[lesbian-archives]

The Emerging Lesbian: Female Same-Sex Desire in Modern China, Tze-Lan D. Sang, 2003

[seeuspacelesbian-deactivated202]

the reason men want women to look so unnatural and bizzare, the reason they want them in layers and layers of makeup, insane amounts of surgery, completely covered and faceless and quiet, is that the less human you can make her, the more you can remove her from her natural state, the less guilt you feel for being a monster. If she is not human, what humanity do you need to treat her with?

[seeuspacelesbian-deactivated202]

i thought of this while watching the breadwinner, and watching the scene where Parvana’s mother is beaten in the street in her burqa— and even her eyes are covered by a mesh. and all i could think about was the experiments where people (largely men) would press a button to shock someone in a room over that they couldn’t see but they could hear. i know in that experiment part of it is that it was an authority telling them to do it, but i do have to think about how the scientists who conducted the experiments specifically made it so they couldn’t see the person they would believe they were harming. i really think that also plays a part in the dehumanization to a degree. when you remove the ability to see the pain you’re inflicting, or can obscure it, make it pretty or easy to cover it up, it becomes even easier for them (men) to inflict it. i think this can be as direct as these two examples or as subtle as the makeup or extreme as plastic surgery. anything to remove you from your basic state, to make you something separate from just how you would be. idk. maybe i’m overthinking it but it is something.

[female-malice]

This is the complete process of othering.

[kova-luu]

When I was younger, I really thought other women enjoyed the things I found uncomfortable and painful. The makeup, the hairstyles, the clothes, the forced smiles and laughter, the heels, the domestic and emotional labor. I wonder how many men go through an unconscious thought process like this: women freely choose to put themselves through this and that and seem to enjoy it, so they must be built differently than us, they must be built for pain. 

[crimson-femme]

Stormé DeLarverie by Diane Arbus in 1961

[imjusthereforashorttime]

I reeeeally don't want to focus on her but....

‘I've no regrets welcoming my twins through surrogacy’ - Chimamanda Adichie

During one of the sessions, Ms Adichie broke barriers by discussing surrogacy, a topic often kept behind closed doors.

... where? when? Celebrities and other public people have been letting the public know about their baby purchases for decades.

The 47-year-old maintained that she chose to speak openly about her surrogacy journey to help more women feel less stigmatised about becoming mothers through non-traditional means. Speaking at the event about the challenges of balancing motherhood and career, Ms Adichie said: “I want more women to feel less ashamed of talking about reaching motherhood through non-traditional means. What I said about having my twins through surrogacy is true because there are some things you simply can’t hide. You can’t hide the existence of two perfect human beings. People got carried away with the idea that I’m 47 and have babies. But I don’t lie about things that could have consequences for others. “I felt many women might be pressured and told, ‘Look, she’s 47 and has twins—what about you? Generally, there’s so much shame around fertility issues, and I think it’s too much of a burden for women. Women feel ashamed when they have fibroids or struggle to get pregnant. I don’t believe in that kind of shame. Some viewers even said I looked fantastic after just having a baby, and I couldn’t say thank you—because it wasn’t true. I said they were born via surrogacy. I heard there was a bit of noise about that.”

I love how she completely ignores feminist critique of surrogacy. I just know that has been most of (if not all) controversy. She got famous for speech on feminism ffs.

Oh, wait...

The author of ‘Purple Hibiscus’ further noted that her announcement sparked controversy because many believe ‘it’s wrong to rent a woman’s body.’ “They argued that it’s dehumanising, I think it can be, but I think it matters how it’s done, and I think it can be done ethically and also the same people we say women can do whatever they want with their body, and there’s a contradiction there. I think that’s what the noise is all about, and my boys are so precious to me. And I hated that anything about them would become politicised, so on the one hand, I wish I hadn’t talked about it, but on the other hand, there is no way I am going to lie about them that I have babies I didn’t birth myself. I think it’s wrong.

Yup a woman can do anything (ANYTHING) with her body. Goo-goo-gaga type of analysis. Are they "the same people"? Are you sure?

[asianwlwthings]

so lforlove.in is an indian website that’s trying to normalise lesbian relationships and

oh my god

it’s so sassy and so cute and just

<333

[desbianherstory]

#LforLove is conceptualised by Ogilvy India and the photographic campaign is shot by lesbian activist and photographer Monisha Ajgaonkar.

