the thing about fat rolls and cellulite and body hair and all of those things we are told our bodies are not supposed to have is that we have been systematically wired to hate ourselves so that some billionaire can continue lining their pockets. being fat was considered attractive until the 1800s when Sylvester Graham started preaching about "indulgent" foods causing a lack of morality and William Banting decided that being fat was equivalent to being disabled. That, plus changes in the way clothing was manufactured, changing diets, and the invention of human scales led us to suddenly thing fat=bad. And who profits from that? The people who came up with the ideas in the first place. Cellulite was introduced to mainstream knowledge in 1968 in a vogue magazine where it endorced using rolling pins and standing correctly to eliminate it, once again lining the pockets of whoever was selling those bullshit unproven "cures." body hair? not a problem until 1915 when Gillette realized they could double their market by telling women their natural hair was disgusting. makeup is the most obvious form of profiting off insecurities. if it was truly a form of artistic expression, "natural" looks would not be nearly as popular as they are and it would not be seen as being necessary to a woman's professionalism. bottom line is that beauty standards ARE capitalism, and by refusing to buy into them (no pun intended) we are engaging in a revolutionary act. i have been told i am wrong far too many times, and I have quite literally paid the price for it. Self love is an act of rebellion. Self love is a necessary revolution.

I feel like the fact that gendered pronouns even exist in the first place is a testament to the grotesque importance of gender within civilization as a means of stratification and control. When you refer to someone, why do you use pronouns for gender, of all things, given the grammatical reason for the existence of pronouns (to serve as a short substitute to a person’s name when referring to them repeatedly)? Under the logic of gendered pronouns, pronouns could be used to indicate any property or characteristic of an individual and yet they were chosen to indicate gender. Are the ideal physical characteristics and/or societal role of an individual, i.e., their gender, necessary to mention constantly in casual speech as a substitute for their name? The fact that gender is given so much importance in language is a clear illustration of society’s dependence on gender and the division of labor that comes therewith.

this is a great take and also a really entertaining time to let you know that grammatical “gender” of pronouns in sumerian was not divided as masculine/feminine but rather animate/inanimate, and the “animate” gender was used of humans, gods, and…. statues…..

she probably thinks michael cera’s character grew up to be a lesbian too

lesbians are allowed to have had previous relationships with men and still be lesbians

See also: it's a completely valid idea for Michael Cera's character to grow up to be a lesbian since trans women exist.

Basic Homesteading Skills

Crafts

Cooking and Baking

Canning

Gardening

Animals

Outdoors

Medicine

Hey, it's super cool and empowering to learn life skills like these, and these links might well have good information (I haven't clicked them), but be ready to take their messages with a grain of salt as OP is a "traditionalist" with a major focus on maintaining strict gender roles, with nuggets like anti-choice posts thrown in every now and again.

A lot of "homesteading" bloggers are labeling things like Christian fundamentalism and white nationalism with innocuous tags like "cottagecore" and "farm life." I know a lot of folks (like myself) want to learn fun skills and feel self-reliant, and those are fulfilling pursuits, but be aware of how a person's politics shape their posts while you're researching and daydreaming. Like, you are not going to get a nuanced, anti-colonialist picture of what an environmentally friendly cooperative should look like from someone who also wants to slip in quotes and aesthetic posts about how motherhood and pregnancy are the height of femininity.

“The low-maintenance woman, the ideal woman, has no appetite. This is not to say that she refuses food, sex, romance, emotional effort; to refuse is petulant, which is ironically more demanding. The woman without appetite politely finishes what’s on her plate, and declines seconds. She is satisfied and satisfiable.

A man’s appetite can be hearty, but a woman with an appetite is always voracious: her hunger always overreaches, because it is not supposed to exist. If she wants food, she is a glutton. If she wants sex, she is a slut. If she wants emotional care-taking, she is a high-maintenance bitch or, worse, an “attention whore”: an amalgam of sex-hunger and care-hunger, greedy not only to be fucked and paid but, most unforgivably of all, to be noticed.”

— Hunger Makes Me, Jess Zimmerman

One last hot take and then I’ll shut up: the reason adhd is framed first and foremost as a learning disability when it is in fact more apt to call it an emotional processing disorder is bc our society is only concerned w the ways neurological disorders impede a person’s ability to “function” aka get a job and contribute positively to capitalist society. How adhd affects interpersonal behaviors and emotional health is only relevant insofar as it relates to a person’s level of societal functioning PERIOD. There is no interest in improving our actual livelihoods

This is why girls are often not diagnosed w adhd until they are much older, bc they are forced to develop certain social awareness and self-surveillance capacities at an extremely young age and thus don’t perform “poorly” in the areas usually looked at to signify the disorder. But that doesn’t mean girls don’t take that distress out thru other avenues, just that the many alternative iterations of the disorder are ignored by professionals bc they don’t matter as far as society is concerned, as long as a girl is performing “well enough”

Too Many Men Can’t Handle Being Told No

Teen Vogue recently published an article about the link between dating violence and gun violence.

