sisterhood

There has never been a point in history where feminists engaged in actual positive change were well liked and warmly received. To be feminist is to be hated and called whatever the Worst Thing Possible currently is btw.

Men’s misogynistic movements (and I’m not saying this to praise them) often appear stronger because they don’t usually exclude other men from joining. Even when they disagree, they tend to keep them within the movement and place them into different categories rather than removing them entirely. They understand that collective power requires having more people involved. These groups aren’t free of internal conflicts either; they still divide over things like ideology, race, religion, class, leadership, and tactics. However, they often prioritize a shared goal over their differences, which can make them appear more unified.

Non-goldstar lesbians are so strong for having experienced the trauma of being with men and kept surviving 💕💕🎉💕

In Minnesota, rape within marriage or any "voluntary sexual relationship" could only be prosecuted if the couple lived apart and (if married) one spouse had filed for legal separation.

Until 2005, marital rape was only illegal in Tennessee if a weapon was used or “serious bodily harm” resulted. Presumably, the effects of unwanted pregnancy and childbirth would not have been accepted as serious bodily harm.

In 2014, Ohio outlawed spousal rape involving violent force, but intercourse performed on an unconscious spouse after purposefully impairing them with drugs was explicitly excluded from the legal definition of rape.

In 2017, John Rideout was found guilty of first degree rape and first degree sodomy of two different women and received the mandatory minimum sentence. Around the same time, a Minnesota woman’s husband who had, four times, drugged her to unconsciousness and filmed intercourse, sometimes while their young child watched, could not be charged with sexual assault. He was convicted of invasion of privacy and sentenced to 45 days in jail. Urged by his victim, Minnesota repealed all exemptions for marital rape in 2019, predicting that 7 additional convictions would result each year.

As of 2026, South Carolina will not prosecute marital rape unless the victim can prove "high and aggravated" violence. There is no suggestion that forced pregnancy and childbirth would be considered sufficiently violent or harmful, even for a woman who is newly postpartum or otherwise at increased risk of perinatal injury, disability, and death.

Also in South Carolina, sexual battery carries a lower maximum sentence if it occurs within a marriage.

In Connecticut, demanding sex while using or threatening force against a third person, such as a child, is illegal rape in "ordinary" cases, but not for spouses or even unmarried cohabitants.

@laurierrose Sure! What’s crazy is, I actually remember the exact context of why I said this; it was because I had just watched Demi Lovato’s documentary on her own life. (Disclaimer: I could be conflating some stuff, in terms of what info was in it vs. what I found out from other sources later–it’s been a long time since I watched it, but I do remember the effect it had on me.)

In it, she talked about having an eating disorder, being addicted to drugs, experiencing bullying, mental illness, and toxic work environments as a child star, to the point of being raped by a co-star, who never saw justice and wasn’t even removed from the project. This doc was also after her phase of identifying as nonbinary and using they/them pronouns, which, the sociological reasons there jump out I think.

In the documentary, I remember being struck about how every single thing she talked about was, “my trauma, my trauma, my trauma.” Every experience either went back to her past trauma or was in itself a trauma. There was no particular commentary in terms of gender–being targeted specifically as a female person, for sexual assault, damaging standards of thinness and beauty, etc–nor even commentary in terms of child actors as a group, their vulnerability to harm and exploitation. She was just narrating a story of harms done to her as a kind of explanation to the public, but with no particular analysis.

It struck me at the time, and it’s stuck with me since then, that framing life events like the ones she experienced as “trauma” is a way of shrinking and psychologizing and personalizing a phenomenon that is larger and political. “The personal is political,” right? Except that it seemed to me then, and to a large extent now, that what had previously been understood to have political dimensions (maybe that’s a fantasy, maybe it was never thought of that way) had been shrunk down to individual instances of harm with no particular pattern in the larger society and no particular social meaning. This was just stuff that was done to her. And why her? There was nothing in it about being a young girl specifically in an extremely vulnerable and exploitable position under the thumb of one of the largest media companies in the world. Just about her trauma.

