Oh damn.
omg that is so fucking accurate
when “no means no” comes up, you hear guys say “oh, but sometimes girls play hard to get” and like…. i guess, yeah. men & women both can be really bad at being honest about what they want. but just consider your options.
- the other person says “no” and means “yes” –> you back down –> they learn that if they want something, they have to clearly express themselves
- they say “no” and mean “no” –> you back down –> you’ve successfully respected their boundaries 👍👌
- they say “no” and mean “yes” –> you ignore them –> you’re perpetuating a pattern of bad communication & ignoring boundaries 👎 & given that you aren’t a mind reader, it’s really just luck that you haven’t coerced an unwilling person into sex
- they say “no” and mean “no” –> you ignore them –> you’ve committed sexual assault 🚨🚨🚨 do not pass go, do not collect 200 dollars
unless you care more about getting laid than not assaulting people, respecting people’s “no”s is a win-win situation. don’t be a potential rapist
This is really important
In the 1960′s Legally a woman couldn’t
drst:
- Open a bank account or get a credit card without signed permission from her father or hr husband.
- Serve on a jury - because it might inconvenience the family not to have the woman at home being her husband’s helpmate.
- Obtain any form of birth control without her husband’s permission. You had to be married, and your hub and had to agree to postpone having children.
- Get an Ivy League education. Ivy League schools were men’s colleges ntil the 70′s and 80′s. When they opened their doors to women it was agree that women went there for their MRS. Degee.
- Experience equality in the workplace: Kennedy’s Commission on the Status of Women produced a report in 1963 that revealed, among other things, that women earned 59 cents for every dollar that men earned and were kept out of the more lucrative professional positions.
- Keep her job if she was pregnant.Until the Pregnancy Discrimination Act in 1978, women were regularly fired from their workplace for being pregnant.
- Refuse to have sex with her husband.The mid 70s saw most states recognize marital rape and in 1993 it became criminalized in all 50 states. Nevertheless, marital rape is still often treated differently to other forms of rape in some states even today.
- Get a divorce with some degree of ease.Before the No Fault Divorce law in 1969, spouses had to show the faults of the other party, such as adultery, and could easily be overturned by recrimination.
- Have a legal abortion in most states.The Roe v. Wade case in 1973 protected a woman’s right to abortion until viability.
- Take legal action against workplace sexual harassment. According to The Week, the first time a court recognized office sexual harassment as grounds for legal action was in 1977.
- Play college sports Title IX of the Education Amendments of protects people from discrimination based on sex in education programs or activities that receive Federal financial assistance It was nt until this statute that colleges had teams for women’s sports
- Apply for men’s Jobs The EEOC rules that sex-segregated help wanted ads in newspapers are illegal. This ruling is upheld in 1973 by the Supreme Court, opening the way for women to apply for higher-paying jobs hitherto open only to men.
This is why we needed feminism - this is why we know that feminism works
I just want to reiterate this stuff, because I legit get the feeling there are a lot of younger women for whom it hasn’t really sunk in what it is today’s GOP is actively trying to return to.
Did you go to a good college? Shame on you, you took a college placement that could have gone to a man who deserves and needs it to support or prepare for his wife & children. But if you really must attend college, well, some men like that, you can still get married if you focus on finding the right man.
Got a job? Why? A man could be doing that job. You should be at home caring for a family. You shouldn’t be taking that job away from a man who needs it (see college, above). You definitely don’t have a career – you’ll be pregnant and raising children soon, so no need to worry about promoting you.
This shit was within living memory. I’M A MILLENIAL and my mother was in the second class that allowed women at an Ivy League school. Men who are alive today either personally remember shit like this or have parents/family who have raised them into thinking this was the way America functioned back in the blissful Good Old Days. There are literally dudes in the GOP old enough to remember when it was like this and yearn for those days to return.
When people talk about resisting conservativism and the GOP, we’re not just talking about whether the wage gap is a myth or not. We’re talking about whether women even have the fundamental right to exist as individuals, to run their own households and compete for jobs and be considered on an equal footing with men in any arena at all in the first place.
I was a child in the 1960s, a teenager in the 1970s, a young adult in the 1980s.
This is what it was like:
When I was growing up, it was considered unfortunate if a girl was good at sports. Girls were not allowed in Little League. Girls’ teams didn’t exist in high school, except at all-girls’ high schools. Boys played sports, and girls were the cheerleaders.
People used to ask me as a child what I wanted to be when I grew up. I said I wanted to be a brain surgeon or the first woman justice on the Supreme Court. Everyone told me it was impossible–those just weren’t realistic goals for a girl–the latter, especially, because you couldn’t trust women to judge fairly and rationally, after all.
