here is what sexism does. one day it’s catcalling, and you answer back because it’s not right and you want to fight back. and then the next day it’s a someome telling you to go make him a sandwitch. and for the hundreth time you explain to him all the reasons why the joke is inappropriate. and then the next day a guy at work tells you not to burden your pretty head with difficult issues, and you calmly and eloquently point out sexism to him. and then the next day the cab driver won’t stop asking you for your number. and you lie you have a boyfriend for the milionth time, because you know he won’t back off otherwise. and then the next day your boss mentions a promotion and ‘jokingly’ adds he hopes you’re not planning on having any babies any time soon. you exhale, count to ten, and smile, as you bite your tongue. 

and the next day… and that’s the thing there is ALWAYS a next day, and there is always another battle. and either, you give up, either you quiet down and accept that this is how things are and settle into life; or you give into anger, you stop explaining calmly, you stop smiling, you stop answering - and you start snapping, and yelling back at the catcallers, and calling your boss a sexist asshole. if you accept it - you will be criticized - as unfeminist. if you get angry - you will be criticized - as emotional, unstable, aggressive - too manly. this is what sexism does - it makes it impossible to win if you’re a girl, or a woman, it makes your entire existance an uphill battle. and truth be told, i am getting so fucking tired. i am 23, a quarter of my life behind me, and i am already tired of educating men twice my age about what is right and appropriate. i am tired of the stares that say i am over-reacting, the replies to calm down, the polite smiles that are meant to knock me down a few pegs. i am tired of explaining to men that sexism is not this one incident, it is my entire life, my every single day. i am 23 and i am so fucking exhausted. 

If I had a dollar for every time someone told me to calm down…

No, I’m serious, if women all got together and went into electrical engineering or automotive repair en masse, then ten years later people would be talking about how it was a “soft field” and it would pay proportionately less than other fields.

Likewise, if men moved en masse to bedeck themselves in sparkles and make-up, then suddenly you’d get a bunch of editorials talking about how classy they look.

None of these things are inherently masculine or feminine; none of these things inherently elevate you or drag you down. But whatever women are seen to do is automatically seen as being inherently more frivolous than anything men do. And shaming women for not pigeonholing themselves into a narrow range of acceptable “masculine” behaviours is just going to result in the goalposts getting moved once again.

This is literally what happened to basically every field women have entered. The opposite happens when men enter. Computers used to be a “woman thing” until the guys who did it got really mad about how badly their job was viewed and realized they could fix it by forcing out women.

Also happened/ is happening with the fields of biology and psychology….

I honestly wonder how much of the backlash against public education in the last generation has been due to teaching becoming a woman-dominated profession.

Fashion used to be a men’s thing. Then women got involved in the late 17/1800’s, so men went the other way because it came to be seen as “frivolous” and “anti-intellectual” to care about how you looked. Add in the homophobia that arose around that time, bam, staid bland dress. Ditto leggings/tights, that are now called attention-whoring when on men they were required to show you cared about your figure and had the money to pay for such a fitted item. 

People want to say misogyny doesn’t exist, that male privilege doesn’t exist. Look beyond “living memory” and you’ll find that’s what drives the “inexplicable reversals” society seems to make on many things. Hell, just look beyond your own society, and you’ll find out that what’s considered “for men” elsewhere is held in high esteem while here it’s scoffed at purely because it’s “for women”: 

The field of anthropology as a whole illustrates this.

Significantly higher proportions of females compared to males are currently entering the fields of archaeology and biological anthropology, and as this occurs, the prestige, funding, acceptance as valid kinds of science, etc, are fading quickly.

This has already occurred with linguistic anthropology and cultural anthropology. Cultural anthropology in particular went VERY quickly from being seen as a manly, scientific discipline (e.g., Franz Boas, Bronisław Malinowski) to being seen as a touchy-feely female thing.

What I get from this is that we should equally distribute ourselves among all fields until we’ve ruined absolutely everything.

Putting these up for anyone who needs them today.

Toxic Parents: Overcoming Their Hurtful Legacy and Reclaiming Your Life by Susan Forward

Why Does he DO That: Inside The Minds of Angry and Controlling Men by Lundy Bancroft

Cannot recommend WDHDT highly enough. I’ve found it helpful not just for romantic relationships, but also for growing up w a “unexplainable/uncontrollable” dad.

IT HAS ALSO BEEN REALLY HELPFUL FOR UNDERSTANDING ONLINE MOB HARASSMENT.

So if you’ve ever been bombarded w threats to be raped/killed, (so…if you’re a minority and you’ve been on the Internet for a while), this book might be useful for getting clarity around the whole entitled, abusive mindset that drives certain kinds of people to behave that way. And by “getting clarity”, I mean (for me) being able to go “oh, that’s what’s happening” and not really feel scared anymore. Or angry, or drawn out into it, or anything.

