you cannot talk about misogyny or racism if you think someone can identify into oppression. that’s the quickest way to let me know you do not care about women, especially women of color
It blows my mind how in class we tend to talk about misogyny and racism and capitalist oppression and the importance of “critical thinking” and write “make abortion legal” on the whiteboard and an hour later I hear my classmates talking about “you identify as a woman, right?”, or “well, he was a nun who wanted to fight in the wars and called himself a man all of his life because he was actually a transman” instead of acknowledging that the poor woman was suffering from so much misogyny in the 16th and 17th century so she adopted male identities to fucking live.
Like literally HOW. All their talking about “critical thinking” is absolutely useless if they don’t practice it.
I’ve come out to a lot of people over many years, but I think the funniest story was telling one of my grandma’s, and having her launch into a story describing her lesbian neighbours from decades ago whom she loathed for “mowing their lawn half-naked in red bras, so loud and hairy”. It’s amusing that the traits some people hate lesbians over are the ones I adore them for. I wish I could’ve met those neighbours. I wonder if they’re out there, somewhere in Melbourne still, old and grey as my grandma, with their own stories about her instead.
I’ve recreated that image in this art and one day hope to recreate it in some photos as well. It’s such a memorable image. Red bra dyke doing her errands. Being domestic was rebellious. Even when I know sharing was an attempt to undermine me, I took away a connection to history instead, and a reminder of why I love being a lesbian so much.
[ ID: A butch lesbian is drawn mowing the lawn in an outback setting. She is white, with light brown, short hair, and green eyes. She is smiling crookedly. She is wearing a red bra and blue jeans, and is hairy on her chest, arms, and stomach. She is fat, with round yet strong features. The lawnmower is a simple electric push device with silver metal, and black and red rubber features. Grass extends into a blue sky with white clouds, and a brown wooden fence lines the background diagonally. End ID. ]
Literal children who wouldn’t be experiencing sexual attraction anyway and they don’t need an identity label for being normal children
Straight women who hate the sexual expectations men place on them, or have only had dissatisfying/painful sex so assume all sex is dissatisfying/painful
People who only want to have sex with the person they’re in a relationship with (a normal thing)
Teenagers who identify as asexual when in actuality it’s completely normal for them to not be mentally/emotionally/PHYSICALLY ready for sex (and they don’t need to use an identity label to justify that)
Gay/lesbian people struggling with internalized homophobia
People who have the mistaken notion that ‘sexual attraction’ means ‘gets uncontrollably horny at the mere sight of any attractive stranger’
People who say that they ‘don’t experience sexual attraction’ even though they have an enjoy sex (in a relationship or casual sex) but they just ‘don’t experience sexual attraction’. (I still don’t understand the logic behind this one.)
People who have low sex drives for a variety of reasons (being on anti-depressants or BC for example)
People like AOC directly saying that abortion isn't a women's rights issue is absolutely devastating. Women are never ever going to be free, are we?
So what IS a women's right's issue according to these people? All women's rights issues affect other people/groups to a certain extent. So following this logic women's rights issues don't exist, ergo women's rights don't matter. People who claim abortion isn't a women's rights issue are saying that they don't think women should have rights.
This would never happen in a different context. You'd never get away with arguing that the BLM movement "isn't a black issue, it's a human rights issue" even though OBVIOUSLY police brutality doesn't just affect black people. This only happens to feminism because people fucking despise women. The left is actively responsible for contributing to this shitshow and destroying the progress made by the feminists that came before us, without whom we would never have had legalised abortion in the first place
We can’t talk for ourselves, we can’t focus on ourselves, we can’t fight for ourselves, we can’t even name ourselves. And people men need to call it something else, not a “women’s rights issue” to give the tiniest of shits.
Men really claim to be the more emotionally repressed sex while beating women and children and physically assaulting each other over petty squabbles and putting holes in the drywall and screaming obscenities at strangers and lighting a city on fire when their favorite sports teams wins or loses and shooting up schools and workplaces and raping women and children. They claim that these are just symptoms of how emotionally stifled they are and then claim women’s rampant eating disorders, self harm, suicide attempts etc are a sign we’re emotionally liberated and free to express our feelings in a safe and respectful environment. What level of delusional narcissist do you have to be on to come up with that?
An Open Letter to the Guy on Twitter Who Wonders if Biological Sex is Real
Imagine you’re standing at a train station.
