Tag: misogyny

This Book Is Gay by Juno Dawson

So, pretty much, don’t read this? I started out reading it and thought, wow, this has not aged well, and then I read the verso, which said the date of publication was… four years ago. Which was pretty much when my internal voice went, ‘Oh… no. This is going to get worse, isn’t it?’. Spolier: it did.

Did not finish. Really exclusionary of pretty much anyone but cis gay males, pretty much every quote on bisexuality is about not liking labels or actually identifying as something OTHER than bi, either because of being being mislabeled or discriminated against (page 27-28), gender essentialist ‘lesbians like vaginas’ ‘gay men like… big hairy men with big willies’ ‘penis? check! …gay men are.. male’(page 51), ‘lesbians like vaginas’ (page 67), transphobic (so many pages), ‘intersex is not so much an identity, as you can’t really choose it’ (page 37), conflates homophobia and transphobia as basically the same thing without mentioning the transphobia rampant in the broader queer community (pages 72-92). Noped out after genuine anti-semitism on page 111 ‘Not being funny, but these guys (Jewish people) kinda started it’ (about religious homophobia).

To eliminate any confusion bout the author’s name, the author came out as transgender after publication, so the first name on the cover is one that shares the initial J with the author’s preferred name, Juno. My reaction to discovering this development was thinking that I really hope Juno works through the utterly pervasive transphobia that is inescapable in this work. Carrying that is toxic. But the fact that the author has come out as transgender doesn’t make this work any less transphobic. In fact, it’s worse, because it makes it harder to argue the damage this book can do when it’s coming from a now-out transgender person, something I will be doing with my library system shortly.

In summary – this book would have been revolutionary ten or fifteen years ago, because nothing like this existed. It still would have been toxic. Time and correct terminology has moved on, but at its core, this would have always been a work that placed more emphasis on trying to be crude and cool to appeal to young people, which is a tragic mistake. Anything that tries this hard is never going to be cool in the eyes of a teenager. Add to that the spadefuls of misinformation, glossing over of history and hate crimes, erasure, exclusion, and casual super gross misogyny for the sake of jokes (‘Lesbians like vaginas. They don’t even want blokes watching. I KNOW, how INCONSIDERATE.’ – page 67), and this is a book that doesn’t even come close to matching the promise of its beautiful, bold, inclusive, balanced cover.

allieinarden:

aspiringwarriorlibrarian:

marzipanandminutiae:

kinkyturtle:

flintandpyrite:

kakumei-no-tomoshibi:

ravengoodwoman:

flintandpyrite:

Inexplicably annoyed by men writing about knitting!

???????

image

The tags on this are extraordinary:

image

girlfriend: *does a completely harmless craft that she enjoys, creating something while she watches tv*

boyfriend: “what is this anti-feminist spinster shit, i’m so alienated”

this is literally why I feel like I have to apologize for sewing

“sweetly oblivious old ladies” Hon I 100% guarantee to you that those old ladies are aware of you, your bloodline, your daily habits and your breakfast order and gossip about how rude you are as soon as you leave.

“If you want to eavesdrop on someone, knit or sew or some sort of womanly craft. Men will act as though you are deaf and blind even when shown evidence otherwise.” – Tricksters’ Choice.

I sourced this one a while back and I was really glad I did. It’s from the book Knitting Yarns: Writers on Knitting, an anthology in which “twenty-seven writers tell stories about how knitting healed, challenged, or helped them to grow.” The passage in question, from a story by Andre Dubus III, describes the writer’s state of mind after going through some problems with his family and having a fight with his girlfriend. Part of his difficulty is that their class disparity has recently come to the fore (his family is working-class, she was born into wealth; the “busywork” line seems a little more pointed), but mostly it’s that he feels disconnected from his roots and craves the easy connection to the past that his girlfriend’s art represents. Look at the way that even this out-of-context passage is written: his apparent contempt barely disguises his envy of her ease and skill, “her fingers working the needles and yarn without having to peek.” The entire arc is about how, finding himself compelled by her craft despite himself, he asks her to teach him to knit so that he can make a Christmas present for his aunt, and, in the process, comes to realize that there is more to knitting than the shallow ideas he read into it before he really understood it.

