so. i think there’s a good chance this was a joke. i lost my mind laughing when i first got it. but also? this is exactly how men talk, so i’m gonna break it down seriously.
i made that post after dinner with my friend’s family. his dad, let’s call him john, was belittling his wife so she wasn’t talking much and he’d made a few jabs about his son’s painted nails so his son was kind of wilting. john’s a nice guy, smart guy, really likes me & thinks i’m smart. i was pretty much carrying all the emotional labor at that dinner–trying to make my friend and his mom feel comfortable while also engaging with john. we were making conversation about lots of things, it wasn’t a particularly controversial or heated discussion at really any point in time. again, john’s a cool guy–he’s liberal and progressive and knows that i’m a lesbian and all sorts of nice things. he works for a bigggg banking company–i don’t wanna say which one, but you’d know the name. we were talking about #metoo and he starts talking about how sexual harassment isn’t really an issue where he works.
three hours before he said this, a man in times square had grabbed my boob. at a restaurant i worked at, a rapist who worked there got my number off the scheduling app and would text me vile things while we were both working to make me uncomfortable. he’d also touch my ass every shift but always managed to pretend like it was an accident. it wasn’t. my best friend, who was also at dinner with us, worked at her moms law firm when she was 17, and the man across from her had a countdown on his whiteboard to the day she turned 18 and every day he would look at her as he changed the number. i’ve been sexually assaulted multiple times outside of these instances, and so has she.
but other men don’t see these things.
and this man looks at me, and tells me sexual harassment doesn’t happen, because he doesn’t see it. and here’s the thing: that’s not why i’m mad. i’m not mad because he didn’t know.
i’m mad because i know this man. he is my friend’s father, he is my father, he is my uncles, he is my professors, he is my cousins, and my bosses, and my colleagues. i know how you have to talk to these men. it’s a game. and you have to play along whether you want to or not, because they won’t hear a word you say if you don’t.
here’s how the game works: john talks about everything like he’s the authority on the matter, because he can’t get it through his brain that someone, especially someone who is not a man, could possibly know something he doesn’t. so john starts talking about things very confidently. and because nobody knows everything, he gets a lot of things wrong. things that i refuse to let him be wrong about. so if i want to change john’s mind, if i want him to hear my point of view, i have to speak to him in the only way he will listen. i have to be, above all, pleasant. john has been taught for years to laugh at a woman’s anger, so if any hint of indignation sneaks into my voice, he won’t take me seriously any more and i’ll lose him entirely. i have to smile and laugh a little and be charming. but i also have to be articulate. i have to make sure i sound intelligent or else he’ll dismiss me as a stupid teenage girl who doesn’t know what she’s talking about. but i also can’t sound too intelligent because if he starts feeling threatened by my intelligence he’ll get defensive. (sidenote! he has a tiny dick.) so it’s quite a complicated game but i’m good at it. in fact, i’m one of the best. so here i am, carefully navigating the best way to hold this man’s hand and babysit him as i give him a kindergarten level course on sexual assault in the workplace, while also not letting him realize that i’m having to condescend to him because his brain is as tiny as his dick, and can only handful little bits of new information spoonfed to him like applesauce. i have to make it sound like i think he is not only smart, but smarter than me. i have to scatter in little phrases like, “in my experience” or “i could be wrong” and constantly undermine myself, even when speaking on a topic i am incredibly well-versed in, because i have to suggest that i think he is smarter than me or else he won’t deem me worthy of his attention.
i’m good at it. i play the little fucking game and before i know it, i’ve got john here nodding along and acting like he agreed with what i’m saying all along, acting like he came up with it, acting like he DIDN’T totally contradict what i just told him minutes before. but since he didn’t come up with it, he’ll likely interrupt me before i even get to the end of my point and say something totally misinformed and now i’m trying to educate him on both of the things he got wrong but before i can even do that he’s interrupting me again and now there’s THREE things i’ve gotta teach this guy without him catching on to the fact that i’m teaching him.
