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beautifulmorningstar · 1 year

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idk what to say about it, but i've noticed a core part of liberal feminism is essentially "well the right-wing people say they hate when women do (thing), and they make measures to punish women for doing (thing), so obviously (thing) is empowering," even though the thing in question is stuff like wearing stuff (clothes, shoes, makeup, etc.) that hinders your ability to move or exist comfortably and appeals to the male gaze by objectifying you, selling your sexuality to strangers (porn, prostitution), or having a lot of sex with men, particularly outside of committed relationships (hookups, even with strangers).

i can't quite articulate why this is fallacious, even though i know it is. obviously i don't think women who do any of the listed things are evil, immoral, or deserving of punishment for the things they do, but i know the things they're doing are humiliating, impractical, and in service of men, whether they know (or choose to recognize) it or not. they're just the flipside of housewives, who are also trapped in appealing to and servicing men in ways that make their lives harder or less satisfying in ways that men never would (least of all for women), yet thinking themselves more "free" than the other (i believe it was a dworkin quote that spoke about how the wife and the "whore" both think their situation to be "better" than the other's).

what do you think? how would you explain it, if you had to?

Hello! I know what you are referring to, this idea that anything anti-conservative is inherently empowering. On the surface, it always looked to me like a bunch of adults still wrestling with their (conservative) mommy and daddy issues. However, I think you're also implying cross-culturally, which may have more to it than just that. I think maybe to the individual, on an individual level, doing something you wish to do that has been coercively denied to you.. It may be a sort of empowerment? It would certainly feel empowering. But as you said, it's NOT empowering in the actual literal sense of the word - that is to say, you do not hold any material power, unless you count personal choice. It's certainly not in a feminist context, where the bigger picture shows us that certain behaviours and modes of dress are literally sold to and in some places coerced to women, not always but often with the specific intention to disempower them materially / encourage female objectification.

Maybe there's a side to it like this: conservative people of any culture are often seen as the parent that tells you not to leave the boundaries of the village because you might come back with ideas they don't like, or have better understanding than them that upturns the social order, or simply because noone should leave the boundaries of the village. You might be someone already intrinsically unable to fit in with this village, you might not. Either way, the reasons you get for "stay in the village" are all shallow and does not take your personhood into account. So you leave, because that act within that moment is an exercise of your own agency, despite any wolves that may or may not exist beyond your parents' village. Later you find another village with opposing views and instead of taking a balanced, nuanced view you immediately feel like your life experiences thus far are validated and you join this other village with the exact same issues in a different control system. Eventually you may see that both villages want you to follow their specific mode of control for their specific use, and that you're better off without them.......or you might never realize it.

That was so dumb, I'm sorry, but that's what I can picture right now: people bouncing from one group's extremism to another, allergic to reflection and analysis. To be fair, many people don't have the time or energy to do much other than survive which is why we have chronic followers everywhere. Many people also do not think through aspects of society of life that they have been raised in since childhood. I personally suspect (based on where I come from) women with common-sense, feminist, or loving mothers tend to be more likely to eventually (or even sooner) reach feminism after observing the world. But again... Only if they observed to begin with.

Also to clarify, I don't think some women who do genuinely want to sleep around should be lumped in here. I understand there's a big segment of women who are coerced into it/do it as self harm/do it because they think it's empowerment, but I've also known straight women who in their 20s had a high sex drive and a desire to sleep with many men. Of course, there's hardly a safe or conducive environment for them to do so, which is the main issue, but at least the ones I know did as much as they could to be safe and none of them were raped or coerced into things they didn't want. Within such a rapey and sEx-pOsiTiVe society the line is thin, but there IS a line. Some women do get enjoyment out of sexual encounters where they're safe, in control of their own sexuality, and aren't being pornified or pregnancy baited.

I've also known bisexual and lesbian women with high sex drives, as a side note, but I won't go into that because it's relatively different when you're sleeping with other women.

I feel like the culture of women is focused on togetherness - perhaps a trait that male culture may have also centered a very long time ago. This trait has been twisted and distorted but it remains, and women are more likely to seek "compromise" even if compromise is not compromise at all. Most straight women will want marriage because that's the most financially secure, "right" (as they were taught) way to procreate, and many straight women do want to procreate. In many places, housewifery isn't even a choice. It's a reality forced on you.

Whether it's being locked in prostitution or having unwittingly been shuttled into being a tradwife, what are these women more likely to do? Grapple with the sense of imprisonment and indefinable depression, or double down on the "right"ness of their lifestyle and scrabble for a feeling of dignity through rejecting feminism (as ironic as that is)? Especially if these are people who were never exposed to a positively-expressed feminist thought in their life.

Ultimately, we are neck-deep in a system and global aspects of culture that is built to torture women in the pursuit of male total dominance and control. The fact that total dominance and control has so far failed is nature; the fact that so much of it has succeeded anyway is nurture (and coercion, and violence, and compliance). To be a woman free and awake within her own mind is an active state: feminists all had to observe, question, unlearn, seek, argue, hide, fight, breakdown, persevere. Feminism is an active battle in our current world system. That's what the problem really is- that straight women can't procreate with men in a way that's guaranteed safe, not that they're intentionally submitting to men's pleasures via marriage or hookups. After all, straight female sexuality exists (I do not believe all women were meant to be lesbians, and bisexuals of course experience attraction to males as well) and as human beings with a certain kind of intelligence, I think relations between the two sexes should have been civilized by now (except that all of us are stuck in a hamster wheel of maintaining toxic societal traditions and ideas).

I agree with you on the other point though, prostitution and stupid dress... gotta go.

#anon #asks #I am SO sorry I rambled for so long #I was honestly thinking through everything you mentioned #I hope it's not annoying.

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nothorses · 3 years

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Interview With An Ex-Radfem

exradfem is an anonymous Tumblr user who identifies as transmasculine, and previously spent time in radical feminist communities. They have offered their insight into those communities using their own experiences and memories as a firsthand resource.

Background

I was raised in an incredibly fundamentalist religion, and so was predisposed to falling for cult rhetoric. Naturally, I was kicked out for being a lesbian. I was taken in by the queer community, particularly the trans community, and I got back on my feet- somehow. I had a large group of queer friends, and loved it. I fully went in on being the Best Trans Ally Possible, and constantly tried to be a part of activism and discourse.

Unfortunately, I was undersocialized, undereducated, and overenthusiastic. I didn't fully understand queer or gender theory. In my world, when my parents told me my sexuality was a choice and I wasn't born that way, they were absolutely being homophobic. I understood that no one should care if it's a choice or not, but it was still incredibly, vitally important to me that I was born that way.

On top of that, I already had an intense distrust of men bred by a lot of trauma. That distrust bred a lot of gender essentialism that I couldn't pull out of the gender binary. I felt like it was fundamentally true that men were the problem, and that women were inherently more trustworthy. And I really didn't know where nonbinary people fit in.

Then I got sucked down the ace exclusionist pipeline; the way the arguments were framed made sense to my really surface-level, liberal view of politics. This had me primed to exclude people –– to feel like only those that had been oppressed exactly like me were my community.

Then I realized I was attracted to my nonbinary friend. I immediately felt super guilty that I was seeing them as a woman. I started doing some googling (helped along by ace exclusionists on Tumblr) and found the lesfem community, which is basically radfem “lite”: lesbians who are "only same sex attracted". This made sense to me, and it made me feel so much less guilty for being attracted to my friend; it was packaged as "this is just our inherent, biological desire that is completely uncontrollable". It didn't challenge my status quo, it made me feel less guilty about being a lesbian, and it allowed me to have a "biological" reason for rejecting men.

I don't know how much dysphoria was playing into this, and it's something I will probably never know; all of this is just piecing together jumbled memories and trying to connect dots. I know at the time I couldn't connect to this trans narrative of "feeling like a woman". I couldn't understand what trans women were feeling. This briefly made me question whether I was nonbinary, but radfem ideas had already started seeping into my head and I'm sure I was using them to repress that dysphoria. That's all I can remember.

The lesfem community seeded gender critical ideas and larger radfem princples, including gender socialization, gender as completely meaningless, oppression as based on sex, and lesbian separatism. It made so much innate sense to me, and I didn't realize that was because I was conditioned by the far right from the moment of my birth. Of course women were just a biological class obligated to raise children: that is how I always saw myself, and I always wanted to escape it.

I tried to stay in the realms of TIRF (Trans-Inclusive Radical Feminist) and "gender critical" spaces, because I couldn't take the vitriol on so many TERF blogs. It took so long for me to get to the point where I began seeing open and unveiled transphobia, and I had already read so much and bought into so much of it that I thought that I could just ignore those parts.

In that sense, it was absolutely a pipeline for me. I thought I could find a "middle ground", where I could "center women" without being transphobic.

Slowly, I realized that the transphobia was just more and more disgustingly pervasive. Some of the trans men and butch women I looked up to left the groups, and it was mostly just a bunch of nasty people left. So I left.

After two years offline, I started to recognize I was never going to be a healthy person without dealing with my dysphoria, and I made my way back onto Tumblr over the pandemic. I have realized I'm trans, and so much of this makes so much more sense now. I now see how I was basically using gender essentialism to repress my identity and keep myself in the closet, how it was genuinely weaponized by TERFs to keep me there, and how the ace exclusionist movement primed me into accepting lesbian separatism- and, finally, radical feminism.

The Interview

You mentioned the lesfem community, gender criticals, and TIRFs, which I haven't heard about before- would you mind elaborating on what those are, and what kinds of beliefs they hold?

I think the lesfem community is recruitment for lesbians into the TERF community. Everything is very sanitized and "reasonable", and there's an effort not to say anything bad about trans women. The main focus was that lesbian = homosexual female, and you can't be attracted to gender, because you can't know someone's gender before knowing them; only their sex.

It seemed logical at the time, thinking about sex as something impermeable and gender as internal identity. The most talk about trans women I saw initially was just in reference to the cotton ceiling, how sexual orientation is a permanent and unchangeable reality. Otherwise, the focus was homophobia. This appealed to me, as I was really clinging to the "born this way" narrative.

This ended up being a gateway to two split camps - TIRFs and gender crits.

I definitely liked to read TIRF stuff, mostly because I didn't like the idea of radical feminism having to be transphobic. But TIRFs think that misogyny is all down to hatred of femininity, and they use that as a basis to be able to say trans women are "just as" oppressed.

Gender criticals really fought out against this, and pushed the idea that gender is fake, and misogyny is just sex-based oppression based on reproductive issues. They believe that the source of misogyny is the "male need to control the source of reproduction"- which is what finally made me think I had found the "source" of my confusion. That's why I ended up in gender critical circles instead of TIRF circles.

I'm glad, honestly, because the mask-off transphobia is what made me finally see the light. I wouldn't have seen that in TIRF communities.

I believed this in-between idea, that misogyny was "sex-based oppression" and that transphobia was also real and horrible, but only based on transition, and therefore a completely different thing. I felt that this was the "nuanced" position to take.

The lesfem community also used the fact that a lot of lesbians have partners who transition, still stay with their lesbian partners, and see themselves as lesbian- and that a lot of trans men still see themselves as lesbians. That idea is very taboo and talked down in liberal queer spaces, and I had some vague feelings about it that made me angry, too. I really appreciated the frank talk of what I felt were my own taboo experiences.

I think gender critical ideology also really exploited my own dysphoria. There was a lot of talk about how "almost all butches have dysphoria and just don't talk about it", and that made me feel so much less alone and was, genuinely, a big relief to me that I "didn't have to be trans".

Lesfeminism is essentially lesbian separatism dressed up as sex education. Lesfems believe that genitals exist in two separate categories, and that not being attracted to penises is what defines lesbians. This is used to tell cis lesbians, "dont feel bad as a lesbian if you're attracted to trans men", and that they shouldn’t feel "guilty" for not being attracted to trans women. They believe that lesbianism is not defined as being attracted to women, it is defined as not being attracted to men; which is a root idea in lesbian separatism as well.

Lesfems also believe that attraction to anything other than explicit genitals is a fetish: if you're attracted to flat chests, facial hair, low voices, etc., but don't care if that person has a penis or not, you're bisexual with a fetish for masculine attributes. Essentially, they believe the “-sexual” suffix refers to the “sex” that you are assigned at birth, rather than your attraction: “homosexual” refers to two people of the same sex, etc. This was part of their pushback to the ace community, too.

I think they exploited the issues of trans men and actively ignored trans women intentionally, as a way of avoiding the “TERF” label. Pronouns were respected, and they espoused a constant stream of "trans women are women, trans men are men (but biology still exists and dictates sexual orientation)" to maintain face.

They would only be openly transmisogynistic in more private, radfem-only spaces.

For a while, I didn’t think that TERFs were real. I had read and agreed with the ideology of these "reasonable" people who others labeled as TERFs, so I felt like maybe it really was a strawman that didn't exist. I think that really helped suck me in.

It sounds from what you said like radical feminism works as a kind of funnel system, with "lesfem" being one gateway leading in, and "TIRF" and "gender crit" being branches that lesfem specifically funnels into- with TERFs at the end of the funnel. Does that sound accurate?

I think that's a great description actually!

When I was growing up, I had to go to meetings to learn how to "best spread the word of god". It was brainwashing 101: start off by building a relationship, find a common ground. Do not tell them what you really believe. Use confusing language and cute innuendos to "draw them in". Prey on their emotions by having long exhausting sermons, using music and peer pressure to manipulate them into making a commitment to the church, then BAM- hit them with the weird shit.

Obviously I am paraphrasing, but this was framed as a necessary evil to not "freak out" the outsiders.

I started to see that same talk in gender critical circles: I remember seeing something to the effect of, "lesfem and gender crit spaces exist to cleanse you of the gender ideology so you can later understand the 'real' danger of it", which really freaked me out; I realized I was in a cult again.

I definitely think it's intentional. I think they got these ideas from evangelical Christianity, and they actively use it to spread it online and target young lesbians and transmascs. And I think gender critical butch spaces are there to draw in young transmascs who hate everything about femininity and womanhood, and lesfem spaces are there to spread the idea that trans women exist as a threat to lesbianism.

Do you know if they view TIRFs a similar way- as essentially prepping people for TERF indoctrination?

Yes and no.

I've seen lots of in-fighting about TIRFs; most TERFs see them as a detriment, worse than the "TRAs" themselves. I've also definitely seen it posed as "baby's first radfeminism". A lot of TIRFs are trans women, at least from what I've seen on Tumblr, and therefore are not accepted or liked by radfems. To be completely honest, I don't think they're liked by anyone. They just hate men.

TIRFs are almost another breed altogether; I don't know if they have ties to lesfems at all, but I do think they might've spearheaded the online ace exclusionist discourse. I think a lot of them also swallowed radfem ideology without knowing what it was, and parrot it without thinking too hard about how it contradicts with other ideas they have.

The difference is TIRFs exist. They're real people with a bizarre, contradictory ideology. The lesfem community, on the other hand, is a completely manufactured "community" of crypto-terfs designed specifically to indoctrinate people into TERF ideology.

Part of my interest in TIRFs here is that they seem to have a heavy hand in the way transmascs are treated by the trans community, and if you're right that they were a big part of ace exclusionism too they've had a huge impact on queer discourse as a whole for some time. It seems likely that Baeddels came out of that movement too.

Yes, there’s a lot of overlap. The more digging I did, the more I found that it's a smaller circle running the show than it seems. TIRFs really do a lot of legwork in peddling the ideology to outer queer community, who tend to see it as generic feminism.

TERFs joke a lot about how non-radfems will repost or reblog from TERFs, adding "op is a TERF”. They're very gleeful when people accept their ideology with the mask on. They think it means these people are close to fully learning the "truth", and they see it as further evidence they have the truth the world is hiding. I think it's important to speak out against radical feminism in general, because they’re right; their ideology does seep out into the queer community.

