A Turbo-Nerd

“When the handle has snapped off the basket that held all your eggs…” gone girl tier monologue

wow she read them down

When you manage a fabric store in a midwest town, you see this played out in real time. Young women coming in during that first year of marriage - when their husbands go to dental college - pert, bubbling with creative plans. Then, four years on, you help them shift to the reality of balancing budget with creativity - and they learn the value of that inexpensive flatfold table that they used to badmouth - to make that 2nd & 3rd baby their own quilts. And they're exhausted. And they're scared. And they are 1000 miles away from family.

And you have your staff play with their kids while you hold them in the tiny restroom as they come completely undone because they just found out that their golden boy husband is having an affair with the someone he's been doing residency with for the past three years.

He confessed that he'd rather be with the other woman but she's of a different faith and it's more important to have kids than to be happy. And no. No he will not grant her a divorce. And he will not stop seeing the other woman - because he's a man. It's his right.

TRUE story.

Also - She was NOT THE ONLY ONE to fall to pieces in our store for similar reasons.

I loath the ideology of "tradwives". It is a false doctrine preach by Patriarchy not a divine being.

It is the nature of evil to hide this way.

.

This is 100% what happened to the host mom I've been au-pairing for. And to many other moms my friends have been au-pairing for.

Married out of college, 4 kids, he spent 15 years building up his career while she took care of the house and the kids. When he was earning $600k a year suddenly he started to pull away - she wasn't as pretty anymore, the kids were loud, the house was a mess... She wasn't good enough anymore. He got himself a flat. He got her me and my precedessors to help with the kids. No, they can't divorce, that would make him pay her money for the kids and he didn't like that. Every once in a while a bill would be unpaid. My weekly checks would bounce. We lived in a $1,5mil house around DC and our gas or water was turned off more than once.

Somehow he was always out of money.

By accident she learned from a friend of a friend that he was actually seeing a young lady lawyer for a few years now. It wasn't her, it wasn't lost interest. He was just a piece of shit.

Thankfully, she had family that took no shit and they stood behind her and borrowed her money for lawyers to force the divorce now that she had proof of him cheating. She's spent tens of thousands to get there while he was resisting every step of the way - because without divorce he wouldn't have to pay her alimony, he could just throw scraps whenever he wanted and still pretend to be a good dad.

She's spent tens of thousands and two years to free herself from this man, and when she could finally go to work (thank fuck she finished college) she was earning $25k a year.

She only managed to get away with the support of her parents and family. Through the au-pair grapevine I've known other families like that. Too many. Lady down the street tried to commit suicide when same happened to her - she was from Taiwan and had no support to get free. And people around scorned her for being "dramatic" - women who held on to their places with their fingertips talked shit about her, because their own husbands would never...! Right?

Right?

I'm going to throw a stone at a hornet's nest and say that the TERFs who like to claim Alison Bechdel as one of their own lack basic reading comprehension—and worse still, they lack shame.

There's an actual, honest-to-goodness, authentic, genuine strip of Dykes to Watch Out For in which Mo gets called out for her transphobia when she whines about sharing a restroom with a trans woman. Moreover, she then becomes the victim of bathroom policing herself, because butch women don't fit the cis-hetero-normative mold. It's all right there in the text, plain as day.

Just because Bechdel is a butch lesbian, and prefers that identity over "trans man" or "nonbinary," doesn't mean that she rejects the theory and rhetoric that produced those labels. That's child logic.

Cherry-picking her work to support their bigotry, just so they can claim lineage from a distinguished queer writer, is not only stupid and easily debunked, but it's deeply insulting. It betrays how little TERFs actually care about LGBTQ rights, feminism, or literature.

