"To understand this position [of the 5th Circuit], you need to understand one thing: At the heart of the 'pro-life' movement is the idea that women are put on this earth for subservience. This is a religious idea (in the US, rooted in Christianity) that women are obedient helpmeets for male heads of household, and all-giving caretakers of children."
"And so this is the plan in the US: Force women to carry pregnancies against their will. If they have medical emergencies or their fetuses have serious problems, force them to continue the pregnancies anyway — forms, I would argue, of physical torture. If the women die, they die — it’s a tragedy, not a man-made killing, and what kind of woman wouldn’t die to keep her child alive?"
I’m bisexual, and trans. I’ve been on dates with men, and women, presenting as both a man and a woman. I usually just pay for myself, or awkwardly fail to turn them down when the other person offers to pay.
#WritersCoffeeClub Ch 2 Nbr 17 — What is the biggest inspiration for your writing? /My mom./
She was my formative inspiration. By example, despite her flaws, she demonstrated how a woman naturally could be just as capable as any man and achieve whatever she wanted despite the obstacles. As a single mom, she marched in the civil rights movement and burned her bra (though she really needed it). It came as a shock to me when I realized that other women faced head winds in their endeavors; I didn't understand why until I saw and experienced it myself as I grew up and entered the real world. Culture /is/ cruel. I saw that buying into gender roles as gospel helped nobody—nobody but those who would control us to their advantage.
I chose to be a #feminist thanks to my mom, and I write from that perspective with my upbringing as my basic inspiration. Regardless of gender, regardless of all racial and ethnic factors, regardless of peer pressure, unfair is unfair. I'm inspired to write stories where people overcome whatever conspires to control them just because "That's they way it's always been done."
Heard on the radio: "As the man, you want to be the fixer, the person who fixes things." Dear Patriarchy, we no longer live in the 1950s. #GenderRoles#Patriarchy
Tori Otten reports on a new poll conducted by ChangeResearch which finds that, in the 18–34 in age group, 64% of women are politically left of center, as are 86% of trans and nonbinary people. Just 39% of men identify as liberal or progressive.
Want to know who's driving the Republican-Trumpian attempt to break democracy as it appears democracy no longer serves Those Who Count?
As Nick El Hajj reports, Kuwait and Lebanon have moved to ban "Barbie" because, as the Lebanese Culture Minister states, the film has been found to was found to 'contradict values of faith and morality' and to 'promote homosexuality and sexual transformation.'
Sprocket Wagner reviews “The Just Kitchen: Invitations to Sustainability, Cooking, Connection, and Celebration” by Derrick Watson and Anna Woofenden, a cookbook that combines recipes with thoughts on faith and justice.
Barbie is refreshing for a few reasons — there aren’t many films where the titular female character proudly proclaims she hasn’t got a vagina — but one thing that really stood out to me was the variety in the male characters and the way that the film really criticises patriarchy whilst realising the ways in which patriarchy harms men in similar ways that it does women. https://medium.com/prismnpen/barbie-isnt-anti-men-it-s-anti-toxicity-353cfae74d95?sk=4d37ea91d9f157dd071823ba4d45910c
"The Feminizing of Society" was the topic on CBS's public-affairs show today in 1984: a discussion of androgyny and changing gender roles, with an appearance by perennial hatemonger Rev. Jerry Falwell and an extensive interview with gender-bending pop music star Boy George.
So... if women hunted, AND took care of child care, what did the men do?
Researchers found that women hunted in nearly 80% of surveyed forager societies.
Child care posed little problem: Mothers carried infants or left them at camp with other community members; older children often tagged along, hunting as well.
Thoughts on watching the Duggars exposé series "Shiny Happy People":
Why there's David Zaslav, now in the news as an éminence grise behind Chris Licht at CNN, as CNN tries rebranding itself as the alternative FOX. There's David Zaslav, in the thick of things as the Duggars vault to fame on the Discovery network, of which he's CEO.
What's that about, the Zaslav link to both of these stories?
Discovery made the Duggars, hand-picked and gave them iconic status. Why?
Of all the families Discovery could have chosen to hold up as iconic, why the Duggars -- a right-wing Republican white Christian fundamentalist family in the small-town South? These are the people the media constantly chide us for not listening to in the Trump era. But there they are front and center on Discovery for years before Trump….
I cannot forget: at the very same time that Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar and their son Josh were making political hay by attacking LGBTQ people as a threat to children, Josh was downloading child pornography and had molested his own younger sisters -- and Jim Bob and Michelle knew and hid all of this.
One of the most stomach-churning aspects of the series is watching women in the IBLP network groom girls to be the kind of women the men leading the movement want: utterly submissive, hanging on men's every word, uttering mindless nothings in litte-girly voices, dressing in infantilizing outfits to please male eyes.
The cornerstone of the movement, its raison d'être: the absolute unquestioned right of men, straight ones, to own, control, command, the absolute obligation of women and everyone else to submit and obey.
One reason this movement continues to have such sway in US society is that many of us who are not part of that cultic world unquestioningly accept these cultural presuppositions based on gender stereotypes.
Those who respond, "Well, they have a right to their peculiar religious beliefs," spectacularly miss the point. The point is that they intend to impose these beliefs on you and me by law, and they are working tirelessly to achieve that goal.
Spot the people of color in the footage of IBLP gatherings or young IBLP folks being groomed for political power. I challenge you to find them in any of that footage.
How do you usually handle paying for dates?
I’m bisexual, and trans. I’ve been on dates with men, and women, presenting as both a man and a woman. I usually just pay for myself, or awkwardly fail to turn them down when the other person offers to pay.