Female warriors have the smoothest, safest shoulders in the world. Nary a scratch to be found there!
Airport news shop: men’s magazines are “general interest,” women’s are “women’s fashion.”
Newsflash:
“sexism against men” is in no way, shape, or form comparable to misogyny, and carving out a day to celebrate women in a society that constantly objectifies and devalues them is not sexist.
Seth MacFarlane made a whole bunch of sexist, reductive jokes at the Oscars last night. It’s frustrating enough to know that 77 percent of Academy voters are male. Or to watch 30 men and 9 women collect awards last night. But MacFarlane’s boob song, the needless sexualization of a little girl, and the relentless commentary about how women look reinforced, over and over, that women somehow don’t belong. They matter only insofar as they are beautiful or naked, or preferably both. This wasn’t an awards ceremony so much as a black-tie celebration of the straight white male gaze.
MacFarlane’s opening musical number, “We Saw Your Boobs,” might as well have been a siren blaring, “This isn’t for you.” Come on, everyone likes boobs, right? No. The answer is no. They’re not something I hate, and heck, I have a pair to call my own, and yet my takeaway from The Accused was not “Finally, I’ve seen Jodie Foster’s breasts.” My lasting memory of Boys Don’t Cry is not “Hey, free breasts!” At least there was that super timely and relevant reference to Kate Winslet’s many nude scenes.
Jeez, the song was a joke! Can’t you take a joke? Yes, I can take a joke. I can take a bunch! A thousand, 10,000, maybe even more! But after 30 or so years, this stuff doesn’t feel like joking. It’s dehumanizing and humiliating, and as if every single one of those jokes is an ostensibly gentler way of saying, “I don’t think you belong here.” All those little instances add up, grain of sand by grain of sand until I’m stranded in a desert of every “tits or GTFO” joke I’ve ever tried to ignore.
Then came the joke about actresses getting the flu to lose weight. “It paid off,” MacFarlane said. “Looking good.” Well, thank God, because what matters to all women is that we look good for Seth MacFarlane. How many women did he introduce over the course of the night by mentioning how they looked: “Please welcome the lovely ___ ,” “the beautiful ______”? How many men?
Uh, those are compliments! Now he can’t even give women compliments? Compliment away, friends. Let’s compliment the shit out of each other. But let’s be really cognizant of what we compliment each other on, and what that says about what we expect from each other, and what we consider valuable and worth mentioning. It doesn’t matter what Salma Hayek says, because she’s so pretty!
You just don’t like Seth MacFarlane’s sense of humor. What did you expect? Actually, I do like Seth MacFarlane’s sense of humor. (Sometimes. No one likes everything all the time!) I’ve been a loyal Family Guy viewer for almost fifteen years. I’ve been to — and adored — Family Guy: Live. If MacFarlane had sung “Shipoopi” all night, I’d be writing a really different story right now. Instead, there were jokes about how Rex Reed would probably call Adele fat — because that’s what’s important about her — and how someday Quvenzhané Wallis will be old enough to date George Clooney — because that’s what’s important about her — and how sometimes, gasp, a woman might have body hair — because that’s what’s important about them. Women are nags, and Jews run Hollywood! Thank you, Seth MacFarlane, for this cutting-edge humor. Like Mark Wahlberg said, the party’s at Jack Nicholson’s house. You remember, that place where Roman Polanski drugged and raped a 13-year-old girl. Ha-ha, ha-ha, ha.
I dream of someday watching women win all the non-performance categories, of women making as many films as men do, of women and men being nominated for a comparable number of awards. There are a lot of reasons why that day is far, far in the future. But I’ll tell you what’s not helping: the biggest night in film being dedicated to alienating, excluding, and debasing women. Actual gender equality is a ways away, but I’d settle for one four-hour ceremony where women aren’t being actively degraded.
—-Why Seth MacFarlane’s misogyny matters
http://www.vulture.com/2013/02/why-seth-macfarlanes-misogyny-matters.html
(via ceedling)
fuck yeah anti misogyn-
oh
-_-
ew…
Um yes, you just took John Green’s words completely out of context. Context is important, people.
Please explain to me in what context it’s acceptable to refer to human beings as “resources.” I’m not a resource, I’m a PERSON, and it’s dehumanizing to say otherwise.
