feminism etc.

p much just archiving things for myself, 99% queue

[sissa-arrows]

In France if you suffer from hair loss as a teenage girl and cannot afford a real hair wig the school will try and force you to go to class bald. The school will make you buy a chemotherapy turban, you will buy two different so that the school can choose which one they prefer and you will prove that they are chemotherapy turban and not hijab but once you wear it they will change their mind and say it looks too much like a hijab and insist on you going bald or buying a real hair wig that you cannot afford.

If your doctor makes multiple documents confirming that you suffer from alopecia because of stress and the medicine you have to take for your epilepsy and that wearing a bonnet or something is recommended for your mental health as you’re not ready to go out bald in high school as a teenage girl, instead of admitting they are wrong the school will accuse the doctor of lying and report him to the Ordre des Médecins (equivalent of the General Medical council). Your doctor will find himself asking you for a document stating that you are not Muslim in order to defend himself and prove that no he wasn’t colluding with you so you could wear a substitute for hijab.

Source

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In France if you are a North African nurse at a public hospital and wear a fabric surgical cap they will try to make you remove it because apparently it’s a hidden hijab. They will accuse you of going against secularism and when you’ll argue that they are discriminating you by assuming you’re Muslim for a surgical cap on your head they will change their angle and claim that you should wear nothing on your hair because you wear the same surgical cap in multiple bedroom which is unhygienic apparently (which is a bullshit argument cause you wear the same scrub/uniform in different bedrooms as well). They will go as far as claiming that disposable scrub caps (you know the thin papery ones?) are not okay to wear in a hospital even if you change it regularly. And then they will fire you for a lack of hygiene because you wear a surgical cap.

Source

───────

All of that will be done in the name of secularism and women’s right despite having nothing do with either quite the opposite.

The teenage girl’s story is also not just about racism and Islamophobia it’s also about ableism as the girl is convinced that the real reason the school is trying to push her out is because she had an epilepsy crisis in class and nobody knew what to do and the school nurse was absent. It could have ended badly had her best friend not known what to do to help. Apparently it was bad enough to cancel class for the rest of the day and the teacher was shocked to the point of ending on sick leave.

[marzipanandminutiae]

oh and don't forget that many parts of France mandate by law how much skin women must show in swimsuits, which they claim is about not getting street dirt in public pools but which is disproportionately enforced on Muslim or even just Middle Eastern/North African women

(and of course is also some forced nudity misogynistic bullshit in general, to boot)

[prettyinpinkcatgamer]

I didn't really care too much about the french government previously, but now I want every one of that scum dead almost as much as the american government.

[sissa-arrows]

What if I tell you that the guy people (internationally) were fawning about because he was the youngest and first openly gay prime minister we had in France is remembered for one thing that he is still very proud of. He passed a law making “abaya” illegal at school. Except there is literally zero way to distinguish a “abaya” from a summer dress or any long dress. So what happened is that Arab and Black girls ended up being profiled at school and school staff ended up deciding that if a Arab or Black girl says that this is not a “abaya” one way to know for sure was to ask them what they were wearing underneath…

So we have grown adults asking underage girls what they are wearing under their dress and if they wear shorts and not just underwear they have to remove the dress and stay in short or they get send back home… grown ass ADULTS checking what UNDERAGE Black and Arab girls wear under their dresses and making them undress or lose access to education. That’s where we’re at in France…

(And you can’t wear a headband either if you’re Black or Arab but that’s an other subject.)

P.S: For the white French people who will be disingenuous and claim that these laws don’t target Arab and Black girls they actually do because it’s only illegal to wear these stuff if you’re Muslim and because Islam is a racialized religion in the West, France assume that all Black and Arab folks in France are Muslim so white girls are not affected by these laws.

