Part of feminism isn’t just proving that women are strong and capable it’s also admitting that women can be awful and disgusting. It’s the flip side of destroying the ‘women are delicate angels’ myth. Don’t pretend women don’t beat, murder, and rape. They do. And stop glorifying women who do god awful things just because they do it in heels and lipstick ok that drug cartel woman is not someone you should be idolizing.
Icon from a picrew by grgikau. Call me Tir or Julian. 37. He/They. Queer. Twitter: @tirlaeyn. ao3: tirlaeyn. 18+ Only. Star Trek. Sandman. IwtV. OMFD. Definitionless in this Strict Atmosphere.
Watch: As Blythe’s poem ends, it’s clear what we must do in the face of rape culture and “pocket feminism.”
WOW WOW WOW PLEASE WATCH THIS
An Excerpt from ‘We Should All Be Feminists’ by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (TEDxTalks)
badass-bharat-deafmuslim-artista:
how can you not see ableism as a feminist issue
autistic girls, especially black autistic girls, are misdiagnosed and underdiagnosed because of the focus on white cis boys and how they present as autistic
disabled girls and women often have their consent violated, both in medical procedures and otherwise, our bodies and minds are often not considered are own and we are dismissed as not having the capacity to make our own decisions
on top of that many disabled girls are seen as delusional and their speaking out about the abuse they have face, by whatever communication method, is often seen as them making things up and over reacting
many disabled women are fetishised and seen as an outrageous ‘thing’ to fuck, but are not seen as human
disabled girls, especially physically disabled girls, do not live up to ideas of beauty in our society and often have extreme self esteem issues
disabled women and girls face more shit than you could ever know and I need you to understand
Ableism. Is. A. Feminist. Issue.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Deaf people, especially deaf women, are seen as “hysterical” when communicating in sign language if they are upset or angry. Some deaf people cannot hear their own voices, so they might make sounds with their throats while communicating in sign language and some hearing people think that the said deaf people are “crazy.”
Deaf people of color–especially deaf black people (and deaf black women)–have been assaulted or even killed for communicating in sign language because some idiots thought they were flashing “gang signs.”
Many deaf girls and women also face high rates of domestic violence and abuse at the hands of others (deaf or hearing), and have no one to turn to, because there are little or NO accessibility services for deaf survivors of domestic violence.
Able-bodied and hearing feminists SHOULD support deaf girls and deaf women.
Thanks.
Okay, I’m going to sound like a broken record to my followers, but I feel like this is really important to reiterate because even a lot of disabled people don’t notice it. But even so, more disabled people figure this out than nondisabled people ever do, for whatever reason.
First for anyone who doesn’t know me, I face lots of different oppressions and I’m not trying to rank them by saying what I’m about to say. This is not about which oppression is worse than others or more unique than others or anything like that. It’s about a specific kind of relationship between different kinds of oppression.
Most people when they talk about many oppressions at once, they’re talking about something I’d call sideways relationships between oppressions: Talking about what happens when a single person faces multiple oppressions. So, they talk about the experiences of disabled women in sexist, ableist societies, and that’s all most people are going to describe when they say “Ableism is a feminist issue.”
But there’s another kind of relationship, one I’d call deep relationships or vertical relationships or embedded relationships or something else of that sort. This is where one kind of oppression is a part of another kind of oppression. Not because there are people who face both kinds of oppression at once. But because there are ideas central to one kind of oppression, that couldn’t exist without another kind of oppression.
An example that a lot of people understand pretty readily is the relationship between sexism and homophobia. Homophobia would look fundamentally different without sexism. There are aspects of homophobia – central aspects – that exist entirely because women are considered inferior to men. So sexism is embedded deeply within homophobia. They’re intertwined in a way that you can’t remove homophobia without also removing sexism.
All oppressions have horizontal relationships with each other, because there are always people who face every possible combination of oppressions at the same time. Not all oppressions have vertical/embedded/deep relationships with each other, because not all oppressions have central aspects of themselves that utterly depend on the existence of some other kind of oppression.