Any so-called "radfems" interacting with this post will be blocked—thereby cleaning up the "Alison Bechdel" tag for my browsing, so I don't have to wade through a bunch of bigotry every time I scroll through it. Thank you in advance. ❤️

As a lesbian i will always relate more to trans women than cishet women. Made to feel disgusting and predatory in women’s spaces? Check. Berated and mocked for our relation to sexuality and womanhood? Check. Hated for our “deviancy from the norm”? Check. Every single essay about womanhood by a trans woman–and especially, especially by trans wlw–has spoken more to me than anything written by a cis straight woman ever could. T*rfs can take that to the bank.

also, may I add because it’s not just the negative stuff. there’s so much positive connection:

gender euphoria experiences with a self determined approach to womanhood, attraction and sexuality

celebration of bodies beyond the norm

creating our own culture of appreciating complex and intertwined expressions of gender and sexuality

destigmatization and newfound respect of and for our bodies

true sisterhood based on choice not force

the inherent revolutionary nature of our existence and our love and community

creating space for exploration of pleasure and identity

These posts were fundamental in my coming out as a woman and hopefully someone else will see them and see the overflowing love and acceptance that is waiting for them too.

On the one hand it does get tired and frustrating when people have no clue what terfs actually are & what they believe in But on the other. You have to admit it's really funny that they failed so hard at being trans exclusionary radical *feminists* that basically any instance of misogyny being perpetrated by other women can be mistaken for terf rhetoric by someone who isn't well versed in theory. Womp womp

It turns out when you hate women it makes you really bad at being a feminist

People have this tendency to think the problem with terfs is that they hate men but it's actually that they hate women. They hate trans women, they hate sex workers, they hate women of color... they're just regurgitating the same old patriarchal bioessentialist narrative about fragile, delicate, Pure white cis women needing to be protected but with a thin veneer of "and men stinky" on top. They don't even hate men 99% of the time they just hate anyone challenging the dominant white supremacist narrative of gender. Yknow, feminism

The secret is that "radical feminism" in the colloquial sense, the way people online self identifying as radfems use it, has *extremely* little in common with what "radical feminism" means in feminist theory. Most people arguing with terfs don't know what terfs are, but even crazier is that terfs don't know what radical feminism is. Everyone is getting their opinions from posts and no one is reading. So I say again with my sad trombone... womp womp

I am aware that words' meanings can change over time. I'm not trying to "no true scotsman" here, there's no denying what radical feminism as a movement has morphed into. Just pointing out something I've noticed lol........ online radfems saw the problems with second wave feminism (bioessentialism, etc) and like, plucked it out and ran with it, without any of the. Feminism. The way self-identified political alignments are often disconnected from what their ideologies actually are/were (i.e. conservatives supporting socialism if you don't call it that, liberals having conservative views on sex, etc) is insane and it's kind of fascinating to me. But this is the no nuance website so I better stop talking

This made me bust out laughing

Peer-reviwed from @myturtlegotjacked

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.

Text: decoupling pregnancy from femininity means accurate and more inclusive language and treatment, but it also allows cis women to refuse motherhood without refusing womanhood, which is great for feminism and terrifying for misogyny.

–THIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIS. As a sterile cis woman who doesn’t want to have children anyway I feel this is every ounce of my being. “Define woman” types tend to do so in a way that excludes me too, so I got to stand with my trans sisters.

Found this on pinterest had to put it here

Tradwives need to realize the seriousness of the shit they are getting themselves into.

The society isn't all that kind to women.

op I'm very sorry but I can't just let this go by in the tags

True and based.

context :

Saw a video of a tradwife being like “idk why women wanted to work” and I just- WOMEN HAVE ALWAYS WORKED. What do you think ladies in waiting, maids, servants, school teachers and factory workers were doing? Women worked on farms and in fields for centuries. Rich, royal and noble women were not the majority of the population. 70-80% of medieval europe’s population were peasants and those women did not just stay home and mind the house. They worked in fields (for the lord who owned the property, peasants only had like a small strip of land they could farm for themselves. Everything else belonged to the nobility) took care of babies (who upon becoming children also began to work). We have never not worked. The happy homemaker phenomenon of the late 20th century was not the norm for the majority of human history and the feminist movements of the 60s and 70s were not just about letting women get jobs, but for us to also be fairly compensated and to let us in to male dominated fields. These are problems we still face today. Women have always worked, we’ve just never been fairly compensated.

this reminds me of a fascist on twitter who posted a "this is what they took from you" tweet but the image was a like early 1900s ballroom with rich people dancing? so no. statistically "they" didn't "take" this from you. most of yall wouldve been laboring in the fields and factories to create everything in this ballroom. and not dancing in it.

