#new age feminism

[midnight-specialist]

Nothing makes me angrier than sitting with a group of girls and hearing them talk about men, realizing they have a completely distorted view of what feminism is. "Taming" your guy and making him do everything you want, talking about him as if he were a dog that should obey you, makes you the entire fucking problem and not some “woke baddie”. But also, what are we normalizing? "Training" someone to be a partner?? My only question is, can't you just be alone? Cuz girl, you need it.

[angelic-ambedo]

anybody looking for weird feminist girlie coming of age s/xual awakening type movies that are not The Virgin Suicides, I’ve got u covered <3

-Raw (2016) - French-Belgian production. a little on the horror side for sure but very deep and interesting. I believe this is still free on Netflix.

- Water Lillies (2007) - French production. Directed by the same woman who did Portrait of a Lady on Fire. Coming of age queer drama about exploring and experimenting with sxuality. full movie is finally free on YouTube!

- Daisies (1966) - Czech new wave film. Feminist farce. Ridiculously good fun. Girlies eating food for an hour. Free on HBO Max.

- Ginger Snaps (2000) - English. another coming of age girlie horror type film. Free on Vudu, Tubi, Prime Video, and Sling TV.

- Alucarda (1977) - another girlie + girlie (romance?) that also involves the devil and is sort of the overlooked version of The Exorcist. You can find this on the internet archive and I believe in YouTube as well.

- Wetlands (2013) - German coming of age movie. Just a girlie who likes to be different and fck around. Should be free on Tubi, definitely on prime video, also on Apple TV (though I must check to specifically see where one can find this for free)

If anybody has other good movie recommendations in this category let me know so I can add to this beautiful list

[guilty-feminist]

[tedhugheshater]

normal people support female separatism <3

[glitter-and-be-gay]

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[teanicolae]

honoured to have discussed my paper, ‘The Western Revival of Goddess Worship’, with Emma Cieslik (@eocieslik), fellow researcher of the female experience of spirituality, which she explores in the context of traditional catholicism (bodily regulation within church etc). Emma contacted me with questions regarding my article, and what followed was a fruitful meeting in which we discussed the gendered & ungendered experiences of religion. i was not familiar with her research area and this exchange has been most enriching! ah. how i love academia!  stay tuned for future article collaborations between the two of us for which i'm so thoroughly excited!! you can read my paper here: https://journals.sagepub.com/.../10.1177/09667350221135089 and you can read some of Emma's brilliant articles here: https://archermagazine.com.au/.../purity-culture-social.../ https://www.teenvogue.com/.../rosaries-fashion... https://outreach.faith/.../the-need-to-chronicle-and.../ these are my favourites of hers!

[omnivorouscinephilia]

Mouchette: A Broken Girl in an Abusive World

Here is a piece I wrote about Robert Bresson's coming of age film Mouchette, a big influence on the work of Celine Sciamma. Give it a read but be forewarned, it is a bleak one for a bleak film.

Robert Bresson sits at a particularly awkward position within French cinema studies categorically speaking. His most famous work is associated with the French New Wave, but he predates the movement by decades, existing within the French Cinematic Golden Age and working through the loathed “Papa’s Cinema” era of post-war cinema preceding the New Wave. He developed a deeply idiosyncratic aesthetic…

[isaacsapphire]

I'd like the Anne McCafferey/MZB joke explained. I think I get it, but I also have an incredible ability to miss the most obvious of points.

@kaziusklasterzoroaster

Sorry about the delay, but the joke is that McCaffrey has out and out eroticized rape in one Pern book (? At least one, I'm sure a Pern fan will pop out of the bushes with a detailed explanation so I don't need to go find a Pern wiki) and other books of hers have other Problematic sexual relationships, including a big age gap in the Pegasus series iirc, and other le problematique stuff, like her approach to gay people. Infodumps are not something I'd considered as part of the problematicness tho.

MZB was a big name fantasy author, important to Second Wave Feminism and New Age Feminist spiritually... And a child molester.

[scholarofgolb]

guys i have to say something. didn't like the barbie movie all that much.

[homoquartz]

this post is not gonna be well put together but i am having feelings

mean girls is trending right now because the musical movie just came out and i feel insane. idk why i do, it was stupid of me to think that most people Got It, no one ever gets it, it was always about the memes and the aesthetic.

the first mean girls movie was based on a nonfiction book called queen bees and wannabes. it interviewed and discussed the social hierarchy system in teen girl friendships. how they hold each other to these insane standards of heternormative femininity out of sheer terror that they won't meet those standards themselves. the way they leverage their relationships for some small degree of power in a world designed to strip them of it, even if it drags other girls down.

the "you can only wear your hair in a ponytail once a week and on wednesdays we wear pink" speech was not an original creation for the script. it's a QUOTE from a real teenage girl. those were REAL RULES.

