Tag: feminism

Female staffers adopted a meeting strategy they called “amplification”: When a woman made a key point, other women would repeat it, giving credit to its author. This forced the men in the room to recognize the contribution — and denied them the chance to claim the idea as their own.

“We just started doing it, and made a purpose of doing it. It was an everyday thing,” said one former Obama aide who requested anonymity to speak frankly. Obama noticed, she and others said, and began calling more often on women and junior aides.

Here’s How Obama’s Female Staffers Made Their Voices Heard

(via styro)

If there were other women in any of my meetings this might work.

(via kkludgy)

Yo! Men can do this for women, too.

It’s like that quote that’s floating around: men don’t need a space in feminism; they have to make their space in society feminist.

(via inkbotkowalski)

Counterproductive Behaviors of Social Justice Activists

fuck-yeah-feminist:

Hey, crew! As the year comes to a close, I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about my own role as an activist, an ally, and a student of critical theory. I’ve done a lot of amazing things in the past 12 months. And I’ve also conducted a bunch of glorious fuck ups. I’ve helped people and hurt them. And people have deeply loved and harmed me as well.

Grace is my goal and hope for 2016. I want to give myself and others grace for our mistakes (as long as we learn from them). In the name of beginning this effort, I’ve come up with a list of behaviors that I’ve noticed were counterproductive in social justice pursuits during 2015… Some in myself, some in others. Here we go:

1. Shaming our allies when they make mistakes. Instead, let’s educate them and lead them to resources to improve their behavior. Sometimes it feels so, SO good to drill a bigoted asshole into the ground. I get it. I really do. But we have to understand that most oppression is unquestioned and ingrained – NOT intentional. Let’s teach more than we crush. Save the crushing for real assholes, not just people who make mistakes on their journey.

2. Pretending that we’ve always been as educated/aware/eloquent as we are now. Let’s be real. We’ve all come a looooong way on this stuff. Even if you’re just entering the world of social justice activism, you’re probably way better at things than you were last month, last week, or even yesterday. Acknowledge (publicly! audibly! constantly!) that this is a long journey.

3. Assuming that we’ve reached enlightenment. Following up the note about the “long journey,” it’s important to recognize that the journey isn’t just long – it’s endless. There is no perfect ally or activist. There is no. such. thing. Say it with me now: We are all deeply imperfect. I am deeply imperfect. I hold ableist/transphobic/racist/sexist views merely by existing in this world. The best we can do is to learn from our mistakes and understand that we have never reached enlightenment; we must always fight toward it.

4. Trivializing the courage and pain involved in understanding the realities of privilege. For many people, seeing our privileges is something we were never asked to do. In fact, we were actively encouraged to deny that we benefit from structural inequality because, frankly, we’re all living in a world that denies these inequalities exist at all. (Myth of meritocracy, anyone?) Unpacking all of this is a lifelong process that causes lots of pain, guilt, and shame. As activists, we must be there to support this process – NOT to minimize people’s journeys or silence them when they talk about the struggles they face.

5. Letting our oppressed identities erase our privileged ones. Following #4, we ALL have to realize that we hide from our privileges by leading with our oppressed identities. For instance, I’m a queer, androgynous woman who deals with sexism, biphobia, homophobia, and transphobia frequently. I’m hurt by these things constantly. But I’m also white, a US citizen, able-bodied, and class privileged. Guess which list is easier for me to talk about?

6. Calling out others for the purpose of making ourselves look good. This one is so, SO hard. It’s easy to see someone’s failure as an opportunity to jump in and parade our own “goodness.” But that’s NOT activism. It’s selfish. We must instead call out others in a way that benefits both their growth as individuals and the progress of our cause(s). And yeah, humor is fun sometimes. So is public shaming. But remember that people are people.

