poor people get treated as dumb and ignorant bc we don't always know how shit works but that's usually not ignorance or stupidity imo.

I have a haircut tomorrow. I've done it in my bathroom since I was in middle school, save for twice as birthday gifts over the past 8-12 years. I don't know what to expect, what the etiquette is, what they even do, because I genuinely didn't think to go somewhere to cut my hair for 10ish years.

when I lived in a city, I had a friend visit. she couldn't figure out the transit system, rideshares, or anything. the town we grew up in has none of that. she's a smart woman, but people got so confused when she couldn't figure it out.

this is just basic stuff, but my point is that poor people are left without what seems like basic knowledge because we just don't have the money to need to know how to use it or our communities just lack it, be it haircuts or uber. and that's small, silly stuff compared to things like credit scores or retirement funds. why and how are you supposed to know what an IRA is when you can't afford to put money into it? how do you shop for healthcare, for fair interest rates when buying a car or house, when there's never been enough money to make that even seem relevant to your life?

then so many of these companies know you don't know. yeah, 200% interest for a payday loan is normal because you've never had the ability to build credit and get a less predatory loan. you have to have car insurance in the US, and very specific, expensive insurance if you've had certain criminal convictions like a DUI, but you need to drive for work. so you pick the cheapest policy, especially if you have a record, and it covers nothing. you crash or get hit, it goes up and you're left w the fees, not the company.

we can talk about financial literacy being an issue, but we don't really talk about why. or the fact that, even if you know you're very well-educated on why this whole system is clownery all the way down, you're still stuck with lack of experience, lack of credit, and lack of options. and you get to hear middle class and rich liberals talk about how you just need more education, when that education can't be applied on the regular. so you say smth and it's just "oh, yeah, I have student loans, I get it." like no, dude, I'm talking payday loans, shitty insurance, evictions on record from not knowing your own rights because you're too busy working for $7.25 or $15 or whatever.

we don't need education so much as we need options, especially for women.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO THE MOST INFLUENTIAL ALBUM OF THE MODERN AGE

I'm at the terf hangout over caffeinated with 4 hours of sleep I just ran into a friend I hadn't seen in 2 years (we drifted apart) this feels like a fever dream I'm floating rn

my teeth were perfectly designed to tear abd rend the soft white flesh of the gentle beast known as the mozzarella

actual criticisms of academia:

cost of education acting as class barrier

exploitation of graduate workers

colonialist past and present

ties to military industrial complex

danger of power structure entrenching and justifying orthodox views on social issues

criticisms of academia that get made:

those damn ivory tower academics are wasting money learning about things

There’s a huge mistake we make when debating prostitution. It should always be talked about as a class issue. Prostitution is humiliation, exploitation and abuse for women as a class of people. It doesn’t matter if some girl claims she enjoys selling her nudes on OnlyFans, for example - what matters is how it affects females as a whole. I’m sick of anecdotal arguments being used for an issue that destroys so many lives.

No one: Tom Brady fans saying Gisele Bündchen is going to go broke after their divorce and become a mess, even though she was way famous before him and makes more than he does. His fan boys are so delusional, I swear. 

i have no idea who either of these people are but i'm sure you're right

Thank you for your strength, sister. ❤️

<333

for context, the first quote is taken from Caliban and the Witch by Silvia Federici and it's about the men who were prosecuted as witches during the witch trials in Europe

"a smaller number [of men] continued to be prosecuted later, mostly drawn from the ranks of the vagabonds, beggars, itinerant laborers, as well as the gypsies and lower-class priests" miss federici you can't tell me this and not provide a source

Ethnicity is just as much a social construct as race though, ethnic groups don't exist in nature they are a man-made construction built on culture, language, history, geographic origin and such. there is no 'polish gene' or 'french gene' that would make a living being (human, animal, plant) inherently polish or french the way there are chromosomes that determine the sex of humans, animals and plants

I will never get over how offensive “sex isn’t real” rhetoric is. It denies the present and past realities of billions and billions of women. It obscures how sexism is systemic. 50 years ago, banks could deny women opening their own accounts (in the US!!!). Was it random? How did they decide who was allowed to and who wasn’t if sex is so obscure and not real and nobody can really tell? Yes, people with DSDs and gender non conforming people have always existed but that doesn’t mean society has/had no concept of men and women. It’s so absurd. I don’t understand how people can say sex isn’t real. I have like award winning professors who say that.