now. here’s the best part about the game. it’s soul-shatteringly dehumanizing. to disregard your own trauma, your own emotion, your own incredibly valid anger that you have fought and fought and fought to believe you have a right to feel, to tone down your beliefs in order to make them more palatable to someone who is this deeply ignorant, to force yourself to giggle and be charming as you discuss the thing that has ripped you into shreds, to ignore how triggering it is to even breach this topic in conversation, to be complicit in making yourself small in order to get your point across, to look into the eyes of a man who has, unwittingly, because of his ignorance, enabled other men to engage in this same behavior–it turns a dinner conversation into a thing that is traumatizing in it’s own right.
and i feel obligated to put myself through this because of my privilege, because as an attractive, white twenty year old, i can hold this man’s attention better than a massive portion of the population, who he likely wouldn’t give the time of day to. i refuse to let him live his life unchallenged, so i do what i have to do to make myself heard.
and i feel the repercussions of this so strongly i dissociate more viciously than i have in weeks and lose all memory of a solid 3 hours of my life after this conversation.
and i come on here, and post: men are useless and exhausting. because i am angry at what men have done to me. at what they continue to do to me. at what i must do to myself in order to force them to wake up and realize what other men are doing to me and to please, for the love of god, MAKE IT STOP.
and i get this message from you, a dumbass who’s got his head shoved so far up his own asshole that it’s about to come back up through his esophagus, assuming you know what i’m talking about. assuming you know more than me about men and about my experiences with them, about why i made this post. assuming that because you’re not the scum of the fucking earth and because you do three good things, it somehow balances out the treatment i have received for years from men, and makes my anger towards them, and my hatred of them: unjust. and my post wasn’t even me being angry! it was me being exhausted!!!!! if i’m tired of men, why the fuck would you, “a male” deem it at all appropriate to come near me, to send me a message, to engage with me at all? leave me alone! you know nothing!
and as much as i thought this was a joke at first, the more i read the message the more i’m convinced that it was written by a man, because even a girl pretending to be a man as a joke wouldn’t manage to sound this fucking stupid. i have dozens of stories exactly like this over the course of at least 10 years of my life. i know more than you. and this isn’t FUCKING about you. if you weren’t useless and exhausting, you would have happily scrolled by and went on with your night. but by sending me this message you proved yourself to be IMPRESSIVELY: useless and exhausting. shut the fuck up for about 3-4 years. you might learn something. also, read men explain things to me by rebecca solnit. she says all this better than i do.
#NotAllMen? How very nice of you dear but shut the godDAMN FUCK UP because #YesAllWomen.
Tag: misogyny
@ the ladies
wouldn’t it be cool if we could like… be ugly… but then…. not be considered subhuman for it
I have written in long detail about my issues with “everyone is beautiful” and this text post summarizes it in 18 words
Not against women in media or anything, but why are there so few “male” legendary creatures printed lately? This is an earnest, sincere question. No malice intended by it.
Here’s what’s going on. Putting the genderless creatures aside, the creative team works hard to make sure that of all the remaining creatures pictured on cards in sets half are male and half are female, just as occurs in real life.
That includes legendary creatures. They are half male/half female, but people are so used to seeing males taking up a larger portion of space in pop culture that half female feels like a larger portion than it is.
For example, there was a big issue last year about how “all” the Pirates in Ixalan block were female. If you went back and counted though you’d find that it was half and half.
This is yet another reason proper representation in entertainment matters. When women are half of a group in the real world, we don’t want it to feel “off”.
off topic but I think the reason women (self included!!!) get so reactive around ~Lifestyle Choice~ things (feminine vs gender nonconforming, tampons vs pads, slut vs prude, motherhood vs being child-free, a million other things you’ve seen people yelling at each other about) — and assert that the other option is more acceptable/encouraged — is the very blatant fact that there IS no correct and acceptable way to be a woman, that each and every one of these things is HEAVILY stigmatized and denigrated in different ways (and the same root), that we have all encountered an entire cultures worth of people asserting that the “option” (not that any of these choices are made freely, am I right ladies?) you did is the more shameful one. it’s a trap though, cuz the same fuckin shit is on the other side. that’s misogyny babes
listening to criticisms of female-centered fantasy, romance, etc. like…women really aren’t allowed to have wish fulfillment huh
One weird and specific thread that I’ve seen flow through a wide variety of tumblr conversations is that you people have no fucking idea what women in our 30s are like: you don’t know what we do for fun, you have no idea what we look like, our media interests puzzle and frighten you and the whole vibe is that every time you find out a woman is over, say 33, you gasp that a wizened hag has again managed to slip in among you. Surely she must be a secret immortal or a terrifying ghoul.
