we are everywhere

Personal archive of feminist posts that are important to me.

[comrade-meow]

[dykerhetoric]

The next time you are watching qu**r eye, drag race, buying a pronoun pin, buying rainbow-decorated products that otherwise have nothing to do with being gay ... ask yourself this: why is the modern expression of being gay so wrapped up in consumerism?

why did widespread gay acceptance only really begin to pick up in the western world when companies began churning out products slapped with rainbow colours? why do banks put pride stickers outside their windows? why do the only shows featuring a majority gay cast rely heavily on consumerism - whether it be makeup, dressing, or self improvement?

gay people only become culturally digestible when they are enactors of capitalism and its associated consumerism. this is also why media NEVER features gender non-conforming lesbians ... because they reject feminine standards, which are inherently capitalistic. When you are a gender non-conforming man, you are a customer. when you are a gender non-conforming woman, you abandon the rituals that would require you to consume.

[celestialapparitions]

God, I'm so tired.

I'm so tired of everything I do being a political statement, even just talking about wanting a girlfriend and dating women is seen as political in a way that straight people will never experience.

I'm so sick of being called a raging feminist for just existing with body hair and not emotionally catering to men. I can't even express anger or dissatisfaction without my peers and teachers seeing it as some sort of statement. If I'm not constantly smiling and performing in my own fucking life, i am inherently a frigid bitch, a man hater, an attention seeking queer.

I'm exhausted from constantly being surrounded by these pornified objectified iterations i am supposed to imitate.

Just bone deep tired. Of it all.

[wulfsbaiine]

men don't actually know what horror is. or metal, or the color black, or anything spooky and grotesque. like jimothy be out here writing his horror novel like "he woke up in a pool of blood" ok? I do that every month. flesh hungry creatures who just want to tear you apart and consume you? that's men @ women all the time. parasitic creatures taking over control of your body? haha. self-mutilating to get rid of the terrors that plague you? (: becoming a starving monster who will do anything to eat and then turning back into a human and feeling guilty afterward? listen I'll eat two burritos a slice of cheesecake and a bag of chips and stand at my refrigerator door looking for more. ritualistic killings? we just do that. belongs to us now and always has sorry scoot back

[powerfem]

Feel like you are crazy or going insane? Paranoid walking down the street? Always feeling a gaze looking down at you, judging you? Feeling like you are running of time, your body is roting, you are disgusting? Wanting to scream, shouting for help but no one is coming to save you?

[gendercult-tiktoks]

Like haunted houses literally being almost metaphorical to trauma. Being in a place you SHOULD be safe in but is plagued by apparitions at best, violent demons at worst.

Grief being a monster, wanting back something so badly it destroys you. Loving what you once had and aching because it's no longer there and you're self destructing. Loving something you shouldn't love and letting it infect you like a cancer.

The feeling of not being perfect and that you're raising a literal antichrist or that you're evil because you feel like you aren't good enough for your work, child, life, etc.

Staring at wallpaper and descending into madness.

Literally the story The Lottery by Shirley Jackson was made when she was looking at her son playing with stones outside the kitchen window.

Women own horror

[sincerelystarlet]

Horror is the daily lives of women.

[clusterlesbi]

men don’t belong in horror because men don’t know fear like women do. murder, rape, kidnapping, torture, stalking - the premise of many horror movies - are, for the most part, crimes against women. these things are fantasizes for men. for women, it is a daily possibility. horror is the encapsulation of being female; writing it comes natural to women because it is natural. men writing horror is vapid, shallow, and voyeuristic upon female suffering. our reality is mere entertainment for them.

[littlejavasparrow-deactivated20]

When I say I’m kink critical it doesn’t mean “you get turned on by feet so I hate you” it means I am wary of people who think their orgasms are more important than someone’s existence or safety from harmful and dangerous behaviours, you’d be surprised how often people’s fantasies of misogyny, racism, transphobia and ableism can leak into how they interact with the real world and that’s fucking scary

[magnetictapedatastorage]

Sometimes you’ll tell yourself you don’t want to break the rules, to deny the fact that you’re too scared to break the rules. The self-lying is so that you don’t have to think about how bad the situation is. I think a lot of women are in this situation, because a lot of women have bottled their feelings for a very long time. Do they like the life they’re living? They tell themselves that they do.

As Dworkin said best, “Many women, I think, resist feminism because it is an agony to be fully conscious of the brutal misogyny which permeates culture, society, and all personal relationships.”

Let’s say you’re in a cage, and it’s huge– 100 square miles. It seems like a lot of space, but you’re still trapped. To avoid thinking about that, you stay in the very center, so that the bars are always too far to see. You choose to live in a space smaller than what is allowed, because by doing that, you can pretend that the cage does not exist.

[riggio037]

MAG-FUCKING-NIFICENT!!!

[autoscum]

In actual fact, the female function is to explore, discover, invent, solve problems crack jokes, make music – all with love. In other words, create a magic world. 

- S.C.U.M. Manifesto (Society for Cutting Up Men) by Valerie Solanas 1967

[blackswallowtailbutterfly]

If you think “females have the physical biological ability to become pregnant and give birth” means “women’s purpose is to become pregnant and give birth”, that is very much a you problem, not a feminism problem. Feminism repeatedly and explicitly says our reproductive abilities have absolutely no bearing on whether we should. The reason this female ability matters and needs to be known as female-only is that whether a man wants to become pregnant or not, he can’t, so he can never be coerced or forced into an unwanted pregnancy or birth. Women can and very often are. “This is a unique female experience” and “women should not be reduced to this” are not mutually exclusive, since one is literally dependent on the other. You can’t reduce men to something they never experience.

