what she says: “Oh I don’t mind; we can eat anywhere. I’m not picky.”
what she means: “For my entire life, I’ve been called bossy/picky/selfish/arrogant/bitchy for voicing my own opinions and making my views known, so now when someone I care about asks me about what I want, my immediate gut reaction is to defer to the other person’s preference. it’s less of a hassle to capitulate to someone else’s desires than to risk having someone verbally berate me for being truthful about what I want.”
i don’t want to achieve equality by sinking to men’s level, i want them to get on ours! why should i have to unlearn the conversational art of waiting my turn, unlearn sexual self-restraint, unlearn trust in others’ good intentions, unlearn the impulse to cater to others’ needs, just to have a chance at success among savages? why can’t the men learn some fucking manners so we can all conduct our affairs in a civilized manner? i shouldn’t have to stop saying sorry, you say sorry!
In the 80s when I was in my freshman year in college, they still had entirely separate mens and women’s dorms. I was in class waiting for a final to start and one of the guys was telling someone about how he had had to go into a women’s dorm to drop something off, and he was startled to see posters on the walls, flowers, curtains, etc. He said his men’s dorm had holes in the walls, things on fire, fights, guys walking around with open wounds and he just didn’t understand why they had to live like this. He said, “I want to live with the women, in civilization.”
Am reading Sisterhood of Spies, about women working for the OSS during WWII. One of the stories mentions that the women in London had a male visitor who would eat in their mess hall once a month. He was married and wasn’t interested in hitting on any of the women; he just wanted to eat in an atmosphere where people said “Please pass the butter,” instead of “PASS THE GODDAMNED GREASE”
I dated a guy who brought me along on group activities (movies, video game night, etc.) with four or five other male friends. Once I mentioned to one of the other guys that I hoped I wasn’t intruding on their “guy time” or some such. He got this sort of rueful look and said, “The truth is, I really like it when you’re here because it gives us a reason to act better. When it’s just guys, we all have to try to outdo each other with how vile we are.”
So the moral of these stories are men don’t even treat each other like human beings.
Me to my 6-year-old son: “You seem to like playing with the girls at school more than the boys. Why do you think that is?”
6-year-old son: “Sometimes I just don’t want to be pushed. It hurts and is mean. And the girls always pretend to be princesses or fun animals and stuff when they have tea parties. The boys just dump the tea all over the place. That’s just stupid and I don’t like wasting all that tea. It takes forever to make.”
Me: “Wow, I can understand why you’d rather play with the girls. The boys seem like they’re kind of rough.”
6-year-old son: “And when I play with the girls they make me the king because none of the other boys want to play tea party.”
Me: “Do you like being the king?”
6-year-old son: “Not really – I’d rather be a wizard, but it makes Georgia and Vivian happy.”
Reblogging again for that last bit–6-year-old is smart.
Fight Club Lord of the Flies are both about this very thing. when men dont have women around we go nuts and destroy everything.
I firmly believe that unless the couple has discussed and agreed to marriage ahead of time, nobody has any business making a surprise public proposal.
Okay except some people want a surprise public proposal.
Girl my husband took me to Spain and gave me a kinder egg on the beach, the ring was inside the capsule (Lord knows how he did that) if any feminist tried to take that away from me I may cut a bitch. Best surprise of my life.
I wish people were capable of analyzing larger social trends and figuring that a significant number of women end up getting pressured into engagements or marriages they don’t want bc the audience that comes along with a public proposal will think she’s a bitch if she says no – instead of thinking “i liked it when it happened to me, therefore it could never turn out badly for anyone, not ever!!!!”
I think what people are misunderstanding here is that agreeing to marriage ahead of time doesn’t need to be like, asking permission to propose? I surprised my now spouse with a proposal in Disneyland but before that we had several conversations about the future of our relationship, future plans for our retirements and how we’d have to get married eventually for immigration purposes. I didn’t go to her and say “so would you say yeah if I proposed?” or hash out deets ahead of time, but we had enough of a mutual understanding and communicated desire to get married that, although it was a surprise for when and how I proposed, it wasn’t out of left field at all.
This is exactly like conversations about consent, people get up in arms thinking that it means you have to have contracts and serious sit down conversations before doing anything when its REALLY EASY to simply COMMUNICATE with your partner so things like this are done properly, yeesh
“proposal can be a surprise, engagement shouldn’t be“ – saw that somewhere, thought it was the most accurate
the whole concept linking being open-minded, liberal, and free-spirited with being sexually available to men and having no sexual boundaries is an absolute tragedy. almost every woman i know has been traumatized or harmed by this ideology in some way, and it is being pushed on girls at increasingly younger ages
i would also like to point out that the idea that it’s cooler to not be emotionally attached in sexual encounters, not have expectations, etc. and be casual about sex and love is also harmful to women and puts the onus on them to change themselves, to criticize themselves for being loving and feeling things deeply, rather than for men to stop being sex-obsessed and devoid of human emotion
this is one of the reasons the sex-positivity movement turned out to be a failure imo. instead of challenging the status quo it’s creating a new set of standards women have to meet when it comes to relationships and sex. it’s putting pressure on women to subjugate themselves even more to the sexual desires of the men in their lives. it’s just sexism wrapped in a new rhetoric and the way its being marketed as the new ideal the Liberated Woman™ should aspire to is so cynical and disgusting to me
People say “Oh you’re just bitter” every time I talk shit about the rich and you’re God damn right I’m bitter. We should all be.
It should leave a bad taste in your mouth that you work your ass off and give up so much of your time and labor to barely scrape by, and there’s a class of people so incomprehensibly removed from that reality. People that do absolutely nothing but piggy back off of your labor and spend wondrous amounts of time relaxing in luxury and getting to be with their families.
they deliberately left out Danny Glover, Whitney Houston, and Mariah Carey and forgot to mention that Sandra Bullock and Jeff Goldblum have Jewish heritage
In a story important to Jews and Christians, they hired Jews and Christians
Also completely left out Ofra Haza who played Moses’ mother and is legit 100% Israeli.
You guys are fucking exhausting.
The Prince of Egypt: *consults with countless scholars from all three Abrahamic religions to make sure they were telling the story correctly, hires notable black and Jewish talent for the voice cast, taps the guy who played Coalhouse Motherfluffing Walker in “Ragtime” (a show all about racial tensions in America) on Broadway to sing one of the film’s most beautiful songs, taps the same Israeli singer to reprise her role as Yochaved in almost every foreign dub of the film, and is generally much more respectful to its source than any live-action Biblical epic released in the past fifty years*
Astronaut bird 