Maybe it's PMS

I am a feminist who is tired of being dismissed

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Being a girl was complicated. It was swallowing rusty nails and clawing our way towards something we didn’t even know we really wanted.

When I was thirteen I told Stephanie that drinking orange juice could stop you from fainting because it raises your blood sugar. In sophomore year, she slammed her head, saw stars, and ended up drinking an entire carton in one sitting. She vomited on her kitchen floor, but she couldn’t tell if it was from the concussion or from a pint of orange juice sitting in her stomach. Her doctor told her mother, “All girls try throwing up at some point.”

I remember the first time one of my friends came to me with eyes so red I thought she’d inhaled a desert. She said her mother had died from breast cancer the night before. She said her home was an open grave, a holy space. She said she’d rather be in school than dealing with an absence so loud nobody could speak. I still think about her every time someone says “save the ta-tas” instead of “please god save our mothers haven’t enough of us suffered.”

On certain Saturday nights we’d all get dressed up like we were going somewhere fancy and then sit in and watch Disney movies. We filled ourselves up with popcorn and gossip. When Patty showed up with a black eye again, we all said nothing about it. We were too young to make fists out of fingers, I think.

A girl on the train was reading a book I love. We got to talking. She’s from the Peace Corps, she said, gave me a smile like a thousand volts. She was one of those people who make you feel good about yourself. When she got up to go, she gave me a little wave. I said “Go stop violence,” and she laughed. Hanging off the back of her bag was a little pink can of mace.

We learned to be secret defend-each-other types. We were going to hold the world down until it liked us. There is something bold about being defiant. There is something about having soft petal skin and still showing sharp teeth.

The box was little and teal and had a bow attached to it. Inside was a pair of brass knuckles in the shape of cat ears. “In case,” my father said, “In case.”

I remember my sister, body wrapped in a towel, saying, “It’s not as bad as it looks,” her shinbone a mess of blood where her razor slipped. She said she saw the patch of skin she removed. She wiggled her eyebrows while holding up her pointer finger. “This long,” she said, “And pretty thick.” She had to throw it out rather than let it clog the drain.

He was tall and gawky and if you asked him personal questions, his ears turned red. He asked if I wanted to go out to the pond in the woods. I blushed and told him I couldn’t swim, and he gasped as if he’d been stung. He picked me up so easily, like I weighed nothing. He put me in the trunk of his car. We were laughing.

Much later, a stranger the same size would say, “Hey mama, wanna come home with me?”

I remember I met this one girl passed out on a couch, her dress hiked up around her hips. She was lying in her own vomit. “Let’s keep walking,” someone said, “Don’t get involved.” I was too much empathy in a small body to let her go unprotected. She shivered in the shower we put her in. Her skin was so blue around her eyes, I thought maybe she’d slipped the sky in there. She looked terrified. I asked her how much she drank, she couldn’t say. I asked her how she got here, she bit her lip and shook her head. “My friends… Just left,” she said, “They just left.” Sometimes friends are like that, I guess.

In late nights, I heard Kathrine crying about the things her father had said to her. She once told me that if it was a choice between being born with her learning disabilities and being born without a tongue, she’d choose the latter one. I whispered something of an apology that fell as flat as I felt, we don’t talk about it ever again.

Skeleton hands never stop shaking me awake. Sometimes I think we’re drowning and sometimes I think we are just painted that way. There’s never an excuse not to be dainty. Someone once told me that beauty is pain.

I remember her lips and how they were bright pink, because the words out of them were sick green things. Maggie said she’d swallowed eighty-nine Tylenol two days before. She said they’d filled her with charcoal and had her spit back up the blackness that was swelling like a river inside of her. We were fourteen.

We flirted with people we didn’t know, we used other people’s hands to mess up our hair, we got home late. We towered in heels that hurt to look at. We felt fierce, on fire. We painted our lips blood red and kissed the mirror until we got a perfect mark out of it. We’d spend ages just getting ready. It was the fun part of parties, I guess.

