monkeyspawnskydiamond

[monkeyspawnskydiamond]

the constant pressure women have to figure out how to be eco responsible for things like diapers, pads, tampons, condoms, birth control pills, the food they feed their kids, the soaps and laundry detergent they use...yes, it's on the table. but it's crazy that you hardly see the same pressures applied to men who most definitely have more leniency to use products for their pleasure. "do you know how many diapers are in land fills?" idk do we know how much energy is consumed by video games?? imagine a campaign around turning off your video games to save the earth or comparing the difference between the energy consumption of 2 hour board game vs 6 hours of video games. instead of focusing on moms who have to take care of their completely dependent baby or women who can't help but menstruate or w/e

[monkeyspawnskydiamond]

If I have any women following me who are in addiction recovery please be aware that men in NA and AA have a thing called “13th stepping” where they try to sleep with vulnerable newcomers in early sobriety, and then if they do they will brag about it with other men in the group. There are also many cases of these men encouraging women to relapse.

and this isn’t an uncommon fringe thing at all - it actually happened to me. when I went to a meeting for the second time a much older man approached me and asked if I needed a sponsor. I was very young at the time and naively said yes and agreed to exchange numbers. He seemed well-liked within the group so I thought he had good intentions. Fast forward a couple days and I was struggling with thoughts of relapsing so I texted him asking him to meet at a coffee shop near me and he said “sure but can we mess around first?” I was stunned at how disgusting it was and I never went to an NA group again after that.

Please only go to women’s groups and if there are none near you, have a trusted friend drive you to and from meetings and get a female sponsor. I’m sure you all already know that but I certainly didn’t know how big of an issue this was when I was in early recovery.

[monkeyspawnskydiamond]

[monkeyspawnskydiamond]

Women Artists to Know!

I've organized the names here into a few broad categories just to keep this from being a huge impenetrable wall of text, but there's a ton of stylistic variation within each category, and overlap between them. For painters who mix figuration and abstraction, I just picked the category I thought was the closer fit. All of these are artists I personally like, so they're mostly contemporary, and this is (obviously) nowhere close to being an exhaustive list of significant female artists in any style or medium. I'll add more names as I think of them or find them. Living/currently working artists are in blue :)

Painters

Abstractionists: Miyoko Ito, Hilma af Klint, Agnes Martin, Joan Mitchell, Helen Frankenthaler, Cecily Brown, Judy Chicago, Agnes Pelton, Aigana Gali, Elaine de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, Donna Huanca, Francesca Mollett, Anne Appleby, Amy Sillman, Bernice Bing, Louise Fishman, Michael (Corinne) West, Olga Albizu, Loie Hollowell, Lee Krasner, Wook-kyung Choi

Figurative painters: Georgia O'Keeffe, Marlene Dumas, Jane Freilicher, Jennifer Packer, Mary Newcomb, Tamara de Lempicka, Mamma Andersson, Agnes Treherne, Mary Fedden, Nicole Eisenman, Dana Schutz (controversial, but make your own judgments), Florine Stettheimer, Sue Bright Lautmann Hertel, Shara Hughes, Joani Tremblay, Lois Dodd, Rosa Loy, Marion Wagschal, Amrita Sher-Gil, Susan Rothenberg, Tatiana Blass, Suzanne Valadon, Michiko Itatani, Zinaida Serebriakova

Surrealists: Leonora Carrington, Remedios Varo, Leonor Fini, Toyen, Gertrude Abercrombie, Jane Graverol, Marion Adnams, Rachel Baes, Emmy Bridgwater, Kay Sage, Dorothea Tanning, Bridget Bate Tichenor, Maria Anto

Textiles, Sculpture, Printmaking, Conceptual Art

Textile artists: Tracey Emin (she's worked in a lot of mediums, but I'm mainly a fan of her quilts), Faith Ringgold (insane quilter), Gunta Stölzl (legendary Bauhaus weaver), Anni Albers (another Bauhaus legend), Otti Berger (another), Olga Fisch (another), Olga de Amaral, the Gee's Bend quilters, Mary Walker Philips, Woomin Kim, Sheila Hicks, Maris Van Vlack (one of the best textile artists currently working, and she's still a student!), Erin M. Riley, Samantha Bittman, Mrinalini Mukherjee

Sculptors, printmakers, conceptual artists: Ana Mendieta, Louise Bourgeois, Roni Horn, Kiki Smith, Ruth Asawa, Käthe Kollwitz, Germaine Richier, Erika Verzutti, Elaine Cameron-Weir, Eva Hesse, Senga Nengudi, Leonor Antunes, Alicja Kwade, Edith Dekyndt, Alice Channer, Lubna Chowdhary

[monkeyspawnskydiamond]

“In certain young people today…I notice what I find increasingly troubling: a cold-blooded grasping, a hunger to take and take and take, but never give; a massive sense of entitlement; an inability to show gratitude; an ease with dishonesty and pretension and selfishness that is couched in the language of self-care; an expectation always to be helped and rewarded no matter whether deserving or not; language that is slick and sleek but with little emotional intelligence; an astonishing level of self-absorption; an unrealistic expectation of puritanism from others; an over-inflated sense of ability, or of talent where there is any at all; an inability to apologize, truly and fully, without justifications; a passionate performance of virtue that is well executed in the public space of Twitter but not in the intimate space of friendship. I find it obscene.

