I love Kate Beaton.
This is too perfect.
Women invented all the core technologies that made civilization possible. This isn’t some feminist myth; it’s what modern anthropologists believe. Women are thought to have invented pottery, basketmaking, weaving, textiles, horticulture, and agriculture. That’s right: without women’s inventions, we wouldn’t be able to carry things or store things or tie things up or go fishing or hunt with nets or haft a blade or wear clothes or grow our food or live in permanent settlements. Suck on that.
Women have continued to be involved in the creation and advancement of civilization throughout history, whether you know it or not. Pick anything—a technology, a science, an art form, a school of thought—and start digging into the background. You’ll find women there, I guarantee, making critical contributions and often inventing the damn shit in the first place.
Women have made those contributions in spite of astonishing hurdles. Hurdles like not being allowed to go to school. Hurdles like not being allowed to work in an office with men, or join a professional society, or walk on the street, or own property. Example: look up Lise Meitner some time. When she was born in 1878 it was illegal in Austria for girls to attend school past the age of 13. Once the laws finally eased up and she could go to university, she wasn’t allowed to study with the men. Then she got a research post but wasn’t allowed to use the lab on account of girl cooties. Her whole life was like this, but she still managed to discover nuclear fucking fission. Then the Nobel committee gave the prize to her junior male colleague and ignored her existence completely.
Men in all patriarchal civilizations, including ours, have worked to downplay or deny women’s creative contributions. That’s because patriarchy is founded on the belief that women are breeding stock and men are the only people who can think. The easiest way for men to erase women’s contributions is to simply ignore that they happened. Because when you ignore something, it gets forgotten. People in the next generation don’t hear about it, and so they grow up thinking that no women have ever done anything. And then when women in their generation do stuff, they think “it’s a fluke, never happened before in the history of the world, ignore it.” And so they ignore it, and it gets forgotten. And on and on and on. The New York Times article is a perfect illustration of this principle in action.
Finally, and this is important: even those women who weren’t inventors and intellectuals, even those women who really did spend all their lives doing stereotypical “women’s work”—they also built this world. The mundane labor of life is what makes everything else possible. Before you can have scientists and engineers and artists, you have to have a whole bunch of people (and it’s usually women) to hold down the basics: to grow and harvest and cook the food, to provide clothes and shelter, to fetch the firewood and the water, to nurture and nurse, to tend and teach. Every single scrap of civilized inventing and dreaming and thinking rides on top of that foundation. Never forget that.
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from a post by Reclusive Leftist on women’s erasure in history. her comments relate specifically to an article by the NYT thanking “the men” who invented modern technology, but pick absolutely any academic field of study, and women’s contributions are minimized, if not outright ignored. literature has been a huge part of my life for a long time, and i grew up reading the classics—which, of course, are typically books written by white men, depicting their experiences. i was taught that the first “modern novel” was Don Quixote, written in the early 1600s by a guy (Cervantes). i don’t think i know of a word to accurately describe my mixture of outrage, shock, and pride, when i discovered later that actually, the first modern novel was written 600 years earlier—by a woman! (it’s The Tale of Genji, written by a Japanese lady-in-waiting who was known as Murasaki Shikibu.) this might not seem important, but if you’re a woman you know just how vital this knowledge is. even now, when women are being told that we can do anything we set our minds to, the historical, literary, and scientific figures we learn about are all men. it’s a much more insidious way to discourage women from aiming high—because what’s the point in putting in so much hard work if it’s not even going to be remembered after you’re dead? (via sendforbromina) |
This is an image of a MLRA (male lion’s rights activist) being oppressed by feminist lionesses. He was simply making a joke about them getting back in the den and caring for the cubs, but feminist lionesses have no sense of humor and bullied this poor Mufasa looking motherfucker. Tragically beautiful.
Daniel Tosh perpetuates rape culture and his response to that “heckler” was to silence her, which is what happens when women speak up and demand to be treated as humans with feelings who do not want to be treated as jokes and do not want to have the most humiliating violation of their bodies to be punchlines. As long as Tosh is on the air, men will continue to see nothing wrong with rape and rape culture—and the women who speak out against it are “bitches” and “ignorant sluts”.
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—Kathleen Quinlan, Take Daniel Tosh Off the Air (via limegl0wstix) I think there’s something to be said here, that would benefit from everyone getting an understanding of what this Jezebel article calls ‘Hipster Racism’:
Now, the example joke here is not even in the same realm of wrong, but THIS PERTAINS DIRECTLY TO JOKES ABOUT RAPE. Not just if they’re made in the presence of a woman (men, we know, are at risk too!), and no, there is no way jokes about rape can be non-threatening, in any context. It’s one thing to joke about things that make us feel uncomfortable in order to distance ourselves but holy fucking balls do we have to keep an eye on that shit because before you know it, it’s spinning out into lazy, pathetic, shithead comedians using it to “shut up a heckler.” Uh-uh. If you’ve got no other way to shut a heckler down than perpetuating a rape culture by suggesting that the men around her rape her, you’ve got bigger problems than looking like a complete asshole. Do I need to spell it out? This is hurting everyone. Dan, buddy, you just made out the men sitting around her as potential rapists — something that all of us women already think about. A lot. And I’m not trying to suggest that women are the only potential people to be hurt by rapists who can only be men. But this is the main thread of this whole rape culture thing we keep raging about. Those men around the woman in the audience were being just as insulted and degraded as she was! So, shit, if you want to whine about us being ‘bitches’ and ‘ignorant sluts’ then consider that maybe this affects you too. I would suggest that the next time you’re in the presence of a rape joke, whatever gender you identify with, you ask the other person if they are hoping that you regard them as a rapist. If they’re hoping you regard everyone around you as a rapist and what they’re actually trying to accomplish by making that easy, boring, joke. And then just, I don’t know. Stop talking to the asshole after that. Ugh. |
Women owning their sexual pleasure veers dangerously close to women wanting to own their bodies. And we can’t have that! The more sexual agency you possess, the less of an object you become. That’s threatening to a lot of people.
