— Judith Butler (via hojassecas)

pearlconcubine:

Fat mermaid is instant reblog!

(Source: itsgrrrlgerm)

angrybrownbaby:

I really get frustrated when people ask me, “Where did you get your strength to survive all that abuse and trauma?”

It’s not strength, it was an ultimatum. I either let it kill me, or I kill it every day of my life.

(Source: thedailylovejournal)

aloofshahbanou:

not interested in politics that don’t incorporate love

not interested in the anaesthetisation of politics

not interested in theory sans emotion 

let’s use our feelings to talk about power

let’s use our feelings to fuck up power

what the fuck are you waiting for

learn how to cry again

learn how to scream again

pour yourself into things

bleed onto things

fuck shit up

let’s get visceral

don’t let dead men with books hold your heart hostage

—

Sara Yasin, Is the Hijab Worth Fighting Over?

(via rcabbasi)

(Source: helenofdestroy)

30down30more:

Red lipstick makes me feel like I could cut a man’s heart out with a high heel shoe and fucking eat it.

You either know what I’m talking about or you don’t 

saucy-mermaid:

me

(Source: insanity7)

tinyfoldablelouis:

i’ve come to the conclusion that the only time i want men to open their mouths is if they’re giving me an orgasm

(Source: fuckyeahhistorycrushes)

whatispatriarchy:

Radical Sister: Comparison between abuser tactics and patriarchy

radsis:

I will compare common abuser tactics to what men do under patriarchy (the abuser tactics are from this article).

Isolation
“Abusers deprive their victims of social interaction with family members and friends. This is necessary to gain control over the victim.”
Women are made to believe that they don’t get along with other women, because they are “catty” and “bitches”. It’s almost a sign of prestige to not get along with other women, because it shows that you’re not “as bad as them”.
Such, women are isolated, thinking that they do not relate to each other and thus have fewer opportunities to realize how much they have in common, especially when it comes to their struggles as women.

Resistance
“The abuser manipulates his victim to become mentally and physically dependent upon him, which reduces the ability of the victim to resist his abuse.”
Any kind of resistance or complaint on the side of women is met with condescension or brushed off as irrelevant/crazy. You see that in the way feminists are treated and what they’re public image is like.
And women’s dependency on men is maintained by keeping women economically disadvantaged and by providing social narratives to women that suggest that the only purpose of their existence is to find a hubby/romantic relationship with a man.

Threats
“Abusers use threats to cultivate anxiety, despair and the ability to resist. Most often they threaten children, family members or friends with harm if the victim doesn’t comply with his demands.”
There are multiple ways in which men use threats as a weapon of patriarchic abuse. On the one side, you’ll find threats against women who speak up about feminist issues. There are both “benevolent” threats such as derailing (“if you don’t do X and Y, I will not accept your feminism”) and those which are openly violent and hateful.
Then there’s, of course, the constant threat of rape, harassment and male violence.

Indulgences
“Occasionally the abuser will comply with the wishes of the victim in order to provide motivation to comply with his every demand.”
This is what they do by using chivalry. The problem is not only that it implies that women are helpless, but also the fact that by doing needless acts of chivalry, they put women “in debt”.
It creates the illusion that men have done so many nice things without even having been asked, but that’s exactly the reason why they’re so manipulative.
Acts of chivalry are absolutely useless to women, but they can be used as a justification to put women under pressure to do things for men, such as having sex with them. Even if the latter is not the goal, the tactic makes women look like they’re ungrateful and just bad people, which is typical for how abusers want to make their victims feel. Self-professed “nice guys” do that all the time.

Omnipotence
“The abuser suggests to the victim that it is futile to resist his demands.”
Men do that by maintaining the impression that they are superior to women or that the gender roles are just the way they are, a biological fact, and that resistance to this “natural order” is stupid, something that only those who are “irrational” would suggest. They like to say that women are “happily submissive by nature” and that they’re “confused by feminist ideas” for rejecting this role.

Degradation
“Abusers degrade their victims in order to damage their self esteem and make them think they are unable to face life on their own. Self esteem can be damaged beyond repair and the victim is often reduced to animal level concerns.”
Women are degraded all the time. Their self-esteem is damaged by creating a social setting in which they feel deeply uncomfortable with their body, being constantly criticized for how they look and even those who are very close to the patriarchally enforced ideal will feel insecure about their appearance.
Other than that, women’s personalities are degraded. No matter how unique a woman is, she will be looked at through the prism of misogynistic stereotypes and if she happens to be imperfect like a normal human being, the negative aspects will be blown out of proportion or reduced to the misogynistic, male idea of how “women” are. There’s a whole arsenal of presuppositions about women that can be used in order to defame them and since they’re so ingrained in our culture, they’re often taken as “fact”, because they’re basically confirming already existing bias.