People who ask you to ‘educate’ yourself while not having actually read any books themselves, while not being able to intelligently defend their own ideological positions, because by ‘educate,’ they actually mean ‘parrot what I say, flatten all nuance, wish away complexity.’

People who wield the words ‘violence’ and ‘weaponize’ like tarnished pitchforks. People who depend on obfuscation, who have no compassion for anybody genuinely curious or confused. Ask them a question and you are told that the answer is to repeat a mantra. Ask again for clarity and be accused of violence.

And so we have a generation of young people on social media so terrified of having the wrong opinions that they have robbed themselves of the opportunity to think and to learn and to grow.”

-Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

[monkeyspawnskydiamond]

[monkeyspawnskydiamond]

I love the post-apocalyptic genre as much as the next horror fan, but there is something to be unpacked in how they often reinforce very reactionary political ideas. Not just in the more bluntly conservative ways of thematically rewarding ideas like

“shoot first ask questions never”

“never offer mercy”

“torture works”

“Strong Government may be doing Bad Things but it is the only thing stopping people from becoming roaming bands of cannibal rapists unless Strong Men with police or military training maintain order once society collapses”

But also in the less easily recognizable reactionary beliefs like

“power vacuums are real and inevitable” (implying that unless you plan to exert a similar level of power and take the top of the hierarchy then you should not seek to dismantle power)

“the people who survive are the best— the strongest and smartest and most resourceful, the ones who deserve it most.” (implying that eugenics is an inevitable biological force rather than a political ideology)

“If someone who deserves to live dies, it is due to the actions of a villain, ‘good’ ‘important’ people do not just die from sickness or hunger or chance or mundane accidents” (more eugenics tbh, or at very least a just world ideology & confusing storytelling conventions with how the world works)

I think this becomes an issue when people—who have not studied, for example, the way that communities engage in mutual aid during natural disasters even if disconnected beforehand—will assume that collapse will inevitably lead to evil cannibal hoards as the biggest threat to survival and therefore the most important thing to prepare for, instead of understanding that collapse is much more likely to lead to an absolute need for community interdependence and cooperation to survive in the face of environmental disaster. I think it’s an issue if you can’t picture disabled people during collapse because you watched a hundred depictions of post apocalyptic shows where disabled people are eerily absent or die immediately, instead of internalizing the much more likely reality that if you survive disaster even if you were able-bodied previously, you and everyone you know will likely be surviving as disabled people.

like the media is fun as a form of storytelling, but if you are approaching your imagination of the future with increasing climate crisis with images you got from zombie shows, you do need to take a break from the fiction and learn from communities that have actually experienced natural disasters in real life.

[monkeyspawnskydiamond]

i think the main reason why so many libfems or queer leftists have a misunderstanding when it comes to radical feminism is because they think that radical feminism means ‘extreme feminism’ when in reality there’s nothing wrong with women wanting to be extreme given our history, but also that radical feminism isn’t ’extreme’ it just requires some type of common sense and critical thinking which those groups i mentioned typically lack… to them it’s a lot easier to say yes to men and fight for their approval than to think for themselves and try to understand different perspectives..also radical feminism is the best form of feminism for women but libfem and queer leftist feminists won’t believe that until we let men in…….

[monkeyspawnskydiamond]

In teaching her about oppression, be careful not to turn the oppressed into saints. Saintliness is not a prerequisite for dignity. People who are unkind and dishonest are still deserve dignity. Property rights for Nigerian women, for example, is a major feminist issues, and the women do not need to be good and angelic to be allowed their property rights.

– Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (2016) Dear Ijeawele, or a Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions, p. 58.

[monkeyspawnskydiamond]

people have this stereotypical idea in their head of what abusive relationships are like that consists of a crazed drunkard husband who's completely insane and yells all the time and a pitiful little wilted flower of a wife who cries all day, when a lot of the time it looks the opposite. the man is calm and collected because he gets to take out all his anger on his wife in private and he has has his wife cooking and cleaning for him so he's totally relaxed. meanwhile the wife is run ragged from doing everything for her husband and children, and is distressed from being terrorized by him, so yeah she's short with people, she snaps at her children a little too often, she's stressed. and when he's slightly inconvenienced, the man throws a tantrum and pretends he's the victim, because he's such a better parent than her, and she's actually the crazy one who needs to just calm down (accept his abuse with no reaction and keep the peace). and people see this and think, "look at this totally calm and rational man, he never yells at his kids, meanwhile his wife is crazy and yelling at her kids and husband all the time." yeah of course she's the one who's crazy! she's being driven crazy 24/7! and the husband says, "yes, see, SHE'S the problem," and everyone believes him. so sickening

[monkeyspawnskydiamond]

This entire thing should be a must-read for anyone who has the standard liberal feminist stance on ~sex workers~ and their ~career choices,~ or for any radical feminists who are looking for yet more evidence that prostitution is a degradation and that johns are scum. 

