Category: Feminism

Women must have the right to organise. We will not be silenced

The radical insight of feminism is that gender is a social construct – that girls and women are not fated to be feminine, that boys and men don’t have to be masculine. But we have gone through the looking-glass and are being told that sex is a construct. It is said that sex is merely assigned at birth, rather than being a material fact – actually, though, sex is recognisable in the womb (which is what enables foetal sex selection). Sex is not a feeling. Female is a biological classification that applies to all living species. If you produce large immobile gametes, you are female. Even if you are a frog. This is not complicated, nor is there a spectrum, although there are small numbers of intersex people who should absolutely be supported.

Female oppression is innately connected to our ability to reproduce. Women have made progress by talking about biology, menstruation, childbirth and menopause. We won’t now have our bodies or voices written out of the script.

This latest silencing of women is a warning. You either protect women’s rights as sex-based or you don’t protect them at all.

Male violence is an issue for women, which is why we want single-sex spaces. Vulnerable women in refuges and prisons must be allowed to live in safe environments – the common enemy here is the patriarchy, remember? How did we arrive at a situation where there are shocking and rising numbers of teenage girls presenting at specialist clinics with gender dysphoria, while some who have transitioned are now regretful and infertile?

Source: Women must have the right to organise. We will not be silenced | Society | The Guardian

A Victorian Magazine Asked Spinsters Why They Were Single, And The Answers Were Incredibly Savage

“Because I do not care to enlarge my menagerie of pets, and I find the animal man less docile than a dog, less affectionate than a cat, and less amusing than a monkey.”

Source: A Victorian Magazine Asked Spinsters Why They Were Single, And The Answers Were Incredibly Savage

Just Admit You Don’t Care If We Die

Jessica Williams writes:

The ways in which girls and women are objectified, dismissed, neglected, harassed, silenced and abused seem to be endless. Girls and women have always been objectified in books, magazines, advertisements, tv shows and movies, and we have been overlooked and erased from our very own archived history. Black and Indigenous girls and women have suffered and have been erased even more so than white women.Our body parts are commodified. Archaic beliefs are held about our natural bodily functions, and unless you are a female, the full extent of the brutal truth about how girls and women are viewed, spoken about and treated has been hidden from you. This steady erosion of our humanness has created a world where, for the most part, we are treated like objects and not like living human beings.

Source: Just Admit You Don’t Care If We Die – J.K. Williams

Fighting the tyranny of ‘niceness’: why we need difficult women

Look back at early feminists and you will find women with views that are unpalatable to their modern sisters. You will find women with views that were unpalatable to their contemporaries. They were awkward and wrong-headed and obstinate and sometimes downright odd – and that helped them to defy the expectations placed on them. “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself,” wrote George Bernard Shaw in 1903. “Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” (Or, as I always catch myself adding, the unreasonable woman.) A history of feminism should not try to sand off the sharp corners of the movement’s pioneers – or write them out of the story entirely, if their sins are deemed too great. It must allow them to be just as flawed – just as human – as men. Women are people, and people are more interesting than cliches. We don’t have to be perfect to deserve equal rights.

Source: Fighting the tyranny of ‘niceness’: why we need difficult women | Books | The Guardian

It’s Black Breastfeeding Week. Wondering why? One gut-punching poem says it all.

Yes, there is something unique about black breastfeeding. Several somethings, actually.

For most of U.S. history, generation upon generation upon generation of black families were torn apart. Black mothers were often not allowed to nourish and raise their own babies, but were forced to nourish and raise the babies of their enslavers. For most of U.S. history, black breastfeeding meant wet nursing white babies, often at the expense of a black woman’s own children.

Source: It’s Black Breastfeeding Week. Wondering why? One gut-punching poem says it all. – Upworthy

Feminist agroecology is taking on the agribusiness model in Argentina

Argentina, where around 60 per cent of the arable land is planted with genetically-modified soya, has become one of the countries where the agribusiness model is expanding the most rapidly. Recent years have also, however, seen the strong emergence of an alternative model promoting food sovereignty and agroecological practices, in production and consumption. Fundamental to this transition are women, who identify the agribusiness model with the patriarchal system and are insisting on the need to include a gender perspective in agroecology.

“Agribusiness is a patriarchal model. It is the men who choose it. The man takes care of the economic side and the woman takes care of the kitchen, etc., that’s why he chooses this model; it’s not that he doesn’t realise, but he doesn’t attach as much importance to his children’s health and nutrition.”

In the same vein, Pellegrini points out, that “agroecology must go hand in hand with recovering women’s role as caretakers of the land, the planet, and the family, at the same time as men learn to share the care work. We have to understand that the violence we inflict on the land with the agribusiness model is the same violence that we, as women, experience in the flesh.”

Source: Feminist agroecology is taking on the agribusiness model in Argentina – Equal Times

No sex, no babies: South Korea’s emerging feminists reject marriage

No dating, no sex, no marriage and no babies: two South Korean YouTubers who vow to stay single have caused uproar in the east Asian nation as it battles the world’s lowest fertility rate.

Jung and Baeck believe marriage entrenches old-fashioned gender roles, with South Korean women spending four times longer on unpaid care – cleaning, cooking and looking after children or elderly parents – than their husbands, according to UN data.

“The current government’s initiatives are not designed for women – it is for men,” said Jung. “They need women who can have babies, so the policy will repeat this vicious cycle.”

Source: No sex, no babies: South Korea’s emerging feminists reject marriage – Lifestyle – The Jakarta Post

Generation X women are screaming in silence

We thought we could have both thriving careers and rich home lives and make more and achieve more than our parents, but most of us have gained little if any advantage.

Gen Xers entered life with “having it all” not as a bright new option but as a mandatory social condition.

Put simply: having more options has not necessarily led to greater happiness or satisfaction. “By many objective measures, the lives of women in the United States have improved over the past 35 years,” the authors of an analysis of Census-style data wrote a decade ago as Generation X entered middle age. “Yet we show that measures of subjective wellbeing indicate that women’s happiness has declined both absolutely and relative to men.”

In 2017, another major study found that the two biggest stressors for women were work and children, with a compounding effect on those contending with both. We bear financial responsibilities that men had in the old days, but are also saddled with traditional caregiving duties.

Source: Generation X women are screaming in silence