"What happened in Germany since full legalisation? Today the police say that only 10% of the women have no pimp. About 90% of the women are migrants from very poor countries, mostly Romania and Bulgaria.

What we see is that prostitution is a very racist system. It is usually the racially discriminated women who enter prostitution – like Roma women from Romania. And prostitution itself is racist too because it fetishizes ethnicity. We have brothels that have a kind of apartheid system when it comes to the women. You go to the first floor for the Romanian women. You go to the second floor for Asian women. You go to the third floor for African women.

We see that prostitution in Germany makes sex buyers more racist. They use very racist and sexist slurs against women and they try to offer refugee women from Syria money for sex.

To allow prostitution makes a country more racist because the sex buyers who, for example, buy Asian women won’t see other non-prostituted Asian women as human. This is what we see. It’s as if we are still a colonialist country.

Legalisation normalises prostitution. For example, we had a TV show that was called ‘Pimp My Brothel’ where a brothel keeper who’s now in jail for human trafficking went into brothels to tell them what they could do better.

Legalisation brings more capitalism into prostitution because the women are the product and are only there to serve the client. So, legalisation strengthens the client’s rights. We even had a court case. There was a girl, I think she was 19, and her punter had not orgasmed and went to court over that. She had to pay him money because he wasn’t able to orgasm with her.

This is what legalisation does."

"The International Organisation for Migration has estimated 80% of Nigerian women travelling overland, then attempting to cross the Mediterranean, are trafficked into the European sex trade."

"Jewel caught a flight from Nigeria thinking she was going to work with old people. [...] In Copenhagen, she was met by a Nigerian woman, who took her the following day to Vesterbro, Copenhagen's red light district. "I was looking around for some sort of hospital," Jewel remembers. They walked the streets for a while, Jewel being told to take note of her surroundings. Then the woman dropped a bombshell. "She said, 'This is where you're going to be working.' I looked round to see if she was pointing at a building I hadn't noticed. But no - she meant where we'd been walking. That's when she told me I was going to be a prostitute, and this was where I'd be hunting for customers. Then the whole of Denmark just crashed down on me…""

"In the most recent figures released by the EU, more than 14,000 trafficking victims were registered in 2017/2018 - but this will be the tip of the iceberg, because they represent only identified cases. Half were from outside the EU, with Nigeria one of the top five nationalities.

Sexual exploitation continues to be the main purpose of trafficking, according to the European Commission, and in a single year the criminal revenues derived from it are estimated at a staggering 14bn euros (£12bn / $16bn)."

I am currently unable to find Jewel's full name, if it is published anywhere, to connect her story or her art with. It may be that she chooses to only release these things under her first name.

Nature Podcast:

Menopause and women’s health: why science needs to catch up

A focus on women’s health research, and the star caught in the act of devouring a planet.

"Kerri Smith and Heidi Ledford join us to discuss two Features published in Nature looking at topics surrounding women’s health. The first looks at efforts to understand how menopause affects brain health, while the second shows how less research funding is allocated for conditions affecting women more than men.

Feature: How menopause reshapes the brain

Feature: Women’s health research lacks funding – these charts show how "

Luckily "for the sake of this conversation" they stick with "women" even though "it's an imperfect term" (it isn't except in a cultural beliefs context) (does science also use special terms and ideas that cater to religious claims like creationism instead of evolution? It shouldn't. Same for this.)

Good information.

@warriordykes (of radfemzine, for the medical sexism topic)

@radfeminist-suggestions

@radfemcoalition

I keep posting about things in my city and I'm afraid of getting doxxed so I was hoping you could share this? It's just so wonderful and exciting so I'm sending it to a few different women 🥰

https://www.mysanantonio.com/lifestyle/article/san-antonio-women-barbershop-tattoo-parlor-17369386.php?utm_medium=referral&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_campaign=socialflow

^^^^^

I think you need to realize that when women could not vote, they did not see it as an injustice or as a forbidden act. They became aware because other women, who started to educate themselves and to think outside the box (= patriarchy), made them see something else.

During 150 years in France, women were not protesting every wednesday to fight for their rights, rather a tiny minority, the critical thinkers, were challenging the status quo from time to time, but most were from the city, or they were/had been in contact with teachers, academics, artists. Feminists are revolutionaries, they pushed and forced the world to fucking Evolve.

