"A lot of men can't tell you what it means to be a man because they were never allowed to learn. They were only taught patriarchy."

 --@Anti_Intellect

(via Tudo Bom(b))

Have I mentioned that I find Solange preferable to Beyonce in every imaginable way?

Reblogged from Tudo Bom(b)

On "virginity".

"I think the concept of virginity was created by men who thought their penises were so important it changes who a woman is."

--Prettieandsick

(via come correct) 

My first reaction to this quote was like BAM! *clap clap* Cheers, all around. 

But then, even though I'd been personally sexually active for a decade before I actually did anything sexual with another human being, and had already worn out the motor in my first vibrator before I had a real live dick in me, I remember feeling kind of wholly changed after I had sex for the first time. We did it for the first time in the morning, on a Sunday, and after we snuggled, he got up to go to church, and I called my girls in quick succession to tell them I'd finally done it. And it wasn't nearly as big a deal as I thought it would be. And oh my dear lord, I wanted to do it again ASAP. And because it wasn't a big deal at all, I went on to have sex with a good friend, a stranger, and then another friend, and become the proactively sex-positive person you see before you today. 

Let's unpack that for a second. My ex and I "losing our virginities" to each other taught me that sex is not, in fact, a huge THING, fundamentally changing my attitude about a lot of things in life and generally causing me to be a lot more fulfilled in certain areas because I realized this was just one more way in which our patriarchal Puritan society had lied to me and kept me from fully enjoying my womanly human self.

So, in other words, in re this statement, BAM! *clap clap* Cheers, all around. 

EVERYTHING IS SOCIALIZATION!!

Reblogged from come correct

Photo

Reblogged from Choosing Pancakes

An analogy that explains why "friendzone-ing" is a bunch of patriarchal bullshit:

by Lavender Labia

*man walks into a store and finds employee*

Man: Alright, I've had enough. Why haven't you guys hired me?!

Employee: Uh...well sir, when did you put in your application?

Man: I never filled out an application.

Employee: Well sir, we can't consider you for employment if you've never filled out an application.

Man: No, that's bullshit, because I've been coming here for years now, and every single time I tell you all how much I love this store and how much I appreciate your customer service, unlike some of your other customers might I add!

Employee: Well, but that doesn't-

Man: AND I even told you that I didn't have a job!

Employee: But sir, that doesn't indicate to us that you would like a job at our store. And again, if you've never filled out an application, we can't consider you. Besides, we're not hiring.

Man: OH! Not hiring, HA! What a laugh. I see your store go through seasonal workers all the time. They come and go like nothing, but you won't consider me as a part-time employee even though I KNOW you've been looking for workers to fill positions? That's insane!

Employee: Sir, we've been looking to hire a few people for management positions. Do you have any management experience?

Man: Well no, but what does that matter?

Employee: ...Well sir, that's what we're looking for. You won't be suitable for the position without management experience.

Man: Oh that's such a load of crap. You know, you'll be waiting around a long time for a manager if you don't lower your standards a little. Who cares if someone knows how to manage a store? I LOVE this store and I'm willing to work here, that's all that should matter to you.

Employee: That...doesn't make any sense.

Man: NO! I'm done. This is over. From now on, no more Mr. Nice Guy.

Employee:

Man:

Employee:

Man: Fuck you, slut.

“While I would not choose them as partners, I like some men I know who are sexist in their thinking, men who are liberal, benevolent, patriarchs, because I see other qualities in them that I value. This does not mean I accept or condone their sexism. Knowing that both women and men are socialized to accept patriarchal thinking should make it clear to everyone that men are not the problem. The problem is patriarchy.”

--bell hooks 

On internalized oppressiveness [with edits]

"The thing about patriarchy -isms of all varieties is that individual men, gay and straight, persons whom are put in positions of privilege by the existence of that -ism are often really wonderful people who you love deeply, but they have internalized some really poisonous shit. So every once in a while they say or do something that really shakes you because you’re no longer totally certain they see you as a human being, and you feel totally disempowered to explain that to them."

