So I was back in Mandarin class and the teacher let us know that in ancient times sometimes they wouldn’t even give their girl children names. Their attitude was why bother getting attached to her when she’s just going to grow up and belong to someone else? She doesn’t need her own identity because she is the property of her future husband. If they needed to refer to a woman they would say that’s Wang’s wife. In the same way you would say oh, that’s Wang’s car or Wang’s house. Let’s remember that we give names to dogs, horses, ships and buildings but some human women don’t deserve such recognition. She also touched on sex-selective abortion for a bit and it was all in all a pretty sad discussion today.

I was really moved but it felt like everyone else didn’t care or thought that stuff doesn’t matter because it doesn’t happen anymore. And yet even now women’s identities are being erased when they get married. Their personal history and family ties are untraceable because they are “adopted” into their husbands family. It’s disgusting and I hate that its so nomalized and I hate that even women’s names are not our own. We might as well never have been given names in the first place.

This effect also disrupts our relationships. Try finding old friends from high school or your second cousin. They are gone and renamed, lost to you.

Common throughout history, unfortunately. Women in ancient Rome often weren’t given names beyond their family names; if you needed to differentiate between sisters, you’d often just say “Cornelia the younger / the elder” or even just give them numbers. Their husbands would address them, in private, by the feminine form of their own names (eg. if you married Julius then he’d call you Julia).

A lot of people think the effect has disappeared today, because women typically have less common names than men - a higher fraction of men are named the absolute most popular names like John or Jack whereas women are more spread out over different names.

But it’s really noticeable how often parents give their male children meaningful names - they’ll have a historically important namesake, or be named after a great grandfather, or have a traditional name with a meaning their parents liked. That’s why the common names tend to be common. The names given to female children are chosen because they’re “pretty” names, because their parents just liked the way it sounded, or are even just nouns / adjectives like “Lily”, “Hope” or “Summer”. They emphasise that the role of the female child is to be a pretty ornament, not to achieve meaningful things or inherit anything from a namesake.

They’re often very infantilising - sure it’s cute when you have a two year old named “Poppy” or “Precious” but she’s going to have to grow up and put that name on her CV. They very often use the diminutive -ie / -y suffix (Millie, Tilly, Becky, Georgie, Katy / Katie), which is typically used to indicate something small and cute and which many women have to obfuscate in order to construct anything that sounds like a professional identity. (I know a Katie who is pretending her name is Katherine, even though it’s legally Katie, just so people won’t think she’s being inappropriately informal in a business context.)

They also highlight just how much ageism is directed at women and how much women have to struggle to keep up with fashion, even in something as basic as their names. A traditional male name like “Joseph” or “Edward” or “James” or “Luke” is fine no matter how many centuries it’s been popular for. An off cycle name might be unusual, but that isn’t a bad thing. But dare give a girl a name that was popular too long ago - “Dorothy” or “Mary” or “Dawn” or “Gertrude” - and she’ll be ruthlessly bullied in school for it because it’s a “old lady name for grandmothers”. Don’t you know those names are ugly now, undesirable, associated with old wrinkled women who aren’t sexy? You need a young, new, sexy name like Ava or Madison or Olivia - keeping in mind of course that those will be “ugly” too when your daughter gets old.

The tendency of feminine names to emphasise beauty - and occasionally sexuality, which can be somewhat inappropriate considering the kid has to grow up with that name - is taken to an extreme if you look at porn stars’ stage names, which are all things like Scarlet or Rose or Desiree or Ravyn. Femininity, taken to an extreme, always ends up being about sexual availability.

And when women do try and give their daughters unique names, so they’ll be memorable even if their surname changes, the Daily Mail runs spots to make fun of names like Nevaeh or Unique or Evylyn because apparently that’s chavvy. And maybe it is! I’m not a fan of replacing all vowels with y either! But wow, there are just no good options for women.