Do you think there's any "good" radical feminism?

No. It sees women as the ultimate victim, rather than seeing gender as a tool to oppress different people differently. Radical feminism will always see men as the problem, and it is always going to do harm to men of color, gay men, trans men, disabled men, etc.

Women aren't a coherent class, and radfems are very panicked about that fact; they think it's going to be the end of us all. But what's wrong with that? That's like freaking out that white isn't a coherent group. It reveals more about you.

It's kind of the root of all exclusionism, the more I think about it, isn't it? Just freaking out that some group isn't going to be exclusive anymore.

Radical feminists believe that women are inherently better than men.

For TIRFs, it's gender essentialism. For TERFs, its bio essentialism. Both systems are fundamentally broken, and will always hurt the groups most at risk. Centering women and misogyny above all else erases the root causes of bigotry and oppression, and it erases the intersections of race and class. The idea that women are always fundamentally less threatening is very white and privileged.

It also ignores how cis women benefit from gender norms just as cis men do, and how cis men suffer from gender roles as well. It’s a system of control where gender non-conformity is a punishable offense.

#transgender #transphobia #trans #transmisogyny #radical feminism #radfem #feminism #transandrophobia #terfs #tirfs #gender critical #nothorses #cult mention #long post

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deactivated-20220808 · 3 years

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On Validity Culture and Alter Race - Parethnicity and Racism in the System Community

Remy here to talk about a difficult and uncomfortable subject, but as a white person who considers themselves an ally to people of color, and especially systems of color, I feel like this is something that definitely needs to be brought up a lot more, so I’m going to talk about it, since no one else really seems to want to.

I will note that this post is mostly directed at white people, so there is a lot of speech directed towards white people and the potential white person reading this post. It should also be noted that this post is going to be very long, but if you actually care about people of color, I suggest you read this post before sending me a death threat for questioning you. If you don’t, well, I think that says a lot more about you than it does about me, and that’s on you to think about.

Introduction

So, another issue I have with validity culture, is that it’s all about making safe spaces...

For white people.

So many system spaces I’ve been in online have been very, very white and generally kind of hostile to systems whose bodies are people of color. Even if it’s not direct, these communities are still working hard to /seem/ not racist, but don’t actually make an effort to unlearn racism and many systems of color, (SOC), feel safe and comfortable in their spaces.

This is such an issue because SOC are already traumatized from childhood onwards by racism, intergenerationally, and as if that wasn’t enough, in the case of DIDOSDD, they were also traumatized enough to gain a system from even more childhood trauma piled on top of that. SOC need a safe space away from all of this more than anyone else, but I so often see them get ignored and thrown under the bus because white people and white systems don’t want to feel bad about their own racism, which they refuse to unlearn.

This isn’t something I want to ignore anymore. Racism is a huge problem in the system community, on all sides of syscourse, in every part of the system, multiple, plural, DIDOSDD and endogenic communities, and the only people that are talking about it are SOC, who can only talk about it with other SOC, lest they get ostracized, harassed, guilt tripped or gaslit by white systems who feel threatened by being called out for racist behaviour, as if being traumatized or mentally ill is an excuse for racism.

So I’m going to talk about it, because I feel like other white people and systems would listen to me more than they would SOC.

What Causes This Behavior?

There are a lot of contributing factors to white systems being so hostile to SOC, even if they claim to be anti-racist or allies to POC, but there are generally 4 big reasons I see as the biggest contributors to this kind of behavior in (white) system spaces:

1) White people first and foremost think that because they know about racism, that they cannot perpetuate it, which is far from true. These people don’t want to see racism as an inherent part of being white, as an inherent part of white privilege and an inherent part of themselves as white people. They don’t want to face the reality that, as white people, we are inherently racist. Not born this way, but raised this way by an inherently racist society made to benefit us and use POC as stepping stones to our success as white people. They don’t want to admit that we actively have to make an effort to unlearn this racism, because that would require not only making an effort, but giving a shit about POC and expending emotional labor that they simply don’t want to give out.

2) Because of this, they want to distance themselves from being white by hiding behind other minority labels, such as their autism, mental illness or their queerness/LGBT identity in a vain attempt to rid themselves of their white guilt, but all it does is make them seem more ignorant. These people will behave in a very ‘I’m not white, I’m nonbinary’ kind of way just to get out of being ‘attacked’ by the big, scary POC who are just trying to make spaces for themselves more comfortable and trying to minimize the trauma of just having to live their life in a society that’s constantly trying to set them up for failure.

3) Then, they do everything they can to seem ‘woke’ on a surface level to other white people without actually putting in the work to unlearn their racism. This is because they care more about getting accused of being racist than they do about actually not being racist, so when they are accused of being racist, they see it as an attack on themselves and get extremely defensive. “Well I can’t be racist, I have BLM in my bio”, “I can’t be racist, I’m queer and I love Marsha P. Johnson”, “I’m not racist, I’m ADHD and you’re being ableist for criticizing me and my hyperfixation, which happens to be racist/include racist elements”.

4) And most of all, they don’t actually, fully understand our position of power over POC and their own white privilege and how they benefit from it--and they refuse to learn because it requires them to unpack their own ingrained racism and try to unlearn it, which means they have to confront the fact that we are racist and have been born and bred to be racist, which is bad to them because they perceive being racist as a personal failure and an irredeemable flaw instead of something that, once recognized, can be learned away from and grown out of with the proper work put into it.

How Does Validity Culture Factor Into This?

I specifically mentioned ‘validity culture’ in the title of this post for a reason, and now it’s time to talk about that and what that means for the discussion of ‘alter race’ and white-bodied system’s usage of Japanese names.

Because of those points listed above, ‘validity culture’ in white system spaces becomes a very subtly racist area that’s full of white systems trying to validate other white system’s racism, and only agreeing with the (few, in my experience) SOC that agree with them.

It actually feels like a natural progression if you think about it. Validity culture in system spaces prioritizes validating everyone and every experience out of fear of making someone feel bad and possibly invalidating their experiences, and that progresses to racism very, very quickly because when you try to call white people out on their racism, they tend to feel bad about it, but not bad that they were doing something racist, instead bad that they were called out for doing something they liked that happened to be racist. As I’ve stated before already, white people tend to care more about being called out for being racist and how that makes them feel than they do about making their spaces safer for POC and how they feel about experiencing racism.

But these white systems very often don’t get called out for their racism because 1) most of these spaces are so hostile to SOC that they tend not to join spaces like this, or when they do, they stay quiet out of fear of being demonized, harassed, and kicked out of these spaces, and 2) this would mean that the other white systems in that space would feel bad and have to work on their own racism, especially if the system doing the calling out in the first place is also white, and as we’ve already established, that’s just too much work for these poor, mentally ill, neurodivergent, LGBT systems, and it’s not like they don’t experience discrimination too! What, are you demeaning the struggles of mentally ill, neurodivergent LGBT people by asking me to do some inner-reflection on my own subconscious, racist biases and actively work on them to make my space and the spaces I’m in safer for people and systems of color?

The answer is no, obviously. You are not having your struggles demeaned and shit on by SOC who are just trying to speak out and make spaces safer for themselves, because there are mentally ill, neurodivergent, LGBT systems of color, too, and to act like SOC/POC are some monolith in which they can’t be these things and that they are persecuting you for asking one of your alters to use a different name, at least online, because it muddies the meaning of that name in their culture for the sake of white people’s aesthetics and how /they/ identify is racist.

This really is one of the few instances where my current blog title, ‘If you feel attacked, you’re part of the problem’, is more than applicable, because it’s true. White people feel attacked for being called out for their racism, and I’ve said this several times before, but I feel it must be reiterated at every instance I can get so that I can drill it into the skulls of other white people, but white people more often than not care more about being /accused/ of being racist than they actually do about the rights and safety and comfort of people of color, which is why even so many leftist/’progressive’ spaces, feminist spaces, spaces for mental illness support, LGBT support and pride, support for the homeless, and many more, online and in real life tend to be so white across the board, and this still rings very true in system spaces.

Validity culture and racism very, very often go hand-in-hand, with primarily white spaces validating other white people for their racism because facing the idea that they might be racist makes them feel bad, as if SOC/POC don’t already feel terrible enough actually having to experience racism on a daily basis.

Parethnicity: Are Alters Actually a Race Outside of the Body?

The short answer to this question: No. Obviously. No, alters/headmates are not actually a race outside of the body, no matter how hard you want to believe this, no matter how offended it makes you, no matter how defensive you get, nothing will be able to change the race you actually are in the body you’re living in because it’s the first thing anyone notices about you when looking at you.

But here’s the long answer, for those who want to understand more, since I know everyone else is just going to come into my inbox and tell me I’m a terrible person:

One of the biggest ways this hostile behavior towards SOC manifests, especially behavior number 2 in that list, is in the form of anime introjects claiming to be actually Japanese in the headspace, partaking in Japanese culture, speaking Japanese and missing/wishing to be a part of Japanese culture/home ‘again’.

The thing a lot of these people and their systems aren’t going to be happy about hearing is that these alters/headmates are not actually, literally those characters and they are especially not actually, literally Japanese. But that doesn’t stop entitled white people from trying to claim to be, or trying to create new terms for themselves to describe a common experience that doesn’t need to be labelled with a confusing and racist/racially weird as hell label that, frankly, doesn’t need to exist because of everything it implies.

Enter: ‘Parethnicity’.

‘Parethnicity’ is the term referring to an alter that identifies as a race or ethnicity outside of the body’s race or ethnicity.

First off, ‘ethnicity’ and ‘race’ are two entirely different things, so the term ‘parethnicity’ is already extremely inaccurate and offensive on that front, and that’s /ignoring/ the fact that it’s a term primarily for white systems to claim races and experiences that they are not a part of.

Secondly, they created another term to go along with it, ‘parethnophobia’, which is doubly offensive because it implies that alters modeled after a specific race outside of the body can experience oppression for a race that they simply, straight up are not, which is absolutely not how it works.

See, a term needs an ‘-ism’ or ‘-phobia’ term when oppression against a minority group reaches a point where it’s so severe on a systemic level that language is required to describe that oppression, the oppression that is getting them killed, ostracized, denied homes, denied jobs, denied medical care, forcibly sterilized, physically attacked and harassed, even in public, especially where attacks like this can be validated by other people in the area, and more, all just for being a member of this specific minority.

‘Parethnic’ alters are not, in any way, shape or form, a group of people that are so significantly oppressed in a systematic way that it needs a term to describe the specific oppression against them because they aren’t a minority and they aren’t oppressed in any way for anything relating to their ‘parethnicity’.

‘-Phobia’s and ‘-ism’s are added to words to give voices to the voiceless, to give words to help these people understand what’s happening to them and so they can help themselves and others fight against what’s happening to them. Not for entitled white kids in system spaces to claim that they have a ‘black alter’. Because 99% of the time, this doesn’t get you persecuted by /anyone/. Most of the time, it’ll just get a white singlet, sometimes even a white system, asking you if you can say the n-word, which I can only hope to god that you said ‘no’ to. That’s not oppression, that’s just an annoyance for us, as white people. On the flipside, a SOC telling you that you can’t use the n-word in a white body because you’re in a white body and your ‘black alter’ isn’t actually black, they’re just a subconscious projection of what you think a black person is and acts like, also isn’t oppression. That’s a fact.

You might not want to hear this, but the thing about alter race is that if you are an alter in a white body that identifies as a race outside of the body, or is otherwise made to look like a race outside of white (when you’re in a white body), you still aren’t actually that race. You have never actually experienced racism and you never actually will, because you exist in a white body and the first thing that people are ever going to notice about you is your skin color, and the facts are: your skin is white. Even if you have (pseudo/exo)memories of experiencing racism, those memories are not applicable to the life you’re living right now, and you cannot ethically or reasonably claim those experiences without speaking over actual POC and SOC on things they experience every single day of their lives.

You have to be aware of the context of the life you’re living right now, and the context is that you’re in a white body and you are the oppressor here now. If anything, you should be enjoying and thankful for the privilege of being able to be white and ignorant of the horrors of actually having to be a person of color.

A Real Life Example and Analysis: Whi-T

This is the longest section of the post, and could be skipped to the TL;DR if you don’t have time to read it all, but if you have the time for an analysis of arguments used against people of color calling out racism in spaces they’re in and you want to understand why some arguments are bad and even racist, and generally how white people act in situations where they are called out on racism and racist behavior, I suggest you read it in full.

I have a very good real-life example of the kind of hostility and entitlement a lot of white systems, especially those with anime introjects, tend to have bubble up in discussions about racism, from a discord server I’m in, starring an introject of a Japanese anime character in a white body that for the sake of their privacy, we will call T.

The discussion begins in a discourse channel within a discord server I’m in.

A friend of mine, S, is part of a bodily Japanese system, and they begin the discussion by asking the channel how they feel about systems who are not bodily Asian having alters with names that are explicitly Asian. T says they never thought about it in depth, but S says that they find it pretty offensive to their culture, specifically mentioning that it’s offensive to them because they and people from their culture get made fun of for their names, while white people get to pick and choose the ones they think are cute and ‘aesthetic’ and get praised for it online, despite these names having a lot of cultural significance in how they are chosen and the meanings behind them.

T jumps into the conversation again and says that they think it’s fine, because, quote, ‘it’s a name and people can choose whatever name they want but again it’s not my culture so not my choice’. Notice them inserting their opinion, and then tacking on the last bit about it not being their culture, so it’s not their choice. They know that they don’t have a say in it as someone who is not Japanese, but they decide to insert their own opinion anyways, speaking over an actual Japanese system to do so. It’s already clear that T did not come into this conversation to debate, they came in to assert their (white) opinion to speak over an actual Japanese system, so they could continue to validate their own racism and the racism of other white people, especially white people in that server.

The next string of messages between T and S go something along the lines of S saying that ‘it’s not just a name it holds high importance to the culture and the culture is closed’, and continuing to reiterate that cultural appropriation is bad, even in systems and even if alters cannot control how they form, and T has the compelling argument of ‘i feel like anyone can choose a name they can feel comfortable with if it represents them. but again not my culture /gen’. Their arguments don’t really branch out much further than them just repeatedly saying this, and something along the lines of ‘that’s gatekeepy and iffy to me, but not my culture so it’s totally not my choice and I don’t get a say, even though I’m actively trying to give myself a say anyways /gen’.

What’s really important to note here is T’s usage of tone tags, and how maliciously deliberate that can be in demonizing people of color trying to speak out against racism in online communities they’re a part of.

Tone tags have become very normalized, to the point where it feels expected for people to use them because it’s polite, which is fine, but when discussing things like this with systems of color I know personally, they very often feel extremely pressured to use tone tags just to soften themselves and how they actually feel about a situation just to appear palatable and not (justifiably) angry with neurodivergent white people being /racist/ towards them, otherwise these white people will blow up and throw a shitfit, they’ll accuse you of ‘mini-modding’, their RSD will flare up and they’ll feel too bad for being called out for their racism and change their statuses to ‘DNI’ and make their profile pictures black.

The fact that T is using tone tags this early on in the conversation is less of a way to soften their tone and more of way to set S up later in the conversation, so they can accuse S of being aggressive and needing to step back from the conversation when they’re just being blunt and mildly assertive, just because S didn’t use tone tags. Even if this is unintentional, this is a manner of T trying to make themselves seem nicer, like they are the innocent one and S is attacking them for no reason, so that S’s blunt and vaguely assertive tone could suddenly seem a lot more aggressive to other white people.

