Open your mind

“I, too, have hair” (SlutWalk - Brazil)

(via Marcha das Vadias 27.05.2012)

via correlato / 1 day ago / 7 notes / Protest, body hair, words, feminism,

“Pairing men with femininity is seen as like an insult, like you’re lowering yourself. Yet women doing masculinity - not an insult to women. I think it’s safe to say that there might even be some fear of the feminine. I’ve heard this phenomenon referred to in some circles as femmephobia. So this aversion to the feminine in marketing and products is one of the outcomes of femmephobia. Another outcome is that anytime someone who is perceived as a man is aligning with anything feminine-y - it is perceived as a direct threat to Mr. Manly Man’s masculinity. You can be aggressive, you can be intolerant, you can be hateful; but don’t dare wear a dress. Or so comes, ‘you’re a fag,’ ‘you’re a pussy,’ and the violence.” - Laci Green

(Source: meredithz)

via lipstick-feminists / 6 days ago / 7,539 notes / feminism, words, gif, fuck gender normativity, Protest,

❝ Simply put: you do not get to build a magazine around making women feel inadequate and then express astonishment and pity when they comply. This is the culture that Glamour and its ilk have helped to build — a culture that is relentlessly critical of women’s bodies, a culture that considers women’s bodies public property open to debate, a culture that trains women to turn this criticism on themselves, and to accept and internalize every comment, opinion, observation and judgment on their bodies no matter who it comes from, be it a parent, a friend, a boss, a significant other, or a stranger on the street, because they think they deserve it. ❞

- Real Quick: Glamour is shocked. I mean eviscerated. I mean shocked. « Two Whole Cakes

via tinyfloralninja / 1 week ago / 825 notes / feminism, body, beauty, words, Protest,

❝ Those who subvert social norms are, ostensibly, people who have forgotten that they can be seen, publicly, at any time. Therefore, when they transgress social norms—by expressing physical affection for a person not visibly coded as the opposite sex, for example, or by being fat and rejecting social and bodily invisibility—they need to be reminded of this omniscient social gaze, and in the absence of institutional discipline, must be punished so they do not transgress again. This is the mechanism by which a dude who sees me in a vividly-colored dress, walking alone as though I either don’t know or don’t care that I am defying bodily norms, feels compelled to scream “UGLY FAT BITCH” at me. He is applying social discipline and teaching me a lesson: Everyone can see you, and your body and/or behavior are unacceptable. ❞

- So Michel Foucault and Jeremy Bentham walk into an elementary school cafeteria* via the Two Whole Cakes blog by Lesley Kinzel (via transformfeminism)

via anarchofeminist / 1 week ago / 1,571 notes / fuck gender normativity, words, feminism, Protest,

❝ People have argued that affirmative action is consistent or is not consistent with meritocracy,” Walton said. “Our argument is not that it’s consistent or inconsistent. Our argument is that you need affirmative action to make meritocratic decisions – to get the best candidates.”

The researchers say that people often assume that measures of merit like grades and test scores are unbiased – that they reflect the same level of ability and potential for all students.

Under this assumption, when an ethnic-minority student and a non-minority student have the same high school grades, they probably have the same level of ability and are likely to do equally well in college. When a woman and a man have the same score on a math test, it’s assumed they have the same level of math ability.

The problem is that common school and testing environments create a different psychological experience for different students. This systematically disadvantages negatively stereotyped ethnic minority students like African Americans and Hispanic Americans, as well as girls and women in math and science.

“When people perform in standard school settings, they are often aware of negative stereotypes about their group,” Walton says. “Those stereotypes act like a psychological headwind – they cause people to perform worse. If you base your evaluation of candidates just on performance in settings that are biased, you end up discriminating. ❞

- Affirmative action is needed to get the best candidates, psychologist says (via titotito)

(Source: sociolab)

via beautifuldancewhore / 1 week ago / 37 notes / they are the future, education, words, racism, feminism,

❝ I hate it when people tell me that I am lucky my mother was pro-life. The truth is, even if we ignore that pro-choice is not the same as pro-abortion-for-every-pregnancy, it was still not absolutely wonderful my mother chose to have me. I was born to her when she was very young, she contemplated abortion. That doesn’t scare me away from being pro-choice. It was my mother’s choice, and she made it. If I had been aborted I would never have known it, it would not have affected me. ❞

-

Jennifer Shea

My absolutely wonderful feminist role model. She teaches English at my high school, and I look up to her more than anyone else in my life.

