She made it unrebloggable đ
Why isn't radblr talking about Adriana Kuch
this is unbelievably cruel.. n the attackers gloating n still talking badly of her after she died.. repulsive. the school should face consequences bc theyâve dealt with this horribly. they advised the parents to keep the girl home so her bullies donât mock her instead of⊠holding the bullies accountable??? what kind of logic
SinĂ©ad O'Connor in âNothing Comparesâ (Kathryn Ferguson, 2022)
It's monstrous how much boys and men love tormenting girls and women. The way so many boys and men actually love scaring and upsetting girls and women on purpose because they think it's funny.
I'm thinking specifically about how I have some phobias of bugs, and I specifically have to hide that from men because once they find out they purposely show me the bugs I'm afraid of to torment me because they think it's funny and cute to torment and upset a woman. Like when one of my male co-workers at my old job found out I was arachnophobic after that he made a point of if he found a spider in the store he'd purposely try to shove it in my face because he thought it was funny and cute to scare me and make me upset. I've had multiple instances of grown male co-workers behaving like this but never a grown female co-worker. Sure, I'm sure there's at least a few grown women in the world out there like that, but for the most part this behavior is only seen in small girls but quickly corrected and beat out of her while men are still tormenting women for fun as grown adults.
Or my mother has a pretty bad phobia of frogs, and she told me a story about how when she was a little girl some boys found out, and they specifically made it a point to collect frogs from outside to throw at her. One time they cornered her in the bathroom and threw buckets of frogs at her, she was sobbing and shaking and having a full blown panic attack while they were laughing. It was for no other reason than they thought it was funny to make a girl upset and scared.
And this ties in with how often if a girl or woman asks a boy or man to stop doing something that bothers her or annoys her they double down and start doing the behavior even more just because they want to upset girls and women. Like schoolgirls asking the boy next to her to stop drumming with his pencils because it's distracting her from being able to pay attention to class, how likely is it he'll actually stop vs just doing it even more loudly and frequently just to bother her? If this is a lifelong pattern for girls this makes girls back off and less likely to stand up to boys and men.
If a girl has for years had a pattern of every time she asks the boys in her class to stop drumming with their pencils while she's trying to pay attention or stop saying gross sexual jokes that make her uncomfortable to her during class or stop poking her and every time they just double down and start doing it even more and even louder or harder just to upset her, is she going to keep asking boys to stop doing things that bother her? Is she going to feel comfortable and safe standing up for herself and asserting her boundaries? Or is she going to get quiet and stop speaking up and hope for the love of god they don't notice the annoyance on her face because if they do that's enough just to make them double down and start doing it more to bother her?
I've seen countless examples of men purposely making women so scared or upset or angry that they're in tears for no other reason than fun and entertainment. Boys and men are fucking sadistic demons. And this keeps girls and women in line, keeps girls and women from being able to stand up for ourselves and assert our personal boundaries to boys and men.
Ppl will be like âend the stigma around mental illness uwuâ but still judge you if youâre unemployed or single or not completely self-sufficient or healthy or perfectly groomed or still live with parents and donât see the hypocrisy in that whatsoever
I love Twitch. I click on a female streamer and within 30 seconds a man is in her chat telling her to go back in the kitchen. One minute later another man is asking for pictures of her feet. I click on another female streamer and she's explaining why she can't put the webcam on: she's had fake lashes put on her and her eyes are red, swollen, crying and burning. She's in so much pain. But it's okay she always gets allergic reactions when she gets fake eye lashes. I click on a male streamer and his girlfriend is hand feeding him dinner so he can keep his hands on the keyboard and play his little game. In response he keeps repeating "you're so pretty oh my god you're so pretty you look incredibly pretty today". His chat is full of men calling the woman "our girlfriend". Twitch keeps recommending me that female streamer who does porn. The female streamer with the highest viewercount among women. A male streamer is anxious to play an online game with vocal chat. He tells his 10k viewers that he's scared another player will say something offensive and he'll get banned from Twitch. In the end he decides to try it, he plays with another guy and it goes well, then he plays with a woman and his chat becomes so misogynistic his moderators have to disable it for a while. I stream myself and try a virtual avatar for the first time, I try to make her look like me. A regular viewer immediately asks me if my breasts are as big in real life. I put my avatar in a wide shirt for a week after that, before ditching the avatar altogether. I receive a private message from a man with a fetish telling me to punish him for saying women can't play video games. He's spamming all women. He made a special account for it. Male streamers' chat are filled with rape jokes inspired by porn. A man who calls his girlfriend a bitch says he won't be playing the Harry Potter game because it's disrespectful to trans people. Many female streamers appear all dolled up under a pink light with a pink catgirl headset the camera titled towards their breasts. Or they use a hentai virtual avatar. All male streamers look like they haven't washed in a month.
