I was just thinking about my high school days in the early 2010's. We had to write a paper on a controversial topic (abortion, animal testing, and a third thing) and I remember talking with my friends and we all agreed abortion should only be legal in the case of rape/incest and that animal testing should be banned for cosmetic products. By the end of high school my views had changed but I grew up in a conservative part of Canada and was religious at the time.

Thinking about it now I just think how absurd and anti-woman those beliefs were. I didn't even realize because I was so sheltered and ignorant. Because of course animal testing is okay unless it is for cosmetics which is primarily consumed by women and girls. We don't want to torture animals (valid). But forced pregnancy and childbirth is literally torture and thousands of woman and girls are forced to go through it every year. It should not matter if you had consensual sex with your spouse or if it was rape. Pregnancy is very difficult for most people. Childbirth is well known to be traumatic but even then people underestimate it. Women and girls are at increased risk of IPV including FEMICIDE during pregnancy. Recovery is difficult Giving up your baby for adoption is a cruel choice for many people. Taking care of a baby is expensive, exhausting, and time consuming. And forcing unwanted children into the world? I think one of the cruellest things to happen to a child is to be unwanted by your parents. Denying someone access to a safe abortion is cruel for everyone involved who cannot just walk away from the situation.

We have the technology for safe abortions. Why are we stopping people from using it?

yes,i think the desire of being provocative of you are a woman comes also from patriarchy,but i don t understand how a person who does Is seen as and object. even if i am against pornography and prostitution i defend these women because i don t think that doing that job means you can be reduced to a "hole" or a "butt"(i ve seen It). i am so angry when people see these people as a body part. It s unsettling for me.

if a man makes sexy content he Is not reduced to a penis. this Is the argument.

there Is a market,a MARKET of women s pictures. those pictures don t NEED consent. they are objects,harmless. men don t live this.

the problem Is not a provocative pictures,but the commodification of It.

Even though the majority of the population is muslim, they introduced a secular dress code policy. Still these women don't want a secular space even if the government wants change. I think every government and public office and school should be secular and should not accommodate any religion. I feel like at this point even if miraculously muslim men give freedom to these women they won't take it. I only feel very bad for a few women like rahaf muhammad who got struck with these kinds of women.

In the 2000s me and my (2ndwavefeminist) mother watched this show "Medium" together and as a child i didn't think anything of it. I've started rewatching it and have noticed significant patriarchal programming laced throughout. I looked online for feminist critiques of the show and they were surprisingly complimentary, praising its realistic portrayal of domestic life and shared duties among husband and wife. I disagree. The burden of housework is still heavily on the wife (Allison), she is still primary carer of the children and from my angle, heavily enslaved by the traditional family structure. The husband is portrayed as the typical good guy golden retriever type but he often gives her shit when she has to go to work and he has to care for his own children and home. It's presented as an idyllic situation and he as the perfect man, but he's still such a cunt to her? Says he's proud of her for her work but doubles back whenever he needs to pick up the domestic slack. She has a job helping the police with her psychic powers and often gets a call and has to leave. But surely he should just appreciate that is the nature of her work and she is still running the house and caring for the children most of the time. And if he's meant to be a realistic portrayal of a good guy, he's still not good enough for me. The whole thing feels like breeding propaganda too, with the three beautiful kids, "perfect husband" and white picket fence. Now I'm watching at age 29 it sounds like a nightmare. Have you seen it and what did you think of the set up? Thoughts?

Some radical thought, Let's say hypothetically if all women under taliban rule united and give poison to all the men in their country they would have gained freedom, I am not saying it's easy I am saying not all women think the same. But the problem is only a few women wanted to fight for rights. There is no unity among women.

I have been struggling to come up with ways in which to address them. In one hand, they are indeed our sisters, but on the other hand.. well, they're kind of.. active participants in our oppression.

Is trying to educate them worthwhile? would you suggest ignoring/dismissing them as much as possible?

do you see male centered women more as possible allies or hurdles to overcome?

