equality is “men can wear makeup toooo!!!!!!!!” liberation is “women should not have to wear makeup. women should be able to be in their natural state and feel safe.”
Stranger Things

JVL

祝日 / Permanent Vacation

Love Begins
he wasn't even looking at me and he found me
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YOU ARE THE REASON

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trying on a metaphor

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@radbean-lesbean
equality is “men can wear makeup toooo!!!!!!!!” liberation is “women should not have to wear makeup. women should be able to be in their natural state and feel safe.”
Does anyone know any newish radfem or rad leaning books? Like 2010's to present day.
If you look through my book tag I have a few posted along with some current zines and stuff
lip injections make everyone's lips look the same nose jobs make everyone's noses look the same this supposed perfected beauty is so boring and limited imperfection is infinite in its forms and all the more lovely for it if the beauty achieved through procedures is so freeing why is it so limited. if i see one more person talk about it as empowering i will scream
Let people do what they want with their bodies even if it seems shallow to you. It’s none of your business.
'let people do what they want with their bodies' is the stupidest stock argument when it comes to this topic. i am obviously not trying to stop people from doing what they want to do with their bodies. i am not omnipotent. i am allowed to think that many forms of cosmetic surgery are societally harmful. as a woman i am also very much subject to the pressure to get work done. fuck off
User tinybutvicious do u die when you read critique or
Y’all,,,
I’m more curious as to what they think being powerful is if not political and economic power.
RIGHT?? I had this discussion with a woman on fb and she said “oh but men desiring/wanting to fuck you is power because you can manipulate them” and I was like 1) you won’t manipulate them 2) they’ll just exchange you for whatever 2 billion other girls that are trying to be sexy but not get anything from it.
Power is true power. Money is power. Political positions, having a position in high law, the government or something. Owning land. Knowledge is power. Stuff that, you know, gets you the power to make decisions without being influenced.
Women’s access to true power has been mediated through men for as long as patriarchy has been around and it’s been the biggest coping mechanism possible to just be like “Well actually men are stupid dogs who are easily manipulated and therefore I hold the power”. It is massively disheartening to think that not only do we not have the same access to power that men do, but that femininity only ever prepares us for being at the mercy of men. It’s a much more appealing image to be the woman pulling the strings of those overtly powerful but truly clumsy men.
the “TERFy language” used in abortion discussions is literally just female anatomy but heaven forbid we talk about uteruses when women are losing access to abortion. it’s not just the right who want to police our bodies.
Everyone who brings up gender dysphoria to derail a conversation about women’s lives needs to go into therapy and quit putting their mental illness off on other people. If you can’t cope with the reality of uteruses, abortion, forced pregnancy, forced birth, and the fact only females can be pregnant, you need to go to a therapist and leave us the fuck alone until you are sorted. Get yourself sorted, elsewhere, we are not responsible for your mental illness.
I hope I’ve made my position clear. If you genuinely think dysphoria is a reason to shut other people up, your mental illness is out of control and you need fucking professional help, and I am not a professional, is that super crystal clear for anyone who even had the fucking nerve to think this is an okay thing to put out on the internet? If you think a “Shut Up If It Is NOt ABout MEEEE and my genderfeels” post is appropriate when women and girls can be literally forced to carry their rapist’s spawn to term and then be forced to deliver it and probably forced to keep it? You need to get some fucking help. Not from me. I literally can’t care less about you.
Right?! Women are literally being jailed for miscarriages. That shit already happens in America. Derailing discussions to say ‘but why aren’t your specifically including trans men with no body dysphoria who want to or can be pregnant’ is disingenuous AF at best, and a silencing tactic at worse to get women to stfu and center men in feminism based on their views.
“Everyone who brings up gender dysphoria to derail a conversation about women’s lives needs to go into therapy and quit putting their mental illness off on other people.”