[deadpowol]

[tahthetrickster]

[hierophagy]

and my take today is that framing misogynistic writing as an "inability to write female characters" subconsciously takes away most of the blame, implying that women are an alien creature compared to men and that it is no fault of the writer because it's out of their skill set. it's not an inability, not a lack of expertise, it's the simple refusal to consider women as individual people and give them the same depth and grace that comes easily to the writer when they write male characters. it's not that christopher nolan, stephen king, james cameron (and frankly anyone using the argument, both professional and hobbyist; yes, that includes fanfic writers) etc can't write women, it's that they just won't. at that point in time it is a conscious decision driven by the laziness to unpack their misogynistic biases, and should be addressed as such

[intactics]

my thoughts on klay thompson cheating on megan are that the smarter, prettier, more talented, and more confident a woman is, the greater the pleasure sadistic misogynist men will get from treating her badly. it allows them to feel like they're superior to her, or like they've one-upped her

[intactics]

with regard to the misogyny: misogynists see women as objects, not people. at the extreme end of things a misogynist man doesn't have a relationship with a woman because he likes her, respects her, or enjoys being around her; she's an object with a use-value, and possessing a "rare" object gives him higher status with other men.

with regard to the sadism: it's personally gratifying for a sadist to inflict pain, humiliation, fear, unhappiness, and uncertainty upon other people. it's also generally more gratifying for a sadist to destroy a piece of Ru ware pottery than it is for him to destroy a mug from Walmart, because of the difference in value other people have assigned to those objects.

when the misogynist fantasy fails, the sadism erupts. it need not take the form of overt violence; instead we see petty bullying, deceit, and sexual infidelity (which potentially exposes his parter to STIs & STDs without her knowledge or consent.)

[raylangivins]

[ot3]

any time a man exhibits any positive trait or behavior it will be attributed to his "healthy masculinity", but this is especially true when the trait/behavior in question is something traditionally seen as feminine. when a man does things such as caring for his children and spouse, being gentle, or being nurturing, it will never prompt the average person to reconsider their stance on men being Feminine let alone the idea of gendering behavior to begin with. it will only ever result in the concept of masculinity being laundered in real-time to subsume any and all qualities a person generally regards highly. we can not let 'masculinity' be a rhetorical stand-in for being an admirable person, even if we stick the word 'healthy' in front of it. if we concede that we need a special term for being a decent human being As A Man then i fear we concede the most basic premise of feminism alongside it.

[varazhi-deactivated20250417]

on psychologytoday.com if you search for therapists and select "female" in the filter then there's a little blurb at the bottom of the page politely chastising you for preferring a female therapist, and even suggesting you need to unpack some things if you prefer a woman. they use phrasing like "believe", "imagine", and "adhering too rigidly to a gender preference".

if you search for male therapists, the blurb totally changes and encourages prospective clients to start with a therapist they feel comfortable with. sexism is baked into e v e r y t h i n g

[girlboss-enthusiast]

In the blurb on male therapists, it says "Some women have prior negative experiences with women that predispose them to prefer working with a male in therapy"

But zero comment made about the many, many reasons a woman may not want to work with a male therapist. Because it's okay for women to distrust other women (those gossipy hags!), but god forbid a woman have a single hesitation over sharing her deepest trauma with a man (our reliable and steadfast protectors).

Every aspect of society wants women to hate other women. We need to do everything we can to prevent that.

[diamond-heiress-deactivated2018]

So Apparently Male Authors Have Been Making Their Wives Do All The Typing

Come on, fellas. Let's get it together.

It’s incredible how much women do behind the scenes. I know a realtor who relies strongly on his girlfriend’s charisma, beauty and personality to gain clients.

[sixth-light]

I’ve just been reading The Glass Universe by Dava Sobel, about the Harvard women who supported the bulk of astronomy research there over the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. While many of them did receive public and academic credit as well as pay - although the university always resisted making any of them faculty until the 1950s - almost all the male astronomers featured were married to accomplished women in their own right, many of them scientists, and you can bet their husbands weren’t putting them on all their papers. 

Which has bled into the modern academic world, where many people are expected to do what was essentially a two-person job (filled by male academic + wife) by themselves, or while married to someone else trying to do the same thing. The lack of acknowledgement of women’s work fucks everybody over. 

[angualupin]

#people who want a return to the mythical prior era #when women did not work #do not want women to stop working #they want them to stop getting credit and pay for it

[orriculum]

This reminds me of how early film history, it was always the male director’s wife who did the editing of the films, because the cutting and connecting of film strips was considered a lot like sewing. Of course, anyone who knows anything about film and editing can tell you it changes how good a movie is very easily.

