(no subject)
Jun. 27th, 2005 03:18 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
thejunipertreeIt is more than a little well known that I do not consider myself to be a feminist. While women, on the basis of their gender, can get the short end of the stick on many things, I have also seen hundreds of situations where men have had the same thing happen to them. I don't want equal rights for women. I want them for everyone. Everyone else is more than welcome to label themselves as they see fit, this is just how I view the issue.
That being said, I'm a bit irked by something I saw while journal-hopping. I had spring-boarded to someone's personal journal from a pagan community, interestingly enough, in which a debate was taking place about the use of the words 'womon', 'womyn' and 'gyrl' to replace the properly spelled words because of negative implications the words may hold. That's a load of bollocks I'm not going to get into at the moment because, quite simply, I don't have the energy for it. However, you can make note that I think that practice is utterly ridiculous for a number of reasons.
In this person's journal, they were discussing their experiences at Womongathering and how wonderful of a time they had in such a safe space.
Buh?
Safe space? What the crap is that?
Reading on, I discovered that 'safe space' was a term that described a place where no men were allowed, by virtue of having a penis, and women would finally be able to feel secure because of the lack of penises in the surrounding scenery. This is a concept that truly boggles my brain.
If you want to hang out with a thousand other women, all half-naked and menstruating freely, fine. Great. Have a fucking ball. Sit around, eat nasty-ass vegetarian food and talk about how your mother never loved you and how you strive too hard to please your uncaring father. Get all googly-eyed about some vague concept of universal sisterhood. Lovely. You can even have a drum circle, if you wish.
But, when you start throwing around terms like 'safe space', I'm going to wish I could throw a brick right at your throat. 'Safe space' implies that women are, as a gender, completely helpless and constantly preyed upon by insidious men. Using that term makes the user appear to believe that men are simply libido-driven knuckle-draggers who want nothing more but to leer, humilate, control, rape, and kill. The term 'safe safe' holds the connotation that it is something we, as women, need.
I don't know about any of you, but I have lived in some seriously nasty neighbourhoods. I've gone to sleep with gunshots peppering my dreams. I've watched news casts about serial rapists in my neighbourhood. I walked past construction sites and through parks at night time. Not once did I ever feel like men were out to get me and not once did I ever feel like prey.
Mind you, I've been harassed by men. I've been shouted at from cars, been asked out by rather aggressive complete strangers, had 'How're you doin', shortie?' said to me more times than I can count, and been mugged at knifepoint. I lost my virginity by force to a boyfriend who didn't understand the word, 'no'.
I don't think the men who did these things did them because they were misogynists. They committed those acts because they're assholes. They had no respect for anyone else on the face of the planet, regardless of gender. Human filth, plainly.
Did they hurt me? Some of them, yes. I have a particularly growl-inducing memory of being thrown in some thorn bushes after being mugged by some pony-tailed jerk, praying that he wouldn't discover my last fifteen dollars in my shirt pocket after I told him I had no money. The sticker bushes ripped the stockings I was wearing, my last good pair, and I wouldn't have the extra money to buy more for a long time. The forcible removal of my hymen is something that I'm not ever going to forget and now that I am older and stronger and smarter, if I were to ever see that guy again, he'd be lucky to come out of the situation with all of his body parts still intact and in working order.
Never, in any of these situations, did I ever feel like a victim. And that is what the use of terms like 'safe space' imply. That we are victims, plums ripe for the plucking, and that we are constantly threatened by the horrors that await us in the hands of men. This, above all else, sets back the notion of equality a few hundred years. You want to be equal? You've got to act equal. And cowering with one's head in the sand isn't the way to go about things.
Every time I've been hurt or harassed, I've fought back like hell. And I didn't allow myself to wither away and whine, like some flailing Victorian heroine, about how persecuted I was for having the misfortune of being born with a cunt.
Fuck that noise. I'm nobody's victim.
So, you can take this concept of 'safe space' and cram it in your goddamn ass, sister. I don't need it.
That being said, I'm a bit irked by something I saw while journal-hopping. I had spring-boarded to someone's personal journal from a pagan community, interestingly enough, in which a debate was taking place about the use of the words 'womon', 'womyn' and 'gyrl' to replace the properly spelled words because of negative implications the words may hold. That's a load of bollocks I'm not going to get into at the moment because, quite simply, I don't have the energy for it. However, you can make note that I think that practice is utterly ridiculous for a number of reasons.
In this person's journal, they were discussing their experiences at Womongathering and how wonderful of a time they had in such a safe space.
Buh?
Safe space? What the crap is that?
Reading on, I discovered that 'safe space' was a term that described a place where no men were allowed, by virtue of having a penis, and women would finally be able to feel secure because of the lack of penises in the surrounding scenery. This is a concept that truly boggles my brain.
If you want to hang out with a thousand other women, all half-naked and menstruating freely, fine. Great. Have a fucking ball. Sit around, eat nasty-ass vegetarian food and talk about how your mother never loved you and how you strive too hard to please your uncaring father. Get all googly-eyed about some vague concept of universal sisterhood. Lovely. You can even have a drum circle, if you wish.
