Despite the overwhelming amount of positivity on my take about why women are often unable to choose where to eat, many people have responded “OR she’s just not picky! OR she just wants to shoot down all my ideas! OR she’s just indecisive! It’s not that deep.”

Female socialization MAKES us more indecisive. We grow up being interrupted more. We grow up being discouraged from leading our peers for fear of being called stuck-up. We grow up with more restrictions on our movement and our activities. We grow up without the amount of attention and conversation that more disruptive boys often get from adults. We grow up with the knowledge that if we don’t defer to our friends’ preferences, we are dismissed as bossy and mean. Personally, I think that for many women, this means we have a hard time actually identifying if we have a preference at all (let alone what that preference actually is) because we are not in the habit of actually considering it. We’re so used to automatically deferring because we’ve done so all our lives, in fear of being inconsiderate or callous or bossy.

Often, when I’m asked about a preference of mine, my immediate thought is “I don’t feel like defending a choice, I just want to be agreeable and have a nice time, so whatever they want is okay. I don’t want to force the other person to have something they don’t want.” I have to literally force myself to take a second to actually think “Wait. If I could choose an option…what would I actually choose? What do I feel like right now?” 

And sometimes I can’t even come up with one! And then I take another second and really consider each option. And I discover that I do in fact have a preference after all! If I had the choice all to myself, I know what I would pick. I’m not indecisive! I DO care!

We literally have to re-train ourselves to identify our preferences. And that’s fucked up.

Until I was in like third or fourth grade, I literally had no idea that there were types of music other than country because that’s what my dad liked and therefore that’s what the whole family had to listen to. It’s not like he was morally opposed to other genres or anything; he just had zero comprehension that we might enjoy something else. He liked it, so that’s all that mattered. Even though I found out years later that my mom doesn’t even particularly like country music, she still listened to it even when she was by herself because it was a habit and it was “just easier.” But as soon as my parents split up, she’d play classic rock and showtunes all the damn time because she was finally allowed to enjoy the music she actually liked. Turned out my dad complained and berated her and made fun of her taste for years before I was born, so eventually she just gave in and quietly listened to whatever he wanted.

To this day when I find myself making choices, I have to pause and think, “Do I really WANT to do this or am I just going along with it because it’ll make it easier to interact with someone else? Am I the one who’s actually interested in this or was it pushed on me?” And even with that learned self-awareness, I’m still surprised how often it’s the latter.

i don’t want to achieve equality by sinking to men’s level, i want them to get on ours! why should i have to unlearn the conversational art of waiting my turn, unlearn sexual self-restraint, unlearn trust in others’ good intentions, unlearn the impulse to cater to others’ needs, just to have a chance at success among savages? why can’t the men learn some fucking manners so we can all conduct our affairs in a civilized manner? i shouldn’t have to stop saying sorry, you say sorry!

In the 80s when I was in my freshman year in college, they still had entirely separate mens and women’s dorms. I was in class waiting for a final to start and one of the guys was telling someone about how he had had to go into a women’s dorm to drop something off, and he was startled to see posters on the walls, flowers, curtains, etc. He said his men’s dorm had holes in the walls, things on fire, fights, guys walking around with open wounds and he just didn’t understand why they had to live like this. He said, “I want to live with the women, in civilization.”

Am reading Sisterhood of Spies, about women working for the OSS during WWII. One of the stories mentions that the women in London had a male visitor who would eat in their mess hall once a month. He was married and wasn’t interested in hitting on any of the women; he just wanted to eat in an atmosphere where people said “Please pass the butter,” instead of “PASS THE GODDAMNED GREASE”

I dated a guy who brought me along on group activities (movies, video game night, etc.) with four or five other male friends. Once I mentioned to one of the other guys that I hoped I wasn’t intruding on their “guy time” or some such. He got this sort of rueful look and said, “The truth is, I really like it when you’re here because it gives us a reason to act better. When it’s just guys, we all have to try to outdo each other with how vile we are.”

So the moral of these stories are men don’t even treat each other like human beings.

William Golding has said that he didn’t write Lord of the Flies about a group of girls because they would have cooperated with each other and got off the island without incident. Even men know they are destructive beasts when left to their own devices.

And then the movie director went on record saying he didn’t want to include girls in the movie cause it would have to include a romantic subplot if he did.

Mind you this is about kids aged 6-12.

In the old west men used to pay a lot of money for a home cooked meal in a nice house. It was a break from their normal crude world where everyone had to be polite and things were clean. Almost no one had wives so they had to pay a pioneering women to experience civility for an evening.

#okay not to ruin the joke by explaining it#but people in the notes are legitimately confused#ok some of this is bad but XYZ is just goofy little jokes!!?#yeah that's what's happening here#she's dramatizing how a steady algorithmic feed of misogyny radicalizes people#it's silly jokes it's Not That Deep#and then it's jolly good-natured lifestyle content#and then it's deeply ugly reactionary conspiracy theories#but it's all so light and quick and it just flows effortlessly over you#once you're in the pipeline#and it all sounds equally friendly and approachable in tone#and maybe the first time you hear something it sounds a little wrong#or not quite what you believe#but the next thing is fine and the next few things are just jokes#until suddenly this is just where you live#this is what the world sounds like hour after hour#this is what the normalization of reactionary fascist ideas sounds like in action

THE TAGS THE TAGS THE TAGS THE TAGS

I am so isolated from the insidious stuff that I always find the slow creep of the jokes funny but they start to itch something at me eventually. I think girl dinner is hilarious BECAUSE it’s so ridiculous but most people don’t take it that way (off tumblr) and then it starts to make me feel icky to joke about it at all and oh my god I’m just ducking down hiding from these reels

bought a pearl necklace and pearl earrings !

also an ivory cashmere scarf :')

I'm starting a radical feminist literature podcast!!