T says that it’s a little ‘iffy’ to them that a Japanese person is uncomfortable with appropriation of their culture, and says it’s because if they identify with a name, T doesn’t feel it’s their responsibility or right to correct them on how they identify just because it would make themselves uncomfortable. The usage of using words like ‘identify’ when talking about cultural appropriation is a way to make system experiences seem like LGBT experiences, when I’ve already said in previous posts that the two are nowhere near the same. When discussing alter race in systems, it’s a lot more complicated than just ‘identifying’ as something, because alters can and do identify as all sorts of things, to the point where they get dysmorphia when they don’t look the way they do in the inner world, I get something like this as my appearance in the inner world doesn’t match up with the body. This doesn’t mean I actually am what I look like in the inner world, similar to how littles in systems aren’t actual children and animal alters aren’t actual animals, and it would be somewhat inappropriate to treat them this way, especially if they don’t want to be treated this way.

Culture is a lot more than just ‘identifying’ as something, it’s something you’re either born into or taken from, a birthright, something that is passed down to you for generations and often times these cultures that belong to people of color get taken from them by white people, who only take the parts they like for the ‘aesthetic’ and muddy their actual meanings to the people in this culture, which leads to a fetishization and misrepresentation of these actual cultures.

Another thing to address in this poor argument is the usage of the word ‘uncomfortable’. Notice how T uses this term to demean the struggles of POC who are threatened by cultural appropriation and cultural theft. They use this term, ‘uncomfortable’, to describe actual racism to demean what actual racism is and try to boil it down to people of color in closed cultures simply being ‘uncomfortable’ with people outside of their race and culture stealing aspects of their culture, fetishizing them for themselves and demonizing the actual POC who actively love and partake in said culture.

S says that it’s more than just being uncomfortable and T says, ‘it makes you uncomfortable yes?’ They say this in an attempt to twist S’s words and continue to demean POC’s struggles with cultural appropriation.

These arguments are incredibly malicious and are made to shut down POC who even remotely try to speak out about racism.

T continues to twist S’s wording by saying ‘so you’re telling them they cannot have a name. that’s iffy to me-’ and when they are questioned on why they feel entitled to speak over an actual Japanese person on this subject, they say that S wanted to debate, and they’re just debating, (again, with tone tags ‘/nm’ and ‘/gen’), but I would disagree strongly. This isn’t them debating with S, this is them intentionally twisting their words to get around being accused of being racist, trying to shut down an actual POC on the subject of racism and cultural appropriation, and pretending to be innocent about it when they very obviously aren’t.

At this point, another white system has joined the conversation, let’s call them B, and they argue on T’s side, saying that S is trying to take away a person’s ‘right’ to identify with and have a name, again, twisting the wording and it’s another example of white people validating the racism of other white people because they’re uncomfortable with changing or admitting that they could’ve done something wrong.

T and B continue to argue with S, essentially claiming that S is gatekeeping their own culture and how people identify, and trying to take people’s names from them, and S saying that it is literally, actually racism and cultural appropriation, while T and B have no other arguments other than ‘that’s iffy’.

C is another SOC who is a friend of mine that joins the conversation on S’s side, saying that T and B should listen to people who have experience with racism and cultural appropriation, and they are completely ignored by everyone except for S, like, several times.

T brings back up the argument of ‘well you wanted to debate and I’m just debating’ despite their arguments not being intelligent or coherent enough to qualify as an actual debate while S, /again/, tries to state the fact that it’s /literal cultural appropriation/, and are once again, spoken over and ignored. S brings up the fact that T is repeatedly disregarding their arguments and speaking over them, and T, bafflingly, again says that they’re just ‘debating’ and, even better, that if they can’t handle a ‘debate’, then they shouldn’t be ‘debating’, when it’s clear to every SOC in the chat that this is not actual debating, this is twisting the words of and silencing SOC, and it only gets worse from here.

This is only the beginning of trying to portray S as the aggressive, antagonistic SOC.

S states how they feel, saying that they are being talked over and ignored and disregarded by white people in the discussion, and and T tries to say that they’re not ignoring them or disregarding their opinion and that they’re listening and just ‘stating [their] opinion’, and proceeds to tell S that they think S needs to step back, saying that they’re getting defensive and aggressive when they clearly aren’t, but S apologizes for potentially coming off that way anyways.

T then sends a couple of messages that form into an argument that essentially boils down to two direct quotes: ‘[...] but you cannot tell someone what to do and expect them to listen’, and the far more baffling take of ‘a lot of people say a lot of things are “closed” when they just don’t want to share their culture.’

The second one baffles me the most because... That’s the basis of a closed culture? What do you think a closed culture is, exactly? You think that Native Americans are so closed off to outsiders about their culture because someone is forcing them to be? NO! It’s because white people have stolen their culture, misrepresented it, disrespected it and muddied its meaning so much that they don’t want to share it anymore. They did share it in the past, but actively made the choice not to because of how shitty outsiders have been to them about their culture! That’s the basis of a closed culture or practice!

Then, when another POC, M, in the chat says that T is blatantly disregarding POC and that people can just be decent and not culturally appropriate when it’s brought to their attention that they are, and T gives us another absolute gem of an argument that, as usual, makes so little sense and is full of an unbelievable amount of ignorance:

‘you can’t expect people to be decent, humans are crap.’

Ah, yes, cultural appropriation is okay and its okay for white people to not listen to POC when they’re calling out white people for these things because *reads writing on hand* ‘humans are crap’. Alrighty then.

S goes on to say that there’s a difference between cultural appropriation and respecting other cultures boundaries, such as eating Japanese food and still respecting said culture and not stealing from it, but T misinterprets this and asks how having a name that S ‘disagrees with’ would be cultural appropriation, and the next exchange is pure gold:

S: i don't disagree with the name? it's cultural appropriation because your taking a name which isn't yours to use.

M: ^^

T: on what grounds? who’s says we can’t use it? /gen /nm cause if it’s just you, no offense but nobody is gonna listen

K, (part of C’s system): Respectfully, T, you're being kinda rude lmao.

M: POC, BIPOC, we say that..../gen

T [in reply to K]: no I’m debating, if you can’t handle it don’t debate /gen /nm

S says that multiple POC agree with them on the subject, and K then goes on to say to T that ‘debating isn’t grounds to be an asshole’. T responds saying that the ‘we’ S is referring to is just two people and threatens to mute K and says that they aren’t being rude, they’re asking questions, as if the two are mutually exclusive. M and S try to tell T that it’s not just them in this obscure discord server that are saying this, but tons of actual, real-life POC, systems or otherwise, and T says that ‘you can’t say what people can and can’t name their kids/themselves :]’.

The best part comes when K and S say that T is the one being rude now despite having gotten onto them earlier for being ‘rude’ and that is when T decides that the debate is over suddenly, saying ‘debate over you all are to upset over my opinion’, and says ‘another message and i’m muting’, and when M says ‘You sure we are the ones that are mad?’ T responds with ‘yes cause you don’t like my opinion. now debate over or I’m shutting the channel down :] /gen /nm’ and forces the discussion to be over.

TL;DR

T didn’t come into this discussion looking for a debate, they came in to assert their opinion by twisting the words of POC, shutting down their arguments, misunderstanding closed cultures and threatening to mute people and shut down the channel, all while using tone tags to make themselves seem a lot more innocent than they actually were, and to paint the POC who weren’t using them as angry and aggressive.

T is an insidiously racist person who only cares about their own comfort and not the comfort and safety of the POC in their own server.

In short, these are the kinds of arguments that white people tend to use, and the kind of entitlement that white people tend to bring to the table when brought up in discussions like this, especially when they’re in a position to silence the POC that are speaking out against them just because they have better arguments than them.

Don’t be like T.

What Now?

So, if you feel attacked, think about why. Because it probably comes from a place of not wanting to face your racism or change your ways because you care more about your own comfort than the comfort, safety and protection of people of color, and you need to remedy that.

This can actually very easily get started just by talking to people of color in general, following them on social media, watching their content on youtube, even if they’re singlets, even if they post things unrelated to mental health and plurality/multiplicity content, even if it’s ‘just’ videogame streams or art or music or etc, because even then you’re supporting a content-creator of color. Of course, that’s not all you have to do, again, that’s just a start, but following and supporting POC on social media and such does so much to help your subconscious views of POC in general that it’s a good idea to just do it anyways.

Oh, and changing the names and negatively stereotypical traits of alters/headmates that appear to be from races and closed cultures outside of the body, and listening to POC when they speak up, and not getting defensive when they tell you that you’ve done something racist and calling your white friends, systems or otherwise, out on their racism and their internal racist biases and etc.

It’s hard, but if you don’t want to do these things, you can always just take the ‘BLM’ and ‘anti-racist’ out of your bio, because you don’t actually support any of these things, you just support these things performatively as long as they benefit you to do so and make you look good.

Sincerely,

Remy

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eruhamster · 3 years

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Lindsay Ellis has been annoying me for a while, and I basically stopped consuming her content halfway through her Pocahontas video where she insisted that it was purely the white settlers that hated the Native Americans and not often a mutual altercation with various tribes, but like, I think the biggest thing that bothers me in her stupid fucking 2hr video is the same thing that bothers me in general about her.

She’s a white ally in the same way Joss Whedon is a male feminist. It’s all a front to make up for her own underlying racism and the focus is always on herself and her own guilt and self-pity rather than the actual issue. That’s why she gets so angry over stupid shit like a bunch of >100-follower Twitter accounts making fun of her for 2 days on Twitter.

You can tell in the way she excuses the criticism of her just being ‘white people’ talking for BIPOC, and how she keeps bringing up her own anecdotal conversations with POC. She doesn’t really think about the underlying issues and why people may have brought it up, it all just gets dumped down to ‘my poc friend told me i was ok so anyone who says otherwise is probably a white person trying to talk for poc’ as if it... White people aren’t allowed to call out stuff they see?

I think it shows most of all with the stuff she’s said about Native Americans. Like in that fucking stupid video, she talks about the Native tribe portrayed in Twilight, and mentions how they got their land back after 50+ years of dispute as a good thing Twilight has done. The thought that this is not a good thing does not pass over her brain. She says that it’s good that it gave them attention, not recognizing that only being given what they’ve been demanded for years after having their culture fetishized and appropriated is like... Literally not good at all. No more than getting $20 at the end of the sexual assault she felt necessary to mention in the video. It’s the same with the Pocahontas video; she clearly thinks surface level that ‘oh what us whites did to the Natives is bad’ and views Native people as an innocent monolith. She thinks that by acknowledging that there was mutual violence before settlers grew ever more powerful and were able to further oppress Native tribes, that that somehow makes the genocide they faced OK, so she has to go by the narrative that no Native tribe ever did anything wrong despite them all being human and many of them being known to be violent, not just with settlers, but with other tribes.

She thinks like a white savior. She does not view POC as individuals, she views them as innocent beings that need saving from the Whites, the same way Joss Whedon views women as innocent beings that need saving from Men. Just like Joss Whedon views all men as evil and manipulative because of his own biases, Ellis seems to legit believe that all white people are just as racist as her and that we’re all only interested in fighting for social justice for brownie points just because that’s what she’s about.

It’s so fucking surface level, I hate it so much. And fuck everyone saying her video is ‘good actually.’ It isn’t. It’s 2 hours of making herself a victim out of nothing, while admitting outright that she’s racist just because she grew up in Tennessee and that that’s ok because ‘we’re all racist anyway’

#lindsay ellis

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janiedean · 3 years

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Hope this is okay to ask but I was wondering what your thoughts are on the way Tyrion is treated by some of the fandom, especially Cersei stans? I feel he is held to a different standard to other male characters and as someone with an invisible disibility irl it makes me a bit uncomfortable. I’ve seen many “Lannister stans” who either hate him or want to ignore he exists.

sure it’s okay to ask don’t worry ;)

that said: when it comes to tyrion’s fandom treatment especially on tumblr there’s like a whole bunch of like... WE’RE ABLEIST BUT MASKING IT BEHIND FAKE WOKE ARGUMENTS crap going on because not counting the fact that show!tyrion has been what he was since S5 bc dnd can’t obviously write him and stopped giving peter decent material after then and it shows, but like... show!tyrion being nowhere near as complex as the book version is a problem that 99% of the show characters had so I don’t think it’s like a valid argument:

the premise is that tyrion is outside like TUMBLR and the likes circles a clear fan favorite when it comes to the general audience if not the fan favorite - like there’s more tyrion merch than idk jon snow merch and maybe maybe he was 50/50 with dany but like... I think that if we did a general poll tyrion would come out as the most liked character, which... I mean fair tyrion is an a+ character and he’s extremely relatable on a whole shitload of levels and let me tell you if a disabled character is for once the main fan favorite I won’t complain:

problem is beyond the fact that he’s disabled he’s... about everything tumblr hates in the sense that a) man, b) (presumably) straight man who has a lot of sex to deal with his issues, c) his issues are not exactly pleasant to deal with, d) not Standard Attractive, e) basically his one trump card is outsmarting people so it’s really easy to attach the whole AH MANIPULATING SCHEMING ASSHOLE argument to him, f) an abuse victim from at least his father and cersei but we all know men can’t be abused on this website *rolleyes* plus he hates the shit out of cers/ei which like.. is apparently the cardinal sin and the key to being labeled a misogynist always, which automatically means that when it comes to tumblr asoiaf fandom nine times on ten people will ignore the fact that his disability is a reason people discriminate him and that the treatment he received because of it gave him TRAUMA and start going like AH BUT HE’S A MAN AH BUT HE’S RICH which... doesn’t mean he can’t be traumatized even if he has male and money privilege;

for what it’s worth anyway bc as stated okay being a lannister did mean that he had a better upbringing/situation economically than a commoner with dwarfism but that doesn’t make his abuse any less damaging, but people on here just... don’t seem to get it;

but yeah like the point is that male chars on tumblr are already held at different standards than female ones (again theon gets more shit than cersei ever had for doing a lot less horrid stuff) but tyrion as... the mega fan favorite especially in within the male fanbase (reddit/w-org and the likes) is held to an extra standard in the sense that if the dudebro faction likes him then he’s BAD NEWS, which means that the fact that he’s disabled and that it affects his life is thoroughly ignored because they have to cry about how he has male privilege over c. and so she can’t abuse him (which... lmao the day I read that shit in S2 I was so out, but whatever);

anyway thing is: ‘lannister stans’ in my experience is a thing that like... is weird in this fandom because actually I never met a supposed lannister stan who likes all of them or who doesn’t ignore some exist, like.. usually most lannister stans who pretend tyrion doesn’t exist are either c. stans or tywin stans or both and don’t get me started on how this fandom has a weirdass tywin worship thing going on for which they think tyrion killing him is an unforgivable crime when it was basically what that asshole deserved and the narrative is having tyrion go in the downward spiral for shae not for tywin. c. stans usually say they also stan jaime but like... they stan whichever version of jaime they think exist that is compatible for a book ending that has the murder suicide thing happening that doesn’t exist in the books and they ignore tyrion exists same as their fave, but then again here we fall back in the pit where everything c. specifically does is seen as either fight against the patriarchy or feminist rebellion or trauma justification on account of c. being a woman and if a man does it it’s horrid or if she does it to a man then it doesn’t matter, so like... it’s a lost cause;

anyway like if someone say they’re a lannister stan and ignore tyrion when whether they like it or not tyrion is the only lannister in the main five povs (which i’d like to remind everyone are jon dany tyrion arya and bran regardless of whoever is everyone’s fave) and the one that has most narrative weight then like... just say you like c. or tywin and go;

tldr: while I think that the show did tyrion a lot of dirt in order to make him more... idk cleaned up when the book character is good as it is, tumblr fandom is swimming deep in ableism and denying that men can be abused and affected by that when it comes to tyrion’s treatment, never mind in the neverending absolutely shallow argument that’s everywhere in asoiaf fandom which is that no one outside specific group of people has understood that one of the key messages of these books is ‘how you look outside doesn’t mean shit about your personality and people who aren’t standard attractive are people with needs and personality who also deserve love and have a lot to give and will meet someone who’ll give it to them’, because the race is basically shipping beautiful ppl together even if it makes sense and negating at all turns that brienne/arya/tyrion/sandor/anyone else who’s not standard attractive are like... viable romantic partners on an even level with whoever so there’s that too, but like I think that on tumblr it shows that ppl are extremely hypocritical when it comes to tyrion and that it shows that their wokeness stops at the surface bc if you read those books and miss The Fucking Point when it comes to tyrion’s disability... text comprehension where have you gone ;)

also when it comes from c. stans** I just sigh and roll my eyes but then again c. stans generally think c. is the only person in these books with justified issues and trauma reaction and downplay not only how she abuses others but also the effects on the ppl she abuses whether they’re men or women so like... they don’t even admit how she is with jaime do we think they’d admit it for tyrion? doubt that.