Her spine cracked while she rested her head on my leg. She said, “Let’s never get old, okay?” and I told her that sounded great. Sometimes in the darkness, she’d sound serious about it. I wanted to ask her if she was fighting bigger demons than the ones I can raise, but before I found out, she moved away.

We belonged to a group that was all punchline. Someone says, “teen girls, am I right?” and laughter spreads like ripples through the room.

I remember the first time you find out that they hurt one of your friends, because that’s how you find out you’re not safe either. She looked so whole, and that was the problem. Her mascara wasn’t even running. I watched her tell the story five ten twenty times to officers who shuffled papers and sniffed at every other word and sighed often and looked at their watch even though they were the reason she was talking. They asked her what she was wearing, she gestured to her body: jeans, tee-shirt, hoodie. They asked her if she knew him, she said no. They asked her if she provoked him, she said no. They asked her if she told him to stop, she fell silent. After a while, she’d try to explain the fear that had crept up her throat until she had choked. They sighed. Asked for the story again. She had this look on her face that I still dream about. It looked like someone had sucked her soul out.

Kelly in the ninth grade with her shining face telling me, “One of us is the better person. Everyone always compares us.”

A waiter looking down my shirt and saying, “Just a water for you, huh?”

Ballet class with pin-thin shaking hands and bathrooms that smelt like a bad dream. A teacher who said, “Don’t eat unless you faint, darlings.” You get used to cigarettes in the hands of young girls. You get used to the backstage addictions of “only nine hundred more crunches to go.” You get used to seeing this stuff until one day someone asks you why you know all the calories in a grapenut.

The television saying, “Lose weight, feel great.”
The television saying, “Girls mean nothing.”
The television saying, “If you’re not pretty, you’re not worth discussing.”
The television saying, “If you’re pretty, your personality is awful.”
The television saying, “Spend your money.”

My father telling me: there’s nothing wrong with this system.

Memories // r.i.d (via inkskinned)

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Gender does not exist. Sexually distinctive behaviors do exist, for example: Females lactate and males do not, though both are mammals. Sexually distinctive behaviors are different from gender because gender is a culturally variant phenomenon, whereas breastfeeding is something that happens everywhere. In the animal kingdom, there are many sexually distinctive behaviors displayed by animals of both sexes, but to confuse these ingrained, instinctive mating display behaviors with something as complex and culturally variant as gender is absurd. Humans are not frogs, fruit flies, ducks, or bonobos. Gender dictates that women behave differently from men, and this behavior varies by culture. Patriarchy requires gender to exist, which is why all patriarchal cultures use gender. The study of the baboons actually brings home the idea that aggressive behavior in males is not inherent, as when the alpha male baboons died out, they were replaced with male baboons who were “nice guys”, and were not aggressive. The young males were socialized to be pacifists, and obviously it worked, and they were. It’s very encouraging because it means that gendered, aggressive male behavior (alpha male BS) is not ingrained, but learned, and that all it would take for humans to achieve a similar result would be to poison all the alpha males and wait a generation… (just kidding).

Anyway, there is no scientific evidence to suggest that there is such a thing as inherent gender in humans. Because human behavior is so richly varied, and gender roles themselves vary by culture, it is impossible that gendered behaviors be inherent in one sex or the other. As such, it is also impossible for them to be misplaced. I am not naturally nurturing any more than all men are naturally violent. Men who are more nurturing, kind, soft, sweet etc, are not “women” on the inside (though they’re A-OK in my book… we need more soft men). They are simply displaying normal human emotions and behaviors. Their gender is not “misplaced”, but they and society at large presume that the behaviors they display, because they are more commonly associated with females, is the result of them being female “on the inside”. I have known many different kinds of women. Some of them wore dresses and engaged in “girly” behaviors, and some of them didn’t shave, enjoyed rock climbing, and hated babies. They were all women because they were all adult human females, but they did not all share the same “feminine essence” that everyone associates with womanhood. None of the more “butch” women believed they were not women simply because their behaviors were more “mannish”. You can’t be fluid and “play gender like jazz” if you honestly believe that picking from one of two constraining boxes is true freedom. Gender nonconformity is one of the bravest things people in our society can do. I’m visibly a very feminine-looking woman, but I’ve chosen to stop shaving, and it’s interesting how similar I look to a male… most female grooming activities are carried out to make women look as different from men as possible, and I’m trying to stop performing gender for its own sake.