(via ChoosingPancakes)

You might ask, why the edits? Don't I recognize patriarchy as a valid thing to be fought against? (Of course. That's a fight I will join any day, with certain parameters.) Do I have a problem with feminist statements? (Not as a rule, though there are often problems with feminist statements.) Do I have to make everything about race? Can't some things just be about gender? (1. Broadening the statement doesn't necessarily make it about race. There is classism, ableism, cissism, heteronormativism, and basically an -ism for every extant social category, though X-centrism may not have a recognized name as of yet. 2. Can water be just about hydrogen? Can the Earth be just about the land? Can education be just about schooling? Can a person be just about one of their bajillion social categories? No. Just no.) Well then why?

Because so many parts of me felt validated by this statement. Yes, gender was a part of my response, but so was race, so was class, so was cultural capital, so was sexual activeness, so were various little facts of my daily existence that become addressed in problematic ways in various social interactions. I applaud its creator for addressing the invisibility-rendering-ness of patriarchy so poignantly, but I felt like the levels of resonance I felt with the statement meant that it deserved expansion.

Does my expansion come at the cost of poignancy, though? Does broadening statements like these to target multiple arenas of oppression take away some of their force?  

“I swear to god I will lose my mind if I hear the “sex sells” fallacy one more time. Sex does not sell. If sex sold, we would see penises where we see boobs. Naked men would be on everything that naked women are on. Sex isn’t what they’re selling you. They’re selling you an impossible, pornographically fueled misogynistic idea of the perfect woman.”

--Tumblr won't tell me. Sadface.

--via el odio por amor 

Public service announcement:

"...if you speak to a woman who is otherwise occupied, you’re sending a subtle message. It is that your desire to interact trumps her right to be left alone. If you pursue a conversation when she’s tried to cut it off, you send a message. It is that your desire to speak trumps her right to be left alone. And each of those messages indicates that you believe your desires are a legitimate reason to override her rights."

--Phaedra Starling, guest post here

Why do I talk to uninteresting/creepy guys that are talking to me?

Just read this on a blog about rape culture:

Women who are taught that refusing to flirt back results in an immediately hostile environment will continue to unwillingly and unhappily flirt with somebody who is invading their space and giving them creep alerts. (source)

And though I try to be good about recognizing stupid things I have been socialized to do and not doing them just because it's more convenient in the moment, I do this all. the. fucking. time.

Okay, well, at least a lot. I can think of a few examples off the top of my head.

Most recently: So I have a new guy's number in my phone. His name is Matthew. He is a grown man. Thankfully, he's pretend-to-be-classy-enough to have given me his number instead of asking for mine, so our interactions will not continue, but let me explain how I came to have Matthew's number.

It was a little before midnight last Monday night. I was standing on the platform at Trenton Transit Station, waiting for my train to take me to Princeton Junction, on my long trip back to campus from my interview in DC. There was a tall pretty cute guy standing to my left, and he caught my eye and I smiled a small smile at him. (This habit of smiling at strangers is something I picked up from my years of working in customer service, and I'm conflicted about whether it's a habit I need to try to break.) I sat down on the train and he sat one row behind me, to my left. As he's sitting, he asks me if this is the local train, and I know it's starting. But then he gets a phone call! He picks up and it's muthafucka this, nigga that, and I have decided that I have no interest in talking to this man. But then he tells whomever he's talking to that his phone is dying and he needs that last bit of juice to last him to NY, so he'll call him back later. Damn. I was almost free from talking to this man. We sit in silence for a minute or so, and then he starts again. I must commend him for his opening line: "Why you got all that hair tied up like that?" (We naturals are known for pride in our hair, I suppose.) I explained that I was coming home from an interview, and he asked me about the position and whether I wanted to move to DC and why and why not Philly or NY? He explained that he splits his time between Philly and NYC, has apartments in both places (the rent for the Manhattan apartment, which is only a few blocks from Penn Station, is $2k a month), and he owns a recording studio and sells cars. He didn't go to college, but his sister went to UPenn. He thought there were 5 Ivies (Cornell, Brown, and Dartmouth weren't on his list. Go figure.) He was talking about how great it is to be able to call himself a success without being in the drug game, and how much satisfaction that gives him, that he makes money cleanly and legally, and I respected that. He was kind of re-vamping my opinion of him until he mentioned that he has a son and he's really cute too. Yes, sir, it's great that you have a kid and evidently like/take care of him, but you are a grown-ass man who runs businesses and has a child and why are you interested in a 21-year-old college student? My answers had gone from being succinct and designed to express non-interest to semi-conversational, but at this point I was just like, wait, why am I talking to his man? Okay, he said I was pretty and he complimented me on my smile and my grey nails and the way I said "they match my suit...which is also grey." So what? (Side note: he also busted right out with "What are you mixed with?" And then seemed dubious of my "nothing recently..." This bothers me on multiple levels and will probably get its own post, so I'm going to move on.) We got to Hamilton and he asked when my stop was and I said next, and he said something that expressed dissatisfaction at this. Later he said, "So how are we gonna do this? You gonna take my number or what?" (Sir, you are not entitled to me. There is no guarantee that we're going to do anything.) I paused and may have "Hmmm"ed, which threw him off guard; he said, "What, you considering it or something?" "Am I not allowed to consider it?" "Well you, like, actually stopped and thought about it. You had me a little worried." I took his number, knowing I would never call it. 

