afghanbarbie - Tumblr blog

[afghanbarbie]

recently noticed that TRAs will harass normal lesbians for saying they only like pussy because they think women not liking dick is 'transphobic', yet will actively go out of their way to show support for other so-called ''lesbians'' who say they prefer dick over pussy.

they are quite literally admitting that as long as you prefer men and male sex characteristics, regardless of your self-identified sexuality, that there is nothing wrong with having a preference. but if you prefer women and female sex characteristics, you're akin to violent fascists.

everyone is required to fuck and enjoy penises. but if you only like vagina? death threats and online abuse.

[afghanbarbie]

I always knew misogynistic podcasts were awful, but it’s actually worse than I thought. I just realized it’s always middle aged men who have dedicated their entire careers to being misogynistic debating the most random ass 20-year-old girls who have no qualifications, interests, or insights on the subjects at hand. And that’s by intention, of course.

Like, it’s never a 45 y/o mens rights scholar debating a 45 y/o feminist scholar. It’s always a rich, notorious 45 y/o mens rights scholar debating a nobody 20 y/o girl who has never even once shown interest in political commentary.

I went on the social media accounts of one of these girls who was invited to debate a bunch of 40 y/o misogynists, and her whole profile was just innocent videos of her lip syncing songs. How do these men look at that and think “ah yes, this is who we need in our show to debate our right-wing meninist views; this is who we need to publicly interrogate on whether she’s a virgin and how many sexual partners she’s had.”

They’re purposely looking for young, unprepared girls to humiliate and that’s so obvious. The power imbalance has to be skewed to such an extreme degree, almost as though they know their regressive ideals would be so easily refuted by a woman with parallel qualifications.

[afghanbarbie]

I think more people on radblr should be talking about sweatshops, especially in the garment industry.

• Around 80% of sweatshop workers are women. Some employers force them to take birth control and pregnancy tests to avoid having to pay for maternity leave. Pregnant women are routinely denied sick leave to visit doctors, terminated from their contracts early, or left without any maternity leave when their short-term contracts are not renewed.

• Women are more likely than men to experience minimum wage violations. According to one study, "30 percent of the women workers in our sample experienced minimum wage violations, compared to 20 percent of the men". [Source: https://www.nelp.org/publication/broken-laws-unprotected-workers-violations-of-employment-and-labor-laws-in-americas-cities/ ]

• Indonesian women employees report that “girls in the factory are harassed by male managers. They come on to the girls, call them into their offices, whisper into their ears, touch them, bribe them with money and threaten them with firing if they don’t have sex with them.” [source: cleanclothes.org]

• "Toilet breaks are monitored, and some workers said they were flat out denied them, even when sick. The same goes for water and lunch breaks, both necessary to stay healthy when working 12+ hour days in a stuffy, overcrowded factory." 20% of women in sweatshops report experiencing sexual violence. [https://iwda.org.au/three-ways-garment-factories-violate-the-rights-of-women-and-how-its-allowed-to-happen/ ]

It's easy not to support this kind of abuse. Do not buy clothes first-hand. Only buy from thrift shops and second-hand apps, or find ethical brands and investigate where and how they make their clothing (hint: if a t-shirt costs $3, it's not ethical). Patch your old clothes. Consider learning basic sewing (it's not as difficult as it seems!)

I don't care how cheap Shein and Temu are. I don't care how much you think you need that specific Zara coat. Buying clothes directly harms women and avoiding it is a very easy way to help.

[afghanbarbie]

would give anything to be invited to this

[afghanbarbie]

[afghanbarbie]

[afghanbarbie]

when women claim men don't have the same emotional capacity as us, i think it's untrue and more importantly letting them off easy. throughout history men have written insightful poems and novels on the human experience or on how "love conquers all", but digging deeper reveals they were still sexist assholes--men definitely have the same emotional intelligence as women (we're in the same species so obviously) but they simply teach themselves that women are the ones who aren't deserving of their empathy. this is why "nice guys" and the men you know are still as dangerous as the strangers you don't know; it has nothing to do with their moral compasses. it's just that no matter how virtuous they are, that virtue is more often than not entirely closed off to women.

