onemistressandnomaster

[onemistressandnomaster]

The Victorians found it convenient to ignore the social conditions that forced women into prostitution, and to pretend instead that epidemic nymphomania was instead the cause, with women turning to prostitution simply because they happened to enjoy it. Traveling from Joy Maidens, through Daughters of Joy, we arrive, by grim and inevitable etymological process, at Joy Division, the name given by the Third Reich to those female Jewish concentration camp detainees assigned to the prostitution detail.

-From Hell: Appendix to Chapter 4, Alan Moore

[onemistressandnomaster]

By night one way, by day another. This shall be the norm, until you find true love’s first kiss, then take love’s true form.

[onemistressandnomaster]

anecdotal obviously but I feel like whenever I watch dateline or 20/20 or shows like that, and a man kills (or attempts to kill) his wife and they have children together, 9/10 the children believe the dad was innocent. I just turned on this one episode where the father was found guilty of killing his wife, and yet at his sentencing hearing, his son stood up and said that his father was the best person he knew and would never have done anything to his father. and then there was another episode where I think the dad attempted to kill his wife, and they had three daughters, and all three daughters blamed their mother and caped for their father. and they were so offended when the interviewer asked them why they thought their mother would lie, because to them, it was no question that their father was a Good and Righteous Man and their mother was an evil bitch. and it's just depressing to think about.

[onemistressandnomaster]

darcey and stacey and dove cameron

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about darcey and stacey--and dove cameron.

for anyone who doesn’t know (and that would probably be for the best), darcey and stacey silva are reality tv “stars” who currently have their own show on TLC. they had been trying to become store-brand kardashians for years. they filmed a pilot for a reality show called “the twin life” that was never picked up, founded a fashion brand, and languished in obscurity until darcey appeared on the first season of a 90 day fiance spin-off titled “90 day fiance: before the 90 days.” as the title would suggest, it was about couples who had not actually gone through with the k-1 visa process that would bring the foreign half to the united states. instead, it was about couples who were thinking about maybe possibly applying for a k-1 visa at some point in the future, with varying degrees of seriousness in their relationships. darcey was in a relationship with jesse, a dutch man 18 years her junior. she was one of the breakout stars of that show for her desperation to get married, her obvious plastic surgery, and her weepy histrionics. I believe in the second season we were fully introduced to her twin sister stacey, who was vaguely hinted at as being in a relationship with a younger foreigner as well. after darcey’s relationship with jesse ended in dramatic fashion, she stayed on the show with a new boyfriend, this one an english dude named tom who was only six years younger than her. the show also officially introduced stacey’s boyfriend and future husband, florian (who is 17 years younger than the twins). when TLC could no longer justify having darcey on a show about fiances without one of her own, they greenlit a spin-off aptly called “darcey and stacey” that would basically just continue their quest for (younger, european) love.

I’m not proud of watching reality shows. they are so often described as a “guilty pleasure,” and I think that phrase fits. I know how exploitative reality tv is, and yet, there is something satisfying about watching the people who agree to be on these shows because you can say to yourself, “I would never be this stupid. I would never act this way for so many people to see. things may be bad for me, but they could be worse!” when I watch anything from the ever-growing extended universe of the 90 day fiance franchise, I can feel that, while I may be working in a job that I hate, I could be coming across as the worst kind of crass american stereotype buffooning my way around a foreign country. but with “darcey and stacey” in particular, I feel this kind of mixture of superiority and pity on another level, because I think these two women exemplify so much of the problem with female socialization in this country.