Don’t believe me? Look at the differences between the famous Jaws as the public’s release of it (insisted upon by the female editor) and spielberg, the male director’s version of it (missing basic suspense methods, shows the phony shark too much, etc). Same goes for almost every tarantino film. Editing makes or breaks a film and even today, you can bet your socks editing “the invisible art” was pioneered and is still pushed by women.

[smallswingshoes]

^^^^^^ This is so true! And once film editing began to be recognized as an actual art form, women were shoved out of the editing room so that men could be artistic or whatever.

Also Tarantino referred to his favorite editor as being kind of like his mom or something and I swear to god the more I see of him, the less I like him.

[squeeful]

The “female editor” for Jaws was Verna Hellman Fields, who cut many other notable films, including American Graffiti along with Marcia Lucas.

Tarantino’s “favorite editor” was Sally JoAnne Menke who edited all of Tarantino’s films until she died.

Because naming and credit is important, especially when you’re talking about women not getting credit and recognition of their work as named individuals.

If you want to know more about women in early filmmaking (emphasis American) and the sociology of how different roles were divided, gendered, and re-gendered in the first decades, I highly recommend Women Filmmakers in Early Hollywood by Karen Ward Mahar.  

There are a number of other books to follow that, but it’s 2am and I’m tired so hit me up later for them.

[beautytruthandstrangeness]

You know what happens when women type? They EDIT. It is a service they are expected to provide invisibly - not to let a mistake or imperfection show to their husband’s audience, but also not to intrude upon his sense that this is all his ideas and his labor. Wives are the unacknowledged story and script doctors, and often co-authors for so many supposedly male-authored works.

Also, I second Women Filmmakers in Early Hollywood. Mahar was my history prof for three or four courses and she is incredibly knowledgeable and engaging. 

[lesbianrey]

there’s just so much about the stress of living as a woman thats hard to explain to men beyond just like, the most explicit and overt sexism/misogyny. its like this tightly wound ball of all these behaviors and expectations and mannerisms that even most women are not consciously aware of half of them. you just get the feeling that something is not right, like it’s unfair. but you can’t explain why because it’s never simply just one thing or action done by another person- it’s that your whole life has always felt this way because the systematic dehumanization of women is so deeply insidious and invisible.

[treecitysessions]

People get really mad when they say somebody’s rape allegations were never proven and you tell them the reason rape is so common is because it’s nearly impossible to prove when it happens to you .

[treecitysessions]

Like this is exactly why sexual violence is one of the most effective weapons that misogynists like to use against women. If you tell a man to stop but there’s no one else around to hear did you really tell him to stop or are you a crazy delusional bitch trying to ruin his life

[z0ruas]

It can be fun to feel exceptional—to be the loophole woman, to have a whole power thing, to be an honorary man. But if you are the exception that proves the rule, and the rule is that women are inferior, you haven’t made any progress.

Ariel Levy, "Female Chauvinist Pigs"

[entheognosis]

“People will do anything, no matter how absurd, to avoid facing their own souls. They will practice Indian yoga and all its exercises, observe a strict regimen or diet, learn theosophy by heart, or mechanically repeat mystic texts from the literature of the whole world – all because they cannot get on with themselves and have not the slightest faith that anything useful could ever come out of their souls.”

— C.G.Jung

[femsolid]

So this is how 2026 is starting for women.

[femsolid]

[whisperedsighss]

[noah-wyles]

she's the best of us

[myloish]

mere whims when a real desire walks in

[transmutationisms]

people love to psychologise bigotry of all sorts instead of analysing what material interests it serves so this is nothing new but it does drive me crazy how liberals talk about inaccessibility like it's primarily a matter of ignorance or even insecurity ('it's bc abled people don't want to think of themselves as potentially becoming disabled') rather than a pretty straightforward effect of active on-purpose efforts to strongarm everybody into economic productivity and eliminate those who cannot comply. like if you look at architectural & urban design history for .5 seconds it's incredibly obvious because those guys were not even hiding it they were straight up in 1820 going like we must create a building that cultivates strong masculine military gymnastic bodies and beautiful fertile demoiselles.. and in 2025 people are like ohhh it's so awful that no one Knows and we haven't had enough Progress yet to let a person in a wheelchair be able to reliably purchase a bag of beans at the grocery store... we must do more public education to fix this