If gender is truly as fluid as you say it is and there is no right or wrong way to be a woman, how do you know you really are a woman on the inside? What is a woman? Describe it to me without falling back on stereotypes, and you’ll find that the only thing that defines woman is sex. That does not make me a sexual determinist. I don’t feel that sex affects abilities, likes, or dislikes, nor does it affect social behavior. Everyone is so very different that sexual determinism (gender), even if it is supposedly “fluid”, places limits on people. Why should it be fluid when it could just as easily not exist at all? The only solution to the oppression of women is the destruction of patriarchy, and the only way to destroy patriarchy is to undermine gender, not make it more “flexible”.

Gender is a social construct in the same way that race is. The color of a person’s skin makes no difference in their abilities or personality, but our society ascribes much importance to skin color through institutionalized racism. Because of this, the color of a person’s skin matters very much socially. Because gender works the same way, a person’s sex matters very much socially. Because I am female in a patriarchal, male dominated, gendered world, my sex matters and is relevant in terms of how I am treated and perceived by society at large. I have been catcalled, groped, and harassed by adult men in public when I was still a girl. They didn’t do this because I “identify” as a girl. They did this because I am female in a culture that is both misogynistic and male-dominated, and because they were socialized to be aggressive, entitled narcissists who are placed in a higher social position over women and girls by default. This socialization is called gender, and my socialization taught me to shrink, to be silent, to not question it because “boys will be boys”. Gendered socialization enables patriarchy to exist. Making the boxes more flexible or making new boxes does not question the hegemony of gender or the oppressive nature of patriarchy (and industrial capitalism), which kills thousands daily (most notably girls and women, but also indigenous people and POC) and destroys the environment at an alarming rate, making our planet toxic, dead and unliveable. All of these things are intertwined. Gender is not harmless expression.

Kitsunegari (via realmofvikings)

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land-of-propaganda:

Everything we know about VonDerrit Myers Jr.

  1. VonDerrit Myers was 18-years-old when he was shot at #16times, on Wednesday, 7:30pm, 10/08/2014.
  2. The officer that shot him was OFF-DUTY at the time of the killing. He was also wearing his St. Louis Police Department uniform.
  3. The police stated that VonDerrit Myers had a gun on him at the time of the shooting. Eyewitness accounts debate that. We do know the St. Louis Police Department has tried to plant a gun on ANOTHER young black man THIS YEAR. The store manager of says VonDerrit bought a sandwich and DID NOT have a gun.
  4. The police also stated that he jumped out of some bushes
    , but we now know that
    there were NO BUSHES.
  5. The fatal shot was in VonDerrit’s right cheek, he was also shot 6-7 times below his waist.
  6. We now know VonDerrit Myers was a father.

(via lesbophobes-deactivated20220907)

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Anonymous asked: Quick question, do you believe trans girls are men?

I believe trans women are male. Man/woman is an identity (I guess?). Male/female is not.

422 notes

lesbolution:

pumpkinpienix:

lesbolution:

maythemoonguideyou:

PSA: Well known transmisogynist, biphobic, whorephobic terf blogger Lesbolution/Lesbianwicce (her name is Sarah but she now goes by the name Chamomile) is planning on attending the Reclaim the Night march in Melbourne. Reclaim the night is supposed to be a safe space for trans-women, sex workers and all queer/lgtbtia* identifying people (as stated in Reclaim the nights safe space policy) but lesbolutions attendance is a direct violation of this policy. So to all my friends attending the march, please be on the lookout for her! She can come across as really nice but its important to remember how toxic she really is. 

that’s correct, i’ll be there!

