The Anarcho-Feminist

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“It’s important to clarify that sex education that teaches about pleasure doesn’t have to teach about technique (though elective college-level sex education that does this is great). Letting teens know that women usually achieve orgasm through the rubbing of the clitoris, whether fingers, mouth, object, or penis, isn’t the same as screening an instructional video on giving good cunnilingus. It’s not the same as writing down the names of sex-toy shops on the blackboard, or handing out diagrams of cool and exciting coital positions. And teaching that lubricants reduce pain and increase safety and pleasure during many kinds of sex should be thought of not as performance advice, but on par with vital lessons about condom use.

Real sex education is not the same as porn education. Instead, it’s about teaching that pleasure is an important part of any sexual relationship. It’s about teaching that there is nothing wrong with wanting to feel sexual pleasure and seeking it out, so long as it is done safely and responsibly. It’s about teaching comfort with one’s body and a lack of shame over desires, and there is more to sex for all people than sticking penises into vaginas. Real sex education teaches how to go about making intelligent , safe choices, rather than just stating the choices available. I believe there is a big difference. And I believe that teaching teens to make smart choices about sex must involve teaching them that having sex, partnered or alone, can be a smart choice”.

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Real Sex Education by Cara Kulwicki in Yes Means Yes

(via fem-blog)

Reblogged from ॐ

Tags: quote sex ed pleasure sex education information

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Males as a group have and do benefit the most from patriarchy, from the assumption that they are superior to females and should rule over us. But those benefits have come with a price. In return for all the goodies men receive from patriarchy, they are required to dominate women, to exploit and oppress us, using violence if they must to keep patriarchy intact. Most men find it difficult to be patriarchs. Most men are disturbed by hatred and fear of women, by male violence against women, even the men who perpetuate this violence. But they fear letting go of the benefits. They are not certain what will happen to the world they know most intimately if patriarchy changes. So they find it easier to passively support male domination even when they know in their minds and hearts that it is wrong.

— bell hooks, Feminism is for Everybody (via poeticallyspeaking13)

Reblogged from Quintessensual Queer

Tags: quote feminism patriarchy men sexism

size and representation in Shrek

hothotsexsex:

feministdisney:

phoetiquette asked: What about Fiona from Shrek? I know she isn’t a Disney character, but does she partially fit the bill of a fat princess, or does she not count b/c she starts off thin, or because her fatness is part of being an “ugly” ogre, etc? ——————————————————

I’m not sure what the “what about” refers to- main, fat leads? To be clear, I don’t deny that it’s possible to scour the last 4-5 decades of children’s media and find a handful of fat leads, but their limited presence does not negate the fact that fat people are vastly under and misrepresented in media.   No matter how positive of a representation Fiona is, it doesn’t even matter because she is one character in a sea of characters that are otherwise generally a fairly uniform (small) size.

As far as Fiona goes, I’m of several minds. At least this franchise has sequels that were nearly as popular as the original so it’s less of a “no one sees it tack on”, but in the first movie, yeah, I don’t think it counts much because she spends 95% of the movie looking like a generic pretty princess.

My second “meh” feeling about her and characters like her is that I find the messages in those movies to often not go much beyond a surface-level feel-good.   The movie does not teach us that all sizes are beautiful; it teaches us that Shrek is considered ugly by everyone, and Fiona is considered ugly by everyone, yet in spite of their ugliness they love each other because love (and happiness) isn’t about appearance.

The message is never really, “You can be fat and beautiful” even though we end up sort of interpretting it that way, as do the characters at times, but I think there’s a difference.   I get really tired of fat characters always being props for the “beauty on the inside” messages because isn’t that what society is always telling fat people 99% of the time to begin with, that they’re only beautiful on the inside, that for someone to love them they need to show personality because their looks are never going to cut it, that only the magical transformative powers of love will make someone think their body is wonderful?

What I would really like is a character that is not treated, or feels, like they are ugly just because they are fat.   Someone who does not need some magic fairy or trickery in order for someone to fall in love with them “despite” their fatness. Fat and beautiful- on the outside.   If that makes sense

~originally a reply, reposted by request~

And let’s not forget that when Fiona turns “ugly” her facial features become more like the ones from a black womyn, wider nose, thicker lips…

Reblogged from POLITICS IS MY HOT HOT SEX

Tags: fat body acceptance body positive love beauty norms quote text

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Advice for young feminists? Do something else besides feminism. I’m serious. The feminist blogosphere is oversaturated in my opinion. Please, find something else you love and take feminist theory there. It gets lonely over here in tech and video games – I have a great crew of other feminists but we are a little island in a vast sea. We need more feminist minded business bloggers, feminist theory wielding finance bloggers. Labor organizers with a feminist lens blogging. Can you imagine what Deadspin (the sports blog) would look like with a feminist on staff? Restructure writes about science, tech and feminism – join her! Publish a blog doing literary criticism with a feminist lens! Take on the NYT! Talk about class issues and feminism. Whatever it is, apply your feminism in a different space.