But, when you start throwing around terms like 'safe space', I'm going to wish I could throw a brick right at your throat. 'Safe space' implies that women are, as a gender, completely helpless and constantly preyed upon by insidious men. Using that term makes the user appear to believe that men are simply libido-driven knuckle-draggers who want nothing more but to leer, humilate, control, rape, and kill. The term 'safe safe' holds the connotation that it is something we, as women, need.
I don't know about any of you, but I have lived in some seriously nasty neighbourhoods. I've gone to sleep with gunshots peppering my dreams. I've watched news casts about serial rapists in my neighbourhood. I walked past construction sites and through parks at night time. Not once did I ever feel like men were out to get me and not once did I ever feel like prey.
Mind you, I've been harassed by men. I've been shouted at from cars, been asked out by rather aggressive complete strangers, had 'How're you doin', shortie?' said to me more times than I can count, and been mugged at knifepoint. I lost my virginity by force to a boyfriend who didn't understand the word, 'no'.
I don't think the men who did these things did them because they were misogynists. They committed those acts because they're assholes. They had no respect for anyone else on the face of the planet, regardless of gender. Human filth, plainly.
Did they hurt me? Some of them, yes. I have a particularly growl-inducing memory of being thrown in some thorn bushes after being mugged by some pony-tailed jerk, praying that he wouldn't discover my last fifteen dollars in my shirt pocket after I told him I had no money. The sticker bushes ripped the stockings I was wearing, my last good pair, and I wouldn't have the extra money to buy more for a long time. The forcible removal of my hymen is something that I'm not ever going to forget and now that I am older and stronger and smarter, if I were to ever see that guy again, he'd be lucky to come out of the situation with all of his body parts still intact and in working order.
Never, in any of these situations, did I ever feel like a victim. And that is what the use of terms like 'safe space' imply. That we are victims, plums ripe for the plucking, and that we are constantly threatened by the horrors that await us in the hands of men. This, above all else, sets back the notion of equality a few hundred years. You want to be equal? You've got to act equal. And cowering with one's head in the sand isn't the way to go about things.
Every time I've been hurt or harassed, I've fought back like hell. And I didn't allow myself to wither away and whine, like some flailing Victorian heroine, about how persecuted I was for having the misfortune of being born with a cunt.
Fuck that noise. I'm nobody's victim.
So, you can take this concept of 'safe space' and cram it in your goddamn ass, sister. I don't need it.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2005-06-27 09:28 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-06-27 09:41 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-06-27 09:44 pm (UTC)There have been times in the recent past when strange.. feminist lingo confused me. Talking about being raped, but.. they'd never said no, weren't unconscious, didn't fight, and as far as I could understand.. were somehow raped because they were tricked, manipulated into having sex.
This concept frightens me, because as a young man-whore, I think I probably took part in a lot of emotional manipulation to get the sex.
Er, sorry, that wasn't directly related to your post as a whole. I just got caught up on strange words.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-06-27 10:10 pm (UTC)Rape is sex without consent, period.
Sex due to manipulation is still sex that has been consented to. Therefore, no rape. It may not be a shiny, happy reason to be consenting to sex, but the consent is still there.
In the past, I've been manipulated into having sex. No one is at fault for that but myself, and that's because I was too stupid to see I was being manipulated. I've also been the manipulator, later on in life, when I discovered that having boobies gave you certain special powers. ;)
At any rate, you have no worries.
Also, 'young man-whore'? hee!
(no subject)
Date: 2005-06-27 10:29 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-06-27 11:12 pm (UTC)But again, I was a mere observer to this outraged feminist discussion, and I am actually a misogynist. So who knows?
(no subject)
Date: 2005-06-27 11:40 pm (UTC)Um...I wasn't inferring anything. Sorry if you took it the wrong way.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-06-27 11:47 pm (UTC)I thought your original reply to me was talking about the type of manipulation in the feminist-to-feminist conversation I overheard, where the person said they'd been manipulated into having sex. I'm pretty sure in that instance, it was not a discussion about abuse, but about trickery. Although I maintain that "verbal, mental and emotional abuse" are not interchangable with "manipulation" which it seems you were implying.
I didn't think you meant me, personally. Although I am all for breaking someone into submission, but that's because I'm a bit of a sadist, and it's pretty consensual across the board. o.O Was that too much information?
(no subject)
Date: 2005-06-28 12:09 am (UTC)I see what you're saying though. I wasn't really implying anything other than the fact that I've heard "manipulation" used in place of "abuse". Some (including myself, I admit) really suck when it comes to semantics.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-06-28 03:01 am (UTC)TIME THAT SHOULD BE SPENT REPLYING TO YOUR BEST FRIEND'S IMPORTANT SCIENTIFIC SURVEY LEFT ON YOUR VOICEMAIL!
*ahem*
(no subject)
Date: 2005-06-29 02:29 am (UTC)I have thought long and hard on the issue at hand, but have not come up with a sufficient response. I need more of your scientific data, please.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-06-28 03:05 am (UTC)Also:
Manipulation is subtle tweaking.
