tera-nyx

[tera-nyx]

Life has a different color without you

The warm glow soaked into the greedy world

I expected a dismal gray

Instead it is sharp and dim

And I cut myself on it by accident

Knowing that time bleeds out of me

And every moment slips from my grasp.

What others would call your ghost follows me,

but memories are not ghosts. And you are gone now.

What you left behind sits on a shelf;

Your absence twists my heart.

[tera-nyx]

If I turn the loss into art,

will it release me?

[tera-nyx]

[tera-nyx]

Dear Andrea,

I hope all your hopes and dreams came true. I'm not sure how much of me you remember, I sure have forgotten too much, but I remembered today that I admired you. You always had a spark in your eyes. I hope everyone who you grew up around fostered that. I hope you still read voraciously and ride horses. I hope the people around you lifted you up as you did them, and that you told the men off for talking over you without missing a beat. I hope you never doubted your worth or faltered in how you demanded respect. I hope you were allowed to cry and be human without being belittled. I hope you have pride in who you were and kept that spark and kindness and pride placed precisely within your heart. I hope you're healthy. I hope you enjoy peace of mind every dawn and dusk over your favorite beverage. I hope you smile and laugh still: often and without restraint.

I don't know why it was you in my mind today. I don't know you at all anymore, we certainly arent kids now. I hope you grew up to do your best to protect your rights and others' despite what neighbors say in a place full of hate.

- An Admirer from the Past

[tera-nyx]

[tera-nyx]

𝔊𝔬𝔱𝔥𝔦𝔠 𝔄𝔢𝔰𝔱𝔥𝔢𝔱𝔦𝔠 (x)

[tera-nyx]

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Ouroboros Pie Crust by Danielle Baskin

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writing advice: never italicize words to show emphasis! if you’re writing well then the reader will know and you don’t need them!

me: oh really??? listen up, pal, you can just try an pull italics from my cold, dead fingers

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In general, understanding radical feminism for what it is and why it appeals to many people requires an understanding that the greatest strength of radical feminism as a tool for understanding misogyny and sexism is also its greatest faultline.

See, radical feminism is a second wave position in feminist thought and development. It is a reaction to what we sometimes call first wave feminism, which was so focused on specific legal freedoms that we usually refer to the activists who focused on it as suffragists or suffragettes: that is, first wave feminists were thinking about explicit laws that said "women cannot do this thing, and if they try, the law of the state and of other powerful institutions will forcibly evict them." Women of that era were very focused on explicit and obvious barriers to full participation in public and civil life, because there were a lot of them: you could not vote, you could not access education, you could not be trained in certain crucial professions, you could not earn your own pay even if you decided you wanted to.

And so these activists began to try to dig into the implicit beliefs and cultural structures that served to trap women asking designated paths, even if they did wish to do other things. Why is it that woman are pressured not to go into certain high prestige fields, even if in theory no one is stopping them? How do our ideas and attitudes about sex and gender create assumptions and patterns and constrictions that leave us trapped even when the explicit chains have been removed?

The second wave of feminism, then, is what happened when the daughters of this first wave--and their opponents--looked around and said to themselves: hold on, the explicit barriers are gone. The laws that treat us as a different and lesser class of people are gone. Why doesn't it feel like I have full access to freedoms that I see the men around me enjoying? What are the unspoken laws that keep us here?

And so these activists focused on the implicit ideas that create behavioral outcomes. They looked inward to interrogate both their own beliefs and the beliefs of other people around them. They discovered many things that were real and illuminated barriers that people hadn't thought of, especially around sexual violence and rape and trauma and harassment. In particular, these activists became known for exercises like consciousness-raising, in which everyday people were encouraged to sit down and consider the ways in which their own unspoken, implicit beliefs contributed to general societal problems of sexism and misogyny.

Introspection can be so intoxicating, though, because it allows us to place ourselves at the center of the social problems that we see around us. We are all naturally a little self centered, after all. When your work is so directly tied to digging up implications and resonances from unspoken beliefs, you start getting really into drawing lines of connection from your own point of interest to other related marginalizations--and for this generation of thinkers, often people who only experienced one major marginalization got the center of attention. Compounding this is the reality that it is easier to see the impacts of marginalization when they apply directly to you, and things that apply to you seem more important.

So some of this generation of thinkers thought to themselves, hang on. Hang on. Misogyny has its fingers in so many pies that we don't see, and I can see misogyny echoing through so many other marginalizations too--homophobia especially but also racism and ableism and classism. These echoes must be because there is one central oppression that underlies all the others, and while theoretically you could have a society with no class distinctions and no race distinctions, just biologically you always have sex and gender distinctions, right? So: perhaps misogyny is the original sin of culture, the well from which all the rest of it springs. Perhaps there's really no differences in gender, only in sex, and perhaps we can reach equality if only we can figure out how to eradicate gender entirely. Perhaps misogyny is the root from which all other oppressions stem: and this group of feminists called themselves radical feminists, after that root, because radix is the Latin word for root.

Very few of this generation of thinkers, you may be unsurprised to note, actually lived under a second marginalization that was not directly entangled with sexism and gender; queerness was pretty common, but queerness is also so very hard to distinguish from gender politics anyway. It's perhaps not surprising that at this time several Black women who were interested in gender oppression became openly annoyed and frustrated by the notion that if only we can fix gender oppression, we can fix everything: they understood racism much more clearly, they were used to considering and interrogating racism and thinking deeply about it, and they thought that collapsing racism into just a facet of misogyny cheapened both things and failed to let you understand either very well. These thinkers said: no, actually, there isn't one original sin that corrupted us all, there are a host of sins humans are prone to, and hey, isn't the concept of original sin just a little bit Christianocentric anyway?

And from these thinkers we see intersectional feminists appearing. These are the third wave, and from this point much mainstream feminist throughout moves to asking: okay, so how do the intersections of misogyny make it appear differently in all these different marginalized contexts? What does misogyny do in response to racial oppression? What does it look like against this background, or that one?

But the radical feminists remained, because seeing your own problems and your own thought processes as the center of the entire world and the answer to the entire problem of justice is very seductive indeed. And they felt left behind and got quite angry about this, and cast about for ways to feel relevant without having to decenter themselves. And, well, trans women were right there, and they made such a convenient target...

That's what a TERF is.

Now you know.

[tera-nyx]

via

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i understand the feeling of hopelessness right now, but please dont give up. we'll survive this together, like we always do.

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so. bad news. we have to keep going tomorrow. good news is that I’ll keep going with you

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Tapping the sign.

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I know there’s an existing post somewhere, but here’s the list of OBGYNs in the USA and other countries that will perform tubal ligation (aka female sterilization) without arguing with you