hop off my clit

instead of watching the abuse on screen, we hear about it through the interactions between the wives. they tell us what happened, and in that way they take control of their own narrative.

rather than being voyeurs witnessing the wives’ trauma played out onscreen, we were an audience listening to their story.

“So instead of showcasing the specific treatment we were told of it, which is the contrary philosophy of most filmmaking (show, don’t tell)”

demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of the idea behind “show, don’t tell.” I would argue that Mad Max: Fury Road DOES show us how the Wives were treated by Immortan Joe. However, it chooses not to do so in the obvious way (which would be showing the abuse), but rather by showing us in other ways.

We’re shown the message the Wives leave behind: “We are not things,” from which we can infer that’s exactly how they’ve been treated for God knows how long.

We’re shown that they wear flimsy white fabric that leaves their bodies on display, unlike pretty much everybody else in the film.

We’re shown them using boltcutters to rid themselves of chastity belts, devices which pretty much exist solely to remove a woman’s ability to choose her sexual partners.

We’re shown rage from the Dag when, even though time is of the essence, she takes the time to run back and kick one of the discarded belts as hard as she can before running back to join the others at the War Rig.

We’re shown Angharad using her pregnant body to shield Max and Furiosa from Immortan Joe, because she knows beyond a shadow of a doubt he won’t shoot her or her unborn child because he still views her as his property.

We hear Furiosa’s “Remember me?” before she kills Joe, and there’s so much fury and anger in those two words that you know she was a Wife before she was an Imperator.

This is exactly why when we say that women are adult human females, TRAs will say things like “Oh so you’re reducing being a woman to having a vagina?”

It never occurred to me to fire back, “Why do you think that having a vagina is the only thing that makes me female?”

The female body is an intricately complex system that impacts our health and our lives every day, and the vagina is not the defining trait of the female sex but a statistically reliable indicator of it. What TRAs refuse to accept is that having a vagina means your body is supposed to have other components of the female reproductive system. This is not transphobic. This is not intersexist.

My body is both intelligent and messy and beautiful and gross and impressive. Every cell, every hormone, every muscle is why I am alive and strong. My uterus isn't there just to make babies. There are studies showing that it affects cognitive function and plays a role in memory. And my ovaries don't just make eggs. In actuality, the ovaries create hormones that impact bone density, cholesterol levels, heart health, and mood. There are things about my female body that work right, and there are things that don't work right. There are advantages I have over a typical male body, but there are also disadvantages I have compared to the male body. There is nothing about this that I have to be ashamed of.

To tell us that the female body, as a complex and holistic system, simply does not exist is how they can gaslight young girls into thinking that their bodies have not been taken advantage of by males in nearly every society since the dawn of time. It is how you squash any discussion of medical misogyny and doom millions of girls to a future of suffering with endometriosis, PCOS, and countless other disorders. It is how you convince a young girl who doesn't like her breasts because she doesn't like that boys ogle and grope them that it is because her breasts are the problem that must be removed instead of the men who raised these boys to believe that sexual access to her body without concern for her humanity was their birth right. It is how they convince a young girl that if she is poor and left to suffer by a society that does not care for her safety and well-being, that she can simply make an OnlyFans so that all men have access to her body which was never really hers to begin with, so there's no reason why this should be traumatic in the first place.

"The body as parts. People with uteruses, people with prostates, people with penises. We are all just a series of commodities, to be bought and sold, our human bodies are the enemy, our male and female forms are aberrations, mistakes that were forced on our sexless default."

part of the fantasy, as in pretending to be a woman/assaulting women as another "woman" is in and of itself sexually exciting to these men. maybe "the predator in disguise" part is the whole point.

a way for them to ensure even easier access to women and no accountability. in fact, predators ARE afraid of even the miniscule chance that they get caught because their biggest goal is to just to be able to continue doing what they're doing, uninterrupted, for their entire lives. they WILL take the extra step if it means they have an extra layer of protection: "boohoo i am just a victim of unfair false allegations because i am the most victim of all most victims, a trans woman!!!" they WILL take the extra step if it means they can enter women's spaces and keep everyone's guards down as long as possible.

not that much "extra work" to begin with. most of these predators think that slapping some lipstick and a messy wig on is enough for them to gain a minority status, and therefore the ability to harass and assault women and still be seen as a victim, and they're absolutely right. trans allies will march through death and hell and fire to defend them regardless of who they think they're defending, as long as the person in question says the magic words "i identify as a woman".

OR, and get this,

Ted Bundy disguised himself as a cop to gain the trust of victims before killing them. Why dress up as a cop when he didn’t always do it?

We have people pretending to be ICE agents to illegally detain migrants. Why pretend to be ICE when you can be a shit stain and call them?

Mark Twitchell created fake accounts on dating sites so he could catfish other males and kill them in a garage. Why didn’t he just go around killing people like normal?

Why did Albert Fish lock up a 19 year old, mentally impaired male, and have several torturous kink sessions with him before finally killing him. He had 6 children of his own in an era where males could legally abuse their wives and children. Why didn’t he do as much to them?

WHY DO HOMOPHOBIC MALES TRY TO COERCE LESBIANS INTO SEX, WHEN MOST OF THE HUMAN POPULATION IS OPPOSITE SEX ATTRACTED AND IT WOULD BE EASIER TO SLEEP WITH A STRAIGHT WOMAN?

