Okay, but this is an excellent method to use when anyone is being inappropriate. Pretend that you don’t get it. Whether the comment is sexist, racist, sexual, misogynistic, inappropriate, off-color… watching them squirm as they try to explain and realize just how awful their comment was it is better than being angry about it.
Playing dumb is very effective. When this one company I worked for asked me to do something sketchy I left a note saying “I’m not sure I understand. I thought we couldn’t do […] because it was illegal? Was I incorrect? Is […] something you want me to do?” And they quickly changed their minds. It works much better than a straight accusation if you’re in a vulnerable position.
American Reflexxx is a short film documenting a social experiment that took place in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. Alli Coates filmed performance artist Signe Pierce as she strutted down a busy oceanside street in stripper garb and a reflective mask. The pair agreed not to communicate until the experiment was completed, but never anticipated the horror that would unfold in under an hour
The result is a heart wrenching technicolor spectacle that raises questions about gender stereotypes, mob mentality, and violence in America.
You see how quickly it escalates– and how quick people are to harass when they feel there is no reprecussion. But as soon as they are confronted, they ran away.
Notice that it’s a cis woman who shoves her down and that there are cis women hurling slurs at her right along the men. You can’t just chalk this up to male violence and act like it’s not your business. Cis women who consider themselves allies need to take a stand against violent transmisogynist cis women just like men need to take a stand against violent rapist men and white people need to take a stand against white violence.
This was really good
A reminder why we still need Pride…and why Pride that is not Trans inclusive is utterly useless.
When we say we’re more afraid of you than you are of us, we aren’t joking. When we say that cis women have a hand in our oppression, we aren’t *fucking* joking.
i looked up a few things after watching this, and there are some clarifications I would like to add
Signe Pierce is actually a cis woman, however much of the violence that ended up happening can be contributed to the fact that people couldn’t tell whether she was male or female, and that scared them. They assumed that she wasn’t cis due to features such as her slightly broader than average shoulders and small breasts, which I think says a lot on both how society views the bodies of trans women and the expectations of what cis women’s bodies are supposed to look like
she did actually acknowledge in interviews that if she was not a cis woman, or if she was a woman of color, the results likely would have been much worse. The interviews that she and Alli Coates did on it are in general really interesting and I would suggest that yall check them out
not directly related to the video, but Signe Pierce and Alli Coates, at least at the time of the video’s filming and then later public release, are dating and I think that’s cute and gay fdjaslkfdj
so. i think there’s a good chance this was a joke. i lost my mind laughing when i first got it. but also? this is exactly how men talk, so i’m gonna break it down seriously.
i made that post after dinner with my friend’s family. his dad, let’s call him john, was belittling his wife so she wasn’t talking much and he’d made a few jabs about his son’s painted nails so his son was kind of wilting. john’s a nice guy, smart guy, really likes me & thinks i’m smart. i was pretty much carrying all the emotional labor at that dinner–trying to make my friend and his mom feel comfortable while also engaging with john. we were making conversation about lots of things, it wasn’t a particularly controversial or heated discussion at really any point in time. again, john’s a cool guy–he’s liberal and progressive and knows that i’m a lesbian and all sorts of nice things. he works for a bigggg banking company–i don’t wanna say which one, but you’d know the name. we were talking about #metoo and he starts talking about how sexual harassment isn’t really an issue where he works.
three hours before he said this, a man in times square had grabbed my boob. at a restaurant i worked at, a rapist who worked there got my number off the scheduling app and would text me vile things while we were both working to make me uncomfortable. he’d also touch my ass every shift but always managed to pretend like it was an accident. it wasn’t. my best friend, who was also at dinner with us, worked at her moms law firm when she was 17, and the man across from her had a countdown on his whiteboard to the day she turned 18 and every day he would look at her as he changed the number. i’ve been sexually assaulted multiple times outside of these instances, and so has she.
but other men don’t see these things.
and this man looks at me, and tells me sexual harassment doesn’t happen, because he doesn’t see it. and here’s the thing: that’s not why i’m mad. i’m not mad because he didn’t know.
i’m mad because i know this man. he is my friend’s father, he is my father, he is my uncles, he is my professors, he is my cousins, and my bosses, and my colleagues. i know how you have to talk to these men. it’s a game. and you have to play along whether you want to or not, because they won’t hear a word you say if you don’t.