Things a 30 something woman can do that are suspicious according to tumblr:
- Enjoy hip youthful things like currently popular bands, movies, cw tv shows, etc
- Enjoy things from her own youth, e.g., Harry Potter, Sailor Moon
- Enjoy square adult hobbies like pintrest crafts and candle collecting
- Enjoy odd adult hobbies like doll or dollhouse collecting
- Have the body of a woman who has given birth to children, or the face of a woman who spent her youth in the sun
- Have the body of a woman who does yoga and the face of a woman who wears sunscreen and has good genes.
- Talk about her pets, especially if she has no kids
- Talk about her kids
And once you get over 40, you become a cryptid.
I can be a cryptid now??? Amazing
Don’t confused ‘oppression’ with ‘first world problems’, it’s a rookie error among feminists.
Wow, okay buddy, you’re BEGGING for a takedown here.
First world problems? Not a thing. People who say shit like “first world problems” are massive racist, imperialist, dismissive assholes.
If you’re ever tempted to say “first world problems,” do me a favor, and pull down a map. Tell me EXACTLY where the “third world” is. Make sure you correctly identify Switzerland as part of the third world, and Turkey as part of the First World. Don’t forget that Djibouti is a part of the first world.
Literally sit down and learn what “third world” means and why people from nonwestern nations think it’s a total bullshit term.
Second: you think people in the so-called third world don’t care about shit like makeup, and love, and technology? You think they don’t care about internet harassment? You think women over there don’t care about street harassment? You think they don’t care about fashion and clothes? You think they don’t care about music and video games?
Because THEY DO.
Right now, there is a woman in burundi teaching herself how to do a cut-crease eyeshadow look. Guaranteed.
“Third world” nations have fashion shows and fashion magazines. They care about street harassment. They care about the internet. They play video games. They know more about anime than your sorry ass every will. And the idea of “first world problems,” which makes it sound like all women in “third world” nations are dealing with starvation, rape, war, acid attacks etc.
Is bullshit.
Rank.
Bullshit.
Women in Iran spend shitloads of money on makeup. Women in the DRC don’t just care about rape. Rape – the ONE THING westerners can be expected to know about women in Congo-Kinshasa – ranks NUMBER FOUR on the list of issues women in Congo want addressed. Political participation is number 1. Economic empowerment is number 2. Women in India are passionate about information technology, and you know what they hate? Coming to the United States, where Indian women in STEM are suddenly considered LESS GOOD than their male colleagues. My friends in Senegal taught ME how to download movies off the internet. Zimbabwe has a fashion week.
As Teju Coal points out:
“I don’t like this expression “First World problems.” It is false and it is condescending. Yes, Nigerians struggle with floods or infant mortality. But these same Nigerians also deal with mundane and seemingly luxurious hassles. Connectivity issues on your BlackBerry, cost of car repair, how to sync your iPad, what brand of noodles to buy: Third World problems. All the silly stuff of life doesn’t disappear just because you’re black and live in a poorer country. People in the richer nations need a more robust sense of the lives being lived in the darker nations. Here’s a First World problem: the inability to see that others are as fully complex and as keen on technology and pleasure as you are.
One event that illustrated the gap between the Africa of conjecture and the real Africa was the BlackBerry outage of a few weeks ago. Who would have thought Research In Motion’s technical issues would cause so much annoyance and inconvenience in a place like Lagos? But of course it did, because people don’t wake up with “poor African” pasted on their foreheads. They live as citizens of the modern world. None of this is to deny the existence of social stratification and elite structures here. There are lifestyles of the rich and famous, sure. But the interesting thing about modern technology is how socially mobile it is—quite literally. Everyone in Lagos has a phone.”
95% of the people who use bullshit expressions like “First world problems” have NO IDEA what life is like for people in the so-called third world. You just like sitting there derailing.
And for the record? As a white, western feminist, DAMN RIGHT I concentrate on issues in the United States. Because when white western feminists try to “save” women outside the west? We do a SHIT job of it. We’re the ones who bowl over actual congolese women, and what THEY want, and say that the #1 issue affecting them is rape. We become arms of the imperialist patriarchal complex.
