Tag: proletarian feminism

Goddamn Watashi ga Motete Dousunda is too real about the difference between how dudes treat you when you meet standards of conventional beauty vs. when you don’t… which is like hilariously relatable but also depressing

Also sometimes “choice feminist” rhetoric bothers me, because like, do your makeup, don’t do your makeup, that’s all fine and good, humans have been painting our faces since we got slightly less hairy then our predecessors, but the whole “I want to choose to stay home and be supported” thing (when done by straight women) rubs me the wrong way a bit because like A: the position of dependence that puts you in makes me uncomfortable and is actually historically aberrant (most people were subsistence farmers, both partners in a married couple were necessary for survival, whereas now the partner who works outside the home would be fine without due to technology and so on, for most of history the vast majority couples were interdependent rather than one depending upon the other) B: The fact that this is overwhelmingly something women choose and are expected to choose is suspicious as fuck C: Without the radical demand for wages for housework it enforces the idea of domestic labor as not being “real” labor D: I’m just saying the fetishization of economic dependence upon someone else (someone you’re presumably in a relationship with) makes me feel icky. E: Being economically dependent on another person creates really fucked up power dynamics that are really hard to overcome and with the gendered power dynamics on top of that it’s just like… really easy for such a situation to turn deeply unhealthy

I’m probably wrong and an asshole for feeling this way… but like stay home with your BBys/cats/whatever by all means, that’s awesome, but demand to be paid for it and shit.

The idea that femininity resides in being smaller/weaker/less than/whatever sucks. Femininity is not passivity, submission, or fragility, those are not where the feminine resides.

There’s nothing wrong with being smaller or weaker or what have you, but like that’s not a healthy place to place your ideas of what makes you feminine if you want to feel feminine (or like even if you don’t, cause like everybody’s smaller/weaker/etc than somebody)

IDK I Feel Like The Way Women Are Often Socialized To Deal With Bodies and Beauty and Shit

Really fucks you up, and fucks up your relationships with other women a lot of the time.

Like sex work has really changed a lot of my perspectives on shit because we live in a society where women are told that their primary value is their sexual desirability and nothing else they do matters if they’re not hot, and like how you know if you’re hot or not is how many men want you, and like we’re told men are these constantly horny lust machines with essentially identical parameters for what’s desirable and so anytime there’s a guy who doesn’t want you, you must be defective somehow.

And like hotness in this worldview is objective and sort of a zero-sum game and like it leads to a really shitty competitive thing between women and like IDK maybe I’m really gay or really primarily gay or something or it’s partially just being a sex worker, and really having the whole “yeah, I know I’m desirable” thing because work really covers that need for me, but like I don’t have that feeling towards other women and like I’m not saying “Oh I’m so good for not being like that, look at how good I am” or anything cause like it’s just an acculturated thing and like I don’t know how to deal with it, but like it’s come up in like my sexual relationships with other women where like they’d literally tell me that whatever about my body or appearance made them insecure somehow or like that attention I got from men made them feel hurt, and I’m also not saying “Oh, I’m secure in my position as hottest, I win” because like there are definitely like circles in which I’m not the babeliest babe or whatever because I don’t appeal to that demographic and my girlfriends would sometimes get more attention than me in those and like I didn’t care because like “the hot girl chose me, so…” so I didn’t mind them getting attention and like my girlfriends have all been really gorgeous in my opinion, and I don’t think hotness is an objective quality or a zero-sum game at all, but like it’s just really depressing that that’s a thing and that like “But I’m with you” isn’t enough to turn the culture of competition into something else.