And of course the moment you put a recognisably female name on your CV you become less employable, your qualifications worth less. But if you have a gender ambiguous name, you’re punished for being gnc. Good fucking luck out there.

It’s kind of a small thing, next to all the rape and mutilation and career discrimination and all the generally horrible things happening to women. But it’s just… nothing is okay, nothing is equal, no part of the world has actually been completely fixed yet. Even our names are yet another thing we need feminism help improve.

Reblogging for this fine addition

Ah, language/literature analysis! How I love and hate you. Great addiction tho. Thank you!

One of my mates has an old fashioned legal name which they don’t go by. While she likes the name because it has meaning to her, she’s said that most people think it’s a weird simply because it’s so old fashioned.

When it was popular what were the most popular boys names? Joseph, Robert, John, William, etc. Have they become old fashioned suddenly? Of course not.

Is there any part of a woman’s life which isn’t just a trend?

Modern feminists rarely reckon with the true immensity of the legacy of men’s subordination of us. This is the kind of thing I mean. Modern feminists are frequently in total denial about the fact that we were all of us property until, relatively speaking, a few seconds ago.

I think about this post a lot. 

We have a tradition in my culture, since Somalia was an oral society, where people kept track of their ancestry by memorizing the names of their fathers, their father’s father and so on. This practice is called abtirsi and in theory you’re supposed to know the names until you reach your clan name.  I think of all the women in my ancestry whose names was forgotten. 

A PSA for those who forgot:

Women’s spaces weren’t created for validation but for safety

this is really interesting!

“Misgendering” is just the new “emasculation.”

Males have long held the belief that women owe it to them to affirm their gendered beliefs about themselves, and now this same entitlement leads them to claim that if they identify as women, women owe it to them to make them feel feminine.

Emasculation:

Misgendering:

Dr. Kraus’ presentations in Vancouver were sponsored by Aboriginal Women’s Organizing Network; Asian Women Coalition Ending Prostitution; Formerly Exploited Voices Now Educating; Foy Allison Law; Resist Exploitation, Embrace Dignity; University Women’s Club of Vancouver; Vancouver Rape Relief and Women’s Shelter.

Thank you for inviting me here to Vancouver. Thank you to all the organizations that have made this possible, especially Suzanne Jay, who invited me and organized everything.

Prostitution has always been legal in Germany, except a short period of time in the early 20th century.[1] Germany instituted a law in 2002 that tried to make out of prostitution a job as any other. The politicians thought, that it wasn´t prostitution itself that was the problem, but the discrimination of the women by the society and the lack of rights they had. Considering the problem from this perspective, they wanted to strengthen the women as best as possible. (They said): Prostitution should not be seen any more as something “against the good morals“, but as a job. For now on, the women were considered as workers, “sex workers.” And if they are workers, they should have the same rights as any other worker that run a business or is employed somewhere, like having a social security or if their rights are not respected, they should have the right to enforce a claim by legal action. The state didn´t want to put any regulations concerning the sex practices. They said that nobody can say how people should have sex. As they run a business, they are also allowed to make publicity for it. So the new law cancelled the restriction of promoting prostitution.

Fifteen years after passing the law, the results are the following:

We are observing an industrialization of prostitution:

We have “flat-rate” brothels. For 70 Euros they offer a beer, a sausage and unlimited women. A flat-rate brothel chain called “Pussy Club” made headlines when, on its opening day on June 2009, 1700 men lined up to get in. The long lineups outside women´s rooms lasted until closing time when many of the women collapsed from exhaustion, pain, injuries, and infections, including painful rashes and fungal infections that spread from their genitals down their legs.[4]

We observe a reduction in the rate of pay for women: 30 Euros for sexual intercourse, while they must pay around 160 Euros for a room and 25,– Euro taxes per day; So they have to serve 6 men before starting earning money. In the streets it starts as low as 5 Euros.

The working conditions have become disastrous. They developed “Verrichtungsboxen”, which means “things that are getting done in a box,” like cow boxes, without water, toilets, nothing.