I do wish that "oppositional sexism" was a more commonly known term. It was coined as part of transmisogyny theory, and is defined as the belief that men and women, are distinct, non-overlapping categories that do not share any traits. If gender was a venn diagram, people who believe in oppositional sexism think that "men" and "women" are separate circles that never touch.

The reason I think that it's a useful term is that it helps a lot with articulating exactly why a lot of transphobic people will call a cis man a girl for wearing nail polish, then turn around and call a trans woman a man. Both of those are enforcement of man and woman as non-overlapping social categories. It's also a huge part of homophobia, with many homophobes considering gay people to no longer really belong to their gender because they aren't performing it to their satisfaction.

It's a large part of the reason behind arguments that men and women can't understand each other or be friends, and/or that either men or women are monoliths. If men and women have nothing in common at all, it would be difficult for them to understand each other, and if all men are alike or all women are alike, then it makes sense to treat them all the same. Enforcing this rift is particularly miserable for women and men in close relationships with each other, but is often continued on the basis that "If I'm not a real man/woman, they won't love me anymore."

One common "progressive" form of oppositional sexism is an idea often put as the "divine feminine", that women are special in a way that men will never understand. It's meant to uplift women, but does so in ways that reinforce the idea that men and women are fundamentally different in ways that can never be reconciled or transcended. There's a reason this rhetoric is hugely popular among both tradwifes and radical feminists. It argues that there is something about women that men will never have or know, which is appealing when you are trying to define womanhood in a way that means no man is or ever has been a part of it.

You'll notice that nonbinary people are sharply excluded from the definition. This doesn't mean it doesn't apply to them, it means that oppositional sexism doesn't believe nonbinary people of any kind exist. It's especially rough on multigender people who are both men and women, because the whole idea of it is that men and women are two circles that don't overlap. The idea of them overlapping in one person is fundamentally rejected.

I think it's a very useful term for talking about a lot of the problems that a lot of queer people face when it comes to trying to carve out a place for ourselves in a society that views any deviation from rigid, binary categories as a failure to perform them correctly.

being so fr when I say that transmisogyny has put feminism back like 50 years

what i thought we had distanced ourselves from was the reduction of women to vaginas and wombs and the ability to bear children. i thought we had progressed past ‘dresses are for women and pants are for men.’ i thought we progressed past the idea that someone is less of a woman if she does not adhere strictly to beauty standards. i thought we progressed past the idea that naturally being comfortable adhering to highly feminine standards is vulgar. but i (sarcastically) guess no one could have predicted that trans-exclusive feminism would be the downfall of all the progress we’ve made

— Quote by Leslie Feinberg, from TransSisters: The Journal of Transsexual Feminism, issue 7, volume 1. 1995.

White Feminism

I wish more white people - and white women especially - would get over their white fragility and truly understand how words and actions like these do more harm than good to women of color. They need to stop making everything about themselves and catering to other whites women like women of color don’t exist.

Leslie Feinberg on trans exclusion in feminist spaces.

From TransSisters: The Journal of Transsexual Feminism, issue 7, volume 1. 1995.

This made me bust out laughing

Peer-reviwed from @myturtlegotjacked

I thought that first chunk of text was itself going to be sarcastic, but no, that person was GENUINELY baffled, like- "Taking basic human rights away from women has hurt women??? The men who hate women also hate us???"

SUPPORT YOUR SISTERS. (especially your WOC and trans sisters!!!!)