But wasn’t it the individual choice of a woman to be a wife, a mother and a housekeeper ? The short answer for a liberal is obviously yes. The feminists disagreed : living under patriarcal laws meant automatically that women were completely discouraged to participate in society the same way men did. And so they did not. And so politics were for men, that was logical !

Yvonnes Dornès, feminist at the time, explains how as a kid, she was not challenged at all. Other women actually thought they were pretty much free, and equal. Though they were not really considered citizens in the Constitution, it was “mostly fine”. They were working twice as hard, both in the fields in the countryside, and at home for the kids and the husband. Somehow, they were under the impression that it was simply their place. Who would take care of all this anyway ?

Women’s Liberation is about making other aware of society, evil systems, vicious industries. They think outside the box, outside the Patriarchy. Of course if your thought process stays confined within the established norms, how are you challenging anything ?

If Feminists did not take the time to make other women aware that they could be much more (and later on, could have the right to), nothing would have happened. When the entire civilisation defines the man as the model, the first and foremost, inevidently, anyone who does not fit the criteria will be less. And Women’s Liberation is about destroying the establishment in place because IT WILL NEVER BENEFIT WOMEN NO MATTER WHAT. You can switch place all you want, you can reclaim some slurs all you want, you can perform feminity in your own way all you want, you can decide by yourself to want unequal dynamics all you want BUT remember that you are doing this under patriarcal norms which means you are not setting yourself “free”. You are saying a deliberate and loud “Yes” to the patriarchy.

"The stench arrives before the lorries do. They are carrying skins that were stripped from cattle carcasses days ago. Flies are everywhere.

The lorries’ destination is Amparo, a small industrial town in São Paulo state, southeastern Brazil. Here, Rousselot, a company owned by the Texan business Darling Ingredients, extracts collagen – the active ingredient in health supplements at the centre of a global wellness craze.

But while collagen’s most evangelical users claim the protein can improve hair, skin, nails and joints, slowing the ageing process, it has a dubious effect on the health of the planet. Collagen can be extracted from fish, pig and cattle skin, but behind the wildly popular “bovine” variety in particular lies an opaque industry driving the destruction of tropical forests and fuelling violence and human rights abuses in the Brazilian Amazon.

An investigation by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, the Guardian, ITV and O Joio e O Trigo has found that tens of thousands of cattle raised on farms damaging tropical forests were processed at abattoirs connected to international collagen supply chains."

“Miriam Kramnick (1978) is one of the few commentators on Wollstonecraft who outlines the nature of the ridicule she was subjected to and the significance of this form of sexual harassment. Wollstonecraft was the recipient of 'barely printable insults', states Kramnick. ‘Her own contemporaries called her a shameless wanton, a "hyena in petticoats", a "philosophizing serpent" or wrote jibing epigrams in the Anti-Jacobin Review, like

For Mary verily would wear the breeches

God help poor silly men for such usurping b…..s

Twentieth-century readers have called her an archetypal castrating female, "God's angry woman", a man hater whose feminist crusade was inspired by nothing more than a hopeless, incurable affliction — penis envy’ (ibid., p. 7).

Even feminists have been careful about associating with her and: ‘The name "Wollstonecraft", once considered synonymous with the destruction of all sacred virtues, disowned by the feminist movement as it marched for votes or pressed for admission to universities, became an obscure reference indeed’ (ibid., p. 8). When women sought to convince men that they were honourable, respectable, and deserving of equal representation in the institutions men had created for themselves, there was little room for Wollstonecraft, who had challenged those institutions and who had gained a ‘reputation.’

Like many of the reviews of Aphra Behn, some of the reviews of Wollstonecraft's work and life, on her death, were vicious. Her work should be read, declared the Historical Magazine (1799), ‘with disgust by any female who has any pretensions to delicacy; with detestation by everyone attached to the interests of religion and morality, and with indignation by anyone who might feel any regard for the unhappy woman, whose frailties should have been buried in oblivion’ (vol. I, p. 34). This was about as far as critics could go in the pre-Freudian days, but once he had made his priceless contribution, the attack on women who did not conform to the precepts dictated by men assumed a new and greater ferocity.