[afghanbarbie]

these past few months i kept letting myself believe that palestine would be the cause. it would be what finally woke westerners up to what their countries are committing or complicit in and get them to force their governments to change. i believed they would not forget about palestine the same way they so quickly forgot about us in afghanistan. and for a while that seemed to be true.

but i've watched people start to move on and forget. nothing changed in their countries — it's just back to business as usual. palestinians dying, like afghans and iraqis (and others outside their western bubble) dying, has just become something normal that we're all supposed to live with.

i wish the world would care about us as much as they pretend to when we're in the news. instead, they get bored, and then they normalise our pain, suffering and genocides so they don't have to care about it anymore.

[afghanbarbie]

There may be a lot of discussion so please be respectful. I just think it would solve a lot of trans people's restroom issues if there was no such thing as "ladies" or "men's". And yes I know there are some, I'm talking about ALL of them being gender neutral.

[afghanbarbie]

Hot take about BDSM but. If you get pleasure from causing pain onto someone, you're a fucked up person. No it doesn't matter if they consented.

[afghanbarbie]

[afghanbarbie]

Nazis backing Nazis. What a shock.

[afghanbarbie]

It kills me how everyday the posts and content about Palestine decrease because of how many people are getting killed everyday.

It also kills me how many stopped boycotting or has never even tried to boycott.

Somethings are so small to do and easy yet people don't even bother when it's a genocide that has been going and going and going not since October 7th but for decades.

[afghanbarbie]

I am thinking about how my father's generation would hide Playboy magazines and swear by god that they were just keeping them for a friend if their wives found them. Now men openly watch the most violent, dehumanizing pornography and call their wives Karens for questioning their morality. It's crazy how much we have regressed on this issue.

[afghanbarbie]

The sex-based apartheid against women in Afghanistan cannot be reduced to, "Afghan men saw Afghan women enjoying freedom and got mad, so they established extremist religious governments to stop it." I am really tired of seeing this misconception and oversimplification spread around by leftists, liberals and feminists – it's racist, and simply not fucking true.

The majority of Afghans want a secular government and for the oppression of women to end. The Taliban represent a minority of Afghanistan's people. The deterioration of Afghan society – in particular, women's rights and freedoms – directly results from decades of foreign intervention, imperialism and occupation. Afghans did not destroy Afghanistan, the United States did, and the USSR paved the way for them to do so.

Had Afghanistan never been treated like a pawn in the games played by imperialistic powers, had we not been reduced to resources, strategic importance and a tool for weakening the enemy, extremism would have never come to power.

An overview of Afghanistan's recent history:

The USSR wanted to incorporate Afghanistan into Soviet Central Asia and did so by sabotaging indigenous Afghan communist movements and replacing our leaders with those loyal to the USSR. The United States began funding and training Islamic extremists – the Mujahideen – to fight against the Soviet influence and subsequent invasion, and to help the CIA suppress any indigenous Afghan leftist movements. Those Mujahideen won the war, and then spent the next decade fighting for absolute control over Afghanistan.

During that time period, known as the Afghan Civil War, the Mujahideen became warlords, each enforcing their own laws on the regions they controlled. Kabul was nearly destroyed, and the chaos, destruction and death was largely ignored by the United States despite being the ones who caused and empowered it. This civil war era created the perfect, unstable environment needed to give a fringe but strong group like the Taliban a chance to rise to power. And after two decades of war, a singular entity taking control and bringing 'peace' was enticing to all Afghans, even if their views were objectively more extreme than what we had been enduring up to that point.

When the United States invaded Afghanistan in 2001, they allied with the same warlords that had been destroying our country the decade prior and whom they had rallied against the Soviets – these are the people that made up the Northern Alliance. The 'good guys' that America gave us were rapists, pillagers, and violent extremists, no better than the Taliban. And that's not even mentioning the horrible atrocities and war crimes committed by American forces themselves.

So, no, Afghan men did not collectively wake up one day and decide that women had too much freedom and rush to establish an extremist government overnight. No, this is not to excuse the misogyny of men in our society – the extremists had to already exist for Americans to fund and arm them against the Soviets – but rather to redirect the bulk of this racist blame to the actual culprits. The religious extremism and sex-based apartheid would not be oppressing and murdering us today if they hadn't been funded and supported by the United States of America thirty years ago. And despite all the abuses and restrictions, many Afghan women prefer the Taliban's current government to another American occupation. I felt safer walking in Taliban-controlled Kabul than I did being 'randomly searched' (sexually assaulted) by American military police in my village as a child.

