💘

“If you start [the abortion argument] from the fetus, however, it’s hard to get back to the women who’ve had those 55 million abortions since Roe, let alone the ones who had illegal abortions before it, and are still doing so in great numbers around the world. You end up debating essentially unresolvable points: If we can agree that a fetus is fully formed at birth, what about the day before birth, a week before viability, or when it can feel pain or when it has a heartbeat or when it is implanted or at the very moment of conception? For abortion opponents, there is no logical stopping place, because fetal development is a continuous process, the unfolding of inherent capacities. Just as, in order to make the fetus visible [with ultrasound] the woman’s body must be rendered invisible, so the interests of the fetus (if something that does not think, or perceive or have self-awareness can be said to have interests) erase those of the woman. What is graduating high school or not feeling ‘ready’ to mother a child or the fact that you are living in your care compared with the very existence of this tiny, helpless creature? Abortion becomes a one-sided contest between responsibility and fecklessness, life and lifestyle, innocence and experience, which is to say innocence versus guilt. No one describes pregnant women as tiny or helpless- they are huge and powerful, they could kill a baby!- much less innocent. But fetuses are always innocent, even more innocent than babies, who scream and fuss and are full of needs and rage- ‘like a fiend hid in a cloud,’ as William Blake put it- and a fetus is way more innocent than a woman, even a rape victim, because what was she doing in that dress, in that place?”

sci-fi plot: yeah and in this futuristic city he meets a woman–

“And who is her performance for? Women? If so, what are we supposed to learn from her story? Surely not that we can find happiness through weight loss and a bottle of peroxide. Or can we?    According to the makeover story of modern female culture, the after is always construed as the real you that was just itching to assert her identity, to reveal her real face. After enough of these stories, however, not only is there no difference between character and appearance; the story of inner value collapses into yet another story of the surface.”

“women only joke when men are not around”!!!

Things men who are serious about becoming feminist allies have to do before they can even think about claiming they respect women:

“Female socialization is a process of psychologically constraining and breaking girls ― otherwise known as “grooming” ― to create a class of compliant victims. Across history, this breaking has included so-called “beauty practices” like female genital mutilation and foot binding, as well as the ever-popular child sexual abuse. Femininity is really just the traumatized psyche displaying acquiescence. In its essence, it is ritualized submission.”

“They reclassify healthy adult female flesh as “cellulite,” an invented “condition” that was imported into the United States by Vogue only in 1973; they refer to this texture as “disfiguring,” “unsightly,” “polluted with toxins.” Before 1973, it was normal female flesh.”

school schedules are designed in such a way that kids are deprived of adequate food and sleep. the sleep piece has been written on extensively, but it’s quite plain that requiring young people to wake up at 6am during the developmental phase when they need the most sleep and tend to stay up later is a terrible public health move. 

the most simplest way of explaining patriarchy, the way that finally got it to click for me was this:

IN ONE IMPORTANT WAY, an abusive man works like a magician: His tricks largely rely on getting you to look off in the wrong direction, distracting your attention so that you won’t notice where the real action is. He draws you into focusing on the turbulent world of his feelings to keep your eyes turned away from the true cause of his abusiveness, which lies in how he thinks. He leads you into a convoluted maze, making your relationship with him a labyrinth of twists and turns. He wants you to puzzle over him, to try to figure him out, as though he were a wonderful but broken machine for which you need only to find and fix the malfunctioning parts to bring it roaring to its full potential. His desire, though he may not admit it even to himself, is that you wrack your brain in this way so that you won’t notice the patterns and logic of his behavior, the consciousness behind the craziness. To further divert your gaze, he may work to shape your view of his past partners to keep you from talking to them directly and to prepare you to disbelieve them should you happen to hear what they say. If you could follow the thread of his conduct over a series of relationships, you would find out that his behavior isn’t as erratic as it looks; in fact, it follows a fairly consistent pattern from woman to woman, except for brief relationships or ones he isn’t that serious about. Above all, the abusive man wants to avoid having you zero in on his abusiveness itself. So he tries to fill your head up with excuses and distortions and keep you weighed down with selfdoubt and self-blame. And, unfortunately, much of the society tends to follow unsuspectingly along behind him, helping him to close your eyes, and his own, to his problem. The mythology about abusive men that runs through modern culture has been created largely by the abusers themselves. Abusive men concoct explanations for their actions which they give to their partners, therapists, clergypeople, relatives, and social researchers. But it is a serious error to allow abusers to analyze and account for their own problems. Would we ask an active alcoholic to tell us why he or she drinks, and then accept the explanation unquestioningly? This is what we would hear: