“It is physically and emotionally draining to be called upon to prove that these systems of power exist. For many of us, just struggling against them is enough — now you want us to break them down for you? Imagine having weights tied to your feet and a gag around your mouth, and then being asked to explain why you think you are at an unfair disadvantage. Imagine watching a video where a young man promises to kill women who chose not to sleep with him and then being forced to engage with the idea that maybe you are just a hysterical feminist seeing misogyny where there is none. It is incredibly painful to feel that in order for you to care about my safety, I have to win this verbal contest you have constructed “for fun.””
—
An open letter to privileged people who play devil’s advocate (via brutereason)
i.e. It’s not our job to explain shit to you
(Source: feministing.com, via brutereason)
8:52 am • 18 June 2014 • 20,025 notes
auberginesheets:
lillianloverly:
THIS IS A PSA
THIS APP IS CALLED SAFETREK AND IS ABSOLUTELY INVALUABLE TO ANYONE WALKING ANYWHERE WHERE THEY DONT FEEL SAFE
YOU ENTER YOUR INFO AND SET A PIN AND THEN WHENEVER YOU DONT FEEL SAFE, YOU HOLD DOWN THE BLUE BUTTON UNTIL YOU DO
ONCE YOU RELEASE THE BUTTON, YOU HAVE 10 SECONDS TO ENTER YOUR PIN, AND IF YOU DONT THE POLICE WILL BE NOTIFIED OF YOUR LOCATION AND DISTRESS CALL
I TRULY BELIEVE THIS APP CAN HELP SOMEONE OUT THERE SO PLEASE DOWNLOAD IT
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/safetrek/id716262008?mt=8
I wish I had this when I would walk home in the dark from my college classes.
(via rosexknight)
12:26 pm • 16 June 2014 • 631,589 notes
“
Patriarchy means societies where men dominate women. Like all systems of domination, it ultimately depends on violence to extract consent from the subordinated. In patriarchal societies, men rape, batter, buy or trade, torture and murder women. Other forms of coercion may include economic, legal and cultural institutions, but sexual violence is at the core of patriarchy. Mary Daly points out that patriarchy is the ruling religion of the planet. It’s all variations on the theme of masculinity asserting itself by killing women and pretty much everything, usually for a sexual thrill. In The Chalice and The Blade, Riane Eisler writes that “underlying the great surface diversity of human culture are two basic models of society.” The first she calls the partnership model, societies that are egalitarian, nonviolent and life-affirming. The second is the dominator model, which values the power to establish and enforce domination.
In her ground breaking article “The socio-cultural context of rape: a cross-cultural study,” anthropologist Peggy Reeves-Sanday studied 95 band and tribal cultures and found that 47% were rape-free while 18% were rape-prone. In rape-free societies, women are respected and influential members of their communities; sacred beings are conceived of as both male and female; economic and political power is held equally between the sexes; nurturing and childrearing are understood as the basis of human interactions; and there is an attitude of reverence instead of dominance toward the earth. In these cultures, rape is considered abhorrent and there are severe consequences for perpetrators. In West Sumatra, the subject of Reeves-Sanday’s book Women at the Center: Life in a Modern Matriarchy, a man who rapes has disgraced himself and all his kin, and will face assault, exile or death.
In contrast, in rape-prone societies, women hold limited economic and political power; men express contempt for women as decision makers; god is male; masculinity is predicated on an ideology of toughness and cruelty; and violence is an acceptable method of settling disputes. Welcome to America.
The basic psychological dynamic of masculinity is that men are men because they aren’t women. Women are the hated Other. Hating her, hurting her, is how boys become men. Masculinity breeds a personality based on entitlement, arrogance and cruelty, which is compelled to prove itself again and again. Inherent in masculinity is a violation imperative: in acts of invading and conquering, men become men. The brilliance of male supremacy is that it links acts of political oppression to sexual response. Not only is the soldier-rapist rewarded with orgasm when he dominates/rapes, but his action feels “natural” rather than political. This welding of domination and subordination to sexual arousal, and the accompanying normalization of oppression, is the deep heart of patriarchy. And these acts of oppression become what sex is—how sex is practiced, how arousal is experienced—under male supremacy.
For instance, researchers tried to show male viewers a film scene depicting violence—not sexual violence, just regular old violence—against women. And they found that they couldn’t. No matter what the film showed (hitting, punching, kicking) at least 25% of the men would get an erection. Sexual domination and subordination are institutionalized into the very concepts of masculine and feminine. Masculinity is simply a conglomeration of the personality traits necessary for the patriarchal soldier-rapist: physically strong, emotionally cauterized, rational, domineering, cruel. All of this is supposed to add up to “handsome” as well. Likewise femininity is ultimately a description of the personality that results from trauma and powerlessness: weak, passive, yielding, emotional, hyper-vigilant to the needs of the dominators and desperate for the dominator’s attention.
