#women’s center

[manicpixxiedreambitch]

The feminine urge I have to make a women’s center that is like a mix between a community center and a homeless shelter but it’s just for women (and children).

It would have:

1. A public library

2. Public lodging that actually gives people who are staying there some privacy

3. A cafeteria with both indoor and outdoor seating

4. A garden where we would grow food

5. A gym where women can go without fear of dealing with creepy men

6. Public classrooms/learning areas that women and children can sign up to take different classes/courses in

7. A large public space where we can host farmers markets for women who are staying at the center to work at so they can make some money

8. Plenty of children’s play areas and daycares

9. Nursery’s

10. Readily available support centers, support groups, and counseling/therapy

11. A thrift shop

12. A laundromat

13. A donation center

14. A quiet center/area

15. A bar/club so women can have a drink and have fun and not worry as much about their drink being messed with

16. A resource center where women can find resources to go back to college, get scholarships, find jobs, etc.

17. A spa and salon

18. A place to rent cars, bikes, scooters, etc.

19. A bus stop

20. A public computer lab

21. Lots of public phones

22. A donated supply store

23. An always fully stocked selection of pads/tampons/etc.

24. A rec center

25. A public pool

26. A walk-in clinic that takes any and all health insurance. Open 24/7

28. A job/volunteer work board

29. Is within five minutes from emergency services such as hospitals, fire departments, and police departments.

30. An outdoor area

31. A food bank

32. A rehab facility

33. A dance studio

34. Plenty of public seating

35. Hand painted murals by local artists.

If you want to add something to this idea, feel free! I love the idea of a women’s only safe space that helps women that are homeless, victims of abuse, single moms, struggling, etc. A place where women with nowhere else to go can stay, and be able to have their kids with them. A place where women who are struggling to make ends meet can come to get some food. A place where women who want to go out without having to deal with creepy/pushy guys can hang out.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Justin Horowitz at MMFA:

Project 2025 advisory board members have attacked or outright called for the end of no-fault divorce, the option to dissolve a marriage without having to prove wrongdoing by a partner. Research highlighted by CNN found “no-fault divorce correlates with a reduction in female suicides and a reduction in intimate partner violence,” including “an 8 to 16% decrease in female suicides after states enacted no-fault divorce laws.” Project 2025 is backed by a nearly-900 page policy book called Mandate for Leadership, which extensively outlines potential approaches to governance for the next Republican administration, including replacing federal employees with extremists and Trump loyalists and attacking LGBTQ rights, abortion, and contraception. The Heritage Foundation’s proposals have a track record of success — the first Trump administration implemented 64% of Mandate’s policy recommendations. Project 2025 is also supported by a coalition of over 100 conservative organizations, many of which have spent years promoting critiques of no-fault divorce as “destructive” for society — or even blaming it for enabling a “culture of death.” According to a Media Matters review, at least 22 Project 2025 advisory board members have made similar comments targeting, restricting, or eliminating no-fault divorce. Additionally, MAGA and far-right media figures have pushed for the removal of no-fault divorce laws across the country, and several local Republican parties in Texas, Nebraska, and Louisiana have called for the dissolution of no-fault divorce in some capacity.

Project 2025 partner organizations, including the American Family Association, Concerned Women for America, Family Research Council, and The Heritage Foundation, have called for significant restrictions or an outright ban on no-fault divorce.

[faelapis]

crazy seeing rightwing people calling the barbie movie anti-men considering i’m pretty sure the “i’m just ken” song did more good for men’s mental health than any number of their shitty little incel forums combined

[ingoodjesst]

one thing i really like about the apothecary diaries is how fluidly maomao moves between high- and low-class society, between the rear palace and the pleasure district, allowing us to see the parallels in the power dynamics. in both settings, we see women trying to make the most of their relative stations with whatever tools available to them, which are often shared. much of the politics of the series centers women and the ways they try to navigate the world through seduction, marriage, beauty, fashion, manipulation, etc, because these are the things they're valued for. their appearance, their social graces, their "purity", their marriageability, their ability to bear children, and beyond - these all lend political, economic, and social leverage to themselves and their families regardless of class.