It’s sad that a man who wrote honestly about the impact that a “womanly art” had on his life got skewered (no pun intended) on the Internet because of this contextually necessary lead-up passage in which he outlines the negative stereotypes that stood in his way and pokes fun at his own immaturity.

My partner and I used to do a biannual local craft market, selling our own handknitted and handmade goods. One of the elderly ladies who ran the trash and treasure side of the market was talking to us about it, about how her own mother? grandmother? I can’t remember, was never without something to do with her hands. She said that she talked to her about it, and she said, “Well, Bea, sometimes a lady needs to sit down.” Bea clarified that she was talking euphemistically about pregnancy. She was also talking about male expectations of female productivity. That if your man came home at the end of the day, and said, “well, what have YOU done all day?” that you could then trot out a list of mending, knitting and handcraft (in addition to the staples of cooking and cleaning) to justify your upkeep. So, yeah, if a dude has a problem with a girl doing handcraft in her spare time, he should know that it’s his damn fault women are conditioned to be busy and productive even in her leisure, and maybe question exactly what benefit he brings the family unit by playing video games.

solacekames:

solacekames:

I’m not going to comment on any of the “women in the alt right” posts flying around today because my perspective is so skewed from following the far right. By necessity I’ve gotten to the point I don’t react to them viscerally anymore like normal people do.

But from my perspective, the increased visibility of the issue is good for us (people who hate Nazis). The debate over women in the alt right is creating more dissent within their movement. There are increasing divisions between three sides when it comes to their position on women:

(don’t get me wrong, they’re all misogynists and wifebeaters, they just disagree on how to go about it)

1) Old-school white supremacists who are misogynist in the traditional way. They mainly hate women but sometimes get worked up about “Valkyrie shield maidens protecting the white race” and say nice things about them. They’re really into pro-natalism and “having lots of white babies”.

2) The “alt-lite” who’ve retreated from the naked anti-semitism of the core alt right since 2016. They also hate women, especially feminists, but are perfectly happy to have self-hating women on their side. Ann Coulter is an older example. Lauren Southern is a newer one. They’re not particularly pro-natalism, but they sometimes give it lip service.

3) The core alt right who hate women to a degree you can’t even imagine if you’re a normal person. Strongly influenced by linked hate movements like MRA and MGTOW, they even hate the whacko white Nazi women who agree with them. Any woman speaking up publicly is supposed to get bullied off the internet immediately. Tara McCarthy didn’t really understand that—maybe she thought they were kidding—but they weren’t, so now she’s paying the price and they’ve turned on her. 

A lot of people are pointing out that the core alt right hate women to such a degree that their movement isn’t going to last very long, because any group in the history of the world needs women and kids to last beyond one generation. The core alt right answer with a magical thinking argument called “white Sharia”, essentially arguing that once they win, they’ll enslave all women and keep them in cages anyway. I’m not being hyperbolic. They actually say this.

https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2017/11/27/white-sharia-and-militant-white-nationalism

This post just got reblogged by a bunch of TERFs so I thought I’d take this opportunity to talk to them if they check the notes. Every time I say misogyny in this post I’m including transmisogyny, when I say women I also mean trans women, whenever I say “the female body” I also mean trans women’s female bodies. And I’m not doing that to look cool because I don’t give a shit about looking cool, it’s just the objectively right thing to do. If you’re a young TERF who got sucked into it out of a contrarian impulse, you’ve been conned. You’re getting into a deadend ideology based on hate with frightening parallels to the alt right. The alt right agrees with you all about trans women, they even draw points for their arguments from your lying campaigns about trans women. You are effectively their allies. Don’t waste the energy of some of the best years of your life on such a reactionary, archaic, hateful, stupid, evil bullshit pointless cult. Get. Out.

Sometimes the customer is wrong for unrelated reasons.

snowflakesandlightning:

prorevenge:

Due to the well of my friends’ “def not an axe murderer” date recommendations drying up, I have turned to that most sacred of modern relationship institutions: online dating. As a very busy person trying to get it in with other very busy people, I prize honestly and directness above all else when it comes to profile creation. I include full body shots in my photos, try to minimize the use of MySpace angles in selfies, and write at the very top of the summary/caption/profile that I am fat. Not “curvy,” not “thick,” not “lots to love”–I’m f*cking fat. I’m not ashamed of it, but I also known that weight is a dealbreaker for lots of people. I don’t want to waste anyone’s time.

