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War and Pieces
Apr 24, 2022

DID NOT VOTE FOR FETTERMAN
I understand that if you give your ideological opponents an inch they'll take a mile, however when you're in a situation that allows for some breathing room you might want to give the fence sitters some space or else it's guaranteed that they'll go over to the enemy.

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War and Pieces
Apr 24, 2022

DID NOT VOTE FOR FETTERMAN

loquacius posted:

I'm done gawking at liberal TERFs*, communist TERFs are the new big thing

https://twitter.com/della_morte_/status/1552815767040688128

*ok I will actually never be done gawking at liberal TERFs

Liberals are just TEFs this is the real deal, direct from TERF provence.

War and Pieces
Apr 24, 2022

DID NOT VOTE FOR FETTERMAN
Norah Vincent, author of "Self Made Man" is dead at 53 of physician assisted suicide in Switzerland

War and Pieces
Apr 24, 2022

DID NOT VOTE FOR FETTERMAN
Do we know if she was sick or do they just let you go to Europe and do that?

War and Pieces
Apr 24, 2022

DID NOT VOTE FOR FETTERMAN

tokin opposition posted:

Tbh it seems to be just a mix of good old contarianism and the fact that the sex negative ones all get jobs writing for conservative outlets as the token zoomer. Speaking as someone on a medication that also kills my sex drive I've never become more sex negative as a result.

if you look at the surveys it's true that young people are having way less sex. hard to say if there's anything ideological there.

War and Pieces
Apr 24, 2022

DID NOT VOTE FOR FETTERMAN

ikanreed posted:

It's the destruction of all common spaces in society. I don't even question my theory. Individualism is social and emotional death

There's still bars and cafes it's just unthinkable to go to a there specifically to flirt and get laid

War and Pieces
Apr 24, 2022

DID NOT VOTE FOR FETTERMAN

YOLOsubmarine posted:

My experience with incels and MRAs is that they hate women and think they should be sexual chattel and talk often about how sluts deserve to be raped. They complain about how women only date assholes but they’re just mad that they’re dating OTHER assholes and not them.

ok what about the phenotypical incel who just gives up on dating without identifying as an InCel MRA or MGTOW?

War and Pieces
Apr 24, 2022

DID NOT VOTE FOR FETTERMAN

StashAugustine posted:

actually on a related note, what's a good source on the history "women in the workplace" because lots of people seem to think it was invented in the middle or early 20th century but Marx is already talking about it in 1848 and ofc in premodern agrarian economy women were heavily involved in subsistence farming and cottage industry (though how far they could go with it waxed and waned)

On the Origin of the Family and Private Property by Engels is the de facto starting point, it's a text I wish every self described Feminist had read.

E. Pairs well with Debt the First 5,000 Years and Caliban and the Witch and Women Race and Class

War and Pieces has issued a correction as of 22:57 on Aug 22, 2022

War and Pieces
Apr 24, 2022

DID NOT VOTE FOR FETTERMAN

some plague rats posted:

Just don't be an rear end in a top hat, it's that easy, no one becomes a better person by reading book

this is autism erasure

War and Pieces
Apr 24, 2022

DID NOT VOTE FOR FETTERMAN

Ghost Leviathan posted:

Pretty much everything about the nuclear family is cosplaying petty aristocrats/the middle class so that probably tracks.

Even amongst the middle class the ideal was that your daughter would work in the mills or work in education/medicine for a few years before marriage.

Obviously many of those women never did get married and some of those that did still worked

War and Pieces
Apr 24, 2022

DID NOT VOTE FOR FETTERMAN

Shiroc posted:

Communism doesn’t really have an answer to incels either, other than the same “get your poo poo together and understand that nobody owes you sex.”

Communism has a job and a house for them

War and Pieces
Apr 24, 2022

DID NOT VOTE FOR FETTERMAN

some plague rats posted:

Encourage it while restricting their access to firearms. We want the staying inside miserable part, not the violent rampage that takes out a bunch of Chads part

tfw no female NEET deathsquad is knocking on my door

War and Pieces
Apr 24, 2022

DID NOT VOTE FOR FETTERMAN

tokin opposition posted:

do NOT arm cis women. That's how the Nazis happened

huh?

War and Pieces
Apr 24, 2022

DID NOT VOTE FOR FETTERMAN

Orange Devil posted:

None of which has anything to do with class. Lol.

Maybe he ought to ask if transpeople own the means of production?

Well certain transmen do

War and Pieces
Apr 24, 2022

DID NOT VOTE FOR FETTERMAN
The 50's housewife was already on multiple magic pills

War and Pieces
Apr 24, 2022

DID NOT VOTE FOR FETTERMAN

Puppy Burner posted:

50% of the women in the Canadian military are assaulted and libs love the military!