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On Slut Shaming (via fuckititsfriday) I want to tattoo this on the inside of people’s eyelids. (via datassguardian) |
#cool chicks #girls #women #tv #feminism #female problems #funny #truth
laughing
This seems like a good opportunity for me to vent about the way the TV show has handled female characters. I hate that it seems like the show wanted us to nod along with Arya here because N O P E.
I have no idea if that was the writers intention, but it felt like the show wanted use to agree with Arya because I mean, look at how they changed Jeyne to Talisa. Jeyne is a sweet and pretty standard noble woman. Talisa isn’t like those ~other noble women. She’s ~different. Those other noble women are silly. But Talisa is better than them!
And then look at how mishandled Cat’s character was and how Sansa was sidelined (and when she was on screen, it was all about her being a victim.)
It really does feel like the show believes that ‘most girls’ are idiots, and only the ones who don’t conform to gender norms are worth our time.
NO TY, SHOW.
yes yes YES YES
I will never forgive season two for what it did to MOST female characters.Let’s remember another GIGANTIC mis-handling: Asha/Yara calling Theon “a cunt”. While on the text:
Cunt again? It was odd how men like Suggs used that word to demean women when it was the only part of a woman they valued.
And if a woman should say she doesn’t want to have children at all, the world is apt to go decidedly peculiar: ‘Ooooh, don’t speak too soon,’ it will say — as if knowing whether or not you’re the kind of person who desires to make a whole other human being in your guts, out of sex and food, then have the rest of your life revolve around its welfare, is a breezy, ‘Hey - whevs’ decision. Like electing to have a picnic on an unexpectedly sunny day or changing the background picture on your desktop. ‘When you meet the right man, you’ll change your mind, dear,’ the world will say, with an odd, aggressive smugness.
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| — | Caitlin Moran, “How to Be a Woman” (via Buffy Plays With Demons) |
“It’s Like Only Ugly Girls Want Me Or Something.”
So my best friend said something to me the other day that made me chuckle buuuut also be a little skeptical. It took me some serious mulling to get to a point where I’m now able to articulate what happened to make me refect his statement, and call him a jerk. Well, let’s be honest, I called him a dick. I know, I could’ve handled it better. I’m but only human.
“It’s Like Only Ugly Girls Want Me Or Something.”
Now, let’s visit his explanation. Obviously I’m paraphrasing and this is some weird double heresy deal but bare with me (rrrargh, mm homonyms) and we’ll get through this business sometime before next Halloween. I think I’m going as the Second Amendment, by the way.
After an exciting lunch at Panera, (that turkey-avocado-blt was delish!) the conversation turns to what he’s been up to and that he went bar hopping with some acquaintances, yay! He displayed his manly prowess when reverse hustling a friend at darts (my friend, a linguistic genius) and then garnered the attention of a girl. YES! Wait, wait, wait, let’s not get ahead of ourselves, here. Guys, the girl was (insert dramatic music) UGLY.
Gasp. Shock. I know, this story is already tragic. I’ve scheduled Friend for counseling and we’ve made a pact to make sure all the Uggos stay away from him. Apparently, according to him, ignoring them doesn’t work. In fact, he’s pretty sure it only makes it worse! What a surprise.
After calling him a dick and laughing, he asked why he was a dick. I responded that I felt so terrible for him for receiving <em>attention</em> from a girl. He countered by painting her as a crazy, aggressive drunk. Now— I trust my best friend but I know him very well and he’s not…the most truthful or the most critical thinker ever. So I’m left asserting my judgment of him as a dick and calling out his first world problem of women finding him attractive enough to flirt with and enough so that she did it assertively. Again, like I said. Could’ve handled it better.
His claim was that she “wouldn’t leave him alone all night” and then “was yelling her phone number” to him out of a car. Y’know the kind of crazy, spontaneous behavior romantic comedies make seem so romantic? Yeah, not so romantic when applied to someone you barely know, I guess. Oh, and also when you’re ugly.
So, not only was she ugly, but assertive and unashamed of her attraction to him. Now, given the situation it might have just been a removal of inhibition given her inebriated state, or the possibility that she is simply a loud and assertive woman who does not meet his standards of physical attractiveness.
Which is my problem. He didn’t introduce the story by calling her too assertive or obnoxious (which is a can of worms I’ll get into later) but that she was ugly. How did he first judge her? Ugly. What was the main problem? She’s ugly. So, simply put before everything else — no judgment on her intelligence or drive, she was shut down for being an Uggo. Are there other factors at play here? Probably. But this is what stuck out like a sore thumb and bugged me — it was his first and main argument. And only when I questioned that argument, did these stories of her being unlikable come out.
Am I being unfair? Maybe a little. He’s been as groomed by society as the rest of us, not to mention y’know, the barhopping. After the conversation ended, a new one began: that he strives to be a dick because that’s what “woman want.”
Sigh.
Everyone is trying to save the Muslim woman; Western society must save her from Islam and Islamic society must save her from Western influence. No one – NO ONE – assumes that the Muslim woman can make up her own mind about what is best for her.
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| — | Nadia El Awady (via hangama) |