But calling it “dating violence” misses a very significant factor. I dug through a list of school shootings from the past few years and tried to pick out every story that seemed to involve any sort of dating/romantic relationship, either real or desired on the part of the shooter.

Anyone want to guess what I found? In every single case, the shooter was male, and the target was female.

Remember last week when I talked about needing to teach kids to hear and accept “No” for an answer? Let me be more specific. Being able to set and respect boundaries is important for everyone. But we desperately need to teach boys and men to respect “No.” That male sense of entitlement is literally killing people.

The whole “incel” thing is another example where we see a guy committing murder because he feels the world owed him sex. Yet, despite the fact that both men and women can be “involuntarily celibate,” it’s only the men lashing out with violence, killing people because they’re unwilling to accept women telling them no.

As a society, this is exactly what we teach men to do. We teach them to be persistent, to never accept no for an answer. The entertainment industry is flooded with stories of men essentially wearing down the target of their desire until the woman says yes. We teach them that women aren’t people, but things to be won and used.

Again and again, we see where those lessons lead…

Continued at http://www.jimchines.com/2018/05/men-cant-handle-no/

Keep reading

Links from the tweets:

Elle: The Woman who coined the word Incel

4Chan: the Skeleton Key to the Rise of Trump

We Hunted the Mammoth: Incels hail Toronto driver

Vox:  How the alt-right’s sexism lures men into white supremacy

The source twitter link: Arshy Mann

Since the incel community is getting a lot of headlines rn, I just wanna make a quick reminder that anyone who tries to console and pity them by attaching isolation and loneliness is full of shit since the incel community is vehemently against including gay men, who are statistically more likely to commit suicide due to isolation.  They even make memes and valorise suicide. They’re not here to save men from themselves just like how meninists never gave a shit about police violence against black men. It’s rationalised white male entitlement and violent misogyny masquerading as community

Like, for a harmless example, I’m pretty confident all of the assertions in this post about the origin of the word “spinster” are bullshit.   I can find no evidence that wool  (hand) spinner was ever a profession that paid well or allowed anyone to own their own business.  Nor does it make any logical sense to me to refer to it as an “art” because it’s not like it’s hard or can be done multiple ways. 

But you can find plenty of references to spinning wool by hand as being the shitty, tedious job that hurts your hands, hurts your back,and damages your lungs.    It’s difficult, but it’s mostly tedious and awful and you can basically “master” it as a toddler.  There’s a new book that suggests, after actually speaking to women whose feet were bound as children, that foot-binding was done in no small part in order to cripple girl children to make them better able to sit still for hours on end spinning and carding wool.   

The image of “spinster” people were calling to mind in the 18th/19th centuries was of a “surplus” woman who had to rely on the charity of her nearest male relatives and therefore had to do the shittiest, most tedious job in the household because her only alternative is to starve on the street or get hanged as a witch.

I mean, I”m being weirdly nitpicky about an utterly harmless post that I’m not even some kind of confident expert in…but there’s something troubling to me about anachronistically finding examples of all these economically self-sufficient single ladies instead of the grim, horrifying reality of how fragile a woman’s life was and how terrible it was to be a woman without some man to give you social status.  I mean, if there were all these examples of free-wheeling spinsters (not window with sons) who made good money and (somehow) owned their own property  then what did we even need feminism for?  I mean, hell, a single woman in the US in 1971 would not be able to open her own textile business because a single woman in 1971 would have no access to credit! 

My justification for being a joyless pendant here is that I think it’s Not Helpful to create these myths that there were lots of happy alternatives for women or to downplay how brutal structural oppression was:   A very small amount of women in pre/semi Industrial Age Europe had any kind of genuine financial security and most of those women in a lot of places/times in Europe and America had to genuinely fear having someone call them a witch and take whatever resources they did have. 

You’re right and that post is nothing but revisionist historical fantasy that totally obscures the fact that single women were in an incredibly precarious economic and social position throughout most of history. The idea that spinsters were *actually* empowered, independent single women earning big money in the comfort and privacy of their own homes is completely ahistorical. And it seems like they’re doing it just to reclaim a dumbass term for unmarried women that’s only persisted because of sexism. 

