Starlight Sapphic Feels

“Sex work” contains political assumptions; that it is not a neutral term. The term endorses the idea that sex is labour for women and leisure for men, and accords men the social and economic power to act as a boss class in the matter of intercourse. The term "sex work" also implies that women’s bodies exist as a resource to be used by other people.

Every time I’m like “maybe being single isn’t that great” I’m reminded of the fucking alternative which is having a man child begging for a blowjob in public 24/7

On the impact of pornography:

“People want experts. We have experts. Society says we have to prove harm. We have proved harm. What we have to prove is that women are human enough for harm to matter.”

- Andrea Dworkin, Letters from a Warzone

— Rebecca Solnit, Grandmother Spider in Men Explain Things To Me and Other Essays

— You Don’t Have To Be Pretty – On YA Fiction And Beauty As A Priority | The Belle Jar  (via elizabitchtaylor)

“Women are never allowed to publicly (or privately) discuss their regret at having children or becoming pregnant. They are supposed to accept every change to their body as a gift, whether it is damaged skin, damaged organs, damaged joints or damaged pelvic floors. The process of pregnancy and birth is one of the most dangerous and damaging a woman can go through, and yet, if she is anything but elated, she is likely to panic that there is something wrong with her. The same can be said for those days and weeks after giving birth, which are socially portrayed as some sort of perfect paradise – but are often filled with sleep deprivation, anxiety, aches and pains, heavy postpartum bleeding, the healing of stitches and internal and external injuries, bruising from injections, catheters and IV lines. Ultimately, women are expected to be completely selfless at the time of pregnancy and birth, they are not supposed to care what happens to their bodies and their lives, and only care for the baby they are carrying and giving birth to. No matter what goes wrong, or how many traumas the pregnancy or birth causes, they are supposed to feel that it was all worth it. And what if it wasn’t worth it? Would a woman dare even admit that?

The trauma surrounding pregnancy, birth and postpartum periods is obscured by the flowery, cute, fluffy, excited narratives of becoming a mother and ‘having a baby’. The ‘true calling’ of women. No matter what women have been put through, there seems to be no consideration for how likely it is that they have been abused or traumatised – and how triggering all of these experiences can be. Even for women without trauma histories, the experience can be a set of traumas in itself. The way this is all glossed over for pregnant women and girls sincerely irritates me. They are only ever told that pregnancy and birth will be an amazing, life-changing and beautiful experience in which all the fear, injury and illness will be worth it. When women tell them the horrors and experiences of birth and motherhood, they are scolded for ‘fearmongering’. What is clear, however, is that many women will never want to experience pregnancy or motherhood at all, and many more experience this time as terrifying, traumatic and, unfortunately for some, as a period of their lives in which they find themselves medicated and pathologised for being scared, unhappy, anxious or irritated.”

- Sexy But Psycho by Jessica Taylor

I dislike the way that people dance around the oppression of women when it comes to conversations about history. Lots of people acknowledge that women were seen and treated as property, but the horror of that experience is rarely conveyed. When teaching about women's rolls in ancient cultures there is always that comment about women not being able to own property, that they were property themselves, and were expected to be submissive to men. But what does this actually look like?

It looks like rape. Like mothers being seperated from daughters. It looks like being forced to cohabit with and serve an owner who will force himself on you and breed you like stock. It is the sadness of miscarriage and the realisation that your body won't hold up. It's mutilation and violence. It's watching the deaths of your friends knowing that none of them lived a truly happy life. It's watching your daughter grow up knowing that she will be sold into servitude and raped until she dies, the same fate you face. In some cases you didn't even have a name.

Women's oppression is the oldest form of oppression, and yet we are still so strongly gripped by patriarchy that there is a refusal to acknowledge what that actually means. We have barely even started earning our rights in the west, and our sisters still face the terror of what I have described above. Women are always one step away from losing everything, and yet the movement meant to fight for women's liberation is being overun by men and misogynistic women. It's easier for them to uphold the status quo than challenge it.