the first thing that comes to mind while watching their show is the palpable desperation of the titular women--desperation to be famous, desperation to be sexy, desperation to be youthful and trendy and cool. all of the things which girls are taught from a young age to value. going on a reality show does not speak to a particularly healthy state of mind, particularly when the reality show is about dating. making something intimate and vulnerable into something public and exploitative is a fool’s errand. and to see how darcey in particular makes the same mistakes again and again, but constantly assures herself that this time it’ll be different, is pathetic. and I mean that in both the colloquial sense of it being cringeworthy and the older sense of it evoking pathos. I was struck by the irony in a recent episode where darcey was crying in her talking head about how she didn’t want to be like her mother. for context, her parents divorced when she and her sister were 11. her father, mike, remarried twice, to successively younger women, but neither of the marriages lasted. her mother, nancy, did not remarry at all, and presents as the polar opposite of her two daughters. nancy has aged naturally. she looks like a normal middle-aged woman. she wears bermuda shorts and puts her graying hair in a bun and doesn’t wear make-up. she doesn’t have a man in her life, but nothing about her behavior on the show (admittedly meager though it may be) suggests that she feels some kind of gnawing emptiness in her life. but to hear darcey talk, particularly in that talking head, her mother is deeply, agonizingly lonely, and darcey is terrified at the idea that she could end up, single and loveless, like her mother. except it really seems like darcey is just projecting. somehow, despite nancy’s seeming normality, darcey and her sister are obsessed with their looks. to the twins, being without a man beings being without value. for all their talk about empowered womanhood--and they bring it up constantly, almost to the point of parody--they are desperate for male approval. specifically, youthful male approval. it seems impossible for darcey to square the circle of her mother’s contentedness when darcey cannot handle being undesirable. and at the same time, her father’s singleness seems less upsetting to her; she did not weep in that talking head over his multiple failed marriages or his currently living as a bachelor. but to look at it from her logic, it is his right, I suppose, as the bestower of value not to see anyone worthy of that gift; but for nancy, a woman, to seemingly find value in her self, is a paradox that darcey’s mind can’t handle.

this talking head that struck me in such a particular way stemmed from a storyline on this newest season about darcey going to see a matchmaker. see, when this show started, darcey of course started dating another younger european guy--georgi, a bulgarian masseuse. that relationship spanned the first three seasons of the show, with darcey ultimately ending their engagement at the end of the third season. and this was a big to-do because she and stacey were supposed to have a big twin wedding extravaganza (even though stacey and florian had already gotten married during the height of the covid pandemic), and then darcey was no longer engaged, but stacey still wanted to go ahead with a big vow renewal for herself and florian. the twins, whether because it gives good drama or because it’s their genuine dynamic (or both), are constantly competing with each other, and the fact that stacey is married while darcey is not is a point of contention. if darcey cannot define herself as being identical to her sister because she’s not married, and if she cannot define herself as desirable to a man because she’s not married, then what is left to her? enter the matchmaker. but from the start, the matchmaking experiment was doomed to failure. the pictures darcey sent to the matchmaker were filtered within an inch of their life. it’s hard to build a dating profile when your pictures are so obviously edited. then, of course, darcey sought younger guys, even though the matchmaker pointed out that she had had no success so far with having a lasting relationship with a younger man. the matchmaker attempted to match darcey with someone around the same age (late 40s), only for the relationship to sputter after a couple of awkward dates during which darcey was constantly trying to signal her “sexy empowered womanhood.” it was as it became clear to darcey that this guy didn’t want anything to do with her that she gave that talking head about her mother. and funnily enough, if anything, she should be more worried about being like her father, given that they have both had multiple failed relationships with younger partners. but the real horror is her mother happily living alone. and even when the matchmaker pointed out that darcey, at 48, is acting immaturely and insincerely, that her shtick is at best tiresome and at worst pathetic, and that perhaps she needs to go to therapy, darcey refused to listen. and as a viewer, I could merely laugh at her. but I also want to reach through the screen and shake her, tell her, “you are a grown woman, not a teenage girl! grow up, develop some self-respect, stop worrying about what men think, get a vibrator, read a book! look to your mother as an example, not a warning” I feel like choice feminism and the conflation of empowerment with sexual desirability and all the other brain rot that gets funneled into girls from birth has dealt irrevocable damage to these women, and it continues to damage others as we speak. the brainless bimbo thing isn’t cool, nor is it feminist, nor is it fair. because the problem escalates to generalizing all or most women as being like this. the world tells girls to act this way out of one side of its mouth, then scorns them for being oversexed and overwrought out of the other. it’s a finger trap, and those caught in it need to realize it, for the sake of themselves and the sake of others.