Why did I do this? I have done this before! As long as the guy wasn't rude or legit calling me out on the street like this is an appropriate means of communication, I will generally entertain their advances, regardless of my own disinterest. I suppose I've always just interpreted it as, hey, I'm a nice person, and he doesn't seem to be an asshole, so I'll let him spit game as long as it doesn't seem like it's going to definitively lead anywhere I don't want it to go. Or as you know, I should work on my communication skills, or on talking to "regular" people (yes I know this term is all kinds of problematic; I just don't know a better way to phrase what I mean. Please volunteer one if you have one.) I don't give such guys my number when they ask--"I just don't give it out. It's just a rule I have."--and I won't volunteer to take theirs. But what's making me feel obligated to talk to them? Why do I feel the need to justify why I won't invite these men into my life by giving them my number? Operating under the rule that any men who do not seem like total and complete disrespectful creeps are allowed to occupy my time is...basically wrong on every level. When a guy calls out to me on the street, I will either ignore or flat out reject him (click here and here for interesting stories from my summer in New Brunswick), but on a train I feel like I'd be being rude by not allowing conversation to happen. But this is RIDICULOUS and I need to stop, like, immediately.  

Whenever a woman says, “I hate girls; they’re catty bitches,” a patriarchy fairy gets its wings.

Reblogged from freedom fighter 

Once upon a time, I used to say variations of this. That time was basically 8th grade after an incredibly stupid fight with my best friend that left us not speaking for a few years, but the sentiment carried on for a good while longer, and for almost all of high school I thought it was "easier" to "get closer" or "be open" or "be myself" with my guy friends than it was with my girlfriends. One of my biggest shocks upon coming to college was developing such instant close friendships with so many girls. It was a big change for me. But not as big a change as the fact that once upon a time, I used to say variations of this. Once upon a time, I was an ignorant bitch who paid no mind to the social and political implications of the words that came out of her mouth, and who bought into racial and gender-based stereotypes without allowing herself to see the complexity and heterogeneity that is any subset of humanity you could possibly choose. Once upon a time, I was an ignorant bitch who went around saying things like this. Don't let that be you. 

I approve very highly of The Good Men Project.

It's an online magazine about masculinity and gender issues from the perspectives of progressive men. I think the world needs more things like this. I wish the ratio of women to men in my Sociology of Gender class hadn't equaled than the student-faculty ratio for the class. I wish that most of my conversations about masculinity weren't female-dominated. One of my big problems with feminism [I know you're all like, damn, how many big problems with feminism does she have?], or maybe just with the way feminism has been perverted over the years, is the tendency of feminists to condemn the masculine. 

Tad Hargrave exemplifies this beautifully in this article from TGMP:

"If you were to sit down the average progressive male and ask them, “What are the gifts that women and the feminine bring to the world? What are the gifts that sexism, patriarchy and oppression have blocked the world from receiving?” The list would be long. Of course, there are dangers of conflating women and the feminine together directly–these lines are often not so clear. One can be in a woman’s body and deeply masculine and vice versa. But still, the list would be long. The gift of birth. The gift of their cycle. The gift of nurturing. Deep intuition and sensitivity. An amazing capacity for depth of feeling. The way that women are often the ones to carry a community–often the invisible giants on whose shoulders a community rides.