Across from you, you see another man step across the tracks. He’s distracted, too busy to take the long way around, too lost in his phone to notice where he’s going. You turn your head the other way and see the train, barreling towards him as he walks into its path. What do you do?
The answer is obvious, hopefully. You scream. You shout. You wave your arms and make a scene. And if he still doesn’t notice, still doesn’t look up from his phone, you jump down and push him off those tracks yourself. Maybe you’re not that brave in reality. I’m not sure if I am. But at the very least you hope that’s what you’d do, right?
And why is that? Why would you go through all that effort? Because, consciously or not, you understand Newton’s laws. You understand that force is equal to mass times acceleration, that a very heavy thing moving very fast can destroy a fragile human body in an instant. You do what you can to get that man off the tracks because you know that a life depends on it.
But did you know that Newton’s laws are hardly stable? That they exist as mere approximations, liable to break down in all sorts of situations? It’s true. Newtonian physics can’t predict the way light bends on its way through the solar system, or how an electron might spin around an atom’s core. Even something as mundane as your cellphone relies on a far more sophisticated model. While those equations you learned in junior high school might get you through the day, the whole truth is never so simple.
Now, here’s a question: Knowing that, do you change what you yell to the man on the tracks? After all, “The train is coming towards you!” is technically inaccurate. Einstein showed us that movement is relative; in a sense, it’s just as reasonable to say that the man is hurtling towards a stationary train. You’ve got a few seconds left. Do you take your time and capture all the nuance?
Physics may be the least of your problems, by the way. Biology is just as messy. You’re probably worried that the man will end up dead, smashed to pieces or ground into bits. But what does it mean to be alive or dead anyway? Many scientists would tell you that no single criteria exists to distinguish inanimate and animate matter. Some entities, like a virus or a prion, hove in the grey space between the two categories. If you can’t even explain why the man on the tracks is alive, what “alive” even means, then what sense does it make to worry about keeping him that way?
And of course, all of this is beside the point if we don’t know what makes something right or wrong in the first place. Dozens and dozens of complex ethical questions exist without any agreed-upon answer, and the foundations of morality are endlessly debated. Should you do anything to help the man at all? You can imagine situations where inaction is best; perhaps he’s a serial killer, or some other unrepentant monster. Perhaps no moral truths exist, and your efforts to save him are completely irrational. Can you be sure it’s right to intervene, if you can’t even define what “right” means in the first place?
Looking back, what started out so simple ends up quite complex —a complex obligation, a complex process, a complex result. Presumably, you’ll want to make sure your warning is in line with all the latest quantum theory. You’ll want to figure out just what you mean by “life” and “death” too. And it wouldn’t hurt to track down the nearest priest or philosophy professor to elaborate the finer points of ethics. Nuance, accuracy, and a critical eye are important, after all. Shouldn’t we strive to get everything right?
Now, here’s a different thought experiment: Imagine it’s you on the train tracks.
Lately, I’ve seen a lot of debates break out on Twitter over biological sex — what defines it, how it can be measured, whether it exists at all. The men who dominate these debates are often experts in their fields, meaning they use terms like “bimodal distribution” and “nonstandard karyotypes” to make their otherwise mundane points. I think most of these points are foolish, tired rehashings of fallacies first identified by ancient Greeks in the fourth century BCE. They confuse — or, perhaps, intentionally conflate — imprecision with invalidity, social perception with social construction, and binarism with exclusivity. In other words, they trade in the all-too-familiar illogic that festers at the intersection of science and philosophy, where ontological cowardice appears as the highest form of nuance.
But here I go again, right? It’s so easy to get sucked into this debate, to get that hot indignation in your stomach that comes when a foolish claim is so proudly asserted. And I don’t even have skin in the game — binary or not, my sex will still land me squarely in the “paid more, raped less” category. So what’s the point beyond intellectual exercise? It seems more and more obvious to me that even entertaining the debate is a concession, an assent to women’s lives being made the subject of thought experiments and counterfactuals plucked from the air by some post-grad who, coincidentally, has never once worried about pregnancy from rape.
So that’s my quarter-through-the-year resolution: I’m not going to debate with you about the reality of biological sex, for the same reason I wouldn’t stand on the train platform debating the finer points of physics while the man on the tracks is ground into bits. Not because your position is unassailable. Because even bringing it up makes you an asshole.
