Tag: proletarian feminism

Women Are Human, Capable Of As Much Good and As Much Evil As Men

The idea that women are better than men (less violent, kinder, more nurturing etc) is misogynist because it excuses men’s bad behavior and holds women to a more rigid behavioral standard than men.

The idea that you can give women power over men and trust them not to abuse it the way men do power over women is bullshit and implies women are as passive and gentle as the patriarchy wants them to be and creates opportunities for abusers to abuse with impunity.

I Don’t Want To Be Your Goddess

I really hate the whole “mother goddess/matriarchal age” nonsense, because like:

  1. I don’t think a religion that reduces women to their reproductive capacity is all that feminist 
  2. If we’d had a matriarchal age, it wouldn’t have been a golden age.  Women are not better than men.  Give any group of humans power over any other and they will mistreat and abuse those they have power over.
  3. It’s always gender essentialist as shit.
  4. There are modern religions focused on a mother goddess and their cultures just use them as a shitty standard to hold real women to.
  5. I don’t want to be divine.  I want to be human.  Don’t put me on a pedestal or in a pit.
  6. Also TERFs are awful

These extracts illustrate how dominant educational discourses of the ideal female pupil may be experienced as narrow and constraining by young working class women, who find it difficult to reconcile a positive view of themselves as pupils with their own notions of an assertive, strong femininity. The girls’ assertions of ‘loud’, active and visible femininities can be understood as challenging the forms of submissive, passive and quiet femininity that are usually rewarded within schools. For boys, such ‘challenging’ behaviours may tend to be read as part of ‘normal’ masculinity, whereas the same behaviours may bring young women into conflict with schools because they are interpreted as deviant and undesirable aspects of femininity (e.g., as problematic or aggressive rather than ‘assertive’).

Inner-city femininities and education: ‘race’, class, gender and schooling in young women’s lives by Louise Archer, Anna Halsall and Sumi Hollingworth

If Black women were
free, it would mean that everyone else would have to be
free since our freedom would necessitate the destruction
of all the systems of oppression.

Combahee River Collective Statement

I feel like this is a really important quote.

Look, if you can’t deal with doing the actual work of challenging and changing sexism (which is a slow and draining process, I know) let me do it. Stay out of the way in your safe space while I get this done, you can come out when the revolution’s finished.

Like, don’t approach people in ways that no one has ever responded positively to because you think that’s an approach people should respond to, and then get huffy when they don’t and destroy all the progress I’ve made.  You’re not helping.