the injury of finally knowing you

I met a girl when I was fresh out of high school in undergrad who frankly, annoyed me quite a bit, but I also had an inkling to continue to be compassionate to her given a few things about her life/background/family

I ran into her two years ago. Last week, her daughter turned 1. This girl, let’s called her “P”, is a really good example of why I never feel comfortable mocking trad wives

Her perfect trad husband, who was a shining young figure in the local religious community, volunteered in all sorts of groups, well loved in his workplace and everything else, beat her up at 1 month post-partum. I reached out to her after seeing her desperately asking for a stroller on a page, confused and slightly concerned knowing both of them came from wealthy backgrounds.

The reality for lots of tradwives living “perfect lives” is this: P was immediately ostracised. All the wealth of her husband and her family meant absolutely nothing if she wasn’t in favour and doing what she was told. Her child and her well-being didn’t matter. P, at 25 years old, was basically deemed an oopsie, and left on her own to figure out how to pay for herself, a baby, find housing, and every other task you can think of.

Having known many of these women (and supported many of these women), another factor most people don’t consider is this: they are intentionally raised to be helpless. When I immediately offered my support to P, she really needed it. This young woman needed to be guided through how to apply for government assistance, how to weigh up rentals and apply for them, how to apply for jobs, how to sign up for childcare. How to sign up for your own power and internet, and how to connect them.

It wasn’t that she was “stupid”, or incapable, or spoiled. While it looks like they’re being sheltered, in reality, these women are practically being held hostage. Sure, they might be allowed to learn things that are expected of them (see: basic cooking, baking, cleaning, child rearing, women’s bible studies, hosting, and so forth) but they are heavily controlled from family life into marriage life, and they are never given the opportunity or the reality of what many of us would consider basic adult tasks.

She’s doing okay now. Her daughter turned 1, is happy and healthy. They live frugally, but they have a roof over their heads and the essentials. I often babysit for her so she can attend counselling, or go to a woman’s support group. She is painfully aware that she has so much to learn about how to live as an adult.

I don’t envy tradwives, but I don’t find any joy in mocking them either. Even when they live the most picturesque lives, they’re also practically living a real life Jenga game. If (and often, when) it comes tumbling down, they’re screwed too, and they often have 0 skills to help themselves or find community (that again, isn’t carefully curated).

I have yet to listen to this podcast episode, but I’ve been recommended it on the topic, and a friend said it really helped shift her thinking about this topic from pure disdain and hatred for these women to understanding the complexities a bit more.

Important:

I think that as this has spread further than I intended, a few people may have missed the original point.

I am not saying that you have to become best friends with tradwives and former tradwives, break bread with them, hype them up and everything they do. I am not saying you have to ignore problematic beliefs they have have held or shared during their time as a tradwife, or that you have to forgive and be super comfortable with them.

What I am saying is that when a tradwife either a) leaves that life or b) shares information from her life that normally would be suppressed, mocking her serves no purpose. If one of these women share that they got beat for burning potatoes slightly, or were given a strict $100 allowance a week to do shopping and not allowed a bank account, or had 5 children back to back and were not allowed pain relief or medical support, I don’t enjoy it when people say things like “what did she expect” “that’s what she gets” “fuck around and find out lol” (such as happened when the ballerina farm article came out)

This just pushes them back towards their cult, or if they were considering leaving, will squash that really quick!