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Latoya Peterson (Source) (via andcouldheplayblog)

this is the quote I mentioned in my earlier work-thoughts dump. at least i think it is.

(via nom-chompsky)

apply your feminism in a different space

rinse & repeat

(via brazenbitch)

!! I’ve been hollering about this for aaaages

(via julesliketheverne)

Reblogged from Never Have Just One Serving...

Tags: quote feminism politics blog

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A friend of mine asked me recently, was I gonna go see the new Batman movie with him. But I don’t respect the concept of Batman because of what I understand about politics now. I’mma lay it out for you: rich dude owns a corporation with state of the art equipment, and he uses this to beat up on street level crime. He doesn’t mess with the industrialists, or the super capitalists, or the Murdochs, or the Trumps. He really just fucks with the person that’s on the corner. Batman is a conservative’s wet dream. Fuck Batman.

— Reginald D. Hunter (via crashbangtrollop)

Reblogged from Fancy as Fuck

Tags: quote batman politics

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Female fat [as] a moral issue is articulated with words like good and bad. If our culture’s fixation on female fatness or thinness was about sex, it would be private issue between a woman and her lover; if it were about health, between a woman and herself… A cultural fixation on female thinness is not an obsession about female beauty but one about obedience.

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Naomi Wolf The Beauty Myth

I’ve always wondered why being fat is bad. Why is it bad? Think about it: why is being not super skinny BAD? Who made it that way?

(via ickyjane)

Reblogged from Internet Winnage

Tags: body fat morality normativity quote

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Racism in America’s police force is linked to their role as keepers of the status quo in an unequal society. They enforce laws written by politicians on behalf of the wealthy — laws that end up trapping poor and working-class people in desperate lives. Racial and sexual minorities, legal and illegal immigrants are seen as threats to the social order. When we protest the law and “occupy” a space we are beaten and arrested. When we commit a crime to “get some” we are beaten and arrested. And when we do neither but simply live we’re busted to make a cop’s stop-and-frisk quota.

— ‘They Think We Are Animals’: How America’s Police State Controls Black People | Nick Powers - Alternet (via newwavefeminism)

Reblogged from new wave feminism

Tags: quote politics police racism law

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An even bigger issue is that if people think social justice is about niceness, it means they have fundamentally misunderstood privilege. Privilege does not mean you live in a world where people are nice to you and never insult you. It means you live in a world in which you, and people like you, are given systematic advantages over other people. Being marginalised does not mean people are always nasty to you, it means you live in a world in which many aspects of the cultural, social and economic systems are stacked against people like you. Some very privileged people have had awful experiences in life, but it does not erase their privilege.

— The Revolution Will Not Be Polite (via hiphopcheerleader)

Reblogged from Chauvinist Sushi

Tags: quote privilege politics

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Those who subvert social norms are, ostensibly, people who have forgotten that they can be seen, publicly, at any time. Therefore, when they transgress social norms—by expressing physical affection for a person not visibly coded as the opposite sex, for example, or by being fat and rejecting social and bodily invisibility—they need to be reminded of this omniscient social gaze, and in the absence of institutional discipline, must be punished so they do not transgress again. This is the mechanism by which a dude who sees me in a vividly-colored dress, walking alone as though I either don’t know or don’t care that I am defying bodily norms, feels compelled to scream “UGLY FAT BITCH” at me. He is applying social discipline and teaching me a lesson: Everyone can see you, and your body and/or behavior are unacceptable.

— So Michel Foucault and Jeremy Bentham walk into an elementary school cafeteria* via the Two Whole Cakes blog by Lesley Kinzel (via transformfeminism)

Reblogged from The Fist of Artemis

Tags: quote politics norms normativity society body

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What are we trying to stop anyway, and why? The American judge, Potter Stewart, famously remarked of porn, “I know it when I see it.” Fair enough, but do children know when they see it? The Daily Mail might reasonably argue that the topless shots of Madonna they published are art rather than pornography, but does that make any difference to a child? Do the boobs do the damage, or are children more or less affected by boobs in certain contexts?

What about vaginas, or penises? Teenage children have these things so presumably aren’t particularly traumatized by just seeing them. Is it the insertion of the penis into the vagina that causes the harm, or is it the love and care with which the insertion occurs? What about sexualization in wider society - are children harmed by an image of a glamour model showing her cleavage, or are they harmed by the lack of diversity of images, in a mainstream media which relentlessly bombards young girls with a particular idea of what a woman should grow up to be?

— Porn panic! | Martin Robbins | The Lay Scientist | Science | guardian.co.uk (via sexisnottheenemy)

Reblogged from sex is not the enemy

Tags: quote porn sex children kids politics media sexism feminism anarcha-feminism

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I have a healthy range of fetishes, one of which is so unusual that I’ve never met anyone in ‘real life’ who shares it. Growing up with that sort of ‘dirty secret’ can be a lonely experience; but finding a whole sub-community of dedicated porn-makers who not only shared my kink, but actively celebrated it and acted out the same fantasies, helped me to realize I wasn’t some twisted freak. At least not for that reason. If porn can help kids realize that their urges are natural and healthy, that’s not a bad thing in my book.