This ^^^^^
Ending female genital mutilation should be at the top of radical feminists’ priority list. For those of you who are on instagram, follow 28toomany, please. They’re a charity organization working to end FGM. Follow their account and donate if you can.
do u ever cry
This is what female separatism could look like but we’re too attached to the chains that tie us to the males in our lives!
honestly? straight men don’t even like women, they like the false and idealized versions of women they see in porn and on tv. they talk about real women (even their wives and girlfriends!) with thinly veiled disgust and condescension because they’d rather have sentient sex dolls than living, breathing human women with personalities and opinions. women love women better than men do because we actually love women.
A 25-year-old waitress who turned down a job providing “sexual services” at a brothel in Berlin faces possible cuts to her unemployment benefit under laws introduced this year
THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS WHEN PROSTITUTION IS LEGALIZED POOR WOMEN ARE PUNISHED FOR REFUSING TO BE HOOKERS
”Under Germany’s welfare reforms, any woman under 55 who has been out of work for more than a year can be forced to take an available job – including in the sex industry – or lose her unemployment benefit. Last month German unemployment rose for the 11th consecutive month to 4.5 million, taking the number out of work to its highest since reunification in 1990.”
fucking hell, ~sex positivity has now brought a system that will force even more unwilling women into the sex industry.
Just noting that this article is from 2005 and since then full legalisation of prostitution and pimping has apparently led from bad to worse. I found a more recent report:
Initially, the German government thought that legalization would lead to the decrease in sex trafficking, safer conditions for prostitutes, and removal of “some of the stigma from the industry.” But in reality, legalization not only increased sex trafficking of women and children but also failed to change the stigma attached to prostitution for the past few years. A study shows that the majority of prostitutes in Germany prefer to “do the job secretly because they still experience discrimination.” The same study also shows that even the government agencies are not willing to broker jobs or offer retraining as they do for employees in other industries. Further, the health insurance company does not provide special health provisions for prostitutes. In terms of their rights, many prostitutes in Germany are still living in poor conditions and exploited by the pimps and the landlords who take the majority of the prostitutes’ earnings.
‘If you don’t take a job as a prostitute, we can stop your benefits’ - Telegraph
The forced rape here only applys to women of course. The state will not be forcing men to be ass raped to keep their unemployment.
I live in Australia and said to a Centerlink (welfare) worker that my only option was selling sex and she said “whatever you can do to make ends meet”. She fully meant that if I refused paid sex she’d cut me off benefits.
It’s not just in places that it’s fully legal. It’s everywhere. We’re reduced down to our vaginas as consumable marketable goods or destitution. Nothing has changed.
I have access to several data bases from my university and it’s so funny every time you look up pornography theres not a single article about how it’s good. It’s 2020 we’ve been studying porn for decades, there’s thousands of studies on it, if you believe porn is scientifically beneficial youre dumber than a flat earther.
it’s almost as if all industries are bad….🤔🤔🤔
Wow what an insightful response you totally just debunked years of sociology research thank you tumblr user aguccimovie for your contribution to science
Patricia Lockwood, No One Is Talking About This
NO woman looks at herself in the mirror and thinks, “that’s a woman, that’s a girl.” we think, “that’s ME, that’s a person, that’s my body, that’s who i am.”
to think that women look at our reflections and immediately categorize ourselves as “woman (object)” is intensely misogynistic; pretending the fact that you don’t means you’re not a woman is similarly a function of misogyny.
woman (costume)
a) physical traits are an indicator of biological sex, end of story. if you do not identify with your biological sex, you will not identify with its physical traits.
b) the identity and self is not just about your physical appearance. so many philosophers wasted so many pages on the subject of self just for terfs to act as if the soul or the mind is something mythical and not real/important.
we understand the concept of self far better than you freaks who insist on pretending that not “identifying” with the roles culturally ascribed to your sex makes you so extraordinary you’re actually not a member of that sex, despite your bodily reality;
far better than the ludicrous notion that gender (culturally variable and socially imposed roles for the two sexes) can somehow be both a social construct and a special innate part of you separate from your body;
and apparently better than you specifically, who seems to feel philosophers have settled the debate about mind/body, which they surely haven’t.
