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Headless, mouth slightly open, long hair, white, frilly uncomfortable dress and flowers – A Weak object for consumption/desire.
“Women aren’t hated for being feminine, femininity is forced on us because we are hated. we don’t naturally apply make up, wear constricting clothing, shave our natural body hair and stay quiet even when we are upset with something. we are conditioned to do this because women are supposed to take up as little space as possible and erase traces of our growth both physically and mentally. women who refuse to perform femininity demand their space and they demand to be heard. they cannot be neutral in a highly gendered society; they are punished for not conforming.”
Femininity literally is weakness forced upon us. Being quiet, serving and submissive is not anything that can be reformed into some good, new kind of gender. We literally modify our bodies. We are trained to serve and be available. We are trained to hate ourselves and not strive too far, lest our oppressors may be displeased.
Femininity is the socialization of the oppressed class.
“Suppose, for instance, that men were only represented in literature as the lovers of women, and were never the friends of men, soldiers, thinkers, dreamers; how few parts in the plays of Shakespeare could be allotted to them; how literature would suffer! We might perhaps have most of Othello; and a good deal of Antony; but no Caesar, no Brutus, no Hamlet, no Lear, no Jaques –literature would be incredibly impoverished, as indeed literature is impoverished beyond our counting by the doors that have been shut upon women.”
— Virginia Woolf (A Room of One’s Own)
“Women feel more guilt than men, not because of some weird chromosomal issue but because they have a history of being blamed for other people’s behaviour. You get hit, you must have annoyed someone; you get raped, you must have excited someone; your kid is a junkie, you must have brought him up wrong”
— Germaine Greer, Guilt Poisons Women
On being female in society.
Boom.
When asked about the wage gap and why we don’t see women equally represented in society how often is one bombarded with comments like: “Women prefer lower paying jobs”, or even better, ‘there is no such thing as the wage gap”. Steaming monkey muffins to that bollocks is my usual reply. Before we go on, one should not forget the neural-sexist angle, “females are just better at doing certain (lower paying, lower esteemed) jobs than others”.
*Gah* with hearty helping of *fml*
Gerda Lerner chooses a historical perspective to analyse the performance gap between women and men in society and in doing so creates an accurate set of insights into why dudes be achieving the way they do.
“For many centuries the talents of women were directed not towards self-development but towards realizing themselves through the development of a man. Women, conditioned for millennia to accept the patriarchal definition of their role, have sexually and emotionally serviced men and nurtured them in a way that allowed men of talent a fuller development and a more intensive degree of specialization than women have ever had. The sexual division of labor which has allotted to women the major responsibility for the domestic services and the nurturance of children has freed men from the cumbersome details of daily survival activities, while it disproportionately has burdened women with them. Women have had less spare time and above all less uninterrupted time in which to reflect, to think, and to write. The psychological support from intimacy and love has been far more readily available to talented men than to talented women. Had there been a man behind each brilliant woman, there would have been women of achievement in history equal to the numbers of men of achievement.”
>— The Creation of Feminist Consciousness: from the Middle Ages to Eighteen-seventy, Gerda Lerner
Let’s not have the porn = ‘freedom of speech’ argument this one time okay?
I live in a country where if you film any act of humiliation or torture, and if the victim is a woman, the film is both entertainment and it is protected speech. Now that tells me something about what it means to be a woman citizen in this country, and the meaning of being second class.When your rape is entertainment, your worthlessness is absolute. You have reached the nadir of social worthlessness. The civil impact of pornography on women is staggering. It keeps us socially silent, it keeps us socially compliant, it keeps us afraid in neighborhoods; and it creates a vast hopelessness for women, a vast despair. One lives inside a nightmare of sexual abuse that is both actual and potential, and you have the great joy of knowing that your nightmare is someone else’s freedom and someone else’s fun.”
— Andrea Dworkin
bleatmop
Mystro
Dead Wild Roses 
Your opinions…