shinelikethunder:

samtalksfunny:

airagorncharda:

muslimfeminist:

sisterresister:

lionessclub:

We live in a really weird era of feminism in which we’re not allowed to criticise any oppressive constructs/industries (marriage, beauty/make up, porn, etc) just because some women enjoy them.

I’m really sick of of opinions and discussions being shut down with “it’s not oppressive if we like it! don’t you know that some women choose to do these things?”

well, heck. don’t you know that  men/the patriarchy have a lot to gain in keeping us content and complicit in our own oppression?

I think our generation of feminists have lost the idea of there being an oppressive structure (patriarchy) which moulds and controls the actions of individual women. So when we say “High heels are oppressive, they are a way of controlling women’s bodies, preventing us from being able to run and deforming our feet” a lot of women hear this as “Women who wear high heels are all stupid and not proper feminists. They are gullible stooges of patriarchy!” This is because Western women have been brought up in a culture that emphasizes individualism and personal choices and ignores the coercive social and cultural structures and hierarchies within which those choices are made.

The criticism is not of individual women and the question is not whether individual women do or don’t choose to wear high heels. The criticism is of the patriarchal system that coerces women into wearing high heels and that denies women a genuinely free choice as to whether or not to wear high heels.

Hey maybe some of you will take what I say seriously after hearing some other people saying it!
To be honest most people dont even wait around to hear that you’re criticising institutions before they start talking about themselves and how it’s empowering

And I think it’s worth adding that “a culture that emphasizes individualism and personal choices and ignores the coercive social and cultural structures and hierarchies within which those choices are made” is designed specifically to KEEP people from questioning those larger forces.

We also like to reject the idea that we ever make non-rational decisions and are all affected by subconscious bias. But realistically, economists and behavioral scientists have long been very aware that humans don’t make rational choices when left to their own devices.

Men in particular like to claim they are “entirely rational” and “just telling it like it is” and if that’s not the dumbest, most ignorant refusal to engage in genuine critical thinking……. 

Counterpoint: in practice, especially when the feminists doing the criticizing are as embedded in an individualist culture as everyone else, it is very common for the “criticism of institutions” to come out as deeply personal, degrading, contemptuous attacks on women who haven’t rejected those institutions outright. Or whose engagement with them simply doesn’t look the way the critic thinks it ought to. Moreover, if they object to being insulted *as a person* and *on an individual level*, they are frequently told they’re overreacting and being solipsistic by trying to make (something that wasn’t actually) a purely institution-level criticism into a personal attack (which it really kinda was).

I’m not saying that system-level criticism is inherently an insult to the people living within the system, mind you. Only that the latter is frequently passed off as the former, and it’s A Problem. So this isn’t “shut up and stop complaining or you might hurt someone’s feelings.” It’s “make sure the complaints you’re defending as Institutional Not Personal are actually, you know, institutional and not personal, because that’s not always the case every time someone claims it is” with a side of “this is why some women react with knee-jerk suspicion/hostility/defensiveness to such language, so no, having to defuse their suspicion from time to time in ambiguous cases is not an unreasonable burden.”

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    This is called the stage of passive acceptance. “In this stage, women lack awareness of the structural and systematic...

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