Burzin Mehta of Ogilvy said, “There’s enough social stigma attached to being lesbian in our country. Add to that, the imagery that pornography fuels and what you get is an absolutely warped perception of what lesbian relationships stands for. So we consulted with members of the community throughout the campaign and also got Monisha – a proud lesbian photographer, to shoot the pictures. Given the nature of the campaign, we made it possible for audiences to ask questions to a lesbian, anonymously. Predictably, most of them stemmed from homophobia and porn. Answering them the way we have, has resonated very positively within the community. That’s a truly heartening feeling. While it has triggered a conversation, let’s hope it goes beyond and results in greater acceptance of the community by the industry, by brands and by consumers alike.”

Monisha Ajgaonkar, the photographer of the series, said, “As part of the LGBTQ community, this campaign spoke to me on a personal level. Lesbians are mostly portrayed as either highly sexual beings or as abnormal girls who are tomboyish and unhappy, which is completely unrealistic. Campaigns like #LforLove will go a long way in normalising the status of lesbians in society.”

[ocaledonia]

one thing i dont think we talk enough about is how pretty much every sex ed resource for lesbian teens tells them they should be open to sex with male partners

i remember being 14/15 and googling how lesbian sex worked and just being confronted with site after site telling me that lesbian sex sometimes includes a penis and it was uninclusive and closed minded to think otherwise :)))

i guarantee you no girl or woman searching for lesbian sex ed resources is looking for advice on how to blow a guy or have piv intercourse, theyre looking for advice about sexual relationships between biologically female partners

i think people underestimate how ashamed and broken it made me and other lesbians feel to read that over and over. after reading those resources i felt so hopeless that i tried to force myself to be asexual because it was the only socially acceptable way to rule out having a male partner

constantly adding these ~helpful reminders~ is like telling lesbians that they just haven't met the right guy yet, and there is no context in which they should forget it

some of these were government affiliated websites insisting that exclusive homosexuality didnt exist, or at the very least that it was unthinkable and unpeakable

its a very impactful and insidious form of homophobia

[logophilestudies]

[preposterousblasphemy]

Rebloggable again ❤️

[nawadi-roman]

I’ve always suspected that part of the reason why men don’t mind having kids with any woman they’re with even if they don’t plan to stay for long, is having children guarantees that the woman will always perform domestic labor. Even if she is exhausted and can’t stand his lazy ass, she can’t punish him by not cooking or cleaning until he does it, because she has to do it for her kids who don’t deserve to be collateral damage. As long as there are kids, the house is clean and there’s food. This also explains the great shift that happens with men once their gf/wife has kids. Men who used to do certain chores around the house will stop doing anything completely once their children are born cause now he knows, she has to do it anyway. He can be a useless piece of shit and ignore her pleads for help and call it nagging and laugh about it with his friends for this exact reason.

[itiswhatitis-33]

The actual percentage of homosexuals is so small that it makes living in this world feel isolating so few understand you nothing is made for you and if it is other groups take it and destroy it

[a-purple-girl]

"it''ll be a statue of a woman, like a beautiful statue of a woman, and it'll be like...she helped lead the way for so many refugees or she was a nurse or she was this and she was that. She was just this pillar of society in her time. She was such an influential and powerful woman.

And they'll zoom in on her face, and they'll zoom in on the plaque, and they'll zoom out and show a full body...and it’ll show that one of her breasts has been basically rubbed off and it’s so shiny because all the tourists and, you know, whoever, has touched her breast and that's her legacy now.

[…] and you walk up to it and it’s just… through all that, through all the effort, through all the care and all the legacy she left behind, the only thing that she is now seen for is her breasts. That's gonna make me actually sick."

-brittany broski via the broski report

juliet, dalida, idk, molly malone

some people are just fucking rotten on the inside.

