Month: May 2014

pansexualfacts:

Fact: Pansexuals are the children of pan, many pansexuals are fae-folks and merfolks, while their sister races are also not human. Asexuals are elves and casters, demisexuals are half breeds between the children of man and other mythical creatures, while bisexuals are hybrids of two different types of mythical creatures. 

So this is why I’m always drawn to the elvish caster types! O_O

ami-angelwings:

summer-of-supervillainy:

ami-angelwings:

I was watching the Star Wars Clone Wars episodes “Bounty” where Asajj Ventress strikes out on her own and sort of starts her path towards redemption.  And there’s a scene at the beginning that’s supposed to be kinda like the Cantina scene in A New Hope except she plays both the part of Obi-Wan and Luke.  A gross dude hits on her and tries to pick her up, she tells him to leave, he doesn’t, so she lightsabre stabs him when he presses.  And that’s great and stuff, but it’s pretty much standard in fiction.  Like, in the Supergirl movie, where our introduction to her powers is through a bunch of gross dudes sexually harassing her.   When women get scenes that are supposed to show how strong/powerful/sarcastic/etc they are, it almost always involves sexual harassment/assault.

Think about how many times in fiction the introduction of a woman having martial arts or super powers or not being timid, etc has to do with some dude or dudes hitting on her, touching her, etc and then her surprising them by beating them up or making a cutting remark. Have a woman character walk into a bar, you KNOW she’s going to get some sleezy dude try to pick her up, have a woman join the army, or a mercenary team, you know some sleezy dude will put a hand on her butt and then she’ll have to show off that she’s not like “other girls”. Even in a galaxy far far away, street harassment is a regular thing women, even Sith women, have to deal with. 

And I was thinking how funny it is that when WE, real life actual women, tell men that we face harassment and rape threat on a regular basis, we get told we’re overreacting or exaggerating or misinterpreting, but yet it’s the 100% default storyline they use all the time for women in fiction.   And they try to convince us this is empowering.  SEE, SEE look don’t you want to imagine that you have the power to fight off sexual harassers?  No.  In my fantasy world, I want to imagine myself being able to do cool hero stuff WITHOUT DEALING WITH SEXUAL HARASSMENT OR RAPE THREAT AT ALL.  How about instead of treating rape culture as this default thing that can’t be fixed in real life so here’s some fantasies about beating up dudes, you take this s- seriously, you take what we tell you about our lives seriously, and actively fight it in real life rather than just use our reality as fodder for fictional narratives.

You know what, I’m gonna reblog this again to emphasize something Ami just said.

“And they try to convince us this is empowering.”

When men tell stories about women encountering sexism and winning, it fits into a really narrow mold.

Man violates woman. Woman responds with cartoonish violence. Man is defeated and stops violating woman.

That’s what a success looks like to them. Because in their power-fantasies-on-our-behalf, women have nothing to fear from men. Women are stronger than men. Women are not conditioned not to fight back. Women face no consequences for fighting back. Women are not traumatized by being violated or by inflicting violence in return. Women don’t know how many women are killed by men.

That’s what really gets to me. These fantasies are your male friend listening to you tell him about creep after creep after creep and just going “You should have yelled, you should have fought, you should have reported, because that’s the way to win. You did it wrong, that’s why you feel so hurt and scared. You could have won. There has to be a way to win.”

Because men don’t know how unfair the world is.

There is no way to win. It’s going to happen again, no matter what.

Girls have grown up under the chilling shadow of stronger boys and men who know damn well they can say what they like to girls, who know exactly how much they can get away with and leave girls angry or scared but unable to tell people why in a way that gets them help. They know how close to sit, they know how to “accidentally” touch women as the bus sways, they know “innocent” openers that girls get called bitches for shutting down.

Men know what they can do to girls and women. And girls and women know too. When a spunky girl punches out a creep onscreen, she isn’t thinking she’s gonna get called an overreacting bitch. She isn’t thinking that people will say “hey, he’s just being friendly”. She doesn’t talk it over with friends and family afterwards and need their reassurance that she wasn’t wrong. One clean punch settles the matter and wins everyone’s respect.

Books don’t have women weighing the odds of harassment escalating into a fight for their lives that they can’t win. Movies don’t have terrified girls weighing the costs of sticking up for each other against men who can overpower them both. Comics don’t have women silently trying to endure harassment and praying that it doesn’t get any worse. And if they do, it’s just the setup to a violent catharsis. It’s plan A, and plan B is always violence, and it always works.

When we tell men about what men have done to us, men go “I would have punched him!” Because to men, women live in a world where punching a man is an end to an argument, not a dangerous escalation. To men, women live in a world where they won’t get blamed and told they were “asking for it” if the situation gets more dangerous after they act. To men, women live in a world where strangers and family alike can clearly see that women were in the right for resisting creeps, and won’t tell them they’re exaggerating, overreacting, or misinterpreting. To men, women clearly and forcefully rejecting men is safe.

Men have no fucking idea.

This is a really spot on analysis too.  They portray sexual harassment and rape threat as something women in their fiction deal with by default, but also make it just this not really serious thing that can be easily brushed off or solved by showing that you’re stronger than them/willing to fight back.  And that’s it.  It ends up making sexual predation the normal nature of men, and also trivializing it as not really a threat, and having no real impact on how women live their lives.  There’s no exploration on what it means that every time a female char goes to a new place some dude harasses her, or how the rest of society would react to this.  It’s just a one-off thing we’re supposed to laugh off.