In patriarchy, political oppression is thus experienced as normal and natural. It’s easy to turn the rapist into the soldier—the template is already in place. Instead of “woman,” fill the Despised Other category with the racial or ethnic group of your choice, and watch men—good soldiers all—rise to the occasion. Sheila Jeffries names this the erotic roots of fascism. This ethic of domination and violation extends beyond interactions between humans to human relations with animals and the earth. Animals aren’t seen as sentient beings capable of suffering. They are instead mechanical units of production to be used in factory farms and laboratories. Or they aren’t seen at all, as their habitats are destroyed for more agribusiness plantations, oil wells and suburban sprawl. The earth isn’t a complex web of interdependent life forms co-creating a living home, deserving our humility, reverence and respect. It’s instead so many board feet of lumber, so many gallons of crude: one part garbage dump to two parts profit margin. The violation imperative inherent in masculinity finds its full expression in modern science—invading the boundaries of the atom with nuclear physics and of life itself with genetic engineering.
It’s heretical to name men. It’s blasphemous to state the simple facts. Around the world and across time men have beaten, raped and incested us; burned us as witches and widows; demanded that our feet be bound, our genitals mutilated, our bodies starved; bought and sold us; kept us captive and veiled; and simply tortured us to death. With the advent of technologies of mass communications, they’ve also filmed it all and made a fortune while creating a population of serial sex killers. The first step in stopping these atrocities is to name who is doing what to whom. And that’s hard, psychologically. It’s not intellectually hard. The facts are overwhelming, indisputable. But psychologically it can be terrifying. And you will be punished. Still, if we want anything like liberty, we are going to have to do it. There was that famous speech by Russell Means, “For America to Live, Europe Must Die.” I agree. And I’d add, for the earth to live, masculinity must die. If we want to end rape, stop racism, save the planet, men have to stop being men.
I’m going to end with a comment addressed specifically to any men who are still reading this. You can be traitors to your class. You don’t have to be good soldiers, good Germans. You can shift your loyalties. You can learn to identify with women. It’s even to your benefit to do so. Growing up, I saw what happened to turn my brother from a child into a boy and then into a man. It was brutal. Male socialization is pretty ghastly. And as long as there is war, the rich, old men will sacrifice the young men on the altar of power and profit. Men may not be defined a priori as victims, as fuckable, like women are, but you can be fucked. 1 in 11 boys are sexually abused. That’s a lot of abuse. As long as domination is eroticized, as long as violence and violation constitute masculinity, you aren’t free either. My question is: how many of you will face that and cast your lot with us?
”
—
exgynocraticgrrl-archive-deacti:
IN THE WAKE - An Interview with Lierre Keith
(via gynocraticgrrl)
(via frothingvagina-blog)
2:01 am • 16 June 2014 • 2,291 notes
qawiya:
show me one great father and I’ll show you 10 great mothers who did the same and more
(via is-there-a-future)
12:25 am • 16 June 2014 • 181 notes
sempiterna:
happy “fathers” day to all the single mothers who raised their child/ren alone, sometimes without even any financial help from other people, yet get shamed by society more than all the shitty fucking fathers who abandoned them.
solidarity to everyone who has a shitty dad.
(via is-there-a-future)
11:06 pm • 15 June 2014 • 36 notes
Things the internet doesn't know about 4chan
throw-away-opinions:
shutdown4chan:
throw-away-opinions:
4chan is the original internet boogeyman. The site that seemed to exist in some dark corner of the internet, where only the most evil people gathered to plan hateful things. The den of the infamous Anonymous, hackers on steroids! They fought Scientology! They drove people to suicide! They refined DDOSing into a art! They invented trolls and memes and reaction images!…
And despite having this legendary status, the average person knows fuckall about 4chan. Even people who spend an exorbitant amount of time on the internet only have the vaguest understanding of the site. Because of this, people get away with saying a lot of dumb shit and making a lot of assumptions about 4chan.
So here’s what you need to know:
The 4chan you think you know is nearly a decade out of date
The “fresh and modern” 4chan you’re dealing with today is as vile and misogynistic as it ever has been. The worrying thing that people have to realise are that children are being indoctrinated and encouraged to be absolute racist shitheads by older absolute racist shitheads.
Their behavior can no longer be considered “just a joke”
You act as if 4chan’s main goal is to oppress women and be racist… But I’m also still pretty sure you’re a joke blog, meant to parody hyperbolic, misinformed SJW bullshit.
