Australia is banning entry to anyone found guilty of domestic violence anywhere in the world.

‘ᴴᵉʸ ᵂʰʸ ᴰᵒⁿ’ᵗ ʸᵒᵘ ᴶᵘˢᵗ ᴹᵃᵏᵉ ᵃⁿ ᴼⁿˡʸᶠᵃⁿˢ,’

ᵃⁿᵒⁿʸᵐᵒᵘˢ ᵃᵘᵗʰᵒʳ

We have more in common than we think

Some people have noticed trans men are nowadays very into top surgery scars, especially the horizontal ones have become a community symbol. Some have interpreted this as a proof of trans men actually not wanting to be cis men at all, but an entity of their own.

As a former trans man, I agree. Not all trans men are like this and at least in the old times there were plenty who just wanted to assimilate, but a lot were like me: I didn't relate to men, I related to trans men. In other words, I wanted a community of extremely gender non-conforming females and thrived in that community. Of course, I wouldn't have used these words and would've been enraged if someone would have described my experiences like this.

I don't think we should ridicule trans men for their identification with other female people who don't conform. Their way of solving the misogyny is different from feminist solutions - individualistic escape versus aspiration for societal change - but we have more in common than either side think.

The trans movement has grown from a fringe phenomenon to a huge societal force during a very short period of time. More changes will occur in the upcoming years and the changes can be fast. The ongoing conversations will affect what these changes will be like and what kind of new phenomenona will rise.

I want us to see the similarities, the common goals, the potential for co-operation with all female people who have been disappointed and abused in one way or another. No one wants to co-operate right now, of course not. But there is common ground. We should start pointing that out. We shouldn't focus on how ridiculous trans men are for celebrating their scars. They aren't ridiculous. They are celebrating their personal freedom, even though it's through cutting their own flesh, like a wolf gnaws it's own leg to be freed from a trap.

I can relate to that.

Many women who became feminists during the 1960s and 1970s were “trashed” by women whom they had come to see as friends. “Trashing” sometimes took the form of a public denunciation in which women were castigated for some “politically incorrect” position. More often, the rupture happened in private. Since women were not prepared to confront betrayal and disloyalty from women, especially women they had come to trust, often the response was to conclude that “women were no better than men.” Thus many women became disaffected from other women and turned back from woman-identification. In the last decade, numbers of women became alienated from other women and from feminism. Mary Daly refers to this as a “crisis of feminist faith,” where women came to believe that the “‘illusion’ is feminism itself.”

There are many ways to analyze this phenomenon. It is instructive that women who turn back from women and woman-identification seem to be saying that to be wounded by a woman is to be a kind of “ultimate victim.” Having known victimization by men, and having expected it to come from these quarters, women did not forsee it coming from other women. Yet it did, and more frequently than many of us would like to acknowledge. Turning away from women, however, in the wake of horizontal violence and betrayal, is like proclaiming that no one can deal more mortal blows to women than other women. Of course, there is one level on which this is true. Because we expect much more from women, women do wound more deeply. This is only a partial truth, however. Partial truths can be enveloping, but the trouble with partial truths is that they are simply not whole truths. The whole truth is that, in a woman-hating world, women will internalize and externalize antiwoman values and behavior. The best that women can make of this is to know precisely that this behavior will occur, face this knowledge head-on (but perhaps more importantly “heart-on”), and act in a more Gyn/affective way because of and in spite of this knowledge of the mind and heart.

The strength of our commitment to women is finally tested in hard times—even when women throw female friendship back in our faces. As women of reality, we must know all of the forces that are ranged against us, including the awful force of women-betraying-women. We must grasp this knowledge, feel it, and then move on—to other women. This requires persistence and stamina—the power to stay with women.

A Passion for Friends: Toward a Philosophy of Female Affection by Janice Raymond

Sailor Moon has been talking about the realest shit since the 90’s…

Press coverage of Amber Heard’s sexuality shows that biphobia is alive and well– and has terrible costs

“Amber Heard‘s sexuality is only relevant in that bi women are at far greater risk of experiencing intimate partner violence…”

Photos: Broadimage/REX/Shutterstock/John Salangsang/BFA/Matt Baron/David Fisher/AGF s.r.l.

thinking about how stupid it is that we've come to rely so heavily on clinical language to explain the human condition precisely because there's just no concise word or diagnosis to describe the worst wounds we accrue throughout life. there's no term in the DSM-5 that can account for the mundane harm we experience in relationships, or the ways in which loneliness and alienation and capitalism change our attitude toward the world and ourselves, or the damage done to our psyches by self-criticism or poverty or cruelty by bosses and teachers and other people in positions of power. these are places where things like therapy and community and mutual aid can help, but psychiatry never can. no amount of pathologizing or medication can help you understand why your dad left you, or why you feel like you need so much more care and attention than others seem to need, or why you struggle to keep up at work or in school.

so why try so hard? don't you think that, by struggling constantly to explain our every behavior, thought, and feeling using psychiatric language, we're struggling entirely in the wrong direction?

boooo we hate your religion

"Abortion is older than the police, the church and the State"

Pasteups in NYC

#AbortionRightsAreHumanRights #abortionsareessential

laying on my stomach on a big fluffy rug kicking my feet in the air writing "i 💘 secularism" in swirly cursive with a sparkly pink gel pen and "I 💀HATE💀 RELIGION" in big bold angry letters with a chunky black marker over and over in alternating rows in my journal, switching between giggling bashfully with my hand over my mouth and gnashing my teeth as i pound my fists upon the ground

"One outstanding characteristic of the feminine speech is the reluctance to voice a declarative sentence—“I say this”—with certainty and strength. Robin Lakoff, a pioneering theorist of feminine inflections, devised a classic masculine-feminine exchange to demonstrate how women routinely turn a declarative into a faltering question:

MAN: When will dinner be ready?