then the musical came, and it was one step removed from the intended messaging of the film. OG mean girls was not perfect (and was extremely racist), but it said what needed said. the musical leaned on the comedy more, but still left a heartfelt undertone, and still critiqued the systems in place. of course no piece of media is going to be perfect, but it was about the conversation.

then this new movie comes out and it is washed over in the veneer of white hollywood feminism so thick you can't see anymore. the problematic aspects of the original movie are taken out to avoid "offending" when the offense was the point. it becomes toothless, it becomes some other thing entirely. they changed karen's line "i expect to run the world in shoes i cannot walk in" to "watch me as i run the world in shoes i cannot walk in." because choice feminism is in vogue, suddenly this character whose entire point is that she doesn't think deeply about WHY she does anything is suddenly hip to the fact that the world is against her.

i think of sokka losing his misogyny arc in the new atla. i think of the Heathers remake casting the bitchy, identical heathers as queer and hollywood-fat outcasts. as if the story, the meaning, the allegory is hidden in the sets and the jokes and the music. it's a whole new thing now, and it's a thing that means nothing in particular.

the plastics should not wear jeans. they should not have curves. their queerness should be suppressed, painful. their sexuality is not a slay, it's the only thing they think they have of value. the santa dance isn't sexy, it's shocking, it's mortifying - they are children.

they're not mean because "we are all mean." they are mean because they are girls in a world that brutalizes them and crushes them into a standardized shape. they are mean because the world is mean to them. they are mean because it gives them some power back. they are mean because it's the only weapon they have.

the landscape of femininity today has shifted to camera-ready makeup at the age of 10, stringent performative hygiene standards, and avoiding being caught on film while having a genuine emotion. the consumerism, the fatphobia, the racism, the classism, the homophobia remain. We could have had a conversation about that.

[asoapylife]

An amazing song

[attictrollsidenityquest]

Self Discovery after Catastrophe

There seems to a be a small trend for women of my generation to experience a major traumatic event (Divorce, death of a spouse, end of career etc.) that totally levels existing identities leading to a need for reanalyzing foundational beliefs. After it happened to me I noticed many creators on social media and others in my community were experiencing a similar pattern. TikTok seemed to be a good place to find them.

So in the past 2ish years my beliefs and identity conceptions have dramatically changed. I was a non practicing Christian that feared hell too much to reevaluate my religious indoctrination, a straight identifying CIS woman in a marriage to a CIS man for 15 years, and a centrist democrat. I was too invested in my own personal equilibrium for any of that to change much if at all, though I had questioned much of it in a casual way. The sudden, traumatic passing of my husband served as a catalyst for literally all of it to be reevaluated.

I do not believe the trauma actually caused much real change in these aspects of my self, rather it caused me to critically examine myself and discover a great many parts of my inner self. It also served to break down or destroy the false personas I had adopted in order to better suit the expectations of others or in response to social conditioning. For example, I was socially trained from an early age that I should be straight and the option to be anything else simply did not exist, so since I now realize I am attracted to many portions of the gender spectrum, it was natural for me in childhood to foster and pursue an attraction to men and ignore or misinterpret any other attractions I felt. The same pressures dictated how I viewed my gender presentation, since I now identify as genderfluid, my desire to express masculine traits interpreted as a tomboy phase that needed to be outgrown. ]

After the event, I first began seeking to understand my spiritual beliefs due to a need to form a solid belief of the afterlife, the nature of the soul, and souls purpose. This search for spiritual truth naturally was almost immediately focused into an exploration of the my true self, integrating my shadow, and a better understanding of my inner wants and needs. Deconstruction of my evangelical christian beliefs eventually led to what I would consider deconversion from traditional christianity. As a child of around 10 I had realized that some of the foundational beliefs that were taught to me as absolute truth didnt stand up to logic or moral standards as I saw them, leaving me in a kind of spiritual limbo where I acknowledge that they aren't truth but was unable to totally discard them due to the fear indoctrination of hell doctrine. Essentially, I pushed these logical holes and problems into a box and refused to think about them for over a decade, avoiding cognitive dissonance discomfort by just never allowing myself to examine anything beyond face value.

Once I began deconstruction of my remaining religious beliefs I naturally needed to renegotiate my views on a great many things in society and politics. I had already been on the left and this reconsideration moved me quite a but further in that direction. Reevaluating my feelings on other societal issues that are not closely tied to religion happened naturally at this point simply due to the process putting me into a more open minded state. I was more willing to honestly examine how things like capitalism vs socialism, the plight of marginalized groups in the US, US foreign policy, climate issues, and the extent of corporate corruption in government. It may have helped that I was never truly indoctrinated to dismiss such issues in the same way that others were around me.

Finally being able to sever those stubborn indoctrinated beliefs led to a domino effect of honest openminded reconsideration that has now resulted in me becoming a drastically different person. I also contend that the person I am now is much closer to the truth of my soul and committed to my principles. I feel that I am a much more morally guided person now. Many might see that as ironic I think.

