Aching to Pupate

Femme, feisty, feminist, finding it harder to alliterate than I expected. Twenty-something, vegan, queer, sex- and body-positive, book-loving, Jewish, kinky almost-college graduate. My feminism is intersectional or it isn't worth shit. Directing my life marginally better than a butterfly in a hurricane.

I'm kinda in love with my best friend.

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"The cognitive need to see the world as a just place requires them to provide some explanation for black women’s circumstances. One way to do so is by believing that inequality must be the result of insufficient effort. The standard set by the ideal of the strong black woman is impossible to maintain. Its insistence that black women can always make a way out of no way sets the stage for failure. Sometimes there really is no way,and not even capable, dedicated, smart black women can carve space out of nothing. Of course, this is true for all individuals, but when black women expect themselves to be capable of superhuman tasks, normal humanity is considered failure and that failure can be used to rationalize continuing inequality."  - Melissa V. Harris-Perry, Sistern Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in America, p189 (via chauvinistsushi)

"Imagine you live in a world very similar to yours, except that there is a war that has been going on for centuries. The borders need to be protected against the Orks. As tradition dictates, this hard but honorable work is the realm of men and the epitome of manhood, and it has been like that for as long as society can remember. Recently, things have changed a little. The military service has become less dangerous, and almost no men die in service anymore. It has also become voluntary. Men are not automatically joining the army as soon as they come of age. They can delay it. As a result, the numbers of men studying at university has risen dramatically; universities used to be the realm of women until about 50 years ago. Still, most men eventually join the army, often giving up their ambitions, and men who don’t are viewed suspiciously. If you sign up for service, this changes your life forever. You cannot un-sign. You need to spend about 20 years in the army, and while the first five years are the most intense, it also requires hard work afterwards. Not surprisingly, this compromises the ability of men to pursue careers. They usually have to take at least a year off at the beginning of service, often more, to concentrate on learning how to fight. They might work part-time later, but this, some say, diminishes the quality of their service. Studies have proven that this is not really the case, but a powerful prejudice survives. Women, therefore, still dominate the professional world and make careers, as it has been for centuries. ‘Women are better suited for careers, this is clear from their brain chemistry’, many say. ‘On the other hand, men are made for battle. This has been like this since the dawn of time. It is better to accept this fundamental fact of life.’"  -

The impact of motherhood on the lives of women: An analogy.

Read this.

(via scipsy)

"Throughout my life somebody has always tried to set the boundaries of who and what I will be allowed to be: if working class, an intellectual, upwardly mobile type who knows her place, or at least the virtues of gratitude; if a lesbian, an acceptable lesbian, not too forward about the details of her sexual practice; if a writer, a humble, consciously female one who understands her relationship to “real” writers and who is willing to listen to her editors. What is common to these boundary lines is that their most destructive power lies in what I can be persuaded to do to myself — the walls of fear, shame and guilt I can be encouraged to build in my mind […] I have learned through great sorrow that all systems of oppression feed on public silence and private terrorization. But few do so more forcefully than the systems of sexual oppression, and each of us is under enormous pressure to give in to their demands."  - Dorothy Allison, ‘Public Silence, Private Terror, in Skin: Talking about Sex, Class and Literature, (New York: Firebrand Books, 1994), p. 117 (via feministquotes)

"Freedom is not enough. You do not wipe away the scars of centuries. You do not take a man who for years has been hobbled by chains, liberate him, bring him to the starting line of a race saying, ‘You are free to compete with all the others’, and still justly believe you have been completely fair. Thus it is not enough to open the gates of opportunity."  - Lyndon B. Johnson (via wretchedoftheearth)

