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I was thinking how funny it is that TRAs only decided to come out after LGB and women won the minimal rights (almost nothing) that they have, and they act as if they were the ones who fought and died for

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“If the religious conservatives hate this thing it means it must be good” is a mentality that got us in deep shit. That’s the main reason people defend prostitution, pornography and even pedophilia. That notion that we should abolish all social taboos. “Bourgeois morality”, etc.

Dumb and annoying.

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21 June 2024 - Sierra Leone’s parliament has approved The Prohibition of Child Marriage Bill 2024. The new bill includes provisions for enforcing penalties on offenders, protecting victims’ rights, and ensuring access to education and support services for young girls affected by child marriage.

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"Stop this bender wars, it's useless, women are just as bad as men!"

Are we? Really? When they have never stopped attacking us? When they're the ones who are violent? When they're the ones committing crimes?

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I’ve come to the the realization I’m not against men being in feminism I’m against the pandering and who they address with their feminism.

Men shouldn’t be addressing women and policing what is feminist behavior in women they should be doing that to men.

Men should be preaching feminism to each other and not be so heavily focused on attracting women and instead begin attracting predominantly male audiences because if all the male feminist can do is argue and police women then he is not a feminist, he is just another man who wants control he just does it under the impression he is ‘saving’ or ‘helping’ the woman which to me is infinitely worse.

If you want to be a feminist as a man by all means go ahead, just know who your audience is meant to be.

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the „sexual revolution“ was for men by the way. it did not promote female orgasm in heterosex or men satisfying women, or healthy boundaries and consent, or women voicing our own sexual desires and being horny and masturbating. it promoted what men always wanted: uncommitted sex, multiple partners, no expectations put on them, women „giving it up“ and getting naked for them, promoting porn and prostitution; basically women fulfilling male sexual desires and considering it revolutionary because its different from what their parents did. what a joke!

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Labor and Liberal receive millions in donations from property investors, Labor and Liberal MPs own millions in property investments as landlords, and benefit from the billions in dollars in tax handouts and subsidies we give to landlords. Is it any surprise they consistently don't address the fundamental issues that cause the housing crisis?

The solution is simple: vote out of the landlords. Vote in the Greens and/or progressive independents whose financial interests aren't linked to perpetuating the housing crisis.

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when you say "men are inherently evil animals," you are saying "boys will be boys."

when you say "maybe she should've thought about that before getting with a man," you are saying "dumb bitch deserved to get hit."

when you say "straight women are dick obsessed," you're saying "stupid femoids only want big dicked chads."

so many of you sound like legit incels. and it's kindaaaa because yall are. yall don't interact with people other than the internet, and that has shaped your brain in a really gross way. yall dont understand normal human relationships, platonic or romantic or sexual.

yall are like middle schoolers. it'd be funny if yall weren't full grown women

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Native Tongue and the Power of Language

     I recently read the book Native Tongue by Suzette Haden Elgin and found that its themes strongly resonate with what is currently going on in gender debates. Most notably, the book deals with the power of language to shape our perceptions and reality. The past few years have seen a push towards more gender-neutral language, to the point of completely changing or stripping some words of all meaning. These issues can be examined in light of Elgin’s message on the power of language, which serves as both a warning and a beacon of hope.

     Native Tongue, published in 1984, is set in a highly patriarchal society 200 years from now. All progress made by women in the twentieth century has been lost, and men hold absolute power. The Earth’s economy in the twenty-second century relies on trade with various interstellar nations, and linguists are needed to learn alien languages in order to conduct trade negotiations. The novel principally focuses on Nazareth Chornyak Adiness, a linguist born to one of the 13 Linguist Lines. In the Lines, women are bred until they become barren, at which point they are sent to the Barren House for the rest of their lives. This is where the women are secretly developing their own language, Láadan, to express their own reality and regain their autonomy.

