you know, i’m a raging lesbian and i was never distracted by what other girls in my classes were wearing in high school. this is a male problem, not an “attracted to women” problem.
This is an “inability to respect women” problem.
Which is a male problem.
Pointlessly Gendered Items - by Sociological Images (click link for more)
When Strangers Click, a 2011 documentary about online dating.
It reminds me of that famous Margaret Atwood quote: “Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them.” It also reminds me of something written by one of the mods of Sex Worker Problems: “Misandry irritates. Misogyny kills.”
I mean, it’s just true.
(via tealeafprincess)
“Misandry irritates. Misogyny kills.”
That’s it. That’s it right there.
(via oddpicturesoddpeople)
How ‘Slut Shaming’ Has Been Written Into School Dress Codes Across The Country
Last month, a New Jersey middle school banned girls from wearing strapless dresses to prom. Administrators claimed that the dresses were “distracting” — though they refused to specify exactly how or why. Parents reacted strongly to the rule; some supported the dress code while others deemed it “slut-shaming.” On Friday, the school compromised by allowing girls to wear single-strap or see-through-strap dresses.
This is no isolated incident in the United States. Across the country, young girls are being told what not to wear because it might be a “distraction” for boys, or because adults decide it makes them look “inappropriate.” At its core, every incident has a common thread: Putting the onus on young women to prevent from being ogled or objectified, instead of teaching those responsible to learn to respect a woman’s body. Here are five other recent examples:
1. A middle school in California banned tight pants. At the beginning of last month, a middle school in Northern California began telling girls to avoid wearing pants that are “too tight” because it “distracts the boys.” At a mandatory assembly for just the female students, the middle school girls were told that they’re no longer allowed to wear leggings or yoga pants. “We didn’t think it was fair how we have all these restrictions on our clothing while boys didn’t have to sit through [the assembly] at all,” one student told local press. Some parents also complained, leading the school’s assistant principal to record a voicemail explaining the new policy. “The guiding principle in all dress codes is that the manner in which students dress does not become a distraction in the learning environment,” the message said.
2. A high school principal in Minnesota emailed parents to ask them to cover up their daughters. A principal in Minnetonka, MN recently wrote an email telling parents to stop letting their daughters wear leggings or yoga pants to school. He says the tight-fitting pants are fine with longer shirts but, when worn with a shorter top, a girl’s “backside” can be “too closely defined.” The big risk of having a defined backside, he thinks, is that it can “be highly distracting for other students.”
3. Two girls in Ohio were turned away from their prom for being “improperly dressed.” Laneisha Williams and Nyasia Mitchell were barred from prom this spring for wearing dresses that administrators considered “too revealing.” The girls say that they didn’t believe they were violating a dress code that said dresses couldn’t be too short or show too much cleavage. But one administrator told local news that the high school girls were only allowed to wear dresses that had “no curvature of their breasts showing.”
4. A kindergarten student in Georgia was forced to change her “short” skirt because it was a “distraction to other students.” It’s hard to imagine that a kindergartener’s outfit could be “a distraction to other students,” but a mother in Georgia told locals news there that her daughter had been outfitted in someone else’s pants — without parental permission — after the principal deemed the skirt the young girl was wearing too short.” The girl had apparently wore the skirt, and accompanying leggings, just one week before without incident.
5. Forty high school girls were sent home from a winter dance in California after “degrading” clothing inspections “bordering on sexual harassment.” A school board member’s daughter was among the 40 girls turned away from Capistrano Valley High’s February dance for wearing dresses that either exposed their midriffs or were cut too low. Before the dance, girls were apparently required to flap their arms up and down and turn around for male administrators’ inspection. The school issues image guidelines for appropriate dress on its website — though the images were nearly all of women, and the only male image depicted proper attire. One girl alleges that the principal told her, “Not all dresses look good on certain body shapes.” A grandmother of one of the girls who was turned away from the dance also said that a teacher remarked about her granddaughter, “What mother would allow her daughter to wear a dress like that?” Apparently the school did receive some praise, though, from the parents of two male students.
When most Americans think about “rape culture,” they may think about the Steubenville boys’ defense arguing that an unconscious girl consented to her sexual assault because she “didn’t say no,” the school administrators who choose to protect their star athletes over those boys’ rape victims, or the bullying that led multiple victims of sexual assault to take their own lives. While those incidences of victim-blaming are certainly symptoms of a deeply-rooted rape culture in this country, they’re not the only examples of this dynamic at play. Rape culture is also evident in the attitudes that lead school administrators to treat young girls’ bodies as inherently “distracting” to the boys who simply can’t control themselves. That approach to gender roles simply encourages our youth to assume that sexual crimes must have something to do with women’s “suggestive” clothes or behavior, rather than teaching them that every individual is responsible for respecting others’ bodily autonomy.
This is nothing new. This behavior has been going on or decades now. Unfortunately it’s only now even being discussed because we have such brave young women out there. I applaud them all. Personally, I’d like to help this along by offering my services by forcefully punching every teenage boy in the dick before entering a school dance, and simply saying “keep your fucking hands to yourself”. It may be barbaric in nature, but I think I could really help drive the point home. Seriously though, something needs to be done. We don’t need to be segregating sexes in assemblies. Put all genders in a large assembly about rape, rape culture, and teach these kids the obvious fucking fundamentals of being a decent human being. A lesson neglected at home.