‘Mary Wollstonecraft was an extreme neurotic of a compulsive type,' argue Ferdinand Lundberg and Marynia Farnham (1959) in Modern Woman: The Lost Sex. Out of her illness arose the ideology of feminism, which was to express the feelings of so many women in years to come. Unconsciously ... Mary and the feminists wanted ... to turn on men and injure them.... Underneath her aggressive writings, Mary was a masochist like her mother, as indeed all the leading feminist theorists were in fact.... By behaving as she did Mary indicated.... that she was unconsciously seeking to deprive the male of his power, to castrate him. It came out in her round scolding of men. The feminists have ever since symbolically slain their fathers by verbally consigning all men to perdition as monsters' (pp. 159-61). Really?

With the framework formulated by Freud, it again became easy to ridicule and harass women who developed any analysis of patriarchy, to dismiss them without having to refute their ideas. The scientific dogma took over from the religious dogma which had been seriously discredited (by women like Wollstonecraft) and both these male-decreed belief systems have been used ruthlessly against individual women and against women collectively. In her own day Mary Wollstonecraft was maligned for her moral sickness; with the advent of Freud it was her mental sickness. The principle is the same and it was a principle that Wollstonecraft herself identified and discredited - the principle that if women do not cheerfully confine themselves to the place to which men have relegated them, then there is something wrong with the women rather than the place they are expected to occupy. Mary Wollstonecraft understood that women would continue to be perceived as abnormal while the limited experience of men was treated as the sum total of human experience. One of her main protests was that men did not know how the world looked to women and, while they insisted that it looked no different from the way it looked to men, women were without space to discuss, share and confirm their feelings and ideas. And in this, Wollstonecraft is one of a long line of women who have come to understand the significance of male power to name the world and to say what is and what is not important, valuable, and ‘logical’.”

-Dale Spender, Women of Ideas and What Men Have Done to Them

Organizations who filed briefs in support of legalizing wetland pollution in the US:

Industrial agriculture trade associations

Cattle trade associations

Mining trade associations

Road building trade associations

Timber trade associations

Residential development trade associations

Railroad trade associations

Fossil fuel trade associations

These associations are supported and run by working class and middle class tradespeople in collaboration with industry leaders.

A large segment of American tradespeople are eager for ecocide. Farmers. Ranchers. Miners. Road builders. Rail builders. Lumberjacks. Carpenters. Rig pigs.

This is what it means to be a settler. This is the fabric of American settler colonialism.

from persepolis 2: the story of a return by marjane satrapi, page 148

Perfectionism cripples me so I'm going to do all the things on this list in hopes of being fixed

☐ make a messy sketch of one of your favourite things you like and colour it so poorly

☐ write an awful pretentious poem that makes you cringe when you read it

☐ write a story that would lose to a 7 year old in a writing competition

☐ find some beats and sounds to put together, find a free audio editing site/software, and make the worst song you've ever heard

☐ get playdough (or make some with flour and water) and sculpt pottery that no sensible person would use

☐ go on a free website maker (or even learn to make it from scratch) and make your very own website that no one else would want to visit

☐ find some dirt and put one seed in it and water it. it probably wont even grow but pretend that it will

☐ look up cool images and put them into a messy incoherent collage on your computer

☐ take 20 blurry pictures of things you like

☐ draw an unfunny crude comic strip

☐ find some string and tie it together to make a thing of a necklace

☐ draw shapes out of paper and colour them, those are your ugly little dolls that you can play with

☐ find cloth and cut up some deplorable clothing for the dolls

☐ write an article about something you're passionate about that no newspaper will find good enough to publish

☐ draw a map of your area that will make someone get lost if they use it

x

Paola Schietekat was facing 100 lashes and 7 years in jail for “extramarital sex” in Qatar despite being raped. the authorities have interrogated her for 3 hours in arabic, victim blamed her and believed her attacker (whom she knew and considered a friend) when he said it was consensual. eventually Paola had to flee Qatar to avoid this inhumane and cruel punishment.

I am begging for countries to stop sending their citizens to places that practice laws such as sharia, there should be no international events held there until their laws are in accordance with the UN universal declaration of human rights. countries that punish women for being victims of rape should not receive any profits from tourism and international events.

hello radblr!

For the sake of Internet safety, you can call me Q. I’m a 19 year old, non-binary college student currently writing an ethnographic paper about gender critical ideologies on microblogging platforms. I’m looking to talk with some of y’all, so if you have the time, please hear me out:

My goal is to understand what the gender critical/TERF/radfem movement is about, genuinely, so that I can understand how ideologies spread over social media. What ideas capture peoples’ attention? How do they warp as they spread? What I’ve noticed is that the radfem movement on tumblr is leagues different from the supposedly equivalent movement that is prominent on Twitter. We don’t agree, that’s obvious, but I’d prefer a conversation with y’all on tumblr any day of the week. That’s why I’m reaching out here.

