#gail dines

[misosouppe]

Gail Dines - Neoliberalism and the Defanging of Feminism, A lecture

[strezzedanddeprezzed]

  Choice feminism will never yield any real results because it treats the patriarchy-the system that traditional feminism aimed to destroy- as almost nonexistent. Yeah okay, ‘patriarchy’ is thrown around as a buzzword, but it’s never seen as a legitimate means of controlling women by choice feminists. Here’s why.

    Choice feminism assumes that every choice a woman makes is made in a vacuum. A woman’s choice to wear makeup is her choice made without the influence of beauty standards pushed by a trillion-dollar beauty industry made by men. A woman’s choice to do sex work is her choice uninfluenced by hyper-sexualization and misogyny created by the porn industry once again created by men. A woman’s choice to participate in kink culture is her choice uninfluenced by the porn culture and influence men created to keep women submissive. 

          Critical thinking is thrown away just so choice feminists can say ‘look at me! I’m empowered doing things men have always expected me to do and benefit from’. Proving some half-thought-out point about women’s autonomy is more important than breaking free from the financial, political, and cultural systems of oppression the patriarchy created for these feminists. 

          Throwing around ‘fuck the patriarchy’ does nothing when you don’t acknowledge it as an extremely powerful force that penetrates women’s lives and influences decision-making. 

[dworkin-dork]

To be “unmanly” is, of course, within our gender binary system, to be feminine, and here lies the essence of gender socialization for males: they need, at all times, to distance themselves as much as possible from anything constructed by the culture as feminine. The feminine hence becomes feared—and that which we fear, we also learn to despise.

Gail Dines

[honeyriot]

"Interestingly, feminists seem to have understood from the beginning that all issues are "women's issues," so it's not coincidental that they were also founders and organizers in the earliest stages of (only a partial list): anti-poverty work, abolition of slavery, child-welfare crusades, penal reform, public-health campaigns, peace movements (regarding every violent conflict, including the Civil War), and environmental activism-often overtly identifying a problem as a symptom of the underlying malady: patriarchy. Women's activism in the temperance movement, for instance, was based on their precocious analysis that a correlation existed between male alcoholism and wife battery; more than a century later, scientific data would confirm the experience-based hypothesis of these "crazy" women."

"Later, not content with a support role, some women would successfully disguise themselves as men to fight in the revolutionary war of independence, as Deborah Sampson did. Small wonder that by 1776, while in Philadelphia at the drafting of the Declaration of Independence, John Adams would receive from his wife, Abigail Smith Adams, the epistolary prophecy warning him that "If particular care and attention is not paid to the ladies, we are determined to foment a rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any laws in which we have no voice or representation." Unfortunately, Adams heeded her advice no more than Thomas Jefferson heeded that of his de facto wife, Sally Hemmings, on denouncing slavery. Nor would this be the last betrayal of female citizens by a revolution that would set an example for worldwide "democracy." Westward expansion, for instance, relied on female labor and sacrifice. As one anonymous Iowan woman wrote at the time, such life "was mighty easy for the men and horses, but death on cattle and women." There were a few roles that broke free from the presumptive one of wife/mother (schoolteacher, solo farmer, businesswoman, even brothel-madam or missionary), but roles enjoying such relative freedom were unattainable for most women."

[kiki-de-la-petite-flaque]

Pornography is to sex what McDonalds is to food. A plasticized, generic version of the real thing.

Gail Dines, The Philosoph

[ttthebreakfastclub]

We know abuse when we see it, unless it's women who are being hurt. When we see pictures of men being brutalized, we see brutality; when we see pictures of women being brutalized, the culture sees sex.

Gail Dines

[alphie-in-the-sky]

[antiporn-activist]

Here’s what you support when you defend pornography.