Tag Archives: feminism

John Birmingham (A Man) Says It’s A Shameful Week To Be A Man

Posted by Fiona on

wtf gif

I mean, what is it with you losers? Do you genuinely hate women? Or are you just too stupid to live and breed? I mean that literally. The gene pool would be better without you. Yes, Sattler, I’m looking at you. And your mate, Akerman. And that restaurant owner with the sub-moronic sense of humour. And the misogynist fools the Chief of the Army is talking to here. And that slobbering waste of human skin married to Nigella Lawson. And seemingly 95 per cent of the communters on Youtube. And the army of dickless wonders stinking up Xbox Live. And the celebrated rapists of rugby league. And that soccer coach with the delightful Dark Ages twist on marital relations. And and and …
- John Birmingham

Yeah, It’s been a hell of a ‘what the fuck men’ week. John Birmingham summed it up well in his post A Shameful Week To Be A Man. I was sickened by the Nigella Lawson D/V story, both by Charles Saatchi – but ALSO by all the people who stood by, taking photos while he had his hands around her throat throttling her. WTF people.  How terrifying must it have been for Nigella to be in a highly public place, knowing people were watching her being strangled, but not one person stood up to help. They were too busy taking photos with their iPhones. How very powerless and vulnerable she must feel, to know that she can be abused in broad day light, in public and no one will help her. Abuse feels humiliating and shaming for most people. This shame is compounded when in a culture that turns a blind eye and permits it. I won’t even get started on what I think of the system response ie. police courts etc..

It was a highlight of my week when Lieutenant General David Morrison issued his get out statement and told the Australian Defence Force to treat women with respect – but it didn’t take the sting out of all the gaming community bullshit for me. After all, those men aren’t seeing the light, not at all.

It’s great when men see the deal.  It’s even better when they call it as they see it. Directly. Publically.  Thank you Lieutenant General David Morrison. Thank you John Birmingham. Thank you for being men.

Book Love: Femininity and Domination: Studies in the Phenomenology of Oppression

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femininity-and-domination-studies-in-the-phenomenology-of-oppression

In seven lucid, incisive essays written over a 15-year period, Bartky confronts some of the ways in which women can be disempowered by the society they nonetheless support. With uncompromising logic, she shows how feminism can be integrated into philosophy. “On Psychological Oppression” explores the reality of such oppression and the resulting alienation of the oppressed, and the similarities between the effects of sexism and those of racism and colonialism. “Feeding Egos and Tending Wounds” maintains that traditional heterosexual relationships keep women subservient through unequal exchange of women’s emotional support for men’s economic support. Women’s acquiescence to their own sexual objectification and the inevitable failure of their efforts to match mass-marketed standards of beauty is discussed in terms of Marx’s concept of alienation in “Narcissism, Femininity, and Alienation.” Other pieces consider the complexities of “politically correct sexuality” and how Michel Foucault’s perspectives can be brought into feminist dialogue. Bartky teaches philosophy at the University of Illinois.
- Publisher’s Weekly

Please Let Women Grow Up

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[see them all HERE]

“Under the current ‘tyranny of slenderness’ women are forbidden to become large or massive; they must take up as little space as possible. The very contours of a woman’s body takes on as she matures – the fuller breasts and rounded hips – have become distateful. The body by which a woman feels herself judged and which by rigorous discipline she must try to assume is the body of early adolescence, slight and unformed, a body lacking flesh or substance, a body in whose very contours the image of immaturity has been inscribed. The requirement that a woman maintain a smooth and hairless skin carries further the theme of inexperience, for an infantilized face must accompany her infantilized body, a face that never ages or furrows its brow in thought. The face of the ideally feminine woman must never display the marks of character, wisdom, and experience that we so admire in men.”

— Sandra Lee Bartky, Foucault, Femininity, and the Modernization of Patriarchal Power

More than just using the unphotoshopped version to measure “reality”and of course our own “ïnferior” beauty against… I think it’s important to see what is at work with this. How women are virtually frozen in time by the cultural expectation/constructions that women don’t age, that their bodies are “uniform” of correct adolescent-like proportion.

There must be a sense of self-alienation when your projected image does not align with the image you are confronted with in the mirror. What’s sad, is that the ïnferior”version is well … yeah … inferior. It means these women can never truly live up to themselves. Nor (as we know) can any of us measure up to them either.

There are many of these photoshop “touchups” that I think rob the character, wisdom and yes, beauty from these women. In particular the Penelope Cruz shots. I also thought the Jennifer Lawrence and Kelly Clarkson touch ups were sad – let them be their regular, healthy selves!