iâm sorry but it is 2023 some of you NEED to let go of this belief that appearance and morality are linked you can not keep living in this disney world where all bad people are ugly and all good people are beautiful you can not
the fact that even just saying you like jkr gets you forever labeled a bigot but all the ppl who openly supported depp get to quietly withdraw back to normalcy. no one sees an issue with that? especially considering one beat a woman & the other has donated millions to women. with the utmost sincerity, if you genuinely think jkr is some sort of dangerous transphobe I think youâve got to be one of the dumbest fucking people on the planet. you lack the most basic critical thinking skills and follow along with whatever youâre told like a naive child. I mean itâs been years now and it genuinely baffles me. not once has she said anything bigoted. no one can even back their arguments of this claim. itâs just been decided and so the crowd follows.
Iâm seeing a lot of posts all over Reddit attempting to explain what gender critical feminists actually believe, and a lot of them are completely wrong. This is a post addressed to newcomers who are visiting this sub to figure out what gender critical feminism is all about.The first thing to get out of the way is this: no, we donât believe that you MUST have periods to be a woman. Iâve seen so many posts saying âJK Rowling is menopausal and doesnât have periods, so by her definition she wouldnât be a woman!â or ânot every woman has a period, some women donât have uteruses!â She isnât saying that at all. Having a period is not a necessary condition for being a woman, but it is a sufficient condition. Itâs sufficient in the sense that if you experience menstruation then that automatically puts you in the woman category (or at the very least it puts you in the female category). But itâs not itâs not necessary that you must be capable of menstruation in order to be put into the woman category. In any case, what Rowling was upset about was female erasure. It is, quite frankly, deeply disturbing and insulting for many women to be called âmenstruatorsâ or âperiod haversâ. This , we feel, reduces us to a biological function. The âbloody good periodâ charity once referred to women as 'bleedersâ, and not only does this not make any sense (men can bleed too!) it is also degrading. 'Bleedersâ sounds like a dehumanising slur. Notice thereâs a pattern here - when have you ever heard males been referred to as 'ejaculatorsâ or 'sperm producersâ?
Iâm going to try to debunk two other claims Iâve seen floating around that are just bollocks. The first is that gender critical feminists conflate sex with gender. The second is that we are biological essentialists. Both of these claims are false, and both particularly sting because a lot of gender critical feminists of the first and second wave of feminism actually railed against these concepts in the first place.
So, back to basics. Sex is biological. Sex refers to the two reproductive roles - male and female. Males produce small mobile gametes, sperm. Females produce the large immobile gametes, eggs. Sex is not a social construct. It is found all across nature. Plants have sexes. Animals have sexes.
Gender is a social construct, and is not the same thing as sex. This was recognised by Mary Wollstonecraft in the 18th century, but was really emphasised by the second wave. Gender is social norms of femininity and masculinity. Gender are roles, behaviours, stereotypes, and expectations placed on human beings according to their sex. Male humans are supposed to live up to masculine gender expectations. Female humans are supposed to live up to the feminine gender expectations. Boys are supposed to like violent sports, getting angry, not crying, not eating salad, the colour blue, being dominant and in control, being logical. Women are supposed to like kittens, being sensitive and empathetic, watching their weight, pink, babies, being a homemaker.
Women are human females who have the feminine gender imposed on them. And men are human males who have the masculine gender imposed on them. And gender also operates as a hierarchy. Femininity is inferior to masculinity.
Feminists pointed out there was nothing natural about gender. Women do not naturally want to be nothing more than baby makers, who cry and like pink glitter, who only care about adornment and home making. This is all a social construct. Gender operates as a constrictive trap, forcing women into one 'naturalâ lifestyle.A big project of the second wave was to point out the artificiality of gender roles, and to break women out of them. There is no one way to look like a woman. Women can wear makeup, have short hair, wear whatever they like. There should be no such thing as masculine and feminine interests - why shouldnât a man enjoy knitting? Why does that have to mean heâs somehow less of a man, or a sissy? And why shouldnât a woman enjoy car racing? Why are we so obsessed with gendering everything, from clothing, to food, to hobbies, to pets, to cars? Second wave feminists established that just because someone is female doesnât mean they are, or should be, girly. Women do not naturally behave, or think, in a particular way.