Women need to learn their history, the grim and horrifying reality of it. The truth of our existence under patriarchy. If we don't seek out this truth, then history is doomed to repeat.

i think it’s very sad that young girls are growing up thinking they have to put up with boys choking them and spitting on them because that’s what they all see in porn and they’re taught not to “kink shame” or they have to convince themselves they enjoy it

“Black women wake up in the morning, look in the mirror, and see black women. White women wake up in the morning, look in the mirror, and see women. White men wake up in the morning, look in the mirror, and see human beings.” — Michelle Haimoff.

The meaninglessness of biology in a world where female biology is overwhelmingly the target of anti-choice legislation, slavery, the withholding of education, forced/mandatory pregnancy, rape, murder, incest, paedophilia and mutilation, is a privilege that very few female human beings on this planet have access to. If you are able to say to biology, “you are meaningless” then you have no idea what it is like to be oppressed on the axis of biology, and ignoring it is a violent slap in the face of the women and girls all over the world who are oppressed on the basis of being born female. This cavalier attitude towards human biology and the behaviours that exist in response to it is dishonest, it is in denial, it is oppressive, and it is above all, misogynistic. It is also anti-intersectional, as it completely ignores how women of colour are further violated on the grounds of their biology. Saying that sexual biology is meaningless is on the same level of delusion as, “skin colour is meaningless” or “disability is meaningless” or “race is meaningless, I cannot for the life of me fathom it or what it means”. It is not meaningless. It is a biological reality, it is a group that people are born into and on this basis are subjected to horrific treatment that is specific to that particular group.

— Megan Murphy

Too many lesbians have couched their discomfort around "genital preference" and "cotton ceiling" discussions, in which the basic sexual orientation and sexual boundaries of lesbians are presented as Literal Colonialist Violence, in kind terms about how we just can't help it, and how we wish we were different, and how of course the people harassing us have point but unfortunately we are just lowly little homosexuals, and this couching and bending over backwards and soothing has allowed these kinds of discussions to go unchecked as the blatantly rapey homophobic arguments that they are. I'm not sorry that I'm attracted to members of my own physical sex at all. I don't feel bad about it. I don't care if it makes you so sad you want to kill yourself. I don't care if you think it is literal violence. I don't wish I was not homosexual. And the women who do feel sorry only feel sorry because you've intentionally used gaslighting and coercive rhetoric ("you don't have to date anyone you don't want to but if you only want to date afab people then you're either bad or socially poisoned") on a group of people who, having been socialized to never stand up for themselves and to acquiesce and to give and give until we have nothing left, are easy to manipulate and scare and guilt trip.

the internet can be a terrifying place for young girls. A lot of what you see online is stuff you cant process until you’re older, and now that I’m an adult I look back and I realize how fucked up the interactions I had online were, and how those incidents had real life repercussions when I was still a minor. Protect girls. 

It’s terrifying how much of girlhood is looking back in retrospect and realizing how inappropriate it all was. 

Getting stealth-groomed online by creeps who target teenage misfits on VampireFreaks.

30 year olds on youtube licking preteen girls faces in front of their moms (*cough* Dahvy Vanity *cough*)

Topix.com and Yahoo Answers existing.

Sex positive youtubers advocating for lower age of consent and the the media glamorizing it through YA books and movies that sing the false song about older men being “more mature and compassionate” lowkey via the vampire archetype.

The Scene subculture’s rampant glamorized misogyny online. The sexualization of self harm, offensive gendered language and violence against women but packaged in glitter skull happy meal form to 11 year olds to prep them for abuse as older teens.

I look back in disgust at how indoctrinated I was. I really thought I was empowered and in control when really I was being mass groomed by culture, and society by proxy, to accept debasing activities as “freedom”, self harm as “choice” and diet version misogyny as “artsy” and “edgy”.

Funnily enough I was reminded of the reason why I made this post a couple of days ago when a man who was 35 (thirty five) when I was 12 and used to talk to me online messaged me again. 

From the ages of 11 to about 15 I used to play a lot of online games, not the kind you downloaded as I didn’t have my own computer, but the kind of stuff you played online- Newgrounds, Miniclip, Kongregate, Neopets & Club Penguin mostly. Point and click mysteries or text adventures or the little one with the yeti and the fish? Bomb. (I just recently read an article on how Newgrounds is actually a hub for a lot of the porn artists who are now kids tv animators and shit so just adding THAT in here as a sidenote) 

Some of these sites, specifically Kongregate, had a tab that opened automatically next to the game that was like a chat room. And that was *the* thing that fucked me over. Immediately, at the age of 11 as soon as I started playing, I started getting contacted by older men. The oldest of which was 38 when I was eleven (a dude named Dustin who said “age is just a number”) From then on I would spend several years getting multiple obsessive messages by multiple obsessive men, many of them making me feel responsible for their emotional baggage and threatening to kill themselves if I didn’t reply, which, as a child, I didn’t know how to handle. 

