radicalkitkat

[radicalkitkat]

i don’t know who needs to hear this but you do not need to wear makeup

[radicalkitkat]

Has anyone else noticed an uptick from the liberal crowd in messages that say “it’s never ok to hate men?” Like they will really argue “it’s reverse sexism” with their full chests and act like you’re being a bigot for calling out men’s sexism and violent patterns of behavior.

This feels extremely sinister and I think it’s connected to the trans movement. When there’s no real definition of what a “man” is, and someone can be oppressed for “identifying” as a man, then we lose any ability to speak to our oppression.

Idk. If those core MRA principles are getting thousands of notes in the liberal tags then we’re cooked, I fear.

[radicalkitkat]

"I don't feel like a girl" "I don't feel like a boy"

There isn't a specific way to feel as a girl or boy. Patriarchy has been forced to us how we're supposed to "act" in order to fit the patriarchal standard. Anyone can be feminine or masculine, anyone doesn't have to be feminine or masculine, it's okay to not "fit" in a gender stereotype. The point is we're not supposed to, we're just humans.

[radicalkitkat]

what can't women do when we decide to do it together

[radicalkitkat]

“i can’t believe i’m saying this but i miss 2015 girlboss feminism now that there is so much tradwife shit 😭” sister idk what to tell you, if you ever seriously used “girlboss” derogatorily or demonized female ambition you are part of the reason we are in this mess <3

[radicalkitkat]

HATE that were calling every recipe Marry Me [Recipe]…. Fucking hate that. How bout Frig My Clit Brownies. Kill Yourself At My Feet Pasta. Shut The Fuck Up And Pay My Grocery Bill Cookies (vegan).

[radicalkitkat]

[radicalkitkat]

I think for the past ten years or so, people have reduced patriarchy to "hatred of women" as if it's simply about personal prejudice. In that case it actually makes sense why so many women think the solution is educating people better. If the issue was just that women aren't liked then campaigns about "loving women" or "teach your sons to respect women" would work.

But patriarchy is not a misunderstanding it's a power structure. And all power structures are held up by those with the power benefiting, not those with power not "knowing better". Ending Patriarchy essentially means you are asking billions of people to give up their power, and the obvious response from people with power is "make me"

I don't expect Bezos to redistribute his wealth because I explained labour rights, so patriarchy isn't any different. You'll never give oppressors moral awakenings. The entire point of power structures is people benefiting from harm while being emotionally insulated from it.

Taking on the burden of making men understand just seems like emotional labour scaled up.

[radicalkitkat]

It's quite telling how diseases that affect women disproportionately are often considered controversial. EDS, POTS, MCAS, fibromyalgia, lupus, chronic fatigue - to name a few.

"Seems like every girl has POTS these days. They're all faking it." annoys me and I don't even have POTS.

Women who dare be vocal about their struggles with chronic illnesses are faced with scepticism by doctors and laypeople alike. The way some of these illnesses are treated as a "fashionable" diagnosis doctors hand out to shut up annoying, hypochondriac women is so, so wrong.

(That's not to say no woman has ever faked a disorder, I'm sure we're all well acquainted with the fake tourettes/autism/adhd trend online, but that's stuff for a different post)

Getting doctors to actually listen to you is a struggle as a woman. It's so disheartening to seek help only for a doctor to tell you that it's all in your head, or that you need to lose weight, or that your have something no one takes seriously and there's nothing to be done about it. You might find a doctor willing to actually listen to you, figure out why you're in so much pain and how to properly address it, which is such a relief; but that also means random people will accuse you of faking it for attention and you'll have to deal with it.

I'm diagnosed autistic, it affects every single part of life, so I'll use that as an example. "You're faking it!" when you fail to meet their expectations, which are usually based around stereotypes and/or their experiences with autistic people with completely different needs. "You're such a r****d" when you do show symptoms and they get uncomfortable. They'll look for proof of our suffering only to use it as ammunition to further harm us.

The accusations of hysteria never went away. People just use a different vocabulary to refer to it now. You don't owe these people an explanation.

[radicalkitkat]

it's so funny seeing "radfems" call themselves that and claim a need to "gatekeep the movement from corruption" when they don't even believe in feminism: the collective political action that furthers women's liberation beccause they a) don't believe in women's liberation as like a real thing that can happen, or feminist progress as real or evident and b) have zero intersectionality or socialist political views. i promise the women who do a and b but are married to men are more in line with radical feminism on here than these doomers. radical feminism isn't a "correct opinion." it's political action that benefits the collective. if you're just a separatist that yells on the internet and nothing else, you're neither radical nor a feminist. so many radblr users these days are radicalized instead of radical. like i promise you there's a difference.

[radicalkitkat]

This is a tangent, but that line of thinking annoys me too because it contradicts everything else society believes about predators.

People simultaneously hold the beliefs that predators are crazy far away monsters, and casual opportunists. When you accuse an average man of rape or other violence, no one can handle the thought because he's normal in every other way. But when you suggest that predators are uninhibited and will do anything, no one can handle the thought because ~why would someone go to such an extreme?~

Which one is it. Is it cognitive dissonance or do people just want to pretend predators don't exist altogether?

People today really dont understand that predators, real, actual predators, will do the most to get access to victims. "Well I dont think he would do ALL THAT WORK just to-" well. He will. And worse. And more. This is not a hobby to them. Their life revolves around getting off the way addicts' lives around about drugs. They are constantly searching for ways to gain access and they dont care if it's easy, hard, inconvenient, they dont care. That once in a generation reminder is coming because people got complacent.