here’s how the game works: john talks about everything like he’s the authority on the matter, because he can’t get it through his brain that someone, especially someone who is not a man, could possibly know something he doesn’t. so john starts talking about things very confidently. and because nobody knows everything, he gets a lot of things wrong. things that i refuse to let him be wrong about. so if i want to change john’s mind, if i want him to hear my point of view, i have to speak to him in the only way he will listen. i have to be, above all, pleasant. john has been taught for years to laugh at a woman’s anger, so if any hint of indignation sneaks into my voice, he won’t take me seriously any more and i’ll lose him entirely. i have to smile and laugh a little and be charming. but i also have to be articulate. i have to make sure i sound intelligent or else he’ll dismiss me as a stupid teenage girl who doesn’t know what she’s talking about. but i also can’t sound too intelligent because if he starts feeling threatened by my intelligence he’ll get defensive. (sidenote! he has a tiny dick.) so it’s quite a complicated game but i’m good at it. in fact, i’m one of the best. so here i am, carefully navigating the best way to hold this man’s hand and babysit him as i give him a kindergarten level course on sexual assault in the workplace, while also not letting him realize that i’m having to condescend to him because his brain is as tiny as his dick, and can only handful little bits of new information spoonfed to him like applesauce. i have to make it sound like i think he is not only smart, but smarter than me. i have to scatter in little phrases like, “in my experience” or “i could be wrong” and constantly undermine myself, even when speaking on a topic i am incredibly well-versed in, because i have to suggest that i think he is smarter than me or else he won’t deem me worthy of his attention.
i’m good at it. i play the little fucking game and before i know it, i’ve got john here nodding along and acting like he agreed with what i’m saying all along, acting like he came up with it, acting like he DIDN’T totally contradict what i just told him minutes before. but since he didn’t come up with it, he’ll likely interrupt me before i even get to the end of my point and say something totally misinformed and now i’m trying to educate him on both of the things he got wrong but before i can even do that he’s interrupting me again and now there’s THREE things i’ve gotta teach this guy without him catching on to the fact that i’m teaching him.
now. here’s the best part about the game. it’s soul-shatteringly dehumanizing. to disregard your own trauma, your own emotion, your own incredibly valid anger that you have fought and fought and fought to believe you have a right to feel, to tone down your beliefs in order to make them more palatable to someone who is this deeply ignorant, to force yourself to giggle and be charming as you discuss the thing that has ripped you into shreds, to ignore how triggering it is to even breach this topic in conversation, to be complicit in making yourself small in order to get your point across, to look into the eyes of a man who has, unwittingly, because of his ignorance, enabled other men to engage in this same behavior–it turns a dinner conversation into a thing that is traumatizing in it’s own right.
and i feel obligated to put myself through this because of my privilege, because as an attractive, white twenty year old, i can hold this man’s attention better than a massive portion of the population, who he likely wouldn’t give the time of day to. i refuse to let him live his life unchallenged, so i do what i have to do to make myself heard.
and i feel the repercussions of this so strongly i dissociate more viciously than i have in weeks and lose all memory of a solid 3 hours of my life after this conversation.
and i come on here, and post: men are useless and exhausting. because i am angry at what men have done to me. at what they continue to do to me. at what i must do to myself in order to force them to wake up and realize what other men are doing to me and to please, for the love of god, MAKE IT STOP.
and i get this message from you, a dumbass who’s got his head shoved so far up his own asshole that it’s about to come back up through his esophagus, assuming you know what i’m talking about. assuming you know more than me about men and about my experiences with them, about why i made this post. assuming that because you’re not the scum of the fucking earth and because you do three good things, it somehow balances out the treatment i have received for years from men, and makes my anger towards them, and my hatred of them: unjust. and my post wasn’t even me being angry! it was me being exhausted!!!!! if i’m tired of men, why the fuck would you, “a male” deem it at all appropriate to come near me, to send me a message, to engage with me at all? leave me alone! you know nothing!
and as much as i thought this was a joke at first, the more i read the message the more i’m convinced that it was written by a man, because even a girl pretending to be a man as a joke wouldn’t manage to sound this fucking stupid. i have dozens of stories exactly like this over the course of at least 10 years of my life. i know more than you. and this isn’t FUCKING about you. if you weren’t useless and exhausting, you would have happily scrolled by and went on with your night. but by sending me this message you proved yourself to be IMPRESSIVELY: useless and exhausting. shut the fuck up for about 3-4 years. you might learn something. also, read men explain things to me by rebecca solnit. she says all this better than i do.
If you take a young man and woman and they both tell a stranger that they work in the same restaurant, it’s very likely that they will assume that the woman is the waitress, and the young man a cook.
But I thought a woman’s place was in the kitchen? Not when she’s being paid for it. I can’t believe it took me this long to realize the implication of this. A woman’s place is one of servitude.
this fucking hit me like a fucking train
One pervasive feature of the post-#MeToo landscape has been distraught men apologizing for their gender, fretting about old drunken hookups and begging for guidance on what they can do to help. (Of course it took only moments to transform a mass catharsis into an emotional labor factory.) O.K., fine. You know what you could do to help? Everything.