No person on earth has the drive and determination of a family member trying to get you to eat meat again

Up to thousands of Romani women were forcibly sterilized in the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Czechoslovakia between 1966 and 2012 (source). Compensations started being alloted in 2012 (source) but the procedure is very slow, complicated, sometimes asks for 50yo documents that have since been shredded, and as a consequence, many applications have been rejected (source). In 10 years, only 275 women have been compensated so far (source).

Czech Romani women have been protesting and organizing to ask for recognition and a better procedure, but they receive very few support and media coverage. you'd think thousands of women being sterilized for their race would be talked about on a global scale and spur massive feminist support but unfortunately, not many people seem to care about Romani women.

Elena Gorolova is maybe the most famous advocate for Romani women's reproductive rights in Czechia. Here she is (left) alongside other women who were victim of the sterilization policy. This picture was taken in november of 2022, only 18 months ago

And finally, let's not forget Czechoslovakia/Czechia/Slovakia aren't the only countries where Romani women were forcibly sterilized. 60.000 Romani women were sterilized against their will in Sweden between 1935 and 1976 (source)

ELENA GOROLOVA // ACTIVIST

“She is a Czech human rights defender. She works as a social worker in Ostrava and is of Roma origins. At the age of 21, she was forcibly sterilized in hospital after giving birth to her second son. She had hoped to have another child and had not given her informed consent to the procedure. In the year 2005 Elena was one of the 87 Czech women complaining of being forcibly sterilized. Since then, she has campaigned against forced sterilization and discrimination against Roma women in Czechia and advocating for redress and awareness of forced sterilizations. She is the spokesperson for the Group of Women Harmed by Forced Sterilization and a member of Czech organization Vzájemné soužití (Life Together).”

Unpopular radfem opinion but I actually (used to) love the word queer, referring to myself as queer, saying "hey queers" to my all gay/bi friend circle as an edgy teen, and all that jazz. It really did feel like a rebellion, a big "fuck you" to straight people who would once have used the word as an insult but now found it powerless to wield against those of us who had chosen it for ourselves. Straight people used to be shocked by self-described queers, it was very clearly a reclamation and a sign of protest.

But then, slowly and insidiously, throughout the years, "queer" changed its meaning. It stopped being a "fuck you" to straight people, a word chosen precisely for its shocking nature and subversive origins. Straight people started using it again, en masse, to refer to us. And that was okay, that was acceptable, because the word had been sanitised, scrubbed clean of its dirty origins and hung out to dry by interlopers and so-called allies. Suddenly gay (boring, assimilationist, old school, privileged) was juxtaposed with queer (revolutionary, modern, subversive, marginalised) when before they had been synonymous. Suddenly straights could be queer and corporations could be queer-friendly and gay rights became queer rights. Suddenly, the term was meaningless.

Reclamation of slurs is an important part of our journeys as individuals to overcome the prejudices we face and the hatred we might internalise. But as soon as a slur is being used by those whom it did not originally target, it's not being reclaimed, it's being mainstreamed, turned back into a mockery. Now straight people call us queer and we have no recourse. Similarly to men calling women cunts and bitches and women being told to stop making a fuss because they aren't seen as proper slurs anymore ("it's a term of endearment in Australia hahaha"). The power of reclamation, "queer as in fuck you" etc, is gone. It's dust. We're not getting it back. At this point, all we can do is relinquish the word entirely. And I can't lie, that hurts a little, because when "queer" meant something, I loved being queer.

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