(Source: fassyy, via oatsandyoga)
"It’s the disconnect of being trained since birth to look a certain way, only to have dudes turn around and go, “Don’t you know we hate all that stuff on your face?” Like it was our idea! Like women collectively woke up one day and thought, “Wouldn’t it be awesome to slap a bunch of chemicals and dyes on our faces every morning from now on?”
We’ve got a multi-billion dollar industry doing their best to remind us daily that we need what they’re selling, so don’t act all befuddled about where we got the idea that we looked better this way. Plus, it’s not like men don’t still expect us to look beautiful. They just don’t want us cheating with cosmetics. Hope your face is naturally flawless!
And while we’re talking, don’t you ladies know how annoying it is that you’re all hung up on your weight? Sure, we expect you to have a great body. But don’t be one of those lame girls who orders salads on a date. We like to see you eat!
Most of the time, when men say they prefer “natural beauty,” they don’t mean that they’re ready for us to start leaving the house the way we roll out of bed in the morning. They mean that they want us to look perfect without appearing to try.
Basically, it’s a trap."
—
Emily McCombs (via interstellardiamond)
- it’s bullshit disingenuous rejection of responsibility for patriarchal beauty standards
- it hides yet another performance standard: never let us SEE what we are doing to you
- it shows contempt for effort. people are not supposed to try at anything, you’re supposed to be a gifted special snowflake
- and admitting that femininity is effort means fundamentally undercutting the idea that women are flighty and trivial and weak
- and it makes - OF COURSE - the whole thing about dude’s boners, and not the way there are social and financial consequences for not being a little made-up
- and it is so hostile to the idea of self-expression? someone who wears bright red lipstick does not think that people will actually assume their lips REALLY ARE bright red, any more than we assume a dude who shaves his face is naturally hairless, or think that a person wearing a blue shirt actually has blue arms. sometimes we make aesthetic choices to communicate with the world.
- which in and of itself depends on women as fundamentally underhanded. of course even the way we present ourselves is a bald-faced lie
basically it is a Gross Things About The Patriarchy 101 midterm all rolled up into one passive-aggressive bid for a pat on the back over some Nice Guy’s “enlightenment”
(via pocochina)
(via rebelion-silenciosa)
This is what people see as they commute to work in Philly.
Hollaback Philly is absolutely doing it right.this is fucking beautiful
yes perfect
we need these everywhere
(Source: poweredbygirl, via sweet-far-things)
"When a man says no in this culture, it’s the end of the discussion. When a woman says no, it’s the beginning of a negotiation."
—
Gavin De Becker (via dandyions)
(via zombres)
(via feministsbakecupcakestoo)
"Male privilege may be more obvious in other cultures, but in so-called Western culture it’s still ubiquitous. In fact, it’s so ubiquitous that it’s invisible. It is so pervasive as to be normalized, and so normalized as to be visible only in its absence. The vast, vast, vast majority of institutions, spaces, and subcultures privilege male interests, but because male is the default in this culture, such interests are very often considered ungendered. As a result, we only really notice when something privileges female interests."
— When Worlds Collide: Fandom and Male Privilege (via loveyourrebellion)
(via sociolab)
"Everybody should be outraged when schoolgirls are sexually harassed in the street and on public transportation, when women are killed by their intimate partners, when police officers turn away rape survivors for being naked, when payments are accepted in lieu of prosecution in cases of child sexual abuse, when our legal system supports this form of injustice, when deputy commissioners of police suggest that teen girls are the ones responsible for the sexual crimes against them. Everybody should be outraged. Not just women. Not just the handful of women parliamentarians. Not just overworked and underfunded women’s organisations. EVERYBODY. And that includes men who for too long have been shamefully silent."
—
CODE RED is a feminist collective of Caribbean women and men. Follow us on twitter and subscribe to our blog.
(via redforgender)
(via feminishblog)
"
Also, these “subtle social cues” we leave ain’t some weird code men are unable to understand. There’s been studies shown that men are perfectly capable of interpreting the wishes, needs and emotions of other people based on non-verbal cues and that, in fact, most of human communications between men, between women and between both together is made of non-verbal cues, body language, facial expressions etc.
Where men are failing is that they IGNORE women’s social cues, or treat them as unimportant, or override the cues they receive with their own assumptions and stereotypes and demands about women. They fail because they forget that we’re people.
"— comment on My friend group has a case of the Creepy Dude by Bunny (@ CaptainAwkward)
(Source: tif-oh-two, via sociolab)
"I suspect it’s difficult for men to imagine a world in which their bodies have long been inextricably linked to their value as an individual, and that no matter how encouraging your parents were or how many positive female role models you had or how self-confident you feel, there is an ever-present pressure that creeps in from all sides, whispering in your ear that you are your body and your body defines you. A world where, from the time of pubescence on, you can feel the constant and palpable weight of the male gaze, and not just from your male peers but from teachers and sports coaches and the fathers of the children you baby-sit, people you’re supposed to respect and trust and look up to, and that first realization that you are being looked at in that way is the beginning of a self-consciousness that you will be unable to shake for the rest of your life.
Even if they are never verbalized, the rules of bodily conduct for females become clear early on: when school administrators reprimand you for the inch of midriff that shows when you lift your hands straight in the air or youth group leaders tell you that the sight of your unintentional cleavage is what causes godly young men to fall, you learn that your body is dangerous and shameful and that it’s your responsibility to cloister it in a way that is acceptable to everyone else. You learn that your body is a topic of public debate that everyone is entitled to weigh in on, from a male classmate telling you that those jeans make your ass look huge to the male-dominated United States Congress dictating the parameters that rape must fall within to be considered legitimate. To be a woman, and to live life in a woman’s body, is to be held to a set of comically paradoxical standards that make you constantly second-guess yourself and jump through a million hoops in pursuit of an impossible perfection."