Every kind of oppression has a deep/embedded/vertical relationship with ableism. Every kind of oppression has ableism embedded deeply within at least some of its core traits. I don’t know why this is the case. But it’s absolutely the case. Meaning you literally can’t address any other kind of oppression without addressing ableism. Can’t. Not possible. Even oppression that is against nondisabled people always contains at least some ableist ideas at its core.
What does this mean with sexism?
It means that women are considered inferior to men based on both real and perceived differences in ability and body type. It means that women’s abilities are sometimes medicalized and pathologized in ways that pretty much exactly resemble the way disabled people’s abilities are sometimes medicalized and pathologized. That’s basically what the ableist aspects of sexism boil down to.
And in vertical relationships of this nature, people have a choice, and they usually seem to choose wrong unless they know what they’re doing. With sexism, that choice is that they can either dismantle the ableism that underlies the way women are considered inferior, pathologized, and medicalized based on body type and abilities. Or they can distance themselves from the entire idea of being disabled, hoping that will make everything go away. Most oppressed groups, faced with this choice, have a tendency to just distance themselves from disabled people. It’s far easier in the short run, and far worse for both women and disabled people in the long run. Especially because the distancing usually serves to reinforce the exact ableism that they’re trying to get away from.
So what sorts of ableist ideas are there about women?
The idea that women are physically weaker and therefore inferior.
The entire idea behind the concept of hysteria in every form it’s ever taken.
The idea that women aren’t as smart as men, and the idea of what that means about women’s worth.
The idea that women are highly emotional and therefore not reliable at understanding themselves or the world around them.
The idea that the male body is the default and the female body is a defective variant on it, and an afterthought.
The idea that men have all the abilities that lead them to be accomplished people who go down in history, and women don’t and that’s why we never hear about as many women’s accomplishments.
The way that ordinary women’s issues become medicalized and pathologized in ways that most men’s issues don’t.
I once heard an MRA refer to the women’s Olympics as the “Special Olympics” as.a way of making it sound like women aren’t the real athletes, and if that isn’t an example of a vertical relationship between ableism and sexism in a very specific context I don’t know what is..
And I’m sure there are tons more examples, those are just some of the obvious broad ones that come to mind the fastest. These are ways that you can’t get rid of sexism without also getting rid of ableism. Not because there are disabled women. These are aspects of sexism that are ableist and yet affect nondisabled women just as much. So you can’t get rid of the way sexism and ableism combine even by ignoring the existence of disabled women. Because you don’t just have a horizontal relationship between the two, you also have a vertical one. And vertical ones mean that one kind of oppression is embedded too deeply within another, too deeply intertwined, for it to be possible to separate them out without addressing both.
So that’s the other side, the one you won’t hear as often, as to why ableism is a feminist issue. And ableism is just as deeply embedded in every other kind of oppression. I don’t know why it’s done that so thoroughly in a way that most oppressions haven’t, but it has. Not all oppressions have vertical relationships with each other, but ableism has vertical relationships with everything else, sometimes one-way, sometimes both ways, but always there. And sexism is no exception.
This is why ableism is so important to anyone fighting any kind of oppression, and why I’m so weirded out that it often gets treated as either a minor form of oppression or as not really a form of oppression at all, by people who ought to know better. Like people who claim to be about fighting oppression are always trivializing ableism even though it’s the key to a deeper understanding of their own oppression and it’s necessary to fix it in order to fix any other kind of oppression because of those vertical relationships that exist. I don’t think I’ll ever get why this happens.
This White Feminist Loved Her Dreadlocks – Here's Why She Cut Them Off
Her dreadlocks felt empowering – so why get rid of them? Read how she learned about cultural appropriation the hard way, and you'll learn how to be a better ally and feminist.
This is how you ally, white feminism.
Oh yeah, and fuck you Allure Mag !
This White Feminist Loved Her Dreadlocks – Here’s Why She Cut Them Off
August 2, 2015 by Annah Anti-Palindrome
I felt the societal pressures of womanhood come on like a plague.
It seemed like one day I was building forts and catching lizards, and the next I was sucking in my gut, picking at my face, and navigating an inescapable shame about my body – a shame that I’ve now spent the last twenty years trying to shirk.