And like I see young women jockeying for position of “resident hottie” in various spaces (usually male dominated spaces) because society has told them that’s what they have to be to be valid, and like if you want to do stuff in a male dominated space you have to be the hottest girl or there’s sort of no point and it’s just… like depressing and fucked up and like IDK when I was younger, and not doing sex work, I did often hang out in places with lots of boys because they were all like… fairly nice to me because I was decorative and like I liked some of the same stuff they liked so it felt good to be there, and like I probably would have felt pretty upset if another girl had come along and I’d sort of ended up in the cold because I wasn’t the pretty one anymore, and so like it’s a social dynamic that’s really perpetuated by men only being friendly or kind to women if they perceive them as sexually interesting and like how there’s only room for like a sort of “token girl” in a lot of heavily male interest circles, and so yeah I’m also definitely not saying that “look at these silly girls, hating other girls because they want to feel like the prettiest” because like it happens for a fucking reason, but it still sucks,

I feel like one thing I’ve noticed in the world is I get a lot more benefit of the doubt when I’m interacting in online spaces in a way that allows people to think I’m a dude, whereas if they think I’m a woman I have to carefully hedge out every obviously shitty interpretation of and potential objection to, anything I fucking say and it’s exhausting and fucking irritating as hell.

La Llorona in Juvenile Hall on JSTOR

this is SO interesting also The White Lady Of Elysian Park’s story and how it’s evolved since then (Now she’s often specifically a Pachuca murdered by WWII sailors) says a lot about… a lot of stuff.

It’s also really really REALLY heart wrenching and I don’t recommend you read it if you’re not in a space to deal with it right now (it has a lot of stuff that relates deeply to issues of class, race, and gender, and just like… I wish I could help and protect every “bad” teenage girl out there)

La Llorona in Juvenile Hall on JSTOR

You Know…

I find that when you include trans women in your analysis of stuff that’s supposedly only an issue for cis women you actually get a way more complete and nuanced picture of the shape of patriarchy.

Like reproductive coercion often including forcible sterilization of trans women (as well as other groups of women the patriarchy hates especially hard), and like I was just thinking about how things considered to be “initiations into womanhood” are often socially considered to be marked by blood (menarche, loss of virginity) and then I realized that gender confirmation surgery for trans women is discussed a lot more than it is for trans men and talked about in terms a great deal bloodier and more violent than it is for trans men and I just think that’s really interesting (obviously one does not need to experience menarche, bleed during the loss of one’s virginity or lose one’s virginity at all, or go through gender confirmation surgery to be a woman, it’s just that society seems to consider these to be things that are initiatory into womanhood) so like basically whenever I think about stuff that’s supposed to be associated with uteruses and what not… I think there’s pretty much always something that’s like socially analogous that trans women go through and we’re never going to get rid of patriarchy if we don’t acknowledge that.

I’ve noticed that even in feminist circles the less sure I sound when I talk about my ideas

The more likely people are to agree with what I say. The more “I think that maybe"s and “I might be wrong but I think it might be X"s and “do you ever think that"s "I kind of think that it’s kinda…"s and "IDK but"s I include the more people go "Yeah that sounds right”.

If I write like I’m sure people shoot me down, if I hem and haw and do the textual equivalent of blushing and looking at my shoes I get agreement… and like I kind of think that might be sort of fucked up, y’ know?

One might simplify this by saying: men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at.

John Berger – Ways Of Seeing

I think I want most of all to observe as well as to be observed. I desire a partner who revels in being desirable to me as well as desiring me… revels not only in my desire but in the knowledge of their own desirability. They watch and watch themselves being watched. A lot of fem dom iconography is based upon the idea that women should get off on the power of being desired… and that feminine power resides in passively being desired rather than pursuing the objects of one’s own desire. I don’t think enjoying one’s own desirability is inherently a problem, enjoying being watched and desired… I think the fact desire for another and the desire to be desired are fractured and separated from one another is the problem. I think that one of the reasons I’m a sub is because I want a partner who wants to be worshipped for their desirability, who doesn’t see that as a weakness, while also desiring me. I don’t sexually enjoy being worshipped, because if I am a deity, what does some mortal have to offer me? I am reduced to the role of a statue of Venus. I also do not want to have to “be the man” in that I am to desire without being physically desired. I think perhaps I like the bimbofication/transformation scenarios I do because in a certain way it’s me going “okay, I desire this person, what can I do to make myself desirable to them, to make myself an appealing object of observation to them?” because someone interested in having me turn myself into their ideal lust object specifically due to their erotic appeal is initially aroused by being desired (as displayed in the willingness to modify my appearance extensively, suffer pain and humiliation *for* them) but then desires me once I’ve made myself into the thing they desire, if that makes sense.