**before everyone else jumps on me: with c. stans I mean the vocal side of c. standom where almost everyone is like that and from whom I never saw once an acknowledgment that she actually did abuse him (or anyone kllkjkgdj), not whichever c. stan around who likes her because she’s terrible/recognizes that she’s bad etc, I mean no ill will, if you didn’t feel called out reading it it wasn’t about you, peace and love.

#ch: tyrion lannister #anti-cersei #anti-cersei lannister #abuse cw #ableism cw #janie writes meta #i guess #meh anon meh #Anonymous #ask post

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allthefilmsiveseenforfree · 3 years

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Connie and Carla

I know nothing about this film requested by Chad other than the following facts: It was Nia Vardalos’s follow-up to the indie smash hit My Big Fat Greek Wedding, and it was universally reviled by audiences and critics alike. So I’m in for a fun afternoon! The plot is your basic Some Like It Hot ripoff - Connie (Vardalos) and Carla (Toni Collette) are childhood best friends who have spent their whole lives performing together, believing they are destined for musical theater greatness. After witnessing a murder, they go on the run and hide out in the last place anyone would think to look for them - as women pretending to be men pretending to be women, aka performers in a drag queen bar in L.A. Everything’s going great until a BOY shows up (David Duchovny), and Connie falls for him. Gender gags, musical theater numbers, mistaken identify, Russian mobsters, hijinks - yeah, we’ve all drunk this cocktail before. So was this top shelf, or something found in a plastic jug at the gas station? Well...

How about a mid-level ridiculous flavored vodka? Like Pinnacle Whipped Cream or something. The film’s conceptions of gender (and of straight women’s feelings of entitlement to what should be LGBTQ spaces) are not my favorite. But its heart is in the right place and overall this leads to something pretty fun and charming, especially if you happen to love musical theater.

Some thoughts:

If there were an airport lounge where I could watch two sad 30-somethings singing a medley of musical theater’s greatest hits, I would go there every day. I wouldn’t even book a flight, that would just be my favorite bar. I think I would go broke driving to the airport every day and buying drinks in this lounge. I’d have my birthday party there.

Oh I love Greg Gruenberg in a bit part as the cheesy celebrity bus tour guide in L.A.

Hello David Duchovny as Jeff! He was my first celebrity crush, and his aw shucks nice guy thing in this movie is really working for me.

This is wildly offensive to drag queens not because of stereotypes, but because no drag act would ever come so ill-prepared with a Rocky Horror number. I recognize that in 2004 we didn’t have over a decade of RuPaul’s Drag Race under our belts, but c’mon, even the most sheltered Midwestern queer would come with something better than this.

Is this supposed to be some kind of feminist statement about beauty standards in L.A.? This anti-botox rant Connie and Carla go on, and the makeover of the woman in the salon - no no no, straight hair and beige lipstick is Bad but curly hair and lip liner is Good. It feels confusing that we’re supposed to see this as empowering when we’re just trading one commodified flavor of femininity for another.

There’s something that just feels deeply wrong about these women taking one of the only paying drag gigs in town, particularly when actual drag performers come to them and beg them to open up their act to include other drag queens. Note that they all offer up tangible skills - I can sew a dress in 3 hours, I can do incredible makeup, I’ve got great choreography. Yes Connie and Carla can sing, but drag is meant to be performative - the artifice is part of what makes it an art form. Smarter queer people than me have written about this, but even for the uneducated, there’s something about this concept that feels off, wrong and exploitative, and deeply rooted in straight privilege. It’s the same icky feeling I get at the gay bar when all the seats for the drag show are taken up by straight women’s bachelorette parties, while actual queer women and men who came to see the show are pushed to standing room.

Ok, I do kind of love these interludes with Tibor (Boris McGiver) looking for the girls in every dinner theater and Broadway show in the country and the only show playing is Mame every time. Fun fact - McGiver’s father actually starred in the 1974 version of Mame!

Feels a little weird that Connie is the one who is explaining to Jeff why drag queens “like to dress up.” Is this being an ally or just erasing and talking over queer folks’ experiences? This is what I mean when I say it feels off - I don’t think it’s malicious, but the way the film handles queer stories feels like a dismissal, an invalidation. Like these straight women can do queer camp better than these gay men.

Did Carla literally just say “I need to get out of this closet”????

Connie is literally the worst at maintaining a cover. The trappings of fame are proving too alluring!

As far as performances go, Collette and Vardalos have great chemistry, and Duchovny is being pretty dreamy as the romantic lead who’s around because he’s trying to reconnect with his estranged brother, Robert (Stephen Spinella). Nobody is winning an acting award for this, but Collette especially is a lot of bubbly fun.

Jeff is a difficult character to grapple with. On the one hand, he doesn’t always handle Robert’s sexuality with grace or compassion, and that can be difficult to watch as a queer person because we all have experienced that same kind of look, that tone of “why can’t you just be normal?” However, he’s putting in an honest effort to grow, and I think that should count for something. Also he straight up gets sexually assaulted by Connie, so I don’t blame him for having a hard time feeling comfortable around the drag queen scene. And that’s another fucked up thing, just adding to the “gay men are predatory and will put the moves on straight guys at the first chance” stereotype.

Even though it sounds cringey as hell when he says it, I’m sure it is probably cathartic for any gay kid who stumbles across this movie and hears Jeff make his big speech about “I should have just loved you and accepted you and not cared about the fact that you wear dresses.” That’s what I mean when I say the script seems to have its heart in the right place even though the way it’s expressing a lot of these ideas just reinforces the status quo rather than interrogating it, or propping up the stories of people who live outside that status quo.

My god, do I love Debbie Reynolds in this head-to-toe red glitter number.

Yeah I don’t think all these queens would take this kindly to being lied to and having their act infiltrated by a couple of straight women. Like this feels laughably “all’s well that ends well.”

Did I Cry? Ok, a tear slipped out when Jeff and Robert hugged for the first time.

This was a very interesting watch. I know I seem to be dragging this shit out of this movie, but I actually largely enjoyed the experience of watching it. It’s got a very 2004-esque view of some complex gender and sexuality issues (and wouldn’t it have been so much more interesting if a queer person had written this and was able to use it to interrogate issues of femininity and its performance as it relates to queerness?). BUT, honestly, the whole thing is Shakespearean in its plot and its broad strokes characters. You’ve got crossdressing, mistaken identity, some light gay panic, long lost brothers reuniting - all that’s missing is a Duke and a forest setting, and you’ve got half of Shakespeare’s comedies right there. And much like Shakespeare, there’s nothing here that hasn’t been done before - it’s the medium parts of Some Like It Hot, the general plot of Sister Act (swap nuns for drag queens), the gender panic of every cross-dressing movie. All very surface-level stuff but there’s a reason these same kind of stories have been putting butts in seats for 400 years.

If you liked this review, please consider reblogging or subscribing to my Patreon! For as low as $1, you can access bonus content and movie reviews, or even request that I review any movie of your choice.

#121in2021 #connie and carla #connie and carla review #nia vardalos #toni collette #david duchovny #movie reviews #film reviews #patreon review

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aish-rai · 4 years

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Hey, I think I'm not sure I'm really understanding what you're trying to say. Definitely not trying to argue so I'm sorry if it comes across that way. But basically, the way I've understood/viewed feminism is the ability/freedom to make your own choices, whatever they may be, and of course not all (in fact most) of our choices serve a greater, bigger purpose. If I want to stay home with kids, I should be able to without being forced/expected to work. Similarly, if I want to work 1/2

Feminism isn’t “many things”. What you’re describing is a specific brand of feminism called choice feminism, which posits that no matter what you do, it’s feminist because you’re a woman and you’re choosing to do it. And it’s total bullshit.

Let me explain. “I wear makeup for me!” is typical choice feminism. But it’s a lie. It might make you feel better on an individual level, but it was invented to make women spend money to correct imaginary flaws. “I wax because I like it!” You may like it, but you wax because in the 20th century they (and by “they” I mean the patriarchy) decided that they could make money off of telling women they shouldn’t have body hair, which they should and which is natural and actually more hygienic. “I have as much sex as men do and it’s empowering!” Great. But the patriarchy wants you to have sex. They see you as an object to have sex with. Literally, boiling women down to what is in between our legs is what has gotten us where we are now. So your choice to fuck as many dudes as possible might feel great for you on a personal level, but if you’re making decisions that the patriarchy explicitly already wants you to make, who are you helping? You’re not helping anyone who feels like they don’t have a choice in those matters, that’s for damn sure.

So to revisit what I said about feminism not being many things, but actually one thing: feminism is a movement on a social, economic, political, and ideological level that promotes equality of the sexes. Equality. In a truly equal world, as many men would take their wife’s last name as women take their husbands. As many men would stay at home while their wives worked as women stay at home now. Makeup would not be a factor in whether or not a woman can find a job. We wouldn’t spend thousands of dollars a year on personal grooming to make ourselves more fuckable because advertisers say that’s what we have to do to be fulfilled. And honestly, these are just surface level concerns. Feminism seeks to end human trafficking. It seeks to reduce incidences of domestic violence and sexual abuse, and to ban child marriages. It demands equal pay in the workplace, not just between white men and white women, but among every color, gender, religion, and sexual orientation. It seeks to protect LGBTQ+ communities. It promotes education for everyone, male or female or non-binary. And not just education in terms of history and mathematics but education about our own bodies. And there are SO many other issues affecting the disenfranchised around the world, but the bottom line is this: the one thing feminism is not, is a free pass for women to do whatever they want and slap the label of feminist on it because it makes them feel better about their choices.

I’m not asking you to feel guilty for the things you decide to do. I just put on self-tanner, and it’s going to make me feel better, but I recognize that that’s because I’ve been socialized to believe it will make me more attractive and that should make me happy. It wasn’t a feminist decision, so I’m not going to insult the people who actually need this movement by saying that it is. Because it isn’t about getting to do whatever you want, it’s about unraveling systems of oppression that have been in place for hundreds, if not thousands, of years and doing it in a way that affects large-scale change. You getting to have your moment of comfort because you did something you wanted to do is all well and good, and I’m not denying your right to do that, but I am saying that you don’t get to make choices and decide they make life better on behalf of all women.

I’m not trying to be hard on you. But what this generation of “feminists” are trying to teach people is misleading at best and dangerous at worst.

#Anonymous

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where-fading-princesses-live · 4 years

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double standards

So I was watching this very interesting video last night... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Di_R6Md-L80

And around 6:43, he talks about the classic Mary Sue trope and how, if you have a male character in a work of fiction who is presented as equally perfect and free of flaw (in other words, a Gary Stu), the criticism is less harsh towards him, or in some cases, nearly nonexistent. Some might even say he's a total bad-ass and how dare you find fault in someone so impossibly cool? But if they're female? Good god, it's bad writing and anti-feminist. People seem to be generally way more accepting of male archetypes who fall under this trope than the likes of their female counterparts, hence double standards. You see this all the time in action flicks for instance. Arnold Schwarzenegger films, anyone? James Bond whomst??? But suddenly you have Rey who's arguably not better or worse than the likes of those characters, and yet, the general opinion of her is... kind of unfair. Understandable, nonetheless... I'm not a fan of her either but at the same time, I don't think we should judge her harsher than male characters who have similar treatments. Male characters like that shouldn't be excused. I'm not saying Stus are NEVER pointed out or criticized, but this guy does have a point. There seems to be a much more airtight scrutiny surrounding female characters of this nature and it might be due to internalized misogyny or ''something something quantum quantum...'' Granted, I don't think Stus/Sues should be a widely accepted overused theme regardless, and that should be blamed on poor writing rather than sexism. Whether male, female, both, neither and everything in-between, characters need to be well-written, well-developed, believable and nuanced and blah blah blah. I'm not really here to talk about that. What I want to point out is double standards. And yes, this is sexism.

Take Rick and Morty for example. I'm not going to get too deep into it, but the fandom seems to praise the shit out of Rick who can easily be labelled a Stu because as we're constantly reminded, he's supposedly the ''smartest man in the universe''. Now, when you create a character who is a self-professed genius and placed on a pedestal by the writers, it can definitely come off Stu-ish. It's not that Rick unrealistically lacks flaws... no, this man is LOADED with flaws, but the fact that he's a literal badass who can get out of almost any sticky situation... well, like I said, there's more to his character than that and I'm not going to get into it, but Rick rarely, if ever, fails. Sometimes there's moments of vulnerability and the fact that he keeps trying to change but just slips back into his old ways, that makes him much more 3-dimensional than a Stu... but you know, despite his narcissism, his sarcasm, his alcoholism and mistreatment of his family and his incapability of maintaining healthy long-term relationships, he still has a limitless ability to create, a superior intelligence level even when compared to higher lifeforms on other planets, enabling him to outsmart entire government organizations and civilizations spanning galaxies, well... you can see where I'm going with this. There's no person on this planet like that who exists irl, even among the smartest of history's greatest men. Yes, it's a cartoon, it's meant to be far-fetched. Yes, it's sci-fi so we're expected to suspend our disbelief. Yes, there's a reason for it. Yes, it drives the core of the story. But even if there's times where it seems Rick will definitely fail, he never truly has an ALL IS LOST MOMENT because the writers conveniently write him out of most of his troubles, because the series has to keep going (obviously). Basically, I never feel a real sense of danger when Rick is in trouble because I know he'll get out alive (if not, there's infinite amount of Ricks and infinite amount of realities to replace him-- not to mention he can replace his family members as many times as he fucks up which became the show's laziest overused point in my opinion). Rick's not a bad character. Far from it. That's not what bothers me.

What bothers me is his daughter, Beth. Okay, no, she doesn't specifically bother me. The way the fandom sees her bothers me. Now Beth is undoubtedly cut from the same cloth. You know what they say, like father like daughter. And yet... the fandom fails to recognize her as a potentially great character, just as equally flawed and brilliant minded as Rick. She's a genius horse surgeon in a failing marriage. (I will go out on a limb and say she's more well written than Rick *ducks from flying tomatoes*.) I mean, her story is literally almost the same as her father's, her flaws are just as realistic--in fact, she's probably more realistic because she's not the ''smartest so and so of the godforsaken universe'' which is just as bad as annoyingly cringey The Chosen One trope. She's just Beth. A terribly smart woman with abandonment issues and trust issues and all other kinds of issues, but you can't blame her given her upbringing. By no means perfect or good at everything she does. Or loved (or hated) by everyone or hailed a genius by the entire flipping universe. You can't even call her a Sue. Yet some of the fandom chooses to label her a b*tch for whatever reason... even though her characterization is near identical to D*ck, er I mean Rick (e.g. she drinks just as much when she hits an all time low). She's just as awful with just as many fuck ups yet she's more sympathetic due to the way Rick raised her (or didn't raise her)... yet there's a double standard because somehow, because she's a female, she's a worse character than Rick, who's a male and apparently awesome (brownie points because he's one of the the two titular characters so you *can't* hate him, it's against the law). If Beth were Rick's son instead of his daughter, I wonder if the general opinion would be the same or not. If Rick were a woman.... he would be Rey, now would he? Don't deny it.

