we are not things

And now we leave the realm of miracles and enter hell. 

Patriarchy is the ruling religion of the planet. It comes in variations―some old, some new, some ecclesiastical, some secular. But at bottom, they are all necrophilic. Erich Fromm describes necrophilia as “the passion to transform that which is alive into something unalive; to destroy for the sake of destruction; the exclusive interest in all that is purely mechanical.” In this religion, the worst sin is being alive, and the carriers of that sin are female. Under patriarchy, the female body is loathsome; its life-giving fat-cells vilified; its generative organs despised. Its natural condition is always ridiculed: normal feet must be turned into four-inch stubs; rib cages must be crushed into collapse; breasts are varyingly too big or too small or excised entirely. That this inflicts pain―if not constant agony―is not peripheral to these practices. It’s central. When she suffers, she is made obedient.” 

t. also becoming the joker

Leave Frida the fuck alone.

They seriously think that all GNC females must be non-binary or trans. They seriously think that being ‘masculine’/GNC makes a woman less female. They hate gender nonconforming women so much it’s insane.

OK.  1969.  I was 9 years old.  I wore “pants” to school.  That was against the Dress Code.  I wore pants for warmth and protection, because I walked to school in the winter, through snow. And because they were practical; you could do more things on the playground in them without worrying if your underwear showed.

I was repeatedly sent home from school because I wore them.  One teacher sent me to the classroom closest with a skirt and demanded I change clothes there.  In the dark, I heard my classmates, AND my teacher, laughing at me.  I came out still in my pants and was promptly sent home.  Which was fine, since it was a beautiful Fall day.

My mother repeatedly met with the Principal.  I’m not sure exactly what she said, but it was along the lines of “Pants are comfortable and practical and you will not tell my daughter how to dress.”

The school gave up.  Within weeks other girls wore “slacks” and “pants.”  Within a year the Dress Code was changed.

I am and always have been a cis heterosexual.  I envied boys back then because they had more freedom.  But I never, ever, wanted to be one.   Lots of straight women from my mother’s generation, who fought on the WWII homefront, found freedom in dressing “like men,” only to be forced back into “normal women’s clothes” after the war, pushed out of “men’s jobs” and into being 1950s housewives.

Straight women have defied “dress codes” since forever.  So have lesbians and bisexual women.

By the way, women dressing in “men’s clothes” was a big thing in the 1920s.  Like bobbing your hair and smoking.  Frida was 17 and being a properly hip, defiantly stylish Bi Jazz Age girl.

if anything this just reinforces for me how much porn is a gleeful expression of dominance through violence and destruction, and just like Ortner said in 1974, male continues to be conflated with domination and female with submission that maps onto Victor and Victim. "our team fucked yours", "did that exam take you out for dinner before it fucked you", it's the same joke constructed from a reference to pornhub and those same roles of dominance and submission expressed sexually.

But I have to question why their personal choices to change their body should mean that everyone else playing by the rules of the game has to suffer?