[lilacbreastedroller]

wild how like PCOS, endometriosis, vaginismus & hell, even frequent yeast infections are “mysterious” with no well known cause and little to no decent treatment, but we have tons of supposedly well researched body fat removal methods, about 20 different kinds of breast implants, laser hair removal, and 100 different dermatologist recommended anti aging creams. we sure had the money and brainpower to cure those “diseases”

[pusheen-the-radical]

also interesting that you mentioned body fat removal methods. as it turns out, we know NOTHING about the actual realities of removing (especially female) fat, which as it turns out is profoundly, structurally different from male fat. fat is actually now considered to be an organ in its own right, and as it turns out violently removing it from a given area (like the hips and thighs) permanently damages its functionality, and causes it to randomly pop up in other places (like the underarms) and causes literally unknown complications when breastfeeding for example, as the fat structure on the hips and ass especially is the way it is to ensure newborns receive the necessary amount of specific fat peptides to correctly develop their brains and eyes.

so in reality, i think its more that we actually dont know shit about anything when it comes to female healthcare, but there are certain areas (read the cosmetic shite that fuels patriarchal capitalism) that we simply lie about in order to get women to do it (like ‘this is perfectly safe and fine’!).

[deadfish-inabarrel]

Reminder that there was a legitimate study on “the attractiveness of women with retrovaginal endometriosis”

[barbievspredator]

Half of the plastic surgeries are complete slaughter jobs done by doctors without any knowledge of long time effects. Breast implants tended to burst and leak liquid until the early 2000s, until the majority of the world banned use of liquid filled implants. They still rotate and disfigure women. There’s literally no research on how breast implants cause early menopause.

Until this day we don’t know how long lip filler actually lasts and why it migrates.

Doctors just started paying attention to constant infections and blindness which are a common long term side effect of facial fillers. They still don’t know why it happens.

Clients of plastic surgeons are their test subjects.

Women are paying to be test subjects for a bunch of (mostly male) surgeons who, at best, have no idea what they are doing and what consequences their sadistic experiments will have.

[femalegothic]

actually he was wrong for thinking that

[mini-wrants]

He silently agreed that his wife was just an accessory to his life and his dreams and goals and they thought we would just skip right on past that??

[femalegothic]

She believed that they were equal partners in their marriage. He believed she was his broodmare. Aren’t they both at fault here?

[femsolid]

I was watching a youtube video of a trial in the US: a young man who killed his father because he'd been raping him ever since he was 6. He got sentenced to life in prison because either the jury didn't believe him or they didn't believe he'd acted in self defence, whatever. I watched him cry as he was being questioned by the lawyers about what he'd endured and I genuinely felt bad for him. I believed him and was moved by his pain. I checked the comments and everybody was being supportive and saying he should be freed, but there were also dozens of comments with thousands of upvotes saying: "if he'd been a girl he would be free right now", "people never believe men", "this is why men don't come forward" and "if he was a girl it would be a whole different story." Men and women, repeating the same thing over and over again, like some rehearsed performance: women are believed more than men and they get a free pass for murder. Basically, that the justice system favours women and hastily punishes those accused of rape. Which is a blatant lie. So why do people believe it? Why do they feel the need to say it every time a man is abused? My empathy for the guy slowly vanished as I remembered that a man would never feel the same way about a woman and that men literally use other men's pain to oppress women further. There's an underlying message with it too: that men rape women so frequently that everyone believes it, which is a privilege. Female privilege. Women and girls are privileged for being assaulted so frequently that it can't be denied. And yet it is.

I looked at the corner of my youtube screen and saw the next recommended video: "Camille Vasquez's Cross of Amber Heard." In the video, Amber Heard cries much like the man I was watching just before, about being raped. The top comments all call her a liar, an evil psychopath, a bad actress and a woman who tried to ruin a man's life with false rape accusations. They're all laughing at her. You really can't make this shit up.

[lemurchick]

There is actually a new paper about bias in sentencing men who sexually assaulted minors (!) depending on the sex of victims.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/bsl.2720

‘regardless of age, having a male victim was associated with the male offender receiving a longer sentence compared to a female victim. Moreover, the older the female was, the likelihood of receiving a lesser sentence increased, but this was not the case with male victims.’

[terfsdontburn]

A woman on twitter posted a comic about reporting her professor for sexual harassment and then not only did people accuse her (a 20 year old woman) of ruining his (a middle aged married man) life

But they drew porn of her being raped by said professor.

People not only DON’T believe women, but they are punished and degraded for even speaking out in the first place.

[femsolid]

#people seem to hold two contradictory ideas about women in their heads

1. women have the ‘privilege’ of being the sex that gets raped so they will be believed by default

2. women use this ‘privilege’ for manipulation and shouldn’t be believed by default

Perfectly summed up by user flixonase

Interestingly, as I've looked more into the trial I was watching, the jury of the first trial could not reach a verdict which resulted in a mistrial. And guess what? The jury was perfectly divided by gender: all the men voted for first degree murder (= life in prison or death penalty) and all the women voted for voluntary manslaughter (around 10 years). In fact, one of the female juror said that the male jurors had joked about the defendant just being gay which, in their opinion, was how he managed to describe the sexual details of the rapes he had endured from his father.