How about Matt Damon refuses to show up to work until his female co-stars are paid as much as he is? How about Jimmy Fallon refuses to interview anyone who has been credibly accused of sexual assault or domestic violence? How about Robert Downey Jr. relentlessly points out microaggressions against female contemporaries until he develops a reputation for being “difficult” and every day on Twitter 4,000 eighth-graders call him an “SJW cuck”? How about Harvey Weinstein anonymously donates $100 million to that legal defense fund and then melts into the fog as though he never existed?
How about hundreds of male movie stars spend months developing a large-scale action plan to help female farmworkers battle systemic gender inequality? How about men boycott Twitter? How about men strike for International Women’s Day? How about men take on the economic and social burdens of calling out toxic patterns of gendered socialization? How about anyone but the oppressed and John Oliver lifts a finger to change anything at all?
Sexism is a male invention. White supremacy is a white invention. Transphobia is a cisgender invention. So far, men have treated #MeToo like a bumbling dad in a detergent commercial: well-intentioned but floundering, as though they are not the experts. They have a chance to do better by Time’s Up.
Only 2.6 percent of construction workers are female. We did not install this glass ceiling, and it is not our responsibility to demolish it.
men: *decided women weren’t allowed attend schools, study sciences, or have access to higher education*
men: well if women are so smart then how come there aren’t many contributions from women in history huh
men: *takes credit for women’s accomplishments* men: why don’t women contribute anything?
You guys literally just condensed Virginia Woolf’s “A Room of One’s Own” into two tumblr posts – I am very ipressed
omg I’m doing research for one of projects for college, and apparently, girls learn better when they’re in an all girls class, but boys learn even worse when they’re in an all boys class, because all the negative things become even stronger of there are no girls to act as “buffer”
get rid of the boys and let girl learn in peace, i couldn’t care less about them
It’s not our job to be a “buffer”
Separate boys from girls then, they don’t have to be acting like mothers at age 12, if boys ruin the education of others boys, um, idk, fix their behavior maybe?
I work at uni. My program is very competitive. Like you need a 92% or more to get in. We get 10x the applications than we can accept. So. This means our program is 95% female. Simply because girls do better in highschool than boys. Its literally that simple. However. This is a HUGE deal in the administration! Because OMG all those poor boys with less than a 92% can’t get into our program and woe is me, those poor poor boys. Every year we meet to talk about ways to “rectify” this “problem”. One year they’re going to stop inviting me to these meetings. Because I always ask questions like “how do we get boys into the program with lower GPAs without denying girls with higher GPAs? And how is giving boys preferential treatment not sexist?” Keep going good ladies, I’m saving your seat!
This type of thing always happens when women are dominating something, protocols are changed to accommodate and benefit men, and if this strategy isn’t successful the field is devalued.
Keep the good work!
The amount of times I heard my grandfather talk about the ‘feminization’ of schools because he wanted to blame the system for boys under performing (or, more accurately: girls out performing the boys) instead of, ya know, boys’ entitled attitudes and overall piss poor behavior when at school.
When women fail at something: there must be something wrong with women When women succeed at something: there must be something wrong with the system
I think I’ve talked about it before on other posts, but I once had an anthropology class that, completely unintentionally, was all women and one man, and he dropped the course after two weeks. The other section of the same anthropology class, taught by the same professor, was mixed with men and women. So, since it was anthropology, she asked if it was cool if she took notes. She said right away that the all female class had a wildly different vibe, that we spoke and acted differently and had different social expectations of her and the rest of the class, and that we let students complete their thoughts before disagreeing, while the mixed class was highly traditional and almost entirely male dominated because every time a woman spoke, a man jumped in halfway through to “correct” her by saying the same thing. Its a very small sample size, but I think about this a lot
how is literally every sentence in this more amazing than the last
I am literally breathless with what-the-fuck.
I still don’t know what “incel” means but I don’t think I want to know at this point.
“Incel” means “involuntarily celibate.” It’s a bunch of guys who hate women and then blame women for the fact that they can’t get a date. As opposed to, ya know, the fact that they’re fucking creeps.
“likely a virgin by not of her smallness and shyness”
Uh….
Good news people, when you have sex for the first time, you get taller! That’s how that works. All short people are virgins. When a short person has sex for the first time, they grow to above average height overnight.
These guys, wtf?
A common story with these dudes is how they were rejected by girls at school, possibly before they started getting rejected for being predatory creeps. I don’t understand why they can’t handle rejection. I mean do they think girls never suffer rejection? Like I got laughed at by my crush when I was 12 and I never admitted having feelings because I knew he would reject me. Boys in general had no interest in me, laughed at my looks. And I don’t go around dropping doors in men’s faces and hunting down waiters being both predatory and racist.
I can sympathise with the pain and loneliness. But I don’t understand the long lasting and generalised anger and hatred.
Pass Through Fire 