Showing posts tagged women

Of Another Fashion: These three Japanese American women are just arriving to Lone Pine,...

ofanotherfashion:

These three Japanese American women are just arriving to Lone Pine, California (May 1942, photographer unknown). They’re walking to a bus that will take them to Manzanar internment camp. There is so much to love about this photograph: the saddle shoes and socks combination, the headscarf, the…

(Reblogged from ofanotherfashion)
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The murder of women, especially transgender women, has been on the rise following the June 28, 2009 coup. According to the International Gay & Lesbian Human Rights Commission, prior to the most recent murders, there have been 31 deaths of LGBTI people in Honduras in the last year and a half.
http://vivirlatino.com/2011/01/13/violence-targeting-transgender-women-in-honduras-continues.php (trigger warning: extreme violence and assault)
That’s right.

That’s right.

(Reblogged from coffeefortwo)

Do Lesbians Earn More Than Heterosexual Women?

Saw this in my Twitter feed, and people seem to be speculating about reasons why this alleged 6% gap exists…

Earlier this year I posted about the pay gap between men and women, which someone tried to prove to me Obama already (magically!) fixed, despite all of the data which shows that women still earn 80 cents to a man’s dollar. Interesting how difficult it is to prove that this is still an issue in our society, yet when it comes to proving that lesbians are somehow privileged over heterosexual women, NO DATA ARE NEEDED. At least a few people with brains managed to find this article, though, because amidst various guesses as to the cause of this gap (maternity leave, the expectation that hetero women will live off their husbands, etc.), someone pointed out that there are far too many conclusions being drawn from very little data. Thank you, person with a brain!

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Nobody told me I had a clitoris. Nobody told me I was capable of having orgasms. For five years I was given “sex education”. It mostly consisted of periods and condoms. It didn’t talk about consent. It didn’t talk about the actual mechanics of sex, about arousal and lubrication and oscillation. It didn’t tell me a single thing about relationships and it didn’t tell me I had a clitoris. I only know now because of the internet. Nobody entrusted with my care and education has ever told me that the female orgasm exists, or about the parts of my anatomy necessary for it. I didn’t find my clitoris until I was eighteen, after six years of active sexuality. That makes me angry.
Sex Education, or, What Boys Will Want From You (via azelie, sexisnottheenemy) (via resmc) (via anarchofeminist)
(Reblogged from anarchofeminist)

Veiling perspectives: Islamophobia vs. misogyny

I will never forget a visit I made to Ilana, an old friend who had become an Orthodox Jew in Jerusalem. When I saw her again, she had abandoned her jeans and T-shirts for long skirts and a head scarf. I could not get over it. Ilana has waist-length, wild and curly golden-blonde hair. “Can’t I even see your hair?” I asked, trying to find my old friend in there. “No,” she demurred quietly. “Only my husband,” she said with a calm sexual confidence, “ever gets to see my hair.”

When she showed me her little house in a settlement on a hill, and I saw the bedroom, draped in Middle Eastern embroideries, that she shares only with her husband—the kids are not allowed—the sexual intensity in the air was archaic, overwhelming. It was private. It was a feeling of erotic intensity deeper than any I have ever picked up between secular couples in the liberated West. And I thought: Our husbands see naked women all day—in Times Square if not on the Net. Her husband never even sees another woman’s hair.

She must feel, I thought, so hot.

From The Porn Myth

Why is it that any time someone wants to offer a “new” and “progressive” take on clothing customs—particularly the idea of veiling—it all relates back to sex? Instead of arguing that the veil is oppressive to women, we’re supposed to buy the idea that it’s liberating because it allows women to feel sexy? I say both camps of thought are a load of crap. Whether a woman veils or not she is doing so in order to please men or to be sexy. Whether a woman veils or not she is being sexually oppressed. Whether a woman veils or not it has nothing to do with her own beliefs, but instead with how the men in her culture might react to it. Here’s a ~radical~ idea: maybe we should learn to see women as people who are perfectly capable of making decisions regarding their dress without first considering whether the menz will approve.

A related post, from Facebook:

A non-Muslim guy asked a Muslim: Why do your girls cover up their body and hair? The Muslim guy smiled and took two sweets, he opened the first one and kept the other one closed. He threw them both on the dusty floor and asked the non-Muslim: If I asked you to take one of the sweets, which one you would choose? The non-Muslim replied: The covered one. Then the Muslim said that’s how we treat and see our women…

I recently saw this pop up in my news feed when a FB friend (see the kickass blog she writes for here) sparked an interesting discussion about the trend on her wall. As she pointed out, both of these popular takes on veiling are problematic in that one is rooted in the Islamophobic idea that all Muslim women are oppressed, while the other is an example of misogyny within the Muslim community. Those same ideas are at work in the article posted above, though it’s about a Jewish woman rather than a Muslim woman. Somehow the author seems to privilege these beliefs over the Western norm, arguing that porn has ruined men’s appreciation of the “real thing”—but I won’t even get into just how fucked up that point is. I’ll just leave it at this: she’s completely ignoring an entire culture of sexism toward women and hatred of our bodies that extends beyond porn and the way women in our society choose to dress. Also, I don’t know who the hell she interviewed, but some of us watch porn and have sex and make out with women because we enjoy it, not because we want to be “cool girls.”

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And thus racism against Arabs also manifests as sexism toward Jewish women. This was certainly a racist demonstration, but it was also a demonstration to maintain male dominance.
From a fascinating article on the intersection of race and gender in this recent protest — an unfortunate example of racist patriarchy in Israel: Jim Crow in Bat Yam
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Rape culture is telling girls and women to be careful about what you wear, how you wear it, how you carry yourself, where you walk, when you walk there, with whom you walk, whom you trust, what you do, where you do it, with whom you do it, what you drink, how much you drink, whether you make eye contact, if you’re alone, if you’re with a stranger, if you’re in a group, if you’re in a group of strangers, if it’s dark, if the area is unfamiliar, if you’re carrying something, how you carry it, what kind of shoes you’re wearing in case you have to run, what kind of purse you carry, what jewelry you wear, what time it is, what street it is, what environment it is, how many people you sleep with, what kind of people you sleep with, who your friends are, to whom you give your number, who’s around when the delivery guy comes, to get an apartment where you can see who’s at the door before they can see you, to check before you open the door to the delivery guy, to own a dog or a dog-sound-making machine, to get a roommate, to take self-defense, to always be alert always pay attention always watch your back always be aware of your surroundings and never let your guard down for a moment lest you be sexually assaulted and if you are and didn’t follow all the rules it’s your fault.
This is a damn good read. (via nikkiwiley)

(Source: asoftrevolt)

(Reblogged from jumbleofnotes)