And if you’re still standing around going “but how does something like GamerGate happen?” or “but why do men hit their wives?” or whatever – please read that book and learn something.

^^^^ truth WDHDT is fantastic at cutting down MRA bullshit and calling it what it really is

Master of None nails the Entitled Nice Guy™ who is all charm and smiles until you reject his advances.

men: *decided women weren’t allowed attend schools, study sciences, or have access to higher education* men: well if women are so smart then how come there aren’t many contributions from women in history huh

yeah i would’ve knocked him tf out too lmao

Yesssss!!!! Omg!

@goodvibes-floatin

Can we talk about how ALL THE MEN sat there and let that woman be harassed while ever woman in earshot called his as out and finally one knocked him the fuck out.

yeh fuckk im up gurl

“Have RESPECT for me, I’m a MAN!!” is literally what this asshole said.

Painfully accurate

“Men were put on this planet to take things, you know? They take your money, they take your land, they take a woman, and any other thing they can put their grabby hands on. That’s men”

i just discovered the term ‘black knighting’ courtesy of reddit and i want to vomit :) 

i can never believe how much men hate women. it just keeps getting worse and worse

I’ve never heard of that. Is it new? And what is it? I have a bad suspicion… :(

no idea how new it is, as i typically avoid reddit like the plague (but i discovered this term through the link to the gendercritical subreddit) 

“A Black Knight is someone who pisses women off for entertainment.“ as opposed to a White Knight aka someone that stands up for women in order to try and get sex :/

here are some excerpts, courtesy of theredpill

on the subject of a woman walking away from you at night: “I’m just a man who decided to run an errand at night. Next time this happens jog after her. There is no law against jogging. Chase her for a while and then stop. Enjoy the fear you created. Woof woof you stupid cunt.”

on the subject of what they called “biological warfare”: “How do you exploit these two weaknesses? Start baking for the office. See how much butter and sugar you can make the little piggies eat. With sustained effort everyone will be up ten pounds in three to six months.”

“Fructose has various nasty biological effects when consumed in excess. Main ones we are interested in are raised blood trigs, adiposity and increased appetite (outside of normal insulin fuckery, but related).“

“Try replacing the fructose with a sugar alcohol like sorbitol. For a portion of the population, it causes “gastric distress” - diarrhea and gas, mostly.”

another story that im gonna paraphrase: guy didnt like his female boss, she was stressed over a project, someone “accidentally” sent flowers to the wrong desk- to HER boss- with a note saying “the interview went great and we look forward to working with you next month!” to make it look like she was secretly searching for another job. she got fired within the week.

using the womans bathroom at starbucks, which one man described as “empowering in a red pill way” because of course most women are going to look confused if not upset… clearly beyond the red piller to imagine reasons a man might enter a womans restroom besides to go to the bathroom

some things fairly innocuous like leaving empty condom wrappers in womens restrooms and stuff…. to intentionally trying to intimidate women, getting a woman fired, etc. men harassing women in various ways, “for teh lulz” i guess. 

We could never hate men as much as they hate us.

Andrea Dworkin recommended for the women of the 21st century to harden our hearts and learn to kill. Perhaps she was right.

women who hate men want to distance ourselves from men, have our own communities, when women hate men, we want to get away from men. When men hate women they do the exact opposite, they invade our spaces, harass us, intimidate us, stalk us, are violent against us. It doesn’t matter how much women hate men, we don’t hate men the way they hate us.

^^^ the last comment is so important

@boys

why are you like this

When I was 13 years old and curious about sex and love, I asked my mom if she had had sex before marrying my father (of whom she is still married to, and has been since before I was born). She said that that wasn’t really a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ question. I said ‘sure it is, you’ve either had sex before him, or you haven’t’. She brought me onto the couch and sat me down and told me about the boy she liked when she was young and how one night she snuck into his house while his parents were gone and they were kissing and he said they should have sex and she said that she wanted to save sex for marriage and he laughed and basically took all her clothes off and he raped her and as my mom was telling the story she cried and this was the second time I had ever seen my mom cry. She was 12 when it happened.