About a year ago I met “Evan” via Tinder. We exchanged friendly messages for a few hours one night and agreed to meet up for drinks the following evening. I waited for a full hour past the designated time, and just as I was getting up to leave, the texts started rolling in.

“I can see you sweating from here.” “How long does it take you to roll out of bed every morning?” “Is there an earthquake or are you just getting up for more pretzels?”

Really idiotic, juvenile shit. Four separate numbers, commenting on things like my clothes, which clued me in that the senders were nearby. This went on for 15 minutes before I finally saw Evan, trying to hide in at a corner table and giggling with a group of buddies. I made eye contact, saw that he saw me, and then walked out. The texts kept up until I blocked the numbers a few hours later.

I ran into Evan about 3 weeks later. We got on the same elevator, and he tried really hard at being super interested in the emergency phone instructions. I just confronted him, and he admitted it was just some “game” that him and his friends play. He knew I was fat before agreeing to meet up; they all did, because that’s what they do. Match up with fat women, then either ghost them or “troll” them at the meet-up. It was also kinda obvious he’d never seen any consequences from this bullshit, as he was sweating pretty hard and looked more humiliated than I felt. I just said whatever and walked out, expecting to never see him again.

About a month ago, some local foodie wrote a great review of the restaurant I own, and we’ve been slammed ever since. In the past, I stayed mostly in the kitchen, but I’ve been doing more and more front-of-house stuff lately, and Valentine’s Day I was working a bit of a split between the two.

I saw Evan just as he was pushing in his date’s chair. My name isn’t on the restaurant, and he didn’t see me. I checked the section up at the hostess stand and saw that one of my favorite old-timers, Nan, was going to be his waitress. I went to the bar till, took out $400, put it in her hands, and said, “This is going to be your only table for the rest of the night. You are going to make this the worst date he has ever been on.”

She spilled every single thing she brought out to the table, all over him. I was waiting for him to blow up on Nan, but he bottled it up, obviously trying to make a good impression on his date. She seemed like a perfectly lovely lady; I told Nan to make sure everything was good for her and terrible for Evan.

She poured ice water on his d*ck. She smacked the back of his head with the edge of a tray. Spilled soup on his shirt. Dropped every fork he asked for. I personally oversalted his food, used the shit liquor for his drinks, used flour instead of sugar on his dessert. To be honest, I don’t know why he didn’t just walk out. He must have really wanted to f*ck this woman.

Finally, he cracked. Demanded Nan find the manager and bring her out. I was only too happy to emerge from the kitchen with my chef’s coat and say what, I’m not ashamed to admit, I’d been planning out all night.

“I would have said hi earlier, but I didn’t want the earthquake to disturb your dinner.”

I will savor the look on Evan’s face for the rest of my life.

He was a little too flummoxed to explain, so I pulled a chair up to the table and introduced myself to his date, Amanda. Told her how I met Evan. Showed her some fun old messages. Then I told gave her a voucher for a free meal on her next visit and told Evan to get the f*ck out and never come back.

He deleted his Tinder profile.

Came out a that kitchen like:

Review: Episodes by Blaze Ginsberg

I really wanted to like this book. I liked Raising Blaze, his mother’s parental account. It’s a personal account by an autist, which I always want more of. I even liked the idea of the format, which I know from reviews here put some readers off. But this book’s unique style and presentation soured for me very quickly for one reason – the continual misogyny and male entitlement.

Blaze’s attitude to girls his own or near his own age is disturbing. If they’re a friend, he flies into rages if he so much as sees them talking to another guy. If they’re a new acquaintance, he immediately scouts them as a potential girlfriend and demands their number or email address, then flies into a fury again if they never reply/answer. (Spoiler: None of them ever do.) This jealousy and rage even extends to girls he’s never met or seen – if he meets someone new and finds out they have a sister, then discovers the sister has a boyfriend, he immediately ‘hates’ them. That’s right – hates. And not just in a passing annoyed way – he hates them enough for it to ruin his entire day or a song he liked at the time.