I couldn’t go to an adult because my family life was awful, and they made me feel ashamed (they had, after all, multiple times, sent me pictures of their penises + had sexual conversations with me) and it *must* be somehow my fault for continuing to engage with them. If I tried to leave the site, I’d get endless emails through the PM system, all of them begging me to come back or else they’d slit their wrists or some shit. 

Aside from seeing and hearing and being exposed to all sorts of sexual fantasies, conversations, pictures, video, audio, pornography, BDSM, and explicit rape fantasies featuring me, I was also groomed into the idea that age WAS just a number, and that I was a “seductive little minx” (said to me, age 12, verbatim by that 35 year old man, Taylor, who messaged me a couple days ago to ask me if i was still a virgin btw) and it was my fault. This opened the door for men in my physical proximity to push me into inappropriate ILLEGAL pedophillic relationships- most notably, a 32 year old man who tried to groom me, stalked me, briefly kidnapped me, went to jail and was let out on bail after sending me a 5 page letter confessing his love of whatever when I was 16. (I should add this man first met me when i was TEN (10) years old, and was a family friend). 

The internet, for a girl, for a child, can be 

1) Dangerous 

2) Isolating 

3) Cause long-lasting damage not only to their image of themselves and the men in their lives, but also to their future relationships and their sense of normalcy. 

There’s definitely a lot about my personal relationship with the internet that feels like a black hole in my history, I don’t exactly know what to call it other than “harmful” in a very particular way because we don’t really talk about it and I KNOW I’m not alone. 

And i worry because with the evolution of pornography into more and more violent shit being mainstream, and with the sex posi movement, and with the sexualization of younger and younger girls, I’m SURE that kids now are really fuckin going through it and we gotta talk about it more. 

i wonder if a single man that’s ever reblogged a “respect women” meme has ever actually respected a woman in his life 

like really… dig deep down and take a close look at yourself. have you ever held a woman in high esteem? have you ever been able to admit that a woman might be better than you? that she might know more than you, have more experience than you, have a better perspective then you? can you put aside your pride and defer to the expertise of a woman and admit that she is right if she corrects you or has a better argument than you, or does it sting? 

do you value the friendship of women, or are you settling for “just friends”? can you be close with a woman without thinking about sleeping with her? can you take interest in her life and hobbies and interests even if they don’t have anything to do with you directly, whether you are dating or not? are you able to take a woman’s feelings, thoughts, and concerns seriously, or do you brush them off as frivolous or overreacting?  

can you really look at yourself and say that you genuinely respect women or is it something that you had to filter through 14 tiers of irony before reblogging as a joke 

A) every person saying ‘it’s just a meme’ needs to read this damn post in entirety for the first time cause there’s no way y'all did before you said ‘it’s just a meme’ in reply to it.

b) this, but not only about guys making pithy ‘respect women’ posts. This, but also about supposedly left-leaning guys who Agree In The Abstract but don’t remotely see the immediate nature of their own interactions through that lens. If the only way your ‘beliefs’ ever come through is in explicit conversation about them, it’s not particularly meaningful to dub them ‘beliefs’ rather than, like, 'thoughts’ or 'debate positions’ or 'argumentation preferences’. To believe something is to act in accordance with it, or be self-inconsistent.

men would be so fucking mad if there was a video game where women could torture and castrate men and it’d be considered proof that we live in a matriarchy and illustrates the evils of feminism but men can rape women in video games and it doesn’t mean anything at all. fiction doesn’t affect reality and vice versa you SJW misandrists!! free speech!!