and I have only touched on the plastic surgery addiction. I mean, the biggest storyline of the third season was their trip to turkey to get basically full body plastic surgery. they’ve already had so much plastic surgery as to make them virtually unrecognizable, and they still had to get more--to get “snatched,” as they termed it. and it looks horrible. they look swollen, stretched, strained. their breasts look both painful and comical as they swallow the entire torso. the filler in their cheeks and lips gives them a permanent duck face. they do not look beautiful. they almost do’t look human. and you don’t want to be that kind of person who springs to criticizing someone’s looks, but it is ludicrous to me to pretend like the way they look now is an improvement over the way they looked before all of the surgery. the emperor has no clothes. these over-the-top surgically modified faces and bodies look wrong, and our brains know that. and so often, what surgery has ruined, only surgery can fix. so sure, you may think that you are following the beauty trends by getting eye lifts and lip fillers and botox and breast implants. but when the insta baddie aesthetic goes out of style, and some other body type takes it place, what can you do but go under the knife again? and again for the next trend, and the next one? when do you realize that there isn’t a point to it anymore? when your nose has collapsed in on itself or you’ve lost feeling in your breasts? every effort to become more desirable only makes them more repellent. that they attract some men who are interested in their (father’s) money and reality show fame and the promise fo a woman who will do (almost) anything for love is not to their credit. to a well-adjusted person, they come across as grotesque--and given that they are on a channel that is like the modern equivalent of a freak show, whatever point they may think they’re proving to the “haters” is lost in the general disgust and ridicule they excite.

look, I know what it’s like to look in the mirror and hate what I see, and I suppose I’m lucky that some part of my brain recoils at the idea of, say, cutting into the flesh of my face, breaking my jaw, inserting some kind of plastic or filler, and then sewing it back up, even if I wish to god that I had been born with a stronger chin. I remember once lamenting the fact to my mother, who shared the same trait. really it’s a family trait from her side--round peasant face and weak chin. and she said that there were surgeries for that kind of thing, but that you couldn’t eat afterwards with some of them, because they might wire your jaw shut. and I think that idea horrified me so much because it reminded me of the pain I had felt with palate expanders and braces and wisdom tooth surgery. those, or at least the first two, had been cosmetic fixes to an extent. I got the orthodontics because I had a misalignment between my top and bottom teeth, and perhaps that would’ve caused a more serious problem down the line. the wisdom tooth surgery, though, had been necessary because I was in real pain as the wisdom teeth attempted to grow in. and afterwards, my jaw sore and tender, I had cried while trying to eat because it was agony and I was hungry. and to think that I would experience that again, except this time for reasons of sheer vanity. if I were only measuring success by marriage, then clearly weak chins had not stopped my mother or grandmother or great-grandmother or whoever else in my family from marrying. and then, too, I imagined the horror of it going wrong somehow, how much worse it would be to have disfigured yourself. and then, too, I imagined that even if it went well, what if I couldn’t recognize myself? my face was my face, the continuities obvious in the photos of my childhood. it was a face like other people in my family. it was the face I had been born with. in some ways, I think this is not a strictly healthy way for me to think either--god knows I have a tendency to hoard and a pathological aversion to change, but in this case, it’s a benefit. this is my face. this is my body. this is me. who would I be, if I changed all of that, if I threw that away when I could hardly bear to part with an old t-shirt? what worth was there in the face I had since birth?

