Not a Dirty Word

People today are terrified of the new f-word: feminism. They think we are man-haters, lesbians, and bra-burners. This is widely not the case.

This is not a man hating or demonizing zone. Here, we do not aim for women's superiority, but for equality for all.

To that end, I encourage you to join us, no matter where you fall on the sex and gender spectrum, to fight for equal rights.

Feel free to pass suggestions/submissions my way, or to ask ANY questions you may have. There are no stupid questions! I will answer to the best of my ability (from a persona POV, as I recognize that I cannot speak for all feminists), and will take any question as encouragement that people ARE interested in learning more and hopefully considering themselves feminists, too!

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Catching Elephant is a theme by Andy Taylor

 

In one recent study, more than 100 university psychologists were asked to rate the CVs of Dr. Karen Miller or Dr. Brian Miller, fictitious applicants for an academic tenure-track job. The CVs were identical, apart from the name. Yet strangely, the male Dr. Miller was perceived (by both male and female reviewers) to have better research, teaching, and service experience than the luckless female Dr. Miller. Overall, about three-quarters of the psychologists thought that Dr. Brian was hirable, while only just under half had the same confidence in Dr. Karen. The same researchers also sent out applications for the position of tenured professor, again identical but for the male and female name at the top. This time, the application was so strong that most of the raters thought that tenure was deserved, regardless of sex. However, the endorsement of Karen’s application was four times more likely to be accompanied by cautionary caveats scrawled in the margins of the questionnaire: such as, ‘I would need to see evidence that she had gotten these grants and publications on her own’ and ‘We would have to see her job talk.’

Cordelia Fine, Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference (via cockchomp)

THIS IS REALLY FUCKING IMPORTANT AND INCREDIBLE 

(via beloquacious)

Oh hey, just in case you think academia is a haven of progressivism and open-mindedness. Women also have a much harder time obtaining tenure if they are trying to raise a family, while men who have children are more likely to be awarded it.

When I was in graduate school, I attended a “Junior Women Scholars and the Profession’-type mini conference, at which one of the senior scholars told us that, if we wanted to have kids, it was better to do it while we were finishing our degrees. Because then you could prove you were able to handle a baby + research and it would be better to take a semester off as a grad student than a semester off as junior faculty. 

All of this is despite the fact that, in the US, hiring committees are not legally allowed to take into account your family status. They aren’t even allowed to ask if you’re married, if you have kids, or what your plans are for kids in the future. It usually comes up somewhat awkwardly during campus visits, where they have to disclose benefits and how the tenure process works.

Like most of the rest of the US, universities and colleges tend to lag woefully behind the rest of the world in offering women choices other than “rock” or “hard place,” and also do not accord men time off for paternity leave, thus ensuring that academic women have to shoulder the weight of those choices. So yay, institutionalized sexism!

(via theletteraesc)

brigantes:

girls on their periods

myvaginaisamango:

thinkblack:

I think it’s time to kill for our women

Time to heal our women, be real to our women
And if we don’t we’ll have a race of babies
That will hate the ladies, that make the babies
And since a man can’t make one
He has no right to tell a woman when and where to create one

“Rap is just noise”

Look at that terrible rap music, poisoning the minds of our youth. 

michael-ceras-nipple:

Why do we need feminism, you ask?

cutecultcover:

likeelectricthroughtheground:

Oh.

Welp.

………..why?

Ugh. Just… ugh.

If it was positive for women’s rights, I’d be fine with it being positive for men’s rights too. But really, the men are suffering SO much here, aren’t they. We just really need to stop focusing on the women and help those guys out more, don’t we?

UGH.

(Source: skeptikhaleesi)

