For women's liberation

Credit goes to @tehbewilderness for coming up with them. Not sure how recently they've been posted so here they are again:

1) Women are responsible for what men do.

2) Women saying no to men is a hate crime.

3) Women speaking for themselves are exclusionary and selfish

4) Women's words and opinions are violence against men; thus men's violence against women is justified.

5) Women and their movements must be useful to men or they are worthless.

6) Women who aren't discreet about their female bodily functions deserve punishment.

7) Women should always be grateful for everything men do for them, and everything men don't do to them.

8) Men are whatever men say they are and women are whatever men say they are.

9) Men always know the real reasons for everything women do and say.

10) The worst thing about male violence is it makes men look bad.

11) Whatever women suffer from is worse when it happens to men.

12) Human pattern recognition is misandry when it's women recognizing male behavioural patterns.

13) Angry women are crazy. Angry men have trouble expressing themselves.

14) Women everywhere have all the rights they need: the right to remain silent.

15) Men are human. Women are strange, subhuman others.

women and girls are denied access to healthcare because they cannot be treated by male doctors, yet they are also barred from education and, therefore, cannot become doctors themselves. shops in afghanistan are even forced to cover up female mannequins. little girls live in fear of becoming child brides, but they dream of being poets, they would kill to get education.

a woman was disqualified from the olympics because she spread the message "free afghan women" at her breakdance performance. there must always be a relative male by their side like women were dogs being treated by their owner, except dogs have more rights than the women suffering.

Tdlr; Rates of violence and homocides against older women (notable grandmothers) rising, a dual issue of children of and partners being domestically abusive, most notably sons. Mothers are less likely to call authorities on their own children for domestic violence or threats, which impacts this grizzly development. Warned "matricide of older women" and lack of awareness. Article from Australia but this issue is stated to be global.

Fourteen women over the age of 55 were allegedly killed in domestic violence-related homicides last year, according to a tally kept by the online feminist group Destroy the Joint. When the Australian Bureau of Statistics releases its data for the year, this number could well increase.

In 2023, according to ABS data, there were 28 women over the age of 55 allegedly killed in domestic violence related homicides, roughly a third of all such alleged homicides. Experts have called it a “silent crisis”: older women who are killed by family violence but whose deaths rarely get as much attention as those of younger women, and whose experiences do not figure sufficiently in government responses to violence against women. “There’s a matricide of older women [and] people aren’t even noticing, there’s no outcry. There’s silence,” says Catherine Barrett, director of Celebrate Ageing. “It’s just being missed.”

A Guardian analysis of government data has found that in the 10 years to 2023, nearly 200 women over the age of 55 were allegedly killed in family violence related homicides, suggesting older women could be at dual risk – from partners and from their children, especially their sons.

The rate of alleged domestic homicides in Australia has more than halved in the past 30 years, from 0.71 deaths per 100,000 in 1992-93, to 0.3 deaths per 100,000 in 2022-23. However, the rate at which older women are allegedly killed in domestic homicides has not fallen consistently. In the past 10 years, the rate of women aged over 55 killed in family violence homicides has reached 0.7 deaths per 100,000 (the same rate for all women 30 years ago) three times – in 2017, 2018 and 2023.

The problem is a global one. In England and Wales, the number of women killed by sons has risen since 2016, after remaining stable for decades. There was also a rise in the number of grandmothers killed by their grandsons, according to the Femicide Census, co-founded by Clarrie O’Callaghan and Karen Ingala Smith.

Lee says that while every family violence homicide is a tragedy, some deaths are given more attention than others, with the media and general public often focusing on the deaths of younger, attractive white women, while the deaths of “women who are marginalised … don’t get highlighted”. “The invisibility and the marginalisation of First Nations women [and] older women means that they remain invisible even when they’re killed.”

One of the main factors, Lee says, is that domestic violence is often considered primarily a problem for younger women so services are often geared towards them. That means older women may not see a family violence service as one that can help them.

“When we talk about violence against women, it’s always a younger woman fleeing with two little kids hanging around her knees. You rarely see any commentary about all the women who grow old with violence, who live with, maybe, sons who are violent. They are really invisible.”

Barrett says sometimes, after a violent relationship breaks down between a man and his partner, the man will move back in with his parents – particularly if he has mental health or addiction problems – and continue to perpetrate violence there. The problem has only increased, she says, in light of the cost-of-living crisis.

All of this motivates me to keep reading, learning, researching - I don't want my basic human skills to decline. I already see a tendency of people becoming lazy when doing basic research tasks on a daily basis and it's scary

But for women it's just. Wherever you are, there she is. The whole thing, complete. Double-checked, and backed up in the cloud.

Well, if we didn't, people would look at the statistics regarding male violence and begin SCREAMING. They'd declare it an epidemic, a world-wide emergency, and researchers would be working 365 days a year to root out its cause and resolve it. Women and children would be recognized as people who are endangered by males and men would never, EVER be allowed into our female-only spaces, or into positions of trust where they're working alone among vulnerable people. The news would never stop reporting on the glaringly obvious pattern of abuse by one crucial demographic: MALES.

