Posts tagged the personal is political
Tears don't mean you're losing.
Prose; pop!: Gay men and the way we talk about and to women, revisited.
So I wrote this the other week and it seemed prescient. I was at a cocktail party recently with one of my friends and we were, you know, yukking it up with party guests, washing down pizza with champagne, and just having a grand old time. Then suddenly, a gay man passed by my friend and decided to pet her butt in the process. She was mortified; this is someone neither she nor I had any backstory with. There is no context for this to occur, really.
I don’t like seeing people I know in a state of distress at parties I bring them along to. Or really, in general. Parties are not for distress. So when she excused herself to use the bathroom, I asked him if he would be able to apologize to her. He was happy to comply.
I mean, I thought so.
But then fifteen minutes later, he turned it into an episode. What he did was permissible because (a) he was a gay man; (b) he was in theatre; (c) it was a “love tap.” I calmly explained that while his motives weren’t evil, it was still a breach of physical space—gay or not. But he wasn’t hearing it. Worse, yet, when I excused myself to go to the bathroom, he took the opportunity to have a discussion with my friend to convince her that I bullied him into the apology. My friend has let it go since; I have let it go; and perhaps this is going to be the watershed moment for this guy to reconsider the way in which he approaches a population that he has romantic interest in.
It was kind of an eye-opening experience for me, to stand there as a man who likes men listening to another man who likes men rationalize away why he would choose to sexually harrass a woman he doesn’t know. I mean a subset of men once championed as being urbane and nuanced are developing neanderthalic habits of their own.
I think for me, the more mortifying thing is that there are women who see that kind of gesture as cute or permissible; who are telling him, “Honey, that’s funny!” But maybe it’s all about boundaries and it takes trial and error to really become aware of those boundaries.I don’t know that the women are MORE mortifying, but the fact that gay men have been given the message that their expressions of sexuality are cute and funny — to the extent that some gay men don’t even understand why a woman wouldn’t want to be groped by a “non-threatening” stranger — has repercussions for everyone. The bottom line is that you shouldn’t touch someone if you don’t know them well enough to understand their boundaries.
YES.
From birth we’re taught that we’re owed a beautiful girl. We all think of ourselves as the hero of our own story, and we all (whether we admit it or not) think we’re heroes for just getting through our day.
So it’s very frustrating, and I mean frustrating to the point of violence, when we don’t get what we’re owed. A contract has been broken. These women, by exercising their own choices, are denying it to us. It’s why every Nice Guy is shocked to find that buying gifts for a girl and doing her favors won’t win him sex. It’s why we go to “slut” and “whore” as our default insults — we’re not mad that women enjoy sex. We’re mad that women are distributing to other people the sex that they owed us.
Yes, the women in these stories are being portrayed as wonderful and beautiful and perfect. But remember, there are two ways to dehumanize someone: by dismissing them, and by idolizing them.
David Wong, 5 Ways Modern Men Are Trained to Hate Women (via chirart)
That last line is right on the money.
(via thingsthatscareme)
(Source: cracked.com, via carefullyeverywheredescending)
Keeping things the way they are because that’s just how you’re familiar with them is problematic, due to most everyone in comic fiction being a white, cis-gendered guy. It’s not an overtly racist distinction you’re making, which is why you seem to feel you’ve come to it without prejudicial racial bias (“similar conclusions can be reached by different arguments”), but it actually IS racist by way of exclusion. “Don’t do something directly racist, but also just keep things how they’ve always been” is racist [and heteronormative, and sexist, and cis-sexist, and so on] because “how things have always been” are white, cis-gendered, and male. Therefore, you prefer things to stay white, cis-gendered, and male. The world has changed, but you want these characters to persist as vestiges of an outdated, slanted view of society.
(Source: jhenne-bean, via mia-culpa)
This comic is about how there are two sides to every story.
(via irony-rocks)
Over the past 25 years, Muslim majorities have elected five women as heads of state in the Muslim world (Tansu Ciller in Turkey, Benazir Bhutto in Pakistan, Hasina Wajed and Khaleda Zia in Bangladesh, and Megawati Sukarnoputri in Indonesia). Notwithstanding our verbiage of female empowerment and liberation, we have yet to elect a single woman as president in the US. The Quran is the only sacred text that devotes an entire chapter to the rights of women. In fact, women in Europe could not inherit property independent of their husbands up until the 18th century. Islam over 1,400 years ago gave women the rights of inheritance, work, and hold public office. But the misperception of a Muslim woman that is veiled and oppressed guides our thinking.
(via rubberglue)
Help my transgender friend win a set of breasts!
Guys, this is important. Malene is a transgender friend of mine, who’s participating in a contest to win cosmetic surgery for a set of breasts, but the people in charge of the competition have continually fiddled with her votes, and even gone as far removing her picture. While her picture is now back, she had her votes removed and had to start over. She’s been in the lead for a good while despite all this, but then suddenly yesterday, a new picture surfaced in the contest with more than double her votes.
This isn’t fair and reeks of cheating, and it’d be great if you could help out by giving her your vote. There’s more information at the link (also in English). You need a Facebook account to vote on the website, but it’s only to make sure no one votes several times for the same person (supposedly, hah.) Malene’s picture is the 6th up from the bottom of the page, on the right side.Edited to add;
The link on this post links to a facebook event which is basically highlighting the blatant discrimination that is going on.
To simply vote, go here: http://www.kostbar.dk/Login.aspx
Log in with Facebook (just click the blue facebook button) and then click on the link to the left that says ‘konkurrence’. Malene’s picture is, as mentioned, 6th from the bottom up on the right side, and you simply click where it says “synes godt om”.
