why did none of you tell me that India Willyboy said he was ABDUCTED BY ALIENS AND EXPERIMENTED ON
I guess if you believe a man can become a woman you can believe anything
Stop trying to find a good man. Trying to find a good man is almost as futile as finding a unicorn. Sure, very rarely, maybe it is possible to find someone decent, but most likely? This will be what your life is like if you choose to partner up with a man. If not, you’ll have at the very least encounter men like this before finding the one, so taking all that into consideration, is the process of hunting down a good man really worth it?
Respectfully, bisexuality is a sexuality and not automatically a political performance.
A woman can't "claim" bisexuality and then have sex with both women and men. She just is bisexual.
Considering patriarchy, the way that men pressure and coerce women to "settle down with a man," the common self-hatred that bisexual women feel - including the fear that by existing and having feelings for other women, we might harm them because being bisexual is somehow "unclean" in some way - it's not fair at all to squint at bisexual women accuse them of being "exploitative and fetishistic."
There is also the very simple, very human situation of a bisexual woman having consensual, no/low-strings attached sex with another woman, that fizzling out, and then coming across a man that she clicks with and starts a relationship with.
Or are we saying that a bisexual woman who is rejected by a lesbian and then who eventually partners with a man is somehow offensive for... some hypothetical lesbian hypothetically thinking, "Actually, she's not for me because I want a girlfriend who loves rockclimbing and she prefers walking on the beach"?
I don't know how there's anything feminist about accusing bisexual women, the ones who are fetishised by men as being hypersexual and forever consenting, about being sexual deviants who exploit other women.
Even as a straight woman looking in from the outside, I can't help but be offended by women who claim bisexuality but say they are attracted to women and will fuck them but will only be in a committed relationship/partner up with a male. It seems exploitative and fetishistic.
I guy in my fyp said today
“Actions taken by men are favors and actions taken by woman are duties”
And I have been just sitting staring into space for about an hour now.
Because this applies to every aspect of woman’s life. Every single one.
I knew this. I just hadn’t given it the proper sentence.
Monstera deliciosa
We should always talk more about the emotional manipulation and gaslighting that comes from being women under the patriarchy. Violence and threats only go so far to oppress women. The rest of the trap is the way that patriarchy has managed to trick women into keeping ourselves down, without us ever noticing it.
Take this paragraph:
Like Buffy, do we feminist women turn to mediocre men who can express messiness so that we don’t have to? Does it make us feel stronger, more powerful, or more competent by comparison—but also keep us measuring our worth in relation to others rather than to ourselves? The strong woman/bad boyfriend phenomenon reminds me of how I felt when I first began interacting with transgendered (male-to-female) women at book signings. The women whom Amy Richards and I met during the Manifesta tour often came with a critique that the book had no discussion of transgender rights. I felt terrifically defensive—obsessed with the way the M-to-F pre-op women would dominate the evening, often with just their physical bigness. I hated the way they invaded a woman-only space, seeming to merely endure our reading so they could get to “their” part of the evening. “They wouldn’t—couldn’t—do that if they had been born women,” I seethed. “You don’t see female-to-male pre-operative men heading to the Harvard Club to demand inclusion. Why is it always women who have to make more space and take in everything?” But as I learned more about the history of transgenderism and met more transgendered people—M to F and F to M and points beyond—I revised that interpretation. I wonder now if it offended me that these women could be aggressive and take up space while I still thought I couldn’t. - From Look Both Ways: Bisexual Politics by Jennifer Baumgardner
From a question about mediocre men that immediately brought TIMs to mind, this feminist woman automatically felt righteously repulsed at men forcing their way into a female-only space, who clearly didn't care about female issues, and only endured discussions of women's issues and thoughts so that they could bleat about themselves instead.
Instead of her accepting what she knew, the fact that TIMs act like men because they're men, and TIFs act like women because they're women, she flipped a switch, threw in that she met a range of trans "and points beyond" people, and suddenly, TIMs taking over women's spaces and demanding that everything be about themselves became her own moral failing.
Again, this last line:
I wonder now if it offended me that these women could be aggressive and take up space while I still thought I couldn’t.
Critiques of her understanding of feminism aside, from the above text, she knew what men are like, and she was right to seethe. And yet, patriarchy is so strong that women will tie themselves in knots to be seen as acceptable to others, because of the teaching that men always matter more.
In her case - and in quite a lot of other cases, from women who won't really even think about feminism across whatever spectrums there are, I would wager - there will be this underlying idea that these men that claim womanhood are simply somehow better women than they are, and that is why those men deserve support and love and kindness over everything else.