IDK about spinsters but feminist medieval historian Judith Bennett has done a lot of work on single women in late medieval England in various trades, like particularly beer brewing. Not that they were making a ton of money at it or anything, but there were a lot of single women supporting themselves by brewing beer. It’s not like single women without men were totally helpless throughout all of history until the late 20th century. There is nuance to be had here. 

If you’re talking about the same Judith Bennett book i think you are, she makes it clear that for much of the medieval period commercial brewing, like home brewing, was considered a (semi) unskilled trade, and paid far less than skilled labor. She also makes it clear that the vast majority of the women brewers were married, not single, that they were often barely getting by economically, and that by the late 1300s brewing was increasingly male dominated. 

I don’t think anyone here is trying to imply that single women living before the 20th century were “helpless” or didn’t work or support themselves, because it’s well documented that they did, some with more success than others. However, the post this is about argued that “a million” European women in the middle ages intentionally chose spinning instead of marriage because it provided them with a a comfortable income and independence, and there’s really no evidence for that. 

You guys, you must stop doing this. You must. We cannot keep yelling at you about it because it makes us so angry, and we are already angry all the time, about real things, like how our lives are turning into a real world Handmaid’s Tale, ha ha ha ha ha ha ha haha ha ha ha ha ha. We cannot keep spending our energy being mad at mediocre men for writing mediocre books that inexplicably win awards and that people tell us to read, for some fucking godawful who knows reason.

So men. My guys. My dudes. My bros. My writers. I am begging you to help me here. When you have this man in your workshop, you must turn to him. You must take his clammy hands in yours. You must look deep into his eyes, his man eyes, with your man eyes, and you must say to him, “Peter, I am a man, and you are a man, so let us talk to each other like men. Peter, look at the way you have written about the only four women in this book.” And Peter will say, trying to free his hands, “What? These are sexy, dynamic, interesting women.” And you must grip his hands even tighter and you must say to him, “ARE THEY, PETER? Why are they interesting? What are their hobbies? What are their private habits? What are their strange dreams? What choices are they making, Peter? They are not making choices. They are not interesting. What they are is sexy, and you have those things confused, and not in the good way where someone’s interestingness makes them become sexy, like Steve Buscemi or Pauline Viardot. Why must women be sexy to be interesting to you? The women you don’t find sexy are where, Peter? They are invisible? They are all dead?” He is trying to escape! Tighten your grasp. “Peter, look at this. I mean, where to begin. ‘She could have been any age between eighteen and thirty-five?’ There are no other ages, I guess? Do you know what eighteen-year-olds really look like, in life? Do you know what thirty-SEVEN-year-olds look like, god forbid? And not that this is even the point, but why are these supposedly sexy and dynamic and interesting women BOTHERING with your boring garbage ‘on the skinny side of average’ protagonist? Why did you write it like this, Peter?” 

And maybe Peter will say at last, “I don’t know.” Maybe he will be silent for a long long long time, and then maybe he will say, “I guess it’s scary and difficult for me to imagine the interiority of women because then i would have to know that my mother had an interiority of her own: private, petty, sexually unstimulating, strange: unrelated to me and undevoted to my needs. That sometimes I was nothing to my mother, just as sometimes she is nothing to me. That I was not at all times her immediate concern.”

“I know, Peter,” you can tell him gently.

“I don’t want to know that my mother was a human being with an internal life, because to know that would be to risk a frightening intimacy with her,” Peter will say, maybe. “Because to know that would be to know that she was only a small, complicated person, no bigger or smaller than I am, and I am so small. To know how alone she was. How alone I am. How alone we all are. That my mother survived with no resources more mysterious than my own. And yet she gave me life. My God: she gave me life. How can I pay her back for that? And how can I forgive her for it? How can I ever repay her for the good and the evil of it, my life, every day of my life?” He will be sobbing probably. “I am frightened of her. I am frightened of loneliness. I am frightened of dying. O God. My God. I didn’t know. I didn’t know.” Drool will run from his mouth as he cries. The way babies cry. He will be ashamed. You must hold him. You must say, “Shh, Peter. Shh.” Wrap your man arms around him. Hum into his thin hair as your own mother hummed once into your own sweet-smelling baby scalp. Kiss him gently on his mouth. There. You did it, men. You fixed sexism. Thank you. You’re the real hero here, as always, you men, and your special man powers, for making art. 

put this in the smithsonian and then bury me with it

Don’t trust guys who call their ex girlfriends whores

What if she fucked guys for money

Don’t trust dudes who call sex workers whores either.

I often hear people say that men are shamed for showing emotion (this is correct and I’m not denying it), whilst it’s considered acceptable or even positive for women to show emotion. This idea that women are expected to show emotion, or are praised for doing so, or gain any social capital that men don’t from expressing emotion is completely untrue.

