6b4t - 6B4T

My radical take is that I don't trust you if you're pro natalist or if you have kids. I seriously can't take anyone seriously trying to talk about making the world a better place when they've already given up the game. Sorry hon but you can't act like you actually want to make things better when you've already made it clear you don't care about the conditions you're bringing your kids into. Having kids is quite literally the most basic way to say "yeah, this is fine, I'm totally fine with my kids living under these conditions." Having kids right now is quite literally supporting every fucked up system because guess what all those systems need? More people to run them. If you actually wanted to make a change, you would have made an effort to make the world a better place instead of having kids just cause you want em.

*hits feminist blunt*: I don't wanna ever see any praise for a man or the male sex. "There are good men out there who work hard on being good." And I'm a law abiding citizen, where is my fucking national award?

We'll be talking about the right to live as free people EVERYWHERE and you're praising a man for thinking rape is wrong? The bar is below the earth's crust. Liberation for all my sisters, not praise to some man for doing the bare fucking minimum. Decenter men from your frameworks pls.

tryna lock in on my fitness journey and be strong

please can i get reasons to work out that arent linked to patriachal beauty standards

🪴

Andrea Dworkin complete works

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I think its really funny when people get mad at the pro-hairy pussy posts on this site (yes including posts hating on bald pussy) and take an angle of “wow everyone is being so weird about shaving now and its so wrong to judge peoples choices like this” because like. Okay. Either you dont fuck or go outside, or you have been doing whats expected of you so long you have no idea how people who dont make the same choice as you are mistreated. Because so many people ESPECIALLY MEN are still convinced simply having body hair is unhygienic and will shame and dehumanize anyone who has it in the most vile and unnecessary way. Like youre seeing so many of these vehement bush or die posts BECAUSE PEOPLE ARE PUSHING BACK AGAINST THAT NOTION its not happening in a vacuum but once again tumblr users are out of touch with what actually happens on planet earth

If you like shaving: congrats, there are millions of people who would not accept you any other way

Does Your Daughter Know It’s OK To Be Angry?

By Soraya Chemaly

May 9, 2016

Girls, taught to ignore their anger, become disassociated from themselves.

Anger is a recurring theme of the current presidential election. Every male presidential candidate has directly and overtly tapped into the very evident rage that the American public feels. They thump podiums, raise their voices, curse, and shout without being called divas, shrill, unhinged, ugly, or unlikeable. More power to them, literally.

Hillary Clinton, on the other hand, has a narrower path to tread when expressing or even responding to righteous anger. After decades in the public eye, Clinton, knows that she has to carefully manage overt displays of any strong feeling at all.

Most girls and women understand the risks they take when they become angry. No matter how justified, appearing angry won’t do her any favors and will actually undermine people’s perception of her competence and likeability. Studies show that when men are angry, people tend to lose their own confidence and defer to men’s opinions. When women are angry, the opposite happens. Studies also reveal that people will opt to work for angry-sounding aggressive men, but not with angry-sounding aggressive women.

The problem with studies that confirm what most women already know is that they may contribute to women policing themselves even more, and to parents teaching girls that being nice is better all the way around. That’s why seeing overtly and justifiably angry women who do not care that they may not be likeable to some people is so important.

According to the American Psychological Association, while both men and women feel anger, and shame related to anger, they show what they feel in different ways. For men, anger reinforces traditional gender expectations, for women it confounds them. That conflict by itself is a source of anxiety.

Girls are more likely to learn that their feelings of anger, no matter the reason they have them, are “wrong” and out of sync with their identities as girls. They are also more likely to intuit that to show anger puts their relationships at risk. Even worse, they associate anger with being unattractive in a social milieu where few things are portrayed as worse for a girl.

These messages start immediately. Ideas about anger in children are quickly infused with parental implicit biases and gender expectations. In one study, newborns were dressed in gender-neutral clothing and researchers misled adults about their sex. Parents were far more likely to describe the babies they thought were boys as upset or angry than the girls, who they categorized instead as nice and happy.

In general, starting when they are toddlers, boys in the United States are given more leeway in terms of being “out of control.” Parents and teachers expect girls to be able to control themselves more and hold them to higher standards, and so girls exhibit better self-regulation. Many parents not only think that boys can’t control themselves, but they unconsciously expect boys to be angry and girls to be sociable. When kids don’t adhere to these stereotypes, parents often respond, usually subconsciously, in ways that develop these traits accordingly. For girls, that means a whole lot of sublimation.

“Unspoken gender rules,” write Deborah Cox, Karin Bruckner, and Sally Stabb, authors of The Anger Advantage, “play into the diversion of women’s anger.”

Anger is diverted in women, who, as girls, lose even the awareness of their own anger as anger. Girls are taught, through politeness norms that suppress disruptive behavior, to use indirect methods of dealing with rage. For example, it’s “unladylike” to be loud, or “vulgar” to curse, yell, or seem unattractive. Adaptable girls find socially acceptable ways to internalize or channel their discomfort and ire, sometimes at great personal cost. Passive aggressive behavior, anxiety, and depression are common effects. Sarcasm, apathy, and meanness have all been linked to suppressed rage. Troublesome behaviors, such as lying, skipping school, bullying other people, even being socially awkward are often signs that a teenager is dealing with anger that they are unable to name as anger.

Girls, taught to ignore their anger, become disassociated from themselves.

