#radfem lit

[nomorerww]

https://twitter.com/nikkicraft/status/1621703774333960192?t=sbxJAcjyneU3iV8pP4gpZg&s=19

#andrea dworkin #radfem lit #lit #ref #radical feminist resource

[redheddebeauty]

#tiktok #radfem #book recs #feminist lit #women #feminism #radical feminism #video

[ill-try-to-do-book-reviews]

Such A Pretty Smile

Kristi DeMeester

RATING: 🕯🕯🕯🕯🔥 (4.5/5)

Such A Pretty Smile is a gripping novel with an incredibly powerful story. The entire book serves as one big metaphor, but it is not a metaphor that is difficult to unravel for those of us already familiar. It has its moments of alluding to more graphic things, but nothing so explicit that I feel it warrants a trigger warning.

This book took me a cumulative 7 hours to read, all spread over the course of about 8 days. Each time I picked it up, I found myself positively enraptured with the writing, the story unfolding before me. I allowed myself frequent breaks to prevent personal burnout but even when I wasn't directly consuming Kristi DeMeester's words, I was thinking about her characters.

SUMMARY: There’s something out there that’s killing. Known only as The Cur, he leaves no traces, save for the torn bodies of girls, on the verge of becoming women, who are known as trouble-makers; those who refuse to conform, to know their place. Girls who don’t know when to shut up.

2019: Thirteen-year-old Lila Sawyer has secrets she can’t share with anyone. Not the school psychologist she’s seeing. Not her father, who has a new wife, and a new baby. And not her mother—the infamous Caroline Sawyer, a unique artist whose eerie sculptures, made from bent twigs and crimped leaves, have made her a local celebrity. But soon Lila feels haunted from within, terrorized by a delicious evil that shows her how to find her voice—until she is punished for using it.

2004: Caroline Sawyer hears dogs everywhere. Snarling, barking, teeth snapping that no one else seems to notice. At first, she blames the phantom sounds on her insomnia and her acute stress in caring for her ailing father. But then the delusions begin to take shape—both in her waking hours, and in the violent, visceral sculptures she creates while in a trance-like state. Her fiancé is convinced she needs help. Her new psychiatrist waves her “problem” away with pills. But Caroline’s past is a dark cellar, filled with repressed memories and a lurking horror that the men around her can’t understand.

As past demons become a present threat, both Caroline and Lila must chase the source of this unrelenting, oppressive power to its malignant core. Brilliantly paced, unsettling to the bone, and unapologetically fierce, Such a Pretty Smile is a powerful allegory for what it can mean to be a woman, and an untamed rallying cry for anyone ever told to sit down, shut up, and smile pretty.

MY DETAILED REVIEW (SPOILER WARNING)

Despite being chronologically all over the place, Such A Pretty Smile has amazing pacing that lends itself well to the story it is telling.

Having gone in blind to the metaphor, I found myself suspicious of every man at play - Caroline's counselor, Lila's counselor, Daniel. This wariness played perfectly into the metaphor at hand - these men were the men I needed to be suspicious of. Just not as individual men.

Like I said, this metaphor is a familiar one to those who have lived it. Men taking strong, independant women and beating them, biting them into submission or ripping them to shreds for disobedience. Men who feel entitled to your body as a young woman, a young girl. And the way those around you deem you as crazy, or out of line, if you fight back. The way our mothers filled those roles of obedient wives out of fear. The way that we will try to fight for the independance they could never have.

All in all, Such A Pretty Smile is extremely worth your time. I will most certainly be trying to ascertain myself a physical copy, and I encourage you too, as well. Amazing feminist literature that should be on everyone's TBR.

#booklr #book tumblr #book reviews #book review #such a pretty smile #kristi demeester #feminist lit #radfems dni #horror lit #horror literature #bookblr

[marrowdaughter]

While this realm is not exclusively hers, the single woman embodies female independence in its most obvious and visible form. This makes her a magnet for reactionary hate, but it also makes her an intimidating figure for a substantial number of other women. The gender-divided labor model that still constrains us has significant psychological consequences. Nothing in the way most girls are educated encourages them to believe in their own strength and abilities, nor to cultivate and value their independence. They are taught not only to consider partnership and family the foundations of their personal achievements, but also to look on themselves as delicate and helpless, and to seek emotional security at all costs, such that their admiration for intrepid female adventurers remains purely notional and without impact on their own lives. [...]

Chollet, Mona. In Defense of Witches: The Legacy of the Witch Hunts and Why Women Are Still on Trial, trans. by Sophie R. Lewis. St. Martin's Press, 2022.

#radfems please touch #radfems please interact #radical feminists please touch #radical feminists please interact #feminist lit #female socialization

[pinkhutia]

surprising that radblr doesnt talk about ariel levy's female chauvinist pigs more. only just finished the introduction and it's grippingg.