WOMAN: Oh … around six o’clock … ?

“It is as though [the woman] were saying ‘Six o’clock, if that’s okay with you, if you agree,’” writes Lakoff. “Here we find unwillingness to assert an opinion carried to an extreme.”

But of course. It is not feminine to express a strong opinion, even about something as uncontroversial as when the roast might come out of the oven. Women are not supposed to be authoritative. By reputation we are not even supposed to be able to present a set of facts in a rational, cogent manner. A female opinion strongly expressed is often considered emotional or bitchy. Commands and directives that come from her lips will be modified with little grace notes, qualified with an extraneous phrase to take the edge off the expression of power. “Would you like to get that for me?” is a feminine turn of phrase. The underling may have no choice: he will get that memo on her desk first thing in the morning or be fired for incompetence, but the command has been softened, the power relationship disguised, the male ego left intact.

Except when dealing with children, women are rarely comfortable issuing a command—not only because we have had fewer opportunities to be in a managerial role, but because commands and orders are blatantly unfeminine. A command uses a minimum amount of language; it need not be couched in terms of politeness. Politeness is required from underlings but not from rulers. A command may be barked, but a woman must coo. “Would you do me a favor and … ?” It is not surprising that insincerity is a charge that is leveled at feminine speech.

Few fault the Southern belle for her insincerity, however. Insincerity is part of her flirtatious charm, as long as it is directed toward the gentlemen in the form of compliments and feigned, wide-eyed interest."

- Femininity by Susan Brownmiller

I think it's pretty clear by now that I'm broadly in favor of open dialogue between people with different viewpoints for many reasons, but while I am not at all opposed to ideology on its face I do think it's fascinating how some people are fully unable to make room for basic animal life as part of their political understanding of human beings, and seeing those failures causes me to raise an eyebrow. For instance, there's a certain portion of well off liberals who see choosing to have children as a wild, foolish, even confusing decision, and there's a certain portion of feminists who are maintain that any desire to be attractive to the sex or sexes you're interested in is a manifestation of patriarchy. But we are very literally animals, which means things which are true of animals must be true of us. No matter what our expressed reasoning, for the most part, people have children because animals have the desire to procreate. Likewise, wishing to attract a mate is so powerful an animal drive that it has driven phenotypical evolution in both the males and females of species from birds to bugs, and caused males of many species to learn to adorn themselves for elaborate dances or other courting rituals. That's very clearly a long way away from doing a full face of makeup every single day for a retail job, but if an ideology is truly making you believe that it's baseline weird to care even a little about one's appearance or that it's baseline weird and unacceptable to wish to have children, it is probably separating you from your own humanity.

don't ask me why but he/hims are supposed to die at sea and she/hers are supposed to lure them to their watery graves idk it just makes sense

In her book "Pornography: Men Possessing Women," Andrea Dworkin sheds light on the patriarchal undertones of the common societal response to pregnancy.

oh and i forgot to add the coolest fitness results of all!! my mom who is 59 and has arthritis and degenerative disc disease has been doing the harder workouts with me and she is KILLING IT this woman is amazing she’s matching me for tricep dips and is doing renegade rows w 8lb dumbbells and has said to me and i quote “i want to be 80 and doing burpees”

and just as an idea of where she started from: a couple yrs ago she could barely stand up from her chair without shaking and now this queen is holding a side plank longer than i can!!!

she keeps showing off her extremely ripped biceps to me every day and i love her. women are unstoppable at every stage of life

sex being this fragmented reenactment of porn consumed is soooooooooo depressing. im not entertaining that

"One student admitted she missed class one day simply because she felt “too ugly to be seen in public.” The other women in the class accepted this claim without surprise, secure in the knowledge that if you’re a woman worrying about how you look, you’ll always be in good company. After offering the obligatory reassurances that she wasn’t ugly, they patted her on the shoulder with gentle understanding.

A couple of weeks before one of these groups was set to leave for a tropical location, the teacher asked his students to write reflections on whether they were prepared for their trip. Out of the seven women in the group, five wrote that they weren’t ready because they had hoped to lose weight before leaving. They seemed more worried about how their bodies might appear than whether they had sufficiently reflected on the work they hoped to do during their trip. Not one man in the group wrote about his body “not being ready.”

How much more time do we spend getting ready for work every day compared to our male colleagues? When one of my most beloved mentors told a group that she wore a scarf every day because her aging neck was “too hideous to be seen,” why didn’t we question that type of talk?

A few years ago, I received an email from a Canadian woman who saw a TEDx talk I gave about beauty sickness. She confessed that she almost didn’t attend an important fundraising function for a children’s welfare organization because she felt she looked too fat in her clothes. After reframing her feelings in terms of beauty sickness, she decided she would “let her looks be a sideshow to who I really am.” This choice made a real difference in her life and in the lives of others. “If I hadn’t gone,” she wrote, “I wouldn’t have met some incredible people. I wouldn’t have bought raffle tickets to help children living in poverty be able to go to camp this summer. I wouldn’t have offered my time to help organize next year’s event.”

As a culture, we face a terrible loss when an entire group of promising citizens is spending so much time worrying about whether they are beautiful that they risk letting another generation go by without seeing the changes they hoped to see in the world. This obsession with appearance—this beauty sickness—turns women toward the mirror and away from a world that stands to benefit from a refocusing of their passions and efforts. How might women’s lives be different if they took the energy and concern aimed at their own appearance and aimed it out at the world instead?"

- Beauty Sick, Renee Engeln