Real Talk: How Could People Get Off To Their Partners Being Hurt In Bed. I Don't Even Want To Entertain

Meanwhile, Maya Forstater was investigated by the police for 15 months over criticising a TIM doctor before it was dropped because there wasn't enough there to prosecute her for "malicious communications."

They're going to have to build a statue of JRK when this is all over. The most successful author in history and one of the most impactful British feminists in history being the same person is insane.

bisexual women did you know you can just.. prioritize yourselves? you dont exist to be the lgbt foot soldiers. you dont have to defer to non-bisexual people's ideas about your experiences. you can dedicate your time and energy to things that concern specifically bisexual women it's fine it's not a sin

Prunus persica

Thank you! I'm currently reading (Un)kind by Victoria Smith on a recommendation from here, and it's incredible just how much weaponised kindness from female socialisation has weakened us as a class.

I think it's also important to remember that few women would even recognise throwing other women under the bus for "acceptable feminism."

I know that I was abused, and when I was safe, I sought out therapy. It was that work with my therapist that allowed me to see just how bad it was. When she first mentioned that I was made to constantly question my reality, that sounded absolutely absurd. To cut a long story short, with her help, I ended up realising that I didn't just "need a little support," I had CPTSD and the abuse was horrendous.

Going through that shifted my perspective about feminism. Patriarchy and female oppression is that abuse, but on a global scale and spread across every woman in different ways.

The reason that I mention all that is that abuse survivors sometimes can't see the abuse that they're going through. They don't even register that they're avoiding words or phrases. They might not even recognise how much of their perspective has been deliberately warped by their abuser(s). It might not even occur to them that putting themselves first is even an option.

When that's scaled up and made much more subtle, and the patriarchy works to whisper more manipulation, it's not a surprise that there are a fair number of women who are trapped by "be kind!"

Feminism is only kind to women. We can choose or not to be compassionate and supportive of men, but the point of feminism is to be technically unkind by taking away things that men have felt entitled to for so long. It's not a surprise that the patriarchy is obsessed with ensuring that we know that we're supposed to be the kind ones.

The greatest trick of the patriarchy was to teach countless generations of women to be kind.

We can talk about statistics all day long, but the weaponisation of our compassion is what keeps us on our knees.

When we see studies about violence, the immediate reaction is but men can be victims, too, and examples like that are why the false ideas of the patriarchy hurts men, too and feminism is for everybody are so prevalent. Women have been so broken down by generations upon generations of manipulation through be kind that is feels wrong, that it feels psychologically painful to centre ourselves.

Instead of women being able to come together and fight for our rights as one, this malicious forced compassion makes us sideline and silence ourselves, with the reward being tricked into feeling like I'm a good and selfless person. When women dare to centre ourselves and put ourselves first reasonably, then we're gaslit into believing that we're being selfish, cruel and even violent, and when other women snap and snarl, tired of our treatment, then they're entirely dismissed as being any modern version of hysteric.

Men like to hide behind the idea that we're the manipulative ones that psychologically damage, but without a thousand generations of men reinforcing that we should think again and actually have kindness and compassion for others, women as a whole would be able to see through the blinders of oppression.

After all, to be anti-prostitution has been reframed as hating sex workers.

Fighting against systemic violence and rape against women is ignoring male victims and supporting female perpetrators.

Protecting female-only spaces is excluding a vulnerable minority's right to exist.

Few ordinary women want to be made to feel like they're hateful or cruel. As soon as we talk about women's issues, examples of individual men are brought up, and women are tricked into talking about them by either proving how kind we are ("of course I don't want anyone to be raped, male victims deserve help!") to distract us from our issues and re-centre men again, or women dismiss that obviously malicious call for compassion ("feminism isn't about men, sort your own issues out!") and then men use it as a reason as to why feminism is evil, because anything without kindness and compassion is wrong.

Women need to be taught that it's not unkind to put ourselves first, and that men use our compassion against us.

In feminism, our kindness and compassion must be reserved for our fellow women.

Women can be kind and compassionate to men in their private lives if they want, but that isn't part of feminism - and they need to be reminded that they won't get that kindness and compassion returned.

How We Got Here

The misapplication, distortion, and clumsy/careless use of social justice concepts is one of the most pressing issues facing women and racial and sexual minorities. People have taken insane, disrespectful liberties with the language and justice tools invented by oppressed groups to name and explain their realities. The result is that once effective justice tools - such as anti racism, anti-homophobia and anti-misogyny- has now lost all credibility and has been rendered a joke. The constant appropriation and careless abuse of these justice tools, (largely by inherently privileged people) has devastated liberation movements to such an extent that one could imagine it's being intentionally done as a form of sabotage. Once useful, powerful ideas and concepts have been watered down and misapplied to the point of absurd parody. Most notably, the concept of "gender". The word "gender", once understood to refer to the system of sexist oppression inflicted on women- is now used to refer to personality traits, fashion sense, mental and psychiatric symptoms, aesthetic preferences and one's degree of conformity to social and cultural stereotypes. This has devastated the coherence, clarity, and intellectual respect of feminist theory. What's worse, this total abuse and disrespect of justice language is now being used to justify an "anti-woke" movement, where people suggest that genuine justice concerns be dismissed along with the nonsense meanings and misapplications created by careless, privileged individuals who greedily appropriated justice tools and borrowed from their legitmacy for selfish, nefarious purposes. This must end. Grassroots justice movements must reclaim their language, ideas, and concepts and rebuild. We must resist the psychological and intellectual theft.

Totally agree, and I would also argue that connecting with other women is the most important first step. Actually taking time to build up the care and empathy for other women is huge. The patriarchy constantly pits woman against woman to prevent us from working together.

You can give up the makeup, love your body hair, abandon the need for male acceptance or approval - but if you don't teach yourself to care for other women, and give other women grace, and understand female socialisation, then all you're doing is partially freeing your physical self while upholding the patriarchy elsewhere.

Considering that the patriarchy also wants to crush us so that we're always kind to men and hyper critical of other women, centring women and actually saving that kindness for other women trains us to be kinder to ourselves, too, which builds our confidence and empowers us to stand up even taller against men.

It's admirable if one day, you can wake up and completely deprogram yourself from misogyny and the patriarchy in one go but it's also OK if:

You start wearing less makeup or wearing makeup less often rather than completely stopping

You start to let your body hair grow a little longer before shaving instead of never letting it grow more than stubble

You stop making new male friends but keep the ones that you have

You share resources online about community efforts before helping in person

You disengage from conversations where casual misogyny or full blown misogyny is used rather than challenging it

Everyone starts somewhere. We don't all have the ability to change our lives completely overnight.

But you have to put in the work to do more and get out of your comfort zone. Women's liberation doesn't happen if we all just do the minimum.

It's a good place to start but you have to learn how to push yourself to do more.

Rainforest~~☆

seeing all the hatred against straight women by men is why we absolutely need to stand by them. straight woman are a vulnerable population and already deal with so much bullshit from men. they can't even have games with fictional males who love them without men shitting all over it and calling it "femcel gooner material".