At any rate, 4chan isn’t indoctrinating children (who aren’t meant to go to 4chan anyways) because 4chan doesn’t have an ideology to spread. It only exists for the purpose of having a place for 18+ people to go and discuss anime, video games, porn, older video games, cartoons and comics, porn, food, guns, business, porn, board and card games, porn, monster girls, waifus, spooky skeleton stories, dickgirl porn, lgbt issues, and other topics.
There’s no agenda. There’s no grand scheme for the millions of multicultural, multiracial, male and female posters to take part in. 4chan exists for the sake of 4chan.
Besides, if you want to talk about hateful content contained within a website, tumblr has tons of blogs run by and for neo-nazis, white supremacists, radical feminists (the kind that think terrorism is good), as well as blogs for your garden variety racists, sexists, and psychopaths.
Guess you should work on invading and shutting down tumblr next. I eagerly await your results.
You act as if the patriarchy constantly requires people to consciously enable and support it. Here’s news for you, it doesn’t. It gets perpetuated by people staying quiet and ignorant with no interest in checking their privilege because they don’t want to be upsetting the status-quo. Everything that 4chan & Anonymous says and does suits the patriarchy perfectly. Encouraging misogyny and racism, even as a joke, will breed more misogyny and racism.
The site may say “18+” but come on, it’s a fact that a large percentage of the users are underage. Even 4chan’s owner, “moot”, was underage when he started the site. Children are impressionable and 4chan are bigoted role models. These children are being praised for hating colored people and vulernable minorities. They’re getting praised for reading nazi material and are practically being shuffled into being the new generation of digital Hitler Youth
(via throw-away-opinions)
9:48 pm • 15 June 2014 • 68 notes
“
What if
all women were bigger and stronger than you
and thought they were smarter
What if
women were the ones who started wars
What if
too many of your friends had been raped by women wielding giant dildos
and no K-Y Jelly
What if
the state trooper
who pulled you over on the New Jersey Turnpike
was a woman
and carried a gun
What if
the ability to menstruate
was the prerequisite for most high-paying jobs
What if
your attractiveness to women depended
on the size of your penis
What if
every time women saw you
they’d hoot and make jerking motions with their hands
What if
women were always making jokes
about how ugly penises are
and how bad sperm tastes
What if
you had to explain what’s wrong with your car
to big sweaty women with greasy hands
who stared at your crotch
in a garage where you are surrounded
by posters of naked men with hard-ons
What if
men’s magazines featured cover photos
of 14-year-old boys
with socks
tucked into the front of their jeans
and articles like:
“How to tell if your wife is unfaithful”
or
“What your doctor won’t tell you about your prostate”
or
“The truth about impotence”
What if
the doctor who examined your prostate
was a woman
and called you “Honey”
What if
you had to inhale your boss’s stale cigar breath
as she insisted that sleeping with her
was part of the job
What if
you couldn’t get away because
the company dress code required
you wear shoes
designed to keep you from running
And what if
after all that
women still wanted you
to love them.
”
—
For the Men Who Still Don’t Get It, written 20 years ago by Carol Diehl.
She wrote a post about the history of this poem that is worth reading.
(via merokok)
(via abegailannne)
5:35 pm • 15 June 2014 • 386,363 notes
“
Patriarchy means societies where men dominate women. Like all systems of domination, it ultimately depends on violence to extract consent from the subordinated. In patriarchal societies, men rape, batter, buy or trade, torture and murder women. Other forms of coercion may include economic, legal and cultural institutions, but sexual violence is at the core of patriarchy. Mary Daly points out that patriarchy is the ruling religion of the planet. It’s all variations on the theme of masculinity asserting itself by killing women and pretty much everything, usually for a sexual thrill. In The Chalice and The Blade, Riane Eisler writes that “underlying the great surface diversity of human culture are two basic models of society.” The first she calls the partnership model, societies that are egalitarian, nonviolent and life-affirming. The second is the dominator model, which values the power to establish and enforce domination.
In her ground breaking article “The socio-cultural context of rape: a cross-cultural study,” anthropologist Peggy Reeves-Sanday studied 95 band and tribal cultures and found that 47% were rape-free while 18% were rape-prone. In rape-free societies, women are respected and influential members of their communities; sacred beings are conceived of as both male and female; economic and political power is held equally between the sexes; nurturing and childrearing are understood as the basis of human interactions; and there is an attitude of reverence instead of dominance toward the earth. In these cultures, rape is considered abhorrent and there are severe consequences for perpetrators. In West Sumatra, the subject of Reeves-Sanday’s book Women at the Center: Life in a Modern Matriarchy, a man who rapes has disgraced himself and all his kin, and will face assault, exile or death.