But if you were to ask the same man, “What are the gifts that the men and the masculine energy brings?” You would often see silence. And shame. Answers come but . . . not as readily. There’s a deep sense, in this culture, that men are a bad animal. A sense that “we don’t need men’s protection–we need protection from the men.” "

If we've reached a point where we feel that men as a collective cannot be celebrated, then we are doing something horribly wrong. Yes, patriarchy exists, and needs to be eradicated, but it doesn't afflict all men, and afflicts many women. Patriarchy is not a "men's issue," just like the work-family-balance isn't a "woman's issue". These are people's issues, society's issues. 

He also quotes a progressive female friend of his, who says the following:

“I’ll tell you something many of us women talk about in these circles for conscious change. We’re surrounded by sensitive new age men and what we really want sometimes is a man who could just bend us over the couch. Yes, we want men to be more sensitive. But sensitive to US as women. Sensitive to our needs and desires and body language. Not overly sensitive and taking everything personally. I need a man who’s solid in himself enough to notice what’s happening over here–not someone who’s obsessed with himself and what other people think of him.” 

 I added the italics there, because for a very long time I've felt like it makes me a bad...person-who-is-conscious-of-the-problems-of-patriarchy to want to be "man-handled" (I wish there was a better term) from time to time. I'm almost uncomfortable asking this question, but I've learned that questions that make you feel that way are the most important ones to ask, so: Does every action that could be construed as being based on male privilege (or white privilege, or class privilege, etc.) have to be interpreted as such? It seems to me that being progressive should be about finding ways to do these actions respectfully. Like, I don't mind being hit on as long as dude is coming correct. I like to wear makeup and flowers in my hair, and I don't think this makes me any more or less of a woman. And sometimes I want "a roughneck n***a, mandingo in the sack/ who ain't afraid to pull my hair and spank me from the back" -- LL Cool J feat. LeShaun, "Doin It". I just also want to be able to hold insightful conversations and go on romantic outings and just kick it on a couch somewhere with him. All of that can be confusing for me, so I can't even imagine what the conflicting messages must be like for guys.

2nd 30 Day Letter Challenge: Day 17--Letter to a Politician: Freddie D and my thoughts this 4th of July

Dear American Politicians,

This letter contains excerpts from Frederick Douglass's 1852 speech, "What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?" 

1. "This, for the purpose of this celebration, is the 4th of July. It is the birthday of your National Independence, and of your political freedom. This, to you, is what the Passover was to the emancipated people of God. It carries your minds back to the day, and to the act of your great deliverance; and to the signs, and to the wonders, associated with that act, and that day. This celebration also marks the beginning of another year of your national life; and reminds you that the Republic of America is now 76 years old. I am glad, fellow-citizens, that your nation is so young. Seventy-six years, though a good old age for a man, is but a mere speck in the life of a nation. Three score years and ten is the allotted time for individual men; but nations number their years by thousands. According to this fact, you are, even now, only in the beginning of your national career, still lingering in the period of childhood. I repeat, I am glad this is so. There is hope in the thought, and hope is much needed, under the dark clouds which lower above the horizon. The eye of the reformer is met with angry flashes, portending disastrous times; but his heart may well beat lighter at the thought that America is young, and that she is still in the impressible stage of her existence. May he not hope that high lessons of wisdom, of justice and of truth, will yet give direction to her destiny? Were the nation older, the patriot’s heart might be sadder, and the reformer’s brow heavier. Its future might be shrouded in gloom, and the hope of its prophets go out in sorrow. There is consolation in the thought that America is young. Great streams are not easily turned from channels, worn deep in the course of ages. They may sometimes rise in quiet and stately majesty, and inundate the land, refreshing and fertilizing the earth with their mysterious properties. They may also rise in wrath and fury, and bear away, on their angry waves, the accumulated wealth of years of toil and hardship. They, however, gradually flow back to the same old channel, and flow on as serenely as ever. But, while the river may not be turned aside, it may dry up, and leave nothing behind but the withered branch, and the unsightly rock, to howl in the abyss-sweeping wind, the sad tale of departed glory. As with rivers so with nations."