Or brothels in a garage.

You see a banalization of prostitution:

Or here, it was 2 weeks ago in Frankfurt: an open house evening in the red light district. Even knowing that the red light district is in the hands of the Hells Angels, so an organized crimegroup, the townspeople came to celebrate the day.[5]

Violence against women became a structural violence, it means that society and the institutions (the political, educational, executive and judicative authority) are not questioning it anymore. It is internalized.

Here in my hometown, also 2 weeks ago: this is a normal clothing shop that had the idea to make publicity like this. Prostitution affects everybody, not only women in prostitution.

The goal of the law, which is reportedly protecting and supporting women in prostitution, has failed completely — of these 400,000 women, only 44 are registered as sole proprietorship businesses.[6] More than half of these women work illegally, meaning they don’t have any social insurance and don’t have access to medical services in Germany. (1) So, even if they have the flu, they don’t have the possibility of visiting a doctor. There is a huge problem with pregnant women who can not pay for the abortion or birth their child in hospital. Very often, they abandon it.[7]

The police inspectors say themselves that they feel helpless. Manfred Paulus, a criminal inspector who worked for years in this field says that Germany with this law became an Eldorado for traffickers, pimps and brothel owners.[8] The women who come from abroad and work in the red light district don´t get to know the Germany that the Germans know and appreciate. No, they are prisoners of a parallel society that is highly criminal.[9]

Those women live under constant fear: the fear of violent sex buyers, fear of not earning enough to pay the daily fixed costs, fear of getting sick, fear of getting pregnant, fear of the police, fear of the pimps, fear of the brothel owners, fear of the competition…

The law from 2002 didn´t help for preventing trafficking at all: in 2000, they were 151 persons condemned for trafficking, in 2011 only 32. The police recorded 636 cases of trafficked women in 2011, 3 times less than 10 years before. 13 of them were younger than 14 years old, 77 were under 18.[10] The police complain that they have just little power to intervene, because without serious proof, they can not enter the brothels. Also, the legal proceedings depend on the women´s statement. Very often they are too afraid to give testimony and the procedures get stopped.[11]

The law that forbids pimping was easy to bypass, they simply became hoteliers renting rooms to the sex workers.

It is estimated that 1.2 million men buy sex every day. 18% are regular consumer, 80% have been in a brothel.[12]

You see growing perversion among sex buyers. Practices are becoming more dangerous with an increase in violence against women and a lack of protection for them. There have been research done that examines violence in prostitution:

Just taking into account these numbers, it is difficult to say that it’s a job like any other. And this research dates back to more than 10 years ago — things have become much worse in Germany.

This is what the dominatrix Ellen Templin had already observed in 2007: “Since the reform you can see that not only have the advertisements become uninhibited, the buyers of sex have become more brutal. That’s from one day to the next. Nowadays, if you say, “No, I don’t do that,” You often get the response, “Come on; don’t be so difficult, it’s your job”. Before it was forbidden to demand unprotected sex. Today, buyers ask on the telephone if they can piss on your face, wanting to do it without protection, wanting to do it anally or orally. These days, it’s an everyday occurrence. Before, buyers still had a guilty conscience. That doesn’t exist anymore today, they want more and more.”[15]

There is a “menu” circulating on the Internet, where buyers can choose what they want from a long à la carte list.[16]

I will just give you a couple of examples:

