sexism
You are viewing stuff tagged with sexism.
You are viewing stuff tagged with sexism.
Meanwhile, girls learn from an early age that it is rude to reject boys. They learn to “let them down easily” and never humiliate them. They learn to give other people what they want, and to put their own desires second — especially when it comes to sex. And few girls get any sex education, either at school or from the culture they consume, that encourages them to think about sex in terms of what they actually desire, as opposed to how they will be perceived by others.
Recent abstinence-only curricula have included messages like, “Girls need to be aware they may be able to tell when a kiss is leading to something else. The girl may need to put the brakes on first in order to help the boy,” and, “girls need to be careful with what they wear, because males are looking! The girl might be thinking fashion, while the boy is thinking sex.”
Even when girls learn comprehensive sex ed, they frequently don’t learn how to ask for what they want, or even how to think about what that is. “We, as a nation, are uncomfortable with women having pleasure,” Lynn Barclay, president and CEO of the American Sexual Health Association, told Bustle in 2015.
Jess Zimmerman illuminates more problems in our deeply sexist society with her “Where’s My Cut?”: On Unpaid Emotional Labor:
The originators and adherents of #GiveYourMoneyToWomen didn’t just suggest that women should get paid for existing, although yeah that too if you’re buying. Rather, women should get paid for all the work they typically do for free – all the affirmation, forbearance, consultation, pacifying, guidance, tutorial, and weathering abuse that we spend energy on every single day. Imagine a menu of emotional labor: Acknowledge your thirsty posturing, $50. Pretend to find you fascinating, $100. Soothe your ego so you don’t get angry, $150. Smile hollowly while you make a worse version of their joke, $200. Explain 101-level feminism to you like you’re five years old, $300. Listen to your rant about “bitches,” $infinity.
It was beautiful to watch #GiveYourMoneyToWomen unfold. Men got angry, and then women explained to them that to have their anger acknowledged, they would have to pay. This made them angrier, of course, but without a donation, who was listening?
Robin Romm’s Double Bind sounds like a good book:
In her introduction, Romm, who is in her early forties, writes about her sense, as a young woman, that “striving and achieving had to be approached delicately or you risked the negative judgment of others.” She felt a pull between the hardness of her ambition and the softness of her socialization, and calls this “the double bind of the gender, success paired eternally with scrutiny and retreat.”
Mykala and I have a steadily-growing list of movies we would like to watch, but there are so many other things we’d rather do (usually, rather read) once Ess goes to bed that we watch very few movies. At this rate, I expect to miss most excellent new films and all of the new mediocre ones for years to come, because soon Ess will want to watch with us. We are prepared and excited for that.
This post marks the beginning of a new theme here, one to which I’ve given little attention in the past, and one that, shamefully, I’ve only really begun to understand with the birth of Essie. It begins with a story…
We took Ess along to see Out on a Limb’s Nutcracker show at the Rosedale Mall. Mykala was occupied running the music, so Ess was my charge for the evening. Just the sight of her mama, without the ability to run over and get a hug was a challenge for Essie, so after feeding her, she and I began doing circuitous laps around the first level of the mall, biding our time, on each lap showing Ess the dancers while avoiding sightings of Mykala.