Proud of NYC for honoring the women who built this city. Shirley Chisom will receive a permanent monument in Prospect Park. As the first black woman to serve in Congress, she paved the way for the record number of trailblazing women elected to Congress in 2018.
There is no feminism to speak of at this point in history: no preserved understanding on the part of any of these women that their rule could potentially change the patriarchal system going forward.
In the long run, ancient Egypt was no less cruel and oppressive to women than every other complex society on Earth – but, here, they snatched the gift away after graciously bestowing it. So even ancient Egypt – the only state that consistently allowed female rule – suffered a woman leader only when it had to, expunging her from the eyes of her people as soon as possible.
When Women Ruled the World: Six Queens of Egypt – Kara Cooney
HBO guest host Brittany Packnett warned white Republican women that they will not be protected from male oppression just because of the color of their skin.
Packnett, an activist for Teach for America, made the remarks during HBO’s weekly Pod Save American program.
“Let’s talk about our sister Stormy Daniels because she absolutely does not deserve the way that this president has been talking about her,” Packnett said. “But here’s what, frankly, worries me. This ‘president’ – yeah, I used air quotes – he has been talking horribly about women since he was a candidate.”
“He admitted to being a sexual assaulter when he was a candidate and 53 percent of white women went ahead and elected him anyway,” she lamented. “So let me talk to my white sisters for a second. I just want to issue a warning and I hope you are listening closely.”
Packnett continued: “I want you tell your mamas and your aunties and your grandmothers – from me – to stop selling us out! Listen, I know it’s really hard but your whiteness will actually not save you from what patriarchy has for you.”
According to Packett, women should learn from the way Dr. Christine Blasey Ford was treated when she testified against then-Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh.
“Right?” Packett pointed out. “We all know what happened to her when she decided to stand up and be a patriot in this country and try to save the rest of us.”
Maybe? The thing is, both ideas are problematic. And it’s more about traditionally masculine things being considered better or stronger than feminine ones and women being “better” for being “not like other girls.” I honestly cannot answer this. But misogyny seems to be a mainstay in nearly every culture… so probably not. Even if a woman is considered better for being domestic, that doesn’t mean domestic skills are considered as important or valued and it is still steeped in regressive gender roles. It’s not “women’s work” that is the problem in and of itself, it is a) considering it “women’s” work in the first place and b) considering it less “cool” or “valid” as, say, being able to change a tire.
Giving up your career is still a big red flag. A lot of women here are expected to, if not give up their career, still put family above that and also still be the primary caregiver, which is just as sexist.
I should note that women in America are still expected to take on the lion’s share of domestic work regardless of whether or not they work. And that just sucks. Maybe “not like other girls” isn’t as prevalent in the East, but 1) I can’t say for sure and 2) that doesn’t mean there aren’t a dozen other sexist attitudes to take its place. But you’re asking a gauche American. All I would really have to ask is: are such skills as valued in men as they are in women? If not… yeah, we still definitely have a problem.
Sad thing, too, because domestic skills are just… you know… being useful. We should just encourage everyone to be as useful as possible.
Natalie Portman’s Step-by-Step Guide to Toppling the Patriarchy
Rape culture… is a term that really tries to connect the dots between an American society that turns this blind eye to sexual assault and the true experience of girls, which is that they are experiencing a lot of sexual assault. So this rape culture is a culture where there are rape myths – that a woman’s outfit or her alcohol consumption has caused her rape – and nobody questions these attitudes that box in the victim. It doesn’t matter that you were dressed a certain way, or it doesn’t matter how much you drank. … So what we really see among this young generation is this refusal to participate in that culture, and also very differently than the ‘90s, when I was in college, back then … what we were taught is carry mace, go to a self-defense class, protect yourself because ‘boys will be boys,’ and the best you can do is make sure that you’re safe on your own. These girls are saying, ‘No! It’s not our problem, it’s YOUR problem. It’s boys that have to change. It’s the institutions that have to change.’ This is about institutional accountability.
“The double agent for the patriarchy is basically just a woman who perhaps unknowingly is still putting the patriarchal narrative out into the world. Is still benefitting off, profiting off and selling a patriarchal narrative to other women. But it’s a wolf in sheep’s clothing. You know, just because you look like a woman, we trust you and we think you’re on our side, but you are selling us something that really doesn’t make us feel good. You’re selling us an ideal, a body shape, a problem with our wrinkles, a problem with ageing, a problem with gravity, a problem with any kind of body fat. You’re selling us self-consciousness. The same poison that made you clearly develop some sort of body dysmorphia or facial dysmorphia, you are now pouring back into the world. You’re like recycling hatred. I find that really dangerous and I think it’s unacceptable and I don’t care if you’re a woman. I think constructive criticism is needed for anyone to ever evolve. For our gender to evolve we need some sort of constructive criticism. As long as we do it in a somewhat careful way. (…) So many of the worst things in the world have happened motivated by greed. And I just don’t think that’s an acceptable excuse anymore. How much money do you need? Really how much money do you need? How much money do any of these huge influencers who are worth millions or billions sometimes… why are they still promoting appetite-suppressant lollipops to young girls? And it’s not a fight against obesity. They have young, already slim girls, in their adverts for Flat Tummy company, this company that are absolutely everywhere, and they’re even being advertised in some of the most mainstream magazines, women’s magazines, and they have a billboard in Times Square. The money is built on the blood and tears of young women who believe in them, who follow them, who look up to them like the big sister they never had. It’s so upsetting and it feels like such a betrayal against women.”
