In The USA During The 1960′s Legally A Woman Couldn’t:

If you want to give someone a big lesson, love them unconditionally. You cannot do this if you do not love yourself. Unconditional love toward the other is properly expressed when you have an abundance of love energy inside of you. That energy is overflowing, the waters of your heart are full so you're able to pour into another lake. You cannot give that which you do not have. Practice unconditional love on yourself first and see how you'll naturally be inclined to spread this energy to others too.

"The computer's processes have unwittingly advanced the cause of women and images, even though these aspects of computer operation have nothing to do with the computer's content, which is the manipulation of information. The world of cyberspace is a computer-generated extension of the human mind into another dimension. The computer has carried human communication across a threshold as significant as writing, and cyberspaces's reliance on electromagnetism and photographic reproduction will only lead to further adjustments in consciousness that favor a feminine worldview. Irrespective of content, the processes used to maneuver in cyberspace are essentially right hemispheric. The World Wide Web and the Internet are both metaphors redolent of feminine connotations."

-The Alphabet Versus the Goddess by Leonard Shlain

A pretty interesting read. It analyzes the advancement in literacy throughout time and some of its pros and cons. It also brings up how we have become predominantly left brained due to the (often forced) use of our right hands, and how this has promoted linear thinking. It may not be a common practice anymore, but I've heard stories of educators hitting left-handed kids with rulers until they learned to write with their right hand. It's a strange thing to enforce, and it really makes one think...

The advancement in technology has a dark side, but the author suggests that some good will emerge in a new "Golden Age" where both right and left brain thinking reach some sort of equilibrium with the use of the internet. This is also interesting since I've been seeing parents, educators, and whoever else talking about the decline in reading amongst children. I'm starting to wonder if there will be a larger shift from text and back to image. Picture books/graphic novels seem to be grasping the attention of adults and children alike more and more throughout the years (if they weren't already). This is an observation of the English language, of course, since there are places that utilize symbols and characters in their writing.

What Are Women's Lands?

Reposted from The Women's Land Blog

Women's lands are privately-owned land that center women. The ethos of women's land can be simply summed up as women primarily focusing their energy towards each other. 

In general, men are not allowed on women's land. 

However, women's lands aren't about the absence of men. Rather, women's lands are about the presence of women, and what women can do to lift each other up when we choose to intentionally live together in community. 

History Of Women's Lands

The first women's land was started in the United States in the late 1960s. 

Over the next several decades, more and more women's lands were founded as intentional communities. Over the years, many disbanded, mainly due to internal conflict, lack of funding or the death of a key organizer. 

However, a small handful of the original women's lands are still in existence and currently operating, with women living on them. 

Where Are Women's Lands Located?

Most women's lands are located in rural areas in the United States. Many women's lands are set up so women who live there are surrounded by nature.  

In 2023, there are about 50 women's lands located around the United States. The sizes of these women's communities range from 2-20 women, depending on the particular women's land. Ages of women who live on the land range from 25-80 years old.  

There are also several women's lands located internationally, including in South America and Europe. 

How Do Women's Lands Make Money?

Some women's lands make money through a cottage-industry system, where women on the land specialize in producing some specific kind of craft or produce that they can reliably sell to support the costs of living on the land. 

Other women's lands support themselves by charging rent, usually at a lower-than-market-rate, to women who live on the land. 

Traditionally, most women who live on women's land have worked some kind of day job in nearby local towns. 

Today, with remote work widely available, there are lots of options for women who want to live on women's land to support themselves. It's become a lot easier to explore the possibility of renting for lower-than-market rate at a women's land near you. 

Women's Lands & Lesbians

Historically, women's land are lesbian-majority spaces. Most of the women who come to women's land to visit or live there are lesbians. 

Many of the women who live on women's lands are lesbians. Many of those lesbians are artists or writers, or both.   

However, most women's lands are not lesbian-exclusive. Most women's lands welcome straight and bisexual women as residents or visitors. 

What Is Living On Women's Land Like?

Living on a women's land typically means a lot of contact with nature, and a lot of community with other women.  You'll have your own space, but you won't be alone.  

You may find yourself skill-trading with other women: teaching them something you know, and learning something they know in return.

You may also find yourself bartering items, or giving and receiving gifts from other women on the land. 