AF = Algierfranzösisch (Zungenanal) – Tongue anal AFF = Analer Faustfick (die ganze Hand im Hintereingang) – Anal Fist Fucking AO = alles ohne Gummi – everything without rubber Braun-weiß = Spiele mit Scheiße und Sperma – play with shit and sperma DP = Doppelpack (Sex mit zwei Frauen) oder: double Penetration (zwei Männer in einer Frau) – Sex with 2 women or double penetration (2 men in one woman) EL = Eierlecken – licking the balls FFT = Faustfick total – Fist Fuck totally FP = Französisch pur (Blasen ohne Gummi und ohne Aufnahme) – blowjob without rubber FT = Französisch total doppeldeutig: Blasen ohne Gummi mit Spermaschlucken und seltener: Blasen ohne Gummi bis zum Finale – Blowjob without condom and with swallowing the sperma. GB = Gesichtsbesamung (manchmal auch Gangbang, also Gruppensex, aber mit deutlichem Männerüberschuss) Ejaculating in the face. GS = Gruppensex – Group Sex. Kvp = Kaviar Passiv (Frau lässt sich anscheißen) – Man shits on woman SW = Sandwich, eine Frau zwischen zwei Männern – one woman between 2 men tbl, = tabulos, ALLES ist erlaubt – without taboo, everything is allowed. ZA = Zungenanal (am / im Hintereingang lecken) – lick the anus.

There are sites on the internet where buyers share their experiences: here is what you can read there: “I spread her butt cheeks and slowly thrust my cock inside her, which was accompanied by a quiet moan. When I was close to finishing and fucked her more and more violently, she wanted me to stop and fuck her in her pussy. I didn’t want to. Sorry, Vanessa! After several more hard thrusts I shot my load and rammed it deep in her again.”[17]

The sexbuyers want distraction. Women are called “Frischfleisch”, it means: fresh meat. More than half of the prostituted women don´t have a fixed residence but are shipped from one town to the other. Sometimes, they don´t even know in which town they are. The women live in the brothels, eat and sleep in the same room they serve the sex buyers. They sleep approximately 5 hours a day. The rest of the time, they have to be “ready” for the sex buyers. Here is an advertisement announcing new girls.

There is a recent medical report from a gynaecologist (Wolfgang Heide) who is working with prostituted women. The health condition of those women is catastrophic. With 30 years they are very often pre-aged. All women have persistent abdominal pains. Gastritis and frequent infections, also due to the unhealthy living conditions. And of course, all kinds of sexually transmissible diseases. The psychological traumatisation can just be stood with alcohol and pharmaceutical drugs. He reports about a growing demand for pregnant women in prostitution. Those women have to serve 15 to 40 men a day continuously until they give birth. Very often, they abandon their child and go to work as soon as possible. Sometimes 3 days after birthing of the child. Those practices are totally irresponsible for the health of the mother and her child. It can leave irreversible damages to the unborn child. And every mother knows that it takes time after giving birth to a child before sexual intercourse is possible again without pain.[18]

Under these conditions, no German woman sees herself as capable of doing this “work.” The makeup of women in prostitution has changed. With the opening of Europe to the east, women come from the poorest regions of Europe: Romania, Bulgaria — and it’s often minorities like the Roma who live in extreme poverty. Today around 95% come from other countries. It has become a prostitution of poverty.[19]

Sabine Constabel, a social worker who has worked in Stuttgart with prostituted women for more than 20 years, says the following: “30% of these women are young, under 21-years old. Often they are sacrificed by their own families to support them financially. The majority doesn’t speak German, and some among them are illiterate. And frequently, they haven’t had sexual relations before. These young women come to Germany and are subjected to the perverse desires of these buyers. They aren’t capable of saying “no”, of defending themselves. They are completely overwhelmed by the situation and completely traumatized by it. Many of them ask for psychotropic drugs immediately after their first experience. They say, ‘otherwise, you couldn’t survive it.’ Some women are only there a few days and say, ‘I’m dead here, I can’t laugh anymore.’ Others endure it for years and say, ‘I have children at home, I have to support them.’ These women are very traumatized, they develop depression, nightmares and physical problems; they somatize, they have stomach pains, they get sick and suffer. They become hopeless, they don’t want to do this horrible work.”[20]

I was asked by the World Health Organization to speak at the conference in Dublin[21] next year about the mental health situation of prostituted women in Germany. What can I say? What is the mental health situation of a women that is reduced to a piece of meat? They are totally destroyed. A woman that is working in an exit program for prostituted women told me that there are just little (very few) women going out of prostitution. They will stay until they break down physically. It is just a matter of time. I asked myself, why it is like this? Because their will has been broken. They are not existing anymore as a person that has an identity and a future they can imagine for themselves. We are talking here about complex traumatisation.