Then there's Ed Edd n' Eddy. As much as I love praising the hell out of this show, I also like to crap on it. There's no shame in pointing out flaws in your faves. But this isn't so much the flaw in the actual show and the actual writing, but again, I'm taking a jab at the fandom and how they perceive male characters v. female characters.

Sarah. Sarah is almost exactly like the female Eddy. She's little and bratty and loud af. She's probably the most hated character on the show (even Jimmy and Kevin are more liked than she is). I used to not like Sarah either but I never really asked myself WHY. When I compared her to Eddy, I realized that they're literally, almost the same character and I have no real reason to hate her (yeah yeah a lot of the cul-de-sac kids share eerily similar traits to the Eds and it was no accident; it makes you wonder why the kids hate the Eds so much if they ostracize them for the very same quirks they have, and it's not just the scams--it's because kids at this age are terribly insecure about themselves and tend to make fun of more vulnerable others who share their flaws to make themselves feel better. I was bullied in middle school for acne by... wait for it.... kids who had acne. GASP. Imagine that. So my point is, we often despise traits in others we despise in ourselves, not to mention we don't perceive ourselves the way others perceive us, hence, the Looking Glass Self theory. Basically, EEnE is deeper than it appears on the surface, and I've analyzed this before during those EEnE Appreciation Month things, so I won't bother repeating myself, but that's the basic idea in a nutshell.)

Ahem, before I get off on a further tangent, let me reiterate my main point. Sarah IS Eddy. No, not really, but yes, kinda really. Her voice can be irritating and grates on your nerves at times, she's bossy and controlling of her friends (I honestly love her friendship with Jimmy, and how they both defy stereotypical gender norms, and how protective she is of him, but there's times where she pushes his buttons), and though she doesn't hold Jimmy back from finding his own independence apart from her the way Eddy sometimes does to Ed and Edd who he treats them more as cronies in the first season (for instance, Sarah doesn't raise objection to Jimmy joining the Urban Rangers and finding his own identity and making other friends besides her, I mean they don't have to be glued to the hip and she damn well knows that), and yet... the way she treats Ed... well... even if Eddy stands up for Ed against Sarah and grows increasingly annoyed with the way she walks all over him... Eddy ain't much better, pumpkins. DON'T ACT LIKE HE'S BETTER THAN HER. Sure, male characters *always* get excused for this kind of behavior, but if it's a girl, she's automatically a mega beyotch with no redeeming qualities. If she's a b, he's a b, and they both have potential to redeem their flaws. They should be treated equally.

Don't get me wrong. I LOVE Eddy. He's one of my favorite characters. OPE. And there's the tea.

Most people LOVE Eddy (not everybody, and if you don't, that's fine; you don't even have to like Sarah, but I have a case). Despite the fact that he's bossy, sarcastic, rude, selfish, self-absorbed, over confident, flamboyant, vain, screams with a voice that makes your ears bleed.... well, gee, didn't I just describe Sarah? Sarah loves make-up clothes and hair just as much as Eddy loves speedos and deodorant and cheap shampoo and dressing to the nines for Jonny's Arbor Day Party. Hell, Sarah had a complete meltdown because she lost her freakin' earring! Eddy flipped the fuck out when Ed lost his porno mags. THEY'RE. THE. SAME. FUCKING. PERSON. (and it's why they butt heads but that's a topic for another day, because you know, you can't fight fire with fire... you can argue the same for Eddy and Kevin)

Yet, the fandom HATES Sarah and LOVES Eddy. Probably not cuz she's female, but aside from the Kankers, the girls (and Jimmy, poor Jimmy) seem to receive harsher judgment towards them as characters by fans, even if they have similar traits to the boys. I'm sure it's because Sarah isn't as well written or developed a character as Eddy (who's a main cast member, actually the driving force of the show, the primary lead) BUT that's not to say Sarah doesn't have her moments of vulnerability or moments of total bad-assery that makes her.... well... interesting if given the chance. (In BPS, she beats the living shit out of the Kankers and devises a plan for her and Jimmy to escape their enslavement, one of my all-time favorite scenes in the entire movie; not to mention she beats the crap out of EVERYONE on the show and it's usually, not always, well-deserved but it's entertaining nonetheless: cat fights with Nazz, even beating up Rolf who's twice her size, etc.). The fact that everyone is afraid of this little girl??? (maybe except Kevin). I mean, this chick is fearless, and yet, she still has moments of weakness. That's 3-dimensional if you ask me. She's more than just the bratty little sister. I didn't used to like her, but after studying her more, I've come to appreciate her. There's nothing about her that makes her an inherently ''bad'' female character. She plays a role, as do they all, and she plays the role perfectly.

Last but not least: Nazz. Everyone's favorite (I'm kidding). I don't know if the fandom hates Sarah or Nazz more. I can understand the hate towards Sarah, but Nazz seems even less just. Nazz is like one of the nicest people on the show and never really does anything to warrant the hate (until the infamous flanderized Season 5-- don't judge me, I love S5 regardless)... but even then she's still nice, if a bit artificially so. I mean, she becomes a bit of a Mean Girl (they all kinda do; it must be how the clique school environment changes a person), but she still goes out of her way to be inclusive towards everyone (even if she can be spotted in the background laughing at the Eds along with the others at times, but they're ALL guilty of this... ya'll out here lovin' on Rolf or Jonny or whatever, and pretending like they're saints, but they laugh at our precious Ed boys too. Also, precious Ed boys are not complete angels either and sometimes they need a good ass whooping or two. I mean, they're just kids. Kids are assholes). She's not a bad person though; she roots for all the contestants during the Spelling Bee. She personally appoints Ed to be the mascot of the football team. I can go on and on. She's just nice. Maybe that's why fans hate her. Because nice is boring. Nice is... personality-less. I don't think Nazz has as much eccentricity as the other characters, obviously, but she, too, has her moments (she yodels, for starters). She's not entirely lacking in personality. Sure, she may have as much personality as a board of wood (actually, I take that back, Plank has MORE personality than her XD) buuuut.... Idk, I like Nazz. I didn't at first either. But even if it irks me a bit that she's reduced down to the unattainable love interest and not much else, she, too, isn't an inherently ''bad'' female character. She has the least development of all the cast members, but she fills her role effectively. Without her, the show would feel like it's missing something. Even if she doesn't appear as often.

What bothers me the most is that she plays the same part as Kevin, only female. Kevin's the quintessential jock/bully popular leader of the kids, the King of the Cul-de-sac if you will (self-appointed or otherwise, just don't tell Eddy I told you). Nazz is like his Homecoming Queen, even if they're not an official couple (they spend the whole series as a ''will they or won't they Ross and Rachel'') and though not the leader of the kids collectively, she does sometimes lead the girls (or really, Sarah and Jimmy), while Kevin leads the boys (Jonny and Rolf, excluding the Eds). AND YET Kevin, though sometimes hated by fans, isn't nearly *as* hated as Nazz. Yet, he has as much personality as her (sorry, I love you, Kev). I mean, THEY'RE. ALMOST. THE. SAME. CHARACTER. Good looking, sporty, popular... He's also the least developed character of the male cast. Plank has more development than him and that's kinda sad... y'know... getting beat by a board of wood. (But Plank comes alive through Jonny, so basically Jonny is split into two separate characters; Plank reveals aspects of Jonny that he won't reveal to us, and vice versa. I can talk about Jonny all day, but let's not, because this is about Nazz.) I mean, again, Nazz and Kevin both have their moments of vulnerability and it's not like they're NEVER interesting; I beg to differ. Kevin, anyway, has two great episodes that revolve directly around his insecurities and anxieties and deep-seated fears, some deep shit I wish we got to see with Nazz. But instead we got BPS and it was hands-down the best character development we ever saw from her in the entire show's run. It's sad it had to be the end, because if they gave us more BPS Nazz throughout the series, she would have been a well rounded 3-d character.

Nazz is angry AF in BPS and I live for angry Nazz. We can kind of feel for her here because Kevin is such a dunce. She's finally reciprocating his feelings and he decides to turn the other way.... for his goddamn inanimate bike. It's something Jonny would do, but Kev always loved that bike... I guess more than Nazz, and it's one of the greatest love triangles ever. Phantom of the Opera don't interact. Ahem. My point is, Nazz finally displays more personality here-- like actual fucking emotion beyond just being nice and pretty (sure, we've seen her get angry sometimes, or freaked out other times, but never like this). Buuuuuut the fandom sees otherwise. They hated Nazz even MORE after this, despite that.... the male characters in BPS, like Rolf who punches through a tree and Edd and Eddy who go at it all piss and vinegar in an actual fist fight, are angry fucking men, and they're allowed to be angry and not Nazz because...? They have more testosterone and she doesn't? Because penises are more justified than vaginas? Oops, no, sorry, women can only be angry when they're on their periods, my bad. I mean, everybody's out in this freezing cold swamp, having a break down, at their wit's end, reaching their ''all is lost'' moment... yet, Rolf and the Eds are allowed to vent their frustrations on each other or on the surrounding environment. But not Nazz. No, Nazz is being a b*tch because.... Kevin's paying more attention to a non-living machine than to her. And he sat flat on his skinny ass and didn't help her when she needed him the most. And she didn't have to tag along with him but she did. She didn't have to put up with his cold aloofness but she did. And even if she was trying to catch his attention and flirt with him at inappropriate times she wasn't entirely useless. It was HER idea to find Eddy's brother. If she hadn't suggested it, he'd still be riding around in circles chasing his shadow. Yeah, okay, she's a total b*tch.

God forbid women have emotions. God forbid women cry or get frustrated. Then they're b*tches. But if they're pretty and nice and perfect and popular, they're Sues. Yet, male characters with the same traits.... get lighter sentences. No one even bats an eye. Boys will be boys am I right?

I can go on but yeah, don't say double standards are total BS. In this essay I will

#personal shit #eene #ed edd n eddy #rick and morty #feminism #mary sue #gary stu #nazz #sarah

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exhakunobest · 4 years

Text

Fate/EXTELLA ZERO Plot

Original text from http://www.typemoon.org/bbb/diary/log/201611.html

translation from: https://forums.nrvnqsr.com/showthread.php/5875-The-BAMBOO-BROOM-DIARY-%28Nasu-and-Takeuchi-blog%29?p=2540101&viewfull=1#post2540101