Imperialism is inextricably linked with patriarchal violence and women's oppression. You cannot talk about the deterioration of Afghanistan without talking about the true cause of said decline: The United States of America. Americans of all political views, including leftists and feminists, are guilty of reducing or outright ignoring Western responsibility for female oppression in the Global South, finding it much easier to place all blame the foreign brown man or our supposedly backwards, savage cultures, when the most responsibility belongs with Western governments and their meddling games that forced the most violent misogynists among us into power.

(Most of this information comes from my own experience living as an Afghan Hazara woman in Afghanistan, but Bleeding Afghanistan: Washington, Warlords and the Propaganda of Silence covers this in much more detail. If you want more on the Soviet-Afghan war and Afghanistan's socialist history, Revolutionary Afghanistan is an English-language source from a more leftist perspective)

[afghanbarbie]

The sex-based apartheid against women in Afghanistan cannot be reduced to, "Afghan men saw Afghan women enjoying freedom and got mad, so they established extremist religious governments to stop it." I am really tired of seeing this misconception and oversimplification spread around by leftists, liberals and feminists – it's racist, and simply not fucking true.

The majority of Afghans want a secular government and for the oppression of women to end. The Taliban represent a minority of Afghanistan's people. The deterioration of Afghan society – in particular, women's rights and freedoms – directly results from decades of foreign intervention, imperialism and occupation. Afghans did not destroy Afghanistan, the United States did, and the USSR paved the way for them to do so.

Had Afghanistan never been treated like a pawn in the games played by imperialistic powers, had we not been reduced to resources, strategic importance and a tool for weakening the enemy, extremism would have never come to power.

An overview of Afghanistan's recent history:

The USSR wanted to incorporate Afghanistan into Soviet Central Asia and did so by sabotaging indigenous Afghan communist movements and replacing our leaders with those loyal to the USSR. The United States began funding and training Islamic extremists – the Mujahideen – to fight against the Soviet influence and subsequent invasion, and to help the CIA suppress any indigenous Afghan leftist movements. Those Mujahideen won the war, and then spent the next decade fighting for absolute control over Afghanistan.

During that time period, known as the Afghan Civil War, the Mujahideen became warlords, each enforcing their own laws on the regions they controlled. Kabul was nearly destroyed, and the chaos, destruction and death was largely ignored by the United States despite being the ones who caused and empowered it. This civil war era created the perfect, unstable environment needed to give a fringe but strong group like the Taliban a chance to rise to power. And after two decades of war, a singular entity taking control and bringing 'peace' was enticing to all Afghans, even if their views were objectively more extreme than what we had been enduring up to that point.

When the United States invaded Afghanistan in 2001, they allied with the same warlords that had been destroying our country the decade prior and whom they had rallied against the Soviets – these are the people that made up the Northern Alliance. The 'good guys' that America gave us were rapists, pillagers, and violent extremists, no better than the Taliban. And that's not even mentioning the horrible atrocities and war crimes committed by American forces themselves.

So, no, Afghan men did not collectively wake up one day and decide that women had too much freedom and rush to establish an extremist government overnight. No, this is not to excuse the misogyny of men in our society – the extremists had to already exist for Americans to fund and arm them against the Soviets – but rather to redirect the bulk of this racist blame to the actual culprits. The religious extremism and sex-based apartheid would not be oppressing and murdering us today if they hadn't been funded and supported by the United States of America thirty years ago. And despite all the abuses and restrictions, many Afghan women prefer the Taliban's current government to another American occupation. I felt safer walking in Taliban-controlled Kabul than I did being 'randomly searched' (sexually assaulted) by American military police in my village as a child.

Imperialism is inextricably linked with patriarchal violence and women's oppression. You cannot talk about the deterioration of Afghanistan without talking about the true cause of said decline: The United States of America. Americans of all political views, including leftists and feminists, are guilty of reducing or outright ignoring Western responsibility for female oppression in the Global South, finding it much easier to place all blame on the foreign brown man or our supposedly backwards, savage cultures, when the most responsibility belongs with Western governments and their meddling games that forced the most violent misogynists among us into power.

(Most of this information comes from my own experience living as an Afghan Hazara woman in Afghanistan, but Bleeding Afghanistan: Washington, Warlords and the Propaganda of Silence covers this in much more detail. If you want more on the Soviet-Afghan war and Afghanistan's socialist history, Revolutionary Afghanistan is an English-language source from a more leftist perspective)