"goddess" "matriarchy" "female wisdom" girl your civic rights

“But I didn’t and still don’t like making a cult of women’s knowledge, preening ourselves on knowing things men don’t know, women’s deep irrational wisdom, women’s instinctive knowledge of Nature, and so on. All that all too often merely reinforces the masculinist idea of women as primitive and inferior – women’s knowledge as elementary, primitive, always down below at the dark roots, while men get to cultivate and own the flowers and crops that come up into the light. But why should women keep talking baby talk while men get to grow up? Why should women feel blindly while men get to think?”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

Expanding a bit on the post I just reblogged, I absolutely HATE how a surprisingly large portion of the population now thinks that feminism is synonymous with being a "girlboss". The idea that working some kind of professional job and being successful at it is the only way to do feminism is insane. People will literally say "feminism has failed us" or "I'm giving up on feminism" when they're unhappy with their jobs. Babes idk how to explain this to you but that is not a problem with feminism that is a problem with your job. You don't need a rich man to provide for you while you take care of the kids you need a goddamn union and some paid leave

The reason why feminists of past generations fought for middle to upper class women to leave the house and join the workforce was not because they thought working a job is some kind of emotionally fulfilling activity. They fought for that because housewives at the time were completely at the mercy of their husbands. If you were a housewife and your husband was abusive, or you just didn't love him anymore and wanted out, you had nowhere to go. You had no money because he controlled the finances, you had no car or place to stay because his name was on the title for both, you had no job because you stayed at home and no education or work experience with which to get a job because you probably got married pretty young. The point of getting women into the workforce was to make women less dependent on men because if you depend on someone for the roof over your head and the food on your plate, they can do whatever the fuck they want to you and you'll have absolutely no recourse.

The natural next step of this thought process should be "ok, now women are in the workforce, they are not dependent on men in the way they once were, how can we change the structure of work such that it doesn't make everyone fucking miserable" giving up on feminism because your predecessors fought for the right for you to have a well-paying job and your job sucks is such an intellectually lazy conclusion to come to.

Like hey, if you've ever thought "working for a living is miserable, I wish I had a man to pay all the bills" do yourself a favor and ask yourself why that was the solution your brain went to? Why is it that when you feel like work is sucking your soul, the first solution you go to is to become a housewife? Maybe it's because as a girl, you were taught that being a housewife is a good and admirable thing to do, and even though you were also taught that it's good to have a career as a woman, everyone for your whole life has always been subtly, gently nudging you toward the idea of "settling down". Have you considered that perhaps that is an expression of a system of social organization that prioritizes the needs of men over women and encourages women to submit to the whims of men? You know, like some kind of *patriarchy*? Damn if only we had some kind of ideology to combat that...

put another way

having finished watching that real doll documentary i've come to the conclusion i did not make the human characters in objects of affection nearly pathetic and weird enough and lemme tell you. they are already pretty pathetic and weird.

it was fascinating watching this because it's like. on the one hand, my instinct is that it's harmless. as a rule i don't kinkshame, especially with things that are just one guy in a house and don't involve other people. a guy likes to play dress up with his big dolls and take pictures of them, and he has sex with them sometimes too. that's not actively harmful.

but on the other hand. many of them were not quiet about how they think of real women. they do not like real women, because real women did not go out of their way to like them. and those attitudes are not harmless. "women should find me interesting because i hang glide, but all women seem to want are a guy with a pint in one hand and cigarettes in the other who watches soap operas" okay or maybe they don't find you interesting because you find women vapid and uninteresting yourself. "women don't like me because of the way i look" maybe women don't like you because you have multiple guns in your house that you keep loaded.

there was a guy who did have a girlfriend, who said she was very open minded and she was willing to accept the idea he had some of these. but then he tells her he has eight of them, and she leaves him a week after they wrapped filming. you could call her closed-minded, or you could call him insanely financially irresponsible for spending, bare minimum, $32,000 on masturbatory items. he outright says they are not for companionship, and that he likes them because he doesn't need to ask them for sex.

anyway. it's very strange and sobering to see what these guys would Really, Really be like in a world where androids are real and you can fuck them. how quickly a lot of men would turn to these solutions instead of working on themselves and their attitudes about women. they would get so so much worse, and there is a degree you have to ignore that to enjoy the fantasy of robot gf.

but you can't entirely ignore it.

Saw your previous post so I watched the documentary, and these are pretty much my thoughts. I don't want (or need, frankly) to judge, and I did reserve my jugdement at first, but they all seem to think that women are uninterested in them for, I feel, the wrong reasons. And, sure, some people are socially too inept and they never manage to make sense of other people, and they suffer when they try but still get lonely and horny. That's fair.