The women suggested that homophobia and sexism were common in the deliberations. "It was hostile in there," said one juror, Tracy Miller, 27, a bookstore clerk. "There were insults, sexual comments. They tried to outshout us." Another juror, a 36-year-old secretary who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said: "We were called ignorant asses and empty headed and 'those women.' "The split was so deep, so early, that some believed that others arrived with their minds made up creating, in the words of juror Hazel Thornton, “too much prejudice . . . to overcome.” The Pacific Bell employee specifically complained that some jurors had a “bias against homosexuals.”

“There’s a possibility (of abuse), but I don’t think that would rectify the fact that they did take the law into their hands to kill their parents,” said juror Robert Rakestraw, 53, who voted for first-degree murder. “I don’t think that justifies their actions, if molestation did occur.”

In deliberations, Ms. Thornton said, she tried to turn the talks toward issues like burden of proof or the concept of malice, but the male jurors were more interested in whether the defendant was homosexual. When that issue was raised by a prosecutor late in the trial, Ms. Miller recalled that several of the male jurors showed new interest. "You could see they were really excited -- they were going to hear some real dirt now," she said. "I think they came in homophobic and with their minds made up."

[quinntheestallion]

Sall Grover said something like: "Transwomen aren't in a fight for rights, they have a list of demands and part of their demand is that no woman is allowed to say "no" to a man with a gender identity. Women are the ones fighting for their rights, the right to say "no" to a man"

[gendiebrainrotreceipts]

UK Supreme Court: women are female humans

TIMs:

[quinntheestallion]

The bill in the uk which defines a women had hundreds of comments from men who believed "we should ban the whole lgbt", just btw. Most of the people who support that bill are just as homophobic as they are transphobic. It isnt a movement to protect women, it is the start of a landslide infringement on lgbt rights in the uk. When they start banning lesbianism, then u will realise what side you are on lmao.

How is the fact that women are pressured by both misogynistic conservatives and misogynistic liberals somehow our fault? I don't GIVE A FUCK if the only men who don't support the erasure of sex are conservative. Just like I don't GIVE A FUCK if the only men who support abortion rights are liberlas who support women getting fired for calling their rapist a man. You're not going to manipulate me to align with one or another. FUCK BOTH OF THEM. I HATE BOTH OF THEM. WOMEN WILL FIGHT THEM BOTH. AS WE ALWAYS HAVE. Women right's doesn't mean "whatever rights men will support". It means women's rights. Women empowered themselves and got rights and protections starting with fighting a conservative base already. We'll just do it the fuck again. "Oh they'll ban lesbianism." It's currently illegal for lesbian groups and spaces to exist without trans dicks in many places. The liberals have already effectively soft-banned lesbians. It's easier to fight people who acknowledge you exist than people who will put you in jail for speaking words they don't like. We know because we did it already. We don't need the support of hostile anti feminist liberals who will give us rights as long as we agree that we don't actually exist or need unique rights. GO THE FUCK TO HELL.

[lesistance]

Wrong, anyway.

There was no bill. There was a supreme court ruling on the definition of 'woman' as defined in an already existing bill. Specifically, the Equality Act 2010. And, yes, the ruling states that the term 'woman' as defined within the Equality Act 2010, specifically, should be interpreted as meaning 'biological woman'

Interestingly, the Equality Act 2010 is also what enshrined in UK law protections from discrimination for trans and gender non-conforming people.

[sossegato]

"When they start banning lesbianism, then u will realise what side you are on lmao."

Notwithstanding this habit of always closing their threats or dismissing of violence with laughter, is this the side that's protecting us lesbians?

Anon's premise is "it's either us, the side which coined cotton ceiling, dykebreaking, which attempts to coerce lesbians into sex with males through social ostracising and verbatim conversion therapy, who then appropriates the term conversion therapy to mean something else entirely, who pushed laws to forbid lesbians from freely congregating, or the other homophobes. And you can't pick neither, if you're not with us you're with them. Either way you're fucked and it's funny lmao".

"Most of the people who support that bill are just as homophobic as they are transphobic."

Citation sorely needed.