Soraya Chemaly: The power of women’s anger
— Gillian Flynn, Sharp Objects
Do you support gender non-conforming men when they don't exist for your entertainment? When it isn't the shock-and-awe, punk "irony" of smeared lipstick and a beard, or the polished showmanship of drag? Do you support the GNC men whose femininity isn't a joke? Or do you feel on some level that men are only entitled to femininity if it's strictly a performance? Do you still expect feminine men to uphold traditional masculinity to be respected? Are you only allowing these men to exist as caricatures?
Do you support gender non-conforming women when they don't appeal to your aesthetics? When it isn't meticulously tailored suits and expensive haircuts? Do you support the GNC women who can't afford or don't want to be "dapper" or fashionable? Or do you feel on some level that women are only entitled to masculinity so long as they're still "making an effort"? Do you still expect masculine women to uphold traditional femininity to be respected? Do you still think women exist to be looked at?
Are you genuinely unlearning sexist rhetoric and dismantling gender expectations, or are you just enforcing it in ways you're unable to recognize because you've tricked yourself into thinking your community is too woke and clever to fall victim to it?
-Malcolm X (1962)
“The woman who checks her makeup half a dozen times a day to see if her foundation has caked or her mascara has run, who worries that the wind or the rain may spoil her hairdo, who looks frequently to see if her stockings have bagged at the ankle or who, feeling fat, monitors everything she eats, has become, just as surely as the inmate of the Panopticon, a self-policing subject, a self committed to a relentless self-surveillance. This self-surveillance is a form of obedience to patriarchy. It is also the reflection in woman’s consciousness of the fact that she is under surveillance in ways that he is not, that whatever else she may become, she is importantly a body designed to please or to excite.”
— Sandra Lee Bartky, “Foucault, Femininity, and the Modernization of Patriarchal Power”
i wonder if the reason why no one assumes because you posted x male writer, you share all of his views, approve of all his actions whereas they do for female writers is because engaging with female writers in the first place is suspect. you are going out of your way to read women, and this choice in itself deserves scrutiny. there must be something nefarious going on.
it’s so odd because we all know that casual readers aren’t aware of x writer’s evil acts when that writer is a man (i mean look at neruda, how many years did that take to become something that is popularly known) but we assume that’s the case for much more obscure female writers, and not only that, but there’s an assumption that the problematic action, belief, thought, whatever is what drew them to the author in the first place, which is rooted in an assumption of female malice, deviousness etc.
anyway, rosamond s. king wrote a nice piece on her feelings about paule marshall’s work and homophobia as a queer caribbean woman. while of course no one is obliged to engage with the writings of people who are homophobic, misogynistic, racist, etc, most of us who aren’t white men do on the regular. we pick up a book deemed a classic - whether by a white man, or a white woman, or a straight woman of colour - and randomly find ourselves attacked and then make a choice to either ditch the book, or go on, and take from it accordingly. it’s just a part of life. this notion of trying to get problematic writers (all female) and those who read their works (all female) on some type of List of Banned Materials is hilarious to me, personally. like where have you been all this time while we’ve been navigating these issues since childhood.
People talk about needlessly gendered items but one time I got diagnosed with female presenting autism and I’m still losing my mind over it
This is why Autism Speaks studies are invalid. it’s resulted in people thinking that only men can have autism. Thus resulting in stupid terms like female presenting autism.
FEMALE PRESENTING AUTISM???
I refused to give my adhd evaluator my gender/sex so she logged my traits and answers from the questionaires both for the “male” adhd and “female” adhd traits and the results varied so much that even my evaluator was shocked by it bc it was the first time she had done both “genders” for one person (and i think it opened her eyes on how wrong and inaccurate sexed tests/evals are). my hyperactivity, and impulsivity scored lower (aka downplayed) on the female page but had a HUGEEEEE spike for it on the male page, their were things like my emotional dysregulation that were also“less apparent” on my female results than my male ones.
Genuinely ask who ever is evaluating you to remove sex/gender from the evaluation process and if they refuse demand that they test you as a “male” and “female”
Lots of us esp black and brown autistics and adhders are getting duped out of a proper diagnosis bc white perisex cishet people are seen as the “standard” for literally everything in the medical field
The term used here is “people”, which is true but non-specific. The vast majority of those sterilised under the race hygiene programme were women (the last women sterilised, in fact, in 1976, was sterilised because, during the course if her university career, she slept with five different men), and indigenous and Romani women were massively overrepresented in comparison to population size.
“When I was young, women were raped on the campus of a great university and the authorities responded by telling all the women students not to go out alone after dark or not to be out at all. Get in the house. (For women, confinement is always waiting to envelope you.) Some pranksters put up a poster announcing another remedy, that all men be excluded from campus after dark. It was an equally logical solution, but men were shocked at being asked to disappear, to lose their freedom to move and participate, all because of the violence of one man.”
— Rebecca Solnit, Grandmother Spider in Men Explain Things To Me and Other Essays
girls learn to watch themselves in third person so they can constantly fix their laugh and smile and hair and dancing and speech in hopes they can transform into a different person that someone will love and girls fear that if anyone sees them in their most candid self then they will be deemed unlovable and I’m so exhausted from practicing my smile in the mirror but girls also know that the ability to be loved is synonymous with their worth
