fabulousworkinprogress:

linoresearch:

You know what I love most about Rey? She is fucking brutal. 

I mean look at this aggression… I’m an older fan and I NEVER saw women presented like this when I was growing up, and I am so happy for all the little kids out there who get to have this

And in tfa it was this bit that got me shook

She just stalks towards him like the badass she is

Look at that face. I f**cking love it. I am so happy (and Daisy just kills it, what a star).

THIIIIIIIS.

I fucking love that she is ANGRY, that she is not PRETTY, that she is not THERE FOR THE MALE GAZE. Look at her shoulders, look at her arms, she is not twirling something or looking bitchface calm or sauntering sexily. 

she is there to slash someone in the face and chew bubblegum and she is all the fuck out of bubblegum

royalturkeyz:

fandomsandfeminism:

fandomsandfeminism:

Look, I dont know a lot about saints and Catholicism, but I know St. Agatha is always depicted with her breasts on a plate, and that’s sure something

Just a few more. This is a big trend. 

Things I learned from the comments

  • She’s a patron saint of rape and abuse victims
  • She took a vow a chastity
  • A low born guy demanded her to be with him and she turned him down
  • For this she was imprisoned and tortured. This is how she lost her breasts (details not required)
  • She was repeatedly raped.
  • The Catholic Church regards her as a virgin for her peity despite the rape. (No matter your views on virginity this is a pretty interesting statement)
  • She was sentenced to death to burn at the stake but was saved by an earthquake
  • In her holiday people make titty cupcakes

I didn’t know she existed and now I think she’s a pretty rad woman. I would hesitate calling her a protofeminist as some often do with amazing women in history but she is pretty cool. Also she’s still very relevant today as women are still treated the way she was.

violent-darts:

yuenchien:

erinbowbooks:

thechanelmuse:

Hazel Scott playing two pianos at the same damn time with ease

Hazel Scott was a musical sorcerer and a civil rights hero.   She:

  •  was admitted to Julliard at 8.  
  • was performing in top venues by 16.  
  • pioneered “swinging the classics” and made the equivalent of a million dollars a year doing it.  
  • was the first person of color to have their own national TV show.  
  • went to Hollywood but refused to be cast as a “singing maid.”  Demanded and got control over her casting, her wardrobe, and how footage featuring her was cut.  
  • refused to perform in segregated venues and led charges for integration in several northern cities, notably Spokane.  

She was brought down by the House Committee on Unamerican Activities, and has been largely forgotten.  But she was a sorcerer, and a hero.  

@theladyragnell

Let’s un-forget her.

joestrummen:

“Sometimes you hear that statistic about how if Barbie were a real person, she would fit the weight criteria for anorexia and her boobs would be so disproportionately big that she wouldn’t be able to walk upright. There’s a less fantastical version of that idea, though, that a generation of girls like me saw play out in Britney Spears: If you did everything you were supposed to do to become the Perfect Girl — did just enough sit-ups and cooed just so and showed just enough skin and kept up the lie that you were born only to make someone else happy — it all just might send you completely over the edge. I hear a strain of this idea in the macabre of Lana Del Rey’s music, which blurs the borders between life and death, between the American dream and a nightmare: “Will you still love me when I’m no longer young and beautiful?” But Britney’s music explores this deep a darkness in only its subtext; her sad songs like “Lucky” and “Everytime” strike me as so intensely devastating because even in their darkest moments, they still put on the façade of pretty, like the girl who early on learned that trick of how to blot away tears without smudging even a smidge of mascara. Britney’s meltdown happened when I was in college, learning to hate the game more than the player, finally able to see larger and more systemic threats to my liberation than the feigned innocence of a pretty girl from Kentwood, Louisiana. Still, something about her breakdown felt too traumatic to fully process it at the time. Only when she managed to miraculously come out the other side of it could I acknowledge the terrible pain she must have been going through, could I admit that I didn’t know how Britney Spears didn’t die of it, of being a girl.”

Lindsay Zoladz, Leaving Britney Alone (via wizzard890)

“Listening to all of Britney Spears’s albums in chronological order is like looking at an Animorphs cover of a teen girl gradually turning not into a woman, but a cyborg.”

STRONGLY RECOMMEND READING THIS WHOLE PIECE

(via professorspork)

explaining why menstrual products should be free to people who don’t get it.

seriesofnonsequiturs:

takealookatyourlife:

toilet paper and soap are free in public bathrooms. workplaces and schools supply toilet paper and soap for sanitary reasons. you don’t technically need toilet paper or soap to survive. but we all know it would be awful if people didn’t have it. toilet paper and soap are relatively cheap because corporations drive prices. everyone expects that they will have access to toilet paper and soap for free.

menstrual products are not free in public bathrooms. schools and workplaces do not supply these items but require that they are used. you don’t technically need them to survive. but we all know it would be awful if people didn’t have it. individuals must, therefore, buy their own at an exorbitant price. half the population must purchase these hygiene products in order to be allowed at their school or workplace. half the population is not charged to be allowed into their workplace. 

And they should be offered in all bathrooms as well

seriesofnonsequiturs:

drferox:

tkdancer:

uteropolis:

maxofs2d:

darksnowfalling:

warpedellipsis:

quasi-normalcy:

meariver:

huntokar:

quasi-normalcy:

No, I’m serious, if women all got together and went into electrical engineering or automotive repair en masse, then ten years later people would be talking about how it was a “soft field” and it would pay proportionately less than other fields.

Likewise, if men moved en masse to bedeck themselves in sparkles and make-up, then suddenly you’d get a bunch of editorials talking about how classy they look.