sunshinecityboheme: letstalkaboutrape: (TW: relationship violence description and imagery) rapeculturerealities: thepoliticalfreakshow: Blaming The Victim: Internet Responds To Gripping Domestic Violence Photoessay By Blaming Photographer and Victim, Rather Than The Abuser, For Domestic Violence [TW: Domestic Violence, Victim-Shaming, Abuse Apologism, Abuse Culture, Abuse Enablism, Violence, Child Abuse, Child Neglect] This week, the Internet got angry at Sara Naomi Lewkowicz. The 30-year-old photographer had the audacity to photograph domestic violence – and to publish the photos in a major magazine just as Congress was debating the reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act. In the photos, we see a 31-year-old man named Shane throw his 19-year-old girlfriend Maggie against a set of kitchen cabinets. He traps her with his body against a kitchen counter. He chokes her. At one point, her 2-year-old-daughter walks in and stamps her feet as she sees what’s happening. The Internet thinks this is Sara’s fault. Sara’s photo essay, earlier called “Maggie and Shane” and originally published at fotovisura.com, was published Wednesday as “Photographer As Witness: A Portrait of Domestic Violence” in Time’s “Lightbox” photography feature. The 39-frame story is edited down from photos taken in three visits with the couple over roughly as many months. Commenters at Time think Sara is unethical for not trying to stop the beating. They accuse her of voyeurism; of choosing “an awesome photo spread over critically need help”; of lacking empathy; of exploiting children. It matters little in such heated discussions whether any of this is true – or demonstrably untrue (as much of it was when the comments were made). One example: Sara called 911. All of that takes a back seat, in these heated comments threads, to something much easier and more visceral: righteous blame. Many of us are familiar with the phrase “blame the victim,” and there’s no shortage of that in the comments, at Time, on Sara’s essay. Here’s a sampling of the ideas you’ll find there: Maggie, the beaten girlfriend, should have seen this coming. Maggie stays because she likes it. Good riddance, Maggie was cheating on her then-estranged husband anyway … etc. In classic form, one insists of Maggie, “She is not the victim. She is the perpetrator.” If there’s a single thing about which the critics shouting about Maggie and Sara in Time’s comment section seem to agree, it’s this: The only adult in the house during the assault who isn’t responsible for the violence is the man committing it. There are limitless variations on the lies people tell themselves about women like Maggie who are beaten by their partners. The truth is so much more straightforward: Women are abused by men who are abusers. Abuse may have accomplices (e.g., drugs, alcohol) and catalysts (e.g., a bad day at work, a fight with the kid) but whatever context clings to the commission of abuse does not change something many of us apparently still can’t easily admit: Abuse is committed by abusers, who alone are responsible for their violence. Sometimes this truth, too, has an accomplice: the camera. Donna Ferrato, the first person to extensively and visually document women who’ve survived domestic abuse, has been taking pictures like these for 30 years. No one ever wants to see them, she says, because they make people nervous, anxious. And for good reason. “The camera catches truth, in action, from all different sides,” she told me. It is “the most powerful kind of weapon.” So maybe it shouldn’t surprise us that a young, female photographer who wielded such a powerful weapon against violence in a society that prefers to keep invisible, and that so often blames victims, finds herself, too, showered with blame. To be sure, it feels like there are things missing from this story. Time opted not to publish details about the 911 call – made from Sara’s phone, which she had to take back from Shane in the midst of the fight — even though Sara had previously written them in response to an earlier round of this same controversy at fotovisura.com (where the pictures went up in December). Paul Moakley, Time’s Lightbox editor, told me he felt their written version, which said only that Sara was “confirmed” someone else had called 911, was “much clearer” without the extra details. But those details matter. Viewers I talked to felt differently when they knew that there were two other adults, friends of Shane, in the house. They felt differently when they knew that Sara physically retrieved her cellphone from Shane’s pocket – he had borrowed it to call Maggie when she left the bar angry at him, and with their shared cellphone, and she hadn’t gotten it back before the argument escalated. She put herself at risk to do that; she snatched it from his pocket as the assault was still happening – and handed it off to one of those adults, instructing him to call 911. They felt differently when they knew that Sara is a tiny 5-foot-2 – all details available with the fotovisura.com version of the story. And I would bet that those who criticized Sara for the frame that includes 2-year-old Memphis crying in the kitchen as Shane beat her mother, those who argue that Sara should have put the camera down and removed the toddler from the danger, would feel differently if they knew what Sara told me: “When I took that, I pressed the button, it took like three frames of this little girl, and then the other adult was in the room picking her up and taking her out. It literally lasted a matter of seconds.” In one caption, Sara writes that Shane tried to coax Maggie into the basement by offering Maggie two options: keep getting beaten in the kitchen, or they go “talk privately” in the basement. But there’s a clause that’s not in the caption: “What he said was — he pointed at me at one point and said, ‘Because it’s none of her fucking business.’” If you look at Sara’s full-body portrait of Shane before he begins hitting Maggie – neck tendons inflamed, muscles taut, mouth opened wide in a shout – you might guess that there would likely have been no conversation in that basement, that the violence would have escalated. “How bad” isn’t a guessing-game worth playing. “[Maggie] just kept saying no, I’m not going down there with you,” Sara told me. “That’s the big thing I thought about – if he was willing to do that with a camera there, what would he be willing to do if they were alone? That scares me to think about.” In case it isn’t clear, it is reasonable to think that Shane thought he was holding back for the camera. It seems reasonable to think that Shane thought what he was doing was harmless enough that even people whose fucking business it wasn’t could watch. It seems reasonable to think Maggie believed the photographer-witness to be her best bet for safety. It would, therefore, it seems to me, be reasonable to think that the act of documentation was not merely passive; it was also protective. And something else: It may seem strange to say so, but there is also victory in Sara’s essay. Ann Jones, who has been writing about violence committed against women for the last 20 years, says the officers’ responses to the 911 call show progress. “The arresting officers here, judging by the captions of the photos, were great. That officer says to Maggie, ‘You know this is going to happen again. They keep doing this. They only stop when they kill you.’ When we started work on this in the battered women’s movement, police were taking the guy’s word for it, not taking a statement from the women, blaming the women for causing the situation in the first place, saying there’s no point in arresting because the women won’t press charges. Prosecutors weren’t pressing charges as they should have,” Jones remembers. “It was all on the women.” There’s also victory of a kind for Maggie: She files a complaint against her abuser, and she leaves him, two things many women in abusive relationships are reluctant to do. “People don’t give Maggie enough credit,” says Sara. “She left. I just wish the story would be about her, not me. I’m just a freaking photographer.” But why confront our discomfort about images when we can instead confront the photographer? Why challenge the perpetrators who commit, and the structures that underpin, this violence when we can blame its victims – and, when the evidence of violence is still too powerful, its witnesses? Maybe that’s too cynical. It is, at least, for Sara. “I’m excited that this is proving people want to talk about this. People want to address this issue. Bottom line, I think it’s got people addressing domestic violence.” Bolded for emphasis