Perpetrators of violence who get off on that violence don’t inherently care about the “ease” aspect. They care about getting their fix.

he also said that it was incredibly unlikely that sexism will ever be resolved in the medical field. that the majority of medications i will ever take - even some of which are "for women" - will not be clinically tested on my body.

the problem, he said, was in getting any human clinical trial approved. to test on a body with a uterus - any body, even elderly patients or those who have been sterilized - was often nigh-impossible, because the concern was that the test patient may, at any point, become pregnant. once/if the patient became pregnant, the study would not be about "the effects of New Medication on the body." instead, the trial would fail - the results would be "the effects of New Medication on a developing fetus/pregnant patient."

it was massively easier, he said, to just test without accounting for a uterus. that's how he phrased it - accounting for a uterus.

at the time, i remember him talking about the ethical implications of testing on a developing fetus; how such testing could theoretically bankrupt a company if a lawsuit was filed. he talked about informed consent and about how long it took for any legislation to be passed about this - that in 1993; the year i was born, it finally became illegal to outright exclude women and minorities from clinical trials.

i remember him shrugging. "that's not to say it doesn't happen," he said. my ears were ringing.

i was thinking about how every time i have been rushed to the ER, the first thing they have asked me is if i am pregnant. when i broke my wrist at 16 years old - despite never having had sex - they made me wait three hours for the test to come back negative before they gave me pain meds. the possibility of a child haunts my health.

how many people have died on the table because they were waiting for the pregnancy test before treatment. how many people have died on the table because they were pregnant, and the only thing we care about is the fetus.

it is hard to explain to other people, but it feels like some kind of strange ghost. our entire lives, we are supposed to "save" our bodies for our future partners. but really we are just saving the body for the future child, aren't we? that hovering future-almost that cartwheels around in a miasma. you can't get your tubes tied, what if you change your mind? think of the child you must have, eventually.

Except homosexuals never wanted any medical treatment to better our mental state. Homosexuality doesn’t cause homosexuals any distress that needs to be treated medically. Homosexuality being classed as a mental illness resulted in homophobes pushing medical treatment on us that we didn’t want to “fix” us. All homosexuals have ever wanted is to be left alone, unmedicalised.

Trans identity on the other hand stems from dysphoria that causes distress that people want medical treatment for. We’re told that dysphoria is so distressing that not treating it with hormones and surgeries leads to suicide. Healthy people who aren’t suffering from mental illness do not require medical treatment to stop them from killing themselves.

this idea that women just “choose” SW on a whim or because they’re wanting to cater to the male gaze?? delusional. at least 90% of women end up there because they don’t have other options. this is my personal opinion as a former sex worker who used it to escape homelessness. most of my co-workers were single mums struggling to feed their kids. full stop.

and YES you’ll see women online saying “i love it, i chose it, it’s empowering.” but you’re forgetting: that’s the JOB. the fantasy is the product. the whole point is to make men believe it’s fun, empowering, and a choice.

They’ll take things from the HP books that were clearly intentional writing choices and act like they were mistakes or things she did wrong

“She was such a coward for never saying Dumbledore was gay in the books”

So true bestie! At a time where books with gay characters would literally be banned from schools and public libraries in the uk (section 28) she just completely coincidentally wrote him as flamboyant, eccentric, mysterious, oddly lonely, intensely private, estranged from his only living family, openly hated by conservatives, criticized for making his school too inclusive, consistently choosing to employ social undesirables at great personal risk, never married or partnered, and suspiciously close with his best friend that he had a tragic falling out with

“She was so racist for naming the only Asian character Cho Chang / giving the only Indian characters the surname Patil / giving a black character the surname Shacklebolt”

There are so many ways to transliterate names from Asian languages into English, let’s not pretend that a white author in the nineties couldn’t have done a lot worse than choosing safe and extremely common names from other cultures rather than risking making something up. Also a huge amount of the names in the book are silly or goofy or specific to people’s skills or jobs, and a TON are alliterative. I’ve seen people say jk essentially named her “ching-chong” and quite frankly i think they’re the racist ones for even suggesting it

Also after centuries of the global slave trade of African people are we really supposed to act like the only acceptable surnames their descendants are allowed are the ones they remember from their homes or the names they married into or the names of their former masters? Is it really impossible that some would choose new names for themselves based on how they escaped or were freed, or that were particularly meaningful to them?

“She was so evil for creating a race of creatures that are happy to be enslaved”

It’s funny how that was your take away - did she actually write house elves as being happy to be enslaved or is that just what all the pureblood students constantly repeated to the concerned outsider who threatened to dismantle that? It’s not like she constantly makes use of unreliable narrators in her writing or anything.

She gets flak for having written hermione as a good hearted little crusader who didn’t ever actually ask the elves what they wanted. She also gets flak for having the elves not want to be freed, even when the text makes it clear that the act of being freed causes them some amount of actual physical suffering.

If we put our critical thinking to good use and actually analyze the literature instead of taking every piece of it at surface value, it’s almost like she was making commentary about how people who get taken advantage of often become trapped in situations they can’t escape and try to make the best of it. Wonder why on earth that might’ve resonated with a woman who had an abusive husband she had to run away from. I’m sure it’s probably not connected.

“She was so nasty for saying they used to just shit on the floor and vanish it”

It’s almost like throughout her book series she established that the British magical world was so contemptuous of muggle technology and innovation that they were literally stuck in the past living like it was still Victorian times, using quills and parchment and candles and carrier birds.