to march against sexual assault like everyone else

my presence isn’t going to put anyone in danger, but your thinly veiled encouragement for violence/harassment against me puts me in danger so well done

you’ve just given people a means to act on their violent threats against me

but i’ll still attend, proudly, with a group of other radical feminists. your scare tactics are never gonna work on me, and nothing will discourage me from standing up against male violence.

accusing a woman of being dangerous when they have literally zero record of threatening harm or actually harming anyone and encouraging people in a crowd to “be on the lookout” for her is actually really threatening behaviour in and of itself and is a perfect example of the kind of blatant misogyny shown towards radical feminists

meanwhile I do NOT see these people screencapping and “warning” people against MEN attending the event - who are by and large the absolute greatest threat to the safety of trans women and sex workers

after a quick look through the “attending” list I see a hell of a lot of MEN

a quick poke through their “likes” shows: “sluts” “Lolita” “drunk bitches” “creeping” “I’ll break your neck” “exotic strippers” “latina babes” “sexy nerd girls” “50 shades of snapchat” about a MILLION revenge porn pages… these RACIST, SEXIST, VIOLENT men who have ZERO concern for women’s boundaries and safety? they’ve got a free pass. No-one is checking them out. You’re all too busy concerning yourself with the “real” threat of lesbian women… yeah, okay then!

lesbian survivors of sexual assault, no less!

(via lagoonhag)

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Get Heather the Lyme Treatment She Needs by Heather Neuner - GoFundMe

thecatsfootiepajamas:

orangekiwibird:

nicterhorstsketch:

blindsprings:

thecatsfootiepajamas:

llamadeus:

thecatsfootiepajamas:

It’s been six months and I’m not even halfway to my fundraising goal. I’m incredibly grateful for the donations I’ve received so far and it might get me through a few weeks but I need closer to $10K for my entire treatment plan. Please help me get the IV drugs, testing, and medication I need! If left untreated, Babesia is crippling and often fatal!

i reblogged this a couple of days ago and for some reason literally all my followers ignored it.

i know everyone hates being guilt tripped into reblogging something, but this isn’t some vague goalless campaign to raise awareness, it’s about a real person who needs treatment for a life-threatening illness.

so many people on my dash like to go on and on about how useless 99% of the disability/chronic illness “activism” on this site is (and i agree), but here’s something concrete and legitimately helpful you could do! i would likely be dead by now if i hadn’t been lucky enough to get my own condition diagnosed and treated in time. that’s how serious this kind of stuff is.

could you all please at least signal boost this?

God bless you all! I’ve posted this dozens of times and have been lucky to get a few persistent reblogs from the same three people but this has seriously restored my faith in humanity (or at least Tumblr). Tick and mosquito-borne illness is no joke but the gov’t seems to think it is so not a penny of my treatment is covered by my insurance. After five years I finally have the attention of Social Security Disability. I have an assessment next month but my hopes aren’t high and I still have bills to pay. Like she said^^ Every penny and reblog goes to help a real disabled person that could die without treatment. The kindness of friends and family over the past few years has been nothing short of a miracle but my inner circle can only give so much. Lyme alone is a nasty illness that can, and has already, infect the brain causing everything from mild light sensitivity and migraines to full blown tremors, gastroparesis (paralysis of the digestive tract), muscle weakness, chronic fatigue and even memory loss and seizures(I’m at the point where I can’t even stand in the shower for fear of seizing) Babesia on the other hand is almost identical to Malaria and literally destroys my red blood cells causing dangerous anemia that no amount of supplemental iron can fix. Please help me reach my goal so I can get the treatment I need! It’s been six months, I don’t think i’ll last six more!

signal boost!

Signal boost as well!

My suitemate actually died from this disease this past summer. It’s a very serious thing, if there is any amount you can give, please do. As the above bloggers said, this isn’t some awareness campaign, its someone who needs our help.

I woke up this morning to find this had over 300 notes and already over $200 in new donations! I’m going to cry, I’ve never met a community of such supportive strangers before. Thank you so much! Each and every one of you is saving my life. If ever I do have full use of my drawing hands again I promise I’ll do something special for all of you! Bless your generous souls!

(via lagoonhag)