“teach her to reject likeability. her job is not to make herself likeable, her job is to be her full self, a self that is honest and aware of the equal humanity of other people.”
— dear ijeawele, or a feminist manifesto in fifteen suggestions by chimamanda ngozi adichie.
Why is it that little girls who are told to stop crying turn into women who scream silently, and boys who are told crying is for girls, grow into men who seek to hear a silent scream?
nothing’s funnier to me than that one time i was talking to this guy who was trying to convince me that being a feminist was bad because… feminism doesn’t help people, it only makes assholes have a reason to be assholes…
So recently I’ve been trying to find some female role models as I’ve been playing bass a few years now and I realised that most of my bass role models are male and I could do with some more badass women to look up to.
Anyways I go on YouTube and decide to watch Tai Wilkenfeld cause she’s an absolutely amazing bass player. However I quickly realised the ENTIRE comment section was full of thirsty straight men objectifying and sexualizing her; completely ignoring her talent.
Here are some examples:
After checking out a bunch of other female bass players I found that the comment section was exactly the same: full of horny men who choose to use their ‘masculine urges’ as an excuse to make comments about their bodies.
Why are women especially female musicians always fucking sexualized and only recognised for the way they look rather than their talent and hard work? It really pisses me off as a musician because I feel like I won’t be taken seriously in the music industry just because of my gender. I also feel that misogynists in the music industry will focus more on what I look like rather than how hard I work and the skills I have.
Please feel free to message me or leave a comment of your own experiences or things you’ve noticed. Or even if you’re a musician and you wanna talk about music or something. I wanna know if other people feel the same way or if I’m just overreacting.
I am a straight, white, cis, male, or in other words a bug of a person. Please tell me how I oppress my sister, my mother, my best friend, my teacher, my aunt, etc, personally.. Please tell me. I dare you
Do you want me to start with the implied threat in your statement, the way you appear to have created an anonymous blog for the sole purpose of insulting and criticizing blogs that argue for equality, the way you asked a total stranger to provide you with specific personal examples because you want to shut me down rather than engage in an actual dialogue, or the fact that you already consider yourself to be a blight on humanity without my assistance based on your username?
Or the fact that he used all the women he knows as leverage in this conversation as if knowing 50% of the population is so difficult and as if he chose to have a mother, sister, aunt, and teacher. As if by having those people in your life we automatically know for certain that you don’t treat them like crap.
Or how he immediately made this post about himself when he isn’t a poc or a woman so this wasn’t addressed to him, but I guess he just clicked the first post he saw on your blog because any blog with feminism in the name is one he wants to harass regardless of the kind of feminism it is.
Like… dude, we don’t know you, we can’t really tell you how you oppress them besides by willfully ignoring the fact that they are systemically oppressed by forces other than you, by the government and media and a lot of men that you aren’t, but we can certainly tell you that there are plenty of people that have daughters and sisters and mothers, men in fact, that rape them, abuse them, murder them, that’s an indisputable fact regardless of your beliefs on feminism. So no, you don’t get to treat this like just because you have a woman in your life you’re immune to the accusations of sexism. Unless you’ve lived in a strict commune in Antarctica, you’ve men some women. All sexists have met women. How else did they oppress them?
First, it’s people/person of color, not “colored.” That’s an outdated and offensive term, which you probably at least suspected since you put it in quotes, but went ahead and used it anyway. So if you’re hoping to have people distrust you for your actions instead of your identity, you’re off to a solid start. If you’re genuinely unsure what a group of people prefers to be called, google it, or ask one of them politely.
If you get upset by oppression and want to be a part of changing it, here is my suggestion. Every time you see someone complaining about cis straight white people and it bugs you, go do something to prove it wrong. Donate what you can to the ACLU, or Planned Parenthood, or any of the other myriad of organizations working against oppressive power structures. Call your government representatives and tell them a cause you want them to consider important. If you’re in the US, volunteer to help get people registered to vote, or make calls/door-to-door visits to talk to people about voting in the mid-terms, or supporting candidates that are advocating for change. Read an informative article and share it on social media, or with conservative family members. Read a book by someone in the LGBTQIA+ community. Watch a show with diverse representation and a showrunner of color. See if there’s anything you can do at your place of work to make it more accessible. Something.
If every time you felt that all straight white people were getting a bad rap they didn’t *all* deserve you did something productive to prove it wrong, not only would you be bettering yourself and society, but you’d be helping to change the perception. When instead you rant reply to someone’s post - which initially was *JUST* a post about considering it reasonable to hold everyone accountable for working to educate themselves about the plights of others and helping to lessen them - about how unfair it all is that strangers aren’t giving you credit for work they don’t know you’re doing, not only do you not come across as an ally, but you waste everyone’s time.
I am white, and I am a feminist. I don’t get upset or defensive when I see people complaining about White Feminists, because I know there is a specific type of person that they’re complaining about, and I know that I put active work every day into not being that person. I don’t need someone to pat me on the back or acknowledge it. I love reading complaints about White Feminists, because sometimes they teach me about things I don’t know and show me behaviors I don’t want to adopt, ways to keep myself from becoming the kind of person being complained about. No stranger is complaining about me personally. But if they *are*? I want to listen, and learn to do better.