Pay Attention Gaming Communities: This Is What It Looks Like When Men Take A Definite Stance Against Misogyny and Sexism

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Ok, I am impressed. Seriously impressed with Chief of Army, Lieutenant General David Morrison.

He’s the tough-as-nails army chief who has become an internet sensation for a video speech ordering misbehaving troops to “get out” if they don’t want to live by his standards.

But Lieutenant-General David Morrison has also won praise from feminist groups for campaigning for the Australian Defence Force to treat women with respect.

The praise across social media for the father-of-three included observations that he should be deployed to train the nation’s politicians on leadership and gender issues before the federal election.

Oh my, shouldn’t he JUST be deployed to train politician’s about gender issues! Frankly, when it comes to confronting misogyny and sexism head on, I think he outclasses Julia Gillard by a mile.

What’s Lieutenant General David Morrison riled up about? Well… in short, his speech followed revelations that members allegedly filmed themselves having sex with female colleagues and women they met in Kings Cross clubs and circulated the derogatory images and text using Defence computers. See the Australian News article, Lieutenant-General David Morrison wins praise over handling of sex scandal, for more information.

The defining (heart warming) moment for me was when he stated:

“If you become aware of any individual degrading another, then show moral courage and take a stand against it.”

Applause

And maybe Lieutenant General David Morrison should be deployed to do some training for the gaming community too. Yes indeed, the gaming community could learn a thing or two from Lieutenant General David Morrison. For instance, I’d love  to see all my male gamer friends, who are NOT misogynistic or sexist in-game (or out) themselves, show some moral courage in-game (and out) and take a stand against other men who are.

I’d also like to see my female gamer friends quit rolling over and pretending that it’s okay when men treat them appallingly in game. I know, I know, I get it. We tolerate it to keep the peace. We tolerate it to retain our raiding spots and our spots on PVP teams. We tolerate it so we don’t look like whiney bitches. We tolerate it so we can “fit in” and allegedly we tolerate it so we can “be one of the boys”. This sends a confusing message. As one of my male friends said, “You are the only woman I know that says anything about it. The other girls act like one of the guys and don’t mind.”

Trust me, I mind. I am not the only woman who minds because I talk to other female gamers all the time, who very much mind. I also talk to my male gaming friends and some of them also mind. If some women have given you the impression that the rest of us don’t mind misogyny and sexism, that’s really sad. And irritating. And false.

I have ZERO tolerance for misogyny or sexism and I never wanted to be “one of the boys”… like most women players, I just want to play the fuckin’ games I want to play without putting up with shit. There is no excuse for why, when  in-game chat is filled with horrid sexist crap, that there is only one person challenging it. That is to say there’s no reason for sexism and misogyny to be happening so blatently (or at all)  in-game (or out) unless there are very few people with moral courage who will confront it.  I’ve got a track record for stepping up when I see anyone being pulled under and I’ve paid the price for it. It’s not a one person job you see, it’s a community thing. ALL of us have to stand up and say no way.

Ms. Blog States”Actually, About Half Of Gamers Are Women”

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I’m not over this one yet … in fact, I may not “get over it” for some time to come.

A new study, “2013 Essential Facts About the Computer and Video Game Industry,” reports that women make up 45 percent of all gamers and 46 percent of all “habitual video game purchasers.” In fact, adult women make up 31 percent of the video game population and boys under 17 only make up 19 percent. And in a study by Magid Advisors of people ages 45 to 64, about 61 percent of women play video games compared with only 57 percent of men.

Read the whole article HERE

What does it take to educate people that misogyny and sexism are not okay? What does it take to create real change? What does it take to make gaming a sexism free good time?
It shits me off that there will be no female protagonists (again/still) in this year’s video game releases. It shits me off that as game consumers women are rendered invisible by the industry.

Maybe change is happening … but if it is, it’s really fucking sloooow change.

Glacial pace

Examine What You Tolerate And Yes Asshats, Women DO Belong In Video Games

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Women belong in video games

I don’t often repost other people’s stuff, however, I am pretty sure that I cannot top Miss Representation’s concise, clear and targeted response to the issue of sexism in the gaming community. If you’ve been around this blog for awhile you will know that I am a girl and I game. I’ve written about sexism in gaming before, and talked about some of my experiences in posts like  Gaming Love: Gamers Against Bigotry or Gaming Love: I’m Feeling Very Into Mute. Suffice it to say, I think its VERY important that sexism be confronted directly in the gaming community – and that when it is not, it makes it unpleasant at best for women who game, but a damn nightmare or worse for many of us.