That might sound a little dramatic, a flourish of rhetoric to cover up a weak rebuttal. But how long have you spent reading up to this point? Five minutes? Ten? If so, the world has fifty more mutilated girls than when you started. Were the men who carried out those mutilations confused about what makes a female body? Did they ponder chromosome parings and standard deviations when they chose who to cut? Or is that kind of nuance a luxury set aside just for educated, progressive, worldly men like you?
Isn’t it odd that sex was never so complicated before? There was nothing ethereal about biology when it came to allocating the right to vote, or own property, or walk down the street at night without fear. We knew perfectly well what made someone female when that female-ness guaranteed a life of subservience and pain. Only when women began to say no did their bodies become a concept.
So many feminists have made this point, over and over again. I see them say it. I know you read it. Did you listen? If not, why? And why do you always respond when I say it? It seems you do know who has a female body, when it comes to deciding which perspective gets ignored.
Sex is such a mystery to you when women want shelters for themselves, meetings for themselves, words for themselves. Pardon me for asking, but is it equally mysterious when you log off Twitter and move over to Pornhub? The true nature of a female body is so complex when you lecture. Does it become simple again when you masturbate? Who does the laundry in your house? Were you somehow able to navigate an inchoate soup of X’s and Y’s to saddle your girlfriend with the dishes? Give yourself some credit — I think you know perfectly well what a female body is. But in case you don’t, here’s a hint:
It’s the only type of body that gets you thrown on the funeral pyre when the husband dies. It’s the only type of body that gets your feet bound and your breasts ironed. It’s the only type made pregnant through rape and burned with acid, the only type expected to sit quietly and listen while we redefine it away, the only type men have spent millennia criticizing and critiquing and buying and selling until we suddenly decided we don’t even know what the fuck we meant this whole time.
You know what a female body is, dude? It’s the only type of body that makes men like you ask such stupid questions. So please, stop. This is an emergency. This is three and a half billion human beings tied to the tracks, and you’re riding on the train. Your insistence on nuance, your fetish for accuracy, your smug deconstruction of common sense — it doesn’t make you thoughtful. It doesn’t make you wise. It doesn’t make you progressive. It makes you an asshole. It makes you worse than a bystander. A bystander does nothing. He watches from afar. You step into the fray just to prod the victim for the imprecision of their screams. I’m not going to step in too, laying out my rebuttal over the sound of grinding bone. It’s just not worth it.
Here’s my resolution: As long as pimps, priests, and politicians know what a female body is, I do too. The moment they’re confused — the moment they hesitate, the moment they qualify, the moment they adopt the restraint and caution you demand from the targets of their abuse— then I’ll happily open myself up to ambiguity. Until then, I beg you. Reserve your philosopher’s curiosity, your scientific rigor, for the ten thousand other questions that don’tmake a thought experiment out of an atrocity. What marks the division between knowledge and belief? How did life develop from non-life? Does P = NP? At what point does a man losing his hair become bald and not merely thinning? Go tweet at Rogaine and get their thoughts on that conundrum. Leave women alone.
Since it was not included in the article, I thought I would provide a rough translation of her historical defense on court;
“When men wear suits and look down they get their sentences lowered; I dont have a suit, my mom barely managed to find this shirt for me. I won’t lie, there is also the joy of being able to survive that i can’t conceal. I’ve walked the corridors of these courthouses countless times, my face covered in bruises, for a restraining order. I didn’t have any other choice. If he hadn’t died, I was going to. He wasn’t going to tell you he had decided to pimp me out, he wasn’t going to talk about his plans of putting me in the arms of other men, he wasn’t going to tell you about the beatings I endured just because the eggplants were slightly overcooked, because the curtains were dirty, because there were leftover crumbs on the table. He wasn’t going to mention how many times I was hospitalized. There is a picture of me taken in the teahouse. I’ve smiled a bit lopsidedly. Maybe he was going to show you that picture and tell you I looked like a dishonorable woman. He was going to tell you he ‘cleansed my honor’ as if he wasn’t planning to pimp me out. You were going to sentence him to 3-5 years and pardon him because i had dishonored him and see my lopsided smile as provocation and feel sad for him. However, honor is mine Mr. Judge, I won’t leave it to anyone else just because I signed a paper.”
her name is Çilem Doğan and she was sentenced to 15 years for this. the court initially wanted to give her life imprisonment. she was released on bail in june 2016 and has since become a symbol for the movement against femicide and violence against women in Turkey.