Trust isn’t something you just get from people the second you meet them. Trust is something you earn over time, repeatedly, through consistent actions. Honestly? Some people might never trust you, and it may or may not have anything to do with you. Ultimately it doesn’t matter. Fighting oppression isn’t something you should do because you want to be given a gold star for your ability to be a decent human being. It’s something you should do because it needs to be done.
I am a straight, white, cis, male, or in other words a bug of a person. Please tell me how I oppress my sister, my mother, my best friend, my teacher, my aunt, etc, personally.. Please tell me. I dare you
Do you want me to start with the implied threat in your statement, the way you appear to have created an anonymous blog for the sole purpose of insulting and criticizing blogs that argue for equality, the way you asked a total stranger to provide you with specific personal examples because you want to shut me down rather than engage in an actual dialogue, or the fact that you already consider yourself to be a blight on humanity without my assistance based on your username?
Or the fact that he used all the women he knows as leverage in this conversation as if knowing 50% of the population is so difficult and as if he chose to have a mother, sister, aunt, and teacher. As if by having those people in your life we automatically know for certain that you don’t treat them like crap.
Or how he immediately made this post about himself when he isn’t a poc or a woman so this wasn’t addressed to him, but I guess he just clicked the first post he saw on your blog because any blog with feminism in the name is one he wants to harass regardless of the kind of feminism it is.
Like… dude, we don’t know you, we can’t really tell you how you oppress them besides by willfully ignoring the fact that they are systemically oppressed by forces other than you, by the government and media and a lot of men that you aren’t, but we can certainly tell you that there are plenty of people that have daughters and sisters and mothers, men in fact, that rape them, abuse them, murder them, that’s an indisputable fact regardless of your beliefs on feminism. So no, you don’t get to treat this like just because you have a woman in your life you’re immune to the accusations of sexism. Unless you’ve lived in a strict commune in Antarctica, you’ve men some women. All sexists have met women. How else did they oppress them?
This post is going to be a mess, because I’m just …untidily angry right now. It began with a series of tweets I made today about my ever-broken Datsun. The mechanic had told my husband that he was “working on that Datsun just as fast as I can because now that I’ve met her I can’t wait to get that little girl behind the wheel again.“
Little girl.
As I tweeted that I was 33 and had earned each of those years and thus preferred to be referred to as “Danger Smog-Dragon” or “Rage-Mistress” or “Ephemeral Time Lady” or “Maggie Stiefvater, #1 NYT Bestselling Author of the Raven Cycle,” a well-meaning fellow replied that perhaps I should “use [my] words, politely but firmly, to his face…” He further observed that he’d told his wife that “you know, Honey, unless you’re willing to SAY THAT to (those people), NOTHING is going to change”.
(note:pleasedo not go search for this fellow on twitter to rage at him; this is not about him. He is set dressing, made more appropriate to the conversation at hand by the fact that he probably is a perfectly nice guy who really didn’t mean disrespect).
I told TwitterMan that I was tired of have to use my words.It’s been 33 years of using my words. Why is it my job to continuously ask to be treated equivalent to a male customer? Why is that when I arrive at a shop, I’m reminded that I have to push the clutch in if I want to start my own car? It’s 2015. Why is it still all sexism all the time?
I discovered that I was actually furious. I thought I was over being furious, but it turns out, the rage was merely dormant. I’m furious that it’s been over a decade and nothing has changed. I’m furious that sexism was everywhere in the world of college-Maggie and it remains thus, even if I out-learn, out-earn, out-drive, and out-perform my male counterparts. At the end of the day, I’m still “little girl.”
Possibly this is the point where some people are asking why this tiny gesture of all gestures should be the one to break me.
Here is the anatomy of my rage.
Step one: It is 1999 or 2000. I am 16. I go to college. A professor tells me I’m pretty. A married man in the bagpipe band I’m in tells me he just can’t control himself around me: he stays up nights thinking of my skin. Another man tells me he can’t believe that ‘a little bitch’ like me got into the competition group after a year of playing when he’s been at it for twenty years. After becoming friends with a professor’s daughter, I’m at her house sleeping on the couch, and I wake up to find the professor running his hand from my ankle bone to my thigh. I pretend I’m still asleep. I’m 17. “If something happened to my wife,” he tells me later, “I could be with you.” At my next visit to her house, I see the wife’s left a book on the kitchen table: how to rekindle your husband’s love.
Step two: It’s 2008. I finally buy the car of my dreams, a 1973 Camaro, and make it my official business vehicle. The first time I take it to put gas in it, a man tells me, “if I were your husband, I wouldn’t want you out driving my car.” I tell him, “if you were my husband, I’d be a widow.” The car requires a lot of gas. I get cat-called every other time I’m at a gas station. Once, I go into the gas station to get a drink, and when I come out, a bunch of guys have parked me in. They want, they say, to have a word with me, little lady. We play automotive chicken which I win because I would rather smash the back of my ’73 Camaro into their IROC than have to stab one of them with the knife on my keychain.