(via iamateenagefeminist)

via ladiosadelaluna / 3 weeks ago / 254 notes / abortion, words, feminism,

clementinecannibal:

for anyone who thinks female armpit hair is ‘no big deal’ these days, for those who question my insistence that my armpit hair on my femme body is a genderqueer expression that has been targeted for violence time and again, check out this comment on my youtube.

grrrlvirus:

this shit is all too painfully real.trigger warning.

when i was nineteen i went to a local show with my sister. i was dancing around and acting crazy, and i was the only grrrl doing so. i was wearing a tanktop. the singer in the band said into the mic “the girl with the red hair (me) really needs to shave her fucking armpits”. people were laughing at me. people were throwing shit at me. i was giving these people the finger and raising my arm, showing off the hair. then a guy punched me in the face, knocking my glasses off. i tried to hit him back but another guy caught my arm and restrained me. i was pushed, shoved and hit by a group of guys. my shirt was pulled down during all of this. my sister’s arms were restrained. i was dragged out on my back by my pigtails, down some stairs and my head was smashed into a pole along the way. it was fucked up and very, very traumatizing. nothing like that had ever happened to me before. after that people would pass the store i worked at in the mall and shout ‘shave your armpits!’ at me while i was working.

I’m just going to put this right here because this is unacceptable. Women shouldn’t have to endure attacks for something so ridiculous as body hair. I just can’t even express how much it disgusts me all these ignorant people doing and saying shit like these. I don’t even get it, HOW is this any of these people business? Like, seriously, why are you even wondering about this girl pubes? How the hair in these women’s armpits where bothering them? They must really feel personally attacked by these women choices and while I could say I feel sorry for them, for being so closed minded, I have to say I wish they all get hit in the face. The saddest part is that I KNOW this kind of thinking is very common. It just makes me sick and angry.

via thiscuntsays / 1 month ago / 1,936 notes / awesome ladies, awesome women, beauty, body hair, feminism, words, Protest,

❝ This makes me think about how some men’s jackets are really beautiful on the inside with colorful linings in less traditionally masculine hues than what the outside of the jacket suggests. I like the idea of secret pleasures inside clothes, especially for when we’re going under cover at our jobs or in other hostile environments. It also makes me think about people wearing undergarments that are differently gendered than what their external clothing indicates they might be wearing. I like to think about people cultivating their own secret expressive pleasures in those ways. It seems like a healing response to coercion. ❞

- Dean Spade (via homoeroticsubtxt)

(Source: queerture.wordpress.com)

via viviopsis / 1 month ago / 168 notes / feminism, fuck gender normativity, words, Protest,

❝ What men mean when they talk about their “crazy” ex-girlfriend is often that she was someone who cried a lot, or texted too often, or had an eating disorder, or wanted too much/too little sex, or generally felt anything beyond the realm of emotionally undemanding agreement. That does not make these women crazy. That makes those women human beings, who have flaws, and emotional weak spots. However, deciding that any behavior that he does not like must be insane– well, that does make a man a jerk.

And when men do this on a regular basis, remember that, if you are a woman, you are not the exception. You are not so cool and fabulous and levelheaded that they will totally get where you are coming from when you show emotions other than “pleasant agreement.”

When men say “most women are crazy, but not you, you’re so cool” the subtext is not, “I love you, be the mother to my children.” The subtext is “do not step out of line, here.” If you get close enough to the men who say things like this, eventually, you will do something that they do not find pleasant. They will decide you are crazy, because this is something they have already decided about women in general. ❞

- Lady, You Really Aren’t “Crazy” (via chromefoam)

(Source: sparkamovement)

via gordon-crisp / 1 month ago / 16,560 notes / feminism, words,

❝ Desire is complicated and tricky to regulate — I don’t think I could stop being turned on by being treated “badly” any easier than a gay man could suddenly start being attracted to women. I might prefer that my big controversial sex preferences involved whipped cream or whatever instead of wanting to be slapped in the face during intercourse, but that is not the hand I was dealt. […] If you don’t have fantasies like mine, I can understand the impulse to want to erase them from the world. But women like me and all the other straight freaks in this world stubbornly refuse to be erased. Sex is too important, too essential a life process, to spend our lives faking it. ❞

- Hit Me Baby, One More Time: Slapping, Spitting, Name-Calling and Other Sex Preferences I Feel Guilty About | xoJane (via sexisnottheenemy)

via allthechocolatesinthebox / 1 month ago / 298 notes / feminism, words, sex positive, domination,

sparkamovement: whoneedsfeminism:

My daughters should not have a truck grabbed out of their hands by an adult and handed to a male cousin because, “This is a boy toy anyway.”

My son shouldn’t be ridiculed because his favorite color is pink.

via thevisualpoet / 1 month ago / 10,381 notes / they are the future, kids, feminism, words, submission,

❝ As an independent sex prostitute (something that offers me a lot of privilege, as does being white, educated, and middle class) I get to decide whom to see, so during my sessions, we tend to explore queer sexuality. My sexuality, mind; most of my clients are straight men, or at least thought they were when we started! […] I expect them to challenge their assumptions of what makes male and female, what is appropriate and what isn’t. We discuss and explore power: who has it, and how, and why. I enjoy demonstrating that penetration is not a male act, or even something only men enjoy. I enjoy discussing sex, and gender and class. I like to help men in positions of power rethink femininity and feminism. My work is intellectually stimulating and challenging, and it uses my brainpower more than any other job I’ve had. ❞

- Kitty Stryker: Some People Enjoy Being Prostitutes… Get Over It (via sexisnottheenemy)

via sexisnottheenemy / 1 month ago / 907 notes / sex work, sex positive, words, feminism,

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