[radicalkitkat]

unwoke or whatever but I think cheating is abuse. human relationship are flexible and humans are perhaps not lifelong monogamists by nature but cheating in what was supposed to be a monogamous relationship is a breach of trust and often a deep wound inflicted on your partner. I’m not one of those freaks who thinks ‘cheating should be illegal’ or whatever but I really do not empathize with cheaters. even if your relationship is in shambles, end it cleanly before you start fucking someone else. bringing a third party in is a great way to make things much worse, much more vitriolic and much more complicated.

[radicalkitkat]

It’s so disingenuous to reply to a critique of makeup’s effect on womens’ self esteem and place in society by bringing up more creative ways to do makeup. Drawing fish on your face, painting yourself blue, giving yourself mermaid scales.

Because it’s obvious that that’s not the kind of makeup anyone was talking about. Women aren’t pressured to give themselves purple skin. We aren’t denied jobs because we aren’t wearing mushroom freckles. We aren’t fed, from birth, depictions of women with this type of makeup treated as if it’s natural. We aren’t told that we should “fix” our lack of big eyeshadow, or green blush, not the same way we’re taught to change our nose and our lips and our eyes.

When someone brings up “makeup” the vast majority of people think of corrective cosmetics. Making your nose and face look slimmer and your eyes bigger and your lashes longer and covering up your acne. When people were talking about Pamela Anderson being barefaced, they weren’t asking her to paint hearts on her cheeks. Bringing up makeup as a tool of creative expression in discussions about the harm of corrective makeup is nothing but a way to shut down conversation.

[radicalkitkat]

a phrase that kinda bothers me when talking about women's historical roles in europe is "cooking, cleaning, and taking care of the children." you hear it so often, those exact words in the same order even. and once you learn a little more you realize that the massive gaping hole in that list is fiberwork. im not an expert and have no hard numbers, but i wouldnt be surprised if fiberwork took up nearly as much time as the other three tasks combined, so it's not a trivial omission.

it's not a hot take to say that the mass amnesia about fiberwork is linked to the belittlement of women's work in geneal, but i do think there's a special kind of illusion that is cast by "cooking, cleaning, and taking care of the children." you hear that and think "well i cook and clean and take care of children (or i know someone who does) and i have a sense of how much work that is" and you know of course that cooking and cleaning were more laborious before modern technology, but still, you have a ballpark estimate you think, when in fact you are drastically underestimating the work load.

i also think that this just micharacterizes the role of women's work in livelihoods? cooking, cleaning, and taking care of the children are all sisyphean tasks that have to be repeated the next day. these are important, but not the whole picture. when we include all kinds of fiberwork—and other things, such as making candles or soap—women's work looks much more like manufacturing, a sphere we now associate more with men's work. i feel like women's connection to making and craftsmanship is often elided.

[radicalkitkat]

I will NEVER let ppl forget that Brad Pitt terrorised and beat Angelina Jolie and their kids so bad on a plane ride that a report was filed by the FBI with multiple witnesses. And I will never forget that Angelina Jolie filed for divorce from him almost immediately after that incident in 2016 and it wasn't until THIS YEAR that Pitt agreed to it after ALMOST A DECADE of dragging her and their kids through bullshit defamation court proceedings. But you'd never know because that fucker is everywhere with his fake racecar movie and shitty cheek fillers and everyone just eats it up. So many people warned that the Depp v Heard case would light the way for famous abusers to be rehabilitated in the public eye and it did. It proved to abusers that they don't even need to be sorry or acknowledge what they did they can just keep showing up, smear their victims behind the scenes with astro turfing and let the fans and industry do the rest. brad pitt, Kevin Spacey, James Franco, Ezra Miller, Johnny Depp etc. all of them are thriving in the spotlight rn and being invited to major industry events and even winning awards despite documented incidents of abuse. It's so fucking depressing.

[radicalkitkat]

TW - CSA

Extremely disgusting and heartbreaking news story that's been developing for a few weeks now.

I am someone who is pretty desensitized to disturbing news stories, but this literally made me wince. And what are the men on Reddit replying with? To that specific comment, no less?

I cannot imagine reading something like this and immediately turning it around to think of how it's hurting *me*. And it's not even out of self-identification like "I was a victim too, I feel so bad for them". It's just "I hate pedophiles because they makes me look bad."

Do you hate "how society has villainised men in education" more than pedophiles? Because that's what it sounds like to me. And of course if you point this out to people, they'll always say "Well that's because we don't need to repeat the obvious! Everyone hates pedophiles!"

Even if that were true (which it's not) - it's clear just hating pedophiles is not enough. Whether it's through genuine neglect or just people not knowing what to look for, CSA is still happening constantly. If they're not being used for commiserations of empathy/disgust, these comment sections could at least be used for productive conversations of what we can do to stop it from happening again. But that's too obvious apparently.

Instead they're used to uplift random men.

[radicalkitkat]

I think a lot of radfems on here genuinely believe that the difference between radical feminism and marxist feminism is that radical feminism is apolitical when really radical feminism is deeply marxist and the difference between rad-feminism and marxist feminism is that radical feminist thought-leaders wanted to put women at the center of political analysis and introduce the private sphere as a legitimate political concept deserving of its own nuanced analyses. radical feminists expanded on the work of marx and engels by saying “you haven’t gone far enough” not “you’re wrong.” it’s radical feminism’s class analysis for women that gives it edge over other forms of feminism, particularly liberal feminism.