power to women

So you agree? You agree that performing femininity is a chore and includes hour-long beauty sessions, while masculinity is just pure inaction and comfortable existence in one's body?

And you agree that to be considered a woman, a man has to put on pounds of make-up, while all a woman has to do to be considered a man is simply exist in her natural body?

Among the Kesh people, men and women live very similar lives, but children inherit their mothers’s house, and their mother’s House. The literal house, the big family home, the family wealth passes from mother to daughter. Men tend to move into their wife’s household when they get married, and move back in with their mother if they are widowed or divorced. The children tend to stay in the mother’s family. The figurative House, the membership in a social and ritual community which also serves as the equivalent a last name, is also passed from mother to child.

Fortunately, the Kesh are a generous and flexible people, and this line of matrilineal inheritance doesn’t dictate people’s lives. People share wealth rather than hoard it. Mothers own the houses, but both men and women can move around freely, and can choose to live with relatives or friends or mentors. House membership dictates some ritual roles and duties, but says little about daily life, and so people are free to take up work and habits nominally associated with another House. Which means that despite the matriarchal arrangement, the men of Kesh have it pretty good, overall their lives are freer, wider and more meaningful than the lives of most men or women today. Many of them fill positions of power and responsibility. Most women see men as equals, and there are only rare instances of old women grumbling that men are ill-suited for this or that type of work.

And yet, despite all of that happiness, there’s the underlying truth that men don’t have children, men don’t have houses. Subsequently, there’s a kind of psychological homelessness, the knowledge that even if you have a house it isn’t your house, that even if you have children they aren’t your children.

Men are free to live where and how they wish, but all the big family houses are a mother’s house, a wife’s mother’s house, or some other woman’s house. In practice, men who are without a house are always taken in, but they can never have the certainty of a house they inherit, the way women do. Man can and often do have a close relationship with their children, and fatherhood matters, but motherhood matters more. Fathers will always see their children initiated into a different House’s rites and rituals, alongside their mother. Men don’t have the power of a home or a family or a lineage. Women can look at the house they live in, and say, my mothers have lived here for centuries, but men cannot say that, for their fathers moved, changed house and House every generation, leaving them no heritage, no history. Sure, men can still have power as individuals, as hunters or craftsmen or sages, and the mores of this generous and benevolently flexible society safeguard men’s wellbeing and prevent women from abusing or exploiting their inherited power. And yet, even cushioned by a very kind and fair society, the loss is real.

And she wasnt the only one disguising herself as a man to fight in the Mexican Revolution: María de la luz Barrera and Angela Jiménez did the same. But they arent retroactively transed because they were straight.

• I am endorsing sweatshops run by women

• I am endorsing unfair labor practices if perpetrated by women

• I support MLMs

• I think margaret thatcher had girl power

When you make posts that use the word women/woman for people who experience misogony you're excluding all the trans and nonbinary people who experience misogony, you're telling us that to have access to feminism and activist communities that we have to label ourselves women even if we don't.

And then if you use the word women to talk about body functions such as menstruation you're also excluding trans women who don't experience those things.

Please find alternative language when you aren't referring to yourself or specific people because it's really tiring being misgendered because cis people won't think things through.

Every one who falls short of cis men experiences some level of gender discrimination based in misogony. Gender discrimination will never be simple enough to fit into a binary so you need to take that into account when you interact with gender related activism and justice.