Step three: It’s 2011. I’m on tour in a European country, on my own, escorted only by my foreign publisher. I am at a business dinner, and say I’m going to my room. My female editor embraces me; my male publicist embraces me and then puts his tongue in my ear, covering it with his hand so that the crowd of twenty professionals does not see. My choices are to say nothing to avoid making a scene in front of my publisher’s people, or to say FUCK YOU. I apparently was never offered the choice of not having a tongue in my ear.
Step four: It’s 2012. I buy a race car. Well, a rally car. Someone asks my male co-driver if I’m good in bed. Someone asks me if I got sponsorship because someone was ‘trying to check the woman box.’ People ask me if I drive like a girl. Yeah, I do, actually. Let’s play a game called: who’s faster off the start?
Step five: It’s 2014. I’m driving my Camaro cross-country on book tour. It breaks down a lot. I’m under the hood and a pick up truck stops beside me. “Hey baby,” asks the driver, “do you need any help?” “Yeah,” I reply, “do you have a 5/8 wrench?” He did not.
Step six: It’s 2015. It’s sixteen years after I learned that I was a thing to be touched and kissed and hooted at unless I took it upon myself to say no, and no again, and no some more, and no no no. My friend Tessa Gratton points out that a male author used casually sexist language in a brief interview. She is dragged through the muck for pointing out how deeply-rooted our systemic sexism is. The publishing industry rises to the defense of the male author as if he has been deeply wronged. I tweet that the language was indeed sexist, though I didn’t think it was useful to condemn said male author. A male editor emails me privately to ask me if maybe I wasn’t being a little problematic by engaging in the discussion?
Step seven. Still 2015. Someone very close to me confesses that her college boyfriend keeps trying to push her past kissing, and she doesn’t want to. I tell her to set boundaries, and leave him if he doesn’t. A month passes. This week I find out she just had sex for the first time after he urged her to have several glasses of wine. She doesn’t drink. She was crying. She says, “I didn’t say no, though.”
It’s been sixteen damn years. I’m tired of having to say no. I’m tired of the media telling me that it’s mouth breathing bros and rednecks perpetuating the sexism. No: I can tell you that the most insidious form is the nice guy. Who isa nice guy, don’t get me wrong. I carry my own prejudices that I work through, and I don’t believe in demonizing people who aren’t perfect yet — none of us are. But the nice guy who says something sexist gets away with it. The nice guy who says something sexist sounds right and reasonable. The nice guy’s not helping, though. It’s been sixteen years, and the nice guys are nice, but we’re still things to be acquired. We are still creatures to be asked on dates. We are still saying no, still shouting NO, still having to always again and again say “no, please treat me with respect.”
I was just invited to a car show; the well-meaning guy who asked wanted me to bring my souped up Mitsubishi. I clicked on the event page. It’s catered by Hooters. I’m not going. Yeah, it’s a little thing, but I have a lifetime of them. I’m taking my toys and going home.
“I can’t wait to get that little girl behind the wheel again.“
At 11 o’clock at night, you moved across the train car to sit far too close to two girls about half your age so you could interrupt our conversation to tell us how pretty we are. We said thank you, have a good night, and went back to our conversation.
You interrupted us a second time to say that you didn’t want to bother us, but we needed to hear it, how pretty we are. We said cool, thanks, have a good night, and went back to our conversation.
You interrupted us a third time to say you wouldn’t say anything else, you didn’t want to bother us, you just had to let us know. We said have a good night, and went back to our conversation.
This seemed to perplex you. You came all that way across a train car to bestow upon us this life altering knowledge - the fact we were pretty - and all you got was a polite thank you? You grumbled about gratitude, about how you better not end up on facebook, were we putting you on facebook? Why was my friend looking at her phone? Was she putting you on facebook? All you’d done was tell us we were pretty.
At this point, my friend says, “Sir, we’re trying to have a conversation. Please don’t be disrespectful.”
This was when you got angry. Disrespectful? YOU? For taking the time out of your day to tell us we were pretty? Did we know we were pretty?
“Yes, we knew,” says my friend.
Well, that was the last straw. How dare we know we were pretty! Sure, you were allowed to tell us we were pretty, but we weren’t allowed to think it independently, without your permission! And if we had somehow already known - perhaps some other strange man had informed us earlier in the day - we certainly weren’t allowed to SAY it! Where did we get off, having confidence in ourselves? You wanted us to know we were pretty, sure, but only as a reward for good behavior. We were pretty when you gifted it upon us with your words, and not a moment before! You raged for a minute about how horrible we were for saying we thought we were pretty, how awful we turned out to be.