Fate/EXTRA/EXTELLA Character Outline ※ There's only one route, so Nero takes the role of saving, guiding, and helping Hakuno grow. Don't forget that this is a boy-meets-girl story. ・ Kishinami Hakuno (Protagonist) The archetypal protagonist who wakes up in SE.RA.PH to find himself caught up as a participant in the Holy Grail War. He has memories of life (daily school life), but no other memories. His abilities are extremely mediocre as a wizard. Fortunately, he has a personality that never gives up, holds no grudges, and always tries to do the right thing. Miraculously, he attains victory. In short, he's someone who can't quit. 　→→ First Spoiler (revealed in the middle and later half of the story) His identity is the same as that of the NPCs on campus, merely "recreated data from past humans." (It is less expensive for the Moon Cell to model NPCs after past humans, but the Moon Cell fundamentally cannot understand humans (intelligent life forms)) He gained a self and passed the preliminary round as a human, so he was registered as a Master. 　→→ Second Spoiler (revealed at the end of the story) The human he was recreated from is in cold sleep on Earth, neither alive nor dead. This is why the NPC managed to gain an ego and autonomy. (This has to do with where souls reside in TYPE-MOON, but that isn't explained in this story.) ・ Saber (Nero) The Servant who was summoned in response to Hakuno's call. (Summoning details are in Material, under Saber's entry.) A female knight who acts as she pleases and whole-heartedly glorifies life. Her speech and attitude are pompous, but at her core, she respects all that is beautiful. She appears condescending, but actually reacts to most things with a "wow, that's amazing. How impressive! But I won't lose, either!" attitude. Her physical abilities are below average for a Servant, but her Skill "Imperial Privilege" is powerful. A true genius displays her talents in all areas. Red Saber's strength can be considered her ability to learn anything that is possible through human levels of effort or talent. Saber is reluctant to reveal her true name. It is not because she wishes to conceal her identity as the infamous tyrant Nero, but because she is afraid that Hakuno will dislike or be disappointed with her if he knows her name. During the fifth round, she moves past this hesitation and reveals it herself. ・ Girl Classmate (Female Protagonist) A girl who occasionally crosses paths with Hakuno, leaving him a casual word of advice. She's always eating a noodle sandwich. She wasn't in the PSP version, so the audience would misread her as "a new heroine!?" 　→→ 　Spoiler (Round 7) The same entity as Hakuno. Personnel data: a NPC created by SE.RA.PH, modeled after Kishinami Hakuno. However, she was configured as a female due to overlapping identity. She gained an ego in connection with the same event for Hakuno, and advanced as a Master. (※ She didn't gain a soul. Hakuno gained a soul, and the aftermath of this awakened her ego.) Because her data was modified further after recreation, she quickly becomes aware that she is not a legitimate being. As a degraded copy, she cannot withstand the installation of an ego (soul), so she is destined to disintegrate. (※ Even if she wins the seventh round, she will then disappear. Only Archer deduces this.) ・Archer (Nameless) The Female Protagonist's Servant. He is a Servant summoned to a Master without a soul, so his summoning circumstances are also irregular. Half of his body is crumbling and burned. Knowing the Female Protagonist's situation, he helps her fight to the bitter end. 　→ Every time Hakuno is alone and in a pinch, Archer saves him. As for why he does this, if Hakuno dies, so does the female protagonist. Archer is trying to give his Master a conclusion where she doesn't lose until the very end, and accepts her end even though she couldn't survive. 　→→ Archer is partially destroyed, so Nero and Tamamo don't recognize him in the world of EXTELLA. Also, the Nameless that appears in EXTELLA comes from a world where the Female Protagonist won. ・ Rin & Rani Fewer appearances than in the PSP version, but their position is unchanged. ・ Leo The heir to the Western European Conglomerate. A perfect prince. The strongest foe in the PSP version. His role is the same in the PSP version, but this time he is defeated in the sixth round. 　→→ Foreshadowing Out of curiosity, Leo talks to Kishinami Hakuno many times, but several of the conversations are inconsistent. "Oh, didn't we talk about this before?" "Yes, I'm interested in you, too." He says things like that, because he's interacted with the Female Protagonist in the same way. Leo loses to the Female Protagonist in the sixth round, so this time, he realizes that the Female Protagonist has the potential to defeat him. ・ Saber (Gawain) Leo's Servant. Unchanged from the PSP version. ・ Julius Leo's older brother. An assassin who handles the dirty work. On Earth, he doesn't have much time left to live. He eliminates Leo's enemies without regard for his own survival. His position is unchanged from the PSP version. He is openly hostile to Hakuno, and is Hakuno's greatest rival. Julius' special animosity towards Hakuno (and the Female Protagonist) is because Hakuno is the same type of person as Julius. On a deeply subconscious level, Julius rejects the notion that a normal person, possessing nothing and chosen by nobody, could rise to become Leo's greatest enemy. It also stems from Julius' irritation that he was unable to do the same. ・ Assassin (Li Shuwen) Julius' Servant. Position is unchanged from the PSP version. ・ Matou Shinji ・ Rider (Drake) The opponent in the first round, which has the theme of fighting a friend. Unchanged from the PSP version. ・ Atrum The opponent in the fourth round. His Servant is Caster (Tamamo no Mae). A new Master for the EXTRA storyline that was reorganized for EXTELLA. A user of sacrificial magic that kills and creates life. Acquainted with Leo on Earth. In the world of EXTRA where fossil fuel resources have run dry, he lacks the cockiness and carelessness of his Fate/stay night counterpart. However, his basic personality is the same. A self-proclaimed feminist, but it's obvious in reality that he views women only as tools. He speaks respectfully to Caster, but also looks down on her. After the Moratorium of Round 4, he sends Caster to seduce Hakuno (to gain his sympathy). "You don't need win the boy over. As long as you can ensnare him, it'll be a windfall for us." "Me? I have things to do. Dirty jobs are a Servant's duty, right?" Casko wearily follows his order, replying "By your command." After dispatching Casko, Atrum accesses a proprietary hidden circuit to Earth to find data on Kishinami Hakuno, but fails to turn up anything. This troubles him. After Atrum loses to Hakuno in their duel, Atrum uses Caster as a scapegoat to avoid the destruction of his own body, and flees. After he escapes from the firewall, he is dealt with by Julius or the Moon Cell. ・ Caster (Tamamo no Mae) Appears as Atrum's Servant. From the start, she is aware that she is expendable to Atrum, but she does not resist fulfilling their pact. (Of course, if Atrum were to sever their contract, it would be a different story.) When she comes to Hakuno on Atrum's orders to seduce him, Hakuno asks, "...Umm, I don't understand why you're doing this," which confuses her. Fox: "I suppose, in short, that my Master's naive strategy is to have me drown you in my charms and end you in your sleep. Failing that, sympathy might still move you to carelessness during your final duel..." Having heard Casko's circumstances and taking issue with them, Hakuno becomes serious. Hakuno: "Have a seat, Caster." Hakuno kneels across from Caster. Casko does the same. Hakuno begins to give her a stern lecture out of concern for her well-being. This is the first event that leads to Caster falling in love. After their duel, Casko burns away, as Atrum's scapegoat. The protagonist then uses his Command Spell to try and save her. Casko is restored, without a scratch. "Ah, I'm finally free!" The way she easily withstands the assault of the firewall is similar to Arcueid's scene. Afterwards, she cooperates with Hakuno as his (self-declared) true Servant. Nero: "Damn you -- who let this raccoon- no, this fox into our den!?" Fox: "That's obvious. As if the curse of a third-rate Master could roast me!" ・ Dan ・ Archer (Robin) The opponent in the second round, which has the theme of defeating one's senior and mentor in life. Position is unchanged from the PSP version. ・ Twice Pieceman The final Master who awaits Hakuno in front of the Moon Cell's core, after the seventh round. Position is unchanged from the PSP version. However, to make his appearance less sudden, he would appear frequently throughout the story. ※ He could also interact with the Female Protagonist instead of Hakuno. PART II Continuing on... 　　◆ �� Reorganization ※ This is basically meant to be a shorter version of the plot, so it only contains the essentials. Unfortunately, I have to cut the excess fat. ※ That said, in the end this is a reorganization of the Nero route. There are differences from the Tamamo no Mae and Nameless routes. For example, in the Tamamo route, the event that occurs on the path to the core is completely opposite. ・ Awakening ~ Preliminary Round ~ Servant Summoning From the top... "A girl falls on the water's surface, lying face up. It's the Female Protagonist before she disappears, after losing to Hakuno in the sixth round." This scene would be interesting to include. The audience would be misled to believe she was someone who died in the preliminaries, but the truth would be revealed in after the sixth round. ※ This is just meant to be a surprise scene, without any bearing on the story. It doesn't have to be included. The protagonist notices the incongruity in school life, escapes from the Inside of the World (the Inside of the Texture), fights a doll, and summons a Servant. Unchanged from the introduction to the PSP version. ・ Round 1, Beginning Round 1 begins while the mood is still carefree, while explaining SE.RA.PH., the Moon Cell, the Holy Grail War, and the state of Earth. The atmosphere of Round 1 is "this is a game," "this is a proxy war," and "this feels like a game." The opponent in the first round is announced. Hakuno faces Shinji. → In the PSP version, the opponent in each round was announced on a bulletin board, but if we have the budget, I'd like to make it more flashy this time. We could show the audience the tournament brackets and where each character is. Also, the Masters can casually face off in in the halls, and we can also have Casko smugly appear. ・ Round 1, Conclusion Events from the competition against Shinji, to the elevator ride, until the final duel. Demonstrates that this isn't a game, but rather a ruthless battle for survival. Drake: "Don't you all realize that you were dead as soon as you got here?" They were all a great herd of fools lured in by the colorful promise that their wishes would be granted. Of course, some were staking their lives on the competition, but the majority of them had been deceived. Even Hakuno is troubled. "What reason and wish do I have for fighting in this war for survival?" 　　→→ Point It left a bad taste in his mouth to join this tournament with neither convictions nor goals, and fight his own friend. It struck him that unmindful murder and innocent fights to the death → Real death. Shinji: "I thought it just granted wishes! Why do I have to die!?" Drake: "Look, that's just what it means to live. All people are unaware that they trample on the wishes of others." ・ Round 2 The heartbroken protagonist fights Dan, the old soldier. The old man who fights with regrets about his life, and the Heroic Spirit Robin who died in regret. ・ Round 3 Round 3 is unchanged from the PSP version. After Hakuno wins, his next opponents Atrum and Casko appear to put on haughty airs. "You face us next, oh ho ho." ・ Round 4 Atrum is a character related to both Leo and Earth, so he serves the supporting but important role of explaining much of the setting, such as the state of Earth, and how it ended in the 2030s. Atrum affects goodwill, taking the "you should lose, so that I can live to save the world" approach to sway Hakuno's resolve. Hakuno, who has no identity, hesitates. However, he overcomes Atrum's intimidation by realizing that although Atrum's words are true, Atrum himself is not. They fight as Masters. As a result of the duel against Atrum, Casko decides to help Hakuno while avoiding detection by the Moon Cell. She becomes a useful and helpful friend. Of course, she schemes to defeat Nero and take her place as the main Servant, given an opening. Nero is aware of this, naturally. Casko and Nero share a friendly, combative relationship. →Their relationship is changed from "heroines of different worlds" to "heroines in the same world." ・ Round 5 Hakuno fights Julius in the fifth round. Nero is rendered unable to fight by Assassin's Noble Phantasm. With Casko's assistance, Hakuno challenges Julius and Assassin on his own. Thanks to Hakuno's efforts, Nero recovers, and the story proceeds as it does in the latter half ot the PSP version. After Nero recovers, she tells Hakuno her true name. Her Noble Phantasm is finally unsealed. ・ Missing Chapter This is when CCC takes place. Casko remembers all of it. Nero only remembers, "Elizabeth is my lifelong rival. But which round did we fight in?" ・ Round 6 ~ early Round 7 Rin and Rani are defeated in round 6, and say their farewells. Hakuno anticipates a showdown with Leo next... but Leo is reported to have been defeated. Leo has fallen, but the name of the Master who proceeded to round 7 is hidden by jamming, and the Master is nowhere to be found. Casko and Saber attempt to investigate, but they are unable to either locate the Master or remove the mosaic obscuring its name. In a dramatic development, they realize, "what if they aren't hiding? What if their name was always this way to begin with?" They proceed on the assumption that their next opponent is nameless. They report this irregularity to the priest, but the priest answers, "No. In a sense, your next battle is fair." Hakuno enters the elevator, not knowing who his next foe will be. No one is next to him. When he arrives at the arena, it's a wasteland resembling the Grand Canyon. Hakuno and the Female Protagonist face off, separated by a valley. The enemy Master was his classmate. "Ah, I knew it," Hakuno says in understanding. The girl: "Let's begin, Archer. This is my final fight." Archer appears in response to her order, facing Nero. The girl dispels the texture concealing her true face. There she stands, aloof, her hair blowing in the wind. For a moment, the story switches to the girl's perspective. It's the story of a girl who suddenly woke up like Hakuno did, and strove to move forward in spite of her lack of self and her impending collapse. The Female Protagonist's fight against Leo is the same as Round 7 of the PSP version. → Even though it was against the Female Protagonist, Leo still lost to "Kishinami Hakuno." Round 7 concludes. Archer disappears along with the girl. The Male Protagonist inherits the girl's memories and details of her fight with Leo as his own. ・ End of Moratorium ~ On the way to the core While traveling the path to the core of the Moon Cell, Hakuno is attacked by a debugging program. Its target is Casko, not Hakuno. The Moon Cell is enraged that a Servant which should have been defeated is still intact. → Hakuno parts ways with Casko. The tone is similar to parting with Casko in the CCC Route of CCC. The debugging is powerful enough to actually erase her in CCC, but the debugging is light in this case, so Casko won't disappear. Casko schemes to capture the Protagonist's heart and affections by risking her life (which is in no actual danger) in a heart-rending farewell, after sharing a tender scene with him. Nero sees right through it. "Come back out here!" "I'll beeeeee baaaaaaaack!" "She'll live," remarks Hakuno, as he dons his sunglasses. Hakuno and Saber arrive at the Moon Cell's core. There, they face Twice. ・ Moon Cell Core ~ Savior Hakuno confronts Twice. Twice gives a long speech. ※ The events here are described in the final entry of the Material glossary. His thoughts breaking down, Hakuno has a showdown with Twice. T: "No Servant can reach me. After all, heroes are little more than flowers that bloom in each age. He who saves the world. My answer is he who saves humanity." The Servant Savior appears. The duel against Twice becomes a reflection on human history in the Common Era. "All this consumption and bloodshed, and this is the conclusion we reach?" laments Twice solemnly. "So what!?" roar Nero and Hakuno in defiance. Twice is correct. Humanity is not. Yet, the final role and responsibility to decide and enforce what is right belongs to the people living in the current era. It would be even more unacceptable to have it decreed by a ghost from the past. After Twice is defeated, the ending of the PSP version proceeds to the Saber Route ending of CCC, and the story feels like it connects to EXTELLA. It leads to a new beginning that collects all of the previous components.

#fate/extra #fate/extra ccc #fate/extella #kishinami hakuno

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historian--in--training · 4 years

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Unsung Heroes: The Societal and Historical Suppression of Black Women Activists During the Civil Rights Movement

by Sarah Slasor

I asked my boyfriend what he knew about Rosa Parks, to which he replied, “she refused to give up her seat on a bus to a white guy, right?”

While he is not wrong, his response got me thinking, why is this all he knows? Why is this all I know? Is this obliviousness a product of my own ignorance, or is something larger at play? I decided to dig deeper.

The involvement of female activists, specifically Black women, during the civil rights movement has been historically distorted and simplified. Important figures tend to be remembered for singular aspects of their extensive contributions, while male activists are promoted as representatives of the movement and, in turn, are studied in greater depth. Historical studies often mention Black women, but fail to include details about their activism or political thought.[1] Rosa Parks, who is known for her role in the Montgomery bus boycott, and Coretta Scott King, who is typically remembered as the widow of Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. (MLK), have both made significant contributions to the movement that are seldom discussed. Both women are national icons, yet their lifelong efforts to achieve racial, economic and gender justice remain largely unknown.

The suppression of the voices and legacies of Black women in the civil rights movement is largely a result of the intersection of racism, sexism, and classism, as well as the nature of scholarship and the way history is digested. Women activists, having taken on the title of “invisible unsung heroes and leaders,” are often ignored by academia, as the history of the movement tends to focus on men as leaders while feminist scholarship tends to focus heavily on white women.[2] This essay will highlight the extensive accomplishments of Rosa Parks, Coretta Scott King, and Ella Baker, and will then explore the factors contributing to the suppression of their legacies and how the issue can be resolved.

Portrait of Rosa Park at Mrs. Anne Braden’s home, May 31, 1960.[3]

Rosa Parks is best known for her role in the Montgomery bus boycott, in which she denied a bus driver’s orders to give up her seat for white passengers. It was not that moment that initiated her fight for justice, but instead her entire life that had been leading up to it. Parks’ passion and love of learning was instilled in her by her mother and grandfather, whose examples Parks followed in dedicating her life to racial justice.[4] Before the bus boycott, Parks was elected secretary for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and founded the Montgomery NAACP Youth Council, where she worked with the community and encouraged voter registration.[5] Parks led training sessions on desegregation following the Brown v. Board of Education decision, advocating against racial and sexual violence both nationally and throughout Alabama.[6] Following the boycott, Parks relocated to Detroit and pushed for Black freedom, helped elect John Conyers, a Democratic Michigan Congressman, in 1964, for whom she worked until her retirement in 1988.[7] In the 1980s, she co-founded the Raymond and Rosa Parks Institute for Self-Development to bring young people into the freedom movement. Parks, often described as quiet and meek, dedicated over sixty years of protest to the fight for justice.

Coretta Scott King at the Vietnam-In-Peace Rally, Central Park, New York, April 27, 1968.[8]

Of everyone I asked, those who actually knew of Coretta Scott King knew her as the wife of MLK. As it turns out, when Coretta Scott King met MLK in the 1950s, she was the political activist and influenced his decision to become involved. Like Parks, King claimed more than 50 years of activism before her death in 2006. During her career, she was a member of both Women Strike of Peace and the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom; led a campaign in support of school desegregation; met with Reagan to urge American divestment in South Africa and was later arrested during her protest at the South African Embassy in Washington; brought attention to Black poverty and the HIV-AIDS crisis; and worked to end discrimination against LGBT communities.[9]

From 1968 onward, King led the Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change, in which her husband’s papers were archived and educational community projects took place.[10] King spearheaded lobbying campaigns to recognize her husband’s birthday as a national holiday, and later lobbied for the passage of the Humphrey-Hawkins Full Employment Bill that promoted full employment and fair compensation to combat rising poverty levels. In the last two decades of her activism, King served on the boards of the Black Leadership Forum, the National Black Coalition for Voter Participation, and the Black Leadership Roundtable, and was present at the signing of the Middle East Peace Accords and South Africa’s first free elections in the 1990s.[11] King was not simply the wife of MLK. Her activism was present from early stages of her life, and she used her platform to make extensive contributions to social change, the fight for freedom, and racial and economic equality. In doing so, King kept her husband’s legacy alive, and established herself as an unstoppable force in the fight for justice.

Ella Baker on September 18, 1941.[12]

Ella Baker is another name I admittedly had never heard. In the 1930s, Baker addressed the stigmas of gender, race, and poverty in her exposé, “The Black Slave Market.” In 1940, she was hired by the NAACP to organize branches throughout the South, and by 1945, Baker had helped the NAACP grow from 50,000 to over 450,000 members.[13] By 1958, she was the President of their New York branch.[14] Baker partook in leadership conferences throughout the 1940s, and in 1957, became the executive secretary of MLK’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), though she never obtained a leadership role. Baker disapproved of the SCLC’s male-dominated hierarchy, and of its centralized structure around MLK as a singular charismatic leader, as she felt that “group-centred leadership” would have been more effective than a “leader-centred group.”[15]

During the sit-in movement of the 1960s, Baker brought together student demonstrators to form the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), which became known as the “shock troops” of the civil rights movement.[16] Through the SNCC, Baker created a “classroom without walls,” in which she educated young proteges and organized protests with the aims of non-violent action and voter registration.[17] Though the SNCC disbanded in 1972, its leaders continued to work toward Baker’s ideals with different organizations, and Baker joined the African liberation movement and fought for civil and human rights in her final years.[18]

Black Women: The Backbone of the Civil Rights Movement from medium.com.[19]

These women, among countless others, have incredible stories that go largely untold. The fact that these women are not the primary faces of the movement and their accomplishments go unrecognized at the surface-level of academia is the product of the three interlocking systems of oppression: racism, sexism, and classism. During the civil rights movement, societal attitudes toward Black women suppressed their voices. Today, social movement scholarship’s focus on men and elites as leaders, along with feminist scholarship’s focus on white women ignores the accomplishments of Black women in history.