Aperture Science Announcement Voice: “Congratulations, Homosexual! Your existence has been deemed profitable in the following regions: North America, Western Europe, and Australia.”
“To celebrate the occasion we have temporarily recolored all Aperture Science appliances in these regions to your favorite flavor of gay.”
“For further pandering on a wider area please continue fighting for basic human dignities and Aperture Science will be right there to celebrate your victory with you. Afterwards.”
Actions speak louder than words :)))
One of my favorite research projects I ever did for school was the effect of single-sex education on children. I’ll tell you why.
My initial research (mostly news articles) all said that there’s no benefit to sex-segregated education. They acknowledged outliers like that school for young black men with such incredible graduation statistics, but said that, generally, there’s no benefit.
But then I kept looking. And it turns out that yeah, if you look at all children overall, there’s no benefit - because sex-segregated education is great for girls, and terrible for boys.
Girls in all-girl schools get better grades, have closer and healthier social lives, and have better mental health.
Boys in all-boy schools get worse grades and get in trouble more.
When attempting to make sense of this, journalists and researchers usually fall back on “girls do better because they’re not distracted by boys/boy drama, and boys do worse because there’s no girls to impress.”
Which is ridiculous, of course, because these effects are seen even grade school - 8 year old boys are not doing well in school to impress girls. It’s also ridiculous because teenage boys are also not doing well in school to impress girls. That’s not how teenagers work.
The answer is obvious to women. Girls learn better away from boys because they are not being assaulted, harassed, belittled, or compared to their male peers at every turn. Boys do worse away from girls because, without a socially acceptable target, they turn their antisocial urges on each other. Even adult men do this when separated from women - see hazing scandals at fraternities, or the constant man-on-man sexual harassment that is just “part of military culture.”
But because it doesn’t benefit men, sex-segregated education is considered pointless. Send your daughters to girls-only schools.
Bye she was like going in to labor and pausing in between contractions to do her makeup
me giving birth
This is actually cool as hell. Women after giving birth are drained physically and look rough because they legit just released a human being from their bodies and the familydoesn’t care they all want pictures. If my BM ask me I’m all for it.
Or we could… stop forcing women to paint their faces with unregulated sludge at every moment and simply allow a woman to look “rough” after going through the life-threatening process of expelling a person from her uterus? Maybe she doesn’t have to be Instagram Ready to be a human being and respected for performing literal fucking miracles with her “rough” body?
The fact anyone sees this as anything other than sad and ridiculous is beyond me. If you can’t step away from your makeup and need to be consumable for something as dangerous and laborious as GIVING BIRTH then you need serious help.
STOP. A lot of the times when you give birth you face literally changes. It swells and looks weird. The hospital I was in had a photographer that did “hospital” photos for every new mom, usually hours after birth. Having her come in and take photos of me, no shower, face swollen and uncontrollable literally sent me into a deeeeeep post partum depression, that still leaves me V uneasy 4 years later whenever those photos surface. I can’t hang them, I can’t look at them, I hate them. (Not to mention labor lasts hoouuuurrrrrs and you aren’t in pain unless your contracting.) I PRAY, the next time I have a baby, I remember to pack some make up for the hospital bag. Makeup is about more than beauty, a lot of the times makeup can help you feel in control of your appearance and in times like labor and birth, can remind you that your a human being and not just a baby maker/maola machine. Feminism isn’t about pushing non traditional views onto women (ie: we shouldn’t need makeup to feel pretty😤😤) it’s about supporting every woman through her personal choices and not making someone feel shamed for thinking of something like their appearance when they are pushing out a child. Youd be surprised how much mental help can come from a jar of makeup.