The German model is producing hell on earth. The lives and the rights of those women are sacrificed, but for what? Are they defending our democracy? Is it to protect our land from invasions or terrorism? No, those women are sacrificed so that some men can have sex whenever they want and with whom they want. And this is the problem. We have to focus on the sex buyer.

The sex buyer is a social construction, it is not a fate. The numbers all over the world prove it: In England, you have 7% of the men who are sex buyers, in Spain 39%, 37% in Japan, 73% in Thailand…[22] It is a result of the unequal gender education. Prostitution does not resolve men´s problem, it is increasing their fear of entering into an equal relationship to women.[23]

When we talk about prostitution, we have to think about what kind of a society we want, not only about harm reduction. We need a new generation of men that does not resort to sexual exploitation and domination of women to define itself. [24] It is false to think that male sexuality is not controllable. Men have to learn a new way to deal with frustration.

Normalizing prostitution means cementing the inequality between men and women and accepting violence against women. And this concerns all of us, women and men. That´s why, also Germany, needs the Swedish model.

Thank you!

Dr. Ingeborg Kraus

Bibliography:

Keep reading

Read all of this and tell me how empowering sex work is again?

Some of the details have changed since 2017, but only marginally - the broad strokes are still the same. But at least the flat-rate shit is illegal now.

I do really wish so many terfs didn't coin the term radfems cause when i looked up the definition it had nothing to do with trans people?

I dont know why we let them take away what seems to be a actually very informative ideology. Something we should as the left look into and not just ignore it.

Just cause some self hating cis woman want to make every trans woman they meet suffer doesn't mean that what they coin as something apart of their bullshittier is actually an ideology that supports them.

Google definition of radfem

"Radical Feminist is a perspective within feminism that calls for a radical re-ordering of society in which male supremacy is eliminated in all social and economic contexts, while recognizing that women's experiences are also affected by other social divisions such as in race, class, and sexual orientation."

I dont know about yall but that seems kinda based but there could be more to the ideology i don't know? I dont know. But what ive seen from the definition is good so i dont know why we let terfs coin this term.

Any thoughts on this? I would like to learn more.

Yes, there’s a lot more to that ideology than the gender critical part. We also didn’t coin the term radical feminism because it’s been around since the 70s and it comes from radical meaning ‘root’ as in radical feminists recognise that the root of all our oppression is men and it’s through different systems that they oppress us. It’s just a branch of feminism which we happen to agree with.

But there’s a point as to why gender critical is a part of radical feminism and we can see that from the definitions that you provided: male supremacy and women’s experiences.

Radical feminism deals with sex based issues which you cannot identify out of and so that means recognising that every single male bodied person is an oppressor on that axis. All of them. That no amount of calling yourself NB or trans can allow you to escape your oppression or the fact that you are an oppressor. And that directly contradicts gender ideology because despite saying ‘sex and gender are different’, speaking about specific sex-based oppression will get you called a TERF. Saying that there are things which ‘AFABs’ or ‘vagina owners’ experience which trans women will never have to go through, that this is due to hatred/oppression of our sex, and that we need spaces specifically to talk about and deal with our sex-based issues will get you attacked and called a TERF. TRAs recognise, just about, that sex and gender are different but won’t recognise the validity of sex-based issues. Take abortion as an example, which is a hot topic right now: you can say it exclusively affects ‘AFABs’, you can even say that it’s misogyny, but dare to say that this is an example of a sex based issue and that all male people are privileged for never having to worry if their bodily rights are going to be taken away like this or the hardship of having to access an abortion or the fact that it’s such a taboo subject so women struggle with it silently because they can’t discuss it openly? That’s TERF rhetoric.

