And now for something completely depressing:
Mar 05 2014
Pointlessly Gendered Products
Check it out: http://www.buzzfeed.com/erinchack/pointlessly-gendered-products
Be sure to read the comments/captions. They’re great.
Feb 24 2014
This weather brought to you by…
“A deep freeze continues to sweep through Europe, mudslides and avalanches caused by heavy rains and snowmelt in Oregon and Washington have prompted evacuation notices, prolonged drought continues to devastate much of the American Midwest, Texas, and Mexico, with many areas now being without rain for over 200 days, and flash fires continue to rage throughout those areas, a heat wave in Australia continues unabated with temperatures well over 100 degrees, there are tornado alerts for regions throughout Tennessee and Oklahoma, Hurricane Gordon has touched down in Florida, swift on the heels of Hurricane Florence, flash floods are rampant in southern parts of Africa, and torrential rains have Brazil still in a state of emergency.”
This weather brought to you by everyone who’s driven a gas-guzzling minivan, pick-up, or SUV in the last thirty years, everyone who still makes unnecessary trips, and everyone who still lets their vehicle idle while they’re somewhere else doing whatever the fuck they’re doing.
Feb 23 2014
Dangerous Sports
I haven’t really kept up with the sexism in the Olympics, mostly because the nationalism bothers me so much I don’t even watch them anymore, but I suspect there are still some sports in which women aren’t allowed to compete. Perhaps because of the tired, old, and fucking patronizing ‘You could get hurt!’
This from the sex that makes beating someone senseless part of the game.
And has its reproductive vitals hanging by a thread at bull’s-eye of the body with nary a half-inch layer of fat for protection. (What’s next in the evolution of the male, a brain growing outside the skull?) (Oops, been there – )
The sex that got the girls’ and boys’ bicycle designs backwards.
And competes on the pommel horse, voluntarily.
Do I need to point out that women’s musculature is generally more elastic, rendering it less prone to injury?
And that women seem to have a better developed survival instinct? We duck. We run the fuck the other way. And we don’t make insupportable claims about our opponent’s sexual preferences or those of her parents.
[Hell Yeah, I’m a Feminist is a feminist blog, often radical feminist (radfem), always anti-gender and anti-sexism.]
Feb 11 2014
Office Help
Anyone remember the job ads titled “Office Help”? You knew, when a job ad was titled that way, that they expected, or wanted, a woman. Women help. They don’t actually do a job, they just help someone else do a job. So the someone else gets the credit. And the big bucks and the benefits. After all, you’re just helping out, you’re just doing a favor. Because you’re nice. That’s what women are. You never saw “Maintenance Help” or “Engineering Help” ads.
Another give-away was, and maybe still is, when the job was for something like “10:00 to 2:00”. A man wouldn’t take a part-time job. Men needed a full-time job. Even if they hadn’t made a couple kids they then needed to support. (Did I ever get paid more to support my choices? Don’t think so.)
And they’d get it too. The full-time job. Men are good at talking about their needs. Because having needs makes you important, If you’re a man. (If you’re a woman, needing something makes you weak, dependent.)
(‘Course everything makes you weak if you’re a woman. Even ethics. It’s called ‘sentiment’. In a man, it’s called ‘integrity’.)
Have things changed?
Feb 11 2014
The Proverbial ‘Walking Alone in a Park at Night’
In a rape trial, that the woman was walking alone in a park at night has been considered relevant – presumably it’s a mitigating circumstance: the accused can be excused for thinking she wanted it if she was walking alone in a park at night.
What!? Why? Why is it that a woman walking alone in a park at night is understood – by men – to be implying consent to sex with any and all men?
Are parks designated sex zones? I suppose in a sense they are. Lovers often meet there for clandestine encounters. Yeah, for consensual clandestine encounters.
Okay, but parks at night are also popular mugging zones, perhaps because of the poor lighting which makes escape easier in the event they are policed. Okay, but a woman walking alone in a park at night is more at risk for rape than for purse-snatching.
So why is a woman walking alone – ah, is that it? A woman unaccompanied by a man is unowned? Up for grabs? Literally?
[Hell Yeah, I’m a Feminist is a feminist blog, often radical feminist (radfem), always anti-gender and anti-sexism.]
Feb 03 2014
Mainstream and Alternative
So I was browsing the movie collection at my online DVD rental site and feeling so very tired and bored with movies by men, about men, for men. My request list had dwindled to almost zero, and I wasn’t finding anything I was interested in. So I decided to check out the “Alternative” section for at least an off-beat movie (by men, about men, for men) and WOH. There they were! The movies by women. About women. For women. Lots and lots of movies with women front and center. Strong, interesting women.
So I’m thinking, what a labeling mistake. Why don’t they just call the mainstream ‘male’ and the alternative/indie ‘female’. (Oh. Right.)
Feb 02 2014
Show a Little Initiative!
If you just do as you’re told, you don’t get promoted, you don’t get advanced up the ladder, because you’re not showing initiative.
Yeah right. Every time I showed some initiative, I got fired. Or at least reprimanded.
Then I realized that’s because there are different rules of advancement for men and women. Initiative in a woman is insubordination, especially if her boss is a man.
Then I realized later, much later, there are no rules of advancement for women: do X, don’t do X; do X, do Y — doesn’t matter, either way you’re not advanced.
Quite apart from the likelihood that the positions you get aren’t even on a ladder of advancement.
‘You can’t get there from here’ comes to mind.
[Hell Yeah, I’m a Feminist is a feminist blog, often radical feminist (radfem), always anti-gender and anti-sexism.]
Jan 28 2014
Porn’s Harmless and Pigs Fly
The fact that ‘you’ claim porn doesn’t harm women is proof that it does. Because such a claim indicates that you are so accustomed to seeing women sexually subordinated you think there’s nothing wrong with it. Such a claim proves that that porn has skewed your perceptions so much you actually believe the women are enjoying, asking for, whatever it is you see. (They’re pretending, asshole. They’re acting. According to some guy’s fantasy script. And they’re doing so because they’re getting paid.)
Such a claim also proves you haven’t read the research: for example, compared to those who did not watch porn, men who watched porn were more likely to have aggressive and hostile sexual fantasies, more likely to say that women enjoy forced sex, less likely to be bothered by rape and slashing, and more likely to consider women subordinate and submissive.
The research also indicates that males are starting to watch porn as young as eleven these days.
Jan 27 2014
Dolly
Wilmut’s team named the sheep cloned from a single adult cell “Dolly” because that cell had come from a mammary gland. I’m tempted, on that basis alone, to cast my vote against human cloning. I mean, if that kind of short-sightedness or immaturity is going to be running things, they’re bound to go horribly wrong.
Did they really not foresee that “Dolly” would become headline news? Or did they not even recognize how juvenile they were being? Mammaries = women = mammaries. We are not seen as people, or perhaps colleagues, certainly never as bosses. Really, need I go on? This is all so old. And yet, grown men, brilliant men, on the cutting edge of science, who become headline news, are apparently still forcing farts at the dinner table and snickering about it.
So, cloning? I don’t think so. Not until the other half of the species grows up.
(Then again, since cloning means we finally don’t need them at all, not even to maintain the species, let’s go for it.) (Could it be they never thought of that either – that cloning makes males totally redundant?)
[Hell Yeah, I’m a Feminist is a feminist blog, often radical feminist (radfem), always anti-gender and anti-sexism.]
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