I remember being ten years old and grieving my girlhood – that short period of time when I was allowed to exist without a preoccupation of my physical appearance constantly looming in the front of my mind – a time when my self-esteem wasn’t rooted in whether or not I was pretty enough, skinny enough, busty enough, sexy enough.
Time passed and the more unattainable and oppressive heteronormative femininity felt, the more I grew to hate myself and everybody around me.
In my late teens, I finally gave up. I cobbled together an outfit with layers suitable for all types of weather and didn’t change out of it for an entire year.
I let my leg and armpit hair grow long, and I let the hair on my head spiral into a nest of cords, matts, and tangles (a hairdo I would later ignorantly and appropriatively refer to as dreadlocks).
I ran away from home – started hitchhiking all over the country, going to feminist music festivals, entrenching myself amidst the company of other (mostly white) grrrls who were shirking their feminine hygiene routines (shaving, bathing, hair combing, general beauty maintenance regimens of all types, really) in order to really “stick it to the patriarchy.” (It was a thing, okay?)
We idolized musicians like The Slits, Babes in Toyland, 7 Year Bitch, Ani Difranco, L7, and Switchblade Symphony – all feminists who wrote songs about smashing mainstream beauty standards – all bands featuring white women who wore their hair in dreadlocks at some point or another during their musical careers.
What It Was Like Being A White Girl with Dreadlocks
In navigating through a predominantly white, feminist punk subculture, I never gave a second thought to whether wearing my hair in dreadlocks was offensive — at least to any one other than to The Patriarchy.
Having dreadlocks was part of what allowed me to stop obsessing over my appearance.
As long as I had them, the pressure – well for me as a cis gender white woman – to achieve mainstream, heteronormative beauty standards was off the table.
I suppose I felt empowered by this form of rebellious self-exclusion (the alternative being forced exclusion because I simply failed at womanhood).
While I did run into the occasional asshole on the street who called me a “filthy dyke,” my whiteness led people to read me as “quirky” and “alternative”.
I wasn’t followed around by security guards every time I went into a store. I wasn’t hassled by the cops for hanging out with my friends on street corners. I wasn’t hauled off to jail on the presumption that I was a gang member just because of my nonconventional appearance.
To further my point, being a white grrrl with dreadlocks, as well as someone who wore clothing scrappily held together by safety pins, dental fIoss and band patches, I was still considered employable and trustworthy.
Without any regard to personal qualifications, even with an incarceration record and no college education, I was often given responsibilities that put me in positions of authority over my co-workers of color.
Despite my rebellious appearance, I enjoyed a level of tolerance from authority figures and society at large that can only be attributed to my whiteness.
Everything changed when I stopped traveling, started investing in local activist projects, and began building a broader, more multiracial community.
For the first time, my peers had lots of questions and critiques about my choice to wear dreadlocks.
The responses other activists had to my hair ranged from mild irritation to downright anger.
People were constantly making comments under their breath when they passed me about “cultural appropriation” – I had no idea what that meant.
Some friends eventually suggested some readings and resources that would help me understand.
I read them and learned more about the history and symbolism of dreadlocks in the US in context to black folk’s resistance movements against white supremacy. I learned that black folks in the US with dreadlocks are not seen as “quirky” or “alternative,” but as “dangerous” and “militant”.
I learned to identify the ways that white colonist mentalities show up in our contemporary, everyday lives.
I realized that I was participating in the shitty reality that, for centuries, white people have felt entitled to taking pretty much anything their hearts desire – entire continents, human bodies, land resources, and, yes, whatever cultural trappings of the communities they colonized that were thought to be intriguing at the time.
The Harmful Messages I Was Sending to the World as a White Woman with Dreadlocks
It finally became clear to me that by wearing my hair in dreadlocks as a white person, the nonverbal statements I was making to folks of color were:
“Look! I can reject all of mainstream society’s expectations of me and still be treated with more respect than you!”
“Your legacies of cultural resistance are so irrelevant that they’ve become nothing more than a fashion accessory to help me evade the expectations of white womanhood!”
“I don’t care that my presence illicitness discomfort and sometimes communicates what is seen as blatant disrespect!”
