Happy International Women’s Day! Or, not!

Today, March 8, is International Women’s Day. The day was first professed by the Socialist Party of America in 1909, the idea arising from women’s rights movements in industrializing nations around the turn of the last century. Its purpose is to celebrate the achievements of women throughout history, as well as engage in the ongoing struggle for gender equality.

March is also Women’s History Month. <-That is a website curated by the U.S. Library of Congress that showcases women’s battles and triumphs with interesting and informative stories, audio, video and still images.

If you are a dude and still reading this post: here, have a cookie. (I baked them myself.) That’s for seeing the word “women’s” and not immediately deciding to GTFO.

However, if you are a dude blogger, social media influencer, or a Big Willie with a platform of any kind? [Read more…]

It’s Day 17 of Black History Month and We Whites Are All Going to STFU and Listen.

At the intersection of patriarchy and anti-Black racism stands the Black woman. There’s even a word for it: misogynoir. And it’s a necessary word, too, because multiple axes of oppression (like misogyny and anti-Black racism) do not compound each other by simple addition. Instead, they contort and magnify each other in a way that is distinct, and it works a lot more like multiplication.

Can Black women experience anti-Black racism in the same way Black men do? YES.

Can Black women experience misogyny in the same way white women do? OF COURSE.

Can Black women experience bigotry and oppression that is unique to the wholeness of their identities as “Black women”? YESSSSS.

And add LGBTQ+, disabled, or any other axes of privilege/oppression and the harm and marginalization multiply. Again.

There are white feminist women being racists toward Black women in the feminist movement (a well-documented phenomenon since the earliest feminist organizing that unfortunately continues to this very day). And Black men being misogynistic and patriarchal toward Black women (also a well-documented phenomenon).

Misogynoir manifests in too many ways to enumerate here, but one example that comes readily to mind is when police assume a Black woman who is dressed appropriately for warm weather is a sex worker, and they then proceed to degrade, harass, arrest or assault her. (Not that mistreating sex workers is EVER okay, in any context.) The misogynoir lies in the initial assumption: the stereotyping and overt sexualizing of Black women, because they are Black women. The consequence of that assumption is harm to Black women.

I have been privileged and honored to know and to work with Black women over the course of my time living in New York, and even more fortunate to count some Black women as my friends.* While they face not only sexism and anti-Black racism but their twisted cousin, misogynoir, in everyday life, my respect, empathy and anger on their behalf only continues to grow, as I do.

WAIT. Now I owe you all an apology! All of that^ was a way-too-wordy prelude (from the white woman who is supposed to be S-ing TFU and listening!) to introducing perhaps my favorite historical figure ever, a Black woman. It just felt necessary to emphasize this context in which she lived her life, because it makes her all the more extraordinary for being who she was, and doing what she did.

Her name is Florynce Rae Kennedy. A.k.a. Flo.

Photo of Black woman Florynce "Flo") Rae Kennedy, wearing a cowboy hat, brown leather vest over a black long-sleeved shirt, pointing upward with one finger, and smiling.
Florynce Rae (“Flo”) Kennedy
1916-2000

[Read more…]

LadyBoss Macaque: Long May She Reign!

 

Photo of face of Japanese macaque monkey Yakei, a rare alpha female.Empress Yakei, Alpha Japanese Macaque
(Macaca fuscata a.k.a. Snow Monkey)
(image: Takasakiyama Natural Zoological Garden)

(via New York Times email briefing):

Yakei, a female Japanese snow monkey who lives in a nature reserve, violently overthrew a trio of high-ranking males (and her own mother) to move up the ranks and become the first female leader in the reserve’s 70-year history. Yakei’s ascent to alpha status surprised both scientists and reserve workers, who are now closely observing her reign.

[Read more…]

Mexico! 🎉

(via e-mail breaking news alert):

Mexico decriminalizes abortion, a dramatic step in the world’s second-biggest Catholic country

The [Mexican] Supreme Court’s decision makes Mexico the most populous country in Latin America to permit the procedure. The ruling comes as Texas, just across the border, tightens restrictions. The decision reflects activism by a powerful feminist movement, as well as concern about women dying or suffering harm from illegal abortions.