But they do reveal themselves, as you said, when they talk more. I was pretty much neutral until the guy started showing his guns and saying all kinds of weird things and I thought "No yeah, you look fine apart from the fact you can't be bothered to groom yourself properly, it's just that your vibes are rancid, bro".

Same with hand-gliding guy, I just can't believe no woman he met ever found his hobby cool, so it must have been something else in his general attitude that turned them off. They probably stayed distant even if it could have interested them in someone else. And it's sad, I do feel that it's sad for these guys, but the dude is speaking about women being "unavailable".

And that other dude who got a girlfriend shows them to her in garish makeup, slutty outfits, legs spread showing their underwear, then proceeds to put them at the dinner table for his birthday with himself and her despite saying they're not for companionship... Wow. Talk about tasteless. Talk about hypocrisy saying he would "give them up" for the right woman (but implying he hadn't yet given them up with his current girlfriend).

What usually gets to me about dudes and their dolls, is... The dolls look so fake. I've never seen one with normal legs, or an un-vacant expression, or an interesting face, or normal proportions. At least get freaky with it instead of generic-porny look, I don't know. (Some of them do seem to have more original tastes like the one they mentioned who wanted a very hairy doll, which they didn't even bother with making, just giving him the materials... which I found dismissive and callous, actually.)

And I can't get over the woman dating the doll-repair guy who felt threatened by the dolls' appearance. It's just baffling to me that even a woman would find them to be a good example of what "perfect" looks like for a woman. It's tragic. It's sad.

Also where are the sad lonely freaky women who would actually date these lonely freaky guys? But I guess they wouldn't look like an AI's idea of a model, and perhaps that's a deal-breaker for them.

You're so right about Chobits and the implications of such androids existing, it's a chilly thought.

yeah the Documentarian's Trick here is allowing these men to hang themselves with their own words via the juxtaposition of what they say vs what they do. so many shots of the way these men keep their dolls, either hanging by chains, stuffed into boxes, legs splayed, etc, just shows that they do not respect these things.

that one guy with the guns, saying he doesn't like women who dress his idea of whorish, juxtaposed with video he shot himself of his doll bent over, skirt flipped up, on his bed. the narrator doesn't need to say anything. these guys say everything themselves

https://twitter.com/delaneykingrox/status/1090402436995473408

a great thing about people transitioning is it presents us with scenarios where we have the perfect control variable to undeniably reveal sexism in the workplace. I read about a trans man neuroscientist who was told he was “so much smarter than his sister” (his sister being his pre-transition self)

and damn i knew the gaming industry was notoriously sexist (even more sexist than other stem fields, and that’s saying a lot) but seeing it laid out so clearly like this is so demoralizing.

Ben Barres was that neuroscientist

Barres has been discussed a lot by my peers, and is generally considered an icon for people like me. And his biting statements on sexism are a HUGE part of that. I don’t have much to say other than yes, it’s a big problem and still is.

Im just a girl 🥺 *says the most infantilizing shit ever while implying shes stupid*

Scalped and beheaded multiple times

“If a woman is an analogy to you, you’re not ready to be talking to a woman” omg you’re so right bestie

.☝🏻☝🏻

<stares into his soul> “And get fucked. Thank you.”

male athletes are so darksided wishing their wives a happy bday on socials always goes something like “thanks for everything you do for ME! you’re hot! and you’re a good mom i guess lol” meanwhile their bday posts to their teammates are like “you’re my everything we have gone through ups and downs together seen each other at our worst and best everyday i think about how lucky i am to know you you have changed my life for the better the world is lucky to have had you in it for this long already and looking forward to so many more years of being your everything” like get real

not to derail from football rpf into feminism but

i am really losing it over the take of “women can’t understand the genre where the characters say the themes of the story out loud to each other constantly”

the sheer emotional depth and complexity of superhero cartoons for little children

