“Schools need to stop teaching critical race theory and gender studies and just focus on the CLASSICS”

Me with a copy of Othello under one arm and Twelfth Night under the other: hehehe

People writing adaptations of "a scandal in bohemia" love to make it less feminist than the original which was published in 1891

"What if they were in love" "what if she actually didn't outsmart him" what if you comprehended the entire point very plainly laid out in front of you which is that this story is That Time Holmes Got Less Sexist

Irene Adler is 1. Very explicitly stated to not be a love interest for Holmes on account of him not being attracted to women and 2. Smarter than him. She appears once and the story is only 44 pages long we get a very basic idea of who she is and that's About It. If you fuck up either of these traits that's not Adler anymore. If you want Holmes to have a wife that bad Watson's right there

[ID: a reply from @jewishevelinebaker that reads "'what if they were in love' She Has An Entire Husband" /end ID]

YEAH SHE GOT MARRIED LOL that was a pretty significant thing that happened

Thinking about this again actually. It's like so bonkers in yonkers to me how many people cannot fathom a male character admiring a woman's intellect without wanting to fuck her, or -- maybe worse! -- said woman wanting *him* because ....??? Why would she. She has no reason to. Introducing romance here in any way undermines the whole point of it and is frankly Weird! For a lot of reasons

here's the thing. I don't think that men and women can't be friends. I do think, however, that some men can't be friends with women. bc they are misogynists and don't see women as people. so if you as a man say men and women can't be friends I think you're telling on yourself

wrong! thanks for playing. but it looks like in your attempt to retaliate against an imagined man for their participation in patriarchy, you accidentally reinforced the idea that men are inherently different to women in an extreme and unreconcilable way, which only helps misogyny thrive. try remembering that other people are as real as you. perceiving men as objects is a funny joke but ultimately has no place in a discussion about heteronormative & misogynistic interactions. try again later!

its been said before but replying to conversations about transmisogyny with "teehee we should all stop fighting and arguing and instead make out and have kinky sex with eachother ;D" is just, in addition to being incredibly dismissive and shitty, brazenly misogynistic.

i have no patience for "we're too polarized and need to reach across the aisle and put aside our differences and work together" types at the best of times, but god if that attitude isn't especially frustrating when paired with the additional layers of viewing trans women as purely sex objects who just need to touch grass and get the transfeminism fucked out of them so they can be normal well adjusted members of the community, who won't speak up when they're being mistreated like a *good* tranny.

like do you people hear yourselves, is this not blatantly fucked to you, am i insane

This story of tech firm Palo Alto using women literally dressed as sexy lamps for their event at a cybersecurity conference (and getting massive blowback from women in tech) has been going around, and it feels like some weird combination of the 00s era of video game "booth babes" (when I saw the story I was like "what year is it?") combined with somebody thinking Kelly Sue DeConnick's "sexy lamp test" was an instruction manual. >_>

Tangentially, I feel like if there was a comic book supervillain whose gimmick was lamps, they'd probably have minions dressed like this.  

#if they had some slinky lamp twinks and a big grand hairy lamp bear as well it would LITERALLY be fine WHEN will they understand#woke police can’t get you if you do tokenism to the sexy lamps!!!!!(via @manyblinkinglights)

XD XD XD

Ltrl the Future Liberals Want u_u u_u u_u

This story of tech firm Palo Alto using women literally dressed as sexy lamps for their event at a cybersecurity conference (and getting massive blowback from women in tech) has been going around, and it feels like some weird combination of the 00s era of video game "booth babes" (when I saw the story I was like "what year is it?") combined with somebody thinking Kelly Sue DeConnick's "sexy lamp test" was an instruction manual. >_>

Tangentially, I feel like if there was a comic book supervillain whose gimmick was lamps, they'd probably have minions dressed like this.  

