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John Stuart Mill wrote an essay in 1861 (published 1869) called the Subjection of Women. From this brief quote we can see the evidence that even in the 19th century there were people who understood how socialization effects people and how they behave. I’m constantly amazed that here and now in the 21st century I run across people who don’t get basic shit like this. It isn’t rocket science and doesn’t take a keen sociological mind to identify the concepts and start to make the relations and come to the conclusions that Mill was making 150 years ago.
“When we put together three things – first, the natural attraction between the opposite sexes; secondly, the wife’s entire dependence on the husband, every
privilege or pleasure she has being either his gift, or depending entirely on his will; and lastly, that the principal object of human pursuit, consideration, and all objects of social ambition, can in general be sought or obtained by her only through him, it would be a miracle if the object of being attractive to men had not become the polar star of feminine education and formation of character. And, this great means of influence over the minds of women having been acquired, an instinct of selfishness made men avail themselves of it to the utmost as a means of holding women in subjection, by representing to them meekness, submissiveness, and resignation of all individual will into the hands of a man, as an essential part of sexual attractiveness.
Can it be doubted that any of the other yokes which mankind have succeeded in breaking, would have subsisted till now if the same means had existed, and had been so sedulously used, to bow their minds to it?”
The tl;dr of what is being said – women are raised in a society that glorifies the toxic notion of femininity and the constellation of man pleasing behaviours that femininity entails (patriarchy anyone?). Surprisingly enough(?), this state of affairs is bad for women.
The Female Version:
And then there is male date preparation:
Wearing pants? Don’t smell? Check! Good to go!
Men worry that their date won’t measure up to their aesthetic preferences. Women worry that they’re going wind up dead.
The disparity is RIDICULOUS, and the fact that dudes get offended when women try to protect themselves is hard proof that way too many guys Do Not Understand how dangerous it is to be a woman. (Not to mention it’s fucking insulting. “How dare you not trust your life and safety to a complete stranger whose intentions you have no way of knowing”?)
The point is, “WE HAVE NO WAY OF KNOWING A NICE GUY FROM A SERIAL KILLER.”
It’s not like they fucking wear nametags, okay? Moreover, the most awful people with the worst intentions often put on the nicest face or deliberately make themselves seem harmless and likeable, to lull potential victims into a false sense of security. (Read up on Ted Bundy sometime. It’s horrifying shit. Or read any thread on the “Let’s Not Meet” subreddit.)
In order to protect ourselves, we are forced to assume the worst of every man we meet, because statistically speaking, the biggest danger to women…IS MEN. Saying “not all men are out to get you, you’re just being paranoid” is like saying “not every car you ride in is going to crash, so buckling your seatbealt is stupid.”
When dealing with an unknown situation, in the absence of absolute proof of safety, exercising a little extra caution can be the difference between life and death. Shaming women for being what you may view as overly cautious is every bit as horrid as blaming them if something goes wrong later on.
[Source]
Canadian society, especially the justice system, just isn’t ready to hear women when they speak the truth…
This is an amazing post detailing all the conditioning, socialization, and patriarchal f*ckery that women have to fight through, just to be heard.
There’s a question people keep asking about the Ghomeshi trial, and I was up most of last night trying to think of how to answer it. I finally shut my brain off by picturing, in as much detail as possible, a solid wall of packed dirt in the dark above me. I spent the rest of the night mentally attacking my invisible wall. When I finally went to sleep it was what I dreamed about.
Between pretend punches, the words crept in.
Why
punch
did
punch
they
punch
lie?
If they were telling the truth about the assaults, why did they lie about other things? Why didn’t they just tell the truth?
“Manipulative”
punch
“Deceptive”
punch
Why?
I’d like to try to answer that question for you because I’m in an oddly perfect position to do so.
As the verdict of the Ghomeshi case came out, I…
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This excerpt from an article in the New Statesman:
“It’s a shame then that my enjoyment of International Women’s Day each 8th March is consistently spoiled by the United Nations’ attempt to put men at the heart of feminism with their #HeForShe campaign.
Let me say this very clearly. Men-centric feminism is garbage. Feminism is not about men. We should not be putting men at the centre of a day for women.
I personally am very happy for men to describe themselves as feminists, but they should be the loyal, kit-wearing supporters in the stands, and women, the first XI. #HeForShe is a pitch invasion, where men nick the ball and start booting it around to show how much they want the match to go ahead as planned.
International Women’s Day is about women. It is about the issues and oppressions that affect women globally. Hearing the statistics and stories should be enough for men to support women without it being specifically branded for them. If a man can hear that 85,000 women are raped in the UK each year and only care when this fact is labelled FOR MEN like a horrifying statistical Yorkie, he probably isn’t that much use to the feminist cause in the first place.