— Stop Catcalling Me | Thought Catalog (via ignify)
(via redefiningbodyimage)
"Our culture is all about pressuring women to just go along with things they don’t want to do in order not to make men have even momentary sadfeels, so I’m not surprised your ladyfriends advised you as they did. They probably have felt exactly as you do at times, and maybe even refused a hug, only to find themselves on the receiving end of a manly tantrum of “I WAS JUST TRYING TO BE NICE WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU” so they want to help you avoid such awkwardness. You risk the man-tantrum (mantrum?) pretty much anytime you decide that your time, or your smile, or your body belongs only to you."
— #444: “Do we hug? Because my feeling is that no, we don’t.” « CaptainAwkward.com (via brute-reason)
(via brute-reason)
When Will You Fight Back: It's not 'slut-shaming', it's woman hating.
1) There’s no such thing as a slut. Can we please stop pretending there is? ‘Slut’ is a word used to shame and silence and attack women. It is only a real thing to misogynists who use language to hurt women.
2) The solution to the sexual double standard that shames women for having casual sex, being promiscuous, enjoying sex, having female bodies, leaving the house, whatever, is not, as a very smart lady on Twitter put it recently, to “turn ‘sluts’ into a special-interest group“. You see, there is no such thing as a ‘slut’ or a ‘non-slut’. There are women. This whole ‘slut-pride’ thing and terms like ‘slut-shaming’ reinforce the very dichotomies feminism works to destroy. Us vs. them. Good girls vs. bad girls. Reinforcing the idea that some women are ‘sluts’ and that ‘sluttishness’ is attached to female sexuality (i.e. that whole — now ‘slut’ means a ‘woman who likes sex‘ crap) is not useful in terms of defining our own lives and sexualities. Like sex, don’t like sex, whatever. You aren’t a ‘slut’ either way. You’re a woman.
3) ERGO. ‘Slut-shaming’ isn’t about shaming ‘sluts’. It’s about misogyny. It’s about shutting women down. It’s about hating women. It’s about silencing. You can be labelled a ‘slut’ regardless of whether or not you have or like sex. Whether you’ve had one partner or fifty. It’s doesn’t matter. Just like women get called bitches regardless of their behaviour. Do we go around telling people not to ‘bitch-shame’ us? No, we say that men who call women bitches are sexist assholes who don’t like it when women speak (read: exist).
4) No matter how hard you try to take back ‘slut’, people will still use it to shit on you. And it still won’t feel good. Just because you’ve painted ‘slut’ across your chest and proudly tromped down the street in fishnets doesn’t mean that assholes across the continent are going to stop using sexist language. A lot of people like to make comparisons around ‘taking back’ the word ‘slut’ to the n-word. But as we all know, racists still use this word in a racist way. Because they are racist and because racism is a thing that still exists in our world. You can pretend that, in the last year, ‘slut’ has been taken back to mean ‘awesome-fun-times-sexy-lady’, but it’s not true.
5) Half of the time people talk about being ‘slut-shamed’ or witnessing ‘slut-shaming’, it’s about clothes. Not sex. Someone thought you or your buddy was dressed ‘like a slut’. Your response was to say that, apparently, some ‘slut-shaming’ happened. But I’m confused now. Which is it? Is it that women who ‘like sex’ are being shamed? Or is it that women who wear push-up bras are being shamed? Because, for the record, wearing ‘slutty’ clothes has nothing to do with liking sex or not liking sex.
The point I’m trying to get across here is that this language is confusing and, rather than take apart virgin/whore, good girl/bad girl dichotomies and rather than address the root of the ‘slut’ language (which is misogyny), ‘slut-shaming’ skirts around these things.
Not only that but the supposed reclamation of this language has served to reverse these dichotomies in a decidedly unhelpful way. So now, the ‘good girl’ is no longer the prude. She is the girl who like to have tons of sex (with dudes). She’s liberated. This is awesome for patriarchy because it provides more soldiers in the ‘feminists are prudes who hate sex’ army. It means that women who don’t like sex (with men, in particular) don’t have valid opinions. Because they’re just maaaad. (Or they have their periods or something. Who really knows.) This phenomenon is also referred to as ‘compulsory sexuality’.
(via america-wakiewakie)
i hate that guys think that every girl is an insecure wreck that feels bad about herself and stuff so theyre like “you’re beautiful” on signs and say shit like “every girl deserves to be called a princess” like we’re not a fucking charity that needs to be pitied all the time
… we’re not a fucking charity that needs to be pitied any of the time. Truth.
(Source: princesspichu, via feministsbakecupcakestoo)
TRIGGER WARNING: DISCUSSION OF RAPE/VICTIM BLAMING IN RESPONSE TO JENNA MARBLES’ VIDEO ABOUT “SLUTS”
Once again, chescaleigh tells it like it is and saves the world.
(If you don’t already watch her, she makes awesome and super funny videos about race and gender and self-respect and everything worth discussing ever. Go.)
This woman is brave, amazing, and incredibly human. Let’s all go comment and send her lots of love, okay? Because there are already a hoard of victim-blaming arseholes in the comments. It’s hard for women to share in this day and age, especially to discuss an experience as difficult as this, on a forum as open and unmoderated as youtube. So spread the positivity my darlings ♡
This made me cry :(
Her message is so true. I can’t even begin to explain the amount of victim-blaming that I felt (and believed) for well over a year after my assault.
this made me cry. this is my rape.
this is my fucking rape.
i appreciate this woman so, so much.
damn.
holy shit, so powerful.
(via sunwillswallow)