As a lifelong-fan of shonen anime and also a woman, I’ve made a little diagram of my experiences in their fandoms:

this little glamorized misogyny "joke" has run its course right. can we leave this corny demonic shit in 2023. it is done now. we've had enough.

this post is not gonna be well put together but i am having feelings

mean girls is trending right now because the musical movie just came out and i feel insane. idk why i do, it was stupid of me to think that most people Got It, no one ever gets it, it was always about the memes and the aesthetic.

the first mean girls movie was based on a nonfiction book called queen bees and wannabes. it interviewed and discussed the social caste system in teen girl friendships. how they hold each other to these insane standards of heternormative femininity out of sheer terror that they won't meet those standards themselves. the way they leverage their relationships for some small degree of power in a world designed to strip them of it, even if it drags other girls down.

the "you can only wear your hair in a ponytail once a week and on wednesdays we wear pink" speech was not an original creation for the script. it's a QUOTE from a real teenage girl. those were REAL RULES.

then the musical came, and it was one step removed from the intended messaging of the film. OG mean girls was not perfect (and was extremely racist), but it said what needed said. the musical leaned on the comedy more, but still left a heartfelt undertone, and still critiqued the systems in place. of course no piece of media is going to be perfect, but it was about the conversation.

then this new movie comes out and it is washed over in the veneer of white hollywood feminism so thick you can't see anymore. the problematic aspects of the original movie are taken out to avoid "offending" when the offense was the point. it becomes toothless, it becomes some other thing entirely. they changed karen's line "i expect to run the world in shoes i cannot walk in" to "watch me as i run the world in shoes i cannot walk in." because choice feminism is in vogue, suddenly this character whose entire point is that she doesn't think deeply about WHY she does anything is suddenly hip to the fact that the world is against her.

i think of sokka losing his misogyny arc in the new atla. i think of the Heathers remake casting the bitchy, identical heathers as queer and hollywood-fat outcasts. as if the story, the meaning, the allegory is hidden in the sets and the jokes and the music. it's a whole new thing now, and it's a thing that means nothing in particular.

the plastics should not wear jeans. they should not have curves. their queerness should be suppressed, painful. their sexuality is not a slay, it's the only thing they think they have of value. the santa dance isn't sexy, it's shocking, it's mortifying - they are children.

they're not mean because "we are all mean." they are mean because they are girls in a world that brutalizes them and crushes them into a standardized shape. they are mean because the world is mean to them. they are mean because it gives them some power back. they are mean because it's the only weapon they have.

the landscape of femininity today has shifted to camera-ready makeup at the age of 10, stringent performative hygiene standards, and avoiding being caught on film while having a genuine emotion. the consumerism, the fatphobia, the racism, the classism, the homophobia remain. We could have had a conversation about that.

"haha these alpha trad men really just have dom/sub kinks!" i know misogyny isn't real to a lot of you guys but did you know that some people just actually do genuinely think women are inferior creatures

like if you actually threw one of these trad men into the dom/sub community, he would just be a danger to a female sub because the problem isn't really with him wanting to dominate but with the the fact that he has internalized the idea that women as a whole are not deserving of respect as equals and exist to be dominated

to be clear when i say "if", i don't mean to say that bdsm spaces don't already have misogynists in them, i am simply replying to those that seem to be advocating that bdsm would be some kind of beneficial outlet for these types or that the the power dynamics they've internalized are just a neutral quirk of sexuality that needs to simply be given the freedom to play out in a better way.

however, while the notes on this post fixating on discussing healthy kink dynamics are great, i feel like they're somewhat missing the point of this post which was not really truly about bdsm - that was just an example being used. it's about people seeming to come up with every reason under the sun to not acknowledge misogyny like... exists... and can be a motive. and failing to acknowledge that and uproot it does nobody any favors.