I took a page out of your book and interrupted you. “Sir, you said you wouldn’t say anything else, and then you kept talking,” I said. “You complimented us, we said thank you, and we don’t owe you anything else. It’s late, you’re a stranger, and I don’t want to talk to you. We’ve tried to disengage multiple times but you keep bothering us.”
At this point, our train pulled into the next stop. My friend suggested we leave, so we got up and went to the door.
Seeing your last chance, you lashed out with the killing blow. “I was wrong!” you shouted at us as we left, “You’re ugly! You’re both REALLY UGLY!”
Fortunately, since our worth as human beings is in no way dependent upon how physically attractive you find us, my friend and I were unharmed and continued on with our night. She walked home; I switched to the next train car and sat down.
So, strange man, I know you’re confused. I don’t know if you’ll think about anything I said to you, but I hope you do learn this: when you give someone something - a gift, a compliment, whatever - with stringent stipulations about how they respond to it, you are not giving anything. You are setting a trap. It is not as nice as you think it is.
But you’ll be happy to know that when I sat down in the next car, a strange man several seats over called, “Hey, pretty girl. Nice guitar. How was your concert?”
“Thanks. Good,” I said, then looked away and put on my headphones, the universal sign for ‘I’d like to be left alone.’
“Wow. Fine. Whatever. Fucking bitch,” he said.
Fucking creepers. May I ask how feminism or anything similar would actually have prevented this from happening? This ya already socially unacceptable.
Men - because to be clear, I called them ‘strange men’ because they were strangers to me, not because there was anything abnormal about them - act this way because they are raised in a culture that lets them believe their time and opinions are more important than the time and opinions of women, and that as a consequence, they are owed women’s attention. They are socialized to believe women should be grateful to them for their attention, and that they are being denied something rightfully theirs when women are not.
Raising someone with feminism, the idea that all sexes/genders are equals and thus no party is beholden to or more important than another, would have prevented this by not allowing men to grow up expecting ‘rights’ that are not actually theirs. You say this is socially unacceptable, but there were 20+ people on that train who actively watched us being harassed and did not say a word. It is socially unacceptable, but this kind of thing happens to me and many other women multiple times a week, with often more traumatic results.
So, yes, I believe more feminism would prevent sexist moments like this. Also, water is wet, the atmosphere is 78% nitrogen, and cheese is addictive.
This was not sexist, this was an awkward man, possibly trying to get a positive reaction versus a neutral or negative one that was displayed, based off of the context you showed. Awful that he interrupted your conversation, and wanted to be engaging socially, whatever his reasons that motivated him. Generalizations of a certain biological sex does not help society as a whole, and the ideal of feminism does not help. The people who “actively watched” you be verbally harassed possibly believed you were perfectly capable in handle yourselves. You’d probably be more upset if there was another man that told the strange man to back off, due to him possibly being “chivalrous”. I find the whole event to be amusing for the awkwardness of the conversation and would only had stepped in had he’d been physical. I really don’t see how this event was “sexist”, and only say that you’re really reaching.
Well I wouldn’t see any part of this amusing, more times then I can count on my hands I’ve been"complemented" and met with really awful responses when I don’t praise someone endlessly… Yes some guys are awkward which is unfortunately bundled up it these kind of interaction. But the problem is when people are instantly hostile when you don’t drop everything and pretend it’s the first time someone’s every noticed you let alone called you pretty! Imagine it’s so women saying this to a guy, if she reacted the same way she’d get called out on being a bitch or what have you… I’m in a shit mood some my writing is terrible but here are two examples;
At the shops waiting for people doing my own thing and someone calls me pretty. I’m preoccupied but I look up and say oh thank you and go back to what I was doing only to have them mutter that they did me a favour and it’d pay to not be so emo. Like sorry I’m on the phone and didn’t drop everything… Perhaps I could say “I was at fault for not engaging in further conversation”
And more recently on a train had a dude compliment my bow to which I replied the same way “oh thanks” and he wished me a good day as I did to him. That was it. Same response from me but boy it’s nice to not feel like I’m a bad person for not saying how amazing and nice they are for complementing me??
Ugh I doubt any of this makes sense or helps but I really can’t look at the situations I’ve been put into and find them funny…..
Thanks for the response and the perspective, and yes they are two different incidents that happened. I find that these compliment baiters to be funny, because they just want attention too, but aren’t observant of the environment they’re in. The situation is uncomfortable, sure, especially when they resort to negative attention seeking behaviors, but for her to contort it to a sexist deposition is something that I’m confused about and don’t agree with at all. These people were probably not taught the art of communication and observation. They don’t need feminism for that. They need to experience a social life.
i find perspectives like this interesting because it lies outside both the sexism sphere and also the victim-blaming sphere. i would say that OP’s post is classified as a sexistthing because i cannot imagine a scenario where a guy would pass another guy on the street saying “hey man, cool hairstyle,” and the other guy responding with a simple “thanks dude,” and then suddenly chased for a follow-up, and then getting a “fine, don’t talk to me then, fucking faggot!” as a response for ignoring the other person.
so why does this happen to women– not just once or twice in a lifetime, but multiple times? i mean, there are nearly 80,000 reblogs with women sharing, on average, 5+ examples of this happening to them and that’s just rattling off the top of their head!
doesn’t that say a little something about the power dynamic between men and women?
i am extremely interested to hear differing view points about this.