sunshinecityboheme:

letstalkaboutrape:

(TW: relationship violence description and imagery)

rapeculturerealities:

thepoliticalfreakshow:

Blaming The Victim: Internet Responds To Gripping Domestic Violence Photoessay By Blaming Photographer and Victim, Rather Than The Abuser, For Domestic Violence [TW: Domestic Violence, Victim-Shaming, Abuse Apologism, Abuse Culture, Abuse Enablism, Violence, Child Abuse, Child Neglect]

This week, the Internet got angry at Sara Naomi Lewkowicz. The 30-year-old photographer had the audacity to photograph domestic violence – and to publish the photos in a major magazine just as Congress was debating the reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act.

In the photos, we see a 31-year-old man named Shane throw his 19-year-old girlfriend Maggie against a set of kitchen cabinets. He traps her with his body against a kitchen counter. He chokes her. At one point, her 2-year-old-daughter walks in and stamps her feet as she sees what’s happening.

The Internet thinks this is Sara’s fault.

Sara’s photo essay, earlier called “Maggie and Shane” and originally published at fotovisura.com, was published Wednesday as “Photographer As Witness: A Portrait of Domestic Violence” in Time’s “Lightbox” photography feature. The 39-frame story is edited down from photos taken in three visits with the couple over roughly as many months.

Commenters at Time think Sara is unethical for not trying to stop the beating. They accuse her of voyeurism; of choosing “an awesome photo spread over critically need help”; of lacking empathy; of exploiting children.

It matters little in such heated discussions whether any of this is true – or demonstrably untrue (as much of it was when the comments were made). One example: Sara called 911. All of that takes a back seat, in these heated comments threads, to something much easier and more visceral: righteous blame.

Many of us are familiar with the phrase “blame the victim,” and there’s no shortage of that in the comments, at Time, on Sara’s essay. Here’s a sampling of the ideas you’ll find there: Maggie, the beaten girlfriend, should have seen this coming. Maggie stays because she likes it. Good riddance, Maggie was cheating on her then-estranged husband anyway … etc. In classic form, one insists of Maggie, “She is not the victim. She is the perpetrator.”

If there’s a single thing about which the critics shouting about Maggie and Sara in Time’s comment section seem to agree, it’s this: The only adult in the house during the assault who isn’t responsible for the violence is the man committing it.

There are limitless variations on the lies people tell themselves about women like Maggie who are beaten by their partners. The truth is so much more straightforward: Women are abused by men who are abusers.

