Today's Oppression Is...

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Roads

Countless whites all over, defining the lanes, the crossings, the order.

Yellow, at the margins, reliable but subservient.

And beneath them all, UNDER them all?  The black.  Your tires on the way to Whole Foods to pick up kale and quinoa for your infant’s coming-out party this weekend are traitors to their race.

We must tear it all down for the good of the world!  For the sake of an equal and just society!  A society without race!  A society without color!  A society without rush hour traffic!

[todaysoppression-blog]

T.E. Lawrence

Now, some of you might better know this tyrant as ‘Lawrence of Arabia’ but make no mistake, myn and womyn, that is the title of a Patriarch and we should be insistent upon using the name given when he was fresh from the caring womb of his mother.

And some of you familiar with history may very well be asking what this hero of Arab Independence could have done wrong.  He fought alongside people of color to support their rights, he advocated against imperialism, he was even a friend to muslims!  I say take off the rose colored horse blinders!  Just look him up on Wikipedia and if you don’t gasp in shock, then you can’t call yourself an ally!  LOOK AT HIM!  He’s raping the proud historical culture of the Middle East, dressed up like the POCs he was supposed to be supporting, appropriating traditions and fashions that were not his, as a privileged white man, to take!  Truly, a fox in the henhouse - only saying and doing the things he did so that he could steal them to serve the ends of the privileged cishet ruling class in the first world!

[todaysoppression-blog]

Cutting boards

Be silent.  Be firm.  Be unmoving.  Be unfeeling.  Just lay there and take it.  Then be quickly washed off and set aside.  

In every kitchen, in every home, around our youth, this is the lesson we teach them, this is the outlook we give them about how we should treat each other.  Do you see it, fellow revolutionaries?  Only when we remove rape from the kitchen counters of our society shall we be liberated!

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Hors d’oeuvre

There’s a lot of different opinions out there about sex work, but I think that when circumstances allow it to be a personal, empowering choice for a woman that she deserves all the support in the world.  But snarky little veiled insults like this reinforced the patriarchy’s attitude that sex workers are of a lesser value.  It’s not hard to translate - ‘apart from the work’ - as though sex workers are shiftless lazy people who aren’t doing a hard day’s work just like the rest of us?  What a joke.  Stay strong, sisters.

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Homonyms

The sexual orientation spectrum is so wide that not even my fellow brave explorers on Tumblr have managed to find the ends of it.  But meanwhile back in the patriarchy's society, all schoolchildren is taught systematic hatred and intolerance in English class.  Words can choose their own sexual expression, white cismales in power, labelling them homo is offensive.  What's even more offensive is how children are never taught the term 'heteronym' and so they just learn to associate hetero with normal and homo with something that has to stand out.

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Breastfeeding

It's shocking how brainwashed so many women are by the patriarchy.  They're willing to be so publicly loud about their desire to sexually assault young boys, girls, and fluids.  I mean this is case-closed proof of rape culture.  Your breasts are SEXUAL organs, women, please stop using the mouths of helpless infants for your own gratification.

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Martial Arts Lessons

It's only in a patriarchal world that you'd find anyone thinking that we should teach our young cis-boys and trans-boys how to physically subdue another human being using physical force.  That we should encourage it as a healthy athletic activity, and cloak it's nefarious nature behind belief that it teaches 'discipline' - a euphemism made by men for physical abuse of a woman.  The highest honors, a 'black belt' is even made to help conceal practitioners lurking in dark street at night.

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Mimes

Silence is not amusing.  Silence is not a joke.  Silence is not a performance.  All of those crushed under the jackboots of the patriarchy's rape culture need to speak up and there is no room at all for theatrical silence in the enlightened world.  Women held at lower salaries by male managers - SPEAK UP.  Girls held to different standards than boys - SPEAK UP.  Mimes, trapped behind invisible walls - SPEAK UP!

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Taxidermy

A macabre show of patriarchal authority and the reinforcement of rape culture.  That living things are meant to be totems proving a man's prestige in this world.  That you can't escape, even in death.  And after dying, you'll be stuffed.  Stuffed?  Rape metaphors all the way down folks.

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Touchscreens

Most people would say these are a 'step in the right direction' in enabling those with physical disabilities to interface with modern technology.  But isn't that really the same as saying that non-consensual groping is 'a step in the right direction' away from rape?  When will the supposed 'innovators' in Silicon valley make truly egalitarian interfaces for their devices?  With options for people without limbs, without eyes, without noses, without gender?

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Zero-SPF Cosmetics

Look if you're going to kill us all, just kill us all and get it over with.  Line us up against a wall and shoot us while shouting Sieg Heil to the patriarchal hive-mind.  But no, that would be too merciful wouldn't it, too kind compared to providing the women - and men with poor complexion, because this isn't about gender - with makeup that offers no protection from being ravished by ultraviolet radiation.  So that we can die at fourty-five from skin cancer while your male doctors and male nurses look on and laugh.

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White bread

I'm trembling with anger as I write this.  Segregation was supposed to have ended in the last century!  But here we are in the future where store shelves still carry white and wheat bread separately.  Even worse, white bread is made by bleaching it to change it's natural dough tone!  The gentrification of the bakery:  an example of how social justice still hasn't been achieved.

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One-way traffic signage

I'm not disparaging the brilliant work done by the brave women who choose to go into civil engineering.  I'm standing up for them because their choices about how best to direct traffic are so thoroughly oppressed by the patriarchy.  One Way?  Is that the only way we can inform motorists about an orderly society?  One way to live.  One way to dress.  One way to drive.  It's all the same thing.  Why not a sign that simply reads "Consent required for this direction?"  

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Newtonian Physics

Objects in motion remain in motion unless acted upon by an external force.  The apple falls, the head cannot protest.  Air resistance can't stop the motion alone.  Inertia, society cries, is undeniable.  You just live with it.

Isaac Newton:  rape apologist.

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Saltine Crackers

Salt on one side, nothing on the other.  The privileged and the oppressed.  Cheap, bland, and always a moment away from crumbling.  Riddled with holes, always the same amount, with no choice for individuals. The best of us fight for a world without the salt binary.

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The 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens

Heteronormative thinking and the influence of the hegemonic structures of the patriarchy influence even the hard sciences.  Is it any wonder that proud intelligent women flee from STEM fields?  When a volcano - already a disgraceful name stemming from Vulcan, a MALE religious figure - explodes our scientists are taught to judge its impact.  If the death toll is larger than most midwestern cities, we give it a strong exotic name like Vesuvius or Krakatoa.  When it doesn't, we get things like St. Helens.  Plural!  Because two women couldn't possibly kill thousands in a single day of terror and loss.  Or so they want our children to believe.

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Petting Zoos

Rape culture starts here.  Young children of all genders being paraded through culturally sanctioned prisons and told to lay hands on the inmates without ever asking for their consent?  Often as part of a child's time in the official state education system.  Is it any wonder that teen-on-teen molestation isn't called what it is: early onset rape, but instead attached to the euphemism 'heavy petting'?