Feminism is constantly expected to make itself pretty and palatable. We’ve created the straw feminist, all smouldering tits and desiccated ovaries, sticking pins into voodoo dolls’ little embroidered balls, just so we can say, “I’m a feminist, but I’m not one of those feminists. I love men!” Loving men and being a feminist are not mutually exclusive but nor is “loving men” in any way a mandatory part of feminism. We should not pander to make men who, whether they support it or not, are part of a system that benefits them.”
-Rosie Fletcher
Ms. Fletcher isn’t going to win many male friends for this article, but rightly so, feminism isn’t about the men. :)
Nothing like being bored with Feminism…
Wow. Meghan Murphy simply and clearly posits what Feminism is about. Check out her blog here.
“There are various ways the divide between “feminisms” is articulated: liberal vs radical, third wave vs second wave, sex-positive vs sex-negative, but none of those have ever seemed wholly accurate to me. (In particular, challenging male-centred or coercive sex does not make one, “sex-negative,” so…) A feminist is someone who supports and/or is active in the fight to end patriarchy. The feminist movement is a political movement that fights towards women’s collective liberation and towards an end to male violence against women. That is to say, if you don’t support those goals, what you are doing is not feminism, no matter how many times you claim otherwise.
We cannot have both objectification and liberation, because being a sexualised object does not allow one to be a full human. We cannot both celebrate sexualised violence and have freedom from sexualised violence because sexualising violence, er… sexualises violence. We cannot normalise male entitlement by saying “men need access to sex and therefore we, as a society, must maintain a class of women who are available to satisfy men’s desires” and also expect to build a society wherein men don’t feel entitled to sexual access to women. We cannot say “women are more than pretty things to look at” but also tell young women that desirability will empower them. We cannot frame “choice” as political while simultaneously depoliticising and decontextualising the choices women make, in a capitalist patriarchy. We cannot confront rape culture while normalising the very ideas that found it: male entitlement, sexualised violence, and gender roles that are rooted in domination and subordination (i.e. masculinity and femininity).
While, the arguments I’m articulating here do, effectively, constitute “radical feminism,” in that it is a kind of feminism that “gets at the root,” I am defining something even more straightforward than that: Feminism – a real and definable thing that holds meaning!
[…]
“Join us or don’t – that really is your choice. But redefining a political movement that aims to protect real women’s lives and humanity in order to make the world more comfortable is not.”
Boom.
I have to thank tumblr for occasionally putting such important concise definitions at my fingertips. So, let’s define what sex based oppression and where it comes from.
“As Friedrich Engels made clear, even before feminism’s First Wave, women were historically controlled because we are “a means of production”—without women, there are no heirs, and without heirs, no inherited property and wealth. Women’s reproductive capacity is why we were colonized as property, just as animals, countries, weapons and land was colonized. Otherwise, we wouldn’t have been important at all; any thing we could do (cooking, cleaning, sewing clothes) could have been done as well by men (and in the military, it was). The reason women were oppressed was to control our REPRODUCTIVE ABILITIES. This does not mean all women had these abilities, but women were assumed to have them until proven otherwise. (In many religious traditions, a woman’s “barren” status was the only acceptable reason for divorce.)
There can be no other logical, rational basis for women’s oppression; unless you think men were just being “mean” or something. No, it was for a very real, profit-centered reason. Men without families and heirs could not build empires (or even working farms) and without this centralized, religiously-sanctioned consolidation of the family, the state could not have evolved. The state then effectively empowered men to be women’s keepers until very very recently in human history.
THIS is the origin of women’s oppression.
So yes, women’s oppression is because of vaginas. Also: uteri, ovaries, ovum and menstrual cycles. That is just a fact. This is what got us consigned to the lower class, and our vulnerability during pregnancy and childbirth is historically what kept us weak and dependent on men. And this is how patriarchy evolved.
To write “vaginas” (or other female body-parts necessary for baby-making) out of the history of patriarchy and the evolution of the state, is flatly incorrect.
It is also anti-feminist, since this account effectively erases the one thing women were allowed to do, the one exception to our limitations: birthing and raising children. Anything women dared to do, had to be somehow connected to that. So, the first women artists and writers were women who painted their children’s portraits; sang their kids songs or made up stories and poems for them; knitted/crocheted/sewed their clothes, created pottery for the family to eat on, etc. Women’s creativity was harshly limited to domesticity like this, and yet, we found ways to express ourselves regardless. It is a story of SURVIVAL. To explain to our daughters (as Virginia Woolf did) why there is no female Shakespeare or Chaucer, is to go back to….. VAGINA. We were only allowed to have babies and failing that, teach or take care of some other woman’s babies.
Period.”
I apologize to my veteran blamers as this is 101 type stuff, but I like being able to link to posts that define a concept clearly. :)
[Source:“Gender is an Experience”]
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