We Can Do Everything

because, like, that’s the seldom-portrayed romantic dream in the patriarchal hellscape that is our world, isn’t it?

a dude being willing to say, “i understand if you don’t feel the same way about me, and i’ll leave you alone forever about this if my attention is unwanted.”

‪Ariana Grande : God is a woman‬

‪Me: ‬

Eu vi, ia fazer um post sobre

1 - click on this flag icon

2 - select “Violação de termos legais — Contém conteúdo que viola leis na sua jurisdição”

PETA: They’d rather spend their money on publicity campaigns than on the animals in their care. PETA killed 73.8% of the animals in their care in 2015 (x)

FCKH8: Is a for-profit company that exploits oppressed groups for money. They’re also wildly uninformed, and spread misogyny, cissexism and bi/panphobia, as well as stealing their posts/designs (x)

Autism Speaks: They spend most of their money on researching a way to eliminate autism, heighten the stigma against autism and don’t have a single autistic person on their board (x)

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all the women that had to grown up being super self-aware of what they wear, what they think, what they say, how they act, where they are, with whom, etc in every aspect of their life, all the time, in this sexist society (especially women of color, non-straight women and trans women): good. finally you all have to learn how to behave.  

Elexus Jionde faces barrage of harassment after tweeting about 9/11 and black history

Jionde’s tweetstorm on black history prompted a largely positive response. However, it also triggered an onslaught of harassment, including racist comments and death threats.

“I’ve received death threats, racist jokes, and a lot of tweets regarding my future children having cancer. That [first] tweet has since gone viral, and without the 40+ tweets accompanying it, there are people in my mentions telling me that I’m a disgrace to my race and country for saying 9/11 only killed white people, when that isn’t what I said at all.”

Jionde believes that her thread being disabled was “no accident,” and she has accused Twitter of deliberately removing the thread.

“I believe Twitter deliberately unconnected the thread to deprive people of context. Some will say that it was some sort of system glitch or whatever, but I personally believe they disabled my thread because someone in the office was offended over the first tweet.”

Twitter outrightly denies this, suggesting that the problem could be the result of a bug. 

[‘Pick-up artist’ Roosh] concludes that the typical fetching Nordic lady doesn’t need a man “because the government will take care of her and her cats, whether she is successful at dating or not.”

He’s not wrong. Several of Denmark’s social services are intended to reduce gender inequality by supporting women, a sort of state feminism that he can’t accept.

Denmark provides eighteen weeks of maternity pay (usually at about two-thirds pay) as well as separate parental leave options that couples may provide to the mother if they wish. The country has also offered incentives to fathers since the 1990s to encourage them to take up paternity benefits. In Denmark, shareable family leaves are two weeks longer if the father pitches in; if he doesn’t, the family loses out on the additional time. This small “daddy quota” may not sound like much, but it indicates a state interest in rectifying unequal historical norms of caretaking.

Denmark also offers one of the best universal child care systems in the world; as a result, the maternal employment rate in Denmark exceeds 80 percent. The country’s mothers accrue 34 to 38 percent of the earnings taken home by couples with children; compare that to American mothers, who only take home 28 percent of parental earnings.

Roosh seems unaware of these services—probably because he’s not on the prowl for moms. His gripes focus on benefits that ensure single women (and men) aren’t in dire need and that coupling is decoupled from dependency; for example, he attacks government-funded higher education because the universities “destroy a woman’s femininity. The more years she spends in them, the less likely she will be able to please you, physically and emotionally.”

Unlike in America, where bestsellers goad already overworked and underpaid women to Lean In even further, the assumption in Denmark is that feminism is a collective goal, not an individual pursuit. Danish women are less likely to be financially dependent on men and therefore feel less pressure to “settle” or change their behavior by, in Roosh’s words, “adopting a pleasing figure or style that’s more likely to attract men.” Imagine that…

Roosh comes to the conclusion that women who aren’t as dependent on men for financial support are not susceptible to the narcissistic salesmanship that constitutes phase one: “attraction.” That’s why Roosh fails to advance to the second level—”trust”—without being creepy. Thus “seduction” is almost always out of the question.

We can agree with pick-up artists that men and women exhibit some behavioral differences. But the PUA framework places their sources in evolution instead of the sexual and social division of labor. In her essay “A Marxist Theory of Women’s Nature,” philosopher Nancy Holmstrom argues that women’s lives are less free than men’s under capitalism “both because they are dependent on men and because they have children dependent on them.” Therefore, “traditional sexual values constrain women more than they do men,” and women “are less able to act to realize their own desires” and must be “more passive and oriented to other people’s wishes than men.”

So there’s a known thing in the study of human psychology/sociology/what-have-you where men are known to, on average, rely entirely on their female romantic partner for emotional support. Bonding with other men is done at a more superficial level involving fun group activities and conversations about general subjects but rarely involves actually leaning on other men or being really honest about emotional problems. Men use alcohol to be able to lower their inhibitions enough to expose themselves emotionally to other men, but if you can’t get emotional support unless you’re drunk, you have a problem.

So men need to have a woman in their lives to have anyone they can share their emotional needs and vulnerabilities with. However, since women are not socialized to fear sharing these things, women’s friendships with other women are heavily based on emotional support. If you can’t lean on her when you’re weak, she’s not your friend. To women, what friendship is is someone who listens to all your problems and keeps you company.

So this disconnect men are suffering from is that they think that only a person who is having sex with you will share their emotions and expect support. That’s what a romantic partner does. But women think that’s what a friend does. So women do it for their romantic partners and their friends and expect a male friend to do it for them the same as a female friend would. This fools the male friend into thinking there must be something romantic there when there is not.

This here is an example of patriarchy hurting everyone. Women have a much healthier approach to emotional support – they don’t die when widowed at nearly the rate that widowers die and they don’t suffer emotionally from divorce nearly as much even though they suffer much more financially, and this is because women don’t put all their emotional needs on one person. Women have a support network of other women. But men are trained to never share their emotions except with their wife or girlfriend, because that isn’t manly. So when she dies or leaves them, they have no one to turn to to help with the grief, causing higher rates of death, depression, alcoholism and general awfulness upon losing a romantic partner. 

So men suffer terribly from being trained in this way. But women suffer in that they can’t reach out to male friends for basic friendship. I am not sure any man can comprehend how heartbreaking it is to realize that a guy you thought was your friend was really just trying to get into your pants. Friendship is real. It’s emotional, it’s important to us. We lean on our friends. Knowing that your friend was secretly seething with resentment when you were opening up to him and sharing your problems because he felt like he shouldn’t have to do that kind of emotional work for anyone not having sex with him, and he felt used by you for that reason, is horrible. And the fact that men can’t share emotional needs with other men means that lots of men who can’t get a girlfriend end up turning into horrible misogynistic people who think the world owes them the love of a woman, like it’s a commodity… because no one will die without sex. Masturbation exists. But people will die or suffer deep emotional trauma from having no one they can lean on emotionally. And men who are suffering deep emotional trauma, and have been trained to channel their personal trauma into rage because they can’t share it, become mass shooters, or rapists, or simply horrible misogynists.