This is a more eloquent version of the kind of thing I meant when I said yesterday that a choice isn’t feminist automatically because it’s made freely by a woman.
In previous political eras, women like these would have been told to hold their tongues or act more ladylike. These days, however, we are being encouraged, at least in some quarters, to embrace our anger. A slew of new books are challenging the ancient notion that rage can be dangerous for both self and society, arguing instead that women’s anger is, as the respective subtitles of these books insist, their “power,” their “revolutionary power,” even their “superpower.”
“I think it’s giving courage just to other women to speak about their stories in general. It’s been very triggering for women, triggering for some of us who are not ready to share, so being here today for us is very important, we feel like we’ve created a movement of people who see what’s at stake here and are willing to put it all on the line.”
An increasing number of South Korean women are choosing not to marry, not to have children, and not even to have relationships with men. With the lowest fertility rate in the world, the country’s population will start shrinking unless something changes.
“I have no plans to have children, ever,” says 24-year-old Jang Yun-hwa, as we chat in a hipsterish cafe in the middle of Seoul.
“I don’t want the physical pain of childbirth. And it would be detrimental to my career.”
Like many young adults in South Korea’s hyper-competitive job market, Yun-hwa, a web comic artist, has worked hard to get where she is and isn’t ready to let all that hard graft go to waste.
“Rather than be part of a family, I’d like to be independent and live alone and achieve my dreams,” she says.
…
When I put it to her that if she and her contemporaries don’t have children her country’s culture will die, she tells me that it’s time for the male-dominated culture to go.
“Must die,” she says, breaking into English. “Must die!”
Must die.
Must die!
Off topic but I’ve always found it weird how people freak out when they hear that birth rates are dropping. Our population can’t increase exponentially so why are you acting like this is a bad thing? It’s not like there’s a shortage of humans. If we found out the cat population was shrinking I’d be pissed but we could do with less humans
South Korea has a population of 51 million plus and a population density of 507 people per square kilometer. I think South Korea and the rest of the world will be just fine with a decreasing birth rate.
“The double agent for the patriarchy is basically just a woman who perhaps unknowingly is still putting the patriarchal narrative out into the world. Is still benefitting off, profiting off and selling a patriarchal narrative to other women. But it’s a wolf in sheep’s clothing. You know, just because you look like a woman, we trust you and we think you’re on our side, but you are selling us something that really doesn’t make us feel good. You’re selling us an ideal, a body shape, a problem with our wrinkles, a problem with ageing, a problem with gravity, a problem with any kind of body fat. You’re selling us self-consciousness. The same poison that made you clearly develop some sort of body dysmorphia or facial dysmorphia, you are now pouring back into the world. You’re like recycling hatred. I find that really dangerous and I think it’s unacceptable and I don’t care if you’re a woman. I think constructive criticism is needed for anyone to ever evolve. For our gender to evolve we need some sort of constructive criticism. As long as we do it in a somewhat careful way. (…) So many of the worst things in the world have happened motivated by greed. And I just don’t think that’s an acceptable excuse anymore. How much money do you need? Really how much money do you need? How much money do any of these huge influencers who are worth millions or billions sometimes… why are they still promoting appetite-suppressant lollipops to young girls? And it’s not a fight against obesity. They have young, already slim girls, in their adverts for Flat Tummy company, this company that are absolutely everywhere, and they’re even being advertised in some of the most mainstream magazines, women’s magazines, and they have a billboard in Times Square. The money is built on the blood and tears of young women who believe in them, who follow them, who look up to them like the big sister they never had. It’s so upsetting and it feels like such a betrayal against women.”
A case has been lodged in the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg last week by five women to remove the state-sanctioned gender bias among the nobility and to give girls and boys equal rights to inherit.
In 2013, the royal laws of succession were amended to give equal rights to a baby girl, but attempts to extend this to the peerage came to nothing. Princess Charlotte of Cambridge was…
There are a hundred and seventy-eight laws that differentiate on the basis of sex. Women can’t work overtime. We have to get credit cards in our husbands names. We’re not allowed to work in the mines. This is a man’s world.
