Chronicles Of New York C.I.T.Y

Look, it’s our friendly male-privileged anon come to tell me I’m being all womanly hysterical.

I’m assuming you’re a guy. If you’re a girl, and this doesn’t piss you off, I’m a little concerned, honestly.

The fact is that it is a big deal, and you just earned yourself a free lecture on why so siddown and shaddup.

Cracked ran a rather diverting article today on

"6 Insane Sex Myths People Used to Teach as Facts"

including things like how westerners apparently thought that Chinese women who immigrated had sideways vaginas and that doctors attributed any number of problems to the fact that they believed women’s uteri could detach themselves when the woman was not pregnant and scamper around the woman’s innards like some sort of wayward jellyfish blob.

Hilarious, right? Can’t believe people used to think that! Oh, how naive they all were!

Which brings us to women-pee-out-of-their-vagina.

People back then kind of have an excuse for stupid notions, because a lot of the time there wasn’t the technology or research or scientific community to call them out on it in order to spread information that was actually factual.

We do not have that excuse today.

Yes, I heard that, greyface in sunglasses in the second row.

"well we don’t teach ridiculous stuff like that!"

Spoiler Alert: We totally do.

Stuff like the complete erasure of parts of female anatomy, publicly taught and widespread misinformation about others and the fact that I learned more about my own body with 15 minutes on Wikipedia than I did in two mandatory Health classes and a Medical Anatomy class.

Send your arguments at me, believe me, they don’t hold water.

"The clitoris doesn’t have anything to do with reproduction!"

Sex Ed covers more than just reproduction. Every time they sent me home with a little paper for your parent/guardian to sign, they said they would be talking about anatomy as well as reproduction.

"Well, female anatomy is a lot more complicated…"

Doesn’t that mean they should spend more time covering it rather than skipping over the parts they deem ‘unnecessary’? Even in my Medical Anatomy class when we had the diagrams to label, despite there being a clitoris in the diagram, there wasn’t a lil line to write down what it was.

"Maybe they didn’t think it was appropriate to talk about for high school."

Female pleasure.

So lewd.

How dare they.

Get the pitchforks and burn the witch.

"They don’t talk about male pleasure either!"

Bitch, please.

I heard aaaaalll about what happens when a dude is aroused and orgasms with the erections and ejaculations and all that nonsense.

Girl orgasms are apparently not a thing. And, depending on the class, neither was female arousal.

(Which I find decidedly disturbing, as a side note.)

"Female orgasms aren’t a part of reproduction either."

Maybe not.

BUT IT IS A SIMPLE PHYSICAL REACTION THAT SHOULD BE TAUGHT IF ONLY FOR SCIENTIFIC AND MEDICAL ACCURACY.

"Fine. The clitoris is controversial. That hardly covers the entire spectrum of female sexuality having misinformation and crap."

Apparently you didn’t read the part up above about how I did not learn what happens when a woman is aroused or orgasms in three years of classes that are supposed to teach me about this thing.

"If it took you 15 minutes on Wikipedia to figure stuff out, why are you so mad? That’s hardly a waste of time."

Because I deserve to know about my own body, and when schools teach Sex Ed in any form, they are taking on the responsibility of teaching me that.

And yet, I learned absolutely nothing useful.

That’s a problem.

"Okay, okay. They don’t talk about female sexual reactions, and that’s kinda sexist."

You know what else is kinda sexist? Telling men that sex is great and women that it’s going to hurt and suck and also you’ll get pregnant and die.

What am I talking about, you say?

The hymen. You know, the thing that covers a woman’s vaginal opening and breaks and there’s blood and that’s how you can tell if your girlfriend is lying about whether or not you’re her first.

Well guess what, buddy-boy, you dumped that girl for no reason because that’s not actually what a hymen is and you’re also a jerk.

The hymen is a flexible membrane that partially covers the vaginal opening (usually in a sort of crescent shape when they are but a wee lass) and did you notice the word up there? ‘Flexible’? Do you know what that means? It means that if a woman is sufficiently aroused, it prolly ain’t gonna break. (wow do you think this myth has anything to do with the lack of knowledge we’re taught about female arousal???)