For those who might say ‘he’s a teenager’ or ‘he’s autistic, he can’t do regular relationships’, stop right now. This has nothing to do with age or autism, and everything to do with toxic masculinity. Blaze is the result of a society that tells men, especially quirky men, that they’re ‘entitled’ to whatever girl they like. That if they push hard enough the woman they want will say yes and become a reflection of their desires. Blaze’s incessant girlfriend hunt isn’t born of a desire for romance, intimacy or companionship. The book seems to make it quite clear – he wants a girlfriend because it’s the next achievement marker in life. That’s why he demands the numbers of every girl he meets. The individual woman doesn’t matter, because she’s just an object to be gained; a proof of his masculinity.

The book was written some time ago, so I hope that in the intervening years, Blaze has learned more about what it means to be a receptive, not aggressive partner. Because if he hasn’t… well, women deserve better.

The Anatomy of Rage

maggie-stiefvater:

This post is going to be a mess, because I’m just …untidily angry right now. It began with a series of tweets I made today about my ever-broken Datsun. The mechanic had told my husband that he was “working on that Datsun just as fast as I can because now that I’ve met her I can’t wait to get that little girl behind the wheel again.”

Little girl.

As I tweeted that I was 33 and had earned each of those years and thus preferred to be referred to as “Danger Smog-Dragon” or “Rage-Mistress” or “Ephemeral Time Lady” or “Maggie Stiefvater, #1 NYT Bestselling Author of the Raven Cycle,” a well-meaning fellow replied that perhaps I should “use [my] words, politely but firmly, to his face…” He further observed that he’d told his wife that “you know, Honey, unless you’re willing to SAY THAT to (those people), NOTHING is going to change”.

(note: please do not go search for this fellow on twitter to rage at him; this is not about him. He is set dressing, made more appropriate to the conversation at hand by the fact that he probably is a perfectly nice guy who really didn’t mean disrespect).

I told TwitterMan that I was tired of have to use my words.It’s been 33 years of using my words. Why is it my job to continuously ask to be treated equivalent to a male customer? Why is that when I arrive at a shop, I’m reminded that I have to push the clutch in if I want to start my own car? It’s 2015. Why is it still all sexism all the time?

I discovered that I was actually furious. I thought I was over being furious, but it turns out, the rage was merely dormant. I’m furious that it’s been over a decade and nothing has changed. I’m furious that sexism was everywhere in the world of college-Maggie and it remains thus, even if I out-learn, out-earn, out-drive, and out-perform my male counterparts. At the end of the day, I’m still “little girl.”

Possibly this is the point where some people are asking why this tiny gesture of all gestures should be the one to break me.

Here is the anatomy of my rage.

Step one: It is 1999 or 2000. I am 16. I go to college. A professor tells me I’m pretty. A married man in the bagpipe band I’m in tells me he just can’t control himself around me: he stays up nights thinking of myskin. Another man tells me he can’t believe that ‘a little bitch’ like me got into the competition group after a year of playing when he’s been at it for twenty years. After becoming friends with a professor’s daughter, I’m at her house sleeping on the couch, and I wake up to find the professor running his hand from my ankle bone to my thigh. I pretend I’m still asleep. I’m 17. “If something happened to my wife,” he tells me later, “I could be with you.” At my next visit to her house, I see the wife’s left a book on the kitchen table: how to rekindle your husband’s love.

Step two: It’s 2008. I finally buy the car of my dreams, a 1973 Camaro, and make it my official business vehicle. The first time I take it to put gas in it, a man tells me, “if I were your husband, I wouldn’t want you out driving my car.” I tell him, “if you were my husband, I’d be a widow.” The car requires a lot of gas. I get cat-called every other time I’m at a gas station. Once, I go into the gas station to get a drink, and when I come out, a bunch of guys have parked me in. They want, they say, to have a word with me,
little lady. We play automotive chicken which I win because I would rather smash the back of my ’73 Camaro into their IROC than have to stab one of them with the knife on my keychain.