Wow do people seriously not have anything better to do than shame women for wanting to feel better about themselves? If using a little bit of makeup makes them feel good during an extremely emotionally and physically exhausting event in their lives, who the fuck are you to tell them what they should and shouldn’t do??? It’s not your life, get off your high fucking horse.
While I don’t ever plan on having kids, I’ve had people throw me surprise parties where I was nowhere near ready for it and people expected me to smile for pictures and be happy in my sweats after 3 days of not showering and having several visable pimples.
Stop shaming women for doing things to make them more comfortable in their own skin. ESPECIALLY people who are prone to depressive episodes.
You’re not being a feminist, you’re being an asshole.
Do wearing sweatpants and having blocked pores mean you can’t enjoy an event your friends out together to make you happy?
If that’s the case, you should seriously do some soul-searching as to why that is.
Why do you feel the need to wear a face full of toxic chemicals, created by men who make money off of your poor self-esteem, in order to socialize with other people, or give birth?
Who cares if your face is puffy? You just created life. If those photos give that one poster veeeeeeeeeeeeery bad post-partum depression because the hospital photographer whose job it is to commemorate one of the most momentous parts of three lives (parenthood, parenthood, birth), didn’t get the right angle and her highlighter wasn’t baked just right.
Come the fuck on. You’re being sold goods and don’t even know you’re being had.
This is not about shaming individual women for wanting to look “nice” in photos or look “nice” during an incredibly intimate experience like giving birth.
What should be shamed is the society that places so much value on a woman’s appearance that she cannot feel comfortable with herself looking anything less than society’s version of feminine and therefore acceptable, even during an experience as life altering and fundamental as childbirth.
Women should be raised to be so comfortable with ourselves and the capabilities of our bodies that we are proud of the photos post childbirth where we are sweaty and puffy and “unfeminine.”
Women should be celebrated more in those moments when we are not “made up” and we are using our bodies to achieve amazing things (this also includes feats of athletic achievement, pursuit of adventure or exploration, academic achievement…etc.) and unfortunately there is so much pressure placed on women “looking acceptable” that instead of being proud of our achievements or focusing on being present in the moment, we are concerned about how we look. 
This is what we are critiquing. This is the problem. This is not on individual women. We are all pressured by society. This is a societal problem that needs a cultural solution.
this is incredibly dangerous for the reasons that these idiots are defending it for. the doctors and nurses need to know if her face is swelling or changing colour because it indicates major things like losing too much blood, not breathing properly, internal damage, etc. women are potentially killing themselves because their pop feminist endorsed body dysmorphia is so severe that even while going through pure torture, all they can think of is if they look fuckable.
Holy fucking shit.
can some lesbian radfems drop their thoughts on comphet and the current trend of young girls and women convincing themselves that they’re lesbians (i.e only finding feminine men attractive, “lesbians” seeking out men for casual sex)
i think it’s easy to blame this all on girls wanting internet points- that’s definitely a factor, but i think it’s not fair to what’s actually happening. it seems to be a kind of neo-political lesbianism, but less aware, less intentional, and with different reasons. but to get to that, we have to establish some basics.
first- what is comphet?
compulsory heterosexuality is the idea that womyn are raised with the expectation of heterosexuality. i think we can all agree that girls are inundated with societal messages about marriage, pregnancy, childbirth, future husbands, PIV sex, boy crushes, etc from childhood. we also get taught about what it’s like for boys and men to be interested in us (scary, but don’t worry about it!) and how we’re expected to give them what they want (either out of obligation as womyn or out of fear of retaliation). male validation/attraction are what we should all strive for, and the best way to get it is by being available to men.
very few girls get to see alternatives that aren’t ridiculed and ostracized, even when said womyn are straight, but don’t partner with men: divorced womyn, spinsters, celibate womyn, nuns, etc, all treated as weirdos, talked about like they’re broken. lesbian womyn get this treatment + homophobia, and so additionally get seen as creepy predators that want to fuck straight womyn and steal them from their husbands or w/e. point is, girls are raised with the expectation of heterosexuality, and taught that not meeting that expectation is Bad™.
