my slightly snarky Catholic feminist side blog

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PBS: Language as Prejudice - Myth #6: Women Talk Too Much (via misandry-mermaid)

Every EVERY women’s studies class I’ve been in has had this problem and failed to address it. 

The sad reality however, is the fact that we aren't going to hear a lot of people talk about that. Because the reality is they don't care about it. Every single leftist who cries about the Epstein files is going to turn a complete and utter blind eye to the grooming gangs and rape gangs that were exploiting the UK. When according to reports the numbers of girls affected was around 250,000. Sad reality is most people don't even actually care about the victims of Epstein and the people who participated in his illicit activities. Because if they did they would be talking about the grooming gangs out of the UK as well. Of course they won't. Because the people who did it are not white or Jewish. Or Rich. Which is apparently the only time when rape is bad. If the perpetrator is the right religion or color, or the victim is the right religion or color.

And it really just baffles me because I see people go you want a know who isn't on the Epstein files illegal immigrants. To which I normally have to respond saying Yeah because Epstein didn't hang out with the poors. But second and third world countries are known as awful places for women's rights and bodily autonomy. Which is to say in a lot of those places they're consent doesn't really matter or exist. So, on an industrial scale the UK grooming gang scandal puts anything that happened with the Epstein stuff in a classification of "those are rookie numbers".

This post showed up in my "for you" feed, and I commented that 63% of people have internalized misogyny, to which two other people asked how being afraid of getting pregnant was misogynistic, so I thought I would explain.

First, the option that the majority of people voted on was this: Pregnancy "sounds like unreal terrifying body horror". Not just something scary or dangerous, but body horror. So lets talk about that first.

Body horror comes from taking something normal and natural about the body and twisting it. Putting teeth where there should not be teeth. Grafting dozens of arms onto every part of the body. Faces in odd places. Limbs bending the wrong direction. Think Dark Souls et al.

Now, one could try to describe normal bodily processes as horrifying, but I wouldn't call this body horror. Take puberty, and all the crazy things your body goes through during it, or describe exactly how each organ keeps you alive in detail. Or take "Skeletons", by Ray Bradbury. This is a horror story in which a man feels aches in his bones and becomes convinces that his skeleton--all skeletons--are some form of Other, some entity inside people that is trying to get out. He describes seeing his wife's skeleton peering out of her mouth each time she smiles, and seeing the shape of people's bones poking out just below the skin.

The thing about this story is that the skeleton is not actually what is horrifying, but rather the man's phobia of the skeleton. It's one of those stories where the protagonist is clearly not in his right mind. It only veers into body horror once the inhuman doctor that first stoked his fears into a phobia shows up and sucks the skeleton out of the man, leaving a gasping, jelly-like mass with nothing to hold it up.

Body horror inherently comes from something being unnatural, something a body is not supposed to have or be able to do.

If one were to view a racial trait, such as more or less body hair, darker or lighter skin, or the presence or absence of epicanthic folds as horrifying, we would call that person racist. If they viewed their own racial traits as horrifying, we wold call that internalized racism.

So now we can circle back to pregnancy. True, pregnancy can be dangerous and scary, and one's body goes through some pretty crazy changes during and after it, but it's also something that female bodies have evolved to be able to do. The potential to become pregnant--the specific gametes and organs and hormones--is literally what makes a body female, at least for placental mammals like humans. Pregnancy is a normal, natural, uniquely and definitively female biological process.

I saw that recently, that by claiming trans women can't be in female sports, we are claiming women are inferior.

No! There is a difference in the sexes and that is okay. It's okay to recognize we are built to handle things differently. It's okay to recognize women are not as likely to hit certain physical milestones as a man. It would be sexist to turn around and argue that difference makes women inferior.