It's common to have some sort of shared chore system to make sure all the work to upkeep the land gets done. Back in the '70s, this sometimes meant working 8-hour shifts nearly every day just to finish all the many chores of the land: chopping wood, carrying water, cooking meals and washing dishes. 

But these days, most women's lands no longer have regular communal meals, instead opting to host communal dinners only on holidays or a regular day of the week/month. Also, more infrastructure has led to significantly less chores. 

Rents on women's lands are usually significantly below-market-rate for two reasons: to enable women to come live on the land, and in exchange for help with the land chores. Today, most individual women who live on women's land spend less than 10 hours per week on land chores. 

If a woman is upkeeping a woman's land on her own, she's probably spending significantly more time than 10 hours per week doing land chores, and could probably use some help.   

Many women's lands also host regular or semi-regular events on the land for the women who live there. Other women in the local neighborhood may also be invited.    

A World Without Men

Most women's lands do not allow men, even as visitors.

Some women's lands allow a male service provider to visit the land on case of need, and often when a woman can't be found to do the same job. 

Some women's lands allow male relatives of women who live on the land to visit.  

Some women's lands allow the sons of women who live there to temporarily live on the land, often (but not always) until age 18.  

There are several women's lands that allow trans women and AFAB non-binary people to visit or live there. 

However, most women's lands are exclusive to biological women. 

Average Age Range On Women's Land

On any given women's land, ages of the women who live there tend to range between 25-80 years old. 

It's very common to go to women's land and meet older women who would be happy to teach you new skills, mentor you, give you advice, lend their wisdom or even just a listening ear. 

If you're a younger woman, you'll find no shortage of elders to learn from. You'll also find your skills very much appreciated, whether you are able to help lift heavy items or assist the older generation with your computer skills. 

If you are an older woman, you'll find many other older women living on women's lands, all helping each other out to the best of their ability in various stages of retirement. Common shared activities are doing puzzles, making art, writing workshops, drum circles, playing scrabble, playing cards, building bonfires, howling at the moon and taking care of animals on the land. 

How To Visit Women's Land

The first step to visiting a women's land is finding out whether or not you have a local women's land in your area. Some states, like Oregon and California, have more women's lands than others. 

The next step is getting vetted. Once you've figured out where the closest women's land is to you, you need to reach out to that women's land directly to indicate that you want to visit. If you don't have their contact info, or can't find it on the internet, you can email the author of this blog post to request information about women's lands near you. 

Each women's land has their own vetting process for new visitors. After all, this women's land isn't just a tourist spot. It's also the home of the women who live there. You will need to build trust with the women of the land before you can get an invite to their home. 

Getting vetted could be as simple as a phone call, or as in-depth as sitting down for a coffee in a nearby town. The woman vetting you may even reach out to a few women she knows to see if someone has heard of you and can vouch for your good intentions. 

If you have dreams of living on a women's land, it's a good idea to start off as a visitor. You'll need to get to know the women on the land and build some trust with the community before the woman who owns the land is ready to rent to you.  Focus on ways you can give back, like bringing a small gift (of food, vegan to be safe) or asking if there are any small chores you can help out with while you're visiting.  

Renting On Women's Land

Women's lands often have a series of rustic cabins or cottages that you can rent at below-market-rate. But what's living on a women's land like?

1. WI-FI: Many women's lands have limited or slow wifi. Some have no wifi, either because no one needed it or because not having wifi was an intentional lifestyle choice. If you want high-speed wifi, prepare  to step up and help your local women's land figure out how to install or upgrade their wifi.   

2. Water: While many women's lands have hot water, not all do. However, all women's lands have running water. At some women's lands, you may need to carry water to your dwelling. 

3. Plumbing: Almost all women's lands have plumbing or at least outhouses. Some have regular plumbing, while others have various eco-friendly solutions, like composting toilets.  

4. Kitchen: Each women's land is different. A women's land may have a communal kitchen, or kitchen facilities may be located inside each individual dwelling. 

5. Laundry: Some women's lands have shared washer/dryers. Others handwash and line-dry their clothing. 

6. Firepit: Many women's lands have shared firepits where women can sit around and talk. 

7. Electricity: Most women's lands have electricity. Some women's lands may have limited electricity, so you'll need to be mindful of how much power you're drawing. 