The military needs high funded LGBTQ tolerance workshops untill the rates for men reach 50% too

War and Pieces
Apr 24, 2022

DID NOT VOTE FOR FETTERMAN

My grandma kicked me out for sleeping in the coach and I had to sleep on the beach

War and Pieces
Apr 24, 2022

DID NOT VOTE FOR FETTERMAN
Married mom's are too busy going on awesome dates with their hot husbands to watch TV

War and Pieces
Apr 24, 2022

DID NOT VOTE FOR FETTERMAN
do the right wingers know that you can just order this stuff online or what?

War and Pieces
Apr 24, 2022

DID NOT VOTE FOR FETTERMAN

loquacius posted:

Yeah I'm gonna say that if you can't afford domestic sex workers you probably also can't afford to drop money on a plane flight to Thailand for the purposes of getting laid; the motivation behind sex tourism is absolutely to find more desperate people

well that a marriage for whatever distinction we can and should make between sex tourism and so-called mail order brides.

By now that industry should've re branded with a progressive sounding buzzword tho. Wonder what they could be

War and Pieces
Apr 24, 2022

DID NOT VOTE FOR FETTERMAN

you're just proving their point by posting ogres

War and Pieces
Apr 24, 2022

DID NOT VOTE FOR FETTERMAN

call me nostalgic but I think we could use some good old fashioned man-hating harpies

War and Pieces
Apr 24, 2022

DID NOT VOTE FOR FETTERMAN
Hermione is a minstrel character whose blackface gets replaced by film negatives upon seeing a ghost

War and Pieces
Apr 24, 2022

DID NOT VOTE FOR FETTERMAN
love how both Radfems and Chuds hate the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit edition now

War and Pieces
Apr 24, 2022

DID NOT VOTE FOR FETTERMAN

A Buttery Pastry posted:

they're the original gamers

Curse of Ra on you

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Game_of_Ur

War and Pieces
Apr 24, 2022

DID NOT VOTE FOR FETTERMAN

Baudolino posted:

What is feminism minus Identity politics? Would`nt that just leave corporate style "lean in" feminism for educated white women?

abortion birth control lactation childcare healthcare hrt etc

War and Pieces
Apr 24, 2022

DID NOT VOTE FOR FETTERMAN

War and Pieces posted:

abortion birth control lactation childcare healthcare hrt etc

is there a leftist argument for wetnurses what if they got paid the same wage as the girlboss
whose employing them?

War and Pieces
Apr 24, 2022

DID NOT VOTE FOR FETTERMAN

pandy fackler posted:

i googled engagement chicken and its literally just roasted chicken with lemon and herbs?? thats barely a recipe

maybe thats in the article idk i skimmed

also i like cooking for my partner feminazis gently caress off!

the secret ingredient is menstrual blood

War and Pieces
Apr 24, 2022

DID NOT VOTE FOR FETTERMAN

A Buttery Pastry posted:

you seem to be conflating two things here, that being having porn star as a profession and actually making porn. a porn star in the office is just another person until they start getting naked, just like a masseuse is just a person until she starts telling you to get naked.

depends on how famous they are

War and Pieces
Apr 24, 2022

DID NOT VOTE FOR FETTERMAN
I've heard that dudes have now started adopting ladies pens name to get there Great American Novels published.

War and Pieces
Apr 24, 2022

DID NOT VOTE FOR FETTERMAN

solution to the radlib dudes of 1985

War and Pieces
Apr 24, 2022

DID NOT VOTE FOR FETTERMAN

A Buttery Pastry posted:

i'd suggest another, harsher, sting, for people who don't accept the above premise: being poor makes you (basically) a woman

not if you conspire with other poor men to make poor women's life hell :discourse:

War and Pieces
Apr 24, 2022

DID NOT VOTE FOR FETTERMAN

Some Guy TT posted:

Twenty eight years ago, I was sitting on the dusty rose carpeting of my childhood bedroom, staring at the cover of the latest issue Seventeen. This particular issue isn’t available on eBay, and only certain articles from inside have been digitized, so I can’t tell you the exact wording of the Editor’s Note, but others have a similar memory of its contents: look at this non-model on the cover, which I interpreted as look at this non-ideal body on the cover.

If this body was non-ideal, I remember thinking, then what was mine? I had just turned twelve years old, and was about to finish sixth grade. I was starting junior high in the Fall. Somehow both bodysuits and massive, baggy flannels were popular. My body, like a lot of other girls at that age, was beginning to rearrange itself. I felt so alienated from it, so unmoored from any sort of solid sense of self.

