My Familiar 🖤

Totally agree, and I would also argue that connecting with other women is the most important first step. Actually taking time to build up the care and empathy for other women is huge. The patriarchy constantly pits woman against woman to prevent us from working together.

You can give up the makeup, love your body hair, abandon the need for male acceptance or approval - but if you don't teach yourself to care for other women, and give other women grace, and understand female socialisation, then all you're doing is partially freeing your physical self while upholding the patriarchy elsewhere.

Considering that the patriarchy also wants to crush us so that we're always kind to men and hyper critical of other women, centring women and actually saving that kindness for other women trains us to be kinder to ourselves, too, which builds our confidence and empowers us to stand up even taller against men.

It's admirable if one day, you can wake up and completely deprogram yourself from misogyny and the patriarchy in one go but it's also OK if:

You start wearing less makeup or wearing makeup less often rather than completely stopping

You start to let your body hair grow a little longer before shaving instead of never letting it grow more than stubble

You stop making new male friends but keep the ones that you have

You share resources online about community efforts before helping in person

You disengage from conversations where casual misogyny or full blown misogyny is used rather than challenging it

Everyone starts somewhere. We don't all have the ability to change our lives completely overnight.

But you have to put in the work to do more and get out of your comfort zone. Women's liberation doesn't happen if we all just do the minimum.

It's a good place to start but you have to learn how to push yourself to do more.

Genuinely proud of myself for being cigarette-free for an entire year today.

Boston Bisexual Women’s Network (Sep/Oct/Nov, 2008)

It bears stating from the onset that feminism is a broad church. There are splits and schisms within it, usually pertaining to what constitutes useful, meaningful action towards women's liberation. It is, however, to put the cart before the horse to start by placing into these furrows. One does not have to be a feminist to become one of the 'hounded', though to be feminist at all arguably requires agreement with the trio of Core Beliefs that follow. For the sake of both clarity and brevity, these three Core Beliefs are identifiable as the beliefs that are at question when a woman – feminist or not – is targeted for opprobrium in the gender wars.

Core Belief 1: Women are materially definable as a class of human being. That means that the category definition of 'woman' describes those humans who are adult and female. The only criterion for being a woman is to be a female girl who survives into adulthood. No other criteria are necessary: no personality traits, no interests, no adornment or style of dress, no mandatory life choice must flow from this definition. This is the realm of category definitions and not value judgements.

Core Belief 2: Women (as adult female humans), are culturally, legislatively and politically important, with their own sets of needs, rights and concerns. On the basis of being female, such women assert the need in particular for female-only spaces, sports, and other services on the basis of privacy, dignity and/or safety – or, simply, in recognition that equality and social justice cannot be achieved where males and females are included together with competing interests in whatever space is under discussion.

Core Belief 3: Where social, cultural or legislative trends are under way – ones that may diminish women's rights and/or liberation – then women have a right to meet and discuss freely that which affects their lives profoundly. As such, when women's events are protested disproportionately via attempts to shut them down or to intimidate attendees, the women involved will respond with even more rigorous calls for debate and reassertion of their right to freedom of speech and assembly.

– Jenny Lindsay (2024) Hounded: Women, Harms and the Gender Wars, pp. 1-2.

god I fear your opinion on bisexual lesbioromantics lmao. like- i call myself bi lesbian because I have sex with men and women but i've only ever felt romantically towards women and like I feel like whatever you're opinion is on that is probably interesting enough to be studied in a lab

i think people who call themselves bi lesbians should kill themselves

Pedro pascal calling JK Rowling a loser fucking pissed me off so bad and people were praising him (majority women!!!!!). I hate that dude so bad, he's only at this level of fame because he's a man.

I AGREE ‼️‼️🔥🔥🗣🗣🗣

Men have to do the barest minimum of "oho yes people I ALSO think bad thing of the month is bad ☝️" and men as a whole will get the benefit of women screaming and crying and saying he's just so smol and squishable and matureeee (read: father figure).

Honestly whenever a man leans into his public image of being... all of that, I get suspicious 😒 genuinely never failed me yet.

I knew it was a TIF because there was a mention of "trans men" in there and wanting to reject the actual use of the word "woman," but I wasn't prepared for the self-satisfied, smug pose on her actual Yale page.

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Actual dystopian level sick this is. Legitimately floored. What the actual fuck.

“”I argue that pregnancy is not to be defined by biological phenomena but instead as a genre of political, aesthetic, and affective experience and expectation. As a multidimensional genre of experience, rather than merely a biological datum, pregnancy can potentially establish a shared ground between trans and cis women. Pregnancy is an existential experience involving birth and becoming in a larger sense. We need a more all-encompassing notion of pregnancy””

Pregnancy is not a haha fun little inclusive to all club. Are you fucking kidding me.

The greatest trick of the patriarchy was to teach countless generations of women to be kind.

We can talk about statistics all day long, but the weaponisation of our compassion is what keeps us on our knees.

When we see studies about violence, the immediate reaction is but men can be victims, too, and examples like that are why the false ideas of the patriarchy hurts men, too and feminism is for everybody are so prevalent. Women have been so broken down by generations upon generations of manipulation through be kind that is feels wrong, that it feels psychologically painful to centre ourselves.

Instead of women being able to come together and fight for our rights as one, this malicious forced compassion makes us sideline and silence ourselves, with the reward being tricked into feeling like I'm a good and selfless person. When women dare to centre ourselves and put ourselves first reasonably, then we're gaslit into believing that we're being selfish, cruel and even violent, and when other women snap and snarl, tired of our treatment, then they're entirely dismissed as being any modern version of hysteric.

Men like to hide behind the idea that we're the manipulative ones that psychologically damage, but without a thousand generations of men reinforcing that we should think again and actually have kindness and compassion for others, women as a whole would be able to see through the blinders of oppression.

After all, to be anti-prostitution has been reframed as hating sex workers.

Fighting against systemic violence and rape against women is ignoring male victims and supporting female perpetrators.

Protecting female-only spaces is excluding a vulnerable minority's right to exist.

Few ordinary women want to be made to feel like they're hateful or cruel. As soon as we talk about women's issues, examples of individual men are brought up, and women are tricked into talking about them by either proving how kind we are ("of course I don't want anyone to be raped, male victims deserve help!") to distract us from our issues and re-centre men again, or women dismiss that obviously malicious call for compassion ("feminism isn't about men, sort your own issues out!") and then men use it as a reason as to why feminism is evil, because anything without kindness and compassion is wrong.

Women need to be taught that it's not unkind to put ourselves first, and that men use our compassion against us.

In feminism, our kindness and compassion must be reserved for our fellow women.

Women can be kind and compassionate to men in their private lives if they want, but that isn't part of feminism - and they need to be reminded that they won't get that kindness and compassion returned.

in case anyone was forgetting what the church was all about