So, I've just been away visiting some friends overnight and somehow the talk got onto my feminism. Gee, I can't think how. Possibly because it was me talking.
Anyway, my friend is a linguistics professor so we talked about gendered language. I spoke about how I really hated swear words like slut, slag, whore etc. All those sexual ones which really only apply to women. My hatred on these rests on the fact that the use of these words rely on the basic idea that women having sex is bad. It's an attempt to control other women's sexuality. Well you know what? Fuck you. My body, my sex. It's got nothing to do with anyone else. Having sex is not bad. It's not wrong, it's not evil. Not having sex is not virtuous. Not having sex does not make you a better person, or a good girl.
And it is significant that there are no equivalent insults for men. If we want to criticise a man for having sex we call them slut, slag, whore. These become insulting not so much because of the sexual aspect of the word, but because by applying them to men we are feminising men. It's like calling a man a big girl. It implies that being female, being a woman is a bad thing, it is inherently a worse state of being than to be a male. Riiiiighht.
My (male) friend agreed with all this. And then said that he believes that we've achieved equality. This makes me so tired.
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Then today on my browsings around the internet I visited The F Word's site. From here I was linked to an Abbey OReilly post on The Guardian's blog site. She talks about being harassed in the street. About being stalked at a London train station. About being groped on the tube. About requests for a blow job from complete strangers. This is violent and threatening behaviour. It happens to all women. It is scary. It is why Reclaim the Night exists. It shouldn't fucking happen. We shouldn't have to put up with this shit. Seems simple right? Apparently not. If you read the comments left on Abbey's post it seems many people cannot tell the difference between chatting someone up and abusing them. This makes me want to weep.
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This behaviour makes me sick.
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To people who say Feminism isn't needed and we've attained equality, may I direct to Ain't it Cool News. In this article, Capone chats up Loretta Devine. She's not interviewed, she's chatted up. This is not about her work, it's about her sexual status, her availability for a shag. It's like putting a big neon sign saying it's ok, she's still a sexual object, we don't have to take her work seriously, we're thinking about her in terms of sex. This doesn't happen to men. Maybe it's because it's mostly straight men interviewing other straight men. But that highlights another problem doesn't it, where are the lady interviewers?
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One good thing can come out of the Wonder Woman Playboy shoot. Provided they haven't photoshopped and airbrushed her pose, comic artists could use this as an example of how spines work.
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