Domination
“Abusers are extremely dominating to the point that they want to control everything that the victim does. If they don’t get their way, they act like spoiled children. On top of that, they use threats to get what they want. If you allow your abuser to dominate you, you will lose your self respect.”
The whole code of masculinity is about domination. And as stated above, accepting your female gender role (= femininity) will make you lose your self-respect, because it’s created to systematically crush your self-esteem to the point of total self-abandonment.
Women are not allowed to exist for themselves. If women indicate that they don’t care about what men think of them by not accepting their gender role, they get ridiculed and threatened.

Verbal Assault
“The abuser tends to verbally assault their victim by calling names, degrading, screaming, threatening, criticizing, berating and humiliating. They will center their victim out in front of family and friends by taking small personality flaws and embellishing them to the extreme. They make snide remarks and use sarcasm to erode the victim’s sense of self-worth and self confidence. Making the victim look bad in front of others is an attempt to isolate the victim and keep them at their mercy. Then, the abuse worsens.”
There are many gendered slurs for women and men use them all the time. They’re even used for whatever men dislike and by taking them out of their context, they get even more general presence, being taken for granted. So women get passively conditioned to think of what they probably also dislike in the same, feminized matter, therefore projecting it back on themselves, systematically creating self-hatred.
You will frequently find women using these gendered slurs against each other, not just in an appropriated, but intentionally harmful way. And women will work hard to not being thought of as what these slurs suggest, because they want to reassure themselves that they’re not what they probably already think about themselves deep on the inside.
And there’s literally no escape of this constant verbal assault, because they’re not only present in media, but also do get thrown at women on the streets by male strangers.

Gaslighting
“Gaslighting is a slang term from the 1950’s but is the perfect word to describe one tactic of the abuser. The dictionary definition of gaslighting is to drive someone crazy. This is used to keep the abuser’s victim under control. The abuser will swear that events never occurred and that certain things were never said. The victim knows better, but over time will begin to question their sanity. Be alert to gaslighting tactics that can beat you down and make you think you are going insane.”
Gaslighting takes place when women are told that the sexual abuse they’ve experienced wasn’t actually abuse, but something they’ve either made up, deliberately lied about or have gotten wrong. It’s a constant pattern in discussions about rape, harassment and abuse, with many women having experienced similar things being said to them.
There are even organizations like the False Rape Society trying to “prove” that women are lying about their rape and that there’s a “false rape epidemic”.

Blackmail
“The abuser uses emotional blackmail to get what they want by pushing your buttons. He plays on his victim’s sense of compassion, fears, sense of guilt and values in order to get his own way. He may refuse to talk to his victim or threaten to end the relationship or withdraw financial support if the victim is dependent on him for basic living necessities. Emotional blackmail is the act of working on the victim’s emotions so the abuser can get what he wants.”
When talking about feminist issues, men will start complaining about their alleged problems. Many a woman will fall for this, feeling pity for all the bad things men supposedly endure. The feminine role teaches us to always be considerate when it comes to other people’s, especially men’s feelings. Men constantly ridicule us for how we speak, but there’s truth to the stereotype that women talk indirectly. We always try to be polite, not sounding too demanding when it comes to asking for something we want. Instead of being grateful, men make fun of women for being tactful and considerate.
Whenever there’s something that displeases them, e.g. about feminism, they refuse to support our cause. It suddenly becomes completely irrelevant to them, which only further proves that they never did care about those issues in the first place.

Abusive Expectations
“This happens when the abuser makes unreasonable demands on their victim. They may expect their partner to reject everything in their life to tend to the abuser’s needs. Included can be frequent sex, forcing the victim to perform sexual acts that are against their will, demanding all of the victim’s attention or demanding that the victim spend all free time with the abuser. No matter how hard the victim tries to please the abuser, he will always demand more.”
No matter how hard women try to fulfill their feminine role, they will always get shit on. The most p-compliant woman will be treated like a worthless piece of garbage, because that’s the definition of her role.

Blaming
“Abusers tend to shift responsibility for their actions to their victims and become angry because the person caused them to behave inappropriately. The abuser might say, “If you hadn’t talked back to me, I wouldn’t have had to hit you.” Don’t fall for it. The abuser did the hitting and no matter what you did, you are not to blame. He is blaming you for his shortcomings and do not believe that you are the one to blame for even one second.”
This applies to how women are victim-blamed for being harassed or raped. There are many such reversals, but this one is all too common. Women are told that they “asked for it” and that the harassment was, in fact, not initiated by the harasser, but the woman’s “disrespect for herself”.