i think actual lesbians (female homosexuals) and poli lezzes agree up to here, but disagree that this brainwashing is all that makes up sexuality, and that one can choose to be a lesbian, that desiring men is all mental, that lesbianism is an action that can be taken to escape patriarchy. that’s something deserving of its own post, but the main takeaway is the idea of lesbianism as an escape from men.
now let’s look at the tiktok girls- what do they think lesbianism is?
these girls have a pretty messed up view on sexuality and themselves overall. they’ve been exposed to porn, to queer/gender ideology, to kink culture, to hypersexual images of womyn. they’ve been told that it’s normal to date people they’re not sexually interested in, that it’s bigotry to not put out for anyone that’s marginalized enough, and that sex is something done to them (and that that’s hot and empowering). also, labels don’t really mean anything and it’s cool and rebellious to claim a label people don’t want you to claim. also, we see a lot of depictions of men being violent and scary, especially sexually (see again, porn). not a healthy place to start.
there’s something revealing about how they define lesbian too. lesbians are “non-men attracted to non-men” or “femme-people attracted to femme-people” or “womyn and non-binary people attracted to womyn and non-binary people”– basically, just not attracted to men. and their depictions of lesbians are either soft and cute (holding hands, forehead kisses, cute girls being cute) or grossly pornographic and male-inclusive (anything involving mtfs lol).
so why do i say it’s neo-polilez? i think these girls by and large are afraid of male violence, of being made sexually available and vulnerable to men. they’re already trying to escape the violence womyn face by identifying out of womynhood, it’s not really a big reach that they’d try to escape it a little more by identifying as lesbians, which is defined as… not being attracted to *men*. queer ideology has successfully convinced a lot of them that maleness isn’t the problem unless they’re “cis” and masculine. and the label of lesbian provides some fleeting idea of protection, this idea that they’re largely unavailable to men unless they choose to make an exception. and lesbians have a tradition of gender nonconformity, of being unappealing to men, of dressing however they want- if hyperfemininity is also unappealing, then that just makes the label more enticing. i think these last two (unavailability + doing what you want) are part of what makes the lesbian label “cool” to them, also.
these bisexual or even straight girls see the “lesbian masterdoc” or similar explanations of lesbian sexuality, find the explanation of “comphet”, and convince themselves they’re simply brainwashed into being finding men attractive. and they “like” girls, think they’re pretty, maybe even think they’re hot (for the straight girls, this can mean correctly reading that they’re performing attractiveness-to-men and mistake it for being attracted to them), and they’d like to cuddle with a girl, hold hands with her, etc. that sounds nice, safe, something anyone sane would want. and apparently that makes them a lesbian, since that’s what all these people online are saying, and after all, they’re not attracted to men!
so they claim to be lesbians… but because they’re still male-attracted, will find excuses to allow themselves to express or act on their natural feelings. they will cling to the label of lesbian even if they’re having sex with men, because “this is just me struggling with comphet” or “he’s not really a man, he’s got non-binary energy” or “well he’s my ONE exception, i’m totally a lesbian otherwise.”
there’s of course some contribution of internet points, being queer to be cool, etc, but i don’t think that’s the main think driving these girls. i think it’s largely a cope for living under patriarchy, with hypersexual culture, with the expectations of increasingly violent sex if you’re into men, with expectations of hyperfemininity, etc. it’s the same cope as male-attracted old school polilezzes use(d), but with a lot less self-awareness/intention: identifying as a lesbian to escape patriarchy.
and as usual, lesbians get to deal with erasure now and the aftermath later :’)
If I may, as someone who thought I was a lesbian for a few years:
I think this analysis is very good. I’m not from the tiktok generation, and being a lesbian was definitely not cool in the tumblr queer circles I was in, so in my case we can safely push aside the social points aspects, though I’m sure this plays a part now as well.
