“1. It likely won’t be different this time, and this is not your fault. Diets fail because they do not work sustainably over time. You may be thinking that you aren’t going to diet (I’m just going to watch what I eat and be healthy) but if weight loss is the goal you seek, you will likely approach change with a dieting mindset. This mindset, by design, gives rise to perfectionism and promotes superhuman expectations. Participating in dieting culture supports the illusion that weight loss leads to happiness and health. Honestly, for most people, weight loss just tends to lead to more worry about weight re-gain.”— 10 Reasons Not to Focus on Your Weight in the New Year - Be Nourished
Please stop ending your critiques of bigoted self-identified feminists with “then you’re not really a feminist.” That’s not a useful statement to make. It’s more useful to say “then you’re a bad feminist, and you are using feminism in a harmful way.”
Feminists can be racist. Feminists can be classist, ableist, transmisogynist, Islamophobic, antisemitic, whorephobic, homophobic, intersexist, terrible people and still be feminists. It makes their feminism tainted and flawed and oppressive and not very useful, but it doesn’t erase it.
Pretending that only people completely free from bigotry are “actual” feminists gives us an excuse to not address the very real problems happening in our movement, by people who are very much a part of it, or even leading parts of it.
To say bigots “aren’t really feminists” allows us to ignore the white supremacist and transmisogynist histories of Western feminist movements, allows us to be self-congratulatory about our own imaginary lack of ingrained prejudice, and neatly absolves us of taking responsibility as a movement for bigotry happening within that movement.
So yes, let’s acknowledge that people can be shitty feminists. But to imply that their shittiness neatly removes them from the movement is to deny the harm that they’re able to do as part of it. And that’s not helpful.
weird liberal feminists: see, women are oppressed for being feminine! for being pretty and wearing dresses and makeup and long hair and for being sugar and spice and everything nice which is BETTER than being a gross unfeminine person!! ugly mannish women are just as bad as men and pretty men are just as oppressed as women!!! being BEAUTIFUL is the source of oppression really!! what’s a gender role?
weird radical feminists: no, no, women are oppressed because biology! for having ovaries and a vagina! some body parts predispose you to oppress others and others predispose you to be a victim! gender is REAL and IMMUTABLE and BIOLOGICAL and INEVITABLE. but we can abolish it. By enforcing a rigid binary based on sex characteristics–
actually fucking useful feminism: okay but hey, what if we looked at gender like we do every single other form of exploitation?
What if ‘womanhood’ is a somewhat generally-defined social class, culturally constructed specifically to be exploited for certain types of labour for the benefit of an (also-socially-constructed) oppressor class? You know, like the fact that employees only exist as a group because capitalists exploit them for their labour?
What if gender is imposed and enacted and enforced and not indicative of anything innate or inborn? What if oppression doesn’t arise from bodies? What if instead it is enacted on and through women’s bodies and our bodies (especially trans women’s bodies!) are fetishized, held to impossible and conflicting standards, treated as aberrant regardless of which standards they do or do not meet, and used to justify our oppression — like other time-honoured forms of oppression, like racism or ableism?
oh wow it’s like when we take a materialist rather than an essentialist view of gender we can actually come up with useful analysis that’s actually consistent with literally everything we know about the way gender has been constructed differently in different times and places!
Trying to communicate with my future morning self is like setting an elaborate trap for an unsuspecting zombie like
if I put my phone alarm on full volume and vibrate and move the charger so I can put it on this out-of-reach metal surface, I can startle her awake. Probably. Then if I securely duct tape this caffeinated chocolate bar to it, it will provide a challenging situation and make her mushy little brain work extra hard to figure out how to turn the alarm off. Then she might go for the chocolate while she’s turning off the loud noises. With luck, she’ll consume the whole thing. 20 minutes of bliss then boom, physiology kicks in and the caffeine reaches her brain. Gentlemen, this just might work.
It didn’t work.
A tragedy in two acts
For years, police-reported hate crimes in Canada were inching up slowly.
They went up by three per cent in 2016 and by five per cent the year before. They even fell in 2013, dropping by 17 per cent from the year before.
That all changed last year — police-reported hate crime rose by nearly 50 per cent, much of it driven by incidents that targeted Canada’s Jewish, Muslim and black populations, according to Statistics Canada data released on Thursday.
And the differences are even more stark when you split the incidents between violent and non-violent crime.
Among religious groups, Jews were the biggest targets for hate crimes — they were victims in 360 incidents last year.
Muslims came a close second, with 349 incidents.
Hate crimes grew for both populations.
Jews were targeted in 139 more incidents last year than in 2016, for an increase of 63 per cent.
Muslims, meanwhile, were targeted in an additional 210 incidents, for an increase of 151 per cent.
Finding out that Frances Dana Barker Gage, a white woman, rewrote Sojourner Truth’s famous speech to be more stereotypically “Southern slave” (complete with slurs and misspellings like dat, dere, dey) when Sojourner Truth was actually from New York and spoke only Dutch until she was almost ten and wouldn’t have actually sounded that way linguistically and decidedly did not use the phrase “Ain’t I A Woman?” at all is…whew. And on top of everything, she embellished details about Sojourner Truth’s life (like the number of children she had/how many of them were sold into slavery), wrote that ST said that she could take beatings like a man, and the reception of the speech in the room (she claims ST was called a n*gg*r, earlier accounts say the room was welcoming).
Lmaooo peak white feminist antics.
You can read the most accurate transcript here, alongside the racist edited one.
working class person: I’m forced to beg for money and am at the mercy of other people’s goodwill as I’m facing serious suffering and/or death because my wages don’t cover the expenses I need to literally stay alive
friends of working class person: we will scrape together some of our own funds at the possible detriment of our own families because we have no other choice if we don’t want our friend to, and we can’t believe we have to say this out loud, die
media: This Uplifting Story of Friendship Will Brighten Your Day :)) Look As These Brave People Go On Happy With Their Lives Despite Hardship :)) This Story Proves That Poor People Who Complain About Their Standards Of Living Are Just Not Trying Hard Enough :)))
this post was sandwiched on my dash between two people’s medical gofundmes and i want to cry
Charities/organisations to avoid:
PETA: They’d rather spend their money on publicity campaigns than on the animals in their care. PETA killed 73.8% of the animals in their care in 2015 (x)
FCKH8: Is a for-profit company that exploits oppressed groups for money. They’re also wildly uninformed, and spread misogyny, cissexism and bi/panphobia, as well as stealing their posts/designs (x)
Autism Speaks: They spend most of their money on researching a way to eliminate autism, heighten the stigma against autism and don’t have a single autistic person on their board (x)
Please support other, better charities, and feel free to add any others you can think of to this.
Susan G. Komen for the Cure: CEO makes insane amounts of money, they deny a lot of requests for wigs/help with treatment/etc., and have attempted to sue other charities that use the color pink as part of their anti-breast cancer campaign. ( x x x )
The Salvation Army: They promote the hatred of LGBT+ people, work with fundamentalist Christian groups to support conservative politics and rip off and exploit workers. ( x x x )
Wounded Warrior: They take money that should be spent on veterans and blow it on huge opulent parties for the company bigwigs. 26 million in 2014 alone wasted! ( x x x )
^ Important reminder to NOT waste any money donating to these groups
Reblogging because of the added info about Wounded Warrior.
A good way to know if a nonprofit you’re donating to is allocating their money in the right way is to check out their Charity Navigator rating: http://www.charitynavigator.org
Signal boosting, the bell ringers are out in force, and this info is too important.
