of human reproductive organs is also impervious to cultural or geographical differences. All over the world people get pregnant and have babies by mixing sperm from males with ova from females. There is no exception. 

Removing humans from the equation also has no effect on the biological reality of mammalian reproduction. Male mammals are male, female mammals are female, and only one of the two can give birth. 

Biological sex is not and never has been a social construct.

Another example is gender. Femininity is the easiest example to discuss. Lets look at different examples of femininity from around the world:

As you can see, what it means to be feminine or girly is very different depending upon the society. None of these is the “correct” femininity, just different versions from different cultures. There is no objective way to determine what makes someone feminine in any given culture- you have to ask people. 

The nature of femininity is totally subjective and relies on the collective agreement of society. If you move one of these women into a different society their defining feminine characteristics instead become physical characteristics with no gender designation at all. In fact, what would make you gender conforming in one culture would make you gender non conforming in another. Gender also changes in individual societies over time, so the meaning of being feminine in America in the 1800s would differ markedly from what it means to be feminine in America right now. How people feel about the construct changes its meaning.Thus we can easily say that gender is a social construct. 

[question-the-status-quo-deactiv]

[getoffmyastroturf]

[radladiesunite]

Small side comment: The US dollar bill, and most other currency all over the world, is a type of Fiat currency, which is currency that a government has declared to be legal tender but has no inherent value in and of itself. The value of fiat money is derived from the relationship between supply and demand (making it a social construction) rather than the value of the material that the money is made of. This is why it is possible to have inflation, where the dollar signifies less value than before based on economic/social conditions. 

I feel like when people hear ‘social construct’ they take it as dismissive, like someone is claiming that thing isn’t real or does not count. Obviously, the US dollar counts for A LOT, it governs peoples and societies all over the world. Social construction just means that the value or definition of something only exists because of collective agreement that it does, consciously or not. 

Similarly, when we say gender is a social construct, we don’t mean to say that people’s experience of gender is completely fake and does not mean anything. We mean that the existence of gender is not inherent to a body, a biological sex, a brain, etc. Just like the value of the dollar is not inherent to its material (hence ”just a piece of paper”). It is something that only exists within the context of human culture, which is why it varies so greatly across place and time. Obviously, just like the dollar, gender has huge impacts on people all over the world, but that doesn’t mean it is not a social construct. 

[bezoarcureforpoison]

Another example of social construct is the calendar.

A day is an astronomical event. It is defined and measured and means the same thing for all humans across the planet, albeit with different words. The sun comes up, hangs around for a while, and then goes down. That’s a day.

The earth orbits around the sun in approx. 365 days. That’s a measurable astronomical event. That’s a year.

Monday is a social construct. February 7th is a social construct. 270 BCE is a social construct.

[daddy-doms-are-gross]

there’s absolutely nothing radical about sex that mirrors social hierarchies, and nothing subversive about kinks that wouldn’t exist if not for those hierarchies

[pwussy-cult]

BSDM isn’t counter-culture. it’s just culture

[e-sadg]

Things that are normal for girls:

wanting to wear clothing from the boys’ department

wanting to cut your hair short

not wanting to wear makeup

being attracted to other girls

hating your body

hating getting your period

hating your breasts and/or vulva

wishing you weren’t a girl

not feeling like a girl

feeling like you’re doing girlhood wrong

[dyketron5000]

this just in: hating your body, wishing you were another gender, and not feeling like a girl are Completely Normal Cisgender Things

[bruckitdown]

Have you ever met a girl or woman?

[ballettie]

Guess what, to be a girl you have to enjoy and be complicit in your own oppression ! You feel alienated, overwhelmed by what it implies to have your body and be a girl in a sexist society ? Can’t possibly be a girl, they’re all submissively happy about the way they’re treated as such !

I’m begging you, start seeing gender for what is it : a collectively oppressive and hierarchic system, enforcing sexism and homophobia 

[lasdelaintuicion]

Noo gender is innate if you’re not okay with being treated like less than human you’re a trans boy 😍

[deputy-shayy]

“this just in: hating your body, wishing you were another gender, and not feeling like a girl are Completely Normal Cisgender Things“

Yeah, that’s correct, you fucking moron. That’s why “cisgender” is not a real or legitimate concept. Because we live in a world that conditions women and girls to hate themselves and their bodies because it treats us as inferior and forces us to squeeze into unnatural boxes. 

For fuck’s sake. This is why the pro-trans crowd is anti-feminist.

[feministism]

[alldudsnostuds]

[radfemchansey]

what fucking psycho invented shaving your pubic hair? Was he just like “yes take fucking razor blades to your genitals so your genitals can resemble a child, Also lets create a smear campaign against pubic hair so every woman who doesnt shave is ostracized and treated like an unsanitary monster for existing how nature intended the adult female body to look and so we can also profit off of their insecurities. Any more suggestions gents?” Fucking lunacy honestly

[radfemchansey]

Oh my god and now the fucking libfem type “b-but its okay if you do shave too!” crowd has hijacked this post. Yeah you’re right its fine if you shave except literally nobody is treating you subhuman for shaving, nobody is selling you pubic hair growth treatments if you don’t grow a lot because it’s shameful not to have a lot of hair. But there are people selling painful waxes, lasering treatments and hair dissolving chemicals, There are jokes about hairy women being ugly in movies, There are stares and glares and looks of horror when a woman has hair on her body. I fucking hate when people derail my posts.