In the 1960s and 1970s, all women were identified by their marital status, even in arrest reports and obituaries. In elementary school, my science teacher referred to Pierre Curie as DOCTOR Curie and Marie Curie as MRS. Curie…because, as he put it, “she was just his wife.” (Both had doctorates and both were Nobel prize winners, so you would think that both would be accorded respect.)
Companies could and did require women to wear dresses and skirts. Failure to do could and did get women fired. And it was legal. It was also legal to fire women for getting married or getting pregnant. The rationale was that a woman who was married or who had a child had no business working; that was what her husband was for. Aetna Insurance, the biggest insurance company in America, fired women for all of the above.
A man could rape his wife. Legally. I can remember being twelve years old and reading about legal experts actually debating whether or not a man could actually be said to coerce his wife into having sex. This was a serious debate in 1974.
The debate about marital rape came up in my law school, too, in 1984. Could a woman be raped by her husband? The guys all said no–a woman got married, so she was consenting to sex at all times. So I turned it around. I asked them if, since a man had gotten married, that meant that his wife could shove a dildo or a stick or something up his ass any time she wanted to for HER sexual pleasure.
(Hey, I thought it was reasonable. If one gender was legally entitled to force sex on the other, then obviously the reverse should also be true.)
The male law students didn’t like the idea. Interestingly, they commented that being treated like that would make them feel like a woman.
My reaction was, “Thank you for proving my point…”
The concept of date rape, when first proposed, was considered laughable. If a woman went out on a date, the argument of legal experts ran, sexual consent was implied. Even more sickening was the fact that in some states–even in the early 1980s–a man could rape his daughter…and it was no worse than a misdemeanor.
Women taking self-defense classes in the 1970s and 1980s were frequently described in books and on TV as “cute.” The implication was that it was absurd for a woman to attempt to defend herself, but wasn’t it just adorable for her to try?
I was expressly forbidden to take computer classes in junior and senior years of high school–1978-79 and 1979-80–because, as the principal told me, “Only boys have to know that kind of thing. You girls are going to get married, and you won’t use it.”
When I was in college–from 1980 to 1984–there were no womens’ studies. The idea hadn’t occurred in many places because the presumption was that there was nothing TO study. My history professor–a man who had a doctorate in history–informed me quite seriously that women had never produced a noted painter, sculptor, composer, architect or scientist because…wait for it…womens’ brains were too small.
(He was very surprised when I came up with a list of fifty women gifted in the arts and science, most of whom he had never heard of before.)
When Walter Mondale picked Geraldine Ferraro as a running mate in 1984, the press hailed it as a disaster. What would happen, they asked fearfully, if Mondale died and Ferraro became president? What if an international crisis arose and she was menstruating? She could push the nuclear button in a fit of PMS! It would be the end of the WORLD!!
…No, they WEREN’T kidding.
On the surface, things are very different now than they were when I was a child, a teen and a young adult. But I’m afraid that people now do not realize what it was like then. I’ve read a lot of posts from young women who say that they are not feminists. If the only exposure to feminism they have is the work of extremists, I cannot blame them overmuch.
I wish that I could tell them what feminism was like when it was new–when the dream of legal equality was just a dream, and hadn’t even begun to come true. When “woman’s work” was a sneer–and an overt putdown. When people tut-tutted over bright and athletic girls with the words, “Really, it’s a shame she’s not a boy.” That lack of feminism wasn’t all men opening doors and picking up checks. A lot of it was an attitude of patronizing contempt that hasn’t entirely died out, but which has become less publicly acceptable.
I wish I could make them feel what it was like…when grown men were called “men” and grown women were “girls.”Know your history.
So this, too, is what they mean saying “make America great again” and/or the good old days.
REBLOG FOREVER.
So important to remember that this is recent history. While we’re still dealing with a lot of the same issues, albeit in different ways or on another scale, it’s easy to take all the progress for granted. Feminists fought to change these laws, and laws over time affect the social norms as well.