Three months later, I read the Letters to the Editor (which, miraculously, have been digitized), which framed the cover model “as a body you can relate to.” The first letter, written from a dorm at Wheaton College, expressed “relief”; the second thanked Seventeen for putting someone “who forgets to do their step aerobics from time to time,” and the third argued that if you’re going to put someone in a bikini on the cover, “she ought to have a better figure.”

Again, the message I received — and why the original cover and the letters to the editor remain fixed in my brain — was that this body was somehow “normal” (and thus desirable/obtainable) but also undesirable (insufficiently controlled, not for public display, un-ideal).

Reading these letters now, it’s striking that they were all authored by groups of girls and/or women — suggesting that they came together, talked about the cover, came to a consensus, and decided to submit their feedback. But it’s also striking that Seventeen chose these three letters as the ones, out of hundreds, maybe even thousands, to highlight. They represent the two postures that pervaded the pop culture of the ‘90s and 2000s: you should let go of old fashioned ideas of beauty and femininity, embracing your own understanding of what liberation and power looks like….while also conforming to new, often equally constrictive standards of girl and womanhood.

Of course, these two postures are in direct opposition. But most ideologies are contradictory in some way — and dependent on pop culture, from the Seventeen letter section to actual celebrity images, to reconcile the contradictions and prop up the ideology as a whole. In the ‘90s, feminist theorists immediately called bullshit on this practice, which they referred to as a “postfeminism” (I cannot tell you how many pieces of feminist scholarship from the early ‘90s I have read on the postfeminist quagmire that is Pretty Woman) but that didn’t stop it from becoming the backdrop of Gen-X’s early adulthood and millennials’ childhoods.

In “The Making and Unmaking of Body Problems in Seventeen Magazine, 1992-2003,” design scholars Leslie Winfield Ballentine and Jennifer Paff Ogle point to the ways in which teen magazines work as illustrating texts — filling in the “contours and colors” — for readers trying to figure to what it means to be a young woman. At the time of their research, Seventeen was “reaching” a whopping 87% of American girls between the ages of 12 and 19.

“Reaching” is different than “reading” or “agreeing with,” but what the magazine communicated, in concert with similarly voiced texts, like YM and Teen, mattered. (At least to white teens: Lisa Duke’s illuminating work found that while white adolescent readers viewed the magazines as sites of “reality,” Black readers primarily used the magazines as opportunities for critique).

In their analysis, Ballentine and Ogle delineated two types of body-related articles. The clear majority were concerned with the “making” of body problems, but they were often accompanied by articles “unmaking” those same problems. In other words: there was an abundance of articles introducing something that the reader should be worried about (cellulite, wrinkles, blemishes, bacne, “flabby” areas, stretch marks, “unwanted” hair, body odor) and how to address it in order to achieve the “ideal” body….but also, often in the same issue, there were articles instructing the reader to let go of others’ ideas about what beauty or perfection might look like. (See the cover of that June 1993 Seventeen: “You are so beautiful / Celebrate your heritage, celebrate yourself)

As any past or present reader of these magazines knows, the framing of imperfections and their reparation is rarely as simple as “your legs are hideous, here’s how to make them not hideous.” It’s more like this passage, from 1993:

Or this 1998 advice column response to a reader to “work [her] butt off” after voicing concern about its size:

Or this 1996 confessional from a high school student after returning from “fat camp” having lost 30 pounds:

As in so many other instructional texts, the body becomes a project in need of constant maintenance in order to achieve its ideal, attractive form, which is slender (but not too skinny), petite, toned but not muscular. Over the course of the ‘90s, that (woman’s) ideal was gradually refined until reaching peak form in the video for “I’m a Slave 4 U.”

There is no accounting for genetics, for race, for abilities, for access to time and capital, for even the existence of actual diverse body shapes. The ideal shifts slightly from decade to decade, but it never disappears; if anything, the sheer number of products and programs available to help it arrive in its ideal state proliferate. And if you can’t arrive at the ideal body, it’s not because your existing physical form cannot achieve it. It’s an implicit or explicit failure of will.

I have the skills to disassemble and analyze these images now, but at the time, I was just trying to drink from the cultural firehose of MTV and Seventeen and My So-Called Life. I didn’t have the internet. Sassy wasn’t on my radar, neither was Riot Grrl. There was no Tumblr, no Rookie. I had a Top 40 station and a mom with feminist inclinations but not a lot of feminist language. I had a fairly conservative youth group and because I wasn’t good at basketball or volleyball, the only other organized activity available to me was cheerleading.