Anger is so successfully sublimated that girls lose the ability to understand what it feels and looks like. Is her heart racing? Does she feel flushed or shaky? Does she clench her jaws at night? Is she breaking out in hives? Does she cry for no reason? Laugh inappropriately during difficult conversations? Fly off the handle over something that seems inconsequential? You can see where I’m going here…those crazy girl hormones, right? Better to just think of it as a phase.

For too many women, however, the phase never ends. It’s lives spent never expressing anger at all and believing that they don’t have the right or ability to do so without great risk.

Interestingly, the reasons men and women tend to get angry differ. A 15-year study of girls and women found that there are three primary causes of anger that are not the same in men: feelings of powerlessness, injustice, and other people’s irresponsibility.

By the time they are teenagers, many girls’ feelings of anger have been shunted into contorted shapes that no longer fit the standard (read male) ways that we think of and understand anger.

When most people think about anger management they think in terms of what can be seen: frustrated, foot-stomping people, most frequently portrayed as men, throwing things, maybe screaming or punching something. In 2004, researchers looking into gender and anger concluded that women’s complex management of anger “may not be accounted for by existing anger models.” In other words, using a male standard for understanding the problem meant, for many girls and women, simply not understanding the problem. Bottling up anger is as harmful, if not more so, than anger exhibited in violent outbursts. “Anger management” should also mean considering what can’t be seen, the kind of anger that women are more likely to experience. How we think of “anger management” should more broadly include teaching girls that it is OK to feel angry.

Few parents are considering these long-term effects when they unconsciously model or teach children lessons about politeness and how to be sociable. As they age, girls are effectively taught to put others needs first and are, indeed, rewarded for doing so, well into adulthood. The result, for many girls and women, long into old age, is a host of physical, psychological, and emotional damages. Anger impairs people’s immune systems, contributes to high blood pressure, heart damage, migraines, skin ailments, and chronic fatigue. Unresolved anger contributes to stress, tension, anxiety, depression, and excessive nervousness. It is now estimated that 30% of all teen girls have anxiety disorders.

Between the ages of 12 and 15, the number of girls who have depression triples, a rate three times that of same-age boys. Feelings of powerlessness and anger are also integral to the development of eating disorders. Suicide rates for girls between 10 and 14 tripled over the past 15 years.

Before puberty, boys and girls typically experience depression at the same frequency. “Social pressures” appear to be greater for girls and we’ve all been schooled on the impact of “hormones and emotions.” But girls aren’t just depressed when they are teens. They grow up to be more depressed in their 20s, 30s, 40s, and beyond.

Depression is complicated—part genetic, part hormonal, part environmental, part economic. Women who make less than their male peers, for example, are four times more likely to suffer from anxiety and 2.5 times more likely to suffer from depression. Imagine what would happen if they could get angry instead?

Clinicians believe that a large component of depression is anger and a specific type of anger caused by a perceived or actual loss or rejection. There are many reasons why girls might feel rejected, powerless, and angry.

First, they begin to see the effects of gender–based double standards that fly in the face of everything they’ve learned so far about their abilities, equality, and potential. Teenage girls feel the very real disparate impact of limitations on their physical freedom and behavior. Everyone seems to have policing opinions about their clothing and appearance, their movement and bodies.

Second, they become aware of physical vulnerability. Street and sexual harassment are common occurrences, including at school. They learn about sexual assault, if they have not already been assaulted (43% of assaults happen before the age of 18). They adapt to having to restrict themselves.

Third, they begin to encounter the cultural erasure of women, people who look like them and whom they are meant to emulate, as authoritative. The older girls get, the fewer women they see in positions of power and leadership. Boys and girls move from childhood realms where women are their primary caretakers, teachers, babysitters, neighborhood, and family adults to institutions where they are marginally represented as leaders. Role models are comparatively few and far between for girls who grow up gender code-switching in ways boys aren’t expected or, for the most part, allowed to. At the same time, the opposite is happening to boys whose confidence during the same period grows.

Fourth, they are navigating the stressful tension between managing their own sexuality and the crush of women’s pervasive sexual objectification. Adults around them often unhelpfully elide the two. School dress codes, for example, are the perfect example of how attempts to stop girls from “sexualizing themselves” handily do the trick for them.

While anger in girls and women is overwhelmingly portrayed as irrational, it is, in fact, completely rational. Girls learn to filter their existences through messages of powerlessness and cultural worthlessness. Girls might be more inclined to depression because coming to terms with your own cultural marginalization and irrelevance is depressing. Why isn’t this making you angry?

Girls need to know—and should be told explicitly—that it’s alright to feel anger. That it’s a healthy emotion that, as humans, they have the right to feel and express. It might not make them any friends, but that’s another topic entirely. It also doesn’t mean giving children, girls or boys, a pass for violent, disruptive, or entitled behavior. Understanding and managing anger can be part of larger childhood lessons about resilience, empathy, and compassion.

“Girls, taught to ignore their anger, become disassociated from themselves.”

— Soraya Chemaly, from Does Your Daughter Know It’s OK To Be Angry? (via wishbzne)

the greatest skill a woman can learn for herself is self reliance

i personally have only very rarely ever used tampons due to personal preference but I remember how friends used to tell me about how they felt it was making their cramps and overall period worse and i heard women talk about starting to use reusable cloth-pads and other alternatives and how much better it got for them - how their flow got weaker, their overall period got shorter and the pain was less

this is literally insane

if you start reading books again. you will feel at least a little better. I promise