Is it possible that this man didn’t know how to interact with women in a non-awkward manner? Absolutely.
Did that make it our responsibility to accommodate him? Absolutely not.
You can control your own actions, but you cannot control others’ reactions to you. I can’t stop this man from trying to talk to us, but I can choose how I respond. He can choose to interact with us, but he can’t force us to be interested. Expectations of people’s reactions not aligning with their actual reactions is often the case in these situations, and is in part a thing that feminism works to dismantle: we’re raised in subtle and insidious ways to think women owe something to men, and men not receiving it gives them a right to lash out, and feminism seeks to level that playing field.
And possibly, if you removed all context from this interaction, you could say it was something other than sexism. But the thing is youcan’t remove the context, because this was an older man harassing two younger women, and removing that context changes the situation so deeply it’s not even worth discussing. Like mentioned above, this is a situation that happens to women on a regular basis, in a way that it does not happen to men on a regular basis, because of sexism. And the way that it’s being regularly responded to here - no matter what I say, no matter how many women chime in how regularly it happens to them, it’s dismissed by people who were not present as incorrect or overreacting or misrepresenting - is pretty sexist, too. Not because of the gender identities of the people dismissing it, but because we’re raised to think comments made by women are more likely to be rooted in emotion than reason and are less believable.
I’m failing to see in any way how this is not sexism at work, when:
a. an awkward woman who compliments a man who then responds, “cool, thanks” would not proceed to badger him for more interaction and then get angry and insult him when he refuses to interact
b. an awkward man who compliments a man who then responds, “cool, thanks” would not proceed to badger him for more interaction and then get angry and insult him when he refuses to interact
c. an awkward woman who compliments a woman who then responds, “cool, thanks” would not proceed to badger her for more interaction and then get angry and insult her when she refuses to interact
The only combination here that produces the OP’s story is a man imposing on a woman (or more than one woman), so how could it possibly not be about gender? People who are awkward don’t go from complimenting someone to insulting someone and swearing at them when they don’t get a response; only people who feel entitled to attention do that.
If I see anyone on my dash seeing this sort of clearly hostile, abusive, harassing, and yes, extremely gender-oriented behavior and trying to frame it in terms of not knowing how to act, I will assume you sympathize with this guy. Lack of social skills? No, he’s an abuser. Awkward? No, he’s an abuser. Trying to engage socially? Yeah, and, he’s doing it abusively. Needs to experience a social life? No, he needs to stop being a shithead.
I see you trying to frame this shit as some poor sad sack not knowing any better, I’ll assume you have acted this way in the past and may still act this way again. It may not be an entirely accurate assumption, but? If this is your idea of what awkwardness looks like, you’re not a safe person to be around.
Oh, and also, if another man in the OP’s situation had interceded and told the abuser to take a seat—and then just let the girls get on with their day, NOT used the occasion as an opportunity to chat them up!—that would have been very decent of him.
I am a straight, white, cis, male, or in other words a bug of a person. Please tell me how I oppress my sister, my mother, my best friend, my teacher, my aunt, etc, personally.. Please tell me. I dare you
Do you want me to start with the implied threat in your statement, the way you appear to have created an anonymous blog for the sole purpose of insulting and criticizing blogs that argue for equality, the way you asked a total stranger to provide you with specific personal examples because you want to shut me down rather than engage in an actual dialogue, or the fact that you already consider yourself to be a blight on humanity without my assistance based on your username?
Yes, I do, please start with how threatening my statement is. Secondly, I haven’t created this for the sole purpose of spreading negativity, I’ve made this as a satire blog making fun of people and groups of people that I find ridiculous (furries, feminists, SJW’s, etc). My friends and I (my other friends have similar tumblr’s to mine) where we laugh at what we can find on Tumblr. I asked a total stranger about specific examples of me oppressing people because you make the claim that ALL men oppress women, so i just assumed you knew ALL men and the ways they oppress women, so I decided to ask you, and not shockingly you didn’t know. Lastly, my user name is just to poke fun at Leafy Is Here, a popular you tuber who calls things he doesn’t like The “Cancer’ of the internet.
Woof, here we go.
Please start with how threatening my statement is.
Dare, verb, to challenge someone to take part in an activity that is risky or dangerous. Implied because you didn’t say what you’d do if I didn’t rise to your challenge, you left it up to the imagination.