the mystery angle in particular enables the story to closely examine what tools and motives are available to women in the apothecary diaries in a way that's contextualized and humanized. it's also how the series highlights said women operating with a keen awareness of society's expectations and systems. whether that's applying deathly white powder to maintain impractical beauty standards, faking illnesses to deter certain visitors, using parlor tricks to subtly punish callous men, or wearing ostentatious outfits to hide a certain truth, each mystery we encounter reveals more about what it means to navigate the world of the apothecary diaries as a woman in addition to revealing their cleverness (or lack thereof) in doing so.

maomao is no exception to the rule, often weighing similar questions of propriety and power before she acts - although she does engage from a unique position. she's a literate woman from the lower class with special circumstances surrounding her birth, versed as an apothecary, and favored by highly ranked members of the court. this, plus her marked lack of ambition beyond medicine, gives her a lot of mobility between and (relatively) unbiased insight into both the high- and low-ranked parts of society. in turn, we readers are given a fantastic protagonist to explore what i consider a core draw of the series: seeing how maomao chooses to move through the world, highly conscious of her own social positioning as well as that of all the other women around her

[clonerightsagenda]

"what if you had a mutual aid network that occasionally told interdimensional monsters to fuck off": Discworld witches as a concept

[trans-androgyne]

“All transandrobros talk about is trans women” — way to tell me all you’ve seen from us is the worst screenshots posted on transandrophobic trans women’s blogs complaining about us. If you would actually look through our tag or check out blogs you’d know the only oppressive and primary perpetrators of transandrophobia are perisex cis people; it just hurts more when it comes from other trans people.

We cannot talk about transandrophobia without mentioning trans women right now, we are simply not allowed it. Whenever we try, we are told wanting and using our own words to discuss our oppression means we inherently hate and want to silence trans women, that we are transmisogynist oppressors just trying to claim trans women oppress us. I would love for this not to be the case.

[garadinervi]

Assata Shakur, b. July 16, 1947 / 2024

(image: Margaret Randall (photograph), Assata Shakur, 1990. Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library, New York, NY. (via Black Women Radicals)

[moonlightsapphic]

Look, I just need you guys to understand how important queer coming-of-age forbidden romances on internationally accessible platforms like Netflix is, especially to youth in countries where homosexuality still hasn't been legally decriminalised or socially accepted.

That was a mouthful, so let me explain. You, a white American adult with a liberal family, may not relate to a fictional anxious teen Swedish prince grappling with strict familial and societal expectations versus his first love. You may not find anything special in a bunch of queer British teens discovering themselves and figuring out complex relationships that are honestly rather simplistic, in retrospect. It might be a little too trite for you. Like, just a little vanilla without any extra drama. Perhaps corny—cringe, even. Too wholesome.

But you know what that is to me, a desi queer young adult? It's representation, in an unlikely place. My country certainly isn't making movies or shows where I see my secret relationship between me and my girlfriend portrayed. I don't see that happening in the next couple of decades, either, sadly. But you know who’s telling our stories? Alice Oseman. Lisa Ambjörn, Lars Beckung and Camilla Holter. Through fictional storylines that might seem kind of boring to you, I am finally able watch my lived experiences play out on screen.

American media has done such a disservice to queer coming-of-age stories. I want to scream this from the rooftops. Y’all, I’m glad to see more out quirky queer side-characters—I can’t get enough of them—but why is it so rarely their story, in sharp focus, about how they found themselves? I want to know how they overcame internalised homophobia. When was the moment they knew? What is the cost they have to pay for being out? For not being out?

And no, I don’t want it to be dramatic. I don’t need to see violence or betrayals or victorious kisses in public, really. I’m happiest with the teenagers behaving like real teenagers. Innocent, vulnerable, nervous. I want it to be heartfelt, and excruciatingly slow, and authentic. I want to see the small wins and the subtle losses. The quiet mental toll of how much you have to give to a queer relationship—especially your first queer relationship—and how hard that can be to separate from your Identity itself.