“I don’t care that my hairstyle symbolizes the kind of white entitlement that has resulted in centuries worth of global, colonial violence.”
Etcetera.
I’m pretty embarrassed to say so… but even after this new stage of awareness I stiiiiillllll had a super hard time letting them go.
Some examples of my last stitch arguments were:
1. “Lots of cultures throughout the ages have worn dreadlocks! I’m part Scandinavian! My ancestors were Vikings!”
To which my friends responded:
Yes, it’s true that dreadlocks are worn in all different cultures around the world, but the context for which they are worn in the US is explicitly rooted in black folks’ (Rastafarians specifically) symbolic resistance to white supremacy.
When white people in the US wear dreadlocks, the power of this symbolic resistance is reduced to an “exotic” fashion trend wherein the oppressor is able to “play,” temporarily, an “exotic other” without acknowledging or experiencing any of the daily discriminations black folks have to face.
2. “We live in an intercultural society. Black women wear white hairstyles, so what’s up with the double standard?”
To which my friends responded:
Black women are told that in order to appear “respectable” in US society, they need to invest an obscene amount of time and energy into making themselves “look more white.”
Due to this fucked-up societal pressure – and due to the institutional power that white people have in determining mainstream beauty standards – it’s not the same.
3. “Nobody can control me! I do what I want!”
To which my friends responded:
…and you know what? You’re white, so it makes complete sense that you’d feel that way.
4. “By wearing dreadlocks, I’m giving up my white privilege to stand in solidarity with POC.”
To which my friends responded:
You are an oppression tourist – a white girl who always has an escape route back to the open arms of white supremacy once she is through rebelling. You can cut them off anytime.
To pretend otherwise or assume yourself a martyr is misguided and offensive.
5. “But there’s a difference between ‘appreciation’ and ‘appropriation’ isn’t there?”
My friends referred me to articles like these, saying:
I’m trying to think of examples of things I respect and how I show that respect. I’m actually struggling to think of a time when I respected something, and decided the best way to show that respect was by taking it. You know how I show respect?
I listen.
I listen hard, I listen deeply, and I listen constantly. I listen to stories, I listen to histories, I listen to learn, and I listen to hear when I’ve misstepped. I listen so I can become a more complete human being.
6. “But that’s not what I mean! What about the purpose they serve me?”
To which my friends responded:
Whether or not you mean to be disrespectful, the statements you are communicating are out of your control. Certain cultural symbols will always have semiotic weight – you wouldn’t wear a swastika pendant just because you thought it was pretty.
The Haircut
I finally cut them off – and when I did, I felt (literally and figuratively) a dozen pounds lighter.
Though I am still pretty “alternative” looking, I’ve learned to stand up against systems of oppression by doing the actual footwork in my daily life. I no longer naively expect my physical appearance (on its own) to do that work for me.
Cutting off my dreadlocks was a form of accountability – an acknowledgment of the ways in which I’ve benefited (and continue to benefit) from legacies of extreme, racialized violence.
Cutting off my dreadlocks didn’t make me an instantly “good white person” or even a trustworthy ally, but it sure as hell dismantled some of the barriers that stood in the way of cultivating deep, meaningful relationships based on mutual respect, trust and solidarity.
As feminists, we do need to continue working hard to dismantle society’s oppressive messages about femininity, but we also need to be thinking about the intersections of race, class, and gender, the ways some of us benefit from the system in which we live, and how we can empower and liberate ourselves without contributing to the oppression of someone else.
People bad mouth women who fucked their way to the top but no one criticizes the men in positions of power who compromise their integrity by handing out favors for the fucking. No one condemns these men for abusing their positions of power to get laid.
People demonize women who fuck their way to the top, but no one mentions how it’s almost always women having to resort to using their bodies to get more power from men who wield it. No one talks about how it’s men with all the power in the entertainment industry and women at their mercy.
Everyone has something to say about women who fuck their way to the top, but no one has anything to say about the fact men are the ones with the keys to the top, and women have to scramble to get them.
What’s the difference here?