Read more [@ WaPo]

While this Republicans (politicians and citizens alike) become more like the Taliban every day, a “powerful feminist movement” in Mexico has succeeded in moving the needle in the opposite direction. And they did so by centering those who are dying and being maimed by illegal abortions – a terrible price to pay for the living to obtain the basic human right to bodily autonomy.

But it’s just not “civil” to discuss such ugliness in polite society! We simply must keep the discourse around abortion rights calm, reasoned and as removed from reality as possible, as we sit around discussing abstract concepts like “choice” over tea. Because that’s really been working so well for us! [/snark]

Wasn’t I just ranting about this very thing on Sunday? Why, yes! Yes I was!

And I said:

The only thing “civil” attempts at persuasion accomplish is allowing sadistic misogynists to continue pretending that picture [of Geraldine Santoro taken in 1964 by police who found her dead after a botched attempt at self-aborting] does not capture exactly what they are doing.

I wonder how many (more) unnecessary deaths and senseless maimings it will take for U.S. Republicans to reverse course? It seems we will also need a powerful feminist movement. More powerful, even, than the Catholic Church in Mexico.

Anybody got one of those lying around?

Sunday funnies.

 

Top: photo of GOP activist Deanna Lorraine, with quote beneath "God Does Not Want Us Wearing Masks... If you have a mask on, it means you actually don't trust God. You don't have faith." Beneath, a cleseup photo of the face of Patrick Stewart/"Captain Picard" squinting with confusion, with overlaid large block letter text, "BUT YOU'RE THE SAME PEOPLE WHO NEED A RIFLE TO PICK UP GROCERIES"

Ya gotta laugh. Or, you know, cry. Either way, there is something very, very wrong and/or hilarious about the conservative mind.

 

Reddit post by u/henke: "Last week one of my art teachers suggested I 'dial down the feminism.' Today I showed him my newest piece: (image of a stainless steel panel labeled Dial Down the Feminism' with a single round tuning knob. To the left it reads 'COMPLICIT IN MY OWN DEHUMANIZATION' and to the right it reads "RAGING FEMINISM."

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

-Iris Vander Pluym, Art Critic.

__________

Tweet by @amy_istrying: "I'm disgusted every time someone does a gender reveal and it's a gender I already know about, what kind of reveal is that"

❤️🧡💛💚💙💜

EXACTLY, Amy. I’m pretty sure that people who do gender reveals are conservative, at least with respect to sex role stereotypes. And those kinds of ideas never seem to travel alone. In other words: eew!

I think if I’d ever had a kid, I might have done a gender reveal just to fuck with the conservatives in my family. I’d make a multi-layer red velvet cake, with each layer consisting of a few different colors of batter roughly swirled together, just like I did for my sister’s birthday that one time. (If I can find a pic I’ll post it later.)

When I’d cut into it, every slice would have a rainbow of colors in it, at which point I’d announce “It’s a gender! Or maybe agender! Who the fuck cares and what the fuck is wrong with you people?”

[CUE: music, disco lighting and ecologically-friendly rainbow confetti.

FtB Mothers Day Anthology: Mothers and Mom.

Mothers Day has utterly confounded me as far back as I can remember. During my childhood years, spent unhappily suffocating in lily-white, middle-class, conservative suburbia, I was continually struck by the jarring disparities between mothers I met in public, at school, at friends’ homes and, especially, those that dominated TV screens and supermarket magazines in the 1970s and ’80s, and the woman I knew as “Mom.” For better and for worse, Mom shared next to nothing with mothers. The contrast was so striking in fact, it occurred to me on more than one occasion that I might be born from another species altogether.

[Read more…]

Conservatives still ruining everything: Turkey edition.

[CONTENT NOTE: graphic descriptions of violence against women including murder.]

[via The Guardian*/Beril Eski and agencies]

A rally to mark International Women’s day in Istanbul where protesters demanded government commitment to the European accord on violence against women. Photograph: Bülent Kılıç/AFP/Getty ImagesA rally to mark International Women’s day in Istanbul where protesters demanded government commitment to the European accord on violence against women. Photograph: Bülent Kılıç/AFP/Getty Images

__________

Protests as Turkey pulls out of treaty to protect women

 

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