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You know its bad when American Conservatives are up in arms.
Today’s Radical Feminist insight comes from Humble Kitten, reminding us that dudes will be dudes in whatever form they happen to come in.
Secondary school, history class.
You cover a small amount of information on the suffragettes, and your teacher shows you a video of Emily Wilding Davison getting struck down by Anmer, the King’s horse.
Your teacher asks the class, “we’ll never know why she did this”
But you know
All the girls in your class know, and are quiet, compared to the boys, who laugh, and jeer, and throw around words like “crazy”, because they simply don’t understand.
But you do.
The teacher asks, “who would have been a suffragette back then?” And you put your hand up.
He asks why.
‘Because,’ you think, ‘because I know how it is to live a life being told by everyone that you are inferior. Being told that you can’t play with us because you’re a girl, and girls are silly.
Being told that being pretty is all that matters, and being told that girls can’t do this, and girls can’t do that, and you still get told that it’s a lot better than it was.
You know that thirty years ago, women were laughed at for wanting to be independent, laughed at for wanting a job, and that was only thirty years ago.
Yet you can still imagine the desperation these women felt when they were doing all they could to be heard, and the whole world was deaf to their cries.
You can understand why Emily Wilding Davison ducked under that barrier to carry out her task, whatever that may have been, and stood in the path of a charging horse with determination and love for her cause.
You can still imagine a time where no woman would have ever dreamed of being independent.
When the idea of a single woman was scandalous and she was shunned.
You can imagine the feeling in the air when Emmeline Pankhurst spoke to thousands of women and declared “no more!”
“No more suffering in silence. No more playing to the whims of entitled men who have been served the earth on a silver platter with the words ‘for men’ carved across the globe,”
“No more being the plaything of man, it is our time. We are strong, and we will show the whole world what womankind can do”
You know how it feels to be female.’
But you can’t say that
You can’t say any of that, because he’s a man, and he could never understand.
So you shrug, and say something that feels wrong on your tongue.
It feels like a lie, because it’s not what you want to say
But you can’t say that
Because he wouldn’t understand
Some activism that I can get behind, thank the holy gh…I mean Fantabulosa Fairy. :)
The BBC reports:
“The service at the chapel of Westcott House in Cambridge was to commemorate LGBT history month.
The congregation was told the use of the lexicon was an attempt to “queer the liturgy of evening prayer”.
But officials said it had not been authorised and was at variance with the doctrine and teaching of the church.
[…]
An Old Testament reading from the Prophet Joel which says “rend your heart and not your garments, return to the Lord your God” was printed in Polari as “rend your thumping chest and not your frocks – and turn unto the Duchess your Gloria: for she is bona and merciful”.
Instead of the traditional “Glory be to the father, and to the son, and the Holy Spirit” the prayer offered was: “Fabeness be to the Auntie, and to the Homie Chavvie, and to the Fantabulosa Fairy”.
I believe the official church response was along the lines: “We are not amused.” :)
We can change society in the (sociological) blink of an eye. Unfortunately, it is usually in service of making a buck. Highlights from JSTOR’s public section.
“For caffeine addicts, a morning without a pot of coffee is a no-go. But it hasn’t always been as convenient to make coffee as it is today—and as Rebecca K. Shrum writes, the dawn of coffee machines came along with a massive dose of manly marketing.
Mr. Coffee, the first electric-drip coffee machine for home use, debuted in 1972, forever changing the way Americans made coffee. Before its rise, women used percolators to brew their coffee on the stovetop or on the counter—a method that produced bitter, scorched coffee. Despite the availability of complicated, non-electric drip systems, percolators ruled American kitchens.
[…]
Mr. Coffee looked and worked differently than percolators. It also made better coffee. Since it automated the superior drip coffee technique, it gave even groggy consumers the chance for a good cup. It was also dramatically more expensive than a percolator.
In a bid to get consumers to give up their familiar percolators for this expensive new product, Mr. Coffee included something unexpected in its marketing: men. Not only was it given a masculine name, writes Shrum, but its marketing suggested that it would produce a man’s preferred brew. The company hired Joe DiMaggio to give his masculine endorsement to the product—adding an additional layer of masculine advice to a product that purported to teach women how to make a better brew.
But Mr. Coffee did more than mansplain. It played into stereotypes of men as arbiters of coffee quality, and encouraged men to get into the kitchen themselves. Since it was so easy to use, men no longer had an excuse to cede coffee-making to their wives. This corresponded with women’s increased entry into the workforce and helped men contribute more to their households.
Today, the thought of a man unwilling to brew a pot of coffee (or so upset about his coffee’s quality that he abuses his wife) seems preposterous. Mr. Coffee changed those cultural expectations, even as it played into existing stereotypes about gender and domesticity.”
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