And yeah, like Summer says, it comes from the same place as when guy friends go “I’d just have hit him” or “you should have hit him” or “you should have said XYZ”.  To them this is just a one off situation and it can be solved just by shooing the guy away, they don’t think about it beyond that, about how the guy could escalate, about how not only are we not sure we could win in a fight, but that we shouldn’t spend our lives always weighing whether we could win in a fight just because these men can’t respect our personal space.  And they think we’d feel super empowered and awesome like in the stories, rather than still angry and scared, and also worrying about the next time, and the next time, and the next time.  Men seem to have no problem writing about the long term impact that the pressure of war or leadership or destiny have on male heroes, or even the emotional impact on a male hero pining for a woman, but they don’t put nearly that amount of thought when it comes to women dealing with sexism, harassment, and rape threat.

Apologists/defenders always say having women face this in fiction is “realistic”, but it’s never dealt with in a realistic manner.  If Ventress was being sexually harassed all the time while out, she’d probably want to just start murdering dudes before it even happens to her.  Women don’t organize, defend each other, start movements, or use their superpowers to do more than just show the audience in a one-off harassment scene “hey look what I can do, I’m so empowered.”  This isn’t about realism, it’s about how creators see women as there to be hit on by men, and that they don’t see this as a real problem, just something that can be solved with a punch or a joke, and then we move on.

regular-snowflake:

2pacsoul:

modalitout:

notanothersonglyric:

ruinedxfate:

ruinedxfate:

ham-safar:

Rayhaneh Jabbari is sentenced to hang for killing her rapist in self defense in Iran. She is now 26 years old and has been in Tehran’s dreaded Evin prison since 2007. The petition for her release can be found here: http://bit.ly/1h7EP4D

UNBELIEVABLE

EVERYBODY SIGN THIS PETITION

It needs 100,000, and only has 8,000 as it stands. 

SIGNAL BOOST THE FUCK OUT OF THIS GUYS

GETTING CLOSE! come on people!

SIGN. NOW.

misandry-mermaid:

This is the video made by the UCSB shooter, explaining why he chose to murder women in retaliation for being romantically rejected.

ETA: I am seeing some bloggers say we shouldn’t be sharing this video because it gives this guy attention.  Firstly, he’s dead now, so it really doesn’t matter if we ignore him or not.  Secondly, I think it’s VITALLY important that women are able to witness the type of attitude and thinking of someone who would commit such an atrocity.  Watching this video could help individuals identify red flags in potentially violent men in the future.  Watching this video can help us recognize the difference between an annoying, romantically-spurned dude and a man with a level of entitlement that creates a desire for vengeance.  That is why I’m sharing this video.  Because we need to know the attitude of men out there (and, like it’s been noted in articles about this case, this guy is NOT ALONE in his thinking.  He belonged to several webforums where he expressed these views among men with the same beliefs and is now being lauded by them as a hero.)  This is a video that needs to be seen, for our safety.

TW for misogyny and death threats

This level of entitlement and utter lack of perspective is fucking surreal

(Source: http://misandry-mermaid.tumblr.com/)

red-sequin-apples:

pokemoneggs:

cis ppl can have horns and swirls and spikes n shit surgically implanted under their skin any time they want if theyre rich enough but a trans woman wants boobs she has to wait at least 1-2 years for doctors to be convinced that she REALLY wants them

A cis woman who doesn’t have boobs or wants bigger ones can go and buy them any time if she has the money. A cis man with low testosterone can have T prescribed for him on the first doctor’s visit. Cis women take estrogen and progesterone routinely, for various reasons. A cis man with gynecomastia (breast growth) can have top surgery just because.

What I mean is it’s not just piercings and horns: Cis people can have actual gender-related medical interventions done any time, and they do have them, and it’s perfectly normal. But when trans people want the same interventions, often to literally save our lives, we have to wait years and jump through countless hoops to convince doctors that we really need it. The same things that cis people can have just like that.

I HATE GATEKEEPING

Wait, I’m new to this asexuality thing, but people randomly see someone else on the street or a picture and they go “Wow! I want to have sex with this person?!” Do they actually think that?

gruntledandhinged:

michaelblume:

nighzmarquls:

anagnori:

Apparently, some people really do think that way. I don’t know how common or intense it is among non-asexual folks, but there’s at least a few of them out there who experience attraction this way.

Yeah it took me a while to properly understand this, for the longest time I figured I was either just picky or oblivious or something.

Nope turns out just don’t care.

Yep, I totally experience attraction this way

Hehhh, storytime! 

Because I crammed all my social skills into a couple of years and basically went with the “imitate everyone around you as best you can” approach, I totally thought that saying you wanted to sleep with someone you didn’t know well or just saw on the street was like…not quite a colloquialism, but a dramatic and accepted part of communication, the way people say ‘literally’ and don’t mean it, or exclaim that something is the worst, when clearly it’s not The Worst. 

…flash forward to my second year of college, where I had to get multiple people to explain to me that yes, they did see people and want to have sex with them. I had never conceived that it actually worked that way. I thought it was romance-movie levels of exaggeration, the way you shouldn’t expect Instant and Perfect Love at First Sight either. 

and this, tumblr users, is how I first started thinking I might be asexual. 

Thank you for sharing this wisdom, I did not know that.