"We accept all girls in kindergarten through 12th grade as members. If a child identifies as a girl and the child’s family presents her as a girl, Girl Scouts of Colorado welcomes her as a Girl Scout. If a child is living as a girl, that’s good enough for us. We don’t require any proof of gender."
—
Rachelle Trujillo, vice president for communications of the Colorado Girl Scouts, responding to a story about a transgender girl who was allowed to join the Brownies.
Coloradans are mad cool, I’m just saying.
(via scarlettshazam)
(Source: knitmeapony, via tehblackbirdflies)
"No man is in any real physical danger on the internet— or even in real life — from feminists. Women are regularly beaten and raped — even on college campuses — but I know of no instance where a man found himself a victim of violence for making a sexist remark in a feminist setting."
— Hugo Schwyzer, on the use of the term “male bashing” (via scarlettshazam)
(Source: michellehaimoff, via sequined-k)
An interesting interview with Steven J.C. Gaulin, an evolutionary biologist, and William D. Lassek, a retired doctor of public health at the University of Pittsburgh. The two authored a book called Why Women Need Fat, which points out how androcentrism in medical science can lead to problematic health advice for women:
Many M.D.s have bought this fallacious line that the optimal weight for women in terms of their health is what M.D.s call normal weight, a BMI between 18.5 and 25. And they have thought this to be true because women with higher BMIs exhibit a series of physiological measures that are indeed risk factors for disease in men. But they are not systematically risk factors for disease in women. If you actually look at the data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey and data from studies done in other countries, the optimal weight for women who have had a kid is what doctors currently call “overweight.”
Someone changed this post to read,
…when I originally had “mother” instead of “parent”.
Besides the utterly bad form of changing the text of one of my posts in a way that doesn’t make the edits obvious (that’s what strikethrough font, [brackets], and ellipses are for), the changes bug me in another way. I know there are some FTMs out there who have given birth and breastfed as men, but as far as I know such cases are surpassingly rare. Breastfeeding is still primarily, overwhelmingly, something only (cisgender) women do. Not all ducks fly, but it’s not incorrect to state that “ducks fly”.
Anyway, my point is that the specifically womanly nature of breastfeeding is why taboos about it even exist—they’re part of larger patterns of policing and disciplining women’s bodies. If you think about it, the shaming of people who breastfeed (see how awkward that looks?) is directed primarily at cis women because they’re cis women. Breastfeeding is perverse and weird and bizarre because it’s something women do and patriarchy has taught us to believe that women’s stuff is perverse and weird and bizarre.
That is why I wrote, “If the sight of a woman breastfeeding her child bothers or disgusts you, you need to grow the fuck up.” Gender neutral language isn’t something that you should automatically use. Sometimes there is a good reason to use a gendered term instead.
"If men’s magazines do, on occasion, speak pejoratively of women, women’s magazines, by and large, speak pejoratively to women."
— Agreed. (via cheatsheet)
(via cheatsheet)
"Despite the lack of descriptive precision in the article, it serves at least as a vague indication of what counts as stigmatized these days in American youth speech, particularly patterns coded as feminine and therefore frivolous. Again we have a popular media account attempting to instill linguistic anxiety in some readers (and instilling a sense of linguistic superiority among others)."
—
Benjamin Zimmer on this 2006 New York Observer article about young, urban women speaking in a supposedly odd way.
The ‘06 article sounds similar to some of the commentary I’ve read about this piece on vocal fry use being more common among young American women these days. My take? Always be suspicious of those who nitpick a particular social group’s speech or language use. In almost every case, what it boils down to is a privileged person (in this case, a man) who is trying to make members of a marginalized group (in this case, young women) feel anxious and self-conscious about speaking out loud. Stigmatizing how another person communicates is a way of disempowering them.
Men build discursive spaces and discursive norms based on their own experience. And for instance, in a male-built discursive space, a threat of sexual violence may be viewed by male participants as an obvious joke. After all, the vast majority of men will never experience sexual violence in their lifetime. (Fewer than 4% of men will be sexually assaulted.) And so within the context of a male discussion on a World of Warcraft forum, for instance, it may seem entirely innocuous to use ideas of sexual violence to express one’s views on the game, or to use “rape” as a verb to describe one’s gameplay skills.
Women as a group have a vastly different experience with the idea of sexual violence. One in six women will be a victim of sexual assault during her lifetime. (Yes, some men are also sexual assault victims. But the numbers are overwhelmingly female — about 90% of sexual assault victims are women.) Rape is not an abstract idea or an obvious joke. For thousands of women, it is an immediate and extremely painful reality.
[…]
The same goes for statements about violence in general. In a male-dominated discursive space, it may be viewed as normal to make aggressive, threatening statements. However, men’s and women’s experiences with violence are also vastly different. One in four women in the United States has been a victim of domestic violence. Suddenly, the joke about wanting to punch somebody else isn’t so funny.
(Source: feministlawprofessors.com)
