Be Proud To Stand Up

A few months ago I allowed myself to be convinced by a guy to do something I didn’t want to do. I had to forget that I was allowed to say No in order to remember that I wanted to say No. I felt like a fool.

And then I said No. I said it loudly, I got up and put my clothes on.

But so much more upsetting than the experience itself was the experience of telling my friends about saying No and them being shocked at my gall. Shocked at how I could stand up for myself. And I was shocked at how foreign it sounded to them. It made me really sad.

I don’t want anyone to be shocked at my boldness. I want everyone to hear that story and say Duh and tell me about their version of the story.

When I was 12 boys slid their hand up my thigh and slapped my butt. I smiled and took it because I didn’t know it was okay to say stop. I didn’t know that I could say no. So, when the principal calls telling me my daughter is suspended for punching a boy who wouldn’t stop touching her, I will cook her favorite meals. When she tells me how she cursed at the boy who wouldn’t move his hands off her knee even though she asked him to, I will smile and pull out her favorite movie to watch together. I will celebrate the fact that she accepts her body as her own and knows she has the right to say no. I never want my daughter to think her body belongs to men, because it is her own and my god should she be proud. I will teach her it’s more than okay to say stop, something I wish I had known when I was that age.

-don’t be soft, let the world know you exist restrictedthoughts

 

Favorite Feminism Of The Day: Everyone Is Gay

Everyone Is Gay is an organization that makes videos, answers questions, and visits schools (elementary and up) talking about sexuality, parents, identity and whatever else you want to ask about.

They spew such simple statements as

“Your parents may feel uncomfortable until they feel comfortable.”

and

“Don’t be a jerk”

Like I always say Keep It Simple, Stupid.

This is probably one of my favorite episodes so far. I love that they make discoveries while shooting. I love that they approach things differently and have differing levels of comfort with statements and activities, and still find their way back to agreeing with each other through problem solving. And they solve all problems with words. Never do they say, if you don’t like what your partner is doing blink at them in morse code until they figure it out, ahem, Cosmo.

So here is the playlist that I listened to for an hour and a half yesterday as I cleaned the house.

And did I mention they lip sync too? What more could you want?

I’m Gonna Play The White Girl’s Friend

Gold.

I Can’t Just Lighten Up, And I Don’t Want To

I spend a lot of time looking at the internet, looking for articles to write about, .gifs to express my fatigue at republicans and images that explain a feeling I can’t begin to put into words

Sometimes I find a picture that instantly makes me understand a concept I’ve had explained to me dozens of times. Like the one above. My best friend often finds it very difficult to be happy. And since we met I’ve spent hours telling her to fake the smile til she makes it, to go to her happy place and will herself to shelve the bad thoughts. And this image was a slap in the face. I was wrong, I’m sorry. I see now that I was hurting instead of helping.

And so I’m revising my advice, I’m going from the above image to the one below. Because I don’t need you to always be happy, I just need you to always be healthy and always be you.

I love you.

A Shockingly Brief Word About Valentines Day

Please watch the first 5 seconds of this video.  The rest of the video is great too and this guy is actually this guy’s brother but the first 5 seconds are the only part I have a comment on.

My comment is:  “yeah”

It doesn’t even deserve capitalization or punctuation.

Valentine’s Day is just a day.  Meh.

Happy thursday everyone!

Also, I wanted to point out that Nerdfighers (the fancy word for people who watch this channel) has something called Esther Day where we’re supposed to do wonderful stuff like this.  I think it’s incredible.

Also, this.  Why does John Green make the best Valentines day videos?

If You Wanna Be My Sistah

I just started reading Caitlin Moran’s How To Be A Woman and I’m already in love with it!  Tonight on the way home I read a bit I particularly liked:

l apologize if you don’t quite understand that.  Moran speaks British.

Basically what she is saying is something my friend Sam said to me the other day.  I was telling him about an ex-friend of mine and it was really hard because I don’t like to speak ill of other women but she has no redeeming qualities.  So I was basically left with “We were friends but we’re not anymore because she did some mean things.”

And Sam pointed out that treating a woman like a faberge egg simply because she has a vagina is a lot like treating a woman like a doormat because she has a vagina.  They’re both wrong.  They both pale in comparison to treating all people like people.

I am in many many ways pro-sisterhood, I just think that refusing to hold people accountable for their faults is like making a racist joke but preceding it with “No offense but-.”  It’s not going to cut it.

Maybe We Need An Overhaul

I just read Nora Ephron’s book “I Remember Nothing” in which she tells a story about one of her first jobs as a writer, or more exactly as a “researcher” aka fact checker at Newsweek.  In the story a name was spelled wrong and there was a tizzle in the ‘research room’ about which researcher had made the error and would be fired.

What she points out that she understood in hindsight is that the writers were all male.  The male writer had written the name wrong and the all-female pool of ‘researcher’ underlings would be blamed.

Ephron points out that at the time she didn’t see the institutional sexism for what it was.

This reminded me of a great article about the talented Nicki Minaj.

Brags and disses are inherent to the culture of hip-hop—part of defining one’s self is by showing how flamboyantly you can cut down someone else—and Nicki Minaj as a spitter is not exempt from this tradition. But the feminist inside me wishes this was not the case, beginning with her feud with Lil Kim during the release of Pink Friday, after Kim accused her of stealing her style. (Prior, Minaj properly genuflected at the throne of Kim.) A few unfortunate barbs back, and the first single from Minaj’s second album, Roman Reloaded, is “Stupid Hoe,” a Kim dis that is sonically adventurous, lyrically amazing (“You can suck my diznik, if you take this jizz-is,You don’t like them disses, give my ass some kisses”), and then verbatim calls her adversaries “Nappy headed hoes.”…

Meanwhile, fans of women rappers watch with dismay as the new crop repeats the male-centric cycle of dis-retort-repeat, rather than supporting one another. As Azealia Banks gets increasingly famous, her Southern counterpart, Tampa Bay’s Dominique Young Unique, is throwing barbs her way, releasing diss tracks and having Twitter fights with the fellow 20-year-old. At this point, the good old-fashioned rap beef feels regressive, especially when we’re finally getting over the drought of women receiving attention. With Minaj’s lead, it would be kinda nice if, just once, all these awesome women would get together and do a “Ladies First 2012.” Because we have a much bigger, much more deadly adversary to combat: patriarchy.

I know basically nothing about rap music or the surrounding culture but I do know that if it’s about proving yourself by dissing others and Minaj as a woman is being pitted against other women, then the Newsweek offices of the 1960’s aren’t that different from wherever Minaj is hanging out.  No matter what it might look like on the outside.