If there's one takeaway, know that most women's lands, to one extent or another, have limited amenities. 

If you move to a women's land, you'll be living rough and close to the land. 

But while you'll have your own space, you'll never be lacking in the company of other women, whether for a neighborly chat or a listening ear. 

Find Women's Land Near You

The location of women's lands are typically secret or underground. If you're a young person, or a young lesbian who wants to visit women's land, you may have trouble finding women's land near you. 

Because women's lands are so deep underground, finding them can entail some serious legwork. You may need to know the right woman to find out where your local women's land is, or even what the women's lands name is!  

To find women's land near you, visit the women's land map. Reach out directly to the women's land in your area, or in an area you'll be travelling to, for more info about how you can visit. Expect to undergo a vetting process that can be as quick as a phone call or as extensive as an in-person meetup.  

If you are a lesbian in the United States, or a woman of any sexual orientation who wants to learn more about women's lands near you, email findwomensland at gmail dot com to get information about women's lands in your local area. 

Trans projection

it’s “kill your rapist’ when it’s a sticker you can sell on etsy but “she’s the abuser actually” when it’s real life

There is no way forward for either women or the planet itself without enacting female separatism and agroforestry on a mass scale. You don't have the eggs to kill every rapist, CEO, anti-abortion politician you see? That's fair. The fastest way to destroy capitalism/patriarchy is for women to walk away-- completely remove themselves in body and spirit. Without their servants/broodmares/receptacles, everything men have built crumbles-- and fast enough to save the planet besides. We walk away, protect ourselves (yes, with violence if need be), and let them burn.

Everything you eat and wear must be locally produced, scavenged, or fairly traded for-- this is the only sustainable path. We need all-female land stewards, all-female livestock keepers, all-female shipping networks, all-female builders, all-female soldiers. Girls must be brought up free of male toxicity, mediocrity, society. If you bear children, bear only daughters.

We do not have time for small gestures.

« Foreigners follow American news stories like their own, listen to American pop music, and watch copious amounts of American television and film. […] Americans, too, stick to the U.S. The list of the 500 highest-grossing films of all time in the U.S., for example, doesn’t contain a single foreign film (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon comes in at 505th, slightly higher than Bee Movie but about a hundred below Paul Blart: Mall Cop). […]

How did this happen? How did cultural globalization in the twentieth century travel along such a one-way path? And why is the U.S.—that globe-bestriding colossus with more than 700 overseas bases—so strangely isolated? 

[…W]hen 600 or so journalists, media magnates, and diplomats arrived in Geneva in 1948 to draft the press freedom clauses for […] the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights […], definitional difficulties abounded. Between what the U.S. meant by “freedom of information” and what the rest of the world needed lay a vast expanse. For the American delegates, the question belonged to the higher plane of moral principle. But representatives of other states had more earthly concerns.

The war had tilted the planet’s communications infrastructure to America’s advantage. In the late 1940s, for example, the U.S. consumed 63% of the world’s newsprint supply; to put it more starkly, the country consumed as much newsprint in a single day as India did over the course of a year. A materials shortage would hamper newspaper production across much of the world into at least the 1950s. The war had also laid low foreign news agencies—Germany’s Wolff and France’s Havas had disappeared entirely—and not a single news agency called the global south home. At the same time, America’s Associated Press and United Press International both had plans for global expansion, leading The Economist to note wryly that the executive director of the AP emitted “a peculiar moral glow in finding that his idea of freedom coincides with his commercial advantage.”

Back in Geneva, delegates from the global south pointed out these immense inequalities. […] But the American delegates refused the idea that global inequality itself was a barrier to the flow of information across borders. Besides, they argued, redistributive measures violated the sanctity of the press. The U.S. was able to strong-arm its notion of press freedom—a hybrid combining the American Constitution’s First Amendment and a consumer right to receive information across borders—at the conference, but the U.N.’s efforts to define and ensure the freedom of information ended in a stalemate.

The failure to redistribute resources, the lack of multilateral investment in producing more balanced international flows of information, and the might of the American culture industry at the end of the war—all of this amounted to a guarantee of the American right to spread information and culture across the globe.

