hot take appreciator

Cats have suffered alongside women, too, which is not something I have seen brought up. Cats were targeted during the Witch Hunts as well, and suffered similar fates as the women they hunted. During this time, cats were nearly driven to extinction, and the mice and rat population go out of control— which is believed to have heavily contributed if not outright caused one of the most famous plagues.

To this day, I think we need to analyze if it’s truly a coincidence that cats are often portrayed as mean or uncaring because they do not behave the same way as dogs— “man’s best friend”— that their boundaries are violated for fun and then people criticize the cat for reacting, for self-defense. They will mutilate a cat so it cannot defend itself, and then abandon it when it is understandably upset, when it can no longer feel safe.

If you look at the statistics, more cats enter animal shelters than dogs, and tend to stay for longer. Personally, my local humane societies seem to have almost exclusively cats. In part, this is because cats are more effective at reproducing than dogs, and there are very little if any resources dedicated to to TNR. This is also because people will not spay/neuter their cats, and then will abandon the cat and/or just the kittens.

I do not think it is entirely coincidental that cats are so heavily associated with women, and they are villainized for not being dogs. That dogs are called “man’s best friend”, but somehow that does not mean cats are called “women’s best friend”— instead diamonds are, for whatever reason, despite women’s shared history with cats, and shared experience of being villainized for having boundaries. They are made the villain for being cats instead of dogs, they are called uncaring and “assholes” because the way they show love is not identical to the way a dog does.

Men's sperm quality quickly degrades into garbage after 30. Don't let them forget it.

Even if a 18 year old woman looks exactly like a 25 year old woman, they'll go for the 18 year old, not because she's more attractive or 'fertile', it's simply because they can have that much more power and influence over her. They can tell her anything about life and she wouldn't know the difference, wouldn't know she's being lied to. She hasn't yet had the experience of tolerating male nonsense to the point of breaking, hasn't seen trough their schemes and grooming process, she doesn't know their true intentions, she doesn't have her finances/career/living situation in order, she is more vulnerable, more naive, more easy to exploit. She's still filled with hope and optimism, inclined to believe the best of them, to give them benefit of the doubt, to forgive and tolerate and do whatever she's told to, in order to gain their approval.

25 year old woman will not do this so easily, she's probably had enough experience with the world and the m*n to see the red flags instantly. The 40 year old woman, who looks exactly as attractive, will not even spare him the second glance, he's nothing to her, she knows his value is null.

I don't think it's youth, appearance, or any other kind of 'biological impulse' that makes m*n go after younger women, it's just the amount of power they're able to have over younger women. The idea of a woman who knows who they are and what they stand for is intensely non-attractive to them, a woman who understands their core and knows their intentions, that is a complete no-go, they'd rather throw insults at her and make sure she can't communicate her knowledge to the younger generations.

But a younger woman who is still under the effects of patriarchal grooming, who is easy to convince, manipulate, trick, cheat, who is without any defenses, naive, gullible, that's where their attraction is amplified. If the situation suddenly switched and all of the younger women had the exact experience and power of mature women, while mature women were under some kind of amnesia and thought m*n were cool, and were willing to do whatever for them, the attraction would flip just like that. M*n really can't do well anywhere except among children who are fawning over them, not knowing what they're looking at.

Being young and without experience makes a woman so much less likely to be able to defend herself against abuse, so much more easily pulled into doing things against her own benefit, much more easily obliged with a promise of a fake future that will never happen. And they all know they're pulling those young women into relationships/partnerships under fake pretenses, that they're just going to use these young women, until they age up to the point where they're sick of his bullshit, and then find new, younger, more inexperienced, more easy to manipulate girls.

“I am to gratify his pleasure and nurse his child, I am a piece of household furniture, I am a woman. I try to suppress all human feelings. When the machine is working properly it heats the milk, knits a blanket, makes little requests and bustles about trying not to think […].“

She wrote this when she was 19, one year into her marriage to Leo and as she was pregnant with the first of his 13 children.

A few years later, when she was 25 or so:

“I am so often alone with my thoughts that the need to write in my diary comes quite naturally … Now I am well again and not pregnant—it terrifies me how often I have been in that condition. He said that for him being young meant “I can achieve anything”. For me […] reason tells me that there is nothing I either want or can do beyond nursing, eating, drinking, sleeping, and loving and caring for my husband and babies, all of which I know is happiness of a kind, but why do I feel so woeful all the time, and weep as I did yesterday? I am writing this now with the pleasantly exciting sense that nobody will ever read it, so I can be quite frank with myself […].“

During her 12th pregnancy she wrote about taking scalding baths and jumping from high pieces of furniture to try and miscarry.  And at one point while reading her husband’s diary (which he told her to read) she found the sentence “There is no such thing as love, only the physical need for intercourse and the practical need for a life companion.” In her own diary she wrote “They ebb and flow like waves, these times when I realise how lonely I am and want only to cry…”

Disney films may focus on female characters, but when it comes down to statistics, these women barely speak. Thats’s right, there are some Disney films with as much as 2% female dialogue.