The first woman is a real human being. She controls her own body and has her own personality. She has control over her own actions and can make autonomous decisions in her life. She also has to directly deal with the people around her and the bigotry, stereotyping and harassment that she is exposed to. She is real, she has emotions, she has thoughts, and she has rights.
The second woman is fictional. She was created by other people who exert full control over her body, appearance and actions. Her sole purpose is to be literally bought and sold for the entertainment of an audience. She cannot make her own decisions, she cannot control her own body and she is not real. She is not responsible for her behavior or appearance: She is the product of the environment that she was created in.
The first woman, by virtue of being a human being who identifies with the feminist movement and acts in accordance to those beliefs, is therefore a feminist. She is actively participating in feminism and is choosing to dress herself in a manner of protest that best demonstrates that she alone controls her body, and that no others have a right to access her body without her consent. She is a multi-faceted person who has agency, and part of that agency includes the ability to look sexy while refusing to consent to her own dehumanization. Her actions are not only one small part of what makes her a person, but she is also participating within a cultural trend of protesting rape culture.
The second woman, because she is not autonomous and was designed by a series of outsiders, is sexist because she is the passive product of sexist content creators. She exists as an ornament. Her clothes were chosen as fan service so that she can be sexually available and gratifying at all times, most likely for straight male gamers. Her erotic appearance has little functional purpose other than to please an audience. And since she exists within an industry that is consistently criticized for ostracizing female participants and creating a large gap between the depictions of male and female characters, her appearance is simply one detail within a much larger array of sexist problems.
Get it?
I really don’t get how this is hard to understand?????
I suggest all females watch this.
*i suggest all humans watch this.
THIS SHOULD BE REQUIRED WATCHING FOR ALL HUMANS
I’m a 17 year old white guy living in middle class America. I’ve never exactly been a supporter of feminism because that kind of thing has never really affected me personally. I don’t notice it and I don’t care about it. But in nine minutes this video has made what is truly a serious problem extremely apparent. Those “why I need feminism” posts or those slut-shaming or rape culture campaigns never convince me of anything. But this video actually did I think.
tl;dr This video kicks ass, just watch it.
Amazing
This is the most amazing thing I’ve seen all year and every person should see this
PSA: THIS VIDEO IS VERY VERY IMPORTANT AND I HIGHLY RECOMMEND TAKING A MOMENT TO VIEW IT.
dil-howlters-uncreative-username:
WHY IS THIS SO HARD TO UNDERSTAND
So for all you feminists out their who think that all men should die, remember, you are not a feminist.
reblogging for the last comment
Yes
Legit question, I’m not trying to hate on feminists or anything. Why is it called feminist if they’re for equality?
That’s a very good question and thank you for asking so politely.
The word feminism was coined by Charles Fourier in 1837, a French philosopher who advocated for the emancipation of women because he believed society treated women as slaves. We weren’t allowed to vote, own anything, or work a real job. Women were ruled by their fathers/household patriarch until they married at which time they’d be under the rule of their husband. If a woman did not belong to male household she was shunned by society and had very little means to make money, most of them unsavory. You know the idiom “rule of thumb”? That comes from a running joke that started in the 1600s, and was still around in Fourier’s time, that said it was okay for a man to beat a woman with a stick as long as it wasn’t any thicker than his thumb.
The point of the word feminist, and the feminist movement, has never been to say that women are better than men. The point is that women and things associated with women have been given a lesser place in society and we want to bring those things up to a place of equality. The focus is on the feminine because that’s what’s being pushed down. However, focusing on the feminine does not mean we’re focusing only women. Men are belittled and called “less of a man” anytime they portray a trait that is associated with femininity. If women and the feminine were equal to men and masculinity then that wouldn’t happen. Feminism is about raising up things associated with females to have an equal place in society as the things associated with males. It’s called feminism, not equalism, because the focus is on raising up not tearing down. Equalism would suggest that male things need to come down to a lower level so that female things can meet it in the middle. That’s not the point. The point is to raise up the feminine so that it’s on the same playing field that the masculine is already on. We don’t want men to lower themselves, we just want them to make room for us.
We don’t want men to lower themselves, we just want them to make room for us.
Alan Rickman
ALAN RICKMAN EVERYBODY