quixote

[blinko]

The concept of the ‘frigid woman’ was invented to explain why women were resisting this change in men’s sexual expectations [the expectation that they actively enjoy and willingly engage in intercourse] and was used as a weapon to worry women into compliance. The sexologists did not suddenly take a humanitarian interest in maximizing women’s sexual response. Rather they took an interest in quelling feminism and women’s critique of men’s sexual behaviour by eliciting from women a sexual response the sexologists believed to be intrinsically linked with total surrender to men’s power and dominance.

Sheila Jeffreys, The Spinster and Her Enemies, 185 (via blinko)

[peace-love-justice-blog-blog]

hmm, really?

[becausechocolatethatswhy-blog]

meanwhile the only country who has ever launched a nuclear attack one which decimated large densely populated civilian areas continues to manufacture and make use of nuclear technology while engaged in more conflicts globally than any...

[alliterate-deactivated20120901]

Since her death in 1979, the woman who discovered what the universe is made of has not so much as received a memorial plaque. Her newspaper obituaries do not mention her greatest discovery. […] Every high school student knows that Isaac Newton discovered gravity, that Charles Darwin discovered evolution, and that Albert Einstein discovered the relativity of time. But when it comes to the composition of our universe, the textbooks simply say that the most abundant atom in the universe is hydrogen. And no one ever wonders how we know.

Jeremy Knowles, discussing the complete lack of recognition Cecilia Payne gets, even today, for her revolutionary discovery (via hollow-gram)

[lesbianseparatist]

[survivingmisogyny-deactivated20]

(TW: rape)

Rape follows me. The threat of rape is a deep bass refrain in my life, I do not fear mugging or theft or homelessness or beating the way I fear rape. Every room I move through, every door I open conceals the possibility of rape, before we got the big dog I used to lie awake alone in my house at night worrying about men breaking in and raping me.

I live in a world with no safety, no psychic silence from the noise the threat of rape makes

Men are not safe people in my world, they are half cocked weapons, potentially full of selfishness and violence. I have very few men in my life because the negotiations that are needed to go through between myself and a man, before I can even think about starting to trust him are so exhausting that usually one or other of us give up on the process before we get to a point we can have any meaningful friendship anyway.

Often in my interactions with men is a surface layer of boredom, irritation and apathy and all of those feelings are real but they are a shield for my terror that they will take me, invade me, annihilate me

And you know what, I know that this isn’t a particularly healthy way to live, or maybe even particularly sensible, and certainly not practical given that half the world population is male.

But the thing is I am the way I am because men have hurt me. I’ve done a lot of healing, years of it and I’ve worked really hard at it but some things don’t heal because some things are true, my body knows that its at risk of invasion by men because it was invaded so many times.

But men get angry with me about it, because I refuse to trust them, and I just feel, why are you angry with me? I didn’t give myself ptsd why aren’t you angry with the men that hurt me?

And women get angry with me when I’m not immediately and obviously accepting and open with their partners, friends, sons, when I shield my body or show no interest in connecting with the men in their lives, and I don’t understand this, I wouldn’t automatically expect anyone to trust either of the men in my life, why would I? a lot of the time I don’t trust them, (this is not the same as thinking that they are not trustworthy) but also just because i like someone, just because I connect with someone why should every other woman?

And then theres the old tired refrain “not all men rape” I know that if I thought that this wasn’t the case I would be a separatist, but you cant tell by looking and in my experience you can’t take anyone else’s word for it either, all the men that hurt me were loved by somebody. and really i dont have the energy to find out.

There is no conclusion to this piece of writing because there cant be really.

[quixoteorjuan]

"Some things don't heal because some things are true." Yes.

Your attitudes toward men sound perfectly sensible, perfectly rational to me. It's a woman's right to draw conclusions about men from her experiential evidence -- it's healthy and necessary.

[zhenotdel-deactivated20121112]

I Think We Should Have a Collective Response To Strangers Who Tell Us To Smile

“Hey. Hey! HEY!” he called from the street. Thinking there was some emergency happening in the millisecond it took for our paths to cross, I turned ever so slightly.

“If I’m not afraid to speak, then why are you?”

Are you fucking kidding me? Could this really be happening? That as I was mulling over the imbalance between men and women in the public square, some strange man who I have never seen before demands that I speak to him only because he would like to speak to me?

Of course I was so mad that I smiled. “Oh,” I said through gritted teeth. “Hello.” Because that’s exactly what he wanted, I guess. To get an insincere greeting from a woman he doesn’t know only because he could.

[quixoteorjuan]

I usually knit my brows and say, "Tell me a joke. Say something funny." That gets them stammering and it's a way to meet a command with a command.

Otherwise, I roll my eyes, tell them to sod off, etc etc. Assholes.

[tinyhousesmallspace]

Hornby Island Caravans

[quixoteorjuan]

cabinspo

[weskit-deactivated20141112]

This dumpster has been repurposed as a tiny swimming pool for a tiny house

[quixoteorjuan]

!!!!! <3333 !!!!