The diversity of adult entertainment is so great that just talking about ‘porn’ as if it’s one big pink throbbing homogeneous mass is profoundly ignorant, whether its the subject of a campaign or a research question. For example, a paper by Michael Flood suggests “exposure to pornography helps to sustain young people’s adherence to sexist and unhealthy notions of sex and relationships,” but would we see the same impact from Maggie Mayhem’s feminist porn that we would from Playboy?

Lumping the two together is like trying to ask, “do video games make people violent,” without bothering to differentiate between the Grand Theft Auto series and Pacman. It undermines research, but more seriously it can lead people to tackle the wrong problem. It could well be true, for example, that the majority of porn reinforces misogynistic attitudes, and that this could damage young children as a result; but if that’s the case then the problem is misogyny, not pornography, and it needs to be tackled wherever it appears, not just in the adult entertainment industry.

— Porn panic! | Martin Robbins | The Lay Scientist | Science | guardian.co.uk (via sexisnottheenemy)

Reblogged from sex is not the enemy

Tags: quote sex porn sexism feminism anarcha-feminism

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…[A]t heart, nationalism is an ideology of class collaboration. It functions to create an imagined community of shared interests and in doing so to hide the real, material interests of the classes which comprise the population. The ‘national interest’ is a weapon against the working class, and an attempt to rally the ruled behind the interests of their rulers.

— Anarchist Federation, Against Nationalism (via authenticiouslycounterfeit)

Reblogged from Ideas and Opinions.

Tags: quote anarchism nationalism politics

On birth control.

kungfucarrie:

thisthat-and-liberalstuff:

So, I see a lot of arguments talking about how “but birth control isn’t JUST to prevent pregnancy, it’s health care X, Y, and Z!”

And I’m just sitting here like “is the prevention of unwanted pregnancy suddenly NOT legitimate healthcare?”

When people give reasons as to why birth control in its various forms should be provided cheap and affordable, prevention of pregnancy is always listed last, as an afterthought, or is presented as “well yeah, SOME people use it so they don’t get pregnant, but MORE people use it for ~medical reasons.~”

So, my wanting to have control over when I become a mother isn’t “medical” enough for you? My wanting to have safe sex while not having to compromise the goals that I have laid out before I enter motherhood isn’t a ~legitimate~ reason as to why I shouldn’t have to struggle to pay for BC, or go to the Health Department because I have no insurance where the people don’t or can’t give me proper reproductive services other than “use condoms” and send me on my merry way without having the decency to help with the constant bleeding after sex/unusual pains/ect?

What I’m trying to get at, is, why isn’t safe sex and pregnancy prevention not considered a legitimate reason for people to have birth control? Is it because it doesn’t fit into the GOP’s “traditional family,” where everyone is magically virginal until marriage, and then the sole goal after he “puts a ring on it” is to reproduce at the rate of rabbits, and any kind of hindrance on “God’s Plan” shall surely send us into the pits of hell?

Perhaps it has to do with the fact that people don’t want to acknowledge that we weren’t put on the planet to be incubators for future generations.

Or maybe it’s because people don’t want to realize that those of us capable of getting pregnant like to have sex (and sometimes a lot of it) without the hassle of also being pregnant. Perhaps they realize we don’t give a fuck about their shitty standards of how we “should” act, and that pisses them off because they can’t have total control over us.

Whatever the reason is (and all of these reasons and then some probably fall as a reason) my decision to prevent pregnancy IS legitimate health care, and I am honestly sick and tired of hearing people place the qualifier “but people use BC for health and medical reasons, not just prevention of pregnancy” as if preventing pregnancy ISN’T a medical decision, or like I should be ashamed because a big reason that I’m on birth control is because I fuck, and I like it, and I DON’T want to be a mother.

I would like to *highfive* this post

Reblogged from This is Only a Test

Tags: text Health Care birth control Contraception quote sex

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Some have a difficult time with feminism. “Why not a human liberation movement?” they say. The answer is that the power differences between the sexes, races and classes are still so extreme that invoking humanism, at this time, dangerously denies that fact. “Those in power always speak of humanism,” says Robin Morgan, “and accuse those who have been made powerless and categorized as ‘other’ of divisiveness. This is done, however, only when the powerless recognize and name their already divided state, and begin to articulate their longing — for union.

The fear is not that we are different. The fear is that we are the same.”

— Loraine Hutchins and Lani Kaahumanu, Bi Any Other Name. (via gtfothinspo)

Reblogged from Pearl necklaces and curse words

Tags: quote anarcha-feminism feminism intersectionality power definition

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Never underestimate the huge middle finger you are giving to the world when you make peace with your body.

— Frances Lockie (via azelie)

Reblogged from need my fix

Tags: quote body acceptance fuck you

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