cambridge university students were asked on campus why they needed feminism. here are 60 answers. click the link for over 600 more.
(via littlemiss)
Can we just repeat that a few more times,
“The comments on any article about feminism justify feminism.”
“The comments on any article about feminism justify feminism.”
(Source: pinkwithlace, via iron-mans)
(via demarches)
effective feminism is realizing that every struggle is not your own and that you can’t always relate
THIS!
(via bigfatfeminist)
You’re so sensitive. You’re so emotional. You’re defensive. You’re overreacting. Calm down. Relax. Stop freaking out! You’re crazy! I was just joking, don’t you have a sense of humor? You’re so dramatic. Just get over it already!
Sound familiar?
If you’re a woman, it probably does.
Do you ever hear any of these comments from your spouse, partner, boss, friends, colleagues, or relatives after you have expressed frustration, sadness, or anger about something they have done or said?
When someone says these things to you, it’s not an example of inconsiderate behavior. When your spouse shows up half an hour late to dinner without calling — that’s inconsiderate behavior. A remark intended to shut you down like, “Calm down, you’re overreacting,” after you just addressed someone else’s bad behavior, is emotional manipulation, pure and simple.
And this is the sort of emotional manipulation that feeds an epidemic in our country, an epidemic that defines women as crazy, irrational, overly sensitive, unhinged. This epidemic helps fuel the idea that women need only the slightest provocation to unleash their (crazy) emotions. It’s patently false and unfair.
I think it’s time to separate inconsiderate behavior from emotional manipulation, and we need to use a word not found in our normal vocabulary.
I want to introduce a helpful term to identify these reactions: gaslighting.
Gaslighting is a term often used by mental health professionals (I am not one) to describe manipulative behavior used to confuse people into thinking their reactions are so far off base that they’re crazy.
[…]
The form of gaslighting I’m addressing is not always pre-mediated or intentional, which makes it worse, because it means all of us, especially women, have dealt with it at one time or another.
Those who engage in gaslighting create a reaction — whether it’s anger, frustration, sadness — in the person they are dealing with. Then, when that person reacts, the gaslighter makes them feel uncomfortable and insecure by behaving as if their feelings aren’t rational or normal.
Omg you need to WATCH THIS TED TALK RIGHT NOW
It’s (almost entierly non-problematic) feminist: yes
It talks about social ques given to children through kid’s movies and the whole Magical Quest trope: yes
It talks about raising boys to respect women in a way that’s not just chilvarly: yes
It’s written by a man: yes
Watch, listen and learn, because this guy knows what he’s talking about. It’s important to teach the right lessons to both girls and boys.
This is fantastic, funny, and extremely true. Both girls and boys need to learn together that they’re equal, not just “girls can be powerful” and “boys can be powerful”. take a sec to watch this, dashboard!
A great watch. Share with your friends.
Must watch!
Wow, this is great.
YES. ALL OF THIS.
(Source: tedxueuropianitiranes1)
At a recent presentation, I asked all of the gay male students in the room to raise their hand if in the past week they touched a woman’s body without her consent. After a moment of hesitation, all of the hands of the gay men in the room went up. I then asked the same gay men to raise their hand if in the past week they offered a woman unsolicited advice about how to “improve” her body or her fashion. Once again, after a moment of hesitation, all of the hands in the room went up.
These questions came after a brief exploration of gay men’s relationship to American fashion and women’s bodies. That dialogue included recognizing that gay men in the United States are often hailed as the experts of women’s fashion and by proxy women’s bodies. In addition to this there is a dominant logic that suggests that because gay men have no conscious desire to be sexually intimate with women, our uninvited touching and groping (physical assault) is benign.
These attitudes have led many gay men to feel curiously comfortable critiquing and touching women’s bodies at whim. What’s unique about this is not the male sense of ownership to women’s bodies—that is somewhat common. What’s curious is the minimization of these acts by gay men and many women because the male perpetuating the act is or is perceived to be gay.
An example: I was at a gay club in Atlanta with a good friend of mine who is a heterosexual black woman. While dancing in the club, a white gay male reached out and grabbed both her breasts aggressively. Shocked, she pushed him away immediately. When we both confronted him he told us: “It’s no big deal, I’m gay, I don’t want her– I was just having fun.” We expressed our frustrations to him and demanded he apologize, but he simply refused. He clearly felt entitled to touch her body and could not even acknowledge the fact that he had assaulted her.
I have experienced this attitude as being very common amongst gay men. It should also be noted that in this case, she was a black woman and he a white gay male, which makes this an eyebrow-raising dynamic as it invokes the psychological history of white men’s entitlement to black women’s bodies. However it has been my experience that this dynamic of assault with gay men and women also persists within racial groups.
At another presentation, I told this same story to the audience. Almost instantly, several young women raised up their hands to be called upon. Each of them recounted a different story with a similar theme. One young woman told a story that stuck with me:
“I was feeling really cute in this outfit I put together. Then I see this gay guy I knew from class, but not very well. I had barely said hi before he began telling me what was wrong with how I looked, how I needed to lose weight, and how if I wanted to get a man I needed to do certain things… In the midst of this, he grabbed my breasts and pushed them together, to tell me how my breasts should look as opposed to how they did. It really brought me down. I didn’t know how to respond… I was so shocked.”
Her story invoked rage amongst many other women in the audience, and an obvious silence amongst the gay men present. Their silence spoke volumes. What also seemed to speak volumes, though not ever articulated verbally, was the sense that many of the heterosexual women had not responded (aggressively or otherwise) out of fear of being perceived as homophobic. (Or that their own homophobia, in an aggressive response, would reveal itself.) This, curiously to me, did not seem to be a concern for the lesbian and queer-identified women in the room at all.
