Hey, cis dudes. Here are some fucked up things about the patriarchy and rape culture* that you might not realize:
Women who don’t get cat-called or harassed feel ugly because of that lack. We know that attractive women get harassed all of the time, and that harassment is about power and objectification, and that all women regardless of appearance are seen as objects to men, and that’s why it’s wrong, it’s bad, and why we get harassed on the street. So those of us who never get cat-called are left to wonder why we’re so hideous that gross men don’t want to treat us like objects.
If we don’t believe women when they say “I experienced this, and this was assault,” it’s sometimes because we’ve all experienced that. And if that was assault, then we’ve been assaulted. And that creates such a cognitive dissonance for women who think that we’re strong, we would fight back, that we refuse to accept that that was assault. So those other women must be liars. Because if they’re right, then our entire life has been a nightmare, and we didn’t even realize it.
Or, we don’t accept that abuse that we’ve experienced was abuse, because that would make our memories false. That would mean that the love or affection or happiness that we thought we felt was not real. Even when we discover that our exes were serial abusers, even if we believe those other women, *we* weren’t abused. What we had was *special*. Ours was the only healthy relationship that ex had ever had. That way we can hate them on behalf of other people, but we don’t have to color our own memories.
Our male partners treat us like therapists, because men are taught that they aren’t allowed to show emotion, so they have to bottle up their problems until they get a communicative femme partner, and then they can finally process their feminist emotions, not realizing how unfeminist it is to make one woman your entire support team.
Every woman was taught to hide her bra straps. If you see a woman’s bra straps, it’s because she has made the *conscious* decision to include them in the aesthetic, or to not give a fuck. But it takes work to get there.
Every single one of us has heard the joke about it being “a little chilly” if our shirt wasn’t thick enough to obscure our nipples. That’s one of the reasons that we wear bras. To stop hearing that comment, not because we all need breast support.
Any more infuriatingly true generalizations come to mind?
*these are all things that have been relevant and infuriating in the last 48 hours. There’s a lot more, believe me.
Cerebral Sexuality 