The thing that I want to point out is that, when the thought “Oh, I must be a lesbian” came during my late teens, it was accompanied by such a great joy and relief that I thought it could only be the truth. Except I failed to pay attention to my other thoughts: “I don’t have to be with a man ever again if I don’t want to”.
I genuinely had no idea bisexuals could strongly prefer women and choose to date exclusively women. I thought, as long as I admitted my attraction to men, it meant I was making myself available to men, and had to date men in order not to “waste” this attraction. If there’s anything compulsory, this is it. Thinking I had to. Also thinking of course I would force myself to sleep with a transwoman, for her own good.
Anyway, I terfed out, had this faulty realization that I was a lesbian, completely did away with femininity, and lived as a lesbian for a few years.
I was utterly convinced (in part thanks to the comphet masterdoc as I didn’t know better) that I had mistakenly identified as bi in the past. I’d have crushes on boys, I fell in love with girls. I was young, so I didn’t want to sleep with anyone. I forced myself to be with boys I didn’t like because I didn’t know how to say no. It didn’t go well, which led me to identify as biromantic asexual before I realized this split attraction model is bullshit.
When I thought I was a lesbian, I was really happy for a while. Not because I was part of a community. I never could manage to connect with large groups of people. But because it gave me this inner feeling of things being right, of being free. And my attraction to women is real so I had no reason to doubt it. And so every time someone questioned my sexual orientation, or every time I questioned it, I would start to get very upset, and angrily shut down the idea that I could be bi, traumatized, and in denial.
But as I grew into an adult and healed from this trauma, thoughts about men started creeping back in, remote men, feminine men, so I was clinging for a while to this idea of comphet, but the dissonance was unbearable and I make a point of being honest with myself and with others about who I am so this situation really bothered me. It took me a few months of constant questioning, a few convenient dreams that unlocked parts of my subconscious, an apology from my ex boyfriend six years after he pressured me into sex, and many confusing conversations with my friends to finally come to the conclusion that I am bi with a strong preference for women.
Because my other-sex-attraction woke up later than my same-sex-attraction, meaning I moved on from childhood crushes to real attraction to women faster, I genuinely thought for a while that I only liked women, that any interest I had before in boys must have been a mistake, the result of growing up being fed romantic stories. The way it went down with my boyfriends served as “proof” that men just weren’t for me. But when my OSA started developing, at its own pace and not at the pace society had set for me, I couldn’t ignore it. It’s really hard to get through the layers of denial, to understand the why and how of the mistake. But it has to be done in order to be able to live with oneself and to have peace of mind.
The people who feel attracted to males and keep calling themselves lesbian baffle me, I don’t understand how they can live in such a state. They sorely lack self-reflection which is normal for teens but highly concerning for adults. It’s most likely a result of the “queer culture” that developed on the internet and in the media, where admitting you are bi would mean, for a woman seeking to escape the patriarchy, making yourself immediately available to sex with men, and also being knocked down a step lower on the special “queer” scale, losing social points, not being able to be “gay” anymore, one of the cool kids.
I hope I’ll be able to do my part and spread the word, because false ideas about bisexuality are so well-spread, and the definition of lesbian has been so watered down, it makes it hard for teenage girls to untangle everything. What really sealed the deal for me was interacting with lesbians, listening to them, and deeply understanding the simple truth that lesbians don’t feel anything even remotely in the realm of attraction for men. If you feel curious about men, got crushes on boys that made you feel like drawing hearts in your notebooks, if you get a tingly feeling sometimes when you think about men in erotic situations (even with other men, as enjoying M/M can be a way to disguise attraction), even if you never date or have sex with a man, you’re bisexual, and there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s always better to know yourself than to live with the weight of fear and denial.