So how are we supposed to agree with an ideology which says that males can be women and that means that they’re no longer an oppressor and talking about how they are privileged because they’re biologically male and we’re raised and socialised as a male gets us attacked and called a transphobe? How are we supposed to agree with an ideology in which women’s discomfort with their sex and oppression is a reason why they’re trans or NB? And this is before we even talk about the silencing of women, destruction of female spaces, and forcing us to discuss our issues with misogynistic language.

I could go on because it’s a more complicated issue but I feel like I’ve got the important stuff down. But basically the only way they could possibility be compatible is if trans activists actually recognise gender and sex as two different forms of oppression and allowed us to speak on them but given how much they shout down any idea of sex-based oppression as TERF rhetoric then I don’t see that happening.

trans activists started calling radfems terfs. “terfs” didnt coin radfem. radical feminists were always just radical feminists. terf was a label forcefully applied to us 

Yeah radical feminisim deals with material reality. Oh and fyi its anti porn too

TV/Film for Females:

A list based on stuff that I’ve seen, not saying each one is perfect representation or even necessarily feminist. But they are entertainment that I have enjoyed as a woman. Enjoy.

Children’s:

Avatar: The Last Airbender

Korra (sequel to Avatar above)

Kim Possible

Mulan

Anastasia

Moana

Cheetah Girls

Cadet Kelly

Aquamarine

She-Ra

*note there are family friendly ones in the other categories as well

About women’s rights/issues (viewer discretion on some of them depending on what you may or may not want to watch):

The Morning Show

Bombshell

The Handmaid’s Tale

On the Basis of Sex

Iron Jawed Angels

Mona Lisa Smile

Belle

In a World

Whale Rider

Bend It Like Beckham

Hidden Figures

Good Girls Revolt

Mrs. America

Orville (some eps)

Unbelievable

The Breadwinner

Strong female presence/relationships:

Dead to Me

Grace and Frankie

Tuca and Bertie

The Joy Luck Club

Thelma and Louise

Fried Green Tomatoes

Wine Country

The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel

Street Food (the eps which focus on women)

Misc:

Ocean’s 8

The Hunger Games

Luna Nera

Cursed (2020 series)

The Kitchen (2019)

Salt

Killing Eve

Someone Great

Ghostbusters (the female cast one)

The Spy Who Dumped Me

Wonder Woman

Captain Marvel

Marvel’s Agent Carter

Star Wars (newer)

Miss Congeniality

Ex Machina

Disenchantment

Parks n Rec

Star Trek Voyager

The 100

Legally Blonde

Others I am checking out/on my list to check out: Cable girls, call the midwife, alias grace, the addams family, the hunting ground, mad max fury road, bomb girls, and a league of their own

I take it back. All the eps of Orville, not just some.

Storyville - Defying the Cutting Season

Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) has been illegal in Tanzania since 1998. But every year thousands of families still plan to have their daughters cut, an ordeal that could cost them their lives. The ‘Cutting Season’ takes place during the December school holidays.

During this time hundreds of girls are saved from FGM by the police, the government and the work of the Safe House. It is run by Rhobi Samwelly, who was herself a victim of FGM, and now, not only does she valiantly run the safe house but she also works with the local police to rescue and protect girls at risk while arresting the parents and cutters.

But they have a tough and dangerous job and old customs die hard. Men believe that girls must be cut to reduce promiscuity and cut girls command twice the bride price in cows as uncut girls. Girls like Rosie, just 12 years old, have had to make the most difficult choices of their young lives - run away from home, not knowing if they will ever see their families again, or submit to female genital mutilation and child marriage.

These brave and courageous young girls are fighting against a tradition that goes back thousands of years. They are standing up for their human rights and fighting for change in their community.

The Safe House is the one safe place they can escape to.

So I just read this article about how people end up fucking up whatever task they’re doing when they feel like they’re being watched.  Scientists have discovered that the sense of being observed actually SHUTS OFF a part of the brain, the inferior parietal cortex. 