Women’s emotions are utterly mocked, demeaned, disregarded and ultimately used to silence and dismiss us. People claim that women’s emotions make us irrational, inferior, and less capable of responsibility. Women are denied positions of power, due to the belief that their ‘emotions’ will get in the way. Women were subjected to medical abuse with diagnoses like ‘hysteria’ for displaying emotion. Our emotion is mocked, pathologized, and ultimately used to demean and oppress us.

‘Being allowed to show emotion’ is not a ‘privilege’ that women have over men.

This is true. But additionally, women are expected to perform emotions constantly, to the point of being punished for not doing so. Resting bitch face exists as a term because neutrality is not an acceptable expression for a woman in public; if you aren't performing happiness you're a bitch. God forbid you work in customer service, where any attitude short of peppy sales rep of the year is declared surly and unbecoming.

So the expression of any emotion is decried as a meaningless, stereotypical function of gender, and anything less is taken as hostility and a refusal to act appropriately.

Good posts regarding sexual violence against men:  “Men who have been sexually abused or harassed need to have their voices heard and shouldn’t be silenced any longer. Sexual trauma is not easy for anyone, and if you are a male survivor, we believe you, and you are not alone. ”

Bad posts regarding sexual violence against men: “See if this was happening to a woman then people would care. Imagine if a man was doing this to a girl! The outcry would be insane, and he’d be arrested on the spot. If you’re a woman and you cry rape, no one would question it! But what about the men?!”

Why

She had a dream and she realized it.

Hey wait but sit down

This is Megumi Igarashi

She’s a Japanese artist

Japan, the country with some of the most fucked up pornography and the penis festival

Where the vagina is basically illegal to talk about 

So she did a bunch of art featuring 3D sculptures of her vagina, including this kayak, and was put in jail for it

She was indicted again in December on obscenity charges for selling vagina art to crowdfund for the kayak and could spend two years in prison

She plans to turn her trial in to a manga comic. She seems pretty sure she’s not going to do any jail time but if you’d like to help her pay for her inevitable fine and court fees, you can check out her online store. There are little glow in the dark vagina characters.

Wow I’ve seen this reblogged a ton of times without seeing the whole going to jail part.

Here’s a recent article about her from July of 2017.  It looks like she did some brief time in jail, and is currently still working on this artistic effort, as well as trying to raise awareness about a new terrorism law and the jail/prison system in Japan. 

Reblogging again for the updates!

i really am sick of seeing transmasculine people explain nonbinary 101 with what essentially boils down to “i always knew i wasnt like other women, i wasn’t a dumb bimbo who was obsessed with makeup, i was a thinking and feeling fully realized sentient human being” and it should be pretty obvious why that shit sucks. everyone is a person and preforming femininity is uncomfortable and restrictive and coercive for women too!! everyone hates wearing painful clothes and being forced to walk in heels! thats not a trans exclusive experience!

if your definition of nonbinary identity directly insinuates that all women are vapid hysterical housewives and all men are meathead alpha male jocks like. work on it. it’s not hard to talk about your personal relationship to gender in a way that doesnt make it clear that you think everyone who isnt you is an idiot and a sheeple or whatever

Wait are you trying to tell me that rupaul might have some questionable gender politics??

Can’t believe the person responsible for “female or shemale” and “you’ve got shemale” and was the center of a major community discussion around the word tranny isn’t good abt trans stuff! Really makes you think

Also trans women have been saying this for literally years and no one would listen to us and in fact we get accused of hating gay men for it, until this recent interview for some reason, like ru Paul has sucked all along and I’ve been shouting at the void about it on this website for literally years, it’s almost as if trans women know what they’re talking about when it comes to transphobia and letting this get this far was completely avoidable

“Also trans women have been saying this for literally years and no one would listen to us and in fact we get accused of hating gay men for it“ this is very important. 

He’s disgusting. Drag is a really awesome thing, but modern mainstream drag is fucking terrible

Yeah like it’s been difficult to kinda get perspective on drag due to some really bad personal experiences with drag queens but honestly, drag isn’t the problem the problem is that the drag scene has been largely over run by cis white gay men using it as a place where they can insult women’s looks and outfits, act out misogynist stereotypes, and touch other people innapropriately without fear of reprecussion, like, if you want to look pretty and perform a song that’s awesome, however if you create a character to act out misogynist stereotypes and insult actual women’s clothes/looks, you’re just a misogynist using drag as cover, and the drag scene is sadly currently completely dominated by these cis men who ruin it for everyone, and honestly we need to fucking take it back because drag could be an amazing thing if it wasn’t unwelcoming/unsafe for anyone who doesn’t want to blindly accept the toxic parts