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When you get what you ask for and realize it wasn’t what you were asking for. In this case dudes wanting cultural legitimacy for their hobby, but of course, unwilling to but up with critical scrutiny of what their hobby actually entails.
I like the replication of toxic patriarchal in my video games and death to those bitches that would criticize what I like… Pretty much the whole Gamer Gate fiasco in a nutshell.
“Public discussion of abortion has come to inexorably privilege fetal life over female life. The imaginary futures—the “personhoods”—of the unborn have taken moral precedence over the adult women in whose bodies they grow.
This is why public accounts of abortions are almost always accompanied with ample helpings of guilt and self-flagellation (“the hardest decision of my life,” “something I still think about”), lest the woman sound icy and immoral. In her excellent new book, Pro, a galvanizing call to reclaim abortion as a moral good, the feminist writer Katha Pollitt refers to this as the “awfulization” of abortion. Most people, no matter their politics, have absorbed some aspect of the right-wing narrative that abortions are uniformly harrowing and traumatic, when for many women they are brief events that leave no lasting mark.
And so we need to make it clear that abortions are not about fetuses or embryos. Nor are they about babies, except insofar as they enable women to make sound decisions about if or when to have them. They’re about women: their choices, health, and their own moral value.”
“Dilbert comic Scott Adams wrote last month that we live in a matriarchy because, ‘access to sex is strictly controlled by the woman.’ Meaning that you don’t get to have sex with someone unless they want to have sex with you, which if we say it without any gender pronouns sounds completely reasonable. You don’t get to share someone’s sandwich unless they want to share their sandwich with you, and that’s not a form of oppression either. You probably learned that in kindergarten. But if you assume that sex with a female body is a right that heterosexual men have, then women are just these crazy illegitimate gatekeepers always trying to get in between you and your rights. Which means you have failed to recognize that women are people, and perhaps that comes from the books and movies you have—and haven’t—been exposed to, as well as the direct inculcation of the people and systems around you.”
“Bernie Sanders isn’t saying anything about feminist politics. He’s not integrating any kind of feminist politics into his vision. I think the important thing is that we see this as the continuum of patriarchal power reasserting itself, and not as though Trump invented it or makes it possible—because it has been there. It’s been there, in Hillary Clinton’s husband and all of these men—except that Hillary Clinton’s husband and Barack Obama became the benevolent patriarchs. They’re the patriarchal men we can love.
Early on, when Barack Obama became president, people were asking him, “Well, is Michelle Obama going to influence you, is she going to come to meetings?” I kept waiting for him to say, “She’s as much a citizen as anybody else and she has a right to her opinions and thoughts.” Instead, he went along with the idea that no, she will be doing her wifely, motherly duties. And not, yes, this is an amazingly smart and analytical woman who will of course have a voice that’s heard.
Even though so many people were deeply moved by Michelle’s speech supporting Hillary Clinton in New Hampshire, even that speech still contained this heteronormative mom-ism idea. As though sexism outrages us because it offends our sense of decency, and not that it offends our sense of justice, of what women and girls deserve. We saw that happening again and again, this focus on a patriarchal mom-ism.”
Well said Ms.Adichie.
Yet more evidence that identity politics is bad for women.
“Pregnant woman” is not an identity. It is a social reality. A pregnant woman’s ever-contracting rights – whether she can choose to end this pregnancy, whether she will risk imprisonment for drinking too much, whether she will lose her job, whether she will be murdered by her partner – can only be seen through the filter of her inferior social status: that of woman. She neither chooses nor identifies with this status and it matters that the restrictions it places on her and others be fully acknowledged. Hundreds of women died today because of the way in which pregnancy intersects with their political and social status as women. The term “pregnant people” denies them the specificity of their deaths and masks the cause.
What gender-neutral pregnancy campaigning has achieved is wholly negative, making it impossible to articulate why there exists a class of people who are not granted full sovereignty over what lies beneath their own skin. It has located the abortion debate (which should not be a debate at all) back where conservatives want it: on the status of the foetus, not that of the woman. It has allowed the misogynist left to consolidate their definition of woman as “passive fantasy girl with tits” as opposed to “person with independent physical functions, emotions and needs.” Above all, it has created the illusion of an opt-out to being placed in the inferior sex class. Well, there isn’t, at least not until you can be bothered to challenge the fundamental idea that half the human race is inferior (oh, but that’s so much harder than messing about with words!).”
Men not tolerating creepy behaviour on the behalf of other men is the least that can be done in the public sphere to combat the gauntlet of patriarchal foolishness women face every day of their lives. Dudes, are you up to it?
“Let me tell you what happened to me an hour ago:
So I’m at the bus terminal and this guy (who’d been following me and hovering over me for 10 minutes) comes up to me and says “hey beautiful. Can I talk to you?” So I said “no thank you.” He goes “I just want to speak to you, though.” And I said “yeah I know that and I’m not interested in talking to a strange man at a bus terminal. Please leave me alone.”
So he stands there watching me.
Finally he says “listen, there’s no need to be difficult. I approached you politely like a gentleman so I don’t see why you’re saying no. Now just let me speak to you.”
I said “nobody’s being difficult my guy. You asked a question, I gave an answer so we’re done.”
Then he says “yeah but the answer you gave me made no sense. Why don’t you want to talk to me? You don’t know what kind of person I am. You’re judging me before you know me. You’re being ignorant and prejudiced so”-
Just then this other guy who’d been sitting close to me said “my nigga shut the fuck up! I saw you following her and stalking her like a fucking animal or some shit, like you didn’t think she didn’t notice? She’s probably scared of your predatory ass and I don’t blame her. Mans need to understand you don’t follow girls and shit. That shits corny.”
So the guy goes “yo, mind your fucking business.”
And the other dude says “nah because I see you harassing this girl and as a man this becomes my business. You thinking you were polite doesn’t mean a girl has to speak to you. Be nice because you’re nice, don’t use that please and thank you shit and think somebody has to speak to you. You’re not a “gentleman if you don’t respect her. Take the L and go catch your bus you fucking creep.”
So the guy starts swearing and then walks away. The guy who’d defended me is like “you okay tho? Like real talk I don’t really like men because of shit like that. They’re fucking predators man. I do what I can when I’m able to for women because you don’t deserve to be hunted.”This is literally how you do it.
bleatmop
Mystro
The Arbourist
Dead Wild Roses 
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