I was reading a blog post from a woman who's basically ruined her life and her marriage by getting a huge, reactive dog and prioritizing the dog over everything else in her life

she describes the dog as being like her baby/child as she doesn't have any kids, which is pretty standard with pet owners

but multiple, separate comments from men were saying there was a sexual undercurrent to the blog post, that the woman must be experiencing sexual attraction to the dog, one even replied that she was probably actually having sex with it

there was NOTHING sexual in the blog post whatever, not even remotely

she just talked about how it's interfered with her social life, work life, relationship with her parents and so on

the way she described how the dog had upended her life and how she was constantly having to plan her schedule around it with regards to making food for it and making sure it wasn't left alone too long was similar to the way women talk about having young children

the language she was using was MATERNAL not SEXUAL

but a bunch of men individually read it and immediately interpreted it as sexual attraction

HEARD THE WHOLE THING BEFORE, THAT

IS INCREDIBLE

The whole premise of the OG Tea App is women’s safety. To post men who: are abusive, rapists, misogynistic, womanizer, etc.

I just wanted you all to know that men have created a counter app for women, I won’t share the name for reasons I’ll explain soon. It was up for only 24 hours.

Do you want to know why it was only up for 24 hours?

Because men were using the website to post revenge porn of their ex girlfriends/wives/others.

When the Tea App started gaining traction and popularity, there was meltdowns from men all over the country. Men threatening lawsuits, men who are worried about being “falsely accused” of being rapists, abusers, and shitty men overall.

But the biggest outcry was men saying “We need an app like that for us men!!! Women can be shitty too!!!” But look what they did. Instead of proving a point that these women are these evil, manipulative, gold digging human beings— they prove our point. That men are, deep down, abusive predators. Opportunists, who would take ANY chance to hurt women.

Men are the wolves in sheep’s clothing. Men are barbaric, misogynistic, and sick.

(Lenin’s wife, for those that don’t know)

Another one:

Lobotomies are still bad, but a lot of people have now understood that it’s a deeply harmful and anti-human practice. It was often performed on women (60% of cases were women in the US, a study in Ontario put women patients at 72%) and on gay men. Societal mores have changed on what is psychiatrically appropriate—many of these women were depressed and repressed housewives, or were not naturally submissive to their husbands and considered “combative”.

Many lobotomies were called “ice pick lobotomies” because they involved inserting an ice pick through the eye to sever the part of your brain that feels emotions. There were different techniques, largely dependent on which surgeon you saw. Norbert Wiener said in 1948, "Prefrontal lobotomy... has recently been having a certain vogue, probably not unconnected with the fact that it makes the custodial care of many patients easier. Let me remark in passing that killing them makes their custodial care still easier."

In 1944, the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease ran an article saying, “The history of prefrontal lobotomy has been brief and stormy. Its course has been dotted with both violent opposition and with slavish, unquestioning acceptance."

Walter Freeman called the practice “surgically induced childhood”—he specialized in lobotomies and performed them until 1967, so he found this to be a good outcome. In fact, he worked on an “assembly line” process where he could lobotomies 20 people a day, and even did a surgical procedure face-off with another doctor in 1948 to compete in an operating theatre to show an audience of doctors that his technique was superior. The other professor was a professor at Yale, William Beecher Scoville, another famous lobotomist known for proliferating the procedure. They called it a miracle cure, and the gold standard for psychiatric treatment.

Scoville’s most famous patient, Henry Molaison, was a 7-year old boy with epilepsy after a fall from his bike. Schiller couldn’t find the problem, so he just destroyed all three regions of Henry’s temporal lobes. Afterwards, the surgeon noted memory loss “so severe as to prevent the patient from remembering the location of the rooms in which he lives, the names of his close associates, or even the way to the toilet or the urinal.”

Scoville’s wife sought psychiatric care after her husband cheated on her and she had a breakdown. Her husband lobotomized her himself.

In the 1960s, when schizophrenia became a radicalized charged diagnosis that was often used against Black people, especially those involved in the civil rights struggle. Walter Freeman did several pushes to lobotomize Black people, including as young as five, for “hyperactive and aggressive behavior”.

The practice continued in some places until the 1980s. It was used to treat schizophrenia, affective disturbance (mood disorders and people reacting in non-mainstream ways like being an opinionated woman or gay), and OCD, chronic neurosis (anxiety), psychopathic disorders, and depression, among other things. You may notice the old names for these things—things that we might not consider the same way now. Being gay was a mental disorder. Women who wanted independence or respect were often diagnosed. Not fulfilling your traditional societal role was a good way to end up institutionalized.