"It saddens me to see girls proudly declaring they’re not like other girls – especially when it’s 41,000 girls saying it in a chorus, never recognizing the contradiction. It’s taking a form of contempt for women – even a hatred for women – and internalizing it by saying, Yes, those girls are awful, but I’m special, I’m not like that, instead of stepping back and saying, This is a lie.
…
The real meaning of “I’m not like the other girls” is, I think, “I’m not the media’s image of what girls should be.” Well, very, very few of us are. Pop culture wants to tell us that we’re all shallow, backstabbing, appearance-obsessed shopaholics without a thought in our heads beyond cute boys and cuter handbags. It’s a lie – a flat-out lie – and we need to recognize it and say so instead of accepting that judgment as true for other girls, but not for you."  - “I’m not like the other girls”, Claudia Gray (via ceedling)

apihtawikosisan:

You know, if there wasn’t a concerted effort to fight this, a person not in the know might believe that native americans are actually all white women in feathers, headdresses and warpaint.  They might start to think that real natives have all died out and no longer exist.

Huh.  What would that be called I wonder.  When you, through sheer force of numbers and ignorance of your actions, speak over and paste over our cultures as though we don’t exist? Inserting your made-up versions of us as truth?

Oh right.

Colonialism.

Jeez, so glad that’s ancient history then.

"

I don’t want to be a feminist anymore. Like a five-year-old, I want to close my eyes, stick my fingers in my ears, stomp my feet on the floor and scream “No! No, you cannot make me, I won’t, leave me alone!” I am, simply put, too tired. So very, very tired.

I am tired of fighting with my friends. I am tired of arguing that someone groping and slapping my butt isn’t “what I have to expect”, just because I’m at a bar, and the one attacking my butt has a drink in the other hand. I am tired of hearing “boys will be boys” and “when you’re dressed like that …” and “that’s just what guys do”. I am tired of trying to drown those sentiments in loud, repetitive no’s, screamed over and over again, till my throat is sore and my voice weak – just to hear them repeated, as soon as exhaustion threatens to silence me.

I am tired of being afraid. I am tired of seeing someone writing something offensive, sexist, racist, ageist, ableist, somewhere online. I am tired of seeing those writings getting likes and lol’s, and SO TRUE’s. I am tired of being consumed by confusion and anger, typing, typing, typing and typing a seemingly endless response, including research, links and statistics, and then hesitate clicking “submit”. I am tired of knowing that I hesitate because I am afraid of the flood of responses that will come. I am tired of knowing that I will be bombarded with lighten up’s, stop whining’s and get a sense of humor’s for so long, that I will start to wonder if I am indeed wound up too tight, a nagger and humorless. I am tired of the fact that I’m afraid of being called a cunt, even though I don’t find genitalia insulting or demeaning.

"  - I don’t want to be a feminist anymore. (via gingerrqueer)

farrahskhan:

Street Harassment 

Summer is shortly here and I’m already tired of the ridiculous amounts of sexual harassment I experience biking especially when I wear a dress. Take note: 

"Dominant groups, however, typically don’t show this kind of attention and commitment to the dynamics of their own dominance. They might see themselves as burdened with the responsibility that comes with power - bosses for workers, or “protecting” and “providing” husbands for wives and children. There are few incentives, however, for them to assume responsibility for the systems that give them power and for the consequences that result."  - Allan G. Johnson (via wretchedoftheearth)

"Another paradox is how patriarchy sets men up to depend on women in ways that make men feel vulnerable and, therefore, powerless in relation to them. In one sense, this is a common feature of systems of privilege that depend on subordinate groups to go along, to ratify privilege as legitimate, and to refrain from challenging the status quo."  - Allan G. Johnson (via wretchedoftheearth)

"To succeed in the provision of a beautiful or sexy body gains a woman attention and some admiration but little real respect and rarely any social power. A woman’s effort to master feminine body discipline will lack importance just because she does it: her activity partakes of the general depreciation of everything female. In spite of unrelenting pressure to “make the most of what she has,” women are ridiculed and dismissed for their interest in such “trivial” things as clothes and makeup."  - Sandra Lee Bartky (via grrrlstudies)

