She in her madness prays for storms

Y’all,,,

You know what, maybe it’s because some of us work in the real world now you know? Like for soooooo long your main point of contact for men is your family and classmates. then when you grow up and you have to call assholes on the phone to get your bullshit paid and scheduled, and then you go to work and you have to deal with your shit ass boss and shit ass coworkers and your shit ass clients and their shit ass customers and your horrid shit ass vendors, then maybe that’s when man hating can really bloom, really thrive

This what happened to me in my first student UN meeting in high school. We were encouraged to share our pronouns, the women did so cheerfully, a few men of the artistic variety did, and when I, the president of GIRLS WHO CODE, simply stated my name and leadership position, the girl next to me paused uncomfortably as if waiting for me to share mine, further drawing attention to the fact I did not. This did not happen among the male sports captains.

men don’t abuse women because they haven’t learned how to cry+show emotions in a healthy way; they abuse women because since birth, through parenting and media and the overall surrounding culture they are taught that women are subhuman, made to exist in the control of men. men exercise this control through violence, with their entitlement translating into epidemic levels of rape and domestic violence.

simply telling men it’s ok to cry wont help women; an abuser can both cry and abuse you know!! society protecting women’s rights and showing zero tolerance towards rape and violence against women will help, and that’s what we should be focusing on instead of engaging with mra types who have no empathy for anyone but themselves

the fact is really that marginalized men of all identities, and i’m speaking from my experience here with black men, actively resent women for not being willing to be their slaves. they hate us for not being subservient, for not subordinating ourselves to their authority. they blame us for their dispossession, disenfranchisement, and downtroddenness because they are enticed by the kind of power white men have. they want to abuse as they have been abused. they want to oppress as they have been oppressed. and they are actively offended that we won’t just allow them to do that. they actively hate us because we won’t throw our own humanity away to suit their whims. and feminism enrages them the most because there are in fact women who will degrade themselves (or really participate in their own degradation) for male pleasure, satisfaction, and validation, so it really pisses them off when we are not only not willing to do that, but are actively organizing against it. obviously men will lose a lot with women’s liberation, but in the greater picture marginalized men frankly stand to gain quite a bit, if not more than they’ll lose. so much what they cling to is a gilded cage. male supremacy can make things easier for them, but to paraphrase a female freedwoman - who wouldn’t prefer a little worriment to enslavement? i’d rather grapple with new burdens of liberation than live in the shackles of oppression.

but, these kinds of men are so deeply obsessed with women and consumed with their resentment of our desire for freedom they would rather be locked in suffering. to paraphrase another woman, they hate us more than they love themselves

i wonder why men all over the world commit the same vicious violent crimes against women no matter what culture they’re from... guess we’ll never know

How they have the same notions of dominance and submission, women as properties, daughters as trade coins, wives as baby making machines, females never being allwed to posses any power and every other aspect of misogyny that we already know, how come men born in different eras, raised by different principles, by different religions, in the most diverse places...will always carry the same opinion about women? Maybe it's just a unfortunate coincidence...

come to think of it, TERFs' notion of gender abolition reminds me a bit of concrete and abstract capital. they want to purge the oppressive top layer of gender, which they feel is arbitrary and abstract, and get down to the firm, concrete roots of biological sex. by washing away gender we can return to a world dominated by material differences of sex. it assumes sex to be steadfast and real and prediscursive, because it's about bodies and organs, you can see it and feel it, and gender to be something frivolous, a layer of abstraction and aesthetic that just papers over the hard physical realities of Sex.

it's vulgar materialism that pretends to be scientific but is actually violently anti-materialist and tinged with idealism and essentialism all throughout

i think one of the worst impacts of the postmodernist movement was the implication that no "prediscursive" reality exists. To put it another way, that because all our perceptions of reality are filtered through a subjective lens, there is no means or reason to try and talk about an objective reality. A reality that exists beyond human observation and our limited capacity to perceive it. Don't you see it? This particular piece of postmodernism runs counter to all environmental analysis. It centers absolutely the human individual and his perception of events, it tells us to not even try to empathize with that which differs from us.

Listen to how mockingly this person talks about bodies and organs, about actual existence. How can I, as an environmentalist, start a conversation about pollution without talking about bodies and organs? Or about habitat destruction? Or about food insecurity? Or, yes, female reproductive rights? How can we talk about the reasons to oppose climate change without talking about the billions of dead bodies, human and nonhuman, it will create? How can vegans (who are an imperfect group agitating for a more perfect world) talk about animal cruelty without talking about bodies? When I see an oil-covered shorebird freezing to death in the Florida sun, am I supposed to ask it to engage in discursive reasoning and explain if it feels it has experienced harm? Is having a body not enough?

This is the most bizarre interpretation of the dialectics of abstract and concrete that I’ve ever seen. Who are you actually referring to? Marx? Ricardo? What point are you making? You use both materialist and anti-materialist as criticisms of a single stance. I have yet to see a logical definition of gender that is not entirely ephemeral, aesthetic, a-scientific or even entering the realm of spiritual dualism (nonsense). So yes it is entirely abstract and immaterial, it is based on the incorrect surmises of perverse sexologists blinded by their own bigotry.