Give me that "am I gay?" quiz and genuinely crying at 3:00 AM because you're in a rabbit hole about LGBTQ+ rights in a country where you actually don’t want to be gay and you don’t even know if you “count” anyway. Show me that moment where you're going back and forth from forbidding yourself from seeing the one person that sees and understands you and it's to protect your mental and physical well-being but it's driving you insane. Give me ALL THE YOUNG ADULT BI+ AWAKENINGS where one person strolls into your life and changes everything. No, it’s really not the same as most cis-heterosexual insta-love movies out there, even if it looks that way to you. It doesn’t even cut it close.

The happy ending, the acceptance is only what I can dream of, not what I can expect. The wholesomeness is actually radical to me.

No, we’re not past the need for basic star-crossed queer romances. For most countries in the world (including for many white American teenagers!), we need them as much as ever.

[obstinaterixatrix]

here are all the recs I posted for femslash february 2024...! each individual rec post can be found in my femslash feb recs tag. I actually thought I wasn't going to be able to do this because work got super chaotic, but in the end I couldn't bear to skip out on a leap year. that's a whole extra day for yuri.

last year I focused on official releases, so this year I wanted to focus on series that aren't technically officially available (plus a french-japanese film). fan translations are always a dicey for artists/translators/publishers/etc because obviously they need to get paid... but yuri's already such an overlooked genre that—in an official capacity—we end up with a couple drops from what's already a pretty small pool. I read hana to hoshi about a decade ago, and I keep submitting it to the seven seas survey for licensure! and yet!! no dice. and even when there are official releases, sometimes they just... disappear!? wish you were gone was licensed and then taken down, so for a while the only way to read it (if you missed out on buying it) was the fan translation. I think it's important to support artists and official releases, and also, to appreciate the thankless endeavor(/crime) of scanlation.

hope yall find something you like!

[uter-us]

there are way too many comments like this:

why must the burden of domestic labor always be w the woman

[haggishlyhagging]

Stop helping men. Stop going out of your way to share knowledge with them. Ignore them if you can do so safely. If that’s not possible, shrug your shoulders when you can get away with it. Act dumb. I don’t know how long that’s supposed to cook for. I don’t know what cleaner to use in the tub. I don’t know where Melvin filed the papers for that big project. I don’t know where Kevin went. I don’t know how to get stains out of a shirt. I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know.

Stop enabling them. Just stop it. Just stop. If they can weaponize incompetence, so can you.

[decolonize-the-everything]

Hi, would you be willing to boost info about Healing Our Homeland? It’s a Palestinian woman-run aid organization with a team on the ground in Gaza. I know the founder—she’s incredibly trustworthy and has dedicated her whole life to helping her people. They’ve also helped queer pro-Pal organizers in central FL by contributing to their bail fund. It’s a great org to donate to. Their IG is @/ healing.our.homeland

"It took just one day of war for Palestinian-American attorney Reem Elkhaldi, of Oviedo, to learn that her friend, a newlywed whom she watched get married last summer, was among those slain in Israel's retaliatory attack in Gaza. But she couldn't mourn. She was already working with the refugees employed by her Gaza-based nonprofit to get food and supplies into the region.

"You don't even get to process the grief before something else happens," Elkhaldi said, describing how she has felt watching the Palestinian death toll spike to more than 20,000 in just three months. "You don't have an option. You have to continue."

source

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A post shared by مركز وطن للمرأة والطفل (@healing.our.homeland)

And if you're in Los Angeles or will be in LA in September there's also this queer fundraiser event coming for Healing Our Homeland.

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[juney-blues]

i think at this point it's beyond clear to anyone with eyes that trans women are an underclass in queer and trans spaces. If you're denying that at this point i don't think you're genuinely ignorant, you're actively malicious.

[anghraine]

Disney-era Lucasfilm has given me essentially one film I adored (Rogue One, which also has my favorite SW ship and two of my favorite SW characters in Cassian and Jyn). It's also produced two more films that I very much liked (though only one of those still remains high in my estimation tbh), and a bunch of SW material that is not really the SW that plays in my mind, but at least fun and interesting to think about with the very glaring exception of TROS. I never had any investment in Legends, either, so for me the Disney era is not some huge loss.