which brings me to dove cameron. again, for anyone who doesn’t know, dove cameron is a disney tween star turned model/actress/singer/influencer. she’s best known for being the titular characters on the show “liv and maddie” (about twins, so it fits!) and one of the main characters in the “descendants” franchise. she also has a pretty clear case of severe body dysmorphia. if you google her, you’ll probably see stuff about the work she has had done, or you’ll be struck by the difference in pictures of her from a few years ago versus pictures of her now. apparently, even before she landed her roles on the disney channel, she was already getting plastic surgery to give her a more “hollywood” look. her mother actually wrote a book about how to turn your child into a “star,” with a heavy emphasis on achieving the most marketable look. so dove cameron probably went under the knife when she was a middle schooler--and then never stopped. most recently, she’s had buccal fat removal, which gives your cheeks a hollowed look. and there is something so annoying about people, especially women and girls, who will preface even the lightest criticism of her plastic surgery obsession with, “if this was her choice, I wouldn’t care! it’s her body, it’s her right, do it to make yourself feel good and sexy! if I had money, I’d do it too! but if you’re just following trends...” or “if you’re suffering from dysmorphia...” but what other reason is there for dove cameron’s plastic surgery if not to appear trendy, if not to fit the ever-shifting beauty standards, if not to make herself feel better by making herself feel consumable? what if “doing it for yourself” cannot be extricated from the wider culture in which you live? what was wrong with her face the way that it was, all the way back when she was a child? and then the counter is that everybody famous does it. well, isn’t it dystopic to think that every celebrity you see has had some kind of work, and every female celebrity especially must feel some kind of pressure to look beautiful? look at justine bateman, an actress who has recently had to defend her decision to...age. a natural process! and she has to defend a lack of action. I read internet comments that say they love the little enhancements a celebrity has gotten done, or they love the “face” they had when one plastic surgery trend was predominant. “oh, I wish kim kardashian would go back to her 2015 face, she never looked better.” am I crazy in feeling like we should only have one face? maybe I’m naive, but one face, untouched by an surgical attempts to enhance it, should be enough. imagine looking in the mirror and seeing the imprint of a surgeon staring back at you. or you see a thousand other people who have all gone under the same knife as you, and you have become like a car, only one in a line of identical models, value depreciating by the second. maybe in the end, the issue is that we think, because we may technically have the ability to “transcend” the material world, that we should as our right and our destiny. but I think an acceptance of both the possibilities of human ingenuity and the boundaries of human physicality would be more conducive to happiness. maybe the human body isn’t a problem to fix--certainly not if the idea of fixing it is just making it “sexier.”

[onemistressandnomaster]

Noooo auntiwanda got termed 😭

[onemistressandnomaster]

you fucking moron, you realize that 1) the boy who “transitions” has still benefited all his life from male privilege/biology and continues to benefit from said privilege/biology by now being a Very Special Boy who has to be treated with kid gloves because otherwise he’ll run screaming to pink news about discrimination so

2) it doesn’t work as easy in reverse, and you would realize that if you thought about any of this for longer than two fucking seconds. how many fucking men are breaking records and going to the olympics on women’s teams, and how many women are just holding their own on men’s teams? where is the female equivalent of l/ia thomas? but then the “you just think women are naturally weak” card gets pulled, as if the systemic discouragement of girls’ athletics isn’t part of the fucking problem, as if it would be this easy for men and boys to suck up all the oxygen on female sports teams if women and girls were respected for their athletics abilities apart from how well they measure up to men

3) “just become a men and solve all your problems” you’re framing this as if it’s ridiculous to think this way even though it is demonstrably true that it is much easier to navigate this world as a man. but what you don’t realize or refuse to realize is that if a man pretends to be a woman, he is still recognized as a man and treated that way. if a woman pretends to be a man, she is still recognized as a woman and treated that way. the men continue to benefit from their maleness no matter what meds they go on or how long they grow their hair out or what pronouns they use. everyone knows you’re fucking pretending anyway, and everyone is walking on fucking eggshells around you because they know it’s not worth the exhaustion to argue with you.

men and boys will do and say fucking anything to get special treatment and to fuck over women and girls, as the history of the fucking world would show. acting incredulous about this is either ignorant or malevolent or both.