[luvtonique]

Could you imagine if there was a video game where you can create your character and the default character was female?

Like imagine if in, say, Skyrim

They’re like “Who are you?” and it turns the camera around and loads up character creation and it’s defaulted, from the get-go, to female Nord instead of male Nord

Could you fucking imagine the outrage that would cause?

Could you imagine how many people would get irrationally pissed off and write angry articles on Kotaku n shit about how the game “forces feminist agendas on its players” if for once, just once, the default was female instead of male

And no, random doesn’t count. If it’s a game where the character creation screen defaults to a randomly generated character every time, or one of multiple presets, that doesn’t count

And neither does any game where there’s multiple races and one of the races is primarily or only female

I mean:

>Start the game >Create character >A female character shows up >In order to be male, you have to click the Male checkbox >Female’s pre-selected >Every time

Every game I have literally ever played that has a female option always has male selected by default, literally every time

Even Pokemon! “Are you a boy or a girl?” has the cursor on Boy by default

I have never, literally ever, played a game where it’s defaulted to female, and I guarantee if it ever happens, there will be an obnoxious amount of delicious, delicious outrage from people who don’t want to admit they hate women

[zanabism-deactivated20200529]

hello everyone. Here’s the worst thing you’ll see this week:

[westpal]

how do these people reconcile believing that wearing a kitschy Halloween costume is uber racist but going to a third world country and paying $20 to “bone” impoverished woc of color is woke

[ramblingpilgrim]

You can’t “ethically travel” if you’re engaging in “sex tourism.” It’s raping men, women, and children failed by their society, many of whom have been trafficked and/or groomed since appallingly young ages.

[appropriately-inappropriate]

But they’ll all tell us about how queer and woke they are for engaging in ethical sex work with a Dominican teenage girl who gets paid in peso while you pay for her body in the mighty dollar.

I spit on them.

[kuunakullanvalkeana]

tbh, i find the emergence of the concept of demisexuality very interesting, and i’m partial to thinking it’s a symptom of hypersexualized patriarchal culture that demands full sexual availability of women. wanting to develop an emotional bond before having sex is actually a very common and even normative thing, yet nowadays women seem to be under so much pressure to have casual sex that they strongly identify with demisexuality to justify the limits of their sexual comfort zone.

i wonder how the idea that not wanting to have sex with people you don’t know well needs its own label might be connected with the “sex-positive” movement and its ideas of “sexual empowerment”. we’ve conceptualized being sexual (as opposed to “half-sexual”) in very strict terms and reached a point where certain sexual behaviours, such as casual sex, are not just seen as normal and accepted but actually positioned as a required part of “full” sexuality, and by doing that we’ve abnormalized not wanting to have sex with people you don’t know well, which is alarming because there is an immense pressure on women to be sexually available to men.

[turtlessuggest]

Anyone need some tiny turtles?

Because I got some tiny turtles

[elliotmoved-deactivated20190116]

true:

having a vagina makes you more likely to be a target of violence

female-bodied people face struggles based on their biology and deserve spaces where they can talk about it without being attacked

also true:

trans women have their own specific issues, so trans women only spaces are necessary

trans women may face violence due to being perceived either as female or as gender non conforming males

these statements and situations aren’t contradictory, they can co-exist.

[vampireapologist-archive-deacti]

[kitchenalia]

i dislike kink even when it “stays in the bedroom,” actually, because so much of it can end up with an abused or dead woman in that bedroom. women’s safety matters in the bedroom as well, which is why feminists have pushed for laws that outlaw things like marital rape. same basic logic applies to being against so-called kinks that threaten women’s lives.

[kitchenalia]

even if you do believe that there is an ethical category of pornography—my views on this should be evident at this point, but for the purposes of the post, it’s open-ended—it’s nothing but dishonest to pretend that pornography, in its current state, is not immoral, unethical, and abusive. i feel as though sometimes women in particular believe that pornography is okay because they do not have a sense of what it actually entails, and have a sort of ‘harmless sex scene’ concept floating around in their heads. a visit to essentially any porn site, even if you just look through tags/categories/titles without looking at a single video, should disabuse you of that notion pretty quickly

[asmallmadhope]

know what’s wild? that the trope of like “my father always wanted a son so he treated me, his daughter, like a boy” is so popular and like lowkey loved, but if you ever saw a mother who talked about how much she wanted a daughter instead of a son, or if she treated her son like a girl, like??? people would think she’s awful and that poor boy??

damn wonder why that is 😒

[asmallmadhope]

i was high af when i wrote this but it’s still true

[kerryrenaissance]

The latter is literally the plot of some horror movies.

[starryweever-blog]

being socialized female is easily  recognized as abuse the moment it’s done to a male child

[iloveyoualeclightwood]

tbh disregarding the recent protests to destigmatize menstruation as “white feminism” doesn’t sit right with me when woc have always been involved and it has always been a global fight:

pakistani students sanitary towel protest

indian women launch happy to bleed campaign

kiran ghandi free bleeding during london marathon

chinese swimmer fu yuanhui breaking period taboo

delhi students hold rally to campaign against menstruation taboo

pads against sexism movement picks up in kolkatas jadavpur university

aditi gupta: menstrupedia

menstruation themed photo series censored by instagram

especially as things like this are happening:

nepal teen dies in menstruation hut

an act of solidarity and protest for an issue that effects millions of women worldwide should not be silenced