Classic example: the guy who was ruling Egypt for the British got british feminists to help him in his anti-headscarf campaign in Egypt. Why did he hate headscarves? Because he wanted to *break the spirit* of Egyptians. Not because he gave a shit about women’s rights.
How do I know that?
Because he was the head of the anti-women’s-suffrage group in England.When women who live outside the west do awesome things, I will signal-boost them, and I will do whatever they think I can do to help. But I follow their lead. Because these are THEIR issues, and THEY know what matters to them. Not me.
FINALLY: My problems are not trivial. My problems are not bullshit. My problems are not to be dismissed with your racist, imperialist logic. Dress codes and makeup and music and books and video games MATTER. They matter to me. They matter to my life.
So fuck you.
And fuck your assumptions.
And maybe consider that YOUR first world problem?
Is that you can’t “see that others are as fully complex and as keen on technology and pleasure as you are.”::stands up and applauds this response::
Have I blogged this before? Still bears repeating.
they’ve really dumbed down the powers of everyone in the mcu to make it more “realistic” as if I show up to these fucking movies looking for realistic scenarios. I’m here to escape, bitch. It’s all about the escapism fuck realistic shit.
These movies would be so much more enjoyable if they didn’t get so bogged down in realism. Like your cinematic universe does not have to abide by the rules of ours. Magic being real can be a given. Time travel can be real. Like it’s really so unimaginative and limiting to be so grounded in reality. There are so many more possibilities when you present aspects of a fictional world as fact.
And they also love to compromise a character’s mythos to make it more realistic which is my pet peeve. Like black widow has her own goddamn serum that keeps her in peak physical condition and preserves her youthfulness and she’s been alive a long ass time in canon and mcu nat is really just a fucking disgrace. Sharon Carter was dumbed down to prop up Steve when she’s a master hand to hand combatant and spy and far more qualified than Steve in MANY areas yet all we are shown of her skill is in the last 2 seconds of cap2 where she shoots a gun real good. Like it’s seriously a mess. And don’t even get me started on Gamora. She’s the deadliest women in the universe and she ffuckign loses in hand to hand against peter “dumbass” quill??? What the FUCK! What the actual fuck! That scene in Gaurdians 1 seriously makes my blood boil. It would’ve made far more sense for her to win easily and peter pursue her and along the way they team up. I’m just so ffucjfu. Like what the fuck. And mcu Wanda. I don’t know how you can call whatever the fuck that mess is the scarlet witch. It’s bad. It’s real bad.
Also very funny how the most glaring examples of this are women. Like the men (excluding loki) are basically the same. It’s upsetting and I’m feeling homicidal
this really sounds like the problem isn’t attempt at realism, but misogyny.
Yep!
Female Character: *Everybody is immediately drawn to her for no discernible reason*
Female Character: *Extremely powerful compared to all of the other characters within the story; there’s no reason as to how she became so powerful*
Female Character: *For some reason is able to quickly pick up new skills in a period of time comparable to a genius; no explanation for this too.*
Female Character: *has virtually no weaknesses except she’s clumsy teehee :)*
Person: Isn’t this kind of a mary-sue?
Tumblr: why do misogynists like to invalidate strong female characters???????????
If we’re going to be fair here, the reason so many people get upset when a female character is called a Mary Sue is because that label is thrown around so haphazardly and so very often handed to characters who really don’t deserve to be labeled as such. The controversy of the term comes from its overuse and misuse.
The term can be used correctly, but it is too often misused by people who see a capable strong female character and have a gut instinct to burn the witch and return to their male hero power fantasy.
To quote @ladyloveandjustice
“So, there’s this girl. She’s tragically orphaned and richer than anyone on the planet. Every guy she meets falls in love with her, but in between torrid romances she rejects them all because she dedicated to what is Pure and Good. She has genius level intellect, Olympic-athelete level athletic ability and incredible good looks. She is consumed by terrible angst, but this only makes guys want her more. She has no superhuman abilities, yet she is more competent than her superhuman friends and defeats superhumans with ease. She has unshakably loyal friends and allies, despite the fact she treats them pretty badly. They fear and respect her, and defer to her orders. Everyone is obsessed with her, even her enemies are attracted to her. She can plan ahead for anything and she’s generally right with any conclusion she makes. People who defy her are inevitably wrong.