As for alternative visions of femininity, I had Lois Lowry books and Go Ask Alice. I had the Delia*s catalog and the Victoria’s Secret catalog and “The Cube” at the local Bon Marché. I was middle class, my home situation was never precarious, and I was largely unchallenged in school — which is another way of saying that I had a lot of mental energy to dedicate to thinking about the ways I failed to fit in to the narrow understanding of what a teen girl should be and look and act like in Lewiston, Idaho in the 1990s.

Which also means I was incredibly susceptible to the understanding of what the ideal should be, and eager for any and all advice on how to achieve it.

https://twitter.com/clhubes/status/1395061523274506242

I like to think of phrases like the one above — along with images like the Seventeen cover above — as a vernacular of deprivation, control, and aspirational containment. It’s the language we used to discipline our own bodies and others, and then normalize and standardize that discipline. For Younger Gen-X and Millennials, it includes, but is by no means limited, to:

Britney’s stomach and the discourse around it (1000 crunches a day)

The ubiquitous mentions of the Sweet Valley Twins’ size (6)

TLC in silk pajamas for the “Creep” video

Jessica Simpson’s “fat” jeans

Celery as a “calorie negative food”

Janet Jackson’s abs in “That’s The Way Love Goes”

The figuration of certain foods as non-fat and thus “safely” consumable (jelly beans, SnackWells, olestra chips)

“Heroin chic” but specifically Kate Moss saying that “nothing tastes as good as skinny feels”

The reign of terror of low-slung jeans

The “going out top” whose platonic form was a handkerchief tied around your boobs

The phrases “muffin top” and “whale tale” and “thigh gap”

Ally McBeal, full stop

The Olson Twins, full stop

Kate Winslet as “chubby,” Brittany Murphy in Clueless as “fat,” Hilary Duff as “chubby,” one of the cheerleaders in Bring It On as fat, America Ferrera as “brave,” Anne Hathaway in The Devil Wears Prada as fat, Gisele as “curvy,” Alicia Silverstone as “Fatgirl”

Tyra Banks as “Thigh-Ra Banks”

The entire loving discourse around Bridget Jones’ supposedly undesirable body

The Rachel Zoe aesthetic

The Abercrombie aesthetic

DJ Tanner eating ice “popsicles” on Full House

The “Fat Monica” plotline on Friends

The pervasive idea that bananas will make you gain weight

Reporting on stars’ diet secrets, including but not limited to soaking cotton balls in orange juice and swallowing them to make you “feel” hungry

“A shake for breakfast, a shake for lunch, and then a sensible dinner!” aka Slimfast, whose advertisements were everywhere

Maya Hornbacher’s Wasted as instructional text

Miranda pouring dish soap on the cake she put in the garbage on SATC

“Diverse body types” articles where “diversity” was a shorter girl with a size-C cup boobs

Messaging from our own mothers, grandmothers, and elders that stigmatized fat, normalized hunger and deprivation, and praised the skinniest (and often least healthy) versions of ourselves

Gwyneth Paltrow’s 1999 Oscar dress

The hegemony of the strapless J.Crew bridesmaid dress of the late ‘00s

The obsessive documentation and degradation of Britney’s pregnant and postpartum body

Valorization of the “cute” pregnancy / Pregnant Kim Kardashian as shamu

I’m starting to get into more recent territory here and could go on for some time, but I wanted to cover foundational, formative language. (Please, feel free to add your own memories in the comments). To be clear, I’m in no way suggesting that young Gen-X/millenials are the first to internalize this sort of destructive body messaging. And I know there are different ideals and messages that have disciplined and damaged men and their relationships to their bodies.

But instead of shouting “BUT TWIGGY!” and “My grandmother survived on saltines and cigarettes!” I think it’s useful to return to the formation of the tweet referenced above: “If any Gen Z are wondering why every millennial woman has an eating disorder…” The author is trying to elucidate a norm (the desire to discipline and contain your body) that, over the course the last twenty years, has become slightly less of a norm. Her tweet, like this post, is a way to explain ourselves, but also to make the mechanics of the ideology not just visible but detectable — if in slightly different form — in their own lives.

It’s one thing, after all, when you hear that your grandparents did something — that feels old-fashioned, foreign, and distant. It’s quite another when it’s the primary practice of people just five, ten, fifteen years ago — when the ideology is still thick in the air. Fat activism and the body positivity movement has done so much, and in a relatively short amount of time, to shift the conversations we have about our bodies. But there’s so much work still to be done. I spent a lot of time thinking about this exquisite Sarah Miller essay:

That last sentence is a sentence of mourning. There is deep and abiding sadness here, the sort that so much of us are processing (or, you know, refusing to process, and submitting to their continued quiet torture) everyday.

