Feminist First

if someone asks me my pronouns, i clarify that i'm female, but that i dont much care about the question and will answer to he or they or she or whatever floats your boat. so, i didn't really "do" anything. hell, i'd still be on testosterone if it wasn't for the side effects that presented themselves almost immediately in the two-ish months i was on it and the long term health risks i learned about later after i stopped. if it was safe, i'd be fine with taking it. being bigger and hairier would be great, i'd love that. it's just not worth the risk to my health, to me. and i'm learning to love the body i have, instead of longing for a different one.

From the Guardian.

There is still a huge lack of awareness that choking cannot be performed in a safe way, and its normalization through pornography is putting people at risk.

Almost 1% of all children in Australia born in the year 2022 have been forced to undertake STI testing because a male pedophile worked at a series of childcare centres and assaulted countless victims

My initial research (mostly news articles) all said that there’s no benefit to sex-segregated education. They acknowledged outliers like that school for young black men with such incredible graduation statistics, but said that, generally, there’s no benefit.

But then I kept looking. And it turns out that yeah, if you look at all children overall, there’s no benefit - because sex-segregated education is great for girls, and terrible for boys.

Girls in all-girl schools get better grades, have closer and healthier social lives, and have better mental health.

Boys in all-boy schools get worse grades and get in trouble more.

When attempting to make sense of this, journalists and researchers usually fall back on “girls do better because they’re not distracted by boys/boy drama, and boys do worse because there’s no girls to impress.”

Which is ridiculous, of course, because these effects are seen even grade school - 8 year old boys are not doing well in school to impress girls. It’s also ridiculous because teenage boys are also not doing well in school to impress girls. That’s not how teenagers work.

The answer is obvious to women. Girls learn better away from boys because they are not being assaulted, harassed, belittled, or compared to their male peers at every turn. Boys do worse away from girls because, without a socially acceptable target, they turn their antisocial urges on each other. Even adult men do this when separated from women - see hazing scandals at fraternities, or the constant man-on-man sexual harassment that is just “part of military culture.”

She was held captive for eight days and repeatedly raped by Melodia, who told her she would have to marry him so she would not become a “dishonored” woman. On January 2nd 1966, after one week, Franca Viola was released, and the kidnappers arrested. As expected, Filippo Melodia offered Franca a rehabilitating marriage. [...]

Knowing she had her family’s support, Franca publicly refused Melodia’s proposal, thus acting against a long-standing common practice in the Sicilian society of the time. Franca Viola became the first Italian woman to publicly reject a rehabilitating marriage. Not only that, but she went so far as to take her abductor to court, accusing him of kidnapping, carnal violence, and intimidation. It was not an easy thing to do: she and her family were threatened, ostracized and persecuted by most of the people of Alcamo, to the point of having their vineyard and barn burned to the ground.

These events and the following trial had a wide resonance in the Italian media, and the Parliament itself was directly involved, as it became obvious that part of the existing code clashed with the public opinion. Melodia’s lawyers tried to portray Viola as a willing participant of the so-called fuitina (elopement, a runaway to get married in secret) rather than a victim of kidnapping, but in May 1967, Melodia was finally found guilty. [...]

The process itself is very simple—feminists will recognize it as having some of the best characteristics of consciousness raising (CR) as it was done early in the movement: no interruption or evaluation is allowed. With time and use I came to appreciate the very complex genius of this process. As a brainstorming measure, it has no peer, and it is the perfect mode for addressing questions such as those I posed to the women who were to meet in San Jose.

It works best in a group of three that has an hour and a half at its disposal. Everyone in the group has equal time to talk—in this case, a half hour each—uninterrupted and with out evaluation. This is a revolutionary experience for some women. Being seriously and completely listened to, being genuinely heard, hardly ever happens to women in ordinary everyday life. Many women cry the first time they try this process. Their being so avidly heard in the present causes them to realize how deeply they have been wounded by being ignored and disregarded, shut up, talked over, and found inconsequential or amusing during most of their past lives.

It is also often the first time women have ever listened to somebody else for a half hour or so without responding, without murmuring, "Oh yeah?," "I see," "Um hum," "I know how you feel," at appropriate intervals. Or laughing, or making sympathetic noises. It is often the first time they have ever listened to somebody else without allowing their facial expressions to communicate understanding, puzzlement, disagreement, or a host of other reactions. It is not easy for women to learn not to respond. We are thoroughly conditioned to respond. We always respond. That is one of our roles in patriarchy—to be the responders, the chorus. Men talk, and we nod and say breathlessly, "Then what happened?" or "Oh, yes, I'd love to hear about your childhood rock collection!" Our children have legitimate needs for our attention. They need to have us laugh when they're witty or cluck with dismay when they tell us their woes. Our faces are infinitely plastic: we are required to register admiration, servility, sympathy, concern, sorrow, and understanding all day long every day. We almost cannot not respond by this time in our lives. We almost cannot allow somebody to set forth upon this quest for their own ideas in our presence without our solicitous questions and reassurances, our reactions stamped clearly on our visages, our oohings and aahings—we are such active listeners. When we first try to listen passively to others, some of us feel like traitors; we feel as if we're doing something illegal, as if we might be arrested for it any moment.

The amount of vitriol aimed at her and her work to diminish her accomplishments and devalue her work when compared to what is leveled at any men (take your pick really), is telling.

Nobody is trying to retroactively claim that any movie ever produced by Weinstein was actually a dud, or that The Pianist has no cinematic value despite Polanski being an actual child rapist, or that if you still enjoy Toy Story you're stupid because it was actually "bad all along" despite Lasseter being... well who he is. No.

People are not trying to pretend any piece of media ever produced by "bad men" were actually never any good. Or not to the extend I'm seeing it happen with JKR and Harry Potter in any case...

First because, again, no one levels that kind of bullshit at other creators. No one is crying foul about Pullman writing within the HDM universe, nor at GRRM for writing side projects within ASOIF before even finishing the main story (granted, he does get criticisms for not writing the end at all, but that's a legitimate thing to say, the vitriol isn't about him writing something else and expending per see which makes a difference here). Others are allowed to expend, to add, even to sell their intellectual property to big studios to plunder without much criticism, but god forbid JKR says Hermione loved math in middle school on Twitter. They act like for her to be legitimate as "HP's owner" she must be perfect and needs to ask "permission" before having fun with it just for the sake of it. I've never seen any other creator treated that way to THAT extent, and if I'm wrong, please show it to me, but I don't think you'll be able to.

Secondly because in what God forsaken universe do you live in where this Fandom DIDN'T ask? We did ask. We did nothing but ask! Are you all zoomers who didn't grow up during the madness or do you have that much of a short term memory?

Back in 2007 after DH was published, people kept asking her over and over again; "Please Jo write Hogwarts: A History", "I hope she does a Marauders prequel!", "Jo, what is Neville's wand core?", "it would be so cool to know what the next Gen is up to" and so on and so forth. This is why Pottermore originally became a thing in the first place, a website which she labeled a gift to the readers at the start and where she released the unpublished material that didn't make it into the novels for FREE.

But now that you don't like everything that she's said and that it doesn't entirely conform to your imagination, ideas and American-centred calvinist politics, you're acting like toddlers throwing temper tantrums for not getting exactly what you want?

A bunch of you are acting so entitled it's not even funny, JK Rowling is one of the huge reason why Fandom culture is allowed to be what it is today, she's was one of the first big name authors to publicly say that people should be allowed to play in her sandbox, with the toys she brought in, even actively encouraged it. But now here you are acting like you own the sandbox and she ought to ask you before participating if she wants to.