     Elgin, having received a PhD in linguistics, subscribed to the controversial linguistic theory known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. In its “weak” form (which is more accepted than the “strong” form), it says that our language constrains and structures our perception of reality. In other words, people who speak different languages see the world in different ways. Moreover, the way we perceive the world depends on the word choice as well as the metaphors encoded in the language. These ideas have also been brought up by feminist thinkers outside of linguistics, such as Hélène Cixous and Luce Irigaray, who examined how language reinforces gender relations and stereotypes. In The Laugh of the Medusa, Cixous writes: “It is by writing, from and toward women, and by taking up the challenge of speech which has been governed by the phallus, that women will confirm women in a place other than that which is reserved in and by the symbolic, that is, in a place other than silence” (881). Thus, Elgin’s position that changing language can change society complements feminist writings of the time.

     The book’s fictional woman’s language, Láadan, is the result of the belief that language can change reality. The creation of Láadan is primarily based on Encodings, which are “the making of a name for a chunk of the world that so far as we know has never been chosen for naming before in any human language, and that has not just suddenly been made or found or dumped upon your culture. We mean naming a chunk that has been around a long time but has never before impressed anyone as sufficiently important to deserve its own name” (Elgin 22). The appendix of the book gives some examples of words in Láadan. One of these is “doóledosh”, which means “pain or loss which comes as a relief by virtue of ending the anticipation of its coming” (332). In this way, Láadan can express the true perception of women by redefining what is significant or not.

     There is a shift in perception happening today, as gender activists push for more gender neutral and inclusive language. However, this comes at the cost of denying biological reality and erasing women as a class. The most glaring example is probably the trend of replacing “woman” with “uterus-bearer”, “ovary-haver”, “menstruator”, etc. This reduces women to their body parts and is quite telling of the misogynist viewpoint these terms stem from. Indeed, since language acts as a lens through which we see the world, this change reflects the view that women are only good as child-bearers and sex partners. Moreover, the spread of this kind of language also perpetuates this ideology under the guise of “inclusive language”. As Láadan was created to show, the lack of female-centered language helps support the patriarchy.

     However, Native Tongue also provides hope for the efficacy of woman-centered language. Elgin believed language could shape reality and showed it in her book. After the women of the Barren House decide to start using Láadan and teaching it to the girls, the men note: “Women, they tell me, do not nag anymore. Do not whine. Do not complain. Do not demand things. Do not make idiot objections to everything a man proposes. Do not argue. Do not get sick […] No more headaches, no more monthlies, no more hysterics… or if there are still such things, at least they are never mentioned” (303). The Linguist men, unsettled by this new dynamic, decide to make all of their women live in a separate residence, thereby inadvertently giving the women something they want. This shows how the new language altered relations between Linguist men and women and as a result brought a change to their lives. The change need not be so drastic, however, as simply using a language that expresses their views and values makes the women more cheerful and cooperative when dealing with the men. They finally have the freedom that only a language of their own can provide.

     Elgin’s book is more relevant than ever at a time where feminists are fighting against the erasure of female-specific terms. The power of language is that it can oppress, like reinforcing gender stereotypes, but also liberate, as Láadan does for the Linguist women. The latter provides hope in the current battle against female erasure. We need language and writing by women, for women. As language is turned against us, so can we use it to fight back and create our own, more just, reality.

Notes:

· This essay is partly inspired by the afterword to the 2019 edition (Encoding a Woman’s Language by Susan M. Squier and Julie Vedder).

· The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis has been largely abandoned in favor of biolinguistics, the linguistic school that holds that the principles underpinning the structure of language are biologically preset in the human mind and hence genetically inherited,  pioneered by Noam Chomsky. Since Elgin wrote Native Tongue in light of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, this essay does not question the validity of the theory. 

· For more about Láadan: https://laadanlanguage.wordpress.com/

· Native Tongue has many more themes to explore, such as the balance of power between the sexes, which I chose not to go into. I highly recommend this book, and I will definitely be reading the other two books in the trilogy.

References:

Cixous, Hélène, et al. “The Laugh of the Medusa.” Signs, vol. 1, no. 4, 1976, pp.       875–893. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/3173239. Accessed 6 July 2020.

Elgin, S. H., Zumas, L., Squier, S. M., & Vedder, J. (2019). Native tongue. New         York: Feminist Press at the City University of New York.

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rape is a conscious choice. stop victim blaming. 

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Not really a fan of Bridgerton, but I am a fan of Nicola Coughlan's response to everyone shitting on her for being "too big" to play a love interest

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