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Finally, a little mainstream coverage of female concerns with the male-centric trans narrative.
I get strange looks when talking about feminism as I usually include the phrase “women deserve to be treated as fully human, just as men are…”. They think I’m speaking hyperbolic and stuff and yet shit like this still happens in 2017.
:/
We usually reserve the side eye for people who start talking about empowerment. Why? Because they are usually talking about the second half of the list.
EMPOWERMENT
1. Physicality
becoming physically stronger empowers us. exercising your body not only makes your body stronger and more powerful, but it brings discipline and helps you connect with your body instead of disconnect.
being able to physically be at a location is empowering. feminists should be fighting to make all places accessible to disabled women.
disabled women should also have access to any type of exercises and physical therapy they can do. i would especially like to see more public pools having more physical therapy programs. swimming is a great way to exercise for strength while not putting any gravitational or impact on your body2. Knowledge
Knowledge is empowering. having knowledge about how our own bodies work is empowering. women and girls who are.knowledgeable are not easily misled. in this vein, learning how to properly debate arguments and think critically about yours and others words and beliefs is empowering. having the ability to trust yourself comes with gaining knowledge.
3. Access to Fulfilling Work.
work that feeds our love and passion is empowering. workplaces with atmospheres where everyone is happy and excited to work with women are empowering. workplaces free from sexual attacks empower women. women stimulating their minds and souls is empowering. women doing the work they find stimulating gives us a sense of purpose.
many women of all different walks of life have a high propensity for art. charging them with female representation in media will empower us all by putting forth the huge diversity that women display as human beings with full experiences and lives and stories to tell.
evidence shows that the least depressed cohort of women are the ones who work and who are financially independent, not the married housewives.
4. Reproductive and Sexual Rights.
women having control over our own.reproduction is empowering. women having orgasms and thinking about our own pleasure during sex is empowering. women accepting their own physical form and refusing to be disrespected by men who find them unacceptable because of their physical form is empowering. women refusing intercourse if it does nothing for their pleasure or they dont want to take the risk is empowering. women not being forced to sell their own bodies is empowering. women having control over OUR OWN BODIES is freedom.
Things that are NOT empowering to girls and women:
1. Femininity
being small, delicate, and on display is not empowering and it never will be. wearing high heels damages our feet and is not empowering. wearing makeup because society does not believe we as women are acceptable without it is not empowering. having long and/or fake nails limits the use of our hands and is not empowering. our collective bodies are not for men to look at and enjoy as they go about their day in comfortable, dignified clothing.
kindness, nurturing, and the desire to help others are good qualities in moderation, and they should be thouhght of as sex-neutral qualities everyone should work on, not just women. women are not the only ones who should be expected to be nurturing and giving.
aspiring for smallness is the opposite of enpowering. women need to eat. women are allowed to grow. our goal should be comfort and health, not emancipation and fragility.
2. Self-objectification
our hands are for doing tasks and our feet are for mobility. our faces are to house our brains and feed us, not a thing for men to find either acceptable or unacceptable to look at. every part of our bodies are for OUR use, not for the use of others. we exist for ourselves. our bodies are not naturally political and they are all acceptable and worthy of humanity, no matter what they look like or what issues they have.
3. Submission
Submissiveness is not empowering. lowering your worth until it is under the worth you give someone elses humanity is self-harm. humiliation and degredation arise out of the degraders sense of superiority over the one submitting to him. being treated as inferior will never empower anyone.
4. Marriage and Traditional Nuclear Family
marriage is a contract of ownership where women take on the last name of men. nuclear families are an extension of male ownership to not only include women but the children they objectify as their legacy of power. men expect women to raise children while they work, but women have goals and dreams too. men expect women to drop these goals and sacrifice only their lives to raise children that men see as their property and investment. men leave the majority of menial housework and micro-cleaning to women. marriage and nuclear families will never be empowering.
5. Outside Control over Reproduction.
up to and including abortion. ALSO involving lack of access to childcare and paid leave. this one explains itself.
6. The Sex Industry.
Mens entitlement over females and our bodies will NEVER be empowering and MUST end.
Now, can people stop using this word for things that ARENT giving women any actual power? Glad we had this talk.
The fascinating bit here is how easy it is for us to fool ourselves into thinking we’re doing “x”, when in reality we are doing “y”. In this study, all that was required to mirror the bias in our society against women was for a company to have a policy of meritocracy in place. Under the aegis of this policy people in the study tuned out their thoughts and considerations for actual fairness and stopped appraising their actions.
“When it came time to divvy up $1,000 in bonus money, there was a stark divide between participants in the meritocracy and non-meritocracy conditions. When the fictional company stressed fairness and individual performance, subjects gave men about 12 percent more than equally qualified women on average. When it didn’t mention a focus on merit, there was no significant difference between the bonus for men and women.