“It’s so crazy JKR is misgendering a real cis WOMAN who was raised as a GIRL her whole LIFE what a dummy” is such a dogshit argument lol stop ceding ground to the idea that cis women have a more legitimate claim to womanhood because they were “born and raised” a woman and that’s why it makes this misgendering “more” ridiculous somehow. transphobes being constantly wrong about who is “actually transgender” is not their trans clocking radar ‘misfiring,’ they are proudly, openly, and successfully terrorising the public into accepting a very narrow & particular white suprematist notion of gendered divisions in society. JKR is not ‘mistaken’ she’s a fucking white supremacist who hangs out with other white supremacists & advances white supremacy through the language of transphobia. why is anyone still acting like she’s “making mistakes” where have you people been

Not calling this person out specifically but I’ve seen this take a bunch of times and I think it’s very misguided. JKR is not being a hypocrite by attacking Black and brown women, she is being racist. She is not being a hypocrite by attacking intersex women, she is being intersexist. She is a racist whose idea of womanhood is bound in exclusively white terms, an idea that comes from a very long, very rich tradition in western (and particularly UK) feminism. There is no hypocrisy going on here, it’s not a rhetorical or analytical error on her part, she isn’t contradicting herself, she is a racist who does not consider Black women or women of colour to be “real” women & especially does not consider them worthy of protection. This is only hypocritical if you ignore the central role white supremacy plays within terf thought

If you routinely refer to every politician by their last name except for the women who you’re always apparently on a first name basis with, maybe spare a moment to ponder that habit.

and look. you can point to individual people and be like "here's the reason we use her first name and his last!" and it makes sense. and you can always point to individual people and be like "we call him by his first name!" and that will be true. there will always be individual cases where the best solution is to be like "here's Mr. Cooper and Beth." but the male providers at my hospital get referred to by their last names, and the one female provider of color gets to be "Susan." I remember reading an article in college that begged people who academical criticize literature to refer to the author as "Austen" instead of "Jane." and maybe Susan and Jane are fine with that! but the totality of this--not the individual cases but the trends, the invisible tendencies of how we use language--is this diminutive effect, as well as this constant marking of gender. the neutral last name versus the feminine first. senators and female senators. artists and female artists.

"Kamala" is a relatively distinctive first name. "Harris" is a relatively common last name. calling her Kamala makes sense! we don't want to get her confused with someone else! but also! she's vice president of the united states of america. she's the presumptive new democratic candidate to be president in a completely unprecedented last minute switch. she's notable. if we're talking about politics and we say "Harris," who else could we possibly be talking about? are we worried that someone might come into a conversation about Harris's position on abortions and go, "I didn't know sitcom actor and Broadway performer Neil Patrick Harris felt that way about reproductive rights!"

HI LET’S SHARE NICOLE’S WORDS ON THE SUBJECT! 

It has been literal years but every time I see Martin’s tweets posted somewhere and his word is shared as truth while her post is not shared it sort of reiterates the fact that we trust men to speak about feminism more than we believe women who experience it. 

Interesting, innit? https://medium.com/@nickyknacks/working-while-female-59a5de3ad266

Reading her account of how their boss treated her blows me away. Men are so emboldened that they will literally admit to illegal discrimination casually and face no consequences.

In all the years of seeing this post I’ve never seen a link to her side. Didn’t even know she’d written one.

Adding screenshots of her post. His whole post is there without needing a link. Hers should be, too.

Also, she posted this is 2017! It’s fucking 2020 and I’ve seen his side of this for years, but it took 3 years for her side to make its way to my dash…

I’ve reblogged his story at least twice; it’s time for Nicole’s.

Reblogged him, bout time I got to reblog her.

I think it's unfair that dressing boys in maid outfits is more popular than dressing girls in butler outfits. There should be solidarity and equality.

new kinds of homophobia/transphobia to add to your worldbuilding:

if you want your fictional society is to be less just world, but in new ways.

>Gay men are seen as too manly. That they are somehow stealing the manliness from the straight men. If woman are around them, they will somehow turn into men.

i like the idea of contagious manliness and gay people start out trying to fuck women but the women turn into men whenever they get close and eventually they give up.