"Feminist theory can open your eyes or shut them tighter. If you are open to the idea that you have lived your entire life on a social throne and everything you say and do is an example of the privilege that your dominant gender has, then you have the ability to start tearing down these social norms and make new ones. It’s not self-flagellation; it’s admitting that all throughout history, sexism has been used to oppress women. Men will continue to see feminist theory as a threat because by feminists showing time and time again that females are equal in every intellectual and most physical respects to males, men are incessantly having to make excuses for their behavior and prove to themselves and other men that they are indeed everything that the world has told them to be."  - Jesse Lawson  (via msandrogynous)

"It is common in the United States that women, especially younger women, are in a bind where neither sexual activity nor sexual inactivity is all right. If she is heterosexually active, a woman is open to censure and punishment for being loose, unprincipled or a whore. The ‘punishment’ comes in the form of criticism, snide and embarrassing remarks, being treated as an easy lay by men, scorn from her more from her more restrained female friends. She may have to lie and hide her behavior from her parents. She must juggle the risks of unwanted pregnancy and dangerous contraceptives. On the other hand, if she refrains from heterosexual activity, she is fairly constantly harassed by men who try to persuade her into it and pressure her to ‘relax’ and ‘let her hair down’; she is threatened with labels like ‘frigid,’ uptight,’ man-hater, ‘bitch’ and ‘cocktease.’ The same parents who would be disapproving of her sexual activity may be worried by her inactivity because it suggests she is not or will not be popular, or is not sexually normal. She may be charged with lesbianism. If a woman is raped, then if she has been heterosexually active she is subject to the presumption that she liked it (since her activity is presumed to show that she likes sex), and if she has not been heterosexually active, she is subject to the presumption that she liked it (since she is supposedly “repressed and frustrated”). Both heterosexual activity and heterosexual nonactivity are likely to be taken as proof that you wanted to be raped, and hence, of course, you weren’t really raped at all. You can’t win. You are caught in a bind, caught between systematically related pressures."  - Marilyn Frye, “Oppression” (via croatoan)

the problem of traditionally gendered acts of chivalry 

Benevolent sexism [aka chivalry] may not be physically violent, but it has a pretty similar outcome to hostile sexism… . . A group of psychologists … ran a study to find out does benevolent sexism influence how girls’ feel about their bodies?

The researchers used a simple test to measure the effects of benevolent sexism on how women felt about their bodies (this is called “self-objectification”, looking at your body as men or other women might and turning yourself into an object in your own eyes). The researchers tested two groups of college women.  Now, here’s the clever part.  In one group, the participants simply filled out surveys measuring self-objectification. In the second group, there was a female and a male research assistant (let’s call them “Susan” and “Tim”) pretending to be participants.  The researcher in charge of the group was “in” on the trick.  During the experiment, she received a fake phone call that she said was from a colleague who needed a box of research materials brought to another room.  She asked “Susan” (whom everyone else thought was just another participant) to carry it, at which point “Tim” stood up and said, “I’ll get that for you,” and took the box.  “Susan” sat back down.  After this exchange, the real participants filled out the surveys measuring self-objectification.

So, what did that little act of “politeness” do?  Well, when they compared the two groups’ survey scores, they found that in the group that watched Tim’s act of chivalry, women felt a stronger sense of shame about their body.  They were more concerned about their bodies not fitting into society’s standards of how a woman should look.  This group was also more preoccupied with monitoring their appearance (which researchers call “body surveillance”).  Basically, the group that saw Tim’s act of “politeness” examined their bodies more to see how they compared to cultural standards of beauty and felt shame about not fitting into what society says women should look like.

But what do we make of these results? How could Tim’s simple act of carrying a box make women feel bad about their bodies? The authors propose that benevolent sexism, even though it may be meant to convey respect, actually reinforces traditional gender roles.  Traditional femininity emphasizes the importance of a woman looking attractive (as opposed to intelligent, witty etc.) Without being aware of it, simply being reminded of traditional gender roles can make women more concerned about how they look (as opposed to their accomplishments or personality) which translates into “body surveillance” or women checking themselves out. When women compare their bodies to cultural standards of beauty, they can feel a sense of shame if they think they don’t “measure up.”  It pretty much goes without saying that this is harmful to women and girls.

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