She had kind of been the biggest example of this phenomenon that I saw at the time, but especially in this fairly early Tiktok/other shortform media just-after-covid era, I felt I was seeing this therapized language absolutely everywhere. This is right around when terms like “gaslighting” got super popular and present in the public consciousness as well. All of this is still everywhere tbh, and shows up in a million different places, because therapyspeak, whether we like it or not, is embedded in our day-to-day language and is what we’re using to describe everything.

and why was it targeted at their own community, specifically. there was arguably a very short, limited time period in internet history where liberal leftists judged some tinder profiles for listing something like "fat/black people dni" and stuff. but. this has been going on for YEARS now, and it only seems to be getting worse.

like i mean, sure, you could just say that the lgbt community has been infiltrated by straight males who cannot take no for an answer, and that's a clean, easy explanation, but i genuinely want to believe that the whole movement is not THAT fucking stupid.

so what the fucking hell is going on?

like why does this take such a priority in the community discourse? why is this important? why is this interesting?

IF, and i say IF your feelings of aversion toward another human being only stem from some kind of unfair prejudice, the goal should be to try to question and challenge that prejudice in and of itself, just so that it does not negatively affect that person, or anyone else around you. but deciding not to date them is not a negative effect. it is always, no matter fucking what, a neutral choice. you are not hurting anyone by deciding to not date them, because they weren't entitled to your romantic/sexual interest in the first place.

like sure, maybe in deciding that, idk, visibly disabled people are gross, you are going to dismiss a person who would have otherwise been a perfect match for you. but that's your fucking loss. not theirs. they weren't promised anything. instead, they deserve to find a companion for whom being disabled has never been an issue to begin with, and they definitely do not have to wait for you to go through the whole unlearning process in front of them.

but this is not even about that, this is about sexual orientation. if we are to accept that straight people exist and that they legitimately, genuinely are unable to find people of their own sex attractive, why the fuck would that same logic not apply to homosexuals? why do the homosexuals need to do so much more of this "are you sure but are you sure are you sure though it is not a bias are you absolutely sure because i mean like are you suuuureee"

a lot of women are peaking on tiktok because transwomen dogpiled one black girl for talking about female oppression (what’s new?) and now that other women are jumping to her defense and pointing out that they never felt like transwomen cared about women’s rights and expected unquestioning fealty they’re just dropping the feminist act all together. in what world does someone who is ambivalent about trans people at worst warrant them wishing death and unwanted pregnancies on them? how are women still doing olympic level gymnastics to defend these men???

these people are standing next to you seething because you’re talking about how roe v wade effects you, because you broke up with your bf when you found out he is in the manosphere, because you said you were feeling bad from your period. they’re going to reddit to post cisfoid death or complain that you made him feel excluded. they won’t ever be on your side.

granted i’m not a professional psychiatrist but i can’t think of any other mental illness where the unwell patient makes a statement about reality and that statement is “affirmed.” a patient with a restrictive ED states they need to be severely underweight to be worthy as a person, a patient with OCD states that if they don’t repeat same ritualistic behavior something terrible is going to happen to them, a patient with depression states that the world would be better off without them in it…all of these hypothetical patients are making statements about reality as a result of what their mental illness/disorder is telling them. but no therapist in their right mind would “affirm” any of these beliefs because they’re obviously the result of a mind that is unwell and “affirming” these individuals would just make them sicker by pushing them deeper into their unhealthy line of thinking.

the same cannot be said of gender dysphoria, where a patient states that they were born in the wrong body/they should have been the opposite sex and that belief about reality is then “affirmed” by medical professionals. in not all, but many cases it’s “affirmed” with barely any questioning/pushback at all. there are a lot of things about “gender affirming care” that i find concerning, but i think the most questionable thing of all literally comes down to it’s name.

not to mention putting this creepy as fuck trend directly in the bio. that trend being imitating a toddler who can't count/know their own age and holds up fingers. i've seriously lost count of all the posts featuring the "this many" trend, many of which are sexual in nature. nothing sexier to a lot of these people than... toddlers

We know this behavior and we can dismiss him for the misogynist he is without hesitation.

But the misogynistic TIMs? They’re actively pretending to be women, insisting that they are women and have ALWAYS been women. They appropriate our experiences. They infiltrate historically female only spaces and communities (I’m not even a lesbian but the amount of literal males walking around calling themselves lesbians is infuriating), and then call us bigots for protesting it. They speak over women and attempt to rewrite the history of feminism. They advocate for completely redefining the word woman.

These are men taking on the role of a woman and silencing real women but with the support of supposedly progressive movements.

We don’t have to worry about leftists publicly protecting MRAs from criticism. But when it comes to trans women, leftists themselves will completely turn against women and label us bigots.