None of these things are inherently masculine or feminine; none of these things inherently elevate you or drag you down. But whatever women are seen to do is automatically seen as being inherently more frivolous than anything men do. And shaming women for not pigeonholing themselves into a narrow range of acceptable “masculine” behaviours is just going to result in the goalposts getting moved once again.

This is literally what happened to basically every field women have entered. The opposite happens when men enter. Computers used to be a “woman thing” until the guys who did it got really mad about how badly their job was viewed and realized they could fix it by forcing out women.

Also happened/ is happening with the fields of biology and psychology….

I honestly wonder how much of the backlash against public education in the last generation has been due to teaching becoming a woman-dominated profession.

Fashion used to be a men’s thing. Then women got involved in the late 17/1800’s, so men went the other way because it came to be seen as “frivolous” and “anti-intellectual” to care about how you looked. Add in the homophobia that arose around that time, bam, staid bland dress. Ditto leggings/tights, that are now called attention-whoring when on men they were required to show you cared about your figure and had the money to pay for such a fitted item. 

People want to say misogyny doesn’t exist, that male privilege doesn’t exist. Look beyond “living memory” and you’ll find that’s what drives the “inexplicable reversals” society seems to make on many things. Hell, just look beyond your own society, and you’ll find out that what’s considered “for men” elsewhere is held in high esteem while here it’s scoffed at purely because it’s “for women”: 

  • Skinny jeans are the height of masculinity in several east Asian societies, rather than being seen as “gay” in the USA because of their association with femininity. 
  • Medical fields in Russia are valued like kindergarten teachers are here, because it’s women who are the doctors instead of men.
  • Love and romance are highly valued in eastern countries, because men are interested in it too—of course they would be, surely you want to share your life with someone? Here, it’s strictly a women’s subject.

The field of anthropology as a whole illustrates this.

Significantly higher proportions of females compared to males are currently entering the fields of archaeology and biological anthropology, and as this occurs, the prestige, funding, acceptance as valid kinds of science, etc, are fading quickly.

This has already occurred with linguistic anthropology and cultural anthropology. Cultural anthropology in particular went VERY quickly from being seen as a manly, scientific discipline (e.g., Franz Boas, Bronisław Malinowski) to being seen as a touchy-feely female thing.

Let’s examine a traditionally male-dominated role that is very well-respected, and well-paid, in many parts of the world — that of a doctor. In the UK, it is listed as one of the top ten lucrative careers, and the average annual income of a family doctor in the US is well into six figures. It also confers on you significant social status, and a common stereotype in Asian communities is of parents encouraging their children to become doctors.

One of my lecturers at university once presented us with this thought exercise: why are doctors so highly paid, and so well-respected? Our answers were predictable. Because they save lives, their skills are extremely important, and it takes years and years of education to become one. All sound, logical reasons. But these traits that doctors possess are universal. So why is it, she asked, that doctors in Russia are so lowly paid? Making less than £7,500 a year, it is one of the lowest paid professions in Russia, and poorly respected at that. Why is this?

The answer is crushingly, breathtakingly simple. In Russia, the majority of doctors are women. Here’s a quote from Carol Schmidt, a geriatric nurse practitioner who toured medical facilities in Moscow: “Their status and pay are more like our blue-collar workers, even though they require about the same amount of training as the American doctor… medical practice is stereotyped as a caring vocation ‘naturally suited‘ to women, [which puts it at] a second-class level in the Soviet psyche.”

What this illustrates perfectly is this — women are not devalued in the job market because women’s work is seen to have little value. It is the other way round. Women’s work is devalued in the job market because women are seen to have little value. This means that anything a woman does, be it childcare, teaching, or doctoring, or rocket science, will be seen to be of less value simply because it is done mainly by women. It isn’t that women choose jobs that are in lower-paid industries, it is that any industry that women dominate automatically becomes less respected and less well-paid.

http://cratesandribbons.com/2013/12/13/patriarchys-magic-trick-how-anything-perceived-as-womens-work-immediately-sheds-its-value/

“Men may cook or weave, or dress dolls or hunt humming birds, but if such activities are appropriate occupations of men, then the whole society, men and women alike, votes them as important. When the same occupations are performed by women, they are regarded as less important (Mead, 1949, p. 159).”
https://www.questia.com/library/journal/1G1-19279160/in-a-complex-voice-the-contradictions-of-male-elementary

“The wage gap is a myth”

The entire field of veterinary medicine says hello.

“A striking example is to be found in the field of recreation — working in parks or leading camps — which went from predominantly male to female from 1950 to 2000. Median hourly wages in this field declined 57 percentage points, accounting for the change in the value of the dollar, according to Professor Levanon. The job of ticket agent also went from mainly male to female during this period, and wages dropped 43 percentage points.”

https://www.themarysue.com/women-work-pay-drops

nyshadidntbreakit:

destinyrush:

A hero without a cape

Her name is Theresa Kachindamoto, and she is a senior chief – political leader of a region with a population of about 900,000 people.

She didn’t run for election; she was appointed, without her knowledge, while she was living and working in a completely different part of the country. She just received a call one day telling her to come back to her childhood home, because she was in charge now.

So she did; and when she arrived, she discovered widespread sexual abuse of children. She browbeat 50 uncooperative local leaders into accepting her decision to annul all the marriages. She then fired four of them when they continued to allow children to be married off in their areas. She still faces widespread opposition from parents who consider it their right to sexually abuse their daughters if they want to; but Kachindamoto very evidently does not give a fuck, and is continuing to use political and legal means to protect children in the region.

She’s not just an anonymous do-gooder; she’s an effective political leader despite incredibly difficult circumstances. Theresa Kachindamoto.