Acts like these are apart of the everyday psychological warfare against women and girls that pits them against unrealistic beauty standards and ideals. It is also a part of the culture’s constant message to women that their bodies are not their own.
It’s very disturbing, but in a culture that doesn’t see gay men who are perceived as “queer” as “men” or as having male privilege, our misogyny and sexist acts are instead read as “diva worship” or “celebrating women”, even when in reality they are objectification, assault and dehumanization.
The unique way our entitlement to women’s physical bodies plays itself out is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to gay cisgender men’s sexism and privilege. This privilege does not make one a bad person any more than straight privilege makes heterosexuals bad people. It does mean that gay men can sometimes be just as unthinkingly hurtful, and unthinkingly a part of a system that participates in the oppression of others, an experience most of us can relate to. Exploration of these dynamics can lead us to query institutional systems and policies that reflect this privilege, nuanced as it is by other identities and social locations.
At the end of my last workshop on gay men’s sexism, I extended a number of questions to the gay men in the audience. I think it’s relevant to extend these same questions now:
How is your sexism and misogyny showing up in your own life, and in your relationships with your female friends, trans, lesbian, queer or heterosexual? How is it showing up in your relationship to your mothers, aunts and sisters? Is it showing up in your expectations of how they should treat you? How you talk to them? What steps can you take to address the inequitable representation of gay cisgender men in your community as leaders? How do you see that privilege showing up in your organizations and policy, and what can you do to circumvent it? How will you talk to other gay men in your community about their choices and interactions with women, and how will you work to hold them and yourself accountable?
These are just some of the questions we need to be asking ourselves so that we can help create communities where sexual or physical assault, no matter who is doing it, is deemed unacceptable. These are the kinds of questions we as gay men need to be asking ourselves so that we can continue (or for some begin) the work of addressing gender/sex inequity in our own communities, as well as in our own hearts and minds. This is a part of our healing work. This is a part of our transformation. This is a part of our accountability.
I was seriously nodding along with this whole thing. If I had a dollar for every gay guy who thought it was okay to touch a woman without her permission because is gay, I’d be a really rich woman.
(Source: yellowhine, via kvothetheraving)
Some of this is taken from other posts. Ladies makin’ history collage.
Mary Gonzalez is the Representative-elect for Texas and will be the first openly pansexual official in the United States. She acknowledged the existence of non-binary identities when she came out.
Mazie Hirono is the Senator Elect from Hawaii and will be the first Asian-American woman in the Senate.
Tammy Duckworth is the Representative-elect for Illinois. She lost both her legs in the Iraq War and will be the first disabled female veteran elected to the House.
Tammy Baldwin is the Senator Elect from Winsconsin and the first openly gay person ever elected to the Senate.
(There was some misinformation over her stance on transgender issues (admittedly, the whole incident was a bit fuzzy at the end) but to clear things up, she has publically spoken out against transgender discrimination and advocated for their rights as recently as last year.)
(via thingsarequeer-retired)
Mazie Hirono, the Senator-Elect from Hawaii, will become the first Asian-American woman in the U.S. Senate.
(via gooodmorningmayamatlin)
Someone show me where the sign on my back that says “I WANT TO BE PART OF YOUR INANE 2012 SJ CIRCLE JERKS” is so I can remove it, please.
I am not trying to be a “feminist ally” as defined by the internet this year. I honestly believe that women are equal in every way to men in matters of intellect and ability, with the possible exception of natural testosterone production.
There is more at stake for women, right now, in this election, than almost any other subsect of the American populace, and I fear for those who are voting for “traditional family values” or against “socialism” without realizing how many of their hard-earned rights and opportunities are at risk if a couple more far-right Supreme Court justices get in during Romney and his homunculus’ reign.
I am a feminist. I care about the equality and equity of women, and I vote to protect or expand their rights whenever the opportunity is presented. I’m not interested in your online social justice cookie game, and I hate to break it to you but this is America and we are fucking OVERFLOWING with idiots of both sexes. There are a lot of stupid women in this country because there are a lot of stupid people in this country. Sarah Palin, for example, is a dipshit. That’s not misogyny. It’s honesty.
What’s more important? “Problematic” jokes, or access to contraception and preventative screenings? Me being a good “ally” on Twitter, or Romney attempting to undo Roe v. Wade?
Make sure you don’t sleep through your voting window tomorrow because you stayed up all night fighting the nonexistent fight on Twitter, okay?
Priorities, pumpkin. Get ‘em in order.
Reblogging because reasons. Also because the tags were flawlessly executed.
(via iammattjordan)
Rereading Is Thor a Feminist Movie? (Yes) this week over at the Social Justice League made me want to draw a billionty pictures of Jane and Darcy blowing the Bechdel Test out of the fuckin’ water. I loved Thor from the first time I saw it, but this little article makes me love it more and more every time I read it. Or maybe feel increasingly justified in my love. Either way - Branagh you beautiful beast, thank you for subverting the superhero genre in so many wonderful ways.(alsothankyouforLoki)
I also love that fandom has decided that these two are this wonderfully compatible odd couple - looking out for each other and being awesome friends. So yeah, Jane & Darcy pre-Thor, just bumming around in their comfy sweaters, drinkin’ coffee and eatin’ poptarts, talking about science, movies, the internet, whatever. Just like real women.
I friend!ship these two so hard. Seriously though, can we come up with a better feminine form for ‘Bromance’ than ‘Homance’?
(via temporarily)
(via temporarily)
(via temporarily)
<3
Holy shit they actually included women of color too!
aaaaah this is giving me so many feels <3
(Source: perpetuallyfive, via demarches)
(Source: fozmeadows, via raffaellacarra)