Given the fact that women are constantly watched in our society, and we are constantly REMINDED that we are being watched by people making fun of fat, “ugly”, or gender-nonconforming women, it makes me wonder how many women have messed up important tasks or projects or just day-to-day activities because A PART OF OUR BRAIN is permanently being deactivated?

Like talk about a fucking handicap.

Women are constantly held under the microscope- whether we are attractive or unattractive, the gaze of patriarchy never ends.

Just last week I was walking my dog and bent over to literally pick up poop.  Suddenly I heard whistling and looked up cause I knew I was the only person around.  Sure enough, about 300 feet away, some construction worker was perched on top of a building, grinning at me and calling out stuff I luckily couldn’t hear because he was so goddamn far away.

I wonder what it does to women to have this constant source of stress hanging over us, each and every day, knowing we are being scrutinized and examined no matter what we’re doing.  I wonder how many more accomplishments, life-changing discoveries, inventions, etc would have been achieved by women if we didn’t have this constant brain-handicap imposed on us by men.

This feeling of being watched extends even when we’re alone and affects our abilities- here’s a study where women took a math test while in a bathing suit and performed significantly worse than women fully dressed, even though all the women were alone when taking the test. The men in bathing suits and the men fully-dressed had no significant difference in performance. It is a major fucking handicap.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/247434408_That_swimsuit_becomes_you_Sex_differences_in_self-objectification_restrained_eating_and_math_performance_Correction_to_Fredrickson_et_al_1998

(I don’t remember how to make a cleaner link on my phone, sorry)

And it’s not just that we are observed by men. We are also taught to observe other women, and constantly observe OURSELVES. When you apply your makeup and do your hair, for the rest of the day, you become your own voyeur. You keep reminding yourself that you have a reflection, and that reflection is more important than you existing comfortably in your body and doing whatever the hell it is that you would like to do. You keep imagining what you look like from different angles, you keep being aware that you have makeup on your face, you keep thinking whether it has already peeled off, smudged or dried up. You start touching your hairdo to find out if you have any escaped strands, and then you worry when would be the next acceptable break to go fix those strands in the bathroom. The same also happens if you have made yourself fit into too tight jeans, too small shoes, too revealing top or too short shirt. You keep wondering whether your bras show, whether your butt crack is visible, whether everyone else has noticed your new pair of shoes.

And this is taught to you before any other skill is, really. Female toddlers are made to wear dresses they must be really careful not to soil, they are given hairpins that must be constantly adjusted, and little accessories so that everyone around them will notice them and call them cute. You are taught to not just become acutely aware that you are being watched, but you are also taught to watch yourself. Every second of the day.

This is just horrifying. How much damage are we dealt with before we even know how to walk?

—

Reblogging again for that paragraph because that is the part we forget the most.

(via girlwiki)

Women’s work is the mother of invention

(via rubestar)

Article archived here: https://web.archive.org/web/20201112002832/http://www.reclusiveleftist.com/2012/06/05/patriarchy-in-action-the-new-york-times-rewrites-history/

I'm very interested in buying and creating a female only apartment complex. The bottom floor would have 2 layers of security: a key and a passcode that is changed regularly. Once you enter, there is a community room with comfy couches and bookshelves. There would also be coffee, tea, cocoa, and snacks available. A pantry with food and menstrual products. A sauna room that has its own passcode. A garden with flowers, fresh veggies, fruits, and herbs on the roof. Male guests are allowed, as I don't think I could reasonably monitor that, but men are prohibited from spending time in the community areas. Idk y'all, thoughts?

I love the idea of this, as long as there’s a decent sized garden to grow food in. Plus I like that apartment complexes could have way more people (more interaction/community) than just a few houses connected together. Could definitely organise activities/sports/ movie night kinda things together and have enough women show up.

I feel like male free zones would definitely be the way to go, but also gotta think about the mother’s who have sons.