Because those men are the kind of women that actual women are telling themselves that they should aspire to be. That actual women are failures, and the fakes are somehow the real deal.
Those women can tell themselves that it's about being unapologetic and loud and forceful about their individual needs - but it's another manipulative trap. Women can never become like those brave TIMs. As soon as they try, they're called TERFs, remember?
Look at the number of women who spend so much time defending TIMs, whether they're trans identified or not. Of course they do. They've been taught that the best of women, the most vulnerable of women? Those better "women" are all male.
Why do I say all this in regards to the trans issue? Because we're living in a time where numbers of women have genuinely been gaslit into believing that men can be women, in such a relatively short space of time. That men somehow can become biologically female through saying a few words out loud.
If that doesn't tell you how effective the psychological abuse of women is under the patriarchy, I don't know what else will.
Ironically, I think that it's the modern evolution of political lesbianism, just without the (historically accidental, because back then it was encouraged by some actual lesbians too) lesbophobia.
There has been the idea from at least 1970 that to be a lesbian is to be an inherently better feminist, because lesbians are supposedly magically better at seeing through patriarchy, they're so pro-woman that they even centre other women romantically, and they reject male supremacy so much that they would never be attracted to a man. It's a strange fetishisation of what is (or at least should be) a neutral sexuality that a woman happens to be born with.
It makes lesbians the top-tier of feminists that all other women should emulate and aspire to be, but also be separated from. It then allows the smaller number of misogynistic lesbians that claim to be "feminists" to feel entitled attack bisexual and straight women under the guise of "feminism," and then when called out for that misogyny and biphobia, claim that they're doing nothing but speaking out about their oppressors, and accusing others of lesbophobia for demanding that lesbians centre their oppressors after that criticism.
In reality, no lesbian ever has to centre straight women. It's understandable if they don't. The problem is that the smaller number of lesbian "feminists" who behave like that like the idea that they are the peak feminists that can speak for everyone, and they enjoy wielding power over women that they like to deem as lesser. If they didn't, if they genuinely wanted to stay focused only on lesbian issues and lesbian support networks and other lesbians (which is entirely reasonable!) then they wouldn't cling to call themselves "feminists" while spouting misogyny and trying to make certain types of misogyny "acceptable" in feminism.
The fact is, to be feminist is to support all women. The vast majority of women are straight. The vast majority of those women have been socialised to get married and have children or be seen as a failure, where it's drummed into their heads so much that they fear dying alone and unloved and unwanted. That's even before the anon's facts that love can happen whenever and wherever, and it is hard to stop it from happening.
That doesn't mean that straight women need to be front and centre of everything, fuck us bisexual women and fuck lesbian women too, but it does mean that their struggles are equally important because freedom for all women is important, and to ignore them or dismiss them is inherently anti-feminist.
I really appreciate your response to the post victim blaming straight women. I was astonished when wanting a life partner was compared to "hitting a hornet's nest". That's like. Not remotely the same thing. Or calling a desire for a partner simple "socialization". No. It's an *instinct* that most people have. And romantic love can be an absolutely incredible and lovely experience. Some of the most beautiful experiences of my life involved romance. Saying that forgoing it is a simple and easy thing and you're just stupid if you don't is massively simplistic. I especially hate this when it comes from lesbians. You're asking straight women to give up something amazing that you aren't at all expected to give up. It is indeed true that most men are terrible and getting into a relationship with them is a big risk, because repeatedly men have shown that they have the ability to be deceptive about the truth of who they are until marriage and/or children have tied their female partner to them. But that doesn't somehow make straight women simply stupid or pathetic for getting into relationships with men. It makes them human beings with human desires. I'm lucky enough to be bisexual, so I'm not inherently going to be deprived of romantic love if I want to keep myself safe from men. But I have fallen in love with men before. Not because I went on dating sites looking for them--I actually select only looking for women on them--but because I've met men at work and school, and fallen for them. Resisting the urge to act upon those desires is massively difficult if not impossible. It's not going out of your way to kick a hornet's nest. It's trying to ignore the call of something primal and potentially beautiful. Sneering at straight women is unempathetic and disgusting, and I would expect better from women who purport to be feminists.
It's because those "feminists" are just lesbians with a superiority complex.
I am also fortunately bisexual, honestly I'm finding that the only people I can trust to be Normal about women is bisexual women.
What makes it even funnier is if you DON'T think straight women are helpless dumb dick addicts swatting at a hornet's nest, you MUST support dating men. Like. No I have a whole ass tag of reasons to never date men, because based on the data it is my belief that it is not beneficial to women. But I do not view women as inherently lesser for giving in to biology.