I’ll wait.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JFiApf_m4H0
so here’s a link to the video and since a ton of the people who have reblogged this post keep talking about context, let’s actually put the comment into context.
within the context of the video, the comment is STILL offensive. do you know why? BECAUSE THE VIDEO ITSELF IS OFFENSIVE. the video consists of this white man telling some 15 year old girl to be happy bc she’s not “malnourished” or “has plastic bags in her breasts” meanwhile having no analysis of eating disorders or plastic surgery or body dysmorphia or unrealistic ideals of beauty imposed on women that btw are neither the fault of this 15 year old girl nor of the “malnourished plastic bags in breasts women”.
so the entire video is about shaming certain types of women john green thinks are shallow and vapid and stupid and awkward and blah blah blah “I’M A WHITE MAN AND AS SUCH GET TO DICTATE ACCEPTABLE STANDARDS OF BEING A WOMAN TO YOU UNDER THE GUISE OF ADVICE AND YOU’LL HAVE TO ACCEPT THIS BC I AM BETTER THAN THE OTHER 5 BILLION PEOPLE ALSO IMPOSING ACCEPTABLE STANDARDS OF BEING A WOMAN ON YOU” it’s all offensive at the end of the day. he doesn’t get to tell her that she should be “better” than women who have plastic surgery or are thin either naturally or out of choice or whatever, he doesn’t get to make the determination at all in any context ever.
and then to be like oh btw nerd guys are awesome albeit a little needy ummmm wow fuck you bc nerdy white guys are SOME OF THE WORST TYPES OF MEN OUT THERE. they are sexist and entitled and HORRIBLE to women. like do you guys remember that part of the social network where mark is constantly looking down on erica for going to BU and not harvard and finally she breaks up with him and is like “btw this isn’t bc you’re a nerd which you’ll think, it’s actually bc you’re an asshole” YEAH.
so in conclusion to all of you who want us to consider the context of john green’s comment: i did consider the context and turns out the context is horrible and john green is still a sexist piece of shit.
adding this to the list I’ve got going on this dude.
lol context is important
unless that context is inconveniently worse than the original statement itself.
Awesome protests erupted in my school today. Our student council planned a “fun” game for valentines day. They handed out paper hearts to every girl at the beginning of the day. Only the girls. If a girl speaks to a guy through the duration of the day, she has to give him her heart. Guys get five raffle tickets for every heart they collect. Girls cannot collect hearts, they only have one to give away, and guys do not have to give away anything. A gay male asked for a heart to give away to participate and was told no.
Some girls have taken this as an invitation to say things such as, quoted from twitter, “keeping the whores from talking today haha.” And boasting about “keeping their heart and not being a whore.” This has turned into an excuse to shame each other for talking to guys. And for what? A valentines game?
Rather than writing their names on the hearts and giving them away, many girls have written notes of protest on the paper hearts and are wearing them proudly as they associate with whoever they please and refuse to give the heart away.
Proud of some of the people in my school today.
it’s really hard to be a feminist and see all this misogynist bullshit everywhere posted by your friends a lot of the time and to want to explain to them that they are being sexist without making them hate you
Gay Men’s Sexism and Women’s Bodies →
At a recent presentation, I asked all of the gay male students in the room to raise their hand if in the past week they touched a woman’s body without her consent. After a moment of hesitation, all of the hands of the gay men in the room went up. I then asked the same gay men to raise their hand if in the past week they offered a woman unsolicited advice about how to “improve” her body or her fashion. Once again, after a moment of hesitation, all of the hands in the room went up.
These questions came after a brief exploration of gay men’s relationship to American fashion and women’s bodies. That dialogue included recognizing that gay men in the United States are often hailed as the experts of women’s fashion and by proxy women’s bodies. In addition to this there is a dominant logic that suggests that because gay men have no conscious desire to be sexually intimate with women, our uninvited touching and groping (physical assault) is benign.
These attitudes have led many gay men to feel curiously comfortable critiquing and touching women’s bodies at whim. What’s unique about this is not the male sense of ownership to women’s bodies—that is somewhat common. What’s curious is the minimization of these acts by gay men and many women because the male perpetuating the act is or is perceived to be gay.
An example: I was at a gay club in Atlanta with a good friend of mine who is a heterosexual black woman. While dancing in the club, a white gay male reached out and grabbed both her breasts aggressively. Shocked, she pushed him away immediately. When we both confronted him he told us: “It’s no big deal, I’m gay, I don’t want her– I was just having fun.” We expressed our frustrations to him and demanded he apologize, but he simply refused. He clearly felt entitled to touch her body and could not even acknowledge the fact that he had assaulted her.