I always feel like a lot of SFF defaults to either “modern, progressive gender norms” or “a vague idea of medieval gender norms but worse.”

Personally I’ve been intrigued at the setting conceit of societies that have intensely binaristic gender roles, like more so than even medieval Europe and Asia (in which people did generally grudgingly accept women in positions of power in certain necessary cases, e.g. a noble lady managing her husband’s lands while he was off on campaign), like roles actually categorically barred to certain genders, but with ASAB as only really a suggestion, and codified means to switch which side of that divide a person was on. And then explore all the ways such a society would work and evolve.

They keep flirting with this idea with the Qunari in Dragon Age but not quite following through.

Years ago, I was running an Apocalypse World campaign, and came up with a concept for a Mad Max-style motor nomad tribe where all sexual and romantic relationships were required to be between a person who droves cars (usually but not exclusively female) and a person who shot guns (usually but not exclusively male). Same-sex relationships were fine as long as they were between a driver and a shooter, but opposite-sex relationships that were between two drivers or two shooters were taboo.

Children rode in the back seat of cars; if you had more biological children than you had room in your car, then any excess children had to be given up to a couple that had room, who thereafter became the child's adoptive parents. If no seats were availabe in any of the tribe's vehicles, then infanticide was the only remaining option.

People who were unable to either drive or shoot due to injury or advanced age were effectively desexualized. Such a person might ride in the back seat with the children if a seat was available, or be left to die if one was not. Either way, the spouse was expected to remarry.

Children are required to choose between learning to drive and learning to shoot upon reaching puberty, and were thereafter expected to stick with that choice. Something like 80% girls defaulted to driving and 80% of boys defaulted to shooting, but a boy learning to drive or a girl learning to shoot wasn't especially shocking; however, moving from the driver seat to shotgun or vice versa as an adult was the equivalent of transing your gender. 

Teenagers were allowed and encouraged to have sexual relationships with their peers (provided it was between a driver-in-training and a shooter-in-training), but any children that resulted could not be raised by the teenagers, as they did not have a vehicle, and would have to be adopted by someone who did (or be abandoned to die). 

Upon reaching adulthood, a person was required to find a spouse of the opposite driver/rider alignment. A major part of the marriage ceremony consisted of the newlyweds being presented with a car. The marriage could not take place (and thus graduation to social adulthood could not occur) unless a vehicle was available. Until a car could be acquired, the couple would be forced to remain in their parents's cars, which was inherently somewhat awkward, and was humiliating to both families if it lasted for an extended period of time.

Finally, motorcyclists were just about the queerest thing to exist in this setting.

Excerpt from The Trouble With White Women: An Interview with Kyla Schuller Author of The Biopolitics of Feeling: Race, Sex, and Science in the Nineteenth Century 

[“NA: One of the fiercest arguments you make in the book is that womanhood is a very recent fiction created for very specific purposes. You write, “Woman’ represents a tactic of risk management”— can you explain what you mean by that?

KS: I’m building on arguments that black feminist theorists made in the 1980s that gender is a racial structure. Womanhood is not a universal category, but instead is an aspect of whiteness that was positioned by definition as unobtainable for nonwhite women, specifically black women. I looked at the scientists who were inventing and codifying the idea of sex difference in the 19th century— not just the cultural role of gender, but the idea of physiological and anatomical sex difference, the binary of a male and female body. Those folks argued that full sex differentiation was only achieved by whites. No other races have achieved the level of evolutionary specification where they were able to differentiate between the distinct roles of men and women.

This is super-surprising, because we assume that the idea of male and female as two opposing categories is universal— at least in Western thought. But before the 19th century, male and female bodies were described as more alike than different. For example, in the 18th century, the vagina was often described in medical textbooks as an internal penis. It’s not arguing that bodies are identical, but it’s arguing a fundamental similarity.