^ yeah that
This is the kind of shit that just really gets to me and pisses me off. How can you support the gay and lesbian community but then not us? It’s not that difficult to go educate yourself on bisexuality and what it means, and it is really not that difficult to understand. This is not some crazy kinky thing that people choose to do. We’re not some crazy attention whores who are confused and don’t know what we want. Are there some people out there who are confused? Sure. Are there some annoying immature girls out there who just want attention? Sure. Are there bisexual people out there who are promiscuous and jump from one to the other constantly? There are. But that doesn’t give anyone the right to generalize and stereotype all bisexuals as one. You are pegging an entire community of people as something bad, and something not to be taken seriously or even considered “real”, based upon the few who give us a bad reputation.
Generalizing entire communities of people is wrong. Don’t sit there and think you know what kind of person I am because you once witnessed a couple 13 year old girls that claimed to be bi and made out with one another at a party. Those aren’t the faces of bisexuality and that kind of behavior certainly does not represent me or what it means to be bisexual. This is a STEREOTYPE. And it’s WRONG and should NEVER be used as some kind of evidence against why you do not support or accept an entire group/community of people.
Just admit that you are a close-minded and ignorant bigot.
Angelina Jolie had a double mastectomy, in case you hadn’t heard. How dare she remove those ticking time bombs from her chest, amiright? Like, hasn’t she learned by now that her body is public domain and we all get to vote on what she does with it? Sheesh, how selfish can ya get.
Angelina Jolie writes about her preventative double mastectomy in an essay for The New York Times.
But I am writing about it now because I hope that other women can benefit from my experience. Cancer is still a word that strikes fear into people’s hearts, producing a deep sense of powerlessness. But today it is possible to find out through a blood test whether you are highly susceptible to breast and ovarian cancer, and then take action. ….
I wanted to write this to tell other women that the decision to have a mastectomy was not easy. But it is one I am very happy that I made. My chances of developing breast cancer have dropped from 87 percent to under 5 percent. I can tell my children that they don’t need to fear they will lose me to breast cancer. ….
I choose not to keep my story private because there are many women who do not know that they might be living under the shadow of cancer. It is my hope that they, too, will be will able to get gene tested, and that if they have a high risk they, too, will know that they have strong options. Life comes with many challenges. The ones that should not scare us are the ones we can take on and take control of.
One of the things is we get ISPs to publicise their connection speeds – and when we launch in a territory the Bittorrent traffic drops as the Netflix traffic grows. So I think people do want a great experience and they want access – people are mostly honest. The best way to combat piracy isn’t legislatively or criminally but by giving good options. One of the side effects of growth of content is an expectation to have access to it. You can’t use the internet as a marketing vehicle and then not as a delivery vehicle."
Netflix’s Ted Sarandos talks Arrested Development, 4K and reviving old shows | Stuff magazine
Jesus, every single line in there could serve as an article headline in and of itself. This, right here, is almost a tl;dr of why Netflix is becoming the dominant player in television.
(via spytap)
…it’s almost like they KNOW WHAT THEY’RE DOING.
(via mikerugnetta)
Junot Diaz, Speaking to students at Bergen Community College, (via aliceincrohnsland)
#This is why. #This is why we need canon femslash and not just rule!63 characters.#This is why we need more stories—media fanfic whatever—about POC. #This is why fandom exists. #To build all of the fucking mirrors that the original authors never made or only half-silvered. #Because if the creators of the original work won’t make us visible we have to do this work ourselves. #And when fandom overwhelmingly shows me that I am invisible not just in the media but within my own fandom… #…I never feel like I existed at all. #fandom
(via minionier)
Love Is All Around - Joan Jett And The Blackhearts
Today Minnesota became the 12th state to permit same-sex marriage in the United States. So, appropriate Joan Jett cover of the Mary Tyler Moore theme song “Love Is All Around”, is appropriate
I am not your wife, sister or daughter
One of the most incisive responses to some of the rhetoric we’ve been hearing in the wake of the Steubenville rape verdict is this blog post over at The Belle Jar. It articulates a discomfort many of us have with the sentiment (invoked in many contexts), “Imagine if the victim was your sister, or your daughter, or your wife.” Read the whole piece. This is what impassioned cultural criticism can do.
Meanwhile, here’s an excerpt:
The “wives, sisters, daughters” line of argument comes up all the fucking time. President Obama even used it in his State of the Union address this year, saying,
“We know our economy is stronger when our wives, mothers, and daughters can live their lives free from discrimination in the workplace, and free from the fear of domestic violence.”
This device, which Obama has used on more than one occasion, is reductive as hell. It defines women by their relationships to other people, rather than as people themselves. It says that women are only important when they are married to, have given birth to, or have been fathered by other people. It says that women are only important because of who they belong to.
Women are not possessions.
Women are people.
I seriously cannot believe that I have to say this in 2013.
On top of all of this, I want you to think of a few other implications this rhetorical device has. For one thing, what does it say about the women who aren’t anyone’s wife, mother or daughter? What does it say about the kids who are stuck in the foster system, the kids who are shuffled from one set of foster parents to another or else living in a group home? What does it say about the little girls whose mothers surrender them, willingly or not, to the state? What does it say about the people who turn their back on their biological families for one reason or another?
That they deserve to be raped? That they are not worthy of protection? That they are not deserving of sympathy, empathy or love?
And when we frame all women as being someone’s wife, mother or daughter, what are we teaching young girls?
We are teaching them that in order to have the law on their side, they need to be loved by men.
Read the whole thing at The Belle Jar.
Photograph of Gloria Steinem and Flo Kennedy.