Men are so “privileged,” that they have less of a chance to win custody of children after a divorce, along with having higher suicide rates, homeless rates, and die at work rates. Yeah…. soooo “privileged” 

goody, now let’s do sexual assault, sex trafficking, spousal abuse, and some other handy pink and blue circles

you fucking moron

1- combat deaths exclude women because women in most countries are not allowed to be in combat. therefore most women who die during war are counted as civilian deaths. Women are also more likely to die after a conflict is officially over than during the conflict itself. Please also note that combat deaths comprise 2-29% of total deaths related to wartime (see table 2). Therefore, 71-98% of all wartime deaths happen after the conflict is officially over, typically caused by things like infectious diseases and traffic accidents due to the damage to infrastructure that inevitably follows a war. These deaths are primarily seen in women and children. From the same reference as above: 

So the takeaway is that yes, more men than women die in combat, but this is because in the vast majority of combat zones, even in recent history, women were specifically barred from being considered active combat, making them more likely to be counted among civilian casualties than military casualties. (Civilian casualties comprise approximately 90% of all war time deaths.)

Therefore the graph should look more like this (assuming the highest ratio of military:civilian ratio and extrapolating it onto every single conflict ever AND accepting the numbers given above as accurate):

(please note that the gray above would be mostly female in most conflicts)

2- custody is not contested in a majority of all cases (link to another tumblr post enumerating the stats)  Men who seek custody are more likely to receive it  and abusive fathers are the most likely to seek custody. From source #2 in this bullet point:

Therefore the graph would look more like this:

3- Child abusers are numerically more likely to be female, but when you consider that 90% of the time, child caregivers are female and only 10% of the time child caregivers are male, the likelihood of an individual female or male to abuse children is tipped in the favor of men: see here for a breakdown of the probabilities. It is p=0.77 for men and p=0.23 for women, making men nearly four times as likely to abuse children they have access to than women. Here is the graph:

4- Homicide: Homicides are also most likely to be perpetrated by men. Men commit approximately 88.7% of US homicides. So let’s make it fair:

5- Homelessness: single men are more likely than single women to become homeless. That’s where that statistic comes from. However, the stat ignores that 34% of the homeless are families, and that 84% of those families are female-headed. Homeless women are far more likely to be responsible for the care of a child under the age of 18 than homeless men (US stats only)

Women and families are also the fastest growing segment of the homeless population. 

6- Suicides. Women attempt suicide more often than men and have higher rates of mental illness. Suicide by definition is self-inflicted harm. To blame women for the actions of men (as many of these graphs actually do) is dishonest. 

7- College graduates: Until the mid-20th century most higher education was barred to women. The fact that men earned more college degrees was framed as a justification for how much more intelligent men were than women. Now, of course, that women have more of a chance to earn the same degrees, it is being painted as female privilege. Interesting how it wasn’t male privilege that keeps faculty overwhelmingly white and male. In fact let’s take a look at that: 

Bonus: breakdown of faculty by race from the same source

The Alaskan Native and Native American representation in higher learning is so low that it rounds to zero percent. In all my years of lab work, research, symposia, and interviews, I have only met one phd holder in my life who was a Native American. 

To get back to the matter at hand, however, it’s interesting how those privileged women are still primarily learning from male faculty. Also interesting is to see how many professors have successfully climbed the tenure track to reach full professor (It is in the link above; I am simply showing the breakdown of all collegiate instructors.)

8- Work place deaths. The professions with the highest workplace death incidence are also the professions where women are either officially or unofficially barred from entry. Logging, working on the oil fields, even being a female truck driver can leave women vulnerable to attack at truck stops from other truck drivers or stopping motorists. However, I will concede that more men die in the workplace than women, so long as those workplaces are legal and aboveboard. 

Women still make up the vast majority of trafficking victims, sweatshop workers, and prostitutes in the world. All of those professions, were they cataloged, would certainly rival some of the deadliest US professions. 

Bonus, for TS: Forcible rape is perpetrated by men 99.1% of the time and by women 0.9% of the time.

hello police I’d like to report a murder

reductress is OUT FOR BLOOD!!!!

i literally hate makeup and will not wear it and i just wish it was seen as acceptable to not wear makeup and not be made out to be some ugly slob just bc i don’t want to gunk up my face w makeup

ok this may be a Controversial thing to say but… i don’t give a fuck about “let men wear makeup too uwu” can we focus on dismantling the idea that women are required to wear makeup in order to be taken seriously and respected as people first?? then u can worry abt “letting” men wear makeup

!!!