Abuse may have accomplices (e.g., drugs, alcohol) and catalysts (e.g., a bad day at work, a fight with the kid) but whatever context clings to the commission of abuse does not change something many of us apparently still can’t easily admit: Abuse is committed by abusers, who alone are responsible for their violence.

Sometimes this truth, too, has an accomplice: the camera. Donna Ferrato, the first person to extensively and visually document women who’ve survived domestic abuse, has been taking pictures like these for 30 years. No one ever wants to see them, she says, because they make people nervous, anxious. And for good reason. “The camera catches truth, in action, from all different sides,” she told me. It is “the most powerful kind of weapon.”

So maybe it shouldn’t surprise us that a young, female photographer who wielded such a powerful weapon against violence in a society that prefers to keep invisible, and that so often blames victims, finds herself, too, showered with blame.

To be sure, it feels like there are things missing from this story. Time opted not to publish details about the 911 call – made from Sara’s phone, which she had to take back from Shane in the midst of the fight — even though Sara had previously written them in response to an earlier round of this same controversy at fotovisura.com (where the pictures went up in December). Paul Moakley, Time’s Lightbox editor, told me he felt their written version, which said only that Sara was “confirmed” someone else had called 911, was “much clearer” without the extra details.

But those details matter. Viewers I talked to felt differently when they knew that there were two other adults, friends of Shane, in the house. They felt differently when they knew that Sara physically retrieved her cellphone from Shane’s pocket – he had borrowed it to call Maggie when she left the bar angry at him, and with their shared cellphone, and she hadn’t gotten it back before the argument escalated. She put herself at risk to do that; she snatched it from his pocket as the assault was still happening – and handed it off to one of those adults, instructing him to call 911. They felt differently when they knew that Sara is a tiny 5-foot-2 – all details available with the fotovisura.com version of the story.

And I would bet that those who criticized Sara for the frame that includes 2-year-old Memphis crying in the kitchen as Shane beat her mother, those who argue that Sara should have put the camera down and removed the toddler from the danger, would feel differently if they knew what Sara told me: “When I took that, I pressed the button, it took like three frames of this little girl, and then the other adult was in the room picking her up and taking her out. It literally lasted a matter of seconds.”

In one caption, Sara writes that Shane tried to coax Maggie into the basement by offering Maggie two options: keep getting beaten in the kitchen, or they go “talk privately” in the basement. But there’s a clause that’s not in the caption: “What he said was — he pointed at me at one point and said, ‘Because it’s none of her fucking business.’”

If you look at Sara’s full-body portrait of Shane before he begins hitting Maggie – neck tendons inflamed, muscles taut, mouth opened wide in a shout – you might guess that there would likely have been no conversation in that basement, that the violence would have escalated. “How bad” isn’t a guessing-game worth playing.

“[Maggie] just kept saying no, I’m not going down there with you,” Sara told me. “That’s the big thing I thought about – if he was willing to do that with a camera there, what would he be willing to do if they were alone? That scares me to think about.”

In case it isn’t clear, it is reasonable to think that Shane thought he was holding back for the camera. It seems reasonable to think that Shane thought what he was doing was harmless enough that even people whose fucking business it wasn’t could watch. It seems reasonable to think Maggie believed the photographer-witness to be her best bet for safety. It would, therefore, it seems to me, be reasonable to think that the act of documentation was not merely passive; it was also protective.

And something else: It may seem strange to say so, but there is also victory in Sara’s essay. Ann Jones, who has been writing about violence committed against women for the last 20 years, says the officers’ responses to the 911 call show progress. “The arresting officers here, judging by the captions of the photos, were great. That officer says to Maggie, ‘You know this is going to happen again. They keep doing this. They only stop when they kill you.’ When we started work on this in the battered women’s movement, police were taking the guy’s word for it, not taking a statement from the women, blaming the women for causing the situation in the first place, saying there’s no point in arresting because the women won’t press charges. Prosecutors weren’t pressing charges as they should have,” Jones remembers. “It was all on the women.”

There’s also victory of a kind for Maggie: She files a complaint against her abuser, and she leaves him, two things many women in abusive relationships are reluctant to do.

“People don’t give Maggie enough credit,” says Sara. “She left. I just wish the story would be about her, not me. I’m just a freaking photographer.”

But why confront our discomfort about images when we can instead confront the photographer? Why challenge the perpetrators who commit, and the structures that underpin, this violence when we can blame its victims – and, when the evidence of violence is still too powerful, its witnesses?