Step three: It’s 2011. I’m on tour in a European country, on my own, escorted only by my foreign publisher. I am at a business dinner, and say I’m going to my room. My female editor embraces me; my male publicist embraces me and then puts his tongue in my ear, covering it with his hand so that the crowd of twenty professionals does not see. My choices are to say nothing to avoid making a scene in front of my publisher’s people, or to say FUCK YOU. I apparently was never offered the choice of not having a tongue in my ear.

Step four: It’s 2012. I buy a race car. Well, a rally car. Someone asks my male co-driver if I’m good in bed. Someone asks me if I got sponsorship because someone was ‘trying to check the woman box.’ People ask me if I drive like a girl. Yeah, I do, actually. Let’s play a game called: who’s faster off the start?

Step five: It’s 2014. I’m driving my Camaro cross-country on book tour. It breaks down a lot. I’m under the hood and a pick up truck stops beside me. “Hey baby,” asks the driver, “do you need any help?” “Yeah,” I reply, “do you have a 5/8 wrench?” He did not.

Step six: It’s 2015. It’s sixteen years after I learned that I was a thing to be touched and kissed and hooted at unless I took it upon
myself to say no, and no again, and no some more, and no no no. My friend Tessa Gratton points out that a male author used casually sexist language in a brief interview. She is dragged through the muck for pointing out how deeply-rooted our systemic sexism is. The publishing industry rises to the defense of the male author as if he has been deeply wronged. I tweet that the language was indeed sexist, though I didn’t think it was useful to condemn said male author. A male editor emails me privately to ask me if maybe I wasn’t being a little problematic by engaging in the discussion?

Step seven. Still 2015. Someone very close to me confesses
that her college boyfriend keeps trying to push her past kissing, and she doesn’t want to. I tell her to set boundaries, and leave him if he doesn’t. A month passes. This week I find out she just had sex for the first time after he urged her to have several glasses of wine. She doesn’t drink. She was crying. She says, “I didn’t say no, though.”

It’s been sixteen damn years. I’m tired of having to say no. I’m tired of the media telling me that it’s mouth breathing bros and rednecks perpetuating the sexism. No: I can tell you that the most insidious form is the nice guy. Who is a nice guy, don’t get me wrong. I carry my own prejudices that I work through, and I don’t believe in demonizing people who aren’t perfect yet — none of us are. But the nice guy who says something sexist gets away with it. The nice guy who says something sexist sounds right and reasonable. The nice guy’s not helping, though. It’s been sixteen years, and the nice guys are nice, but we’re still things to be acquired. We are still creatures to be asked on dates. We are still saying no, still shouting NO, still having to always again and again say “no, please treat me with respect.”

I was just invited to a car show; the well-meaning guy who asked wanted me to bring my souped up Mitsubishi. I clicked on the event page. It’s catered by Hooters. I’m not going. Yeah, it’s a little thing, but I have a lifetime of them. I’m taking my toys and going home.

“I can’t wait to get that little girl behind the wheel
again.”

In the world of superheroes, because it’s such a melodramatic world with operatic undertones to it, most of the best ones have some sort of tragedy, deformity, or disability that is meant to add depth and poignancy to their heroism, whether that’s Bruce Wayne sobbing over his parents’ bodies or Bruce Banner forced to live a life of emotional repression in order to keep his dark side at bay. You could argue that Peggy’s cross to bear is Steve’s death, but we’d argue right back that she’s mourning him in a more or less normal, human way and her grief seems to be following a healthy evolution. No vows to dress like a flying rat over his grave or anything. She’s just taken what she’s learned from him and letting his memory inspire her. No, her cross is even more basic than that. In order to protect her mission from her co-workers, Peggy has to become the bumbling, ineffective Clark Kent/Peter Parker type, hiding her victories and strength from the very people she so desperately wants to notice them. And because this show is using the patriarchal and chauvinistic attitudes of the day as a backdrop for this story, Peggy’s sacrifice becomes all that much more poignant. She has to pretend to be dumber than she is and take no credit for her work in front of a group of men who already think it’s an insult that she be allowed to work alongside them at all. Peggy Carter’s kryptonite IS the patriarchy.

Tom and Lorenzo on Agent Carter, “Time and Tide” (via clairemactavish)