Some choice excerpts:

“[O]f 700 men interviewed […] just over half were either married or in a relationship with a woman.”

[One participant] said: “I want my ideal prostitute not to behave like one,” he said, “to role-play to be a pretend girlfriend, a casual date, not business-like…”

“I asked [one participant] how often he thought the women he paid enjoyed the sex. ‘I don’t want them to get any pleasure,’ he told me. ‘I am paying for it and it is her job to give me pleasure. If she enjoys it I would feel cheated.’”

“When asked what would end ­prostitution, one interviewee laughed and said, ‘Kill all the girls.’”

“Almost half said they ­believed that most women in prostitution are victims of pimps (“the pimp does the ­psychological raping of the woman,” explained one), lured, tricked, or trafficked. But they still continued to visit them.”

“One of the most interesting findings was that many believed men would “need” to rape if they could not pay for sex on demand.”

“Visiting an area where prostitution is legal or openly advertised [such as Amsterdam or Thailand] had given them a renewed dedication to buying sex when they returned to the UK.”

“[One participant] said: ‘Look, men pay for women because he can have whatever and whoever he wants. Lots of men go to prostitutes so they can do things to them that real women would not put up with.’”

Emphasis added.

The johns interviewed were a very foul mixture of “the girls don’t even pretend to like me, it’s all robotic and mechanical :( :( :(” + “I buy access to these women so I can treat them like dirt and i want them to know it.” One of the johns interviewed even said a prostituted woman asked him to help her, said she had been tricked and brought to London on false pretenses, but he just had sex with her and left because she might have been lying to him.  I mean… if anyone needs any more proof that men who buy women hate us, don’t care for us, don’t care about anything except their own feelings and their own orgasms, JUST ASK THE JOHNS. They tell on themselves all the damn time but for some reason certain people don’t want to hear it. 

[monkeyspawnskydiamond]

some of you guys view misogyny as simply men being mean to women and not a systemic hierarchical issue that prevents women from gaining liberation, support systems or a socioeconomic foothold and it shows every time you talk about “misandry”

[monkeyspawnskydiamond]

it’s so funny when people talk about porn like it’s this revolutionary counter-cultural thing. oh yeah the thing almost no one doesn’t watch that confirms every sexist, racist, homophobic myth imaginable and makes sex a commodity? yep you’re breaking barriers jacking to it. good work out there, champ.

[monkeyspawnskydiamond]

[monkeyspawnskydiamond]

Surrogacy is the continuation of millenia of men claiming that they are the life force/source of the soul for babies, and that women are just the mindless vessels for them. Only now that men have learnt more about genetics, they’ve decided to use this to continue the exact same line of thinking “I own the genetics and the surrogate is just a vessel who has no legal or moral right to her body or her children.” There is no justification for men owning women’s bodies regardless of whether it’s a priest or a scientist claiming otherwise.

[monkeyspawnskydiamond]

“I came to learn that women have never had a history or culture of leisure. (Unless you were a nun, one researcher later told me.) That from the dawn of humanity, high status men, removed from the drudge work of life, have enjoyed long, uninterrupted hours of leisure. And in that time, they created art, philosophy, literature, they made scientific discoveries and sank into what psychologists call the peak human experience of flow. Women aren’t expected to flow. I read feminist leisure research (who knew such a thing existed?) and international studies that found women around the globe felt that they didn’t deserve leisure time. It felt too selfish. Instead, they felt they had to earn time to themselves by getting to the end of a very long To Do list. Which, let’s face it, never ends. I began to realise that time is power. That time is a feminist issue.”

— Brigid Schulte: Why time is a feminist issue

[monkeyspawnskydiamond]

i was watching testimonies by survivors of sex trafficking, and a lot of them talk about how their captors referred to them as “sex workers” and kept telling them they had to “work” and generate profit if they wanted to eat, if they didn’t want their relatives killed, if they didn’t want to be hit. if a “client” paid for a “service,” they had to give it to him.

work work work work work never rape never prostitution always work, to little girls who had heard of prostitution but never “sex work,” who didn’t know what was happening was illegal, who were told that what was happening was normal, that it would stop hurting eventually because “it’s just work, look at all these other women doing it.”

there was a testimony by a pimp, who admitted to having kidnapped girls off the streets. he said he liked the power of bossing people around. he said he liked having so many “employees.”

normalizing prostitution and using “destigmatizing” language is not a new tactic to “empower” (prostituted) women. it’s something perpetrators of sex trafficking have been doing for years to hide the realities of the sex industry from young girls and keep them from seeing themselves as victims of a crime.

don’t call yourself a feminist if you’re unwilling to see the parallels between sex trafficking and “consensual sex work.”