[fckyeahnetart]

’woman wiring an early ibm computer’

Berenice Abbott Documenting Science series (1938-58)

[carpathxanridge]

it’s funny how even when you think you’ve possessed feminist consciousness for a long time, when you’ve spent years resisting the performance of femininity, when you think you truly and fully have your eyes open to how unnatural femininity is, and you’re at the point where noticing a woman with shaved legs or makeup is what feels unnatural because you’ve so thoroughly left behind those tools of patriarchal conditioning… it’s still possible to be hit suddenly with a moment of horrible realization of the depth of female socialization.

i’ve worn boxer briefs for a while now, and am used to them to the point of no longer feeling physically comfy in even the comfiest women’s underwear. but it was only just now, getting dressed and forgetting my pants and simply walking through the house in my boxers and t-shirt to retrieve them, that i realized— i wouldn’t have done this before, i wouldn’t have been able to without feeling immodest and self-conscious. oh my god, i used to go to the beach in bottoms shorter than this. oh god, i used to be forced to run fucking cross country track in bottoms shorter than this. i used to choose to wear shorts shorter than these. and i was struck once again with horror at comprehending the discomfort i was acclimated to my entire childhood, that all girls are acclimated to. all while there are teenage boys who have never known what it’s like to not be able to lounge around the house in your boxers in the summer.

i knew this. of course i knew this. but maybe there is no state of knowing something like this, something so tangled with feelings of dread and embarrassment and anger. maybe it needs to be a continuous forgetting, and then remembering. finding feminist consciousness isn’t a single moment of “peaking,” and then you’re there, work done—it truly is a life-long process of excavation, picking apart and pulling out the threads of harm that were sewn into you.

[entheognosis]

A tree in Yemen

Boabab tree in Madagascar   photo by @maguzman83

Bulbous red cedar

The Thinking Tree, an ancient olive tree in Puglia, Italy

The candelabra tree at Shady Dell in the Sinkyone Wilderness State Park

[magnetictapedatastorage]

“its a bathroom for feminine presenting-” i have literally never voluntarily been feminine in my entire life but guess what i still need a trash can in the stall for used pads while my uterus is shedding its lining because thats part of being an adult woman and it isn’t an optional choice like putting on lipstick or whatever. its not something you get to choose.

[elizabitchtaylor-deactivated202]

simply the fact that different body types for women go in and out of style throughout the decades should be enough to tell you that women’s bodies are considered consumable goods under capitalism

[kaumnyakte]

very cool how the gender binary in the emerging trad terf synthesis is like, there are two genders, the one that does bad things and the one that bad things are done to. the only thing in the world is immorality and it flows from unexperiencing agents to unacting experiencers.

[kaumnyakte]

which naturally appeals to people who would like to be perceived as inherently lacking the capacity for immorality. for whatever reason

[radfemarchive-deactivated202304]

Quite literally any social analysis that is centered on power dynamics and systemic oppression is based on the premisse of group A (oppressor) doing bad things to group B (oppressed), that is for sex, class, race, nationality, sexuality and so on, yet none of these later are labelled as people picturing themselves as eternal victims incapable of immoral acts as a whole, it's a grasp on how these groups of people are treated under that specific axis.

Apply this type of OP's logic to any other form of activism and it is clear how failed and right-wing "nobody is a social victim" aligned it is.

[michaelmilkers]

genuinely so fucking tired of people leveraging the "groomer" argument against people who support sex ed because scientific literature over decades shows that comprehensive sex education starting around kindergarten actually prevents children from being sexually abused and groomed because it teaches children the correct words for their body parts and also teaches them concepts of privacy, personal space, bodily autonomy, the difference between appropriate and inappropriate touching, and the fact that sex is something that only adults do. children with this knowledge are not only better equipped to identify abuse and predatory behavior and communicate that its happening to a trusted adult, but also prevent it from happening in the first place by recognizing when something is happening that shouldn't.

sex education does not sexualize children, it prevents children from being sexualized. anyone who is against early foundational sex education and claims they are doing it to protect children is a fucking liar.

[cisthoughtcrime]

so let me get this straight, y'all can understand how being racially "colourblind" fails to address racism because it fails to distinguish the oppressing vs oppressed classes, but y'all can't wrap your heads around how pretending "biosex" is undetectable/unimportant does the same thing? y'all can acknowledge that race is immutable and biological and changes the way you are treated in the world even though there is no actual scientific basis for any race's superiority, but no one's supposed to acknowledge that being female is distinct from being male and changes the way you are treated in the world even though there is no actual scientific basis for a superior sex? y'all see why it's offensive for a white person to say "I just feel like a black person, like Im sassy and love fried chicken and soul music" and pretend that that means they've never had white privilege, but a male saying "I just feel like a woman, I'm always nesting and clumsy and hypersexualised" is the most oppressed woman of all?

seeing the disparity in the concurrent discussions of BLM vs sex based oppression has really just further convinced me that liberals don't believe women are actually an oppressed class. obviously they're different issues and I'm not trying to be inflammatory, but this comparison fits for any axis of oppression where acknowledging a difference between the privileged and disenfranchised is not the same as granting the natural supremacy of the privileged.