—

As we move into 2016, let’s all be reflexive of our activism. Let’s live it, not just speak it. Cheers to growth.

queenofattolia:

This disconnect doesn’t just have to do with female characters,
either. I’m reminded of that Tumblr post that compares two magazine
covers featuring Hugh Jackman: a men’s magazine on which he appears
bulging-veined, huge-muscled, and sort of terrifying and weird, and a
women’s magazine on which he appears as a slim, athletic guy smiling and
wearing a sweater. Anyone who reads comics is familiar with this
weirdness: comics heroes are often depicted as nightmarishly
hyper-muscled, enormous man-mountains. (Interestingly, this trend grew
more and more exaggerated as women became more and more nominally
liberated– that is, as they should have been more and more able to
communicate what they wanted, including what they wanted from men.)
Hyper-masculinity is almost always framed in terms of being attractive–
to women or, for gay men, to other men– and sometimes even talked about
in the same breath as “the female gaze.” Yet, as that Tumblr post points
out, while “the female gaze” is attracted by things like a naked,
sweaty Chris Evans or Idris Elba, it’s also attracted by things like:
men smiling in sweaters, men crying (DON’T LIE TUMBLR), barefoot fragile
Sebastian Stan in the rain on Political Animals, men holding
babies, men speaking foreign languages, Mark Ruffalo, and a whole bunch
of weird stuff on Ao3 that I don’t even wanna get into. And that’s just
“the female gaze as it pertains to men.“

But think about whether men would agree that this is what women find
attractive in men. Imagine a men’s magazine that offers tips on being
attractive to women that include: looking fragile, being a bumbling
scientist, acting like a helpless meatball, expressing affection to tiny
children, blushing, being intensely interested in gorgeous clothes,
etc, etc. This is hard to imagine. In fact, these are characteristics
that are typically characterized as not ideal for men, because they are coded as feminine. Yet they’re also not only traits that are commonly attractive to women, but are generally accepted
as commonly attractive to women, if one looks at “women’s”
entertainment (romantic comedies, chick lit, anything in which Hugh
Grant appears).

What I’m getting at is that there is a division between what attracts
women and what men accept/permit as attracting women. Men are engaged
in a constant enforcement of heteronormativity, a policing of women’s
desire and their own accession to it. What women want is subordinate to
what men decide that women want, and the latter is then culturally
broadcast as the ideological “what women want” that becomes accepted.

This is true also in the case of female characters. What do women want in female characters? Well, I mean, a lot of us just want female characters for the love of God. But
specifically: some of the most popular current female characters in
comics/MCU fandom are: Natasha Romanoff, in a movie (Cap 2) where she
only briefly appeared in a sexy bodysuit and instead spent most of her
time wearing jeans and a hoodie, wisecracking, having a complex
narrative about salvation, and hacking computers, not to mention the
down-to-earth Phil Noto comics depiction, who even (GASP) sometimes
wears a ponytail; Peggy Carter, a 1940s secret agent with little
patience for men; Kamala Khan, a teenage Pakistani-American girl who
writes fan fiction and wears a modest homemade costume; Darcy Lewis,
who’s full-figured, socially awkward, and not a superhero; the lady
scientists of the MCU (Jane Foster, Maya Hansen, Betty Ross)… I could go
on.

But what do men apparently believe that women want in female
characters? Well, going by Joss Whedon: superheroines who wear catsuits,
beat up men, are secretly very vulnerable, and are sexually threatened,
fragile and unstable girl-women with superpowers beyond their control…
oh, wait. That’s it. Expanding beyond Whedon, the most common
characteristics tend to be: aggressively sexy, sexually threatened,
beats up bad men but is secretly vulnerable. I discussed already one
potential reason this is attractive to men (see my previous post); my
issue here is: this is not what women want, but it is what men believe
that women want, because it is what they have been told by other men
that women want.

Once again, what women want is ignored (or, more accurately, invisibilized– in that men deny or are oblivious to its existence)
in favor of the ideological construct of “what women want,” which is
determined and enforced by men. Men genuinely believe that they know
what women want, and are earnest in their attempts to explain “what
women want” to women. They are deeply confused, because of course
they know what women want! Right? They are unable to see that they are
selling a version of “what women want” is essentially “what it would be
attractive to men for women to want.”