As someone still doing this work with myself every day, what I crave — and where Virginia Sole-Smith, Sabrina Strings, Aubrey Gordon, and Michael Hobbes are already leading the way — is something more akin to a deep excavation, a social genealogy and cultural archaeology, of these ideas: where they come from, how they gain salience and thrive, how they adapt and acquire new names (hello, intermittent fasting, I see you!)

Why, for instnace, did Bridget Jones need a particular sort of body to make its narrative work? Why does it feel so revelatory and familiar and deeply sad to hear Taylor Swift talk about the gray area of disordered eating? What made it so easy to fall in love with the postfeminist dystopia? What ideas are passed down through our families, and how do we even begin to reject them?

We can’t unlearn noxious, fat-phobic ideas if we can’t even begin to remember where and how we learned and normalized them. We can’t stop the cycle of passing them down to future generations in slightly camouflaged form if we can’t even identify their presence in our own. And we can’t unravel these ideologies without acknowledging the deep, often unrecognized trauma they have inflicted.

https://twitter.com/thekuhlest/status/1395880183589003265

When millennial women shudder at the prospect of the return of the low-slung jean, we are not being old, or boring, or basic. It’s not about the loving jeans AS JEANS, and I wish people could actually understand that. It was about the jeans on our bodies. We are attempting to reject a cultural moment that made so many of us feel undesirable, incomplete, and alienated from whatever fragile confidence we’d managed to accumulate. We are trying to avoid reinflicting that on ourselves, but more importantly, on the next generation.

The jeans will come back. They already have. I know this. Whatever the style of fashion that made you feel inadequate and unfixable, it will likely come back too. You might have the strength to refuse to allow it — and the ideal body it imagines, — to have power over you. Some young people are acquiring more of this strength every day, facilitated by TikTok and Billie Eilish and other forms of internet communication I probably don’t even know about. Many are learning a vocabulary of resistance and analysis that I simply didn’t have access to, at least not until late into college.

But twenty years from now, will Gen-Zers be excavating their own relationship to TikTok’s beauty norms and midriff fetishization, to Kendall and Kylie Jenner, to Peloton and pandemic-induced eating habits, to the faux empowerment of the “Build a B*tch” video and their moms’ and grandmothers’ fitness and “wellness” routines? I mean, yes, certainly. But we could also start having those conversations now. Because as Sarah Miller puts it, “I’m pretty sure we haven’t “arrived” anywhere. And why would we have? The material conditions of being a woman have not been altered in any dramatic way, and seem to be getting worse, for everyone.”

As I’ve said before in reference to my relationship to work and burnout, I am trying to and failing and getting slightly better and backsliding all the time. The same is true with my relationship to fatphobia. That doesn’t mean the work is bullshit. It also doesn’t mean I’m “succeeding” at it, or that I don’t periodically think, like Miller, that it’s too late for us.

It just means the work is hard — but that it does gets easier, however incrementally and imperceptibly, when you don’t feel like you’re doing it alone.
still missing the point that it's ok to be undesirable but that message doesnt sell designer lingerie so...

War and Pieces
Apr 24, 2022

DID NOT VOTE FOR FETTERMAN
Fellas is it gay for a man to love himself?

War and Pieces
Apr 24, 2022

DID NOT VOTE FOR FETTERMAN
the flip side is that men who do learn that stuff only did it to impress women

War and Pieces
Apr 24, 2022

DID NOT VOTE FOR FETTERMAN
is it easier to teach the cool guy hygiene or to teach the hygenic guy how to be cool?

War and Pieces
Apr 24, 2022

DID NOT VOTE FOR FETTERMAN

BigWeirdSashimi posted:

What's the endgame for "all men are wild rabid animals, you get what you deserve, pigs?"

I believe thats covered in the manifesto

War and Pieces
Apr 24, 2022

DID NOT VOTE FOR FETTERMAN

tokin opposition posted:

Is it more transphobic to say trans men are scum too or to exclude them from being scum like other fellas.

scum as in stagnant water or scum as in S.C.U.M?

War and Pieces
Apr 24, 2022

DID NOT VOTE FOR FETTERMAN

Ghost Leviathan posted:

This level of hypothetical discourse really isn't useful for anything in the first place except getting clicks.

Upper-class white women are just upper-class and white first and foremost before anything else, also.

yeah obviously, whO else is taking PTO to go on a vacation to the woods?

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War and Pieces
Apr 24, 2022

DID NOT VOTE FOR FETTERMAN

tokin opposition posted:

I don't think the question mentions if the man is an uggo or not op

it's called subtext and it's for cowards

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