It's called "Radical Feminist Reads" and there are currently two episodes available on Spotify! In the future I hope to be available on more platforms, but since I have literally no experience with podcasting and started this yesterday, that's still a work in progress. You can find the first episode here!

The first work I'm reading is Dworkin's Right-Wing Women. I'm hoping to finish that in the next few days before moving to a weekly upload schedule - probably every Sunday or Monday. After RWW, I'll be reading Pornland by Gail Dines, and then - we'll see!! I'll put a poll at the bottom with some popular texts to see if there's any preference.

Also - I feel it's important to mention that I am absolutely not profiting off of this in any way. It's just something I wanted to do to increase accessibility to feminist texts!

If anyone has any advice, suggestions on which pieces to read, or anything - don't hesitate to tell me!

I will add that a lot of womens denim is "softer" and more elastic for the purpose of making them have a tight body-con fit whereas mens pants are tailored and meant to drape and fit. Small pockets mean less fabric and reflect that skin tight fit of the pant. Essentially the sexualization of women also plays a role in the crappy quality women are sold.

If your thighs and glutes are large and muscular and your movement patterns are more athletic, your body will destroy pants that are not elastic enough. The thicker the fabric, the faster it shreds, no matter how well it's sewn together. And you can forget about pockets ever again unless they're lower thigh cargo style. Understand your situation and get the right pant for the job. Sometimes the right pant is leggings.

Genuine question. If jeans were originally designed for the worker with the purpose of working in them, I saw my muscular carpenter father wear the same pare of levis for years, you can see shredded lumberjacks in worn but durable jeans, and I've seen a welder wear the same canvas overalls literally every day for over a year, why would they shred? When at the same time I have leggings that lasted only one cross country season before they disintegrated and jeggings that didn't last a winter before I had to replace them because they ripped in the ass. How is a lower grade cotton spandex blend better than high grade cotton

Some highlights from this video where Lydia Cacho talks about her life work fighting sexual slavery:

“By the time i was 14 or 15, I came to this existential crisis. I was really mad, really angry, […] so I took up judo and karate. And every time in school a bully was molesting or being aggressive to a girl, I was there to defend her.”

“When I started doing journalism in Southeast Mexico, I kept going to these small Mayan towns to interview women, because I wanted to explain to the world how poverty and racism were affecting them. But they didn’t want to talk about poverty or the lack of food, they wanted to talk about domestic violence.

So after a while, after interviewing all these people, I had a radio programme. And here I was, talking about domestic violence, and the rights of women, and all of a sudden one day […] the producer starts banging at the window, […] so I open the door and there’s like 25 women, standing there going “Lydia, thank you, thank you for opening the radio, […] we’re leaving our husbands, you’re right, we have rights and this is not fair, we’re leaving.” So I told them, okay, let’s go to social services and find out what you can do. […] And [the woman at social services] was like “Oh no no no, ladies, go back home, behave well, cook the meals and stop complaining.” I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. So I gathered a group of friends and told them, we have to open a house, a big house where women […] can go with her kids, so she won’t be mistreated and can get a new life. So I opened a big shelter and I called it the High Security Shelter for Battered Women.”

“I dressed up as a prostitute, and I got in [brothels], infiltrated some clubs in which I knew were teenage girls, and I found clubs that had 12, 13 year-old girls, in the Dominican Republic, in Mexico, in the US, in Japan, in Cambodia. […] I was able to see, and count, how many little girls were in the brothels. In a very small area in Mexico City, I found 140 little girls, younger than 10 years-old, that were exploited sexually, and the police cars were outside there, protecting the pimps. So I documented this, and you can read it in my book, Slavery Inc. […] I wanted to explain to people how clients thought. [I talked to] some of these clients, from Europe, in their 40s, all of them married, some of them doctors, journalists, writers—I dressed up [as a prostitute] and […] they told me all their stories, and I wrote one chapter specifically on the clients. 

And I kept hearing this story over and over again in many countries: […] “You know, I’m happy, my wife is fun, she’s beautiful, I have these kids and everything is okay at home, but you know, I don’t know what happened to European women. […] They want to tell you when they want to have sex and when they don’t. I like Latin women because they’re so submissive, they’re so obedient. […]” That was a question I kept asking European and Mexican and American men—why do you go to these places? Aren’t you aware that these young women might be slaves? And they could have a joyful, happy, free sex life, and not have to be enslaved like this, and forced to have sex, or raped? And what they said was, “We miss the way women were. And we like this. How manhood feels like.”

And I think that’s one of the biggest secrets of the sex slavery industry. Men. […] It has become a tremendous burden for women in every country in the world, because 93% of all NGOs that work to rescue girls and boys and women, or work on psychology groups to help them go through the trauma of being enslaved—are women. Women who have a career, who have a life, and then on top of that are activists because they want to change things. Yesterday in Melbourne somebody said “Sex slavery is a woman’s problem.” And I said “It has become a woman’s problem, because men are not working with us to end slavery.” The male population is not only responsible for this terrible crime around the world, they are also responsible for not doing anything about it.”

(If you want to read a more detailed account of Lydia Cacho’s life & fight, I posted a link last year to a series of articles about her.)

Laundrosaurus, a piece of household surrealism, by Helga Stentzel

saw so many women with leg hair out today. holy shit. I am a changed woman.

like so many women wearing skirts and shorts and dresses with curly leg hair on full display. omg omg omg.

horror → directed by women

girl dinner (big fucking plate of carbs and protein) girl math (complex analysis) girl career (trades and engineering and politics and compsci) girl sports (dirtbikes and football and weightlifting) girl instruments (drums and bass guitar and electric) girl personality (loud and opinionated and annoying and brash)

worst day ever