Teachers are often unaware of the gender distribution of talk in their classrooms. They usually consider that they give equal amounts of attention to girls and boys, and it is only when they make a tape recording that they realize that boys are dominating the interactions.Dale Spender, an Australian feminist who has been a strong advocate of female rights in this area, noted that teachers who tried to restore the balance by deliberately ‘favouring’ the girls were astounded to find that despite their efforts they continued to devote more time to the boys in their classrooms. Another study reported that a male science teacher who managed to create an atmosphere in which girls and boys contributed more equally to discussion felt that he was devoting 90 per cent of his attention to the girls. And so did his male pupils. They complained vociferously that the girls were getting too much talking time.In other public contexts, too, such as seminars and debates, when women and men are deliberately given an equal amount of the highly valued talking time, there is often a perception that they are getting more than their fair share. Dale Spender explains this as follows:The talkativeness of women has been gauged in comparison not with men but with silence. Women have not been judged on the grounds of whether they talk more than men, but of whether they talk more than silent women.In other words, if women talk at all, this may be perceived as ‘too much’ by men who expect them to provide a silent, decorative background in many social contexts. This may sound outrageous, but think about how you react when precocious children dominate the talk at an adult party. As women begin to make inroads into formerly ‘male’ domains such as business and professional contexts, we should not be surprised to find that their contributions are not always perceived positively or even accurately.

[x] (via neighborly)

castiel-knight-of-hell:

xtheycallmeslimshadyx:

problematic-url:

basilsilos:

pennman9000:

dil-howlters-uncreative-username:

WHY IS THIS SO HARD TO UNDERSTAND

So for all you feminists out their who think that all men should die, remember, you are not a feminist.

reblogging for the last comment

Yes

Legit question, I’m not trying to hate on feminists or anything. Why is it called feminist if they’re for equality?

That’s a very good question and thank you for asking so politely. 

The word feminism was coined by Charles Fourier in 1837, a French philosopher who advocated for the emancipation of women because he believed society treated women as slaves. We weren’t allowed to vote, own anything, or work a real job. Women were ruled by their fathers/household patriarch until they married at which time they’d be under the rule of their husband. If a woman did not belong to male household she was shunned by society and had very little means to make money, most of them unsavory. You know the idiom “rule of thumb”? That comes from a running joke that started in the 1600s, and was still around in Fourier’s time, that said it was okay for a man to beat a woman with a stick as long as it wasn’t any thicker than his thumb. 

The point of the word feminist, and the feminist movement, has never been to say that women are better than men. The point is that women and things associated with women have been given a lesser place in society and we want to bring those things up to a place of equality. The focus is on the feminine because that’s what’s being pushed down. However, focusing on the feminine does not mean we’re focusing only women. Men are belittled and called “less of a man” anytime they portray a trait that is associated with femininity. If women and the feminine were equal to men and masculinity then that wouldn’t happen. Feminism is about raising up things associated with females to have an equal place in society as the things associated with males. It’s called feminism, not equalism, because the focus is on raising up not tearing down. Equalism would suggest that male things need to come down to a lower level so that female things can meet it in the middle. That’s not the point. The point is to raise up the feminine so that it’s on the same playing field that the masculine is already on. We don’t want men to lower themselves, we just want them to make room for us.

When people with privilege hear that they have privilege, what they hear is not, “Our society is structured so that your life is more valued than others.” They hear, “Everything, no matter what, will be handed to you. You have done nothing to achieve what you have.” That’s not strictly true, and hardly anyone who points out another’s privilege is making that accusation. There are privileged people who work very hard. The privilege they experience is the absence of barriers that exist for other people.

No One Cares If You Never Apologize for Your White Male Privilege
(via deliciouskaek)