In contrast, in rape-prone societies, women hold limited economic and political power; men express contempt for women as decision makers; god is male; masculinity is predicated on an ideology of toughness and cruelty; and violence is an acceptable method of settling disputes. Welcome to America.
The basic psychological dynamic of masculinity is that men are men because they aren’t women. Women are the hated Other. Hating her, hurting her, is how boys become men. Masculinity breeds a personality based on entitlement, arrogance and cruelty, which is compelled to prove itself again and again. Inherent in masculinity is a violation imperative: in acts of invading and conquering, men become men. The brilliance of male supremacy is that it links acts of political oppression to sexual response. Not only is the soldier-rapist rewarded with orgasm when he dominates/rapes, but his action feels “natural” rather than political. This welding of domination and subordination to sexual arousal, and the accompanying normalization of oppression, is the deep heart of patriarchy. And these acts of oppression become what sex is—how sex is practiced, how arousal is experienced—under male supremacy.
For instance, researchers tried to show male viewers a film scene depicting violence—not sexual violence, just regular old violence—against women. And they found that they couldn’t. No matter what the film showed (hitting, punching, kicking) at least 25% of the men would get an erection. Sexual domination and subordination are institutionalized into the very concepts of masculine and feminine. Masculinity is simply a conglomeration of the personality traits necessary for the patriarchal soldier-rapist: physically strong, emotionally cauterized, rational, domineering, cruel. All of this is supposed to add up to “handsome” as well. Likewise femininity is ultimately a description of the personality that results from trauma and powerlessness: weak, passive, yielding, emotional, hyper-vigilant to the needs of the dominators and desperate for the dominator’s attention.
In patriarchy, political oppression is thus experienced as normal and natural. It’s easy to turn the rapist into the soldier—the template is already in place. Instead of “woman,” fill the Despised Other category with the racial or ethnic group of your choice, and watch men—good soldiers all—rise to the occasion. Sheila Jeffries names this the erotic roots of fascism. This ethic of domination and violation extends beyond interactions between humans to human relations with animals and the earth. Animals aren’t seen as sentient beings capable of suffering. They are instead mechanical units of production to be used in factory farms and laboratories. Or they aren’t seen at all, as their habitats are destroyed for more agribusiness plantations, oil wells and suburban sprawl. The earth isn’t a complex web of interdependent life forms co-creating a living home, deserving our humility, reverence and respect. It’s instead so many board feet of lumber, so many gallons of crude: one part garbage dump to two parts profit margin. The violation imperative inherent in masculinity finds its full expression in modern science—invading the boundaries of the atom with nuclear physics and of life itself with genetic engineering.
It’s heretical to name men. It’s blasphemous to state the simple facts. Around the world and across time men have beaten, raped and incested us; burned us as witches and widows; demanded that our feet be bound, our genitals mutilated, our bodies starved; bought and sold us; kept us captive and veiled; and simply tortured us to death. With the advent of technologies of mass communications, they’ve also filmed it all and made a fortune while creating a population of serial sex killers. The first step in stopping these atrocities is to name who is doing what to whom. And that’s hard, psychologically. It’s not intellectually hard. The facts are overwhelming, indisputable. But psychologically it can be terrifying. And you will be punished. Still, if we want anything like liberty, we are going to have to do it. There was that famous speech by Russell Means, “For America to Live, Europe Must Die.” I agree. And I’d add, for the earth to live, masculinity must die. If we want to end rape, stop racism, save the planet, men have to stop being men.
I’m going to end with a comment addressed specifically to any men who are still reading this. You can be traitors to your class. You don’t have to be good soldiers, good Germans. You can shift your loyalties. You can learn to identify with women. It’s even to your benefit to do so. Growing up, I saw what happened to turn my brother from a child into a boy and then into a man. It was brutal. Male socialization is pretty ghastly. And as long as there is war, the rich, old men will sacrifice the young men on the altar of power and profit. Men may not be defined a priori as victims, as fuckable, like women are, but you can be fucked. 1 in 11 boys are sexually abused. That’s a lot of abuse. As long as domination is eroticized, as long as violence and violation constitute masculinity, you aren’t free either. My question is: how many of you will face that and cast your lot with us?
”
—
exgynocraticgrrl-archive-deacti:
IN THE WAKE - An Interview with Lierre Keith
(via gynocraticgrrl)
(via frothingvagina-blog)
4:30 pm • 15 June 2014 • 2,291 notes
A brief introduction to what the 4chan website is, how it functions and what the users are like.
1:51 pm • 15 June 2014 • 86 notes