It was considered, at time of invention, to be an humane alternative to insulin comas and shock therapy (ECT). Many people considered it lifesaving and gold standard treatment for mental illness. Some reports believe that about a third of patients found the procedure beneficial. Others faced dementia, death, incontinence, inability to speak, paralysis, and other effects. Many people were unable to ever leave care again afterwards, though they were more complacent.

I don’t think any scientist who tells you that science is settled is a good scientist. I think that treatments that target people who don’t fit the mold of society, people who are countercultural, and people from marginalized groups should be especially criticized. Psychiatry is a very new field. Part of the phasing out of lobotomies had to do with the development of the first medications for psychiatric use—which in turn have had their own social, political, and ethical conundrums and misuse. Many could consider Valium (“mother’s little helper”) the spiritual successor to the lobotomy.

But in 1949, if I said lobotomies are bad—I might have been met with “Do you hate mentally ill people?” “It works great for most people!” “Without it, she will just be depressed and kill herself” or “My friend did it and all her problems seem better now”.

A friend’s husband killed himself after trying to kill her, he had 22 guns stashed in the home and piles of bullets, and she was trapped because divorce laws in our state require that moms stay with husbands for at least 6 months after filing divorce to give them time to “reconcile” and judges “don’t like to hear he said/she said abuse stories.”

If you have that many guns in your home unlocked around kids, you immediately get carted to prison for 20 years and mom gets your social security payments while she’s locked up as if you were a dead parent.

At the same time, it’s also extremely easy for a man to kill a woman with his bare hands in a matter of seconds.

AND: Domestic Violence is 2-4 times more prevalent in police families than in the general population. How many police officers do you see going to prison for beating their wives.

Prison abolition is about structural changes that make people less economically precarious so that they are less likely to commit crimes of poverty and people in unsafe situations are more able to leave because they are not economically dependent on their abuser.

The US Government spends over 80 billion dollars a year on prisons. The states spend a combined 64 billion. If we got rid of prisons today and gave every person in the country an equal share of that money (about $430/year), that could make a lot of people’s lives a lot better. That doesn’t even count any money spent on policing.

Creating a society in which unfettered violence is allowed by state actors does not make people safer.

Estimates of how many domestic abusers spend time in jail are between 2-10%. Only about a quarter of DV cases are reported, only about ⅓ of reported cases result in prosecution, and even at high estimates of 50% of those prosecutions resulting in convictions, that’s still only about 4% of domestic abusers who are convicted, and not all convictions come with jail time.

Since we don’t take domestic violence seriously enough already, we should let the ones who are convicted out and hope the systemic changes happen fast enough and women don’t die during that time.

Who’s going to make these systematic changes, I don’t know, since if we can’t lock up domestic abusers, I seriously doubt we’d be willing to pay those domestic abusers or over-recruit them in the workforce to improve their financial situations in the hope they stop beating their wives over it, but idk, maybe a miracle will happen. I’m sure a check of $430 per person in the United States will solve domestic violence. I mean, we all saw beatings go down when people got their COVID economic stimulus checks, right?

And as we all know, only poor men without economic opportunities beat their wives. Since rich men have other outlets for their anger, we don’t have to worry about what incentives to provide those men to stop them from hurting their wives - they never do it! Rich women are never beaten either, it’s not possible to abuse a woman who has a job and health insurance and opportunities.

Why continue to support a system actively working against the interests of domestic violence victims.

It’s possible to abuse anyone, it’s impossible to stop people from hurting other people entirely. It’s easier to escape violence with money and support. It’s easier to spot red flags and get out earlier with education and a lack of economic desperation.

A nicer prison is still a prison. A prison with carpets and couches and libraries is still a prison. A prison with computer classes and GED programs and single-person cells and grocery stores and massage therapists is still a prison.

What should have happened to the man who tried to kill my friend, since prison is not an option. He already had a job, he had savings, he had a car, he had family, he had medication and health insurance, he ran a fucking support group for other men. What could have been introduced in his life that would have stopped him from threatening to kill her.

Men don't hurt women and children because uwu they didn't have enough education or opportunities; they do it because they feel entitled to do so. Removing what little consequences they do get doesn't help that.

something minor you shouldn't go to prison for (because prison is damaging to people).

Something that shouldn't even be a fucking crime (like 'stealing' resources you and/or your children need to live, or a woman killing her abuser)

And the last category - executable offenses (like rape, domestic violence, murder etc)

Most women shouldn't be in prison because they are there due to male violence. Most men shouldn't be in prison because they should've been hanged.

And still, 40% of icelandic women have been sexually and/or physically assaulted by men. Nearly half of the women in the world's best country for women have been violated and battered by men.