“My most recent research study, which included more than 17,000 fifth-grade through 12th-grade girls in The Girls’ Index, reveals a troubling trend: 67% of the participants reported that they don’t say what they’re thinking or disagree with others because they want to be liked. Let that sink in for a moment. Two-thirds of girls are silencing themselves to be accepted.”

“Other findings from our survey are just as stark and, frankly, terrifying. Since 2017, the percentage of girls reporting confidence has declined from 68% to just 55%. A staggering 53% of girls report feeling persistently sad or hopeless. As one seventh-grade girl told us, “Girls my age don’t feel happy the way we are. We want to be someone else.” Reading this, I feel a painful twinge of recognition — like I’m hearing my younger self speak.

We also discovered that two-thirds of girls reported that their body image negatively impacts their confidence. Two-thirds! And nearly 60% of high school girls said they don’t believe they’re smart enough for their dream jobs.”

My analysis ⬇️

This is very disappointing, but it is no surprise. Undergoing female socialization means being conditioned to constantly monitor how you appear to other people.

Questions such as “am I being respected right now”, “do I agree with what is being said”, “do I feel healthy” take the background, while questions like “do I seem nice and kind”, “how can I get this person to like me” and “do I look pretty/skinny/young” take the forefront instead. This is an exhausting way to live.

In the political sphere, women are being asked to first change the language around how we think about our issues before we can talk about them. The specific words we use are often more important to those on the left than the actual content of what we are saying. Making sure we appear politically correct is being made more important than choosing the words that best reflect what we want to say. Often, changing our language so we can appear to be kind and considerate towards others completely obfuscates our points and issues.

As someone I forget so brilliantly put it, we are more concerned with saying nothing wrong than doing something right.

Lobotomies are still bad, but a lot of people have now understood that it’s a deeply harmful and anti-human practice. It was often performed on women (60% of cases were women in the US, a study in Ontario put women patients at 72%) and on gay men. Societal mores have changed on what is psychiatrically appropriate—many of these women were depressed and repressed housewives, or were not naturally submissive to their husbands and considered “combative”.

Many lobotomies were called “ice pick lobotomies” because they involved inserting an ice pick through the eye to sever the part of your brain that feels emotions. There were different techniques, largely dependent on which surgeon you saw. Norbert Wiener said in 1948, "Prefrontal lobotomy... has recently been having a certain vogue, probably not unconnected with the fact that it makes the custodial care of many patients easier. Let me remark in passing that killing them makes their custodial care still easier."

In 1944, the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease ran an article saying, “The history of prefrontal lobotomy has been brief and stormy. Its course has been dotted with both violent opposition and with slavish, unquestioning acceptance."

Walter Freeman called the practice “surgically induced childhood”—he specialized in lobotomies and performed them until 1967, so he found this to be a good outcome. In fact, he worked on an “assembly line” process where he could lobotomies 20 people a day, and even did a surgical procedure face-off with another doctor in 1948 to compete in an operating theatre to show an audience of doctors that his technique was superior. The other professor was a professor at Yale, William Beecher Scoville, another famous lobotomist known for proliferating the procedure. They called it a miracle cure, and the gold standard for psychiatric treatment.

Scoville’s most famous patient, Henry Molaison, was a 7-year old boy with epilepsy after a fall from his bike. Scoville couldn’t find the problem, so he just destroyed all three regions of Henry’s temporal lobes. Afterwards, the surgeon noted memory loss “so severe as to prevent the patient from remembering the location of the rooms in which he lives, the names of his close associates, or even the way to the toilet or the urinal.”

Scoville’s wife sought psychiatric care after her husband cheated on her and she had a breakdown. Her husband lobotomized her himself.

In the 1960s, when schizophrenia became a radicalized charged diagnosis that was often used against Black people, especially those involved in the civil rights struggle. Walter Freeman did several pushes to lobotomize Black people, including as young as five, for “hyperactive and aggressive behavior”.

The practice continued in some places until the 1980s. It was used to treat schizophrenia, affective disturbance (mood disorders and people reacting in non-mainstream ways like being an opinionated woman or gay), and OCD, chronic neurosis (anxiety), psychopathic disorders, and depression, among other things. You may notice the old names for these things—things that we might not consider the same way now. Being gay was a mental disorder. Women who wanted independence or respect were often diagnosed. Not fulfilling your traditional societal role was a good way to end up institutionalized.

It was considered, at time of invention, to be an humane alternative to insulin comas and shock therapy (ECT). Many people considered it lifesaving and gold standard treatment for mental illness. Some reports believe that about a third of patients found the procedure beneficial. Others faced dementia, death, incontinence, inability to speak, paralysis, and other effects. Many people were unable to ever leave care again afterwards, though they were more complacent.

I don’t think any scientist who tells you that science is settled is a good scientist. I think that treatments that target people who don’t fit the mold of society, people who are countercultural, and people from marginalized groups should be especially criticized. Psychiatry is a very new field. Part of the phasing out of lobotomies had to do with the development of the first medications for psychiatric use—which in turn have had their own social, political, and ethical conundrums and misuse. Many could consider Valium (“mother’s little helper”) the spiritual successor to the lobotomy.

But in 1949, if I said lobotomies are bad—I might have been met with “Do you hate mentally ill people?” “It works great for most people!” “Without it, she will just be depressed and kill herself” or “My friend did it and all her problems seem better now”.