I haven’t created this for the sole purpose of spreading negativity, I’ve made this as a satire blog making fun of people
What is making fun of people if not spreading negativity? Making fun or bullying is legitimately the act of being negative toward people or attempting to bring them down. If the only way you know how to have fun is at the expense of others, I suggest getting help. I’m not even touching your tenuous at best idea of what satire means.
because you make the claim that ALL men oppress women
Whether or not it’s active, whether or not you like it or it makes you uncomfortable, we live in a society that is structured for cis white men to have it easier than people of color, and cis white women to have it easier than women of color. Do I think all men are actively being awful all the time? Of course not. But I also don’t think they’re actively trying to be good. Oppression isn’t something that you personally caused, since it’s been in place long before you were born, but it is something that you can actively do something about. You can learn about gender/race/etc issues, you can support causes that fight for these issues, or you can do small things like try to not use actively offensive terms, or just listen when someone different from you talks about their experience instead of talking over them or making fun of them.
I don’t really have hope that you will take these words to heart, since that’s rarely how arguments on the internet work. But there’s always the chance that someone else coming across this might, and that’s worth it.
Tfw you use a Scully GIF but as the more rational of the pair she wouldn’t follow your bullshit corruption of feminism.
I’ve been mulling over this message for a bit since there are so many problematic aspects of it and I can’t decide which is the most upsetting:
- that someone thinks a fifteen year old girl deserved to be murdered for being female, Jewish, or both. - that someone thinks a strange woman on the internet deserves to be murdered for voicing opinions on feminism. - that someone created a tumblr blog for the sole purpose of sending vitriolic message(s?) to strangers. - that someone felt strongly enough to voice this hate, but not strongly enough to be held accountable for it. - that someone might not actually feel this way, but thinks it’s a funny joke or an effective way to shut down people they don’t like. - that someone thinks this is an acceptable way to behave because they’ve seen it happen repeatedly all over the internet and don’t think there are any consequences. - that someone equated themselves with Ahab, often considered a devil-worshipping man on a doomed quest to destroy greatness out of spite and impotent rage, and probably was not considering it ironically. - that someone thinks captain is spelled captian.
At 11 o’clock at night, you moved across the train car to sit far too close to two girls about half your age so you could interrupt our conversation to tell us how pretty we are. We said thank you, have a good night, and went back to our conversation.
You interrupted us a second time to say that you didn’t want to bother us, but we needed to hear it, how pretty we are. We said cool, thanks, have a good night, and went back to our conversation.
You interrupted us a third time to say you wouldn’t say anything else, you didn’t want to bother us, you just had to let us know. We said have a good night, and went back to our conversation.
This seemed to perplex you. You came all that way across a train car to bestow upon us this life altering knowledge - the fact we were pretty - and all you got was a polite thank you? You grumbled about gratitude, about how you better not end up on facebook, were we putting you on facebook? Why was my friend looking at her phone? Was she putting you on facebook? All you’d done was tell us we were pretty.
At this point, my friend says, “Sir, we’re trying to have a conversation. Please don’t be disrespectful.”
This was when you got angry. Disrespectful? YOU? For taking the time out of your day to tell us we were pretty? Did we know we were pretty?
“Yes, we knew,” says my friend.
Well, that was the last straw. How dare we know we were pretty! Sure, you were allowed to tell us we were pretty, but we weren’t allowed to think it independently, without your permission! And if we had somehow already known - perhaps some other strange man had informed us earlier in the day - we certainly weren’t allowed to SAY it! Where did we get off, having confidence in ourselves? You wanted us to know we were pretty, sure, but only as a reward for good behavior. We were pretty when you gifted it upon us with your words, and not a moment before! You raged for a minute about how horrible we were for saying we thought we were pretty, how awful we turned out to be.
I took a page out of your book and interrupted you. “Sir, you said you wouldn’t say anything else, and then you kept talking,” I said. “You complimented us, we said thank you, and we don’t owe you anything else. It’s late, you’re a stranger, and I don’t want to talk to you. We’ve tried to disengage multiple times but you keep bothering us.”
At this point, our train pulled into the next stop. My friend suggested we leave, so we got up and went to the door.
Seeing your last chance, you lashed out with the killing blow. “I was wrong!” you shouted at us as we left, “You’re ugly! You’re both REALLY UGLY!”
Fortunately, since our worth as human beings is in no way dependent upon how physically attractive you find us, my friend and I were unharmed and continued on with our night. She walked home; I switched to the next train car and sat down.
So, strange man, I know you’re confused. I don’t know if you’ll think about anything I said to you, but I hope you do learn this: when you give someone something - a gift, a compliment, whatever - with stringent stipulations about how they respond to it, you are not giving anything. You are setting a trap. It is not as nice as you think it is.
But you’ll be happy to know that when I sat down in the next car, a strange man several seats over called, “Hey, pretty girl. Nice guitar. How was your concert?”
“Thanks. Good,” I said, then looked away and put on my headphones, the universal sign for ‘I’d like to be left alone.’
“Wow. Fine. Whatever. Fucking bitch,” he said.
Fucking creepers. May I ask how feminism or anything similar would actually have prevented this from happening? This ya already socially unacceptable.
Men - because to be clear, I called them ‘strange men’ because they were strangers to me, not because there was anything abnormal about them - act this way because they are raised in a culture that lets them believe their time and opinions are more important than the time and opinions of women, and that as a consequence, they are owed women’s attention. They are socialized to believe women should be grateful to them for their attention, and that they are being denied something rightfully theirs when women are not.
