Tag: feminist role models

A misogynist writer, a feminist portrayal and me: why I can’t choose a side

I know there’s a lot of hate about Steven Moffat, and from what I can tell, a lot of it’s justified, but I haven’t really weighed in much on it, because I am incredibly conflicted.

Why?

Because I was a girl in the late ‘80s and early ’90s, and like a lot of girls my age, I found Press Gang. It was such an important, unique, groundbreaking show in so many ways, and it gave me a role model who I still hold in my echelon of favourite female characters. Lynda Day.

She was strong willed.
She was ruthless.
She didn’t care about fashion.
She had ambition.
She advocated for herself and her profession with all her might.
She wasn’t perfect, and at times, she was just plain wrong and unlikable.
She was never punished for her sexuality.
She was willing to use that sexuality if it got her what she wanted, but she was never a slave to it.
She was hard and even cruel to people around her on a daily basis, but she would fight for their job security and for their freedom to tell the truth in their articles.

As a girl who’d spent her life abused, manipulated and shamed into conforming, Lynda Day showed me that you didn’t have to make nice, you didn’t have to play by the rules, and you could carve your own path. And without Steven Moffat, she never would have existed.

I’m not saying that everything I’ve changed about my life and become since is owing to him. It’s not. It’s down to me. I did all that, myself, and I earned all the kudos. I’m not that scared, shamed, traumatised little girl any more because of a lot of reasons. But one of the first female characters I latched onto, that set my feet on the path to being something better, was Lynda. And I can’t wish for a world where she didn’t exist.

Ask me what kind of porn I’m into,
and I will take you on a magical journey to
fanfiction.com/harrypotter/nc17—

What turns me on
is Ginny Weasley in the Restricted Section with her skirt hiked up,
Sirius Black in a secret passageway
solemnly swearing he is up to no good,
and Draco Malfoy
in the Room of Requirement
Slytherin in to my Chamber of Secrets,

I am an unapologetic consumer of
all things Potterotica,
and the sexiest part
is not the way
Cho Chang rides that broomstick,
or the sound of Myrtle moaning,
the sexiest part
is knowing they are part of a bigger story,
that they exist beyond eight minutes in
“Titty Titty Gang Bang,”
that their kegels
are not the strongest thing about them,
and still,
I am told that my porn is unrealistic.

Not quite as erotic
as flashing ads that say “JUST TURNED 18!”
so you can fantasize about fucking
the youngest girl you won’t go to jail for;

I’m told that my porn isn’t quite as lifelike
as a room full of lesbians begging for cock,
told that this
is what is supposed to turn me on,

Don’t you give me raw meat
and tell me it is nourishment,
I know a slaughterhouse when I see one.

It looks like 24/7 live streaming
reminding me
that men are going to fuck me
whether I like it or not,
that there is one use for my mouth
and it is not speaking,
that a man is his most powerful
when he’s got a woman by the hair;

The first time a man I loved
held me by the wrists and called me a whore,
I did not think, “RUN.”
I thought, “This is just like the movies,”
I know a slaughterhouse when I see one.

It looks like websites and seminars
teaching you how to fuck more bitches;
Looks like 15-year-old boys
bullied for being virgins;
It looks like the man who did not flinch
when I said “Stop,”
and he heard, “try harder,”

If you play-act at butchery long enough
you grow used to
the sounds of the screaming.

It is just a side effect of industry;
Everything gets cut
into small, marketable pieces,
you can almost forget
they were ever real bodies.

I will not practice bloody hands.
I will not make-believe dissected women.
My sex cannot be packaged,
my sex is magic,
it is part of a bigger story;
I am whole.
I exist when you are not fucking me,
and I will not be cut into pieces
anymore.

Brenna Twohy, FANTASTIC BREASTS AND WHERE TO FIND THEM 

Brenna’s slam poetry has gone unexpectedly and brilliantly viral — but she’s about so much more than Harry Potter 

(via micdotcom)

WOW that is great

(via feminismforthewin)

Oh there’s the rest of the poem.

(via amemait)

fozmeadows:

scienceofsarcasm:

Evening Post: August 12, 1899.
“She immediately alighted, caught hold of the astonished youth, and gave him a sound thrashing, using her fists in a scientific fashion…”

I would love to know what this means.

I think that might be code for “punched him in the balls with devastating accuracy”.