[onemistressandnomaster]

"When I say there is an all-out global war being waged against women, there are always some people who shake their heads and say, "Really, Sonia! War is a very big word. Obviously, things aren't good for women, but you mustn't overstate your case. If you exaggerate, nobody's going to believe anything you say. Why not tone it down a little?" I tell these people how fervently I wish war were too big a word for what happens to women in this world every day, how I can't wait for the day when war is too big a word and I am overstating my case. But the fact is, war is far too small a word. There isn't a word in the men's dictionary monstrous enough for what happens to women on this planet, and has happened unceasingly for thousands of years.

Men speak humorously, or so they say, of "the war between the sexes" - a transparent and guileful attempt to mislead us into thinking that there is a natural enmity between women and men, and that the "sides" are evenly matched. Nothing could be further from the truth on both counts. The "war between the sexes" is man made, and it is not between anybody. It is against women. We know that to be born female in patriarchy is to be born behind enemy lines.

But because everything associated with women is degraded by that association, something subversive happens to the glorious male vision of war when we insist on calling women's lives with men on this earth "war." War, to the patriarchal mind, is heroic, grand, full of magnificent courage and color, camaraderie, idealism, moral and physical strength - the whole shot through with religious fervor: God is always on our side because we are right and good and noble. The Old Testament is all the proof one needs that war in patriarchy is the holiest of holies.

Then feminists come along and sully that splendid word. What could be less noble and heroic and grand and magnificent than the furtive ugly sneaking weak and cowardly acts of rape and battering and incest and pornography-inspired sadism, and sexual harassment and pauperizing and sterilizing and obligatory motherhood - to name just a few of the less heroic aspects of this most invisible and vicious and widespread and prolonged and prototypical of all wars in human history. No wonder people become alarmed, even outraged, when the holy word "war" is used for the disgustingly two-bit work of bullying and brutalizing women into submission. Even to use the words "war" and "women" in the same sentence makes a mockery of all they reverence.

Yet, the screams of women, their moaning, the crying of the women of the world, past and present, echo through the chambers of the unconscious in every human being alive. On some level, each of us knows what is going on, but it is as if we have signed a pact not to let on that we know, have sworn to keep it secret. What else can account for the public aghast when one minute fragment of the hidden hoard of evidence escapes into public awareness?"

- Going Out of Our Minds by Sonia Johnson

[onemistressandnomaster]

I made a shirt

[onemistressandnomaster]

how did this moid type this out and hit post without a shred of irony......and how did fourteen fucking accounts upvote this without a shred of irony........

[onemistressandnomaster]

I was at the bookstore the other day, and I picked up a book in the u.s. history section entitled “the woman they could not silence” out of curiosity. it’s about a woman named elizabeth packard, whose husband imprisoned her in an insane asylum for disagreeing with him. I had never heard of this woman before, so I read the first few chapters and later googled her name. and like.....stories like this are so important in helping to raise feminist consciousness, and it’s wild to think how these kinds of things are just glossed over when it comes to early american feminism.

so for starters, elizabeth packard was well-educated, but when she was 19, her father committed her to an asylum for “brain fever,” which was attributed to her taxing her womanly mind with all of her studying and teaching. the author of the book speculated that elizabeth actually had meningitis, and that the “treatment” for brain fever (ie. locking elizabeth up in an asylum for six weeks and bleeding her) did more harm than help. then elizabeth got married, at the age of just 21, to a man fourteen years older than her, and who she only married because he was a friend of her dad’s and she wanted to please her parents. she was pretty insistent in her writings that she never loved him and he never loved her due to their completely incompatible personalities. her husband, theophilius, was a minister, and when they moved to illinois, he opened up his own church. elizabeth disagreed with her husband’s calvinist beliefs, though, and they also clashed over other issues like slavery (this was all happening pre-civil war; elizabeth was pro-abolition, theophilius was pro-slavery) and the rights of women (elizabeth thought women should be treated like human beings, theophilius did not). when elizabeth started making her opinions more and more publicly known, theophilius started spreading rumors that she was insane--and he was able to use the fact that she had spent time in an asylum to his advantage. eventually, he gathered a whole bunch of “testimony” from his church about elizabeth’s insanity, and he had elizabeth committed to the jacksonville insane asylum. 