Thanks in advance. ♥
Update: 11 year old trans girl lost appeal
The above article is an update. Her mother went to appeal to keep her out of the psychiatric ward and lost. She will be institutionalized because of her expression of her gender. She will be held until she conforms to male gender and then released to foster care, not her mother who was supporting her.
Please, if you haven’t signed the petition, sign it, reblog it, ask your friends to sign it. We’ve managed to get 40K signatures for a pageant model, we’ve only gotten 11K for a little girl about to have her life ruined. Lets get on the ball and spread the word.
I literally just repeated the f-word until I ran out of breath.
Let me catch my breath. I may go on a cursing spree again as soon as I get it back.
Seriously people…
(via passingknightly)
I need the sea because it teaches me: Come on America! What are you doing?
I AM A PROUD AMERICAN, REALLY I AM…BUT, I JUST SAW ONE OF THE MOST UPSETTING CLIPS IN THE HISTORY OF MANKIND. NOT MANKIND, MORE FANGIRL-KIND. SHERLOCK AND WATSON, THE BROMANCE/ROMANCE OF THE MILLENIA. WITHOUT SHERLOCK AND WATSON WE WOULDN’T HAVE ANY OTHER…
Anytime you use headcanon slash to bemoan a female character’s presence, your argument becomes automatically invalid. Depending on the ferocity of your bemoaning, your argument is also sexist. If your argument hinges on homophobia, when the duo in question are dude-bro, canonically straight men who only get it on in fanfiction, you are wrong in so many clusterfucked ways I despair for humanity.
And finally, when legions of young women are protesting the onscreen presence of beautiful, talented women of color in favor of no-homo! wink-wink straight white men, and you find yourself among those legions, you need to take a long hard look at the media you consume, think critically about why straight white men are everywhere, and sit the eff down.
(via humanpieceoftoast)
fHere is the thing, okay? Coming into a feminist conversation with, “Have you considered that sometimes women acquire free drinks at bars?” is like walking into graduate school during Philosophy finals and saying, “Have you considered that the color blue that I see may not be the color blue that you see?”
Imagine you are the guy who just walked into that Philosophy class and laid that shit down. Imagine the class full of students who have worked very hard and committed themselves and sacrificed to be here, students who have spent several years of their lives learning about this subject. Imagine now their feelings when you go to the head of the classroom with a smirk on your face and demand the professor give you an A for effort. Imagine now that they think you are a douchebag asshole, because they do, and because you are. You are a douchebag asshole because you are obviously so self-centered, arrogant, and completely ignorant of the world around you, that you thought you could walk into a high-level course with no background and no work and say something profoundly simplistic and totally unrelated and also everybody should congratulate you for having done this thing, so brave, so provocative.
[….]
You are not asking us a real question. You are simply illustrating, for all to see, your own ignorance. You are saying, “I have not considered the implications of the question I have just asked. I have not taken the time nor effort nor commitment to sit down and ask myself this question. Instead, I have come into your philosophy classroom/office/feminist blog and shat out my question with a smirk, because I believe that my two seconds of thought are worth more than your long-term analysis, because I believe I am worth more.”
Fugivitus: A few things to consider when you find a feminist blog (via absolutely-spiffing)
In my experience, the men who are most likely to come into feminist groups to criticise them are self proclaimed ‘intellectuals’ who turn up to demonstrate to people just how oh-so-clever they are, to masturbate over their ‘logical’ arguments, to incite ‘new and stimulating’ debate about subjects that have been done to death, to willfully ignore how they are erasing experiences and silencing people, just so that they can have a few moments of ‘thrilling’ discussion in their otherwise dull, highly privileged lives. And when this brief adrenalin rush is over? They can go home, safe in the knowledge that they have shown all these silly hysterical women exactly what’s what, safe in their privilege which means that they do not have to give this encounter more than a passing thought. Believing that they have made a difference. And this makes me sick.
So, this is actually a pretty good example to use. Perhaps these men will read it and we can get it through their pseudo-intellectual heads that this is not ok. This is harmful behaviour and contributes absolutely nothing of worth to anything at all. Feminism has enough flaws as it is. Feminism is, by and large, racist, transphobic, ableist, homophobic, and classist. We do not have time to pander to these individuals too. If men really want to help? Commit to being a good ally and give us the opportunity to solve these problems without this almost constant hindrance.
Omg this is perfect.
(via angrybanette)
So much about this, so true. People think they’re throwing you some curve ball when it’s really like they’re still in the early pre-cambrian bacterial stages of earth’s global evolution yet they’re convinced they’re multicellular organisms. And you’re like “no dude, it’s really clear that you’re not.”
Anyhow, just to add my own to the first example, it’s so complicated indeed and it’s come up twice for me in the past week. I went on a date last night and I was so, so relieved that they did not hassle me at all about buying my own drink. It was in contrast to two nights before, when I was trying to pay for my drink and another guy at the table really wanted to pay for it to me. So many things go through your head- my friends are always all like, “You might as well accept it if they’re offering,” and if I don’t accept the offer in most cases the guys are not like “cool, you must be upholding your internal, personal feminist values,” they’re often offended and feeling like I made a big deal out of nothing and feel it is a slight (and these guys aren’t assholes, to be clear, they’re just accustomed to what this action normally signals). And I myself feel like I’m being unnecessarily argumentative over what is basically just a generous offer, yet I feel really conflicted about accepting a drink from someone if I’m not actually interested in them (but they are in me), and just about the whole… situation. Anyhow. Yeah, it’s complicated, and there is often no win/win solution.
(via feministdisney)