Raising someone with feminism, the idea that all sexes/genders are equals and thus no party is beholden to or more important than another, would have prevented this by not allowing men to grow up expecting ‘rights’ that are not actually theirs. You say this is socially unacceptable, but there were 20+ people on that train who actively watched us being harassed and did not say a word. It is socially unacceptable, but this kind of thing happens to me and many other women multiple times a week, with often more traumatic results.
So, yes, I believe more feminism would prevent sexist moments like this. Also, water is wet, the atmosphere is 78% nitrogen, and cheese is addictive.
REBLOGGING FOR THE FUCKING COMMENTARY
Glad these girls stood up for themselves, but I don’t think feminism would fix this. There will always be assholes in the world, you can’t fix assholes.
Except you absolutely can.
People act out or misbehave when they think they can get away with it. It’s why people say things anonymously online that they would never dare say to someone’s face. It’s why crime is more common at night or dimly lit places. It’s why people feel emboldened to act when they have a crowd supporting them, or are in a group of their friends. It’s why men tend to harass women who are either alone or with other women, but not women who are with other men.
You can never 100% curb a behavior, it’s true; there are too many humans and we all vary in too many ways for one thing to be effective on everybody. But kids who grow up watching TV/reading books/playing games that tell them it’s acceptable to treat women (or really anyone who isn’t an able-bodied, cisgendered straight white male) badly, as lessors, as people who have equal rights in only a winkwinknudgenudge manner are going to grow up emulating the things they’ve learned through the media they’ve absorbed. Kids who see their parents, or other adults, or other kids their age treating people poorly and not being corrected or admonished grow up thinking that they too can act that way without getting in trouble.
Kids who grow up seeing people of all types being treated equally, seeing people who are openly intolerant being shut down by those around them rather than quietly allowed to continue, grow up emulating better behavior. Social acceptance is a powerful motivator. Think about how terrified you were as a teen of saying or doing the wrong thing and having people ridicule you or think you were lame. Imagine being that terrified of someone thinking you were a misogynist.
If a society taught these men to act this way, the same society can teach young, impressionable boys to act a better way. Sure, it’ll take awhile, but you have to let the ball start rolling first. Claiming something is unfixable isn’t helping anyone
At 11 o’clock at night, you moved across the train car to sit far too close to two girls about half your age so you could interrupt our conversation to tell us how pretty we are. We said thank you, have a good night, and went back to our conversation.
You interrupted us a second time to say that you didn’t want to bother us, but we needed to hear it, how pretty we are. We said cool, thanks, have a good night, and went back to our conversation.
You interrupted us a third time to say you wouldn’t say anything else, you didn’t want to bother us, you just had to let us know. We said have a good night, and went back to our conversation.
This seemed to perplex you. You came all that way across a train car to bestow upon us this life altering knowledge - the fact we were pretty - and all you got was a polite thank you? You grumbled about gratitude, about how you better not end up on facebook, were we putting you on facebook? Why was my friend looking at her phone? Was she putting you on facebook? All you’d done was tell us we were pretty.
At this point, my friend says, “Sir, we’re trying to have a conversation. Please don’t be disrespectful.”
This was when you got angry. Disrespectful? YOU? For taking the time out of your day to tell us we were pretty? Did we know we were pretty?
“Yes, we knew,” says my friend.
Well, that was the last straw. How dare we know we were pretty! Sure, you were allowed to tell us we were pretty, but we weren’t allowed to think it independently, without your permission! And if we had somehow already known - perhaps some other strange man had informed us earlier in the day - we certainly weren’t allowed to SAY it! Where did we get off, having confidence in ourselves? You wanted us to know we were pretty, sure, but only as a reward for good behavior. We were pretty when you gifted it upon us with your words, and not a moment before! You raged for a minute about how horrible we were for saying we thought we were pretty, how awful we turned out to be.
I took a page out of your book and interrupted you. “Sir, you said you wouldn’t say anything else, and then you kept talking,” I said. “You complimented us, we said thank you, and we don’t owe you anything else. It’s late, you’re a stranger, and I don’t want to talk to you. We’ve tried to disengage multiple times but you keep bothering us.”
At this point, our train pulled into the next stop. My friend suggested we leave, so we got up and went to the door.
Seeing your last chance, you lashed out with the killing blow. “I was wrong!” you shouted at us as we left, “You’re ugly! You’re both REALLY UGLY!”
Fortunately, since our worth as human beings is in no way dependent upon how physically attractive you find us, my friend and I were unharmed and continued on with our night. She walked home; I switched to the next train car and sat down.
So, strange man, I know you’re confused. I don’t know if you’ll think about anything I said to you, but I hope you do learn this: when you give someone something - a gift, a compliment, whatever - with stringent stipulations about how they respond to it, you are not giving anything. You are setting a trap. It is not as nice as you think it is.