 So today I ask, is America still young? 235 years is much longer than 76, but cannot hold a candle to thousands, as Freddie D suggests so eloquently. So do we still have time to work things out and became a nation whose values are not, in any way, hypocritical? Do we still have time to develop the backbone to stand for things we believe in rather than fall to popular opinion? Do we still have time for popular opinion to become informed? Do we still have time to care, to see the bigger picture, to remember the meaning of the word democracy? Or has our window for greatness closed? If all the masses do to observe today is barbecue and drink and watch some fireworks, who will remember the gritty history and the gritty details of the present? Sometimes I feel like we as a nation are hungover after having gotten drunk on our own ideals, and now we're too out of it to do anything but lay in bed with a cold compress and watch it all play out. We need to wake the fuck up and do something. That's the meaning of independence. In that vein:

2. "We have to do with the past only as we can make it useful to the present and to the future. To all inspiring motives, to noble deeds which can be gained from the past, we are welcome. But now is the time, the important time. Your fathers have lived, died, and have done their work, and have done much of it well. You live and must die, and you must do your work. You have no right to enjoy a child’s share in the labor of your fathers, unless your children are to be blest by your labors. You have no right to wear out and waste the hard-earned fame of your fathers to cover your indolence."

 Next I say that having never really experienced any other part of the world, I am patriotic almost to a fault. Though I hope to do some traveling eventually at some point, the US of A is the end-all be-all for me, and I'm okay with that. There's nothing I'd rather be than American. There is nothing I would rather be than a black American, but that means that, like Freddie D all those years ago, I would like to call attention to the things America overlooks as we celebrate ourselves today. He calls attention to the peculiar institution of American slavery:

3. "I shall see, this day, and its popular characteristics, from the slave’s point of view. Standing, there, identified with the American bondman, making his wrongs mine, I do not hesitate to declare, with all my soul, that the character and conduct of this nation never looked blacker to me than on this 4th of July! Whether we turn to the declarations of the past, or to the professions of the present, the conduct of the nation seems equally hideous and revolting. America is false to the past, false to the present, and solemnly binds herself to be false to the future. Standing with God and the crushed and bleeding slave on this occasion, I will, in the name of humanity which is outraged, in the name of liberty which is fettered, in the name of the constitution and the Bible, which are disregarded and trampled upon, dare to call in question and to denounce, with all the emphasis I can command, everything that serves to perpetuate slavery-the great sin and shame of America! "I will not equivocate; I will not excuse;" I will use the severest language I can command; and yet not one word shall escape me that any man, whose judgment is not blinded by prejudice, or who is not at heart a slaveholder, shall not confess to be right and just. But I fancy I hear some one of my audience say, it is just in this circumstance that you and your brother abolitionists fail to make a favorable impression on the public mind. Would you argue more, and denounce less, would you persuade more, and rebuke less, your cause would be much more likely to succeed. But, I submit, where all is plain there is nothing to be argued. What point in the anti-slavery creed would you have me argue? On what branch of the subject do the people of this country need light?"

I would like to call attention to its lasting effects, as well as to the lasting effects of the fourth value this country was raised on: 'life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness[, and patriarchy].' I want to ask you, America, whether you are celebrating poverty and the disproportionate percentages of women, children, and people of color [and their women and children most of all] who fall below the poverty line in this country. I want to call attention to the wage gap between men and women. I want to call attention to the fact that, according to multiple very-well run audit studies by one of my professors, Devah Pager, it is easier for a white man with a criminal record than a black man with no criminal background to get a JOB in this country, and that was BEFORE the recession hit. I want you to remember the founders' cries of "No taxation without representation!" and ask yourself who exactly our legislators represent. Is the nation's best interest those of its richest or its poorest? America, are you celebrating our failing public schools? Our inability to truly separate church and state and recognize love in all its forms? The tightening and tightening of border control and anti-immigration sentiment in a land that once proclaimed 

"Give me your tired, your poor/Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free" --Emma Lazarus, "The New Colossus", mounted inside the Statue of Liberty

America, have we EVER truly been the land of the free? Certainly not when my man Freddie was talking to you, certainly not now while we have the highest incarceration rates in the entire world. Certainly not now when getting caught with a bag of weed can lose not only your liberty, by sending you to prison, but also silences your voice (as many states ban ex-felons from the ability to vote), and makes it impossible to break the cycle of poverty and self-destruction (as you cannot receive federal financial aid or welfare).