The purpose of this blog is to record the process of refining my understanding of these formerly hidden or rejected parts of me, or my shadows if you will, and possibly connecting with others who might be able to relate. I am certain that this drastic renegotiation of self is not an uncommon occurrence and that there is much value in hearing about the journeys of others. While I have access to thus through the TikTok app it seems that may not always be the case and the Tumblr community has always been one that I enjoyed. I particularly wish to hear from parents who resonate with any or all of this stuff about ways they have navigated this with thier children. Ultimately, even if I am not able to connect with anyone who understands, the act of blogging about my experience has plenty of value for me as well.

SO......anyone else??? Mid-30s identity crisis anyone? feeling like the you from just a year ago is almost a total stranger? Learning about your own gender identity and sexuality well into adulthood? Learning what those different expressions and relationships might look like for you? Recovering from narcissistic abuse patters at the same time? Actively exploring different faith paths searching for the answers? or maybe generally feel like the past few years in society has rocked your metaphorical shit??

We should form a guild or something. :-)

[honeyriot]

"Women are bullied into thinking that a man’s word is correct, to deny their own reality, to doubt their own senses, to second - guess and doubt themselves continually, to erase their own knowledge, to disavow their own experiences. They are taught not to inhabit the lived reality of their own bodies; they are sexually, physically and emotionally abused out of their minds and bodies. The culture of male supremacy subjects women to continual ‘gaslighting’, to a perpetual crazy - making disavowal of their material and emotional realities. How perfect then that women are instructed to inhabit a Now which contains only the prescribed permissible feminine emotions of joy, bliss and happiness, which is all about ‘acceptance’ (also known as ‘obedience’) which is based on a radical historical amnesia.

New Age self - help advice can be read as instructions for women about how to adapt to their own exploitation, how to become more efficient and obedient wage slaves in an exploitative economy in which they face unemployment and under - employment, where they have very little control of their lives. It is advice for the female ‘precariat’, the majority of women who have long lost security at any level. Patriarchal capitalism requires female wage slaves who radiate approval for their own exploitation, who smile continuously, who rapidly move on from one exploitative situation to another without blaming anyone but themselves, who can appear to rise above the numerous socio-economic and sexual threats to a life made viciously precarious.

One must Smile or Die , as the title of Barbara Ehrenreich’s 2009 book on how breast cancer is framed as the outcome of women’s negative emotions, puts it. These feminine ‘feeling rules’ are so controlling that a frown or any sign of negative or revolutionary or dissident emotion can lead to social rejection. Many women are told to smile more at work. The seemingly light-hearted suggestion conceals a threat: ‘smile or we will persecute you’. Women must appear to be happy and positive, not because they are, but because to be otherwise is to risk political persecution."

[80sdragonbreath]

Moral Value Systems

It looks to me like much of the developed world is searching for a new moral value system.

The old moral value system (Medieval Christianity) has been denounced as archaic, rife with corruption and vice, and in need of replacing.

I'm not taking a position on whether or not I agree with this. It's more that I'm making a comment on how those people who have renounced Christianity are still in need of a moral value system.

What I see happening is that they are trying out various beliefs to see if they fit the unconscious requirements of a value system.

Feminism.

Intersectionality.

LGBTQ+.

Liberalism.

Islam.

New Age prophets.

Corporatism.

All of these have tenets of Christianity built into them. Feminism has Original Sin (men are the original sinners, women are fallen saints). Liberalism is based on a contorted compassion (skewed love thy neighbour). Islam is based on Christian values in a more rigid and controlling manner. New Age prophets talk of empowerment and self-sacrifice (truly Christ would have been proud). Corporatism takes on the judicial struggle between Christ and the lawmakers at the time who disagreed with Christ. No wonder that we feel oppressed by the corporate world!

None of these really fits fully.

They all leave us wanting more from our chosen value system, and perhaps that's because each one of them is incomplete.

If your moral value system requires that limited compassion be directed at any given segment of society, then it is incomplete.

Men don't get behind feminism in significant numbers because feminism directs almost no compassion towards men. Sure, I get it, you can make all the excuses you want as to WHY, but the fact remains that it ignores a large population. It's incomplete.

Liberalism gets a bad press from conservatives who need something that liberalism cannot provide - stability from the chaos of the ever-changing world.

...

Next time you find yourself discounting the opinion of someone who you disagree with, perhaps look at your own value system to see where it is incomplete. Why do your values exclude someone?

There's some magical self-discovery in that question.

[newvision]

someone shooooooooooot meeeeeeeeeeeeee my heart is silly

[depresseddepot]

I talked myself into a hole at work today because I explained an opinion poorly and then clarified poorly so I've decided my only chance at participating in society is to be stupid