radical-brownie - Tumblr blog

[radical-brownie]

Here’s what gets me about choice feminism (shaving, makeup, other performative femininity):

If you feel anxious, ugly, embarrassed, or generally bad about going out in public and around others when you have failed to do it, how much of a choice is there?

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The radical feminist community is vast and diverse. Some will have wack opinions and takes. It does not mean they are TRAs or male infultrators

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Female cops don't deserve rape

Tradwifes don't deserve rape

Conservative women don't deserve rape

Fascist women don't deserve rape

""Terfs"" do not deserve rape

MRA women don't deserve rape

Disagreeable women in general do not deserve rape

No woman no matter her shitty ideology deserves to be sexually abused

Once it's okay to excuse rape based on ideology sooner or later you'll meet someone who doesn't agree with you.

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I'm back

Hey everyone, I took quite a long break from Radblr due to irl stuff, but I've returned, now with even MORE to say and more under my belt. Please excuse any of my old posts, as when I first joined radblr I was 13 lol- I follow and reply back from @maiis-old-shit (I don't use my main anymore) I hope to spread more positivity this time around :)

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all the circular logic in the world cant hide that trans ideology DOES have a definition of woman: someone who enjoys performing femininity.

it's obvious in your art, your styles, your writing, the way you talk about transition.

it's obvious because when a girl expresses discomfort with femininity you suggest she might be trans. because "prolonged gender nonconformity" is widely accepted as a sign a child is trans. because you use the word "gender" as a synonym for style or personality.

it's the antithesis to feminism. it's basic sexism. and the more people take a closer look, the more will realize how regressive and bullshit the whole thing is.

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notice how we’re supposed to find the dad bod attractive but there is no mom bod. there’s only “snap back since pregnancy” progress pics

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god bless mens tummies. the fat ones and the flat ones and the toned ones and the flabby ones and the disabled ones and the thin ones and the curvy ones and the straight ones and

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men: hmm… what if i could leverage my wealth and power to have sex with poorer, less powerful women who don’t want to have sex with me

weirdos: this is very feminist! and not at all evil

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gurl jus let me fucking live 😭

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Religious people literally run the fucking world there are so many theocracies that 24/7 hurt and kill gay people and women and mfs still come on here trying to coddle them with “we need to respect everyone’s beliefs🥺” SHUT THE FUCK UP

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I’ve just returned from a conference in Rome called Prostitution: Is Italy ready for the Nordic model?. The event was the first of its kind to be held in the Italian senate and it has caused some controversy.

A new bill drafted by senator Alessandra Maiorino was launched at the event, which, if approved by parliament, would criminalise the buying of sex and decriminalise those in prostitution. Known as the Nordic model, this approach to tackling the harms of the sex trade was first introduced in Sweden in 1999 and has since been adopted by a number of countries, including the Republic of Ireland, Northern Ireland, France, Norway, Sweden, Iceland and Israel.

Outside the venue, a small protest group representing sex workers and allies accused the organisers of “talking about our lives and bodies without even inviting us to the discussion table”, despite the fact that the views of pro-legalisation individuals are in the evidence that is included in the bill. Perhaps more significantly, the voices of those women who have survived the sex trade and since left it are loud and clear in this debate.

The tide is turning in Italy about the sex trade. Maiorino, a parliamentarian in the Five Star Movement party, has garnered cross-party support, with speakers at the conference representing youth, violence against women and gender equality.

Evaluation shows that this Nordic model approach has reduced the number of women in prostitution and that it challenges the culture of acceptability of men paying for sex. There are calls from abolitionists, including many sex trade survivors, to introduce the law globally.

Italy has a history of legislating against the sex trade. In 1958, senator Lina Merlin introduced the Merlin law, which effectively abolished legal brothels. Before the law was introduced there were 560 state approved brothels. The law also abolished the keeping of records of prostituted women, freeing them from the stigma associated with selling (but not buying) sex and providing support to leave. The key aim of the law was to reduce the numbers of women being forced, coerced or exploited into prostitution. It is regarded by Italian feminists as the foundation for a human rights critique of commercial sexual exploitation.

The law periodically comes under fire from those in favour of legalisation. The most recent example came in March 2019 whenit was challenged by the court of appeal in Bari in relation to a case in which businessman Giampaolo Tarantini was convicted of aiding and abetting prostitution by recruiting “escorts” for the then prime minister Silvio Berlusconi. Lawyers argued that prostitution is organised differently than in 1958 and that women now have sexual freedom and therefore can freely choose to be sex workers. The appeal was rejected by the constitutional court and the Merlin law was upheld.

According to Maiorino, there is more violence, abuse and exploitation in the sex trade than in 1958. “There are increasing ways in which women can be coerced into prostitution,” she said.

In fact, as Ilaria Baldini from Resistenza Femminista, a feminist activist group, told me, prostitution across Italy was “totally normalised” and the police often ignored the criminal exploitation of women in brothels and on street, rarely targeting pimps or buyers.

In March, Roberto Saviano (whose book Gomorra exposed one of Italy’s most powerful mafia networks) wrote an article for Corriere della Sera, arguing that legalising prostitution in Italy was necessary, that prostitution was a “real profession” and that the only way that women can be protected within the sex trade is to “regulate” it.

The article caused huge controversy and the newspaper was inundated with emails from anti-sex trade feminists, demanding a right to reply. Monica Ricci Sargentini, a reporter at the newspaper, supported the call for a feminist response; as a result, she was issued with a written warning and threatened with a three-day suspension.

