Unfriendly tavern dweller

"

my name is BABY and you lean out of your car and spit at my feet it lands in a puddle in front of me and i am thirteen and in a suburban neighborhood on the way home from school and i gag and run with my backpack banging like the echo of your words against my back like you are chasing me all the way home

my name is SWEETIE and i am fifteen in the city with my friends for the first time and we get a little lost and you follow us for a full block you name my friends HONEY and DARLING and WHY THE FUCK WON’T YOU TALK TO ME

my name is NICE ASS and it’s two in the afternoon and i still feel my heart slam against my ribs because i am under a hundred and fifty pounds and i have weak lungs and weaker fists and while you saunter down the steps, swinging the beer bottle in your fist, my father who is walking behind me shouts, “she’s seventeen, you dipshit” and maybe i’m near my family but i don’t feel safe until we’re home again

my name is JAILBAIT and my friend is laughing and we just graduated high school and we feel like we are on the brink of something beautiful and terrifying and she is in heels and about to throw up and you name her DRUNK ENOUGH and i have to physically drag you off and when we go home she cries for four hours because a night that should have been just teenage fun almost resulted in the end of her trust of humans

my name is LOOK AT THOSE TITS and we are on a college campus and the boy i am with holds onto my waist just a little tighter while you drive up next to me. you name him THUG and throw a bottle at his forehead. i can’t stop shaking until long after it’s over. he says “it happens,” and i say, “it shouldn’t.”

my name is DAMN GIRL and we are walking down the street. there are ten of you and two of us and you snap a picture when you think we’re not looking. you tell us to either come inside or you’ll fuck us on the street. you all laugh like this is funny. this is compliment. this is just something boys do to get ladies.

my name is LITTLE LADY, my name is FINE MISS, my name is FUCK YOU AND FUCK YOUR FRIENDS, my name is LOOK ME IN THE FACE, my name is STOP FROWNING, my name is SMILE, my name is WHY DID YOU EVEN GLANCE AT HIM YOU WERE ASKING FOR IT, my name is THIS IS A COMPLIMENT so i looked it up according to Oxford that’s “a polite expression of praise or admiration” i think you’ve got the definitions mixed up

my name is PRETTY THING, my name takes nice words and make them into bullet wounds my name is NICE BODY and no girl i know has dated a man who catcalled her, my name is GREAT RACK and it turns out that if you shout things at a stranger, they sound like knives more than flowers, my name is WOMEN LIKE YOU NEVER KNOW THEIR PLACE and every single “nice” thing you say to a woman is something you’d never utter to another man because you know that it’s derogatory, my name is PRINCESS and A REASON TO GET PUT IN PRISON and if another man spoke to your mother sister girlfriend like that, you’d kill him

my name is SEXY and every time i hear someone raising their voice i am thirteen again and i don’t know who you are and i’m running home with a weight on my shoulders and your words like a slap to my spine and your laughter like a hanging, i am scared and alone and suddenly so small,

and compliments are supposed to make me feel good not afraid for my life, compliments are a way of saying “i care and i appreciate you and i thought you should know it,” and if you really meant it as a compliment, you’d care about how i would take it - but you don’t mean it like that, you mean it to show off, you mean it to make us object, you mean it to shove our names into your back pocket so you can tell your friends “i saw the HOTTEST LITTLE THING yesterday” and they can groan about how we just walked away because you don’t see us go home with keys in our fists and all the lights on and we keep 911 dialed just in case and we triple-check our locks and we don’t fall asleep at all because your compliment knocked us over and took who we are

if we are all saying “it doesn’t sound like a compliment, it sounds like a threat,” if you really wanted to make us feel good - wouldn’t you stop doing it?

— COMPLIMENT =/= CATCALL // r.i.d (via neutral)

(via lisa-garbageface)

"We cannot expect poor women feeding their families on food stamps to have the same priorities as female lawyers hoping to become partners in law firms. We cannot expect working-class women concerned with getting paid sick leave to have the same priorities as college professors. We cannot expect women who face both sex discrimination and race discrimination to develop the same priorities as women who face only sex discrimination. … There has never been a single, unified feminist agenda. We see feminism as an outlook that is ever being reinvented by new groups of women. Feminism necessarily changes as the world women inhabit changes."