It’s not a coincidence having hyper long, painted nails has become a fashion for women. It’s not a coincidence wearing high heels has become an ideal for women, in some workplaces and contexts even mandatory. It’s not a coincidence women are expected to wear make-up. It’s not a coincidence tight skirts and dresses (without pockets too) basically only exist for women.
It’s all there to limit us, to make us helpless, and to make us consume. It’s there to make us waste our time putting on make-up in front of the mirror every morning and then waste our energy going around feeling we’re never pretty enough. It’s there to make us compare ourselves to eachother. It’s there to make us throw away our hard-earned money so that some rich, white men can make more money than we will ever dream of selling their branded make-up and “beauty products”. It’s there to make it difficult for us to be practical, to move freely.
Yes, yes, I know what some of you will say. “Don’t shame women for wearing make-up!”. “It’s our choice!”. “I can move freely in these long nails!”. “I feel powerful in high heels!”. But come on. Have some intellectual integrity. We all know men don’t need to do all this shit. We all know no man ever gained real power by wearing high heels. We know high heels hurt women’s bodies, for real. We know we’re wasting our money on products that are bad for us and for nature. We know spending four hours every morning doing hair and make-up never empowered any woman, and even less so women as a sex class. It’s okay not to have the energy to resist, to be afraid of the punishment and backlashes that meet women who resist. But please, can we stop pretending like this is all natural and right? Can we please stop humiliating ourselves and our sisters like this? Because acknowleding women are forced into dehumanizing, limiting and time consuming beauty regimes actually isn’t what’s humiliating here …
Helplessness and vulnerability are attractive to men since they are predators. They are attracted to what they can take advantage of. Hence why they go after (and get aroused by) feminine women. Especially if you consider the fact that they view those women as accepting their lower status by accepting to be hobbled and marked in this manner. Domination is very attractive to men. Femininity is a handicap, a sign of submission and a sexual fetish all at once.
It is brutal and awful, but was it necessary to add “this is 3rd world brutality”? Why is it not enough to say “this is brutality” or any sort of comment against human rights?
Saying shit like this sounds like 3rd world countries have some sort of inherent brutality. Instead of making stupid and quite racist comments, focus on improving the living conditions and human rights of the girls and women in your country. Period.
because the number of gay people is a tiny minority, even a small percentage of straight people (a much larger population) trying to shove their way in will have a large demographic impact.
for example if you have 10 homosexual people, and 1000 heterosexual people, and 1% of heterosexual people decide to larp as gay (10 out of 1000) you’d then have a “gay community” that’s 50% straight (10 out of 20).
This demographic amplification is rarely brought up, but it’s important.
Concept: a makeover story, but instead of “ugly nerd girl brushed her hair and wears makeup and gets the boy” it’s “popular girl realizes her unhappiness and stops shaving and wearing makeup or heels, and becomes a sexy butch lesbian”
Because putting on a sheep costume doesn’t magically transform a wolf into a herbivore, right? Doesn’t change him from predator to prey?
Like, I can just see how the comic continues. A well-meaning sheep will come in and see him. She will want to be supportive and will be all like “Oh, hi, fellow sheep, may I sit with you?” And the wolf-in-sheep’s-clothing will feel so freaking validated, right, and say “Yes, please!”
The waiter comes over again and takes the sheep’s order. “A large pasture greens salad, please. Extra forbs!!!” Since the wolf-in-sheep’s-clothing ordered before, his food arrives pretty soon… and it’s a heaped plate of raw meat and organs.
The sheep is shocked. She thought the other animal was actually truly a sheep on the inside? This couldn’t be right. “You, um, didn’t feel like having forbs today, haha?” she jokes uncomfortably.
The wolf-in-sheep’s-clothing gets defensive. “Not every sheep is a herbivore, you know!”
The sheep is floored. “We kinda… are?”
“Well, I’m a sheep and I’m a carnivore, so clearly, carnivorous sheep exist.” It’s said with a little growl. The sight of his canines makes her heart beat faster.
A wolf in sheep’s clothing is someone who pretends to be something they’re not to gain the trust of the people they plan to prey on. How could this not be satire?
The cat represents people who are condescendingly validate genderhairs for woke points.