I want to better understand where the difference between the movements on the two platforms are coming from, or if it even exists - maybe I’m just looking in the wrong places. I was hoping to have a conversation with whoever would allow me.

What a conversation would look like is just me asking you about your beliefs. Neither of us would try to convince eachother of anything, sell any ideas. Just mutual understanding: we don’t agree, but we aren’t trying to. I want to understand how you think so I can represent you fairly in my writing, and as someone who identifies under the trans umbrella, there are aspects of your ideology that are simply going to be impossible for me to reach without conversation. I want to understand how such a nuanced ideology with complicated understandings of gender and sex and society can exist on tumblr, and seemingly less on Twitter.

I can’t promise anything in return. I’m just hoping some people who enjoy academic dialogues or anthropology will be willing to engage with me. My dms are open. Thank you for your time. If you think I’m wasting your time or being annoying, please kindly just move on. Thank you for your time if you’ve read this far.

love this!)

lesbian zine submission request

lesbians! please feel free to click on the form below and fill out what lesbianism means to you

this will be included in a zine that's being made and all responses (happy, sad, poetry, drawings, anything) would be super appreciated!

we wanted to make this because there are so many takes from non-lesbians about what lesbianism is or isn't (it's fluid, it's restrictive, it's exclusionary, blah blah blah) so please help us spread some real lesbian viewpoints!!

Mexico now has legalised same sex marriage in all of it’s provinces!!

What’s more foreign to man than the surface of the moon?

Apparently, it’s human female genital anatomy. The clitoris is 10 times larger than you think. The full structure of the clitoris was only fully mapped in 2005, and the first 3D images of the clitoris during stimulation were created in 2009. Both of these events occurred after we mapped the entire human genome. But perhaps a better comparison would be the study of male genitalia: male genital anatomy has been actively studied for hundreds of years, and studied through MRI since the 1970s.

The study of the clitoris, on the other hand, has been plagued with sexism since its inception. Scientists who claimed to have “discovered” the clitoris in the 1500s (apparently unable to understand that women had been discovering their bodies for centuries) proposed that it either had no function or was not present in healthy women. Alternatively, it was believed that the existence of a clitoris on a woman proved she was a witch. (Thanks I guess?) Gray’s Anatomy included the clitoris in 1901, yet it was absent from the 1948 edition, and its study was grossly neglected throughout the majority of the 20th century. The idea that the clitoris has no real function persists to this day, and so does ignorance about its full structure. There are many reasons for the scientific neglect of the clitoris including the shame that we attach to female sexuality, and the lack of consideration given to women’s health in a patriarchal system. It is imperative that we understand all aspects of the human body. Not understanding the full structure of the clitoris has devastating consequences during pelvic surgery.

So, what is the full structure? In 2005, Australian urologist Helen O’Connell, through dissection and MRI, “showed that the erectile vestibular bulbs are a part of the clitoris, and that the female urethra and vagina, although not erectile in character, are closely related structures that form a tissue cluster with the clitoris that is the site of female sexual function and orgasm.” This and later studies showed that the erectile tissue of the clitoris surrounds the vagina, and that the sensitivity of the vaginal anterior wall is due to the full structure of the clitoris. Yet, despite these huge leaps in scientific knowledge, the full structure of the clitoris is not taught in most sex ed. I had seen detailed anatomical diagrams of the penis for decades before I ever even heard that there was more to the clitoris than meets the eye. Why?

Men and boys continue to ask if the “g-spot” is real and if so “where is it” as if they are wondering about the existence of extraterrestrial life. But this isn’t some great unknown that we have to wait lifetimes to understand. Women have known for centuries that stimulation of the clitoris makes penetration more pleasurable, and our anatomical understanding of the clitoris shows why. Women’s body’s are not the unknowns of science fiction. Moreover, the understanding of women’s anatomy and sexual health is a human right.

Image source: https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2017/03/3d-clitoris/518991/

Fun fact: every female mammal has a clitoris, and so do some non-mammalian species. In early mammals, stimulation of the clitoris, which was inside the vaginal canal, triggered ovulation. This leads us toward an evolutionary understanding of the female orgasm.