— Dorothy Sue Cobble, Linda Gordon, and Astrid Henry in Feminism Unfinished (via magicalrocketships)

(via neoliberalismkills)

"The woman who checks her makeup half a dozen times a day to see if her foundation has caked or her mascara has run, who worries that the wind or the rain may spoil her hairdo, who looks frequently to see if her stockings have bagged at the ankle or who, feeling fat, monitors everything she eats, has become, just as surely as the inmate of the Panopticon, a self-policing subject, a self committed to a relentless self-surveillance. This self-surveillance is a form of obedience to patriarchy. It is also the reflection in woman’s consciousness of the fact that she is under surveillance in ways that he is not, that whatever else she may become, she is importantly a body designed to please or to excite."

—

Michel Foucault, “Femininity and the Modernization of Patriarchal Power” (via chocolate-eggs-and-lacan)

This is a misattribution. Foucault did not write this in an essay called “Femininity and the Modernization of Patriarchal Power”– SANDRA LEE BARTKY wrote this in an essay called “Foucault, Femininity, and the Modernization of Patriarchal Power.”

This misattribution is particularly glaring given that Bartky wrote this essay, in part to build on Foucault’s ideas about power in how they related to patriarchal power, but also to criticise Foucault for the lack of attention he paid to the specific kinds of violence faced by women under patriarchy:

But Foucault treats the body throughout as if it were one, as if the bodily experiences of men and women did not differ and as if men and women bore the same relationship to the characteristic institutions of modern life. Where is the account of the disciplinary practices that engender the “docile bodies” of women, bodies more docile than the bodies of men? Women, like men, are subject to many of the same disciplinary practices Foucault describes. But he is blind to those disciplines that produce a modality of embodiment that is peculiarly feminine. To overlook the forms of subjection that engender the feminine body is to perpetuate the silence and powerlessness of those upon whom these disciplines have been imposed. Hence, even though a liberatory note is sounded in Foucault’s critique of power, his analysis as a whole reproduces that sexism which is endemic throughout Western political theory.

So, basically, a woman wrote an essay expounding on a man’s ideas about power, specifically as they related to patriarchal power, and criticising that man’s failure to take gendered violence into account… and you attributed a quote from that essay… to that man. In a misattribution that now has nearly 12.5k notes. That’s kind of funnily ironic but also, more than that, incredibly unjust.

Once again, the person who wrote this is Sandra Lee Bartky.

(via amazighprincex)

(via neoliberalismkills)

"Because the first time I got raped, my boyfriend broke up with me because I had “cheated” on him.
Because the word “rape” is considered a joke.
Because over 70% of women let their partners fuck them when they don’t want it.
Because 17% of American women have been the victim of sexual assault at some point in their lives.
Because only 39% of rapists get reported to the police, and only 3% of them go to jail.
Because about 13% of the rape victims commit suicide.
Because the first time I got raped, he put a knife to my throat and told me he would kill me if I said I didn’t want it.
Because when I wanted to report him, people told me I couldn’t because I hadn’t said “no” to him.
Because at least half of all babies born to minor women are fathered by adult men. (10+ years age difference)
Because I can’t wear a skirt without being told “I’m asking for it.”
Because when I went to a party when I was 14 and I wore a skirt and a guy kept touching my ass all night, my mother told me it shouldn’t have happened if I wore sweatpants.
Because a 16 year old girl who had her first orgasm while getting raped, had to watch her 34 (!) year old rapist go free because she had had an orgasm.
Because when my guy friend told me and some friends he got raped by a women when he was 12, a “friend” laughed at him and said he should be happy he got laid that young.
Because my 17 year old best friend’s parents let her 14 year old brother walk outside until 12pm, but she has to be home at 10.
Because a guy from my old school got raped by another guy, but because he is gay, they said it wasn’t considered rape.
Because a 19 year old lesbian got raped by a guy, and he didn’t go to prison because he said “he only tried to turn her straight so she would get accepted by her parents”
Because in some cultures, girls (and boys) still get thrown out of the family because some guy/girl sexually assaulted them.
Because they’re still teaching girls to walk faster at night instead of teaching guys they shouldn’t rape.
Because I have to explain why rape makes me angry."

— (via stay-ocean-minded)

(via lisa-garbageface)