Attitudes toward Black female activists, in the rare instances that they are actually studied, have been historically negative. Under the patriarchy, many looked to males for leadership, which, at the time, largely stemmed from religious traditions of having a male leader.[20] This was evident in the experience of Ella Baker, who was never given a permanent position in SCLC nor a salary comparable to any man who replaced her.[21] Many organizations, such as the Black Panther Party, maintained a male-heavy image, as their intention was to appeal to the “brothers on the block.”[22] While this attracted members, it shut out many female activists who struggled to be heard.

This male-dominated arena is perpetuated by historical scholarship, which tends to focus on formal organization and membership and ignores women’s radical protest and activism. As a result, history commemorates formal leaders and overlooks women, as leadership positions were often unattainable for women activists. Women of colour are frequently viewed as uninvolved in feminist organizations, and therefore unconcerned with women’s rights.[23] This was not the case, as pointed out by historian Gerda Lerner, who remarked that women’s liberation meant different things to different women during the mid-20th century, and emphasized that while the mainstream societal ideology of women’s primary place was in the home, Black women’s place was in the white woman’s kitchen.[24] Liberation was different for Black women than for Black men, and the repression of many women’s voices during the civil rights movement is reflected in the way scholarship digests history.

According to historian Bernice McNair Barnett, there are three major biases that influence the way that Black women’s history is construed: (1) Black women are stereotypically connected with “pathologies” within the family, such as female-headedness, illegitimacy, teen pregnancy, poverty, and welfarism; (2) there is a middle-class orientation that ignores poor and working-class women, a large percentage of whom are Black; and (3) there is an apolitical, non-leadership image of Black and poor women as political passivists as opposed to movement leaders.[25] In turn, the roles of Black women have been ignored in research of modern social movements. As such, it is generally assumed that the women involved were white, and the men were Black.[26] While the “great man” theory of leadership is often critiqued by sociologists, this perspective is perpetuated by history, as the leaders were predominantly male, and history loves leaders.

One of the foremost exceptions is Rosa Parks. Parks’ story is included with that of Malcolm X and MLK in history classes, but, in actuality, students only know of her for one event, despite the rest of her activist career being of equal importance. Along with Parks’ lifelong activism, history often fails to mention Jo Ann Gibson Robinson, Alabama State College English professor and president of the Montgomery Women’s Political Council, where Robinson had been actively planning a boycott of city buses months prior to Parks’ arrest.[27] History also ignores the hundreds of women, like Robinson, who were forced to resign from their positions at Alabama State University and other workplaces across the United States for making noise about equality.[28] Society has excluded, ignored, and oppressed Black women; and historical scholarship is no different.

The civil rights movement, though perceived to be led by men, was heavily bolstered by Black women. Though not typically recognized as leaders, Black women initiated protests, formulated strategies, and mobilized other resources necessary for collective action. Racism, sexism, and classism created an environment in which women were silenced, and, as a result, frequently go unnoticed in historical scholarship. Rosa Parks, largely known for her actions on one day in her sixty years of activism, Coretta Scott King for her marital status, Ella Baker for her association with the NAACP, and countless others are the unsung heroes of the civil rights movement. It is imperative that we recognize their accomplishments to cease history’s glorification of male leaders when Black women were integral to the success and legacy of the movement, and look past what history wants us to believe.

All sources cited in this essay are written by women.

_____

Notes

[1] Dayo F. Gore, Radicalism at the Crossroads: African American Women Activists in the Cold War, New York; London: NYU Press (2011): 161.

[2] Bernice McNair Barnett, “Invisible Southern Black Women Leaders in the Civil Rights Movement: The Triple Constraints of Gender, Race, and Class,” Gender and Society 7, no. 2 (1993): 163; Ibid, 164.

[3] Portrait of Rosa Parks at Mrs. Anne Braden’s home, May 31, 1960. Photograph. 3.5 x 5 inches. Louisville, Kentucky. Highlander Research and Education Center: Highlander Research and Education Center Records, 1917-2005.

[4] “Rosa Parks Interview, 1992 February,” Connie Martinson.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Ibid; Christina Greene, “Women in the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements,” Oxford University Press (November 2016): 3.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Coretta Scott King at the Peace-In-Vietnam Rally, Central Park, New York, April 27, 1968, photograph.

[9] “Women in the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements,” 3; Vicki Crawford, “Coretta Scott King and the Struggle for Civil and Human Rights: An Enduring Legacy,” The Journal of African American History (January 1, 2007): 112.

[10] Ibid, 114.

[11] Ibid, 116.

[12] Ella Baker on Sept. 18, 1941. Photograph. Afro Newspaper/Gado/Getty Images, from Time Magazine.

[13] “Women in the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements,” 5.

[14] Anne Romaine, “Anne Romaine Interviews, 1966-1967: February 1967; SCEF Office, New York; Ella Baker Interviewed by Anne Romaine,” 11.

[15] Britta Waldschmidt-Nelson, “Ella Baker: A Leader Behind the Scenes,” FOCUS: Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies (August 1993):4.

[16] “Women in the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements,” 5.

[17] Barbara Ransby, Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press (2003): 284; “Anne Romaine Interviews, 1966-1967: February 1967; SCEF Office, New York; Ella Baker Interviewed by Anne Romaine,” 12.

[18] “Ella Baker: A Leader Behind the Scenes,” 5.

[19] Black Women: The Backbone of the Civil Rights Movement. Photograph.

[20] “Invisible Southern Black Women Leaders in the Civil Rights Movement: The Triple Constraints of Gender, Race, and Class,” 175.

[21] Ibid, 176.

[22] “Women in the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements,” 9.

[23] “Invisible Southern Black Women Leaders in the Civil Rights Movement: The Triple Constraints of Gender, Race, and Class,” 164.

[24] Ibid.

[25] Ibid.

[26] Ibid, 165.

[27] Allison Berg, “Trauma and Testimony in Black Women’s Civil Rights Memoirs: The Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Women Who Started It, Warriors Don’t Cry, and From the Mississippi Delta,” Journal of Women’s History (2009): 89.

[28] “Invisible Southern Black Women Leaders in the Civil Rights Movement: The Triple Constraints of Gender, Race, and Class,” 174.

Bibliography

Primary Sources

Baker, Ella. “Interview with Ella Baker, April 19, 1977.” Interview by Sue Thrasher. Documenting the American South, n.d. Retrieved from https://docsouth.unc.edu/sohp/G-0008/G-0008.html

Black Women: The Backbone of the Civil Rights Movement. Photograph. Retrieved from https://medium.com/@nadiarising411/black-women-the-backbone-of-the-civil-rights-movement-618b9859a5c

Coretta Scott King at the Peace-In-Vietnam Rally, Central Park, New York, April 27, 1968, photograph. Retrieved from https://www.cnn.com/2013/08/23/us/coretta-scott-king-fast-facts/index.html

Ella Baker on Sept. 18, 1941. Photograph. Afro Newspaper/Gado/Getty Images, from Time Magazine. Retrieved from https://time.com/4633460/mlk-day-ella-baker/

Parks, Rosa. “Rosa Parks Interview, 1992 February.” Interview by Connie Martinson. The Drucker Institute, February 1992. Retrieved from https://dp.la/item/81d0ae423e14a2f67d20fdb34b3b0cc3

Portrait of Rosa Parks at Mrs. Anne Braden’s home, May 31, 1960. Photograph. 3.5 x 5 inches. Louisville, Kentucky. Highlander Research and Education Center: Highlander Research and Education Center Records, 1917-2005. Retrieved from https://www.wisconsinhistory.org/Records/Image/IM52893

Romaine, Anne. “Anne Romaine Interviews, 1966-1967: February 1967; SCEF Office, New York; Ella Baker Interviewed by Anne Romaine.” Recollection Wisconsin, Wisconsin Historical Society, 1960-1968. Retrieved from https://dp.la/item/5493d0d6be916f0b12a9cc57534d3906

Waldschmidt-Nelson, Britta. “Ella Baker: A Leader Behind the Scenes.” FOCUS: Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, August 1993.

Secondary Sources

Berg, Allison. 2009. “Trauma and Testimony in Black Women’s Civil Rights Memoirs: The Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Women Who Started It, Warriors Don’t Cry, and From the Mississippi Delta.” Journal of Women’s History21 (3): 84-107.

Crawford, Vicki. “Coretta Scott King and the Struggle for Civil and Human Rights: An Enduring Legacy.” The Journal of African American History 92, no. 1. January 1, 2007.

Gore, Dayo F. Radicalism at the Crossroads: African American Women Activists in the Cold War. New York; London: NYU Press, 2011.

Greene, Christina. “Women in the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements.” Oxford University Press: Oxford Research Encyclopedia, American History, November 2016.

McNair Barnett, Bernice. “Invisible Southern Black Women Leaders in the Civil Rights Movement: The Triple Constraints of Gender, Race, and Class.” Gender and Society 7, no. 2 (1993): 162-181.

Ransby, Barbara. Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2003.

#civil rights movement #essay #rosa parks #ella baker #coretta scott king #BLM #black lives matter

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the-most-pathetic-edge-marquis · 4 years

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Do you know a lot about terfs? i used to follow a blog that called themselves a radical feminist which sounded kinda terfy but i couldn’t find them posting anything anti-trans. Is “radical feminism” even real? or is it like neo nazis saying alt-right? thanks for any help

Hoo boy. (This got long, so there’s a read-more.)

Preface: I am not an expert, I’m just someone with a blog who has been experiencing the internet for a while, and you might get better answers out of going to blogs specifically about lgbtq issues. That said:

There are a decent number of terfs who use the phrase proudly, as a term to describe themselves, because they think it’s a good thing. There’s also a lot of people who are terfs who go at it more subtly. Like JK Rowling. There’s no explicit anti-trans language, but they say things like “dress however you want” (which can be something said in ignorance, but can also be intentionally undermining the reality of trans people. Which given Rowling refusing to respond to lgbtq groups is...likely).

What I’ve found even more, though, is people who never outright attack trans women. Instead, they go after men.

A lot of the time, they make really valid points. They say things like “men experience the world in different ways because of their privilege” and “women’s bathrooms can become places of safety” and stuff like that. And on the surface, they’re right. It all seems really feminist and full of solidarity among women, and they never outright say anything anti-trans.

But what they are more subtly doing is saying that trans women are men, and the fact that they were assigned male at birth means they can never be female. Talking about women’s bathrooms being safe spaces is them subtly saying that trans women shouldn’t be allowed in them. Saying men are privileged, and experience the world differently, is them saying that transwomen can never be “real women.”

(Side note: Men are privileged, but trans women aren’t men. They experience whole other levels of discomfort and discrimination. Also, the idea that womanhood is based on oppression, and if you weren’t oppressed for being a women, you can’t be one, is all sorts of flawed! Even afab people experience different levels and types of oppression based on where they live, the amount of money they have, race, and so much else.)

When I was new to the Interweb, (full disclosure this is not my first Tumblr blog, and yes, I started on Pinterest), I reblogged and saved a lot of that stuff. Because it’s really hard to recognize that rhetoric. It’s subtle. That’s the point. It’s based on flawed premises, but it’s hard to see that without having the context of seeing more explicitly anti-trans rhetoric and playing connect-the-dots. A lot of the times they never say they’re anti-trans, you never even get a hint of it, but they’re lumping in trans women with everything they say about men. Other terfs realize it, and trans people probably clue in because you start to see how your experience is being invalidated, but the casual reader never picks it up.

If I had to take a guess, I’d say that was the type of “radical feminist” blog you were following. Because in my experience, I’ve never run across someone using that phrase who wasn’t using that type of rhetoric, (except for people who are new to the phrasing and don’t know any better). I’ve even seen it not online, when I worked with someone who seemed like a really cool activist, so I gave her the benefit of the doubt when she used that phrase, and then it all blew up over the issue of me having a trans pin. (She also told me I “didn’t have the right to question God’s power unless I could walk on water,” but that was later and mostly unrelated.)

So...yeah. It might not have started that way, but I’m pretty sure “radical feminist” is now a pretty clear indicator of terf views, similar to alt-right.

Again, this is just based on my personal experience, and I would actually love any contributions from other people, but I hope this helped!

#lgbtq #terfs #wow this got long

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feminist-hot-takes · 5 years

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Why “Pop Feminism” sucks

Feminism as popularized by the likes of Katy Perry, Taylor Swift, or Miley Cyrus can be defined simply as “believing in equality of women and men” or “loving yourself as a woman”. I’m positing that this “pop feminism” is interpreted to be the practice of encouraging female autonomy. Women should be able to do anything and everything they want to, free of outside coercion. While much of the earliest feminist conversations have been centered around proving that women are able to do X Y or Z as well as men can, current mainstream concerns are more about encouraging women to actually do those X Y or Z things, and granting them the access and power to do so more easily, without judgement. Women should be CEO’s, presidents, senators, police chiefs, principals, professors... women should share equally in the power men hold over our society, culture, and economy. It’s a numbers game. Women should be able to lead free, autonomous lives. Be a sex worker! Be a housewife! Be a teacher! Be a CEO! Be an instagram model! Be an oppressor! Do whatever you want. Any decision a woman makes “freely” is then feminist praxis. You want to quit your job, leave the demands of the workplace, and focus on raising your children in a household, despite some fake “feminists” telling you not to? Do it! You want to be an escort and live off of rich men? Do it! A woman who tries to tell you what you should or shouldn’t do, or who criticizes your actions to be actually ‘anti-feminist’ is NOT a real feminist, but rather a cranky old lady stuck in the second wave who needs to be fully liberated. Our biggest female celebrities are able to make millions of dollars off their sex appeal, participating in the “sex sells” scheme that has made women famous since the likes of Marilyn Monroe, and still be a feminist. This pop feminism is easy, accessible, fun, and profitable. Forever 21 will sell you “feminist” merchandise. Teen Vogue regularly publishes articles about “feminist” celebrities. Young girls can grow up watching scantily clad Katy Perry, Taylor Swift and Miley Cyrus shaking their asses in music videos, and realize their autonomous ability to “subjectify” their bodies in an empowering way, despite the fact that almost no male pop stars engage in the same supposedly “empowering” behavior. Ariel Levy discusses this rise in “Raunch” feminist culture of the 90s into the 2000s in Female Chauvinist Pigs to be highly influenced by neo-liberalism and the commodification of sexuality.

What is this brand of feminism trying to prove? That women can do *literally* anything they want to and still be a feminist? Then what’s the point? Pop feminism places the sole defining factor of what is or isn’t feminist into the conscious intentions of the feminist actor, rather than the effects or results of their actions on themselves or others. There isn’t even any strong ethical framework in place to judge what those conscious intentions should be aiming at. For example, pop feminism doesn’t ask feminists to make decisions with the intentions of say, increasing one’s day-to-day happiness, or dismantling patriarchy. Women should just be able to do whatever they want, free of disruption or critique. Without a concrete goal or mission with which to monitor one’s conscious intentions of actions, this feminism falls flat. A progressive movement whose label can be stamped onto seemingly any woman’s actions as “feminist” does not change or better the conditions for women in any way. If we as feminists are not expected to change or monitor our own actions, make sacrifices, or even cater our actions to be intended to accomplish some sort of unified goal, how are we to change anything? Where is the sense in performing the same actions and behaviors for decades and expecting some different, better outcome each time?

I would argue that this feminism even permits women to co-exist and excuse blatant misogyny in a cool “liberating” way. For example, young women may date or have sex with misogynist dirt-bags who see women as objects in order to gain security, housing, food, money, or “woke” clout, even when these women are not in desperate situations where this is their only way of survival. These men are powerful, and use women to maintain this power and status. This logic is troubling. If a slave consciously decides to remain a slave and maintain their perceived existence as an object or commodity to be owned in an effort to secure stability, housing, food... is this liberating? Perhaps in some cases, the risks of revolution or escape are great enough that remaining a slave is indeed a more safe choice. But I doubt anyone would say this is “liberating” in any sense. How is consciously intending the fulfillment of your own oppression liberating?