In grade 8 I got a call from my friend in the middle of the night and she was drunk in the park crying and told me that she went out that night with some other friends and they drank a little and her guy “friend” starting flirting and yes she laughed at first but then he tried to pull her shirt over her head and she pulled away and he ripped her shirt and it was her favourite shirt and then he pushed her to her knees and HIS BEST FRIEND HELD HER JAW OPEN WHILE HE FACE FUCKED HER. And so I went to the park and picked her up and took her home and slept in her bed with her except we didn’t sleep because she just cried and her mouth bled and this was four years ago but I still have to be the one to bring her items to the till it the cashier is a man, and she still has anxiety attacks and she’ll get a rash all over her body and I just want to kill those boys but instead they are still walking around. And I’m in the bathroom with her, dabbing at her skin with a warm cloth until it returns to its regular colour.

And in grade 9 one of my closest friends was kinda seeing this boy and so they hung out one night and then she said that she really had to be getting back home and he said that she wasn’t going anywhere until she gave him what he wanted and he parked the car and took off her clothes and she said no and he ignored her and so she laid in the backseat totally limp and just cried and it wasn’t even sex, he just masterbated by using her body instead of his hand and she came to school the next day with vodka in her water bottle and she drank all day and I had to fight her to get the alcohol away from her and she just cried and threw up and I skipped class while I held her hair back and that same boy texted me a month later, asking if I ever wanted to hangout sometime.

And in that same year my very best friend who has never even kissed a boy, confessed to me that when she was 9 years old, her 12 year old cousin made her give him a hand job and he told her that was what cousins do and he gave her a chocolate bar afterwards and she told me that he probably doesn’t even remember it but that it’s something that she’ll never have the luxury of forgetting.

And in grade 10 I knew a girl who invited her best friend over to watch Disney movies and then he started to put his hands down her pants and she said no but she is 130lbs and he is 220lbs and he called her a tease while she tried to fight him but he used one hand to hold her down, and the other to put inside of her and i was the one to push her inside of a classroom and stand in front of her while calling the police when he showed up at our school looking for her and she was so damn scared.

And a few months later I skipped class and was in the car with a guy who i had had unprotected sex with in the past while under the influence of cocaine but this time I was sober and I insisted we use a condom but he told me he couldn’t feel anything while the condom was on so he ripped it off and I said I refused to have unprotected sex again and so he just grabbed me and forced himself into my mouth and I was crying and he pulled me onto him and I just came saying “stop” over and over like a broken record but he must’ve heard something different because he went until he came and I just sat naked in the backseat while he drove me back to the school and said “we should do this again sometime”. And I had five showers that night and I scratched at my skin so hard to try and rip his fingerprints off of me, I still have the scars.

And I found out soon afterwards that that same guy had raped a classmate of mine, 5 months earlier and she told me about how he brought her McDonald’s first, and how he said they could take things slow and she told me about how he didn’t listen to her either. And he goes to our school and so after she told me about her incident and I told her about mine, we decided to report it to the police and the trial is currently still going on and he told people about it, except in his version we are just “asking for attention” and all his friends talk about how bad they feel for him. As if HE is the one that still wakes up screaming. As if HE felt like his skin no longer was beautiful, no longer belonged to him. And I held her in my arms as she bawled after giving the police her statement. And she did the same for me.

And I met a woman a year ago in a paint store and she had a service dog and I asked what the dog was for and it turns out that she had been so brutally raped and abused in her life, that the dog is literally trained to keep men away from her.

And I’m so FUCKING SICK AND TIRED OF THIS WORLD WE ARE LIVING IN. How many rape victims eyes have I already looked into? How many more will I? And how many more friends will I hold while they shake? Because I don’t know how many more I can take. And who the fuck still has the nerve to make rape jokes? And… Something just has to change. Please, someone just start being that change.

-16 year old girl

Straight men are fucking babies, pass it on. 

Has anyone ever taken a pad or tampon out into the light of day only to have boys and grown men back five feet away? This shit is tip of the stigma iceberg that women experience for simply menstruating. How many of those products in the image can cause toxic shock or infections? How expensive are those products? How often do they need to be bought/replaced? These are real issues that affect our health, finances, and social/internalized perceptions of ourselves. Men absolutely REFUSE to acknowledge us for our biology when it’s not sexually appealing to them. They refuse to consider our mental and physiological health, and mock and silence us when we try to talk about it. 

we should make armor out of menstrual products so men stay away

Men are fucking disgusting, part 2485726364784483762367472636474

What the ACTUAL fuck?

do…men understand that you cant just….buy birth control…in the store………….like condoms?????? you…cant really shop around…for birth control?????

And you don’t just pop a pill every time you want to have the sex. It’s a daily pill you have to take consistently for it to work, regardless of whether you’re having sex three times a day, three times a month, or never and just have debilitating cramps. the “You’re a party favor” comment is really, really insulting, uneducated, ignorant, and rude.

Guy code: helping each other pick up girls

Girl code: protecting each other from creepy guys who won’t stop trying to pick them up