howdy

“I Want a Twenty-Four-Hour Truce During Which There Is No Rape” 

So we decided to wait as long as we dared and then, just as the arrests were really about to begin, direct everyone up and out of the street. Which, much to the relief of the police, is what we did. Safely back on the sidewalk, many of the women who had been in the street wanted some kind of closure on the experience. They didn’t want just to wander off home without any acknowledgment or discussion of what we’d just done, so we formed a circle and began to take turns telling how we had been affected by what had happened. 

Every woman was euphoric, high with admiration for herself. I remember one woman particularly. “Do you know who I am?” she demanded, as she stepped into the circle. “I’m just a housewife from Maryland. But I knelt in that street for over an hour. I could have been arrested. I would have been arrested. And I did it for women! I didn’t know I had the courage to do anything like that!” She paused, then turned to me and asked, “When are we going to do it again?” Many women expressed similar excitement at discovering how much they cared about themselves and other women, how deep their longings for justice and dignity went. They all felt bigger and nobler, capable of so much more than they had thought. Each had caught a glimpse of her true stature and was ready to grow into it as fast as possible.

Any capacity that civil disobedience has to change the system, I thought, must come from its ability to profoundly change women’s concepts of ourselves and to alter our ways of being in the world. It not only tells others that we know our own worth, but, by providing a stage upon which we can act out our larger selves, it testifies to us, too, that we are worthy. In telling others that we are serious, we realize-often to our own surprise -how very deeply serious we are. And after this, we find it easier to take ourselves and one another seriously, an incredible feat for any woman. More worthy and more serious, more everything good and strong than we dream we can be, we see how much we have to gain and how little we have to lose, and we slough off our fearful skins.”

not true. in many cultures, and further back in our culture, the breasts are/were not sexualised, objects for sexual arousal. they are organs designed to produce milk for babies. clothing would be worn with breasts uncovered, and no sexual emotions attributed to them. i remember a documentary where a european man told some men in an african tribe, where the women were topless, about how breasts are covered because they’re seen as sexual in western culture, and the african men laughed and said something to the degree of ‘are white men babies, why are they wanting breasts like that?’

I’m a medical student and when we were learning about physical exam techniques and got to the heart exam the consequences of treating breasts like sexual objects for the purpose of pleasing others became VERY apparent.

People were freaking out about performing cardiac exams on female patients. One man in the class nervously asked, “ but what do we do about … yknow?” when it came to stethoscope placement because the best way to hear sounds from the mitral valve requires placing the stethoscope kind of under and up someone’s breast. And while there were zero questions or concerns about performing cardiac exams on men, performing cardiac exams on women was suddenly a big issue no one wanted to do because even though thesteps were exactly the same between men and women, in women it was suddenly a “sexual” exam like pelvic or testicular exams. And it didn’t help that 100% of our textbook and lecture PowerPoints used for stethoscope placement only showed men.

And then I thought about it and remembered the time I was seen by a male cardiologist who only used stethoscope placements higher up on my chest and didn’t listen to the mitral valve, and concluded that because he didn’t hear any murmurs my echocardiogram could be delayed a few months. As you can probably guess, the echo showed mitral valve prolapse which would have been heard if he’d listened to the mitral valve. Which he didn’t because it involved lifting and touching my breast. Which he didn’t do because breasts have been unnecessarily sexualized. And based on the other medical students in my class, that is not going to change any time soon.

Fascinating discussion on how Abortion was common in America until the male only American Medical Association decided to 1. Remove their competitors and 2. Increase births in the Proper stock, fearing the population increase from immigrants and Catholics. The second reason was the motivation for male politicians too.

None of it was about women's health or social needs such as "I have 4 children and 2 step under the age of 10" or "child birth is a hell of a lot more dangerous"

An eighteen-year-old is not suddenly an adult. You don't wake up on your eighteenth birthday fully developed into an Adult.

The "legal" age of 18 is an arbitrary number. There is no developmental difference between a 17yo and an 18yo.

Eighteen-year-olds are actually still children who have about another seven years of physical and mental development ahead of them. In fact, did you know at eighteen a child's prefrontal cortex has not fully developed? This means children at 18 are about as equipped to understand abstract consequences as they were at 15. (There's a whole nother argument to be made with this information about not allowing 18yos to sign contracts if they can't understand the long-term impact of what they're signing but that's a digression for another day)

At 47, this man is old enough to be her father. Literally.

This man fostered and encouraged sexual feelings in this child when he was her tennis coach. It is natural for children to fantasise sexually about authority figures. It was his job to terminate those feelings, and instead he exploited them.

For this grown, middle-aged man, four years is not a long time. For her, it was almost one fifth of her life. For him, it was just waiting out a clock until he wouldn't go to jail for engaging in an inappropriate sexual relationship with an adolescent child.

A middle-aged man with a career, credit history, life experience, and resources is not on equal footing with a child who just graduated high school.

Who has the power in a relationship where one person may own a house and the other couldn't rent a studio apartment without a cosigner?

And my final question:

What the fuck does a forty-seven-year-old man have in common with an eighteen-year-old girl other than her idolization of a father figure?

What, is she going to commiserate with him about his prostate exam? Is he going to listen patiently while she complains about her Philosophy assignment? What is he going to have to say when she switches her major? When she gets a bad grade?

Can you stop acting like it's inconceivable that Black women needed low cost reproductive healthcare?

If you can't bear to see gay people on screen without writing a think piece about how the characters should've been "aroace" then consider shutting up actually

Like, wtf, straight people get full on CENTURIES of media dedicated to them without an issue, but the MOMENT that gay people start reaching for a slice of pie, suddenly nobody can shut up about how oh so alienating it is to see gay people kissing instead of being the best of buddies.

Captain America is a war criminal, Winter soldier is an assassin and Hawkeye murdered people in endgame.

1. the holy book of women’s mysteries by zsuzsanna budapest

they thought the tiny fruit was so good that they bred it for thousands of years, making it larger to form into bowls and cups, and different shapes to become bottles and spoons

and musical instruments

And then, people took the hollow gourds they farmed, and they turned them into houses for birds. We adapted them into the perfect houses for birds, and now there are specific breeds of birdhouse gourd just for making into birdhouses

And humans dedicated gardening space and time and thousands of years of breeding to make the gourds so absolutely perfect for birds, that there is a species of bird that lives almost exclusively in them