This pop feminism is rampant in the mainstream music industry. Besides the celebrities already mentioned, Ariana Grande, Beyonce, Lady Gaga, and Ke$ha are additional spokesmen of this philosophy. Ironically, Ke$ha’s situation with her producer, Dr. Luke, is proof of the phony nature of pop feminism.

When Ke$ha came onto the scene, she was the embodiment of the drunk, stupid, party girl character who puked glitter, had sex in public, and lived life as a “free spirit”. This caricature was framed as feminist, liberating, and re-appropriating the “slut” stereotype. Ke$ha is a liberated feminist! Who can do whatever she wants! Years after her premiere on the scene with the party anthem “Tik Tok”, Ke$ha quietly left the pop world to focus on her lawsuit against her abusive and manipulative producer, Dr. Luke, who held complete control over her financially and professionally. After years of public struggle, weak support from fellow celebrities (ex. Taylor Swift sent over Ke$ha $250,000 in show of “support”, but didn’t do much else) and a stint in rehab for eating disorders and mental health issues, Ke$ha lost.

Pop music is a machine. While Katy Perry shoots whipped cream out of her bra against an army of Snoop Doggs in a music video, she may be claiming self-objectification and empowerment. But on the other side of the screen are a whole slew of men, directing, monitoring, and profiting off of all things Katy Perry. Just as Marilyn Monroe’s sexualized image was directed and encouraged by the professional world of men around her in order to profit, the same goes for pop stars today. Only now, these pop stars tell us they’re intending to sexualize themselves. So it’s feminist...? Men in the music industry are now benefiting from the feminist branding, sometimes even more than the women they brand. They can continue to produce and control sexualized female celebrities as they’ve always done, but now, feminism is on their side. On the surface, Ke$ha may preach liberation and autonomy and intended sexualization, while behind the scenes, she’s suffering from the same mental health issues as notable sex symbols of the past (Marilyn Monroe, Judy Garland...) and subjected to major abuse.

Why do we describe the identity of a “feminist” purely by a belief in equality for women and men? Feminists are defined only by sharing a belief, rather than sharing a commitment to action or goals. Feminism is then made apolitical, requiring almost no change in actions or behavior. You can be a republican and a feminist! You can be catholic and a feminist! While this apolitical nature helps the idea of feminism reach farther stretches of the population than say, the Black Lives Matter movement what’s the point in a movement that carries no firm ethical framework or goal or mission?

I would argue that this feminism of autonomy is touted mainly by women who don’t experience the more tangible and oppressive effects of patriarchy. Or at least, by women who are unable to truly acknowledge how patriarchy effects themselves. If women were no longer raped, abused, silenced, and murdered, then of course, women could do anything. If we didn’t live in a patriarchy, a woman choosing to be a housewife wouldn’t have the same implications it does now. Rid of the link between objectification and abuse, self-sexualizing wouldn’t be such a big deal. But we don’t exist in a vacuum. For the women who are daily confronted with the uglies of patriarchy right in their faces, total autonomy isn’t going to do them much good. Autonomy, of course, should be the result of the feminist project. However, depending on it this early in the fight against patriarchy is putting the cart before the horse. Autonomy cannot be both the means and ends of feminism.

What I’m arguing may lead to some conservative conclusions about women participating in sex work, pornography, etc and whether or not these actions can truly be enacted in liberating manners. As a woman who has freely participated in sex work in the past, I recognize the complexities of the issue on a personal level, and how confusing it can be to navigate as a young female within a capitalist state. It’s a matter of balancing the idealism of a feminist ethics and mission with the realistic situation women find themselves in while living in capitalism. Feminists have been arguing over the ‘sex wars’ for decades, and it seems sex-positive feminism has won. I’d like to dissect this problem more in a separate essay.

#feminism #essay #feminist

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hendriksen36french-blog · 5 years

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EU Lifts Many Permissions Versus Belarus In spite of Human Rights Issues.

When you lift the weight, weightlifting increases your heart rate during the brief ruptureds of power. The lift in my block of apartments is such an antique it has a cable grille as well as doors that open up in an outward direction, like the ones in Woman in a Cage, allowing me to play pranks on visitors by making believe to be the little boy ghost from Animosity as well as peering in at them as they rotate gradually previous. It is much easier if we consider the numbers from pascal's triangular installation right into spaces. He raised his hand to comply with the next step but I ordered it softly as well as place it pull back. The players continued to be in high spirits and also were heard giggling that their combined weight could have triggered the lift to bend. In the year to the end of June, concerning 35% of those joining The Gym had actually never ever been participants of various other health and fitness centres. 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Theoretically, the Earth was not one regular age, however was several billions of different ages separated by little variations, depending on the power of the lightning strikes. It is constantly recommended to put your computer system in Rest mode or Hibernate mode to minimize power usage. And while thinking about exactly what an empty gap her life was coming to be, Tess saw her daddy's head turn and his covers raise heavily. Claude Chabrol's Funny of Power stars Isabelle Huppert as a French court who attempts to reduce the very effective however corrupt Chief Executive Officer of a huge company. It was checked in shops by Tesco a couple of years earlier and also other supermarket chains are exploring similar devices. While they look comparable, the pelvic lift is an advanced kind of the pelvic tilt. We slept late, uninterrupted, in safe and secure resort among the trees, the substantial river chanting its limitless track on either side people. Throughout the night meal, partaken of amidst the gathering shadows of golden, our newly discovered buddy again showed his power as a trencherman. Universal home gyms that utilize different types of resistance are less expensive than those with weight heaps. This is dealt with by the use of circulation transformers as well as power transformers Generally, a power transformer has two sections: a main coil and secondary coil. It's the maximum use your time, says Tom Holland, author of Beat the Health club." You get everything simultaneously as well as you're not in the gym for an hour." He recommends choosing an upper body, lower body, abdominal muscles and after that a cardio interval. Because it's longer and also does not have to do as much hefty lifting as the first period, I'm really delighted regarding Power period 2. Gym policy should need that team get training in the operation of any type of brand-new devices in the gym. 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Acknowledging the influence of my subconscious mind over my power of will, I shall take care to send to it a guaranteed as well as clear picture of my CLEAR PURPOSE in life and all minor functions bring about my major objective, as well as I will keep this image CONSTANTLY PRIOR TO my subconscious mind by DUPLICATING IT DAILY. The TRX and also competitors like the Jungle Gym XT will certainly permit you to greatly exhaust your core and overcome useful series of movement you wouldn't have offered to you with dumbbells alone. No, as if https://studiosante.de/onycosolve/ , the wall surface it sat on, as well as the house it was held inside of, merged the power. After years of lack of exercise, TJ returned as heaven Space Ranger in order to help the Galaxy Rangers combat the Psycho Rangers. The issue is that lots of people miss one workout as well as prior to they recognize it, they haven't been to the gym in 4 weeks. Bel came to me with an old buddy of mine, among the good friends who quit on me. He lightly slid his arms around me as well as raised me from the messy health club flooring. There excel reasons to be hesitant of the concept that a win for Clinton will usher in a feminist utopia-or also just higher political power for women. The power relocated external from me, or perhaps I moved on via something that was always there, however tonight I could notice it. Siobhan moved forward, and the power did not fill her. And also it predicted that kite power would certainly cost so little that developing countries would be able to use it to wean themselves off polluting diesel generators as well as various other carbon-heavy power sources. If you want straightforward exercise tools instead of a way of life principle, check neighborhood authority centers.

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hope-for-olicity · 6 years

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After a while, the true-life horror stories women tell about their struggles to get reproductive health care start to bleed together. They almost always feature some variation on the same character: the doctor who waves a hand and says, “You’ll be fine,” or “That’s just in your head,” or “Take a Tylenol.” They follow an ominous three-act structure, in which a woman expresses concern about a sexual or reproductive issue to a doctor; the doctor demurs; later, after either an obstacle course of doctor visits or a nightmare scenario coming to life, a physician at last acknowledges her pain was real and present the whole time. Sometimes there’s a quietly gloomy boyfriend or husband in a secondary-character role, frustrated by the strain his partner’s health issue is putting on their intimacy.

That many women have stories of medical practitioners dismissing, misdiagnosing, or cluelessly shrugging at their pain is, unfortunately, nothing new. Research cited in the Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics in 2001, for example, indicated that women get prescribed less pain medication than men after identical procedures (controlling for body size), are less likely to be admitted to hospitals and receive stress tests when they complain of chest pain, and are significantly more likely than men to be “undertreated” for pain by doctors. And there’s a multi-million dollar industry of questionable alternative health remedies that was arguably built at least in part on a history of doctors being dismissive toward women’s bodily health.

But in 2018, these stories of neglect and unhelpfulness within women’s health care, especially women’s sexual and reproductive health care, are bubbling up to the surface—being documented, circulated, and acknowledged by public discourse—in curious abundance.

It started early in the year. In January, a widely cited Vogue cover story on the tennis great Serena Williams, who gave birth to a daughter in September of 2017, told the harrowing tale of how Williams had to urgently insist to the hospital staff in her recovery room that what she was experiencing after her C-section was a pulmonary embolism in order to get the treatment she needed to stay alive. “The nurse thought her pain medicine might be making her confused,” the story reads. A month later, Vogue published an essay by the Girlscreator Lena Dunham on her choice to have a hysterectomy at age 31 to end her struggle with what she understood to be endometriosis. “I had to work so hard to have my pain acknowledged,” she writes. “And while I’ve been battling endometriosis for a decade and this will be my ninth surgical procedure, no doctor has ever confirmed this for me.” After her uterus is removed and she wakes up in a recovery room, she writes, the doctors are eager to tell her she was right: her uterus is “worse than anyone could have imagined.”

Then, in April, The New York Times published Linda Villarosa’s revealing reporton the dangerous endeavor of being black and pregnant in America, a phenomenon partly attributed to medical practitioners’ “dismissal of legitimate concerns and symptoms.” The story’s primary character, 23-year-old New Orleans mother of two, Simone Landrum, recalls being told by a doctor to calm down and take Tylenol when she complained of headaches during a particularly exhausting pregnancy; those headaches were later found to be caused by pre-eclampsia, a pregnancy complication that causes high blood pressure and can result in the placenta separating from the uterus before the baby is born. This happened to Landrum, and her pregnancy ended in a stillbirth.

The stories kept coming. Netflix’s The Bleeding Edge, a documentary released last month, is primarily about the poor testing of many medical devices on the market, but it nonetheless also functions as an indictment of carelessness toward women’s health at the regulatory-body level. Three of the four primary narratives are about medical devices hastily approved by the FDA and marketed to women as safe, easy solutions for fertility- and childbirth-related issues. One prominently featured woman whose medical device—the birth-control implant Essure—lands her in the hospital so many times she loses her job, her home, and her kids over the course of the documentary, recalls being told by a doctor that her abnormally heavy, persistent vaginal bleeding after its insertion is “because she’s Latina” and that her problems are all in her head.

The new KCRW podcast Bodies, a series about medical mysteries in women’s health that launched in July, kicked off its run with the story of a woman in her twenties who experiences deep, burning pain during sex and is initially told by a doctor that nothing’s wrong, lots of women have pain during sex, and that she should just wait and it’ll probably go away. After getting a referral for a specialist from a friend who visited 20 doctors over the course of seven years before getting a diagnosis, she’s diagnosed with and successfully treated for a type of vulvodynia—which the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecologydescribes as “common” (though “rarely diagnosed”).

Sasha Ottey calls this phenomenon “health-care gaslighting.” Ottey founded the Atlanta-based nonprofit PCOS Challenge: The National Polycystic Ovary Syndrome Association in 2009 to raise awareness of PCOS, a hormonal disorder affecting the ovaries that’s often linked to infertility, diabetes, and pelvic pain. Despite the fact that PCOS was first identified and researched in 1935 and the CDC has estimated it affects some 6 to 12 percent of adult women in the United States, many doctors still don’t recognize the symptoms. Women with PCOS and similar conditions like endometriosis and uterine fibroids, Ottey says, “have been told to suffer in silence.” Additionally, because PCOS often causes obesity or weight problems, many women with PCOS experience not just sexism but what Ottey calls “weight bias” in the health-care system. “Many women and young girls are told, ‘Oh, it's all in your head. Just eat less and exercise more,’” says Ottey, who herself recalls being initially instructed by an endocrinologist to lose weight and come back in six months. “People who are following an eating plan and present their diaries to their physicians or nutritionists will be told, ‘You left something off. You're lying. You're not doing enough.’”

Ottey, who spearheaded the PCOS Challenge’s first-ever day of advocacy on Capitol Hill in May, has noted the recent shift in how—and where—women talk about their struggles getting the sexual and reproductive health care they need. “We're at a critical juncture in women's health, where women are now feeling more empowered to speak up. Because frankly, we're frustrated,” she says. “We're frustrated with the type of care that we've gotten. We're frustrated that it sometimes takes someone decades to get a diagnosis. It's been a year, or a few years, of being empowered and emboldened."

Katherine Sherif, an internist at Jefferson University Hospital in Philadelphia and the director of the hospital’s women’s primary care unit, says she hears “day in and day out” from patients “about how they are not listened to [by other doctors], how they’re blown off, how a clue was missed.” Sherif believes most of the minimization of women’s health concerns is “unconscious” on the part of both male and female doctors, but blames general societal sexism for the gaps in women’s sexual and reproductive health care. Men with sexual and reproductive dysfunction have to fight for the care they need sometimes too, she points out, but “to a lesser extent” from what she’s seen.

In her 23 years practicing medicine, Sherif has received a lot of thank-you notes from women she’s treated—and “they don’t say ‘Thank you for saving my life’ or ‘Thank you for that great diagnosis,’” she says. “They say, ‘Thank you for listening to me.’ Or ‘I know we couldn’t get to the bottom of it, but thank you for being there.’” So Sherif sees a common theme in the recent flurry of high-profile expressions of disappointment in women’s reproductive health care, feminist protests against President Donald Trump, and the #MeToo movement: All three, she says, result from women feeling that their complaints, concerns, and objections aren’t being listened to.

“Perhaps it parallels what’s changing in our society,” Sherif says. “When we shine a light in those dirty, dark corners, I think it may give us courage to shed light on other things.”

Ottey, meanwhile, believes women’s increasing candor about their health- and health care-related frustrations can be traced back to the advent of social media. Ottey describes her own struggle to finally get a diagnosis and a treatment plan for PCOS in 2008 as one that made her feel “absolutely alone,” but in the years since, she says, she’s seen women with similar conditions and complaints find and support each other on platforms like Facebook and Twitter. “Women see other women, and other girls, speaking up,” she says.

Ottey’s social-media strength-in-numbers theory is borne out in The Bleeding Edge, too: Women whose health deteriorated after getting the Essure birth-control device implanted eventually created an advocacy campaign after finding each other through a Facebook group launched in 2011. Thirty-five thousand women had joined by the time The Bleeding Edge was filmed.

Angie Firmalino, the Facebook group’s founder, remembers being surprised at how many women quickly joined the group, despite it being a project she’d started just so she could warn her female friends about the device. “We became a support group for each other,” Firmalino says, as a montage of selfie videos women have posted to the group page play onscreen. “The day I was implanted, I left the hospital and I was in pain,” says one woman. “They told me to take some ibuprofen and it’ll get better,” says another.

When Firmalino researched the process by which Essure was approved for sale and implantation, she found the FDA hearings had been videotaped, but the video company that owned the tapes would only release them to her for several hundred dollars. So she posted on the Facebook group asking for donations to buy the video—clips of which are repurposed in the documentary and account for its most chilling moments. They raised $900 in 15 minutes.

#women's health #SO SO SO IMPORTANT #PCOS #endometriosis #maternity care #contraceptives #pain #being ignored

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