I say all of this to emphasize that I'm not a kneejerk Disney SW hater. Nevertheless, I'm actually very disappointed with DLF's tendency to emphasize how ground-breaking and diverse and ~challenging some new SW media thing is without doing much to support the people involved or appearing to foresee that a fanbase prone to bigotry, nostalgia, and throwing screaming temper tantrums for decades on end is not going to react well. This is in no way an excuse for those fans, but DLF does not seem to ever predict how SW fans will respond despite their well-documented history of responding really badly to anything that remotely challenges them.

I love SW and I love my personal friends in SW fandom, but there have always been a significant number of vocally hateful and reactionary SW fans who manage to shape the discourse around basically everything in it. This is completely predictable. The fact that DLF seems completely unprepared for this reaction every time they give central roles behind and in front of the camera to women and/or POC, and also appears to do very little to support the actual RL marginalized people they hire when not just cravenly giving in to the worst elements of the SW fanbase (*cough*TROS*cough*) is incredibly frustrating.

Yeah, this is about DLF's poor handling of eminently predictable fan tantrums over The Acolyte which has just culminated in cancelling it after a bare eight episodes, but it's happened so many times at this point. The Acolyte was far from perfect but after how visibly unprepared DLF were for the raging bigotry directed at Kelly Marie Tran, John Boyega, and Daisy Ridley, or how weird people were about Solo, or the misogynoir surrounding the response to Reva in Obi-Wan Kenobi, or or or—they absolutely could and should have known that something like The Acolyte was going to need a lot of higher-level support to have any chance of success. At the very least there's no excuse for being surprised at this point.

And it feels a bit like it, and the actual people involved in it, were never really given a fair shot and the real higher investment is going to be in, like, Baby Yoda 4: Now With More Ewoks.

My friends and I just finished our first run of Jedi: Survivor, which we really, really liked, but there is definitely a tragic white boy protagonist propped up by POC and/or women (many now dead!) aspect to the whole thing that feels essential to its popularity. And it is frustrating and disappointing and all the more so because it's so eminently foreseeable at this point.

[uwmspeccoll]

It’s Feral Friday! 

Sometimes getting feral simply entails pondering the familiar from an unconsidered perspective and finding fascination in the everyday. This week we’ve selected a work from our Book Arts Collection that does just that. Sarah Peters’ The Moon Has No Weather is a book that posits the earth’s natural satellite as its own archivist—a celestial body with no atmosphere whose physical history is preserved on its windless, waterless surface.  

Inspired by an installation of Peters’ work at the Minnesota Center for Book Arts, The Moon Has No Weather was produced during her residency at the Women’s Studio Workshop and published as an artist’s book in 2013 in Rosendale, NY. The text was letterpress printed in Fox typeface (designed by Chad Kloepfer) on Magnani Arturo paper. The book also includes hand-marbled Hahnemühle Bugra, Thai Mulberry, and handmade abaca papers, as well as selected pages from scientific lab books and a 1984 Polish electronics manual.  

Wanna learn more about how this book was made? You can follow along with Peters’ production process here. Wanna learn more about the thought process behind it? Check out this 1885 text The Moon: considered as a planet, a world, and a satellite (also available for loan through the UWM library catalog).  

--Ana, Special Collections Graduate Intern

View more Feral Friday posts

View another Sarah Peters post

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View more Marbling posts

[electricpurrs]

tex red vs blue is insanely transgender but im the only one who sees it that way because im crazy in the head.

what if there was a past version of yourself. a woman, a wife, a mother, with long hair and a sweet smile. and she died long ago. and you are her. but you are not her. you're nothing like her, but the people who knew her desperately want you to be her, want to preserve the memory they have in their minds of the woman they loved through you. but you never asked to be her, never asked to carry the burden of someone else's expectation of who or what you should be. you have a new name. you prefer to go by this one. people remark on how weird it is that it's a guy's name. sometimes the people who loved [the past version of] you call you by your old name. they are not referring to you when they say it. you live in the shadows of someone who's long gone, and you're something different now, but you don't feel like you're ever allowed to define yourself on your own terms, to be your own person, to control your own life, because you exist solely through the memories people had of you. and the longer she has been gone for, the more desperately people try to get her back, the less you resemble her and the less you know who you are, or if you ever even got to be anything at all. what i mean is that transition could have saved him