Genuinely Proud Of Myself For Being Cigarette-free For An Entire Year Today.

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.

i promise it is not subversive or satirical to be a caricature of what men think of women. they don't get the "joke" you are literally just reinforcing those beliefs

I saw a post asking about whether there was a woman or women in your life that changed your view about misogyny in society, or made you realise that women needed feminism, and I immediately thought of my abusive mother, the woman that gave me the CPTSD that I still struggle with.

She was the one that gaslighted me to avoid apologising for something that she had done wrong, but cried and apologised to my brother.

Where I was abused, my brother was excused, and when he stood by me and supported me, that was still my fault, and I was punished for it.

She was the one that eagerly bragged about being supportive of gay men, but was quick to share how disgusted she was by bisexuals, particularly bisexual women, and lesbians.

She was the one who screamed and beat me if I ever tried to stand up for myself, but when my brother stood up to her, she beat me again for not telling him to stop - and then absolved him of his words by deciding that he had been possessed by the ghost of her own abusive mother.

I was the one broken down and trapped into being a carer and homekeeper to take care of the family, and gaslit into believing that I was lucky to be able to be able to do that in the first place.

Feminism doesn't absolve women of their crimes. I'm glad that she's dead and gone and won't forgive her memory. But that wasn't random abuse. I was treated much worse than how she treated my brother and her husband because I was a girl and then a woman. She quite literally deluded herself to create excuses for my brother to forgive him and attack me. Even though she abused them, too, it was still nothing compared to what happened to me. The abuse had misogyny baked all the way through it.

I can't blame her for hating women, considering the patriarchy around us and other personal circumstances where she learned that hatred, and understanding just how strong and ingrained misogyny is, but I will blame her for her choice to abuse, because it was a choice. I think that sometimes, there's a belief that feminism means needing to protect or defend every single woman, even the most disgusting and evil women, and that isn't true at all. Evil women deserve liberation. No woman, whatever she does, deserves rape or abuse or oppression. What they deserve is to face true justice instead.

So yes, a woman made me rethink misogyny around me and the need for feminism, just not in the way that others would expect.

Waddesdon Manor

That is every single TIM (and lesser amounts of TIFs) that demands access to spaces, all the way down to demanding their choice of pronouns.

It's all very well and good being "kind" or thinking "I'll be respectful if that person's respectful," but at the end of the day, if they're AGPs (or the rarer female equivalent), what they're doing is forcing you to become part of their fetish play. Later, when alone, they'll revisit the sound of your voice, or they'll screenshot the image of your text, and masturbate to the memory of it, because they made you play along.

It's not only the fetish of being seen as a woman for those AGPs - it's also an exhibitionism fetish. Strangers being forced to play along into their fantasies are another layer of this.

There's a reason that it's marketed as "gender euphoria" instead of a cleaner, more sterile idea of "when I'm referred to as the pronouns I feel, I don't hurt the way I normally do." It's a state of pleasure. Whether it's the literal pleasure of playing a part, or the pleasure of having such control over others to the point that they deny science and their own eyes, it doesn't matter.

It's not just misogyny. It's sexual harassment and abuse.

gyns I am deeply ashamed of you, and exceedingly disappointed

why did none of you tell me that India Willyboy said he was ABDUCTED BY ALIENS AND EXPERIMENTED ON

I guess if you believe a man can become a woman you can believe anything