In the 19th century, one of the things that emerged was the idea that male and female were fully different capacities and bodies at every level. It’s helpful to imagine the idea of “male” and “female” as racial categories— not just as gendered roles but as actual physical, anatomical, physiological difference. This suddenly makes projects like white feminism in the 19th century extra-suspect, because many white women were only arguing for the rights of white women— “woman,” in that sense, is part of an overdetermined category of whiteness. Of course, there were white feminists who were arguing against that, and black feminists were trying to expand the category of womanhood itself, but it helps explain some of the reasons why liberal feminism still does such a terrible job accounting for race, because to some degree their idea of woman itself has always been elaborated as a quality of whiteness, not a universal quality of people.“]

"girl dinner is when you don't eat teehee" "men think about the roman empire women think about their ex best friends and poetry" "✨sapphic love✨ is so pure and innocent and sweet unlike nasty gross Man Lust" "girl math is when you can buy starbucks and makeup because you didn't buy it yesterday so it's free" "I'm going to explain (complex topic) for the girlies! so basically it's like when you go shopping-" "I love women because they're so soft and smooth and feminine and we can talk about girly things and they're not sweaty or hairy or horny like gross men" "women should be unemployed girls don't need jobs men should do all that for us" "ugh girls that don't like pink or being feminine just need to stop being such pick mes and get over their internalized misogyny it's gross"

god save my hairy dyke ass from this hell before I start whacking people's shins with my Girl Baseball Bat. teehee!

I was showing my class that, contrary to popular belief, divorce rates aren’t at an all-time high but actually peaked in the 80s. When I asked them why they thought divorce rates went up so quickly in the 60s-70s, none of them could guess. One guy thought it might be because of all the “free love,” drugs, etc but I told him it wasn’t all hippies getting divorces. Not a single one of them had any idea just how hard it was for women to leave an abusive marriage before the late 1960s at the earliest.

In the late 90s, having secured a permanent and full-time position as a teacher, I applied for a car loan. During the conversation with the credit union rep I was told that I was a risk because I might get married within the 5 year loan period (with the unspoken implication that if this hypothetical marriage were to occur it would immediately result in my becoming a housewife) and that, not entirely linked to the possibility of nuptials, I might also get pregnant (and again, be rendered incapable of paid work.)

I was dumbstruck.

My parents had to go guarantors for the loan. My freaking parents.

I was in my mid-20s. I had a well-paying, secure job. I was single with zero intent to marry, and even if it had been on the cards it sure as fuck wouldn’t have been to the sort of person who would immediately insist I quit my job and stay at home.

But apparently, the fact that I was a woman overshadowed all of that stuff. That single factor meant I was a risky prospect and had to get my parents to back me.

It was absolute bullshit.

Dude, women in Ireland were forced to resign from their jobs upon getting married up until 1973

In the late 60s, no-fault divorce became possible, and it spread throughout the US through the 70s.

The combination of “you do not have to prove to a [male] judge and [mostly-male] jury that your husband is abusive (without being able to afford a lawyer)” and “you can now have a bank account in your own name” did indeed kick off many, many divorces.

Divorce rates are lower now. Marriage rates are also lower now - because, again, women no longer need to get married to get access to a bank account, rent an apartment, own a car, etc.

and even with these advancements women still get paid significantly less and often remain dependent on men for stable and supportive income. that’s why i hate the “evil gold-digger” stereotype because we did not choose to be financially dependent on men. they did.

its "think of the children" and "let kids be kids" but they won't even let a 9 year old pretend to be a cat without causing a moral panic. they won't let little girls wear anything that might show their fucking shoulders in school and teach them that their bodies are inherently sexual and they should be ashamed of it. they won't even let a five year old boy cry without making fun of him for it. nor will they condemn it if an adult woman pursues a teenage boy, so long as it's straight. "protect children" my ass.

#don't forget rolling back child labor laws for migrant kids(via@arrows-for-pens)

^^^^^^

Also remember: The Republican Party has repeatedly stirred up panics against anti-bullying measures, and they've often succeeded in getting them revoked or denied.