You think you can change the country? You should look to her generation. They’re taking to the streets. Protests are important, but changing the culture it means nothing if the law doesn’t change.
Who did you say your name was? Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
I found out recently that at a time of his life when Tolstoy was in a slump and had stopped writing & earning money, his wife Sophia borrowed money from her mum to start her own publishing office and publish editions of his works—and in order to figure out how publishing worked, she travelled to St Petersburg to ask Anna Dostoyevsky for advice, as Anna had also spent the past 14 years planning the editions of her husband’s work, correcting proofs, placing ads in papers, battling official censors, etc. It reminded me of this post about women writers supporting each other—so many links between women in history that we never hear about. Someone please write a book about the wives of all the great male writers…
(In previous years Sophia, while giving birth to Tolstoy’s 13 children and raising them and managing his estate (he was a count) pretty much on her own, also wrote the clean copies of all of his manuscripts out of his nearly illegible drafts—the final draft of War and Peace was 3,000 pages and she copied it seven times, correcting spelling and grammar and offering key suggestions and critiques of the plot; for example explaining to him that people would be more interested in the social or romantic plots, the human aspects, than in the minutiae of the battles and war strategy plots. A few months before his death, Tolstoy named a male friend the executor of his literary estate rather than his wife, who had been doing this thankless job since she was 19, and gave to the public domain all the copyrights to his works that Sophia had previously owned (for her publishing company). She wrote in her diary “Now I am cast aside as of no further use, although I am, nevertheless, expected to do impossible things.”)
Also I shouldn’t be surprised (but I am) at just how many “great male writers” read their wife’s (or female relatives’) diaries and drew a lot of inspiration from them, stealing ideas or even sometimes entire sentences / paragraphs / poems out of them. This is such a recurrent pattern. There’s Tolstoy (who read Sophia’s diaries and also asked her, when she was 17, to show him a short story she’d written, gave it back to her the next day saying he’d barely glanced at it, when he actually wrote in his diary “What force of truth and simplicity!” and used the story as the embryo for the Rostov family in War and Peace), but also William Wordsworth who read his sister Dorothy’s journal and drew a lot from it, and F. Scott Fitzgerald of course. When Zelda was still young a magazine editor offered to publish parts of her journals, and her husband (of 5 months!) said he couldn’t allow it because he drew a lot of inspiration from them and planned on using parts of them in his future novels and short stories. There’s also French novelist Raymond Radiguet who stole his female lover’s diary to write his novel The Devil in the Flesh, and was lauded by fellow male writers & critics for his brilliant insights into a woman’s mind. Which had been copy/pasted from this woman’s diary. [Also, while he didn’t read it until after her death, Henry James’s sister Alice mentions in her diary that he “embedded in his pages many pearls fallen from my lips, which he steals in the most unblushing way, saying, simply, that he knew they had been said by the family, so it did not matter.”] I really love reading women’s journals, and when they were married to a famous writer, you wouldn’t believe how often the person who edited them mentions in the introduction “if some passages sound familiar it’s because her husband was reading her diary and ~getting inspired” ie plagiarising although the term technically doesn’t apply because every word his wife wrote and idea she had was legally his property (just like she was).
It makes me feel so bitter to contrast what women do—decades of unpaid, unacknowledged work to proofread, copy, publish, preserve from censorship, improve, develop and promote their husband’s writing—with what men do—openly steal ideas and whole sentences from their wife’s writing while forcing her to give birth to 13 children that she didn’t want and he doesn’t help raise.
Warner Bros and DC Entertainment have chosen Cathy Yan to be the director of an untitled girl gang movie, likely the next superhero film to be graced by Suicide Squad scene-stealer Harley Quinn, in the form of Margot Robbie. A deal has to be completed, but it is expected that Yan will become the second female filmmaker to join the DC club after Wonder Woman‘s Patty Jenkins, and the first female Asian director ever tapped to direct a superhero film.
Yan got the job over numerous well established male directors, and because she is taking this giant leap with just one small-budget indie movie under her belt. That would be Dead Pigs, a film that won the World Cinema Dramatic Award For Ensemble Acting at Sundance last January. Despite being a new talent, Yan’s presentation for Birds of Prey was exceptional, and Robbie held firm to her desire for this film to be directed by a woman.
Not That Bad, an anthology of writing on rape culture, featuring 29 contributors and edited by me. Out 5/1/18. Pre-order now at your preferred book retailer.
The canon is lousy with authors who yearn to be admired for their sensitivity to the full range of female personhood, be that personhood luscious, pert, or swelling coyly against a sheer camisole. These are writerly men confident that they’ve nailed women’s psyches, all because of how single-mindedly they want to nail women.
Read moreon the ridiculousness that ensues when bookish men perform interest in women’s inner lives out of a misbegotten sense of nobility.
House of Brat 