Abuse is a motherfucking jackhammer.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-06-28 03:03 am (UTC)Most likely, but your knack for relaying too much information is something all of us Lucas fangirls love about you. ;)
By the way, Luke, meet my best friend Kathy.
She's entirely too literal for her own good.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-06-28 01:01 pm (UTC)And that's bullshit. It shits on the experiences of those who kicked, screamed, and fought, saying no all the way, but could not overtake an attacker. It shits on women who actually were hurt by someone.
Being around clatches of feminists created me: a female mysogynist.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-06-28 02:59 am (UTC)That's not manipulation, that's straight out abuse. And if you're talking about what I think you're talking about, it goes triply for that.
The other stuff, that's a hanging offense where I come from.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-06-27 11:52 pm (UTC)Too bad he spelled feminism wrong. The shirt's a pretty princess pink, though.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-06-28 02:50 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-06-28 03:19 am (UTC)All in all, I think I'm just weird.
I never feel uncomfortable talking about things of a sensitive nature in front of a man. Well, not any moreso then I would feel talking about them in front of anyone. For me, it depends on the individual people I'm around, rather then just their gender. Any inhibitions I have are only dropped when I completely trust a person and I've never really understood the idea of auto-trusting someone because of a superficial commonality they may share with me.
You've got my respect for daring to get semi-naked in semi-public, though. I can't comprehend doing anything like that in a million years. I can verbally expose my deepest inner workings to complete strangers, but physically? No can do.
<3 to you
Date: 2005-06-28 03:05 am (UTC)The drummer of Matt's band's girlfriend, her sister and her friend all ganged up and beat on me -- starting it with a suckerpunch -- because they don't like me... because I "draw attention to myself." [This is largely because of my habit of making out with girls and it getting male attention that they don't, according to a friend]. ANYWAY... safe space, my ass. No male has ever suckerpunched me. They've aired their grieviances and it's been worked through.
The idea that woman = safe is the biggest, stupidest myth EVER.
I refuse to be a casulaty of victim mentality. I was raped years ago; ot affects me, yes. But I have a boyfriend, who I have been with for two years now, who loves me, takes care of me, and provides me with the "safest space" that I can imagine. It's all asinine.
This, Lady T, is why I will always hold you in the highest regard [amongst other reasons.]
Re: <3 to you
Date: 2005-06-28 03:21 am (UTC)Two years?!
Criminey.
I have absolutely no concept of the passage of time, sometimes.
This, Lady T, is why I will always hold you in the highest regard [amongst other reasons.]
hee.
*blush*
Re: <3 to you
Date: 2005-06-28 12:48 pm (UTC)Throws me off, too, sometimes. Hell, we've been living together for 6 months now!
Time's a weird thing.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-06-28 06:07 am (UTC)I just love sky-high rhetoric like 'safe space' and this one I heard from this young, dumb girl I once knew, 'every man commits rape every day...they rape with their eyes.'
Just as much as I love how these people believe that women have a monopoly on being rape victims.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-06-28 02:18 pm (UTC)*hides*
aaaaaiitt
Date: 2005-06-28 02:32 pm (UTC)lets start with the rape thing,,,its evil and should not only come with a prison sentance and the good ass reamin that awaits behind bars for rapists,but also the family should be allowed an hour alone with any amount of blunt objects they can carry in the room with them. but deciding after the fact that sex with someone was a bad idea is not rape,its poor judgement plain and simple. getting a girl so drunk that she passes out and taking advantage is rape ok,but two people getting shitfaced and then fucking is a bad call after a long night of drinking. if you have been talked into having sex by someone ,your just fucking weak willed,not raped,you fucked up,,
now.... pussy is not the ark of the fucking covenant,,noone has the hope fucking diamond living between there legs,its more like a pair of socks,they come in different shapes and colors and they all fit a little different but at the end of the day they all do the same thing.
too much power is given to a womans vagina and the hoops one must jump thru to get inside of it. culturally allot of girls use sex as a weapon or a trump card,a thing of power,to make men do what they want because they controll the power, and its not phisical control its emotional and monitary most of the time and it leads to a catch 22 allot of times we lie and do things we really dont want to not because we care but because we are horny and in our minds there is no other way,and after its all said and done thetre is no need to pretend because well,,it just wasent that good,and the girl gets her feelings hurt because this is not how it was supposed to go. just as girls or gyrls or womom or wymyinne or whatever need to not fall for a guys bullshit we neeed to not let them lead us around by the cock,,ya wanna do cartwheels to get a piece of ass good for you,i hope she takes you for everything she can and leaves you broken then maybe you will get yourself some self controll.
and another thing,,,,, being honest desent work either you can tell someone the moment you meet them your cute i want to sleep with you,,,then sleep with them,,and they expect something more or different,its the whole you knew i was a snake when you picked me up thing.
there is no safe place,because woman is just as responsable for the fucked up sexual dynamick in america as man is. we fuck each other up for no good reasion all the time it is our nature to exploit each other,its what people have dome since the dawn of time