I’m a long standing WOW player and from time to time, the sexist bullshit has pulled me down so far that I just switch games. Like now, for instance. I haven’t logged into WOW for a couple of months and a big reason for that is I just cannot be assed to deal with sexist bastards. I’ve been playing more single player games (Skyrim) or GW2 of late and I have to say that the GW2 community is FAR more accepting toward female players. General chat is not continuously bombarded with hateful sexist speech, rape jokes and all the crap that demeans and diminishes female players.

women don't belong in video games

All that said, I was playing a bit last night and because there is such a LACK of sexist gibberish in general chat, my eye was instantly caught by a bunch of players talking about the Dragon Bash Festival … which they changed to the “Cunt Bashing Festival”and went into some detail about gang banging women … with or without rape (confusing I know but asshats are often illogical).  Anyway, it made me sick and it made me sad, and once again I elected to log out and go read a book.

This sexist garbage is serious shit. It’s NOT ok … and for you guys that indulge in this sort of ingame behaviour – you have GOT to realize that your hideous behaviour matters. It impacts on people, real live people sitting on the other side of that computer screen. Not only are you treating women like shit, you are also creating a permissive culture where it is acceptable and even funny to demean, demoralize, diminish and sometimes terrorize women. You teach young men that this is okay behaviour. You teach young women that this is ok, no, better than ok, it’s “fun”.

It’s not fun. It’s not funny. Women play video games. We buy them with our money, same as you people with penises do. We want to play them with the same abandon that you do.

Please read the Miss Representation synopsis of the current state of play and support their iniatives. It takes less than 2 minutes to write a tweet and let other people know that you are not on board with a gaming culture that is sexist and overrun with ignorant women hating men. If you don’t think that there is a sexist women hating gaming culture, I encourage you to read each and every one of the linked “negative and hateful replies” to Sarkeesian’s tweet.

Earlier this week, at the biggest video game conference of the year – the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) - Microsoft unveiled a number of new games for their Xbox One video game console. After the presentation, Anita Sarkeesian, of Feminist Frequency, correctly observed that none of the games featured had a female protagonist. Her one tweet elicited a slew of negative and hateful replies from male users who inexplicably seemed to take offense to her statement.

Their vitriolic and sometimes violent words, as Sarkeesian says, reveal “the male privilege and male entitlement endemic in the gaming community.” In fact, during the very same Microsoft event, the tech company introduced a game by making an oppressive rape joke themselves - in front of a massive audience – for which they were later forced to apologize.

As video games have become one of the dominant forms of entertainment globally, with the top titles regularly out earning even the biggest summer blockbusters, it’s increasingly important that we challenge the messages these games and the larger community around them send to our girls and boys.

Let’s not forget that the aforementioned sexism is reflective of a larger American culture that continues to demean and degrade women. For instance, this same week, Republican congressman Trent Franks claimed that pregnancy rates are lower for women who have been raped, while others in Washington decided not to substantially overhaul a military system that allowed at least 26,000 sexual assaults to occur last year.

The issue of misogyny in gaming is particularly troubling because – contrary to stereotypes – at least 45% of all gamers are women and girls. How can our leaders, in corporate America, the media and beyond, continue to ignore and demean half of our population? And how can so many sit idly by when the women and girls they love continue to be disrespected and disparaged?

It’s time for all of this to stop.

On Monday, U.S. late night talk show host Jimmy Fallon will launch his annual “video game week,” where he will spotlight – to an audience of millions – many of the titles that debuted at E3. The producers of his show have explained that the intent of this week-long celebration is to broadly represent the rise of video gaming culture. Which means, they should be critical of the rampant sexism on display and certainly include the voices of women and girls.

Yet, based on early reports, the show doesn’t plan to promote any games with a sole female protagonist.

Tweet Mr. Fallon (@jimmyfallon) and his team (@LateNightJimmy) to ask them to stand up for women and use their influence next week to challenge misogyny in the gaming community. By encouraging a better representation of women in video game culture, Late Night with Jimmy Fallon can help reverse the troubling trends that were on display this week.

tweetjimmy 2

- Miss Representation

Sunday Thoughts: Jesus Isn’t Actually The Boss of Christianity

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“All information that we have about the life and teachings of Jesus Christ are in the Bible. One of the things that Jesus is quoted as saying is that the Old Testament was accurate and inspired down to the very punctuation (jot and tittle).

So, either the Bible is a valid book, or Christianity is false. There is no other valid option.