As for our apparent wish to “return to a world dominated by material differences of sex” I have no idea how you concluded that from a group who wish to make radical and feminist (anti sexist) changes to the world which is catered to the male sex and designates females as second class citizens, regardless of their feelings on the matter or self perception. I also don’t know what lead you to believe that gender ideology has allowed us to depart from that world. Radicals don’t want to “return to a world” they want to change it from the roots. We do not want the world to be dominated by sexism. Pretending that sex and our oppression is not real is not helping.

Humans are male or female, some 1 in 2,000 births experience DSD (Disorders of Sex Development). Human biological sex is dimorphic, secondary sex characteristics can be diverse in individuals and altered by the introduction of medicated hormones and plastic surgeries, but this does not erase the reality of primary biological sex. To say otherwise is merely self flagellating false idealism.

not nick diramio coming out as nonbinary and being like “when somebody misgenders me by saying ‘oh a 30 year old man criticising a 19 year old girl’ and associates being a man with bad behaviour, that is an issue for me” like wow 30 year old man opts out of being part of the oppressor group how original -.-

Can we women collectively agree to stop trying to convince men of our oppression? It's not for a lack of evidence that they don't believe in it, it's because they think this is how society should be set up. They think women being subordinate is so natural and normal that there's no way it could be oppression. So please let's stop wasting our time on these discussions, it pains me to see so many of you give these men your energy when that's what they want. They deserve to be ignored.

“When have those in control ever given up a significant amount of it to those they control? Can you think of a single time in history?

Well, it has never happened and it’s not going to happen. We should have learned that with the Equal Rights Amendment. If we didn’t learn it then, what is it going to take to teach it to us? Our not learning it is part of our seasoning, our profound conditioning. We’re deeply dependent, deeply servile in ways that our surface militance camouflages. That is the main goal of seasoning: to make us believe the men must  change the world for us and that we’re powerless to change reality unless the men change first. But the truth is that they’re not going to change - can’t change - so we don’t have to waste our time trying to get them to any more. We are the ones who must change, because we can. And when we change, everything outside us will have to change to accommodate our new way of being in the world-including men, but that’s beside the point. The principle underlying all seasoning-how you get this effect, how you reach this goal of getting women to believe that our salvation depends on someone else’s behavior - is that you get someone to do everything in relation to someone else who they perceive as more powerful; you get them always to consult an image of someone else in their minds, to say to themselves-to say to ourselves as women, for instance - “Now, how will the men respond to that?” every time we make a decision, or “If we do this, what will they do?” Always to be relational, to consult the masters in our psyches every time - this is bondage. When women make our internal states, our well-being, contingent upon men’s behavior, behavior we can neither control nor change, we give up all chance for independence and freedom. Our freedom must depend exclusively on us; we are the only ones we can change and control.”

- Sonia Johnson, Taking Our Eyes Off the Guys

in the epilogue to trauma and recovery judith says “At the extreme, sexual violation is the definitive method of putting women in their place.” which is not news but is Very Concise

I actually slightly disagree with this analysis, or at least I see it as an incomplete analysis. When men are pandered to by placing feminized, objectified women on every marketable product, and by using the objectified female body as a product, what’s actually happening is that the concept of male superiority and male supremacy is actually what’s being sold. Men are being sold the idea that they are superior to women and that women exist for their (male) use and pleasure. Men are being sold the idea of male supremacy and female subordination.

This is also part of why this type of marketing fails to work the other way around (male bodies sold for women’s pleasure). Naked males do not represent a form of female supremacy or female power to women. Selling a product using naked men does not have the same effect on women that selling a product using naked women has on men, because female power is not based in male subordination, and women do not generally feel superior when shown images of naked men. The male form is not objectified the way the female form is, and if the male body were objectified the same way the female body is, the men would appear weak, vapid, too young, and fake. The naked objectified female body being used to sell products reminds men of their “superiority” over women, and reminds them that according to patriarchy, women exist for them. Women simply do not have this same relationship to the male body.

It really bothers me the way male vs female rape victims are discussed. It’s considered way harder for men to come forward because it signifies a deeper loss of dignity. Do women not have dignity? Did it never occur to anyone that women are whole human beings also capable of feeling diminished/humiliated? Is the violation of our bodies so commonplace that our shame means nothing?

Diminished/humiliated - men have a special word for that when it happens to them, ‘emasculated’, but it’s just how women are meant to be! Femininity itself is ritualised humiliation.

It’s not an accident men are the perpetrators of rape and violence against women. It’s on purpose. They want to do it and they also don’t care. That’s why feminism is about dismantling male supremacy for female liberation.

- Catherine Mackinnon, Points Against Postmodernism

“Despite all the evidence that women are attacked as projections of The Enemy, the accusers ask sardonically: “Do you really think that MEN are the enemy?” This deception/reversal is so deep that women - even feminists - are intimidated into self-deception, becoming the only self-described oppressed who are unable to name their oppressor, referring instead to vague “forces”, “roles”, “stereotypes”, “constraints”, “attitudes”, “influences”. This list could go on. The point is that no agent is named, only abstraction.“

- Gyn/Ecology by Mary Daly