I mean dude you can shove a baby outta that thing and it returns to its original shape, you can’t tell if a woman is a virgin or not by the state of her hymen anyways. They can tear during exercise n stuff as well but there is literally not much of a reason why sex should be painful for girls and why you call it “popping the cherry”

OH WAIT MAYBE IT’S BECAUSE DUDES LIKE TO THINK THAT THEIR DICK HAS MAGICAL POWERS THAT FOREVER CHANGES A WOMAN’S LIFE AND SHE’S NEVER BE THE SAME AFTER YOU WRECKED THAT TIGHT LIL HOLE.

Well, fun fact, if she’s tight that means you kind of suck balls at the whole sex thing.

Can we talk about how dangerous this is, actually?

Yes. I said dangerous. Not because I’m a girl and I would like sex to be enjoyable thank you, but because we’re teaching women that a men have a right to have sex be enjoyable where we do not.

We’re teaching women that if she is uncomfortable or in pain, that is normal and she has no right to complain.

We’re teaching women to do something because it makes a man happy, regardless of how she feels.

We’re teaching women to be the submissive, receptive partner rather than an active participant.

I didn’t learn about a woman’s arousal or a woman’s orgasm simply because apparently that isn’t important.

It doesn’t matter if a woman is enjoying it.

It doesn’t matter if she likes what you’re doing.

We teach these things in a public setting, and we wonder why youth are legitimately confused about what constitutes rape, and why it is a bad thing that has a profoundly negative and possibly permanent effect on the victim.

birth control and abortion were considered sinful for the same reason.

anti-choice sentiment started because people (men) wanted women to be punished, and these misogynistic ideas have carried on for hundreds of years.

17 lies we need to stop teaching girls about sex

Fueled by outdated ideals of gender roles and the sense that female sexuality is somehow shameful, there are certain pernicious myths about girls and sex that just won’t die. That sex education in America has gaping holes doesn’t help much, either; in a recent Centers for Disease Control (CDC) report, just 6 out of 10 girls said that their schools’ sex ed curriculum included information on how to say no to sex. This lack of personal agency was reflected in a forthcoming study by sociologist Heather Hlavka at Marquette University as well, which found that many young girls think of sex simply as something that is “done to them.”

i got Super Streak

WOW

WOW

Women of Steel

*clears throat*

there were actually tons of women and girls on board ships during the age of sail and it’s really cool history that no one!!! ever!!! talks about!!! 

like captains of merchant ships used to bring their wives and children on board for long voyages all the time (and of course there were plenty of well known female pirate ship captains, and women cross-dressing as men, and prostitutes that more people seem to know of)

there’s actually a really amazing story of one woman, Mary Ann Patten who was the wife of the captain of this ship called Neptune’s Car. Captain Patten decided that he wanted her onboard with him and she was super about this and learned all about navigation and sailing and everything. so this one voyage they’re going around the tip of south america when her husband gets sick and is bed ridden with a fever right as the ship sails into one of the worst storms any of the crew had ever seen and it looks like they might lose the ship or have to stop

so you know who takes over??? the first mate??? 

no.

MARY

she took over the whole crew and sailed that ship through freezing water and pack ice and had it coasting smoothly into the san francisco harbour like it was nothing. and she did this all at age 19. while pregnant.

at one point the first mate tried to get the crew to mutiny against her but they all rallied with her and told him to shut the heck up because she obv knew what she was doing.

there’s a great book about women in the age of sail called ‘female tars’ by suzanne stark that i cannot recommend enough and has way more amazing stories and insights about the myriad roles women and girls played aboard ship during that time period.

Female Tars: Women Aboard Ship in the Age of Sail by Suzanne Stark

Hen Frigates: Passion and Peril, Nineteenth-Century Women at Sea by Joan Druett

Hen Frigates: Wives of Merchant Captains Under Sail by Joan Druett

Iron Men, Wooden Women: Gender and Seafaring in the Atlantic World, 1700-1920 edited by Margaret S. Creighton and Lisa Norling

Petticoat Whalers: Whaling Wives at Sea, 1820-1920 by Joan Druett

Sea Queens: Women Pirates Around the World by Jane Yolen

Seafaring Women: Pirate Queens, Female Stowaways and Sailors’ Wives by David Cordingly

The Captain’s Best Mate: The Journal of Mary Chipman Lawrence on the Whaler Addison, 1856-1860 by Mary Chipman Lawrence