Gender critical feminists have always held fast to this idea that there is no necessary connection between sex and gender roles. If I tell you I have blue eyes, can you infer anything at all about what my tastes are from that information alone? What is my career? My hobbies? My interests? My behaviour? My aspirations? My overall appearance? No -of course not. That is because we donât imbue having blue eyes with any significance. Blue eyes has no connection to your personality or your cognitive capacities. Well, thatâs what gender critical feminists think about sex. If I tell you a person is female, that doesnât necessarily tell you anything about her hobbies or interests. At most it tells you sheâs a human who is very likely to experience the incidents of being female - she is likely to be capable of menstruating. She is likely to be capable of getting pregnant. Beyond those basic facts of biology, though, females are people and can have a wide range of behaviours and appearances. There is no 'rightâ way to be a woman. Literally the only precondition is that you be female. Thatâs it.
Female biology is different from male bioloogy, and due to us living in a sexist society is often pathologised and overlooked. For example, menstruation has been coded as 'uncleanâ and impure - gender stereotypes are interposed on top of natural biological functions. So what Rowling was trying to emphasise was that for women our sex is deeply important to us. Itâs a core part of our experience going through the world. We are stigmatised for having periods, stigmatised for going on contraception, stigmatised for abortions, stigmatised for giving birth (too many or too few babies). And so there are important political concerns that only apply to those with female bodies. Also, female bodies are often a locus of state control. The state will try to control women by controlling their bodies (see abortion legislation, forced sterilisation,) What that means is even if you accept that trans women are 'womenâ (whatever women means) there must still be room for a distinctive female rights movement. Some dude on the Reddit front page was given hundreds of awards for blithely saying âno one is saying sex isnât real - we are just saying that sex isnât important.â With no respect, dude, itâs just not your place to say that. Women are pointing out that sex IS important to them - women are dying because they are taking drugs that have only been tested on male bodies. Men canât handwave that away with claims that 'sex isnât importantâ. WE are telling YOU that it is. Itâs important. Itâs not bigoted for women to campaign for their sex based rights.
Biological essentialism is related to all this. Biological essentialism is the view that sex roles are natural. BECAUSE I am female it is therefore natural for me to like babies, be more emotional, and to desire to go shopping. But as I already covered, this view was contested by second wave feminists. On average, women may enjoy makeup more than men. They may be more caring and nurturing, They. may be less into train and plane spotting. But none of this is natural. Women arenât born this way. There is no natural connection between women being female and women liking makeup. Thereâs no biologically essential way for women to be.
You may notice that people on Reddit just donât seem to really get what biological essentialism means. Biological essentialism has nothing to do with saying 'women have female bodies.â Itâs not 'essentialistâ to say that women are female. Thatâs just part of the definition of woman. Biological essentialism is the claim that because someone is a woman they have to behave or think in a particular way. In actual fact, many commenters will support trans theory using biological essentialism. One male commenter bravely attempted to define women - â a woman is someone who conforms to our societies expectations of femininity - they dress in a feminine way, think in a feminine way, have feminine interests and so on.â This is pure essentialism. Gender critical feminists completely deny that there is any such thing as 'feminineâ thoughts. What on earth is a 'feminineâ way of thinking? If you say that women are more ditzy, creative, and less logical - isnât that just super sexist? And whatâs a 'feminineâ interest? Are we really back to the bad old days of saying you are less of a woman if you enjoy dirt bike racing? Are you less of a man if you film makeup tutorials? On this definition I would simply fail to be a woman. I wear pants. I donât have typical feminine interests. I work in a male dominated career. I find this definition really sexist - it says that women have to think and act, and look a certain way in order to be women. they have to conform to femininity.
But the definition that a woman is an adult human female is not biologically essentialist because all it tells you is that women have female bodies. Thatâs it. Women can look and act in any way they like.
To recap and clarify - gender critical feminists are against biological essentialism. And they do not think that sex and gender are the same thing!
*tries to bite you in a cute flirty way but accidentally rips your throat out with my teeth*
âż 19, European, radfem âż (attracted to men but impossible to not despise them)
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