There is a widespread assumption that simply because my generation of women has the good fortune to live in a world touched by the feminist movement, that means everything we do is magically imbued with its agenda. It doesn't work that way. "Raunchy" and "liberated" are not synonyms. It is worth asking ourselves if this bawdy world of boobs and gams we have resurrected reflects how far we've come, or how far we have left to go.

written in 2005. still depressingly relevant

#f lit #radfem safe #*

[little-octant]

Some sketches

#art #artists on tumblr #drawing #artwork #fanart #sketchbook #sketch #traditional drawing #traditional art #oc #oc artwork #oc art #radfem artist #xmen #charles xavier #russian literature #russian lit memes

[junipercastor]

i miss when i was into more mainstream things. like when i was nine, i really liked my older brothers' shounen jump comics, especially shaman king/yuyu hakusho. but it's really telling that i grew out of them as i grew older and got tumbled through the washer and dryer that is life and in it, female socialization. there was never any room in those 1990/early 2000s manga for girls, unless as a love interest or an unpopular/pesky side character (think naruto's sakura) and if i wanted a girl's version of shounen jump there was none tbh. the manga my friends traded around were all heterosexual shoujo romance and that's what all girls magazines were. the girl was only as important as her relationship with the male love interest, or how she could use her beauty as currency to gain a male love interest. what i mean is, there was really no escape, in comics, or in books, especially as you grow older. no escape from female socialization or the pressure to perform feminity.

#obviously theres good children and ya lit out there but there wasnt much in the libraries around me growing up #also no escape from the heterosexuals #tehehe #radblr #radfems can interact

[androgynealienfemme]

“Do Approach” by Jill Johnston (1971) sourced from Burn It Down! Feminist Manifestos for the Revolution.

#do approach #Jill Johnston #lesbian manifesto #lesbian history #lesbian feminism #lesbian writing #lesbian lit #burn it down! #lgbt history #lgbtq+ history #shes an extremely important figure in lesbian feminism history so #and the history of lesbian lit and discourse #but she was also a 70s radfem and lesbian separatist so uh keep that in mind

[mephorash]

Woman Hating - Andrea Dworkin

#buzgie ❁ #feminism #lit #radfem

[menalez]

i wish ppl would stop calling themselves "radfems" when they aren't even actual radfems. Lots of them are just gender critical or conservative tradwives, y'all can just join the fds tradwife group & stop pretending as if you have radfem beliefs.

i really wish we could physically gatekeep them fr

#before calling urself a radfem u gotta be involved irl or something #or have read several radfem lit #that should be the bar lmao

[sir-klauz]

No I don’t want your jk rowling looking azz on my profile bye

#I mean this in the sense of someone portraying terf views in my face #not literal #tho tbf if someone looked like jk they’d probably sketch me out not bc ugly though just association to a major nazi of our time #terf mention #terfs #terf cw #terf tw #she’s also a total queerphobe and uses us just as an army for her ideology she’s lit a straight cis white nazi #terf hate #radfem mention #radfem tw #terfs do not interact

[pinkhutia]

This regulation of duty by the mere circumstance of sex, rather than by the fundamental principle of moral being, has led to all that multifarious train of evils flowing out of the anti-christian doctrine of masculine and feminine virtues. By this doctrine, man has been converted into the warrior, and clothed in sternness, and those other kindred qualities, which, in the eyes of many, belong to his character as a man; whilst woman has been taught to lean upon an arm of flesh, to sit as a soul arrayed "in gold and pearls, and costly array," to be admired for her personal charms, and caressed and humored like a spoiled child, or converted into a mere drudge to suit the convenience of her lord and master. This principle has spread desolation over the whole moral world, and brought into all the diversified relations of life, "confusion and every evil work." It has given to man a charter for the exercise of tyranny and selfishness, pride and arrogance, lust and brutal violence. It has robbed woman of essential rights, the right to think and speak and act on all great moral questions, just as men think and speak and act; the right to share their responsibilities, dangers, and toils; the right to fulfill the great end of her being, as a help meet for man, as a moral, intellectual and immortal creature, and of glorifying God in her body and her spirit which are His. Hitherto, instead of being a help meet to man, in the highest, noblest sense of the term, as a companion, a co-worker, an equal; she has been a mere appendage of his being, and instrument of his convenience and pleasure, the pretty toy, with which he wiled away his leisure moments, or the pet animal whom he humored into playfulness and submission. Woman, instead of being regarded as the equal of man, has uniformly been looked down upon as his inferior, a mere gift to fill up the measure of his happiness. In the poetry of "romantic gallantry," it is true, she has been called the "last best gift of God to man;" but I believe I speak forth the words of truth and soberness when I affirm, that woman never was given to man.

Angelina Grimké, 1837

#radfem safe #* #i love the rhetroic 19th century women’s rights advocates. i swear ppl act like beauvoir invented modern feminism #fem lit