Making Excuses
“Abusers seldom take responsibility for their actions, but try to justify their behavior by making excuses. They may blame the abuse on a difficult childhood or a hard day at the office. Their mind-set tells them that they are never to blame for any negative behavior.”
Men make such excuses all the time and they have a huge support system they can rely on. On the large scale, they make excuses for the rape epidemic caused by them. They will emphasize that “not all men are like that”, implying that those are just a few rotten apples, thus excusing the collective behavior of men and obscuring the fact that it is a systemic act of violence against women. This pretty much goes for any misogynistic behavior. They rarely make efforts to try to examine their own.

Fantasies of Success
“Abusers believe that they would be famous and rich if the victim and other people weren’t holding them back. Because he believes his failure in life is due to others, he feels he is justified in retaliating in any way he can, including physical and emotional abuse. He belittles, berates and puts others down, including the victim, to make himself feel more powerful.”
This sums up the MRA. Apart from the MRA, there are many like-minded men who will blame women for any unrelated failure of theirs.

Assuming
“An abuser’s thought patterns lead them to believe that they know what others, including their victim, is feeling and thinking. They use this warped logic to blame these people for their behavior. For instance, an abuser might say, “I knew you’d be angry about that, so I went for a few drinks after work to enjoy myself. Why should I come home to listen to you nag?””
This is a male all-time-favourite, the “what women want” or “what women think”. Men like to project their own misogynistic assumptions about women on them, acting as if these projections were their actual thoughts and motives. They will, for example, say that “the bitch is doing this for attention” or “when women say no, they actually mean yes”. Men act like women are some sort of alien species which cannot be understood properly. But instead of asking women, they look for male “translators” who tell them “how women really think”, because all they actually want is to be reassured that they don’t have to take a woman’s word seriously.

Dependence
“Believe it or not, abusers are emotionally dependent on their victim. This causes an inner rage that encourages the abuser to lash out. Because he is so dependent, he takes control of his victim’s life. This is the way they deny their weaknesses and make themselves feel powerful.”
Despite of their woman-hating ways, men cling to women. They live off of our energy and need our submission in order to feel powerful. That’s the reason why there’s this ongoing “wife recruitment program” by patriarchy. You will also see how MRAs constantly whine about the “decline of marriage” and the “rise of divorce”, although they insist on the fact that women “ruin” them.

Symptoms of Emotional Dependency
“Symptoms of emotional dependency include, but are not limited to, excessive jealousy, jealous rages and possessive actions that are usually sexual in nature. Abusers spend an excessive amount of time monitoring the action and movements of their victims. Often, abusers have no support network and lack those supportive roles that others depend upon. Another sign of emotional dependency is the extreme affect the abuser suffers if his victim leaves. He will go to any lengths to get the victim to return.”
Men do want to control women’s sexuality in every way possible. They openly express their dislike of women who have multiple sex partners, creating a social climate where women they consider “relationship material” (= private property) have to be sexually available to them only and anything else making the woman deserving of mistreatment to a) have some women who are “wifeys” and b) maintain a class of women they can abuse more freely, i.e. in the most degrading ways imaginable (the “whore”).
Lesbians do not exist to them, because all women have to be potentially available to them at any time. A man who has been rejected by a woman will badmouth her for not choosing him, often referring to women collectively as if they were doing something absolutely unacceptable.
The “leaving victim” also reminds me of how men go to any lengths to make women compliant to their gender role. Any sidestep will be met with aggression and contempt for the woman to bully her into compliance.

Withdrawal
“Abusers have a tendency to put up emotional walls and never give out personal information freely. He keeps his real feelings to himself and is not interested in what others think of him.”
Not openly expressing emotions (other than anger and hatred) is written in the code of masculinity. Women, on the other side, are encouraged to open up, which makes them more vulnerable to male abuser tactics. If women act more emotionally, they can be told that they’re crazy or irrational. The code of masculinity makes sure that men don’t become vulnerable to manipulation.

Minimizing Actions
“Abusers always minimize their actions and refuse to accept their mistakes. An abuser might tell his spouse who has a black eye, “I didn’t hit you hard enough to give you a black eye.””
Look at how men constantly trivialize the systemic workings of patriarchy. They always reduce them to single, unrelated incidents.

Ownership and Possession
“Abusers are extremely possessive and believe that they should get everything they want. They also feel they can do whatever they wish with their possession and abusers see their partner or spouse as something they own. They feel they are justified in hurting their victim by taking their possessions, attacking them mentally and physically and controlling all aspects of their life.”
Men act like women are mere objects which can be acquired. I mean, they literally purchase women and don’t see anything wrong with that. They feel entitled to porn with zero concern for the women in the porn industry. And they feel entitled to women’s bodies in general, whether it is sex that they expect or demanding women to look like they want them to.

(Source: amandadancewithgirls)