if somebody identifies as something telling them that they are not something is kind of heartbreaking no matter how ridiculous it may sound to you
getting upset is a universal feeling, and when somebody goes “you can’t be that because it makes no sense to ME” people are bound to get upset especially if they truly identify with that.
i am not an otherkin - however i can empathize with them. imagine how you would feel if somebody said “your sexuality is not valid - just love a guy” or “your gender is not valid - you can’t change it if you were born with (insert genital)”. otherkin are often beaten down the same way, minus the support network.
just because YOU can’t understand how someone feels doesn’t mean they can’t feel that way.
it doesn’t matter if somebody’s black or white, tall or short, fat or skinny, mentally ill or able - if somebody identifies as something, don’t be a dick and at least respect them. how on earth are they hurting you?
I’m going to be honest: this reading made me feel literally sick to my stomach. I wanted to throw up. Which, whatever. As someone who has been in a relationship, and has talked to a lot of people who have been in sustained relationships, I am honestly repulsed by some of the comments of these young women. I don’t mean to say it as a judgement thing - what irritates me most is the culture that causes such sentiments, but I’ll get back to that. I also don’t mean it targetted against women; I would be just as angry at men who voice such opinions. Society giving men leave to be sexually promiscuous is completely ludicrous, and the biology they base it off of is severely flawed (I also hate most scientific arguments for things - if there’s a social bias available, I stay skeptical of the argument; science is much less telling than the 20th century has convinced us it is, and any real scientist should acknowledge that).
The arguments used by the women to justify cheating are so revealing of the privileged middle+ class view of love. Delaying adulthood? What a joke! The refusal to take responsibility in one’s life and DO SOMETHING is what is driving this world down the drain. Not that it was better before or after, but that doesn’t make it less of a major problem, and it’s easier now to do it. But that is not the central conversation. Basically, I agree with Alison: cheating is bad, period. I found it interesting that the writers mentioned her “strict conservative views on sexuality, positioned her outside of the collegiate culture of delayed adulthood” because honestly what does that mean? What conservative views? How do conservative views immediately connect to delayed adulthood? If anything, I would argue that her early marriage - which may have been influenced by conservative views on sex - and making that work, or trying to, is probably what puts her outside of the culture of delayed adulthood. Which, frankly, I don’t think is a bad thing.
Again, drawing back to my point earlier this term about “enacted age” and “comprehensive age” - I think these women sound very immature, and it makes sense because this is a sampling of class-privileged women and they have been able to afford to be selfish. Don’t get me wrong, people who are underprivileged can also be selfish, but less easily, and generally with different motivations (I don’t want to go in-depth about privilege/race/class, but I think a rough idea is hinted at in my discussion of Not Under My Roof). Most of them have not yet been through a string of divorces and not yet realized that “the perfect one” that “you won’t want to cheat on” doesn’t exist in a way that women who grow up in communities of fatherless households might. I’m completely generalizing, but that is the sort of statement I expect to hear from people who have not actually talked to couples about the struggle that marriage often is.
I don’t mean to be offensive or super critical - I’m just listening to P!nk and venting - this is just something that I care a lot about because, again, my own expectations about love really set me up for a lot of pain, and I honestly think society’s twisted standards does the same for our relationships. Let me explain.
Wilkins describes how the women interviewed unanimously agreed that they valued monogamy and shamed cheating. But they also saw a validity for cheating in certain circumstances, and half of them had cheated. I really agree with Wilkins conclusion, which was that:
“Women’s cheating occurs in a context of persistent gender inequality in heterosexual relationships, in which women are not expected to control relationship progression or to be direct about their relationship desires. College women’s cheating behavior, then, may be less an indication of collapsing distinctions between men and women’s sexuality than of continued inequity in dating relationships. Women cheat, in part, because they have less power to enter, leave, and negotiate satisfactory dating relationships, and because relationships and femininity continue to be coupled in public understandings. In the context of both relationship inequity and continued pressure on women to sustain relationships, infidelity becomes a strategic option for exiting unwanted relationships.”
Really, a wonderful summary analysis. And I think she’s really right: we have set up this desire for this perfect relationship, via romantic comedies and stories and then given girls no way to get there. Which is extraordinarily frustrating. Women are told we will be in a sexually fulfilling, emotionally rich relationship and that we’ll “know” when we’re in love and it’ll be happily ever after, but men are told that they are wired to just be after sex, and we’re all told that college is no place for a relationship and we’re too young. Many times relationships were described in the paper as “greedy” - which I wonder if it’s a term interviewees actually used, or was something just created by the writer…
Because honestly, the struggle doesn’t get better. It doesn’t get easier. Just because you have an established job down the line doesn’t mean that you’ll be willing to give it up or whatever. And yes, college is an extraordinarily busy time, and yes, people do change a lot, and there are many different opinions about it, but I honestly just wish we policed our scripts less. Yes, relationships CAN be “greedy”. And yes, honestly, being an adult and having responsibilities and taking them onis really scary and not a lot of fun, and yes, a lot of us don’t really get to have a lot of “fun” very often because of the fast pace of society, but it really is about the goals and intentionality with which we approach life, depending on our values. I think that sexual exploration should be able to happen within relationships, and that women should be able to exit relationships; I also think that both men and women should be held responsible to be faithful. As the women discuss, it can be extremely emotionally painful to your partner, and it is often emotionally motivated, but that doesn’t make it a good thing.