which is how we get asinine jokes/hot takes such as greatest hits like "if a man is cruel to women, clearly this is a sign he is secretly gay. because obviously it's progressive to pin the blame neatly on homosexuality and not a greater problem society has with women. and obviously if someone wants to fuck you, that automatically means they're going to view you with respect"

and

"fundie christianity is basically just a breeding kink :P! it definitely isn't due to the fact these communities are raised to believe it is their moral imperative to create as many new believers as possible in order to bring about a wholly christian world and this certainly doesn't intersect with viewing the proper role of women (as they narrowly define them) to be subservient breeding machines who are created for and obligated to sacrifice their bodies and lives to do so."

yall do realize just because something has been a target of misogynistic criticism, that doesn't make stanning it completely uncritically in response some kind of revolutionary feminist praxis. right.

like i hate to break this to you but plenty of people who dislike taylor swift have better reasons for it than 'she's a successful woman'. plenty of people who dislike twilight aren't just jumping on a decade plus-old hate train because 'teenage girls like it'. pure personal taste aside, someone pointing out the racism in your girlboss media of choice is not the same as an incel frothing at the mouth over a woman minding her own business while having fun, and you're frankly telling on yourself if you're equating those two people

I miss when most people in lefty queer feminist circles understood why "not all men" is stupid annoying and missing the point

"You can't hate men some of them are gay or black or something" criticism of men as a social class isn't about individual men being mean or not. Criticism of men as a social class also isn't the same thing as bioessentialism, the patriarchy isn't about hormones or chromosomes or whatever the fuck else. Do you get it. I know someone with the cool gay disabled black dad you're all citing for Why Men Are Good, Actually and she still has to live under the patriarchy. Do you understand? Yeah, sure, not ALL men, but 99% of the time it's men in positions of power fucking over everyone else !!! Please

Like... oh my god. It's absolutely worth talking about intersectionality and how white (and/or cishet, abled, whatever) women hold a certain level of power over other groups, but we can't be denying that the patriarchy... exists. Remember feminism? I miss feminism so much

#also i always get a strange feeling whenever online people's definition of intersectionality is 'which men are opressed by women'#like yes white women (especially middle/upper class cis abled etc.) can hold power over several groups of men#but did you know... that every single one of those opressed classes... also has women in it?#'do you think a homeless man can be misogynistic against a rich white woman'#believe it or not i'm actually a lot more concerned about the homeless women he's around#the framing of men of color as dangerous predators to white women is obviously white supremacy#but that doesn't those men aren't misogynistic. and their primary victims are overwhelmingly women of color in their own communities#idk it sure is something that these people's definition of intersectionality so blatantly ignores black women#who the term was grouped by and for!#misogyny#feminism

EXACTLY

i need misogyny to stop it's pissing me off so bad. everyone quit it for real

can i be honest im 100% for the fact that like the tradwife stay at home mom thing is really fucked culturally but also like i think we as a society have to figure this shit out because a child needs the equivalent (if not more) of a full time job's worth of work from an adult who (for the health of the child and for the ethics of the situation honestly) needs to be able to function in a way that isn't making the adult miserable because being raised by miserable adults has really tangible negative impacts on children. whether its community childcare so that simply more adults can be involved in the situation or much more robust social aid towards young families. like this might he stupidly idealistic but i think really the root of a lot of issues in society come from the fact that people refuse to understand the gravity of like. parenthood. its an insane responsibility. i think it should be treated as such

"goddess" "matriarchy" "female wisdom" girl your civic rights

“But I didn’t and still don’t like making a cult of women’s knowledge, preening ourselves on knowing things men don’t know, women’s deep irrational wisdom, women’s instinctive knowledge of Nature, and so on. All that all too often merely reinforces the masculinist idea of women as primitive and inferior – women’s knowledge as elementary, primitive, always down below at the dark roots, while men get to cultivate and own the flowers and crops that come up into the light. But why should women keep talking baby talk while men get to grow up? Why should women feel blindly while men get to think?”

— Ursula K. Le Guin