Maybe that’s too cynical. It is, at least, for Sara. “I’m excited that this is proving people want to talk about this. People want to address this issue. Bottom line, I think it’s got people addressing domestic violence.”

Bolded for emphasis

the-kindly-anon: masturbasians: a muslim woman protesting the burka. in some countries, muslim women are raped and beaten for showing even their noses and mouths. in some places, they get their hands chopped off for showing their wrists, or looking at a man.  This is amazing, this is beyond amazing. Damn. Brave.  This is likely the only time my blog will have nudity on it but I feel this is too important not to have on my blog.  The female body is something beautiful. Harming a woman for the reasons listed above is beyond cruel and oppressive. It should never happen and I’m glad people are taking a stand against it.   This is fantastic. Disclaimer: I believe you SHOULD wear a burka IF YOU WANT TO. I absolutely and not fighting to eliminate the burka/niqab/etc. HOWEVER, I also think it SHOULD be a choice, and it isn’t always. So props to her for fighting against the FORCED use of the burka(etc), and for the choice to where what she wants.

the-kindly-anon:

masturbasians:

a muslim woman protesting the burka. in some countries, muslim women are raped and beaten for showing even their noses and mouths. in some places, they get their hands chopped off for showing their wrists, or looking at a man. 

This is amazing, this is beyond amazing.

Damn. Brave. 

This is likely the only time my blog will have nudity on it but I feel this is too important not to have on my blog.  The female body is something beautiful. Harming a woman for the reasons listed above is beyond cruel and oppressive. It should never happen and I’m glad people are taking a stand against it.  

This is fantastic.

Disclaimer: I believe you SHOULD wear a burka IF YOU WANT TO. I absolutely and not fighting to eliminate the burka/niqab/etc.

HOWEVER, I also think it SHOULD be a choice, and it isn’t always. So props to her for fighting against the FORCED use of the burka(etc), and for the choice to where what she wants.

(Source: gxddess)

cityboheme: ewok89: “They say I have a sweet ass, nice tits, a real pretty dress. They say I’m their future wife, or I’d look good with their dick in my mouth. They try (and probably succeed at times) to take pictures down my shirt. They ask if they can get my number, they ask where I live, why I’m not smiling, why my boyfriend lets me walk around by myself. Then they ask why I’m such a bitch, if my pussy is made of ice. They say that they never do this, as though I’ve somehow driven them to inappropriate behavior and deserve it. They say they’re just having fun, trying to pay me a compliment. Pretty frequently they get mean, slipping into a loud tourettes-like chant of bitch-whore-cunt-slut. Before you try to tell me that it’s because I take my clothes off for a living, let me tell you that this started way before I was 18. Let me tell you that every single woman I know has at least one truly terrifying story of street harassment and a whole bunch of other stories that are merely insulting or annoying. Let me remind you that in a room of pornography fans, who have actually seen me with a dick in my mouth and who can buy a replica of my vagina in a can or box, I am treated with far more respect than I am walking down the street.” —Stoya I never thought of it that way, dear stoya… That last sentence is very poignant.

cityboheme:

ewok89:

“They say I have a sweet ass, nice tits, a real pretty dress. They say I’m their future wife, or I’d look good with their dick in my mouth. They try (and probably succeed at times) to take pictures down my shirt. They ask if they can get my number, they ask where I live, why I’m not smiling, why my boyfriend lets me walk around by myself. Then they ask why I’m such a bitch, if my pussy is made of ice. They say that they never do this, as though I’ve somehow driven them to inappropriate behavior and deserve it. They say they’re just having fun, trying to pay me a compliment. Pretty frequently they get mean, slipping into a loud tourettes-like chant of bitch-whore-cunt-slut.

Before you try to tell me that it’s because I take my clothes off for a living, let me tell you that this started way before I was 18. Let me tell you that every single woman I know has at least one truly terrifying story of street harassment and a whole bunch of other stories that are merely insulting or annoying. Let me remind you that in a room of pornography fans, who have actually seen me with a dick in my mouth and who can buy a replica of my vagina in a can or box, I am treated with far more respect than I am walking down the street.”

—Stoya

I never thought of it that way, dear stoya…

That last sentence is very poignant.

(Source: praxis89)

youngwildfree585: Bitch, please. on @weheartit.com - http://whrt.it/XbiQkl

youngwildfree585:

Bitch, please. on @weheartit.com - http://whrt.it/XbiQkl