Those Pesky Dames

Don’t ever compliment me by insulting other women. That’s not a compliment, it’s a competition none of us agreed to.

People want to believe gender is something that’s essential, and people repeat these essentialist ideas all the time. “Oh, women do that” and “Oh, men do that” and the reality is that all women don’t anything. We as individuals do what we do, you know, and sometimes that’s informed by gender and sometimes it’s just who we are. And I think all that just makes people really, really uncomfortable because they don’t want to think about who they are.

I am a lesbian woman of Color whose children eat regularly because I work in a university. If their full bellies make me fail to recognize my commonality with a woman of Color whose children do not eat because she cannot find work, or who has no children because her insides are rotted from home abortions and sterilization; if I fail to recognize the lesbian who chooses not to have children, the woman who remains closeted because her homophobic community is her only life support, the woman who chooses silence instead of another death, the woman who is terrified lest my anger trigger the explosion of hers; if I fail to recognize them as other faces of myself, then I am contributing not only to each of their oppressions but also to my own, and the anger which stands between us then must be used for clarity and mutual empowerment, not for evasion by guilt or for further separation. ********I am not free while any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very different from my own. And I am not free as long as one person of Color remains chained. Nor is anyone of you.***********

At what point do you take girls out of school altogether because boys can’t handle it?

Wonderful tips from Rosianna!

YouTube comments aren’t “just the Internet.” They’re not the product of a group of otherwise nice guys who suddenly become evil when they wear a veil of anonymity. YouTube comments are actually a nightmarish glimpse into the sexist attitudes that define the fabric of our own existence in the “real world,” a world that, like YouTube, is owned and dominated by men. The most terrifying gift that the Internet has given us is that it’s shown us how men honestly perceive the world: as a place where women exist exclusively for their sexual pleasure. In the wake of VidCon, and as more and more women start speaking up about the harassment they face online, it’s time to start realizing that our narrative of progress is deeply flawed. Things aren’t getting better for women on the Internet; they’re deteriorating and ignoring the problem amounts to being complicit in it.

The thing that I've noticed about feminist comments and videos and antifeminist comments and videos is that the feminist ones are addressing a problem and critiquing our culture while antifeminist ones are attacking the feminist and/or original commenter/video. It's like the antifeminist, or MRA in a lot of cases, are trying to beat down the people to silence them while the feminists, in non radical cases, are trying to bring to light issues that have been silenced/deeply embedded in our culture