Also, I fee blessed (for the lack of a better word) to live in a time were the resistance to misogyny is so visible. You no longer get away with writing a sexist article in a major newspaper, without being called out or made into a meme. The resistance is coming from all angles, and that is a powerful thing.
what “the personal is political” MEANS: things in people’s private lives can be usefully analyzed by talking about wider structural/political aspects of society. for instance, bullying of gender-non-conforming children can be understood as “sexism” rather than “people being dickbags.” women tending to be primary caregivers can be understood as “sexism” rather than “men’s natural aversion to spending time with toddlers”.
what “the personal is political” DOES NOT MEAN: there is a single objectively correct series of Most Feminist Choices.
in reality all choices– makeup or no makeup, monogamy or polyamory or singleness, working motherhood or stay-at-home motherhood or childfreeness– are influenced by wider structural/political aspects of society, and a politics of personal purity will not have much of any effect on sexism. the individual must decide for herself which particular set of tradeoffs she wishes to make, without criticizing others for the tradeoffs they choose to make, and then join with others to actually combat sexism
“
A Black woman does not have to pass a certain “bar” of entry that White women hold before she is “acceptable” to feminism and this suggestion is most certainly racist, especially since White women are automatically assumed to be feminist. Even White women who openly hated feminism, such as Margaret Thatcher, has had the label “feminist” placed upon her post-mortem. White women can be considered feminist even when clearly operating in ways that reinforce imperialist White supremacist capitalist hetero-patriarchy, like Thatcher did (examine her damn record, one that is as patriarchal and imperialist as any White male leader), yet Beyoncé is consistently attacked for not meeting some arbitrary standard as White women stand GUARD over feminism?
”
Privileged folk ridiculing safe spaces is so funny as if men don’t refuse to enter “girly” stores and have “man caves”, as if white people don’t avoid black neighbourhoods, as if straight people don’t ostracise gay people from their social circles, like who’s really the one with the safe spaces lol
that’s the thing about power dynamics. Your boss has no problem entering your work space randomly, while you can’t enter his office as freely. Same mechanic is happening here, only that when you refuse to let your boss (privileged people) enter your space (safe space), they feel offended because they think they’re entitled to entering your space all the time.
They see exerting boundaries as an attempt to exert dominance, because they believe having boundaries is a privilege of the rich and powerful.
And they’re not wrong about the second part, but they’re still part of the reason why.
some good consent phrases
“May I hug you?”
“When I ask you if you want to do something, you know it’s always okay to say no, right?”
“Let me know if you get uncomfortable, okay?”
“How do you feel about (x activity)?”
(When someone’s insecure about having said no and asks if it’s okay/if you’re mad or upset they said no) “I’m disappointed, of course, but I’m really glad you were willing to tell me (no/that you were uncomfortable/etc.). That’s really important to me. Thank you.”
“I’d ALWAYS rather be told no than make you feel pressured or do anything to hurt you or make you uncomfortable.”
“I care about you, so when something I do hurts you or makes you uncomfortable, I want to know, because I don’t like making you feel bad.”
“Wanna do (x)? It’s okay if not, but I think it would be (fun/worthwhile/prudent).”
(When starting a social phone call): “Hey, are you busy right now?”
(When confirming plans made earlier): “Hey, are you still up for doing (x) at (time) on (day)?”
“Can I vent a little about (x)?”
“Can I tell you something (gross/depressing)?”
“Are you comfortable talking about it?”
“Do you think you could talk me through this problem I’ve been having? If you have the time and emotional energy of course.”
“It’s okay if that doesn’t work for you.”
“I’m interested in spending more time with you. Would you be interested in doing (x) together on (y day)?”
“No? Well let me know if you ever want to do something else.” (leave it open! don’t nag! let it go!)
Consent culture - it’s about way more than just sex!
Give people as much freedom as possible to make their own choices without pressure or control.
Even children deserve as much autonomy as allows them to remain safe and get their needs met - remember, you can’t train a child to make good/safe/healthy choices without ever giving them choices. A child who is taught to respect consent is a child who doesn’t assault people! A child who knows they have a right to say no is a child who knows that someone who infringes on their autonomy isn’t supposed to do that.
A consent-conscious relationship is a healthier and safer relationship, and a person who is aware of and deliberate about asking for, giving, receiving, refusing, and being refused consent is a healthier and safer person.
just a thought but why do we gays always come out in the car like what is it about sitting in a car that makes us tell someone we’re gay
There’s a reason for this.
Psychologically, it’s easier to have difficult conversations while in a car, especially if the person you’re talking to is driving, because it removes the pressure of making and/or maintaining eye contact since the driver has to watch the road. Also, the existence of a finite end point to the ride - when you get to wherever you’re going - gives you an automatic easy out to end the conversation, making it easier to start it in the first place.
In fact, some parenting experts actually recommend starting hard conversations with your kids in the car for these exact reasons.
I’ve always thought of cars as a sort of emotional liminal space. There’s something about being in a confined vehicle in motion that makes you feel a bit removed from reality. Your feet are not touching the ground, you’re moving faster than you ever could out of a car, you’re occupied with a task that’s both demanding and automatic, and your brain and emotions get a bit unfettered.
Hey, this post may contain adult content, so we’ve hidden it from public view.