At Target this lady told her son he couldn’t have a Wonder Woman doll because “that’s for girls” and then bought her daughter the same one. It got me thinking about how often I see people bar young boys from appreciating girls/women as protagonists and heroes, and my own experience with it as a kid.
“When we deny women and girls representation, we put them in ever smaller boxes,” she wrote. “And when we limit their potential, we limit the potential of our culture as a whole. When we limit the contributions of half our society, we cut our potential in two.”
THERE’S THIS PERVASIVE NOTION THAT WHITE MALE IS THE, LIKE, THE BASIC MODEL HUMAN AND ANYTHING NOT WHITE MALE IS A VARIANT EDITION
She added, “If superheroes are meant to reflect the best of us, they should reflect the best of all of us, especially as that message can become confusing, and we can internalize the idea that heterosexual white males are the best of us.”
“Motivated by a strong desire to show that "average is beautiful,” Lamm has decided to make his designs come to life with a doll called “Lammily.”
Lamm decided to take matters into his own hands after being bombarded with questions about where to buy a Barbie of normal size. The entreprenuer is offering prototypes of his toy to the first people to donate to his CrowdtiltOpen campaign, but his plan is to eventually be able to distribute the doll widely online and in retail. The longer term vision also includes embracing diversity by creating dolls with different ethnic backgrounds and body types.
The trend towards heavier sexualization of girls’ toys may have finally reached a tipping point with consumers. There’s a clear demand for toys that are realistic and appropriate for young girls, and many parents, if they knew there was an option, would buy them.
We’re seeing incredible momentum in the toy industry, and its not unrealistic to think that soon the empowerment of girls won’t be something companies even have to think about anymore. It will be automatic. But until then, Lammily will most certainly do.“
T*RFS really call being trans a “cult”. All we have in common is gender issues and all of their blogs look the exact same. Not all of us agree on what gender is or how it’s developed but they all have the same 2 arguments. Not all of us experience gender the same but they all have the same exact stance on us.
every time i see radical feminism discourse i always see tras say that we “reduce women to their bodies” and i’ve never really understood that
what is so dirty about our biology? why is it so repulsive and bad to point out that females have female genitalia? none of us have ever said that women as people are just their bodies. what we are saying is that the word woman defines an adult human female and implying that to be a woman you need more than female anatomy is literally just sexism
I’m not sure what a TRA is, but I’m going to hope you asked this in good faith and answer in kind, and ask that if you genuinely want to talk, you return the favor, okay?
There’s no problem with talking about vulvas and their assorted parts. (Or, well, there shouldn’t be, they’re just parts.) The problem is that saying “biologically female” relies on a really, REALLY superficial understanding of biology. Here, I’ll give you just three examples that throw the whole concept out of the water:
1) Androgen insensitivity syndrome: a condition where you have XY chromosomes, but your body just kinda…fails to recognize that. You have a vulva, you grow breasts, but you have no ovaries or uterus. Without genetic testing, there’s literally no way to know you don’t match the TERF definition of female until you’re well into the throes of puberty and yet somehow not having a period. I think we can both agree it would be incredibly cruel to look at a fifteen-year-old who spent her entire life as a cis girl and say “you have XY chromosomes so you’re biologically male, sir.”
2) Swyer syndrome does much the same thing as androgen insensitivity disorder, with one vital difference: women who have it do have uteruses, and can become pregnant via an egg donor. Like AID, Swyer syndrome results in a cisgender woman with XY chromosomes.
3) intersex individuals. Up to 1.7% of all individuals worldwide are intersex, which doesn’t sound like a big number until you realize 1.7% of the current world population is 1.35 million people…and the population of trans people is approximately 0.7%. The fact that intersex individuals can exist, rather than just being absorbed in utero, is pretty astonishing.
You can say “these are outliers.” Technically, you’d be right. But when you say “outlier, outlier, outlier, outlier,” eventually you’ve created a group of one. It becomes so hyper-specific as to be useless. Who is helped by such a group?
I’d also posit that suggesting you must have a specific set of genitals to be female is sexist, and not just because of trans people. There are A LOT of cisgender women out there with no ovaries, no uteruses, no breasts—either due to surgery or because they just didn’t grow. Women who were subject to FGM have never experienced life with a clitoris or fully-functional vagina, but they’re still women. I have a friend who has two vaginas! She didn’t discover this until she was in her early 30s and went to put in a tampon one day and went “….what the fuck is THIS?” Went to her doctor who was like “yeah, that happens sometimes.” (I wish I could share her dramatic reenactment here, because the story really isn’t complete without a thick Tennessee accent and all the appropriate pauses. I’m afraid you’ll have to imagine it for yourself, but it was hilarious.) Bodies are weird, and whether or not yours grew in one specific way shouldn’t define who you are.
So: the problem isn’t with celebrating bodies that have vaginas. It’s with the idea that there is One Right Way For A Body To Grow And Present, and that this One Right Way defines one’s gender.
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