Media also distinguish between males and females in a more subtle way: importance. ‘Children scanning the list of titles of what have been designated as the very best children’s books are bound to receive the impression that girls are not very important because no one has bothered to write books about them. The content of the books rarely dispels this impression’, remarked Lenore Weitzman and colleagues in their classic review of Caldecott winners, nearly a third of which had no female characters at all. And of course there are characters, and then there are main characters. The Dr. Seuss books are rightly classics, adored by children and a joy of rediscovery for parents. Yet as Lamb and Brown observe, in all the forty-two books he wrote, not one has a female lead in its central story. The power of the media to dish up a stripped-down, concentrated version of cultural values enables it to represent the higher status of males in this uncomfortably blunt fashion. Even in contemporary picture books, researchers find that this is a habit that dies hard, with writers and illustrators still less inclined to feature female characters. For example, the most recent analysis of the Caldecott winners and runners-up, together with 155 best-selling children’s books around the same time, found that males, overall, were featured nearly twice as often as females in title roles, and they appeared in about 50 percent more pictures. Nor does the use of gender-ambiguous animals or characters in books help to increase female numbers. This is because mothers almost always label gender-neutral characters in picture books as male. If it doesn’t look like a female, it’s male. I’ve tried labelling neutral animals and characters as female when reading to my children – it feels extremely unnatural, as you will discover if you try for yourself. (The reason is probably that we have a tendency to think of people or creatures as male unless otherwise indicated. In other words, as has been long observed, men are people, but women are women.) As within the pages of books, females tend to be underrepresented on TV and computer screens, and to miss out on central roles in advertisements and even cereal boxes. A recent survey of 19,664 children’s programmes in twenty-four countries found that only 32 percent of main characters are female. (This drops to an even more dismal 13 percent when it comes to nonhuman creatures like animals, monsters and robots.) And, a survey of the 101 top-grossing Grated movies from 1990 to 2005 found that less than a third of the speaking roles go to females, with no signs of improvement over time. As the Web site of the Geena Davis Institute, which sponsored the research, asks, ‘What message does this send to young children?’

As mentioned above, the funny support characters are always male. In Mulan, the main support character is the red dragon Mushu right?

What would happen if in a country like Japan, which has a festivity on phallic symbols (Kanamara Matsuri), a woman decides to exhibit art whose main concept is the vagina? Maybe you already know the answer or you can imagine it or maybe not, anyway this is what happened to Megumi Igarashi, a mangaka, artist, sculptor, feminist and activist, whose mission is to free Manko.

a lot of young people on the internet look to television and movies for people to model themselves on. especially looking to older characters to figure out the type of person they want to grow to be.

women in media are both rarer than men and nearly always worse written. there’s a lot of character archetypes which simply don’t exist in the female form.

female characters who are powerful, muscular, funny, intelligent, etc. are exceedingly rare. attractive, but not-sexualised women are rare. masculine women are practically non-existent.

I went to trans subreddits and looked into what characters invoked “gender envy” and the answers are like, Aragorn, Hiccup from the dragon movies, Peter Parker, the our flag means death dudes, Link, those dudes from supernatural, Bucky Barnes, some of the dudes from umbrella academy, Howl, etc.

are there mainstream female equivalents of any of those characters? not really, in my opinion. we do not have crazy female wizards. or charming female bards, or noble knights, or adventurous geniuses, or eccentric pirates, or handsome magical women. some, but probably not many.

+ the overlap between fandom culture and trans culture is very big. the demographic is young girls who spend a lot of time online.

most fandom shows are very androcentric. supernatural, marvel, sherlock, voltron, lotr, hobbit, hannibal. is teen wolf still a thing? recently our flag means death.

Chinese Women Are Dumping Their Boyfriends Over a Feminist Comedian

Young men and women in China are increasingly divided over feminism.

If young women in China want to know if their male partners support gender equality, there is a good way to find out: talk to them about Yang Li, a stand-up comedian who has turned into a feminist icon for her mockery of men.

Several female comedians have, since last year, gained fame during the stand-up contest Rock & Roast, a new cultural moment in China’s male-dominated comedy scene. Among them, Yang made the most direct, controversial jokes about men.

The 29-year-old famously called men “average yet confident,” a comment on men’s egos women found so accurate that it became a hot meme instantly. She joked that if a man proposed to her, he probably just wanted to beat her up—a reference to the domestic violence that often goes unpunished in China. Facing criticism, she said men turned frenzied and hysterical when they were unhappy, “just like women.”

These punchlines, which give China’s burgeoning feminist movement a new language, won Yang as many fans as enemies. And people on both sides believe the difference makes it impossible for them to befriend or date each other.