But you’ll be happy to know that when I sat down in the next car, a strange man several seats over called, “Hey, pretty girl. Nice guitar. How was your concert?”
“Thanks. Good,” I said, then looked away and put on my headphones, the universal sign for ‘I’d like to be left alone.’
“Wow. Fine. Whatever. Fucking bitch,” he said.
Fucking creepers. May I ask how feminism or anything similar would actually have prevented this from happening? This ya already socially unacceptable.
Men - because to be clear, I called them ‘strange men’ because they were strangers to me, not because there was anything abnormal about them - act this way because they are raised in a culture that lets them believe their time and opinions are more important than the time and opinions of women, and that as a consequence, they are owed women’s attention. They are socialized to believe women should be grateful to them for their attention, and that they are being denied something rightfully theirs when women are not.
Raising someone with feminism, the idea that all sexes/genders are equals and thus no party is beholden to or more important than another, would have prevented this by not allowing men to grow up expecting ‘rights’ that are not actually theirs. You say this is socially unacceptable, but there were 20+ people on that train who actively watched us being harassed and did not say a word. It is socially unacceptable, but this kind of thing happens to me and many other women multiple times a week, with often more traumatic results.
So, yes, I believe more feminism would prevent sexist moments like this. Also, water is wet, the atmosphere is 78% nitrogen, and cheese is addictive.
REBLOGGING FOR THE FUCKING COMMENTARY
Glad these girls stood up for themselves, but I don’t think feminism would fix this. There will always be assholes in the world, you can’t fix assholes.
Except you absolutely can.
People act out or misbehave when they think they can get away with it. It’s why people say things anonymously online that they would never dare say to someone’s face. It’s why crime is more common at night or dimly lit places. It’s why people feel emboldened to act when they have a crowd supporting them, or are in a group of their friends. It’s why men tend to harass women who are either alone or with other women, but not women who are with other men.
You can never 100% curb a behavior, it’s true; there are too many humans and we all vary in too many ways for one thing to be effective on everybody. But kids who grow up watching TV/reading books/playing games that tell them it’s acceptable to treat women (or really anyone who isn’t an able-bodied, cisgendered straight white male) badly, as lessors, as people who have equal rights in only a winkwinknudgenudge manner are going to grow up emulating the things they’ve learned through the media they’ve absorbed. Kids who see their parents, or other adults, or other kids their age treating people poorly and not being corrected or admonished grow up thinking that they too can act that way without getting in trouble.
Kids who grow up seeing people of all types being treated equally, seeing people who are openly intolerant being shut down by those around them rather than quietly allowed to continue, grow up emulating better behavior. Social acceptance is a powerful motivator. Think about how terrified you were as a teen of saying or doing the wrong thing and having people ridicule you or think you were lame. Imagine being that terrified of someone thinking you were a misogynist.
The Supreme Court has had eight months to exercise their right to advise and consent in regards to President Obama’s pick for the Supreme Court seat. They have failed to exercise this right in an effort to obstruct his choice, and they have waived their right by causing an excessive delay. Here is a petition to have Obama make his Supreme Court pick before leaving office:
This is not by any means an exhaustive list of actions you can take, but it is a start. Please don’t ever feel you are helpless or that you can’t do anything. You matter. Your votes matter. Your actions matter. And no matter how difficult things feel right now, you are not alone.
Happy International Women’s Day to all of my lovely followers!
We still have a lot of work to do to create a more inclusive world for everyone, but I want all of the girls who follow me to remember that we can be anyone we want, we can achieve our dreams and we are strong enough to make the difference.
i’m sorry but i have to say this. honestly i love sokka with my whole heart but HE IS NOT THE FEMINIST ICON IN ATLA!! i’m begging y’all to stop making him one because he’s NOT. do you know WHO IS A FEMINIST ICON??
KATARA IS
SUKI IS
TOPH IS
despite sokka being totally sexist for the first season yall make him out to be the feminist character of the show while ignoring the WOMEN who carried the show and was representation of actual feminism in media.
suki is the leader of elite all girls warriors, she literally kicked the misogyny out of sokka, and single-handedly took on prison guards and captured the warden of the most secure prison in the fire nation.
toph is the world’s greatest earthbender who kicked ass the first scene we saw her in right after the boulder said he won’t fight “a little girl” and she held the championship title of earthbending fighters AND invented metal bending all while being BLIND.
and don’t even get me started on katara. miss girl started waterbending by barely holding up a bubble of water and then she could literally STOP THE RAIN, she taught the avatar waterbending (TWICE), and took down the northern water tribes misogynistic belief that girls can only be healers and proved that women can be warriors THE NEAR PINNACLE OF FEMINISM and a literal icon for dark skinned poc girls
i’msickandtired of y’all attributing the leading feminist role to A MAN and disregarding the powerful women in the show who are actual symbols of feminism.
SHOW SOME RESPECT TO THE QUEENS
just to be 100% clear this is a feminist post about all women in media. ALL WOMEN including trans women. so terfs please back the fuck up i don’t want you here <3