Therefore, if feminism is not taught in the Bible, and even further, if feminism is contradicted in the Bible, then there is no intellectually honest way that a woman could call herself, “Christian” and “feminist” at the same time.

The Bible is the only source for Christian knowledge, and it therefore must be accepted in order to be honestly a Christian believer.”

Read on –> The Bible and the Feminist

Sunday thoughts god is sleeping on the job

It’s safe to say when it comes to defending women’s rights, god’s sleeping on the job and has been for a verrrrrry long time. Guess that’s what we’d expect from imaginary friends.

What Jesus Affirmed about the Old Testament

The Nature of the Old Testament’s Authority. It Has:

A. Divine Inspiration — Matthew 22:43
B. Indestructability — Matthew 5:17,18
C. Infallibility — John 10:35
D. Final Authority — Matthew 4:4,7,10
E. Historicity — Matthew 12:40; 24:37
F. Factual Inerrancy — John 17:17; Matthew 22:29
G. Christ-Centered Unity –Luke 24:27, John 5:39
H. Spiritual Clarity — Luke 24:25
I. Faith and Life Sufficiency — Luke 16:31

The Extent of the Old Testament’s Authority. It Extends to:

A. The Words — Matthew 22:43; (cf. 1 Cor. 2:13) B. The Tenses of Verbs — Matthew 22:32; (cf. Gal. 3:16) C. The Smallest Parts of the Words — Matthew 5:17,18

Sunday thoughts - jesus was a feminist

This whole “Jesus was a feminist” argument posed by writers such as Leonard Swidler (book linked above) or by “Christain Feminists” is simply irrelevant.

Whether Jesus existed or not …. was or was not a feminist, is neither here nor there. IF Jesus existed, he at best set a precedence for “choose my choice, cherry picking religion” – which is to say, Jesus cannot both state that the Bible is the True word of God, whilst picking and choosing the parts he wished to adhere to or behave in a way that was not in accordance with the True Word of God.  Doing so would simply make him a hypocrite or a bad Christian.

It doesn’t matter if Jesus was a feminist, or whether Jesus was nice to women. The fact of the matter is the Bible is NOT feminist. The Bible does NOT promote equality of men and women. The Bible does NOT ensure the rights and freedoms of women. Women were second class citizens according to the Bible. They could be bought, sold, raped or murdered, silenced, beaten, excluded and the list goes on and this has not changed over much.

It doesn’t take an atheist woman to see this. Lisa Miller wrote an article called, Feminism’s Final Frontier? Religion that is noteable for the fact that it makes explicit that there are men, religious men, who very clearly see the writing on the wall.

“…. an evangelical minister named Jim Henderson, argues that unless the male leaders of conservative Christian churches do some serious soul-searching — pronto — the women who have always sustained those churches with their time, sweat and cash will leave. In droves. And they won’t come back. Their children, traditionally brought to church by their mothers, will thus join the growing numbers of Americans who call themselves “un-churched.” Nevermind that the Bible talks about women submitting to men and sitting silently in church, Henderson declaims. That’s ancient history.  “Until those with power (men) decide to give it away to those who lack it (women), I believe we will continue to misrepresent Jesus’ heart and mar the beauty of his Kingdom,” Henderson writes.

I of course, am not blaming Jesus for any of this. Jesus was not the boss of Christianity, afterall.

God is NOT Pro-Life and Religion Is NOT Personal

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sunday thoughts - Religion is political

It is ridiculous to say that religion is a “choose my choice”undertaking for women. Religion is used to control our relationships, our bodies, our minds and our voices. Religion impacts our rights and our freedoms. Religion is POLITICAL.

Sunday Thoughts - Women Bring it On Themselves

Religion sees women and “women’s issues” in very particular ways which are political, which disadvantage us legally, socially, economically, physically and mentally. You cannot choose your choice to believe the “good parts”of religion whilst ignoring  the widespread oppression of women which is done in the name of “god”.

Sunday Thoughts God is not pro life

There is no evidence to support the presence of a god, certainly not a god who cares enough about humanity to not willfully destroy humanity at the point we do not believe enough, or properly. Saying god, any god, is pro life is the most ridiculous and short sighted drivel. Saying religion is “pro-women”or even “feminist” is insane.

Sunday thoughts Seperation of religion and community services please

Religion is political. When we give over public dollars to religious organizations, we’d have to be beyond naive to believe that their religious values/beliefs/opinions will not shape those “public services”. Church organizations have no business imposing their religious agendas on the public, whether through their vote, or their “services”… religious based community services will ALWAYS disadvantage women, children and minorities.