My college dorm was like this and it was great. Men were only allowed in the upper floors during certain hours. There was a common room in the basement where you could have male guests during any hour.

I wish someone would do it for the real world. You don’t even have to go all out like OP described. (I’m shuddering at the HOA fees you’d need to maintain community spaces like that). It could be as simple as a development of townhomes/single family villas where only women are allowed to own/rent. Not unlike the 55+ communities where only those 55+ are allowed to own and rent. 

Almost all current resources go to women with children, which is a huge factor in finding shelter space for homeless single women of any age without leaving them vulnerable to pimps and human traffickers. Single and childfree women cannot be afterthoughts every time. Women come from many different backgrounds.

There are women who don't want to be forced to raise anyone's children, women who don't want males brought into common property for overall safety or their own peace of mind, etc. but there's nothing wrong with the women who do making these resources for themselves like we've always suggested. The ultimate goal is having so many options for women to be independent from men, we can find our best fit. I would never live in an apartment complex like this with men coming in and out and boys underfoot, but many other women would, and that's fine for them. It's better than every woman locked in a home sharing a bed with a man who controls her finances.

Not a criticism but commentary: This is illegal in the US - that's why the female-only residential hotels all closed. You cannot deny housing on the basis of sex. This is yet another example of why legal equality (no discrimination on the basis of sex) instead of legal protection (no discrimination on the basis of being of the female sex) was a horrible move. NOW and equality feminists either underestimated the degree to which men would use this 'loophole' to their advantage or believed that legal equality would bring true equality. Instead, it left women without many of the resources that nurtured female consciousness and safety such as purposefully female only workplaces/companies, female residential hotels/boardinghouses, female only schools with federal funding (and female only public schools), etc. Men have maintained their male only workplaces, residences, and schools through maintaining structures that were previously in place such as: huge frat houses (these are almost always bigger and better located than sorority houses), jobs (many jobs are set up to benefit men - janitorial jobs, construction, mining, long haul trucking - where the historical male dominance places women who would try to join those jobs in potential danger or take the employee away from home for extended periods of time, leaving women to the traditional jobs of child and house care. Male only education continues too - my dad has been a trade professor for almost thirty years and nearly 80% of his students have been men and he has more women than the machinist courses. But what high school counselor asks girls if they're interested in working on cars or drafting? Not a one! They ask if the girls are interested in education and healthcare - both profession with more women than men but where the men ascend faster and are paid more. The first step to even setting up a female only apartment building would be to fight for federal and state legal changes to allow for the discrimination against the male sex. You'd probably have to make a legal argument about right to escape sexual harassment but I'm not a lawyer and so I have no idea how you could legally and physically manage this. TLDR: prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sex instead of on the basis of the female sex was a massive mistake in the women's movement and it's hamstringing us now without greatly inconveniencing men.

We had (before Biden) some female-only spaces though: bathrooms, locker rooms, changing rooms, etc. And we had female sports teams, etc so it might have been worth it to look at the wording of those laws (based around protection from sexual assault and equal opportunity) that allowed for that male exclusion

I think the place where so many of these “hyperfemininity but make it empowering” ideas fail is the assumption that men care about your interiority. Like “I present myself as a bimbo but I’m actually a full, self-aware, empowered person with thoughts and ideas”, yeah they don’t give a shit though. Every woman who has been made out as a bimbo or a sexpot or a Playboy bunny is a full entire person, with thoughts and experiences and opinions and feelings of her own. It’s not subverting anything to pretend that’s an innovation and that the new, ~empowered~ bimbo is separate from ye olde pinup girl. As long as they’re getting the catering and sexual gratification out of it, men aren’t gonna care about the personhood of the woman under the makeup. They never have.

Like another version of “I’m different from other girls” where you have successfully kowtowed to the patriarchy by deluding yourself into believing that all the women before you weren’t really people, and that only you somehow are capable of submitting while not submitting