Though the experiment didn’t provide specific insights into the reasons for the different results, based on previous academic work, Castilla and Benard suggest that the variance might have to do with the participants’ confidence in their own judgement. In agreeing with the company’s meritocratic principles, they might have bolstered their sense of their own objectivity or felt they had established their “moral credentials” as non-prejudiced people.
“An organizational culture that prides itself on meritocracy may encourage bias by convincing managers that they themselves are unbiased, which in turn may discourage them from closely examining their own behaviors for signs of prejudice,” Castilla and Benard write.”
And there be the one of the problems with existing within a society that has normalized patriarchal standards. It is so very easy to forget that the very societal air we breathe comes with a implicit set of normative attitudes that, when not consciously opposed, take over. This is why not conforming to patriarchal expectations is tiring because feminists know that the ‘autopilot’ is complete trash and must always be on manual control.
“i really don’t understand how you preach that women should all love each other but not accept transwomen. i do see some of your points about men claiming to be trans lesbian and not actually be either but.. i still think transwomen are women.. i had a lot of respect for you until now..”
awaitingthematriarchy answered:
“I’m sorry to hear that of course, but I stand by my beliefs. ‘Woman’ is not an identity that you can opt in or out of – it is a politically neutral fact of biology. It’s the word that describes adult human females. Women can exist in infinite variations of personality types and aesthetics, but whatever our differences, we’re all united by our shared biology, which in turn confers a shared experience as being socialised as female under the patriarchy.
However, if we accept male-bodied people as ‘women’, then the meaning of the word changes. What does it mean to be a woman if we remove it from the state of existing as female? What does it mean to ‘identify as a woman’ if you are biologically male? What are you identifying with? If you can’t identify with the biological reality of being a woman, and you can’t identify with being socialised as a female, then the only thing that you can claim to identify with is the more abstract concept of femininity, which isn’t the same thing as womanhood at all. Does ‘woman’ become redefined to mean ‘anyone who identifies as feminine’? Where does that leave women who don’t identify with the social expectations around femininity? Aren’t they women?
How can we combat (or even vocalise) sex-based oppression if our biological sex is now irrelevant to womanhood? And let’s be clear, as a female I don’t have the option of identifying out of sex-based oppression. If all women everywhere collectively announced that we no longer identified as women, then it wouldn’t somehow magically stop misogyny. It would still be the same 50% of the human population being raped, abused, and exploited. The very act of a transwoman identifying as a woman and demanding recognition as such is an extension of male privilege. Women don’t get to chose our oppression under patriarchy.
So no, I’m afraid that I love and respect women too much to pretend that I view transwomen as anything other than gender non-conforming males. I don’t hate transwomen, and I believe that they should be able to live their lives free from violence or harassment, and I support their right to dress and present themselves in whatever way makes them happy, but I don’t believe that the act of doing so fundamentally changes their sex. My feminism is about prioritising females and lesbians, and combatting sex-based oppression. I wouldn’t be able to do that if I believed that womanhood was something as flimsy as something that anyone can ‘identify’ into.”
Brave words in the current climate of fake news and factual-relativsm.
This from a review on the Feminist Current by Jen Izaakson:
“What unites these men’s rights groups with the alt-right is that they believe white, straight, males have been left behind and now exist at the bottom of the social and sexual hierarchy. They believe that while the world once belonged (rightfully) to them, now women, people of colour, and sexual minorities rule. Indeed, their insult of choice, “cuck,” is acute projection — they feel usurped and humiliated by these groups, and believe they have been robbed of the privilege they are entitled to. This is perhaps best demonstrated by the phenomena of what 4chaners refer to as “incels” (men who conceive of themselves as “involuntary celibates”), lamenting that women refuse sex with them, rendering them modern victims of their self-conceived “sexual hierarchy”.
When Nagle writes of “online culture wars,” we must recognize that the main battle is over truth. While Nagle does not explore the feminist dimension of these online street fights, specifically, the implications are evident. Both the alt-right and the anti-materialist, regressive left believe that prostitution is not about women’s position under patriarchy as a resource for men, but sexual liberation and the free market. Both consider the sex trade to be a situation where women come out on top — with autonomy, empowered through profit and/or sexual freedom. Rather than overturning the system of prostitution, both groups believe we need to offer more rights to pimps and johns, in order to allow prostituted women to benefit from an unregulated free market. (So far, so Marxist!) Most significantly for feminism, both these tendencies wish to block certain feminist analysis and activism — specifically, the kind that challenges the system of patriarchy at its root.”
And there you have it folks, your handy guide for knowing that you’re doing effective feminism – if you are pissing off the dudes on the right, and the left, you’re doing work.
I may have to check out this book, as it seems to address the growing problem on the left of getting away from material analysis of societal problems.
bleatmop
Mystro
Dead Wild Roses 
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