"What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelly to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciations of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade, and solemnity, are, to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy—a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices, more shocking and bloody, than are the people of these United States, at this very hour.

Go where you may, search where you will, roam through all the monarchies and despotisms of the old world, travel through South America, search out every abuse, and when you have found the last, lay your facts by the side of the everyday practices of this nation, and you will say with me, that, for revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, America reigns without a rival."

So I ask you, how much has changed? I don't want to feel like I've abandoned my people--American women, American children, American people of color--by wearing my red, white, and blue today.


Maya

Does King Deserve to be King?

One of the biggest tangible changes being an African-American studies certificate pursuer has made in my life is my like, newfound...let's say "objection" to Martin Luther King Day as a holiday, as part of a larger...yeah, I think we can actually say "disgust" with the commonplace representations of the Civil Rights Movement in contemporary American classrooms and homes. I hate being lied to, particularly by authority figures. I hate the images of Christopher Columbus and Abraham Lincoln that are portrayed to young children everywhere. I hate when culture tries to rewrite history to make it more convenient. And similar to all these hatreds, I hate that America puts MLK up on a pedestal without addressing any of the flaws in his strategies and ideologies. 

Now don't get me wrong; Martin Luther King was an incredible man who did phenomenal things for black people in this country, and who tried to do similarly phenomenal things for poor people. There was a time when I would have said that I owe my very lifestyle to him; but that kind of statement, and the mindset it reflects, is exactly what pisses me off so much about this holiday. I owe my lifestyle to the Civil Rights Movement, fact, but while culture elected King as the Movement's face, there are so many other people who made contributions just as--if not more, in light of the fact that I am a black WOMAN--relevant and effective on my day-to-day being. With all of my knowledge of African-American history, I can think of NO reason King deserves to be elevated over Malcolm X or Ella Baker. I can think of NO reason for the American public--even the BLACK American public--to think of Rosa Parks as just some little old lady who wouldn't get up from her seat on the bus one day, as opposed to the die-hard political activist she really was.

Martin Luther King was many many wonderful things, but he was also a stickler for some pretty bad ideas: a) political sexism, and b) passive resistance. I think that to some degree, the black "community" as a whole is still struggling to recover from the lasting implications of the utter dominance of these ideologies, and the effective hero-worship and idolization of King in this country simply pushes conversations about the inherent badness of these ideologies further and further under the rug. If we can't address the faults of the persons we are told to view as having been great in the past, how will we ever recognize them in the future? Sexism in the black community is STILL un-talked-about by anyone but black feminists, and fact: no one really listens to them anyway. My mother STILL says she's oppressed as a black person but not as a woman, and black women's position in society will NEVER increase until we can eradicate the existence of such limited mindsets. But how can we if we continue to praise King as our savior? Political sexism is, in some aspects, even worse than in-everyday-life sexism, because it's like saying there are specific areas in which women can never be equal to men and certain arenas in which they should never be listened to, as opposed to just being generally ignorant. Passive resistance too often leads to just sitting there and taking the shit this country throws at us, and maybe I'm a radical but I will fight to the death for the things I deserve. We all should; it's the only way to get anyone to listen. The Movement has DIED; now we all practice passive resistance, and our men and boys rot in jail, and our children fail in failing schools, and our success stories are ostracized and remain single and childless for being strange exceptions to unwritten rules...it's not getting us anywhere. Blindly accepting King as the face of the Movement, as the King of race relations in America and as having the chief ideas that should be recognized and remembered just sets us back into the faults of his time, and I for one shall not regress.