Despite the significant resistance from pro-legalisation activists in Italy and elsewhere, its benefits are clear. Everywhere it has been implemented, the number of women in prostitution has fallen, as has violence – including homicide – against them. Neither is it an overly punitive or “carceral” law; proposals within Maiorino’s bill for sex buyers are typically modest: for first offenders, a fine of €1,500 to €5,000 and a police caution. Those that reoffend more than once in five years can be fined up to €15,000. A prison sentence of between six months to three years can be avoided if the buyers participate in a perpetrator re-education programme.

On the other hand, legalisation is always disastrous, as I discovered during my research. Germany introduced blanket legalisation in 2002 and, as parliamentarian Leni Breymaier told delegates in Rome, it has since become one of the fastest growing destinations for traffickers of women and children.

“There should never have been the scandal of Berlusconi,” she tells me. “And nor should any Italian men be led by his example.”

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“Students in our “Psychology of Women” classes have routinely argued that the act of a man opening a door for a woman has nothing to do with sexism. It is simply one person being polite to another. If they are right, then men should feel complimented when women (and men) open doors for them. To test their presumption, we ask the women in the class to open doors for men and the men to wait at doors until a woman opens the door for them. We also ask them to record the responses they receive. (We invite readers to do the same.) The women learn that there is a sizable minority of men that refuses to go through a door held open for them by a woman, becoming irate if the women insist on “just being polite.” The men report that women will open the door for them, but that the women frequently give them disapproving looks or say unkind things “under their breath” to them. These class observations are somewhat similar to the findings of Ventimiglia (1982): the most confusion by male recipients of door-opening by females, and the most disapproval and avoidance by male recipients of door-opening by other males. 

Social norms are often invisible to us until we violate them. And social norms regarding what is considered polite depend on the sex of the individual, which suggests there is more going on here than people “just being polite.” What could it be? We then ask students to look for underlying themes regarding what is considered polite for each gender. Do the behaviors considered polite for men have anything in common? Do the behaviors considered polite for women? 

It is not a cultural accident that the personality traits associated with a male’s performance in rituals between the sexes are precisely those traits which this culture values the most and considers socially desirable and mentally healthy activity: efficacy, authority, prowess, independence. Nor is it a cultural accident that the personality traits associated with the female’s performance are exactly those that our culture writes off as immature and childlike: passivity, dependence, weakness, frailty, ineptitude. The effect of chivalry, then, is to reinforce sex roles, a system geared to the creation of dominant males and submissive females. 

Social norms of politeness for women require women to wait for men, the actors. We are forced to conclude, then, that social norms regarding politeness in males and females are not just about being polite: they operate to maintain sex roles that champion action in males and passivity in females. One has to question the psychological healthiness of social norms that oblige women to be passive if they are to be perceived as polite. Pitting action against politeness affords women no real, or healthy, choices about how to behave.

Though it is apparently ironic, the man who insists on opening doors for a woman often is the same man who argues that a woman should not be considered for a high-level job and that women should make less money than men. Similarly, it is entirely likely that the man who marries his wife to protect her from harm is the same man who beats her. Ted Bundy, a mass murderer of women, walked women to their cars at night to protect them from violent males. This behavior made it difficult for his friend, Ann Rule (1980), to believe he could have committed atrocities against women. Acts of protectiveness appear inconsistent with acts of violence. However, there is another way to look at this behavior: male protectiveness embodies an admission by men of men’s malevolence toward women.

These kindnesses wrap in a chivalric cloak the misogynistic core of our culture, disguising the actual situation of women. If men’s kindnesses toward women were really only kindnesses, a man would be pleased if another man or woman offered these kindnesses to him. He would be pleased if another man or woman lit his cigarette or pulled out his chair for him. He would be pleased to derive his income, prestige, power and even his identity from his partner. He would take pride in another man’s or woman’s offer to walk him to his car at night. But in fact, “one of the very nasty things that can happen to a man is his being treated or seen as a woman, or womanlike” (Frye 1983, p. 136).”

- Loving To Survive by Dee L. R. Graham

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I’m just so, so fucking tired of turning on the news and feeling my heart plummet through the soles of my feet. Things are just getting worse, and worse, and worse, and worse, and every time there’s the initial outburst of rage, an outpouring of grief that floods every social media platform, every status, every post, and then time passes and we get used to the New Normal, hating it every minute, every second, joking about it where we can, just so that we get a reprieve from crying and raging about it, and then, just as we think we’ve found our footing with the dreadful way things are now, the rug gets pulled from under our feet again. Except it’s not a rug, it’s the crust of the Earth, and we’re all just falling further down towards oblivion. I’m tired of being shocked every time. I shouldn’t be shocked every time. And still, I’m scared of the time this happens and I’m not shocked any more.

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To those who reacted to the new information with malice against the fake constructed picture of “privileged white conservative women”

No, it won’t be that “rich women will still be able to get abortions” or that “conservative women are safe”

ALL women are affected by this, we NEED female class conciousness NOW more than ever. We need female solidarity, even with women you hate, despise and loathe. As a woman you will have more in common with other females than you ever will with someone who has XY chromosomes and that is an undeniable fact.

So for the love of god, stop putting other women down for male validation, practice female separatism if you can. Support your sisters as we watch the world regress into madness because all we have in this patriarchal hellworld is each other.

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rip folx

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literally if someone says “white people are evil” everyone with half a brain understands this as meaning “white people as a social class are responsible for great evils in this world” but someone says men are evil and suddenly it’s like but what about the men who were born with glass bones and paper skin who have never even killed a bug like my friend Ben :( he might see this post and get sad!!