[starting-from-here-blog]

Those of you who were following my recycled 1948 Camper project, check this out.  It is hard to believe that it is the same camper I picked up along side the road for 300.00.  It is all nestled back in the woods behind the house and is the perfect retreat.  This fall, I am going to fit it with solar panels and other green technology so that it functions as a tiny house totally off the grid!

[jessicameza]

[cottonceiling-deactivated201301]

Not to be mistaken with transfeminism, which is the idea that women are not the ones with the vaginas. 

[th3n0cturnal-blog-blog]

[nicoleclarkconsulting]

(Pictured above: Members of Loyola University Chicago Empowering Sisterhood (LUCES))

I recently received an email from a young woman of color and a recent college graduate. She contacted me to ask if I could point her in the direction of women of color organizations...

[exgynocraticgrrl-archive-deacti]

TEHRAN, Iran - These days, Iranian women are not even allowed to watch men compete on the soccer field, but 2,000 years ago they could have been carving the boys to pieces on the battlefield. DNA tests on the 2,000-year-old bones of a sword-wielding Iranian warrior have revealed the broad-framed skeleton belonged to a woman, an archaeologist working in the northwestern city of Tabriz said Saturday. “Despite earlier comments that the warrior was a man because of the metal sword, DNA tests showed the skeleton inside the tomb belonged to a female warrior,” Alireza Hojabri-Nobari told the Hambastegi newspaper. He added that the tomb, which had all the trappings of a warrior’s final resting place, was one of 109 and that DNA tests were being carried out on the other skeletons. Hambastegi said other ancient tombs believed to belong to women warriors have been unearthed close to the Caspian Sea

Woman Warrior Found In Iranian Tomb

[quixoteorjuan]

(via gynocraticgrrl)

[chrysostmomhasmoved]

Some workplaces are changing too, and some women are finding more ways to work and have children. Everyone is happier. Except, of course, that everyone is not — or not quite. Rosin’s chapter on women at “the top” indulges the soul-searching of educated women trying to “have it all.” She gives us Silicon Valley as today’s mecca, insisting that companies like Google and Facebook — flexible, new-economy places — are (in spite of their notorious frat-house cultures) solving the problems of women and children and work. But while I’m happy to learn that a woman at Google persuaded her boss to fly her child and her nanny with her around the world business class, this hardly seems a viable economic model for most companies, or most mothers.

‘The End of Men,’ by Hanna Rosin - NYTimes.com

And so we see that in the feminist revolution—Hanna Rosin’s vision of it, at least, mainstream liberal feminism’s vision of it perhaps too—the status quo will remain in place for working class women. No one will care what happens to us, so long as the rich and upper middle class women are getting their goodies. We will probably keep cleaning their toilets and serving them their very important lattes and dinners to go, putting our babies in substandard day cares or living off of welfare.

(via lutheranturtleowl)

[radtransfem]

About "objectification" - what does it really mean?

I want to write about this in more detail, but I came across the linked article recently and I thought it did a good job of illustrating one key point.

Objectification isn't "finding someone attractive", or leering at them, or harassing them, although it can play into all of those things.

Objectification is literally seeing someone as a non-human object, like a cube, or a climbing frame.

Objectification is when you only acknowledge a woman when she has placed herself inside a plastic "object" shell created out of makeup, restrictive clothing, performed feminine behaviour and is in some kind of vulnerable situation.

What's being acknowledged then isn't a woman any more, it's the exoskeleton/cage of "woman".

If parts of a woman show outside of the cage - for example, stretch marks, or un-made-up eyes (made-up = fantastical = not real), or god forbid a defiant personality, it will either be forced back into the cage (oh, she's so feisty! kitten got claws!) or, the woman having "failed" to present as an object, she will not be acknowledged as a "woman".

Mary Daly writes about relations to fetish objects in Gyn/Ecology that a fetish is a sexual relation with an object. When we look at what culture recognises as a "woman", we can see that culturally normative male heterosexuality is a sexual relation with an object, that is, a fetish for the "feminine".

Daly also calls this necrophilia, a sexual relation to a thing which is not alive, which in its course requires the literal or figurative death of a person (the woman) so that her body may become the non-human fetish object.

This is why objectification is one of the key processes of patriarchy, and is so enabling for rape culture. It destroys women and turns them into non-human things, which then of course become un-rapeable, because a climbing frame does not have boundaries to violate.

It's also why claims that men can be objectified are often pretty tenuous. There was a post I bumped into a few days ago which I can't seem to find now which gave an account of a semi-genuine case of this, where a man was treated like a woman after he took his shirt off, I think in a music video. Over time he felt more and more like the audience wasn't seeing him, just a plastic (my word) torso, and had (or came near to?) a breakdown. Now imagine the effect on women who are conditioned to this from birth.

EDIT: This is the article I meant. Thanks, orlikeawhale!

[ronulicny]

Barbara Hepworth, Stringed Figure (Curlew), Version II, 1956.

[killyourenemies-deactivated2013]

keep your friends close. kill your enemies.