It was during an argument about Yang earlier this year that Wendy Liu, a 23-year-old university student in the central province of Hunan, decided to break up with her boyfriend of four years.

While Liu was praising Yang for speaking up for women, her then-boyfriend, deeply offended by the jokes, accused Liu of “getting brainwashed by feminist extremists,” she told VICE World News. The man then proclaimed that no men would like feminist women, and blamed the rise of feminism in China on “foreign forces.”

“At that moment I felt I had wasted all these years,” Liu said. “I don’t know how I lived through these four years. I thank Yang Li for helping me make up my mind to break up.”

Kristen Liu (she is not related to Wendy), a 20-year-old law student in the southwestern city of Chongqing, also broke up with her ex-boyfriend this year following an intense debate over Yang. The man, she said, called Yang “sick” and found her jokes insulting.

Kristen decided she no longer wanted to date this man. “I hope my boyfriend could empathize with women, and at least respect and understand my feminist thinking,” Liu said. In the future, she said, she would find out if a potential date is an ally before committing to a relationship.

China ranks 107th out of 156 in the World Economic Forum’s 2021 Global Gender Gap Report, which measures gender-based disparity in economic opportunity, education, health, and politics. With growing awareness of gender inequality, young women in China are increasingly pushing back against the society’s oppression of women, from the prevalent sexual abuse to workplace discrimination to everyday sexist language—it’s common, for example, for Chinese men to make suggestive, misogynist jokes at workplace or over dinner.

The popularity of Yang and her fellow female comedians has reflected women’s desire to be represented in the business of fun. However, many Chinese men refuse to acknowledge the privileges they have enjoyed in a patriarchal society and perceive the rise of feminist voices as a threat.

Yue Qian, a sociologist with the University of British Columbia, said her research showed that the divide over gender issues between Chinese men and women has widened in the younger population compared with previous generations. Women are becoming more pro-equal rights as they gain more education, Qian said, but the effect is smaller on men.

“The social divide along Yang Li’s jokes and more broadly, feminism, is also a reflection of the growing gender gap in how men and women embrace gender ideology,” Qian told VICE World News. “Women have become way more egalitarian, whereas men have been left behind. And they are increasingly being left behind by women.”

A pushback against feminism has also been observed in other Asian countries. In South Korea, for example, men who feel victimized by feminism have protested against a pinching hand emoji used by women to mock small penises.

In China, Yang, the comedian, became the battlefield of the gender war. Last year, her critics threatened to report her to China’s media watchdog for verbally abusing men and inciting conflicts between the two sexes. In March, angry men called for a boycott of Intel over an advert featuring Yang, prompting the company to pull the ad. Women fought back by flooding the hashtag “I am a woman, I support Yang Li” on microblogging site Weibo.

Proponents and opponents of feminism have called Yang a “filter” and a “pH test strip” that could help them find out if someone is on the same side.

Joyce Zhang, a 27-year-old mainland Chinese woman in Hong Kong, said whenever she met a fellow Chinese man on dating apps, she would bring up her appreciation of Yang to gauge his opinions on women.

The men who came off attacking Yang would be eliminated.

“Someone who cannot accept Yang will not think about how to respect women,” Zhang said. “If he does not respect me, and treats women as their belongings, we won’t be able to get along. It’s better to find out about it early on.”

But if Yang was a litmus test, its ability to weed out unwanted suitors works both ways. On Quora-like Zhihu, a platform popular with anti-feminists, many men vowed to stay away from Yang’s fans.

“I used to hate Yang Li, but now I like her. Isn’t she a great filter?” said an August post that got more than 6,000 likes. “If you date a feminist and get married, you have to hand in all your salaries. Your children may not bear your surname.”

Yang has never called herself a feminist, although she said being female had made her unique. She counted American comedian Ali Wong as an inspiration. Some women have argued that she is way too mild to be hailed as a feminist fighter, but her fans said the attacks from men had proven her value as a rare voice speaking on women’s behalf.

In the latest season of Rock & Roast this month, Yang made a joke about how women said they would only date men who liked her. “If he likes Yang Li, shouldn’t he be dating Yang Li?” she said onstage. “I finally know why I’m not in a relationship. The few people who like me have all been claimed by you girls.”

Wendy Liu said that when she met her ex-boyfriend in her first year in college, she was anticipating a traditional romantic relationship with the woman taking a subordinate role. But her mind changed in the last two years, as she read feminist discussions online and books by Japanese feminist author Chizuko Ueno.

Liu said she and her female friends now want to date feminist men who could empathize with their concerns about workplace gender discrimination, violence against women, and the pressure on them to have more children.

If you’re a man in China that managed to get a girlfriend, brother you should be praying DAILY she doesn’t leave your sorry ass for a much better model. Why the fuck would you do anything to jeopardize that?