The postwar expansion of American news agencies, Hollywood studios, and rock and roll bore this out. […] Meanwhile, the State Department and the American film industry worked together to dismantle other countries’ quota walls for foreign films, a move that consolidated Hollywood’s already dominant position.

[…A]s the U.S. exported its culture in astonishing amounts, it imported very little. In other words, just as the U.S. took command as the planetary superpower, it remained surprisingly cut off from the rest of the world. A parochial empire, but with a global reach. [And] American culture[’s] inward-looking tendencies [precede] the 1940s.

The media ecosystem in particular, Lebovic writes, [already] constituted an “Americanist echo chamber.” Few of the films shown in American cinemas were foreign (largely a result of the Motion Picture Production Code, which the industry began imposing on itself in 1934; code authorities prudishly disapproved of the sexual mores of European films). Few television programs came from abroad […]. Few newspapers subscribed to foreign news agencies. Even fewer had foreign correspondents. And very few pages in those papers were devoted to foreign affairs. An echo chamber indeed, [… which] reduced the flow of information and culture from much of the rest of the world to a trickle. […]

Today is not the 1950s. [… But] America’s culture industry has not stopped its mercantilist pursuits. And Web 2.0 has corralled a lot of the world’s online activities onto the platforms of a handful of American companies. America’s geopolitical preeminence may slip away in the not-so-distant future, but it’s not clear if Americans will change the channel. »

— “How American Culture Ate the World”, a review of Sam Lebovic’s book A Righteous Smokescreen: Postwar America and the Politics of Cultural Globalization

Are you “4b” if you still care about what somebody who sucks dick says? You still value what heterosexuals and bisexuals say, for what?

One day these movements are going to realize the average XY and XX is the same. Stop looking at the physical. You become the people you’re around the most and that only accelerates when you’re swapping juices with them. Most women have dick on the brain; when I say they’re mentally ill, I mean it in the truest sense.

every trait you have is a choice. When somebody speaks and acts, observe and takes notes. If you wish to engage in a reactionary manner, that is also a choice. When you understand what you’re looking at, nothing is surprising or hurtful anymore.

In a way these same sex attracted XXs need a wake up call, so I hope heterosexuals keep being their hateful selves cause y’all think you can reform her like they try to reform the XY.

sometimes i flippantly say “identity is a trap,” and i want to explain a little more what i mean.

identity shouldn’t be something that can be invalidated by other people not believing in it; your identity cannot require other’s participation in order to exist.

a healthy identity formation goes like this:

you live your life and the facts of your life construct your identity.

unhealthy identity formation goes like this:

you construct your identity and that dictates how you live your life.

i often get charged with “invalidating” people’s gender identities, which always gives me pause, because a healthy identity should not be able to be “invalidated” by my non-participation.

for example, being a runner is part of my “identity” because i run. if someone tells me i’m not a “real runner” or i don’t “look like a runner” or refuses to call me a runner—none of that changes the material fact that i run almost every day, i run 35-40 miles a week; i DO that. so someone else “denying” that i’m a runner changes nothing about the fact that i am a runner by virtue of the fact that i run.

let’s say i did not run, but i wore running gear around. i dressed the part. someone might mistake me for a runner, but that doesn’t suddenly translate into miles run. i could insist people refer to me AS a runner, but unless i actually RUN, it makes no difference.

gender is the same premise.

i AM female, and that’s why i’m a woman. getting called “he” or “sir” doesn’t change that, dressing in “masculine” clothing doesn’t change that, and transitioning didn’t change that either. someone can “deny” that i’m a woman but i know i am because i’m female! which is such a relief and very liberating, tbh. i don’t identify AS, i AM.

on the flip, a male person can “dress like a woman,” and “look the part,” he can even insist people refer to him as “she,” or “woman,” or even “female,” but he never will be, because he is male.

when TRAs accuse me of “invalidating” gender (identity), they’re really telling on themselves; if your identity CAN be denied and that actually affects it, it’s not real. it’s constructed. it’s a fantasy that’s been miscast as an identity. and it’s unhealthy to organize your life around an identity that isn’t rooted in reality. it’s unhealthy to organize your life around an identity.

identity —> life = not healthy

life —> identity = healthy

This is a fetish, nobody can convince me otherwise.