I have experienced this attitude as being very common amongst gay men. It should also be noted that in this case, she was a black woman and he a white gay male, which makes this an eyebrow-raising dynamic as it invokes the psychological history of white men’s entitlement to black women’s bodies. However it has been my experience that this dynamic of assault with gay men and women also persists within racial groups.
At another presentation, I told this same story to the audience. Almost instantly, several young women raised up their hands to be called upon. Each of them recounted a different story with a similar theme. One young woman told a story that stuck with me:
“I was feeling really cute in this outfit I put together. Then I see this gay guy I knew from class, but not very well. I had barely said hi before he began telling me what was wrong with how I looked, how I needed to lose weight, and how if I wanted to get a man I needed to do certain things… In the midst of this, he grabbed my breasts and pushed them together, to tell me how my breasts should look as opposed to how they did. It really brought me down. I didn’t know how to respond… I was so shocked.”
Her story invoked rage amongst many other women in the audience, and an obvious silence amongst the gay men present. Their silence spoke volumes. What also seemed to speak volumes, though not ever articulated verbally, was the sense that many of the heterosexual women had not responded (aggressively or otherwise) out of fear of being perceived as homophobic. (Or that their own homophobia, in an aggressive response, would reveal itself.) This, curiously to me, did not seem to be a concern for the lesbian and queer-identified women in the room at all.
Acts like these are apart of the everyday psychological warfare against women and girls that pits them against unrealistic beauty standards and ideals. It is also a part of the culture’s constant message to women that their bodies are not their own.
It’s very disturbing, but in a culture that doesn’t see gay men who are perceived as “queer” as “men” or as having male privilege, our misogyny and sexist acts are instead read as “diva worship” or “celebrating women”, even when in reality they are objectification, assault and dehumanization.
The unique way our entitlement to women’s physical bodies plays itself out is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to gay cisgender men’s sexism and privilege. This privilege does not make one a bad person any more than straight privilege makes heterosexuals bad people. It does mean that gay men can sometimes be just as unthinkingly hurtful, and unthinkingly a part of a system that participates in the oppression of others, an experience most of us can relate to. Exploration of these dynamics can lead us to query institutional systems and policies that reflect this privilege, nuanced as it is by other identities and social locations.
At the end of my last workshop on gay men’s sexism, I extended a number of questions to the gay men in the audience. I think it’s relevant to extend these same questions now:
How is your sexism and misogyny showing up in your own life, and in your relationships with your female friends, trans, lesbian, queer or heterosexual? How is it showing up in your relationship to your mothers, aunts and sisters? Is it showing up in your expectations of how they should treat you? How you talk to them? What steps can you take to address the inequitable representation of gay cisgender men in your community as leaders? How do you see that privilege showing up in your organizations and policy, and what can you do to circumvent it? How will you talk to other gay men in your community about their choices and interactions with women, and how will you work to hold them and yourself accountable?
These are just some of the questions we need to be asking ourselves so that we can help create communities where sexual or physical assault, no matter who is doing it, is deemed unacceptable. These are the kinds of questions we as gay men need to be asking ourselves so that we can continue (or for some begin) the work of addressing gender/sex inequity in our own communities, as well as in our own hearts and minds. This is a part of our healing work. This is a part of our transformation. This is a part of our accountability.
Great ad campaign from the Maine Coalition Against Sexual Assault. More posters here.
Sexism against women is more personal than “sexism against men.”
A study by Swim et al had male and female students keep a diary of sexist encounters. They found that women experienced more every day prejudices and instances of discrimination, about one to two instances per week, “consisting of traditional gender role stereotypes and prejudice, demeaning and degrading comments and behaviors, and sexual objectification.” As a result, these incidents “affected women’s psychological well being by decreasing their comfort, increasing their feelings of anger and depression, and decreasing their state self-esteem.”
Men, on the other hand, experienced fewer sexist incidents. The sexist incidents that they did experience, moreover, were more general and less personal (“All men are pigs,” vs. “You were asking for it because of the way you dressed.”).
Negative attitudes against the male gender, therefore, are usually not directed towards individual men, but rather “men” in the sense of resenting a general culture of masculinity. In contrast, sexism against women is tangible and personal, and results in measurable psychological damage to the women who experience it.
^ This is important and why I don’t take instances of interpersonal “sexism” against men that seriously.
Reblogging because I love it when studies back up what we’ve been saying for years: prejudice against men isn’t as bad as it is for women. Period.
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