and here’s the kicker--elizabeth argued that she couldn’t be admitted without a hearing, because that was the law. except that the law didn’t apply to married women--it specifically said that husbands could remand their wives to asylums, no questions asked, and the women had no right to challenge their imprisonment. and when elizabeth was being forced onto the train, she expected some of her friends in the community to help her. but only one person--another woman, a ms. blessings (I can’t remember her first name)--said anything in her defense, which was basically that if she were a man, she would fight to protect elizabeth’s rights. but all the men just shrugged their shoulders and allowed elizabeth to get carted off. and she spent three years in the asylum, constantly being berated by the doctors, who wanted her to admit that she was crazy for her religious and political views. and it was only when her by-now adult children demanded her release that they let her go--into the custody of her husband, who then locked her up in their house. and she was only able to escape that after a trial to determine her sanity, because while it was legal to send her to the asylum, it was illegal for theophilius to imprison her in their home. the “evidence” that theophilius presented for her insanity? arguing with him and trying to leave his church.

fortunately, she was found legally sane. unfortunately, theophilius sold all of her things, rented their house out, and skipped town, leaving her homeless and penniless. and she had no right to seek recompense for her stuff or for the loss of her minor children because married women were not entitled to any of that under illinois law. she became an activist for the rights of women and those in asylums and succeeded in getting legislation passed granting married women more rights under the law. but like.....I had never heard of her until finding that book, even though her story shows how deep the oppression of women goes. we think we’ve come so far, but we don’t even properly appreciate where we started. married women literally had no legal personhood for so long in this country and so many others!! there needs to be more attention paid to women’s history, to the women who have stood up and fought for their rights, and for the women who were silenced--because elizabeth packard was not the only woman in that asylum who had been sent there by a husband. how many women suffered? we shouldn’t forget them.

[onemistressandnomaster]

THIS right here is the result of depp v heard. men treating women defending themselves as abusers. i hate what this trial has done for women.

[onemistressandnomaster]

quick what was that book that mentions a story about a man in military sharing his “depression” bc his buddy got killed so he went and raped a woman in front of her kids and then killed them all

[onemistressandnomaster]

[onemistressandnomaster]

I hate the implication that street harassment is no big deal if it involves working-class men harassing middle to upper class women. like actually women being made to feel like pieces of meat on display whenever they dare to step outside and try to go about their business in public is always bad

[onemistressandnomaster]

Women are people

yes, a specific class of people who are specifically targeted by abortion bans. saying abortion bans kill "people" is about as helpful as saying "all lives matter."

[onemistressandnomaster]

went to the dc bans off our bodies march on saturday, and while it was great for the most part, I got really annoyed at one of the chants. it started as “pro-life is a lie, you don’t care if women die!” but after a few times with that wording, all of a sudden it changed to “pro-life is a lie, you don’t care if people die!” like while we’re begging for our lives, we still have to make sure we don’t offend the idiot men who want to larp as women or the self-hating women who want to larp as men. I kept using the word “women” because women are the class of people affected by abortion bans, but it was somewhat disheartening to hear. 

on the plus side, a lot of the signs specifically referred to women and girls, and the bits that I could hear of the speakers (there were a ton of people there, and I was kind of far from the stage at the start near the washington monument) also referred to women. also at the very end, when we had reached the supreme court building, there was a small group of anti-choicers (some of them with a big banner that said YOU ARE SCREAMING FOR INFANT BLOOD lmao), and I flipped them off. and it was encouraging to see how many people were there in support of abortion rights, and how many people on the streets were cheering as we marched by, and how few of the anti-choicers came out to counterprotest. we aren’t alone in this fight--but it’s still going to be a tough one. and I wish so badly that I could live in a world where women don’t have to constantly fight for our rights and our dignity.