God, what a Mary Sue.
I just described Batman.”
The problem isn’t that characters are unrealistic. Heroes often are unrealistic and it’s ok to criticize media.
However, female characters are criticized where male characters aren’t.
Everything in OP’s post could apply to Luke Skywalker (and definitely applies to Anakin) but those characters won’t be criticized the way Rey has been (even though everything Rey does in The Force Awakens is believable). We are more willingly to believe in a male chosen one who can just do amazing things because he’s the hero.
Boys can have wishfulment stories but girls can only have realistic stories.
^^^^
So, there’s this interesting thing where a certain degree of saturation in stories will train the audience to just accept stuff that’d normally strike them as bizarre or unrealistic, and move on without questioning it. It’s sort of like ‘willing suspension of disbelief’, except that phrasing doesn’t really encapsulate it precisely. It’s more like… commonality breeds acceptance.
For example, a humble young boy who rises to prominence and becomes a hero is such a standard piece of storytelling, that virtually no one ever sits down to watch a movie and actually goes ‘well, but, this is just a young farm lad – surely he can’t do a single thing to help stop the Forces of Evil!’ People in the movie might do that. But unless the audience is very, very young, or has somehow managed to avoid most books, movies, songs, comics, television shows, and oral traditions for the whole of their life, they’re going to sit down and think ‘ah yes, here’s our guy’.
Even though, in real life, it actually IS still pretty far-fetched for Ye Humble Village Lad to turn out to be the only thing standing between mankind and destruction.
The interesting thing, though, is that if you change enough elements of what is so common as to be thoughtlessly accepted, the image you present will no longer resemble the familiar narrative. Even if, below the surface, the other components are exactly the same.
This, along with the above-mentioned misogyny, is another contributing factor to the Mary Sue thing.
Because there are fewer female heroes who are just unabashed power fantasies, embodying unlikely rises to success or mastery of untold skills, if you take a very typical story that stars a dude and swap him out for a lady, the elements once rendered invisible by familiarity, are now noticeable again. The audience is jolted out of complacency, and begins to think more critically about what they’re being asked to believe. (You can accomplish the same thing with other demographics, too, i.e. putting characters of colour in roles typically given to white actors, or having LGBT+ characters with the same abundance as straight ones, and so on and so forth.)
So even people who like to think of themselves as totally fair and unprejudiced can end up enforcing double-standards in entertainment. Because if you don’t catch yourself, you will not even realize that you managed to sit through three Iron Man movies without ever questioning the premise of Tony Stark’s genius, but somehow Shuri in Black Panther just struck you as ‘unrealistic’.
So I just read this article about how people end up fucking up whatever task they’re doing when they feel like they’re being watched. Scientists have discovered that the sense of being observed actually SHUTS OFF a part of the brain, the inferior parietal cortex.
Given the fact that women are constantly watched in our society, and we are constantly REMINDED that we are being watched by people making fun of fat, “ugly”, or gender-nonconforming women, it makes me wonder how many women have messed up important tasks or projects or just day-to-day activities because A PART OF OUR BRAIN is permanently being deactivated?
Like talk about a fucking handicap.
Women are constantly held under the microscope- whether we are attractive or unattractive, the gaze of patriarchy never ends.
Just last week I was walking my dog and bent over to literally pick up poop. Suddenly I heard whistling and looked up cause I knew I was the only person around. Sure enough, about 300 feet away, some construction worker was perched on top of a building, grinning at me and calling out stuff I luckily couldn’t hear because he was so goddamn far away.
I wonder what it does to women to have this constant source of stress hanging over us, each and every day, knowing we are being scrutinized and examined no matter what we’re doing. I wonder how many more accomplishments, life-changing discoveries, inventions, etc would have been achieved by women if we didn’t have this constant brain-handicap imposed on us by men.
This feeling of being watched extends even when we’re alone and affects our abilities- here’s a study where women took a math test while in a bathing suit and performed significantly worse than women fully dressed, even though all the women were alone when taking the test. The men in bathing suits and the men fully-dressed had no significant difference in performance. It is a major fucking handicap.
(I don’t remember how to make a cleaner link on my phone, sorry)
This is AMAZING. It never occurred to me that “Observing a thing changes that thing” includes the eye of the male gaze.
i'll apple your turnover 