Currently dealing with a choice feminist and other sexist and misogynistic women on the r/women sub over shaving your vulva. How many women have to be told that it isn't ok to conform and encourage other women to partake in sexist and p3dophilic beauty standards because it hurts ALL of us??? One woman even called me "those people" as if fighting your own oppression is crazy. Also just had to tell a woman who thinks sexism is ok as long as the woman is a POS of person that no that is in fact misogynistic and again, hurts ALL of us. I'm tired boss. 1000s of years of sexism and women want rights without the discomfort of changing the things that keep us from having rights. It makes me think of Audre Lorde-"your silence won't protect you".

before anyone misunderstands my point, this is not another post about whether religion and feminism are compatible. that discussion has already happened countless times. this is about privilege.

religious people who claim to be feminist can defend patriarchal religious values because they live in countries where they are free to reject them.

you can support modesty because modesty is your choice. you decide what it means, how to practice it, and when not to. nothing happens if you stop.

you can defend hijabs or burqas, or other religious garments because wearing them or refusing to wear them does not take away your legal rights. your education, your career, your freedom of movement, and your basic autonomy are still protected.

you can even defend the idea that the husband is the head of the household because your husband cannot legally stop you from working, controlling your own money, filing for divorce, or leaving an abusive marriage.

and whenever religious texts promote male authority over women, you get to cherry pick. suddenly the verse is historical, symbolic, metaphorical, mistranslated, or taken out of context. you are free to reinterpret the parts that conflict with the rights you already have.

that is exactly the privilege.

what makes this version of religion feel empowering is not the patriarchy within it. it is the freedom to ignore, reject, or redefine that patriarchy while keeping the parts you personally like.

religious "feminism" becomes much easier to defend when secular society has already guaranteed women's rights independently of religious authority

If anyone is struggling with avoiding activities which are patriarchal like doing makeup or shaving - this one thing worked for me. I remind myself that if a man can get away with this choice, then I can too. They can get away with not looking put together, being cocky, being overconfident, or just looking normal.

This is from an instagram account of a woman who works with imprisoned women, she speaks to hundreds of women in prison, and what she gathered is all of them, are in there because of a man, because they defended themselves, defended their children, or a female family member. And that society would not be ANY less safe if all of these women were freed.
Her user is jvanderleun on ig

So apparently false accusations are A-okay when it is a woman.

He was literally told by several people that it can’t be her and he still not just leaves the posts up, but doubles down and continues with them. And then adds if it’s not her, the real Jane Doe should come forward to clear her name.

In conclusion, we now know what is an acceptable form of false accusations. Ladies, just doxx and accuse a random dude of something and say if it’s not him, then the real perpetrator should come forward. If not, we will just throw this placeholder in jail. Regardless if anything happened at all. Makes sense.

The men screeching about “false accusations” were ridiculous anyways, but if anyone was still doubting their real intention, they just don’t like “any accusation against a man whether it’s true or false” but for women rights and legal protection laws shouldn’t matter because they hate us anyways.

Online I often stumble upon comments expressing anger for the government, algorithms and everything else that has some power over us. People say that we should come together and fight against all the evil, but we can’t because „we keep being divided, left vs right, men vs women”.

I don’t understand, why would these people want to come together with people who have opposing views at best and are actively hostile to them at worst? They bring up the men vs women thing like it’s some nonsense removed from reality, just gender wars being treated too seriously.

It pisses me off how most people really have no grasp on how serious of an impact patriarchy has on us and that there are 100s of reasons for why we can’t just join hands and come together.

They even misname gender wars when it is simply a gendered war. Men's collective denial of reality was described by Evan Stark in 1997 as percepticide when he published the evidence for coersive control.

Wherever men gather they reinforce their violence and their rights to violence. Even falsely claiming "all people are violent" and "women are more psychologically violent". They steal power by denying reality, reshaping it toward their propaganda, and aggressively assert collective denial via this demented collusion.

Men are simply not safe people when they assert men's widespread values. Additionally, men centred women are unsafe women. Men keep these values private, they dont wave red flags about until it's far foo late. Yet they all know EXACTLY what they're doing by enforcing these collective delusions. Having married a feminist and divorced a violent perp AFTER children it was Reddit women that alerted me to the phenomenon of the baby trap charted by Jess Hill's podcast The Trap. Zero experience of DFV until babies arrived and his lies started. I NEVER tolerated his BS so that made me his villain. Now psychologists want to pathologise me when he has multiple diagnoses. Mentsl illness is not an excuse but good grief it complicates how he chooses to wreck havoc

Right now I only am engaging in self learning and bringing up women's issues/feminist issues more often and freely in daily conversation. But my social circle is admittedly small and I am looking for opportunities to do more. So I am hoping we can discuss here what we do to promote feminism and it's ideals even if it is under a different label.

Meta (Facebook) is banning ads for a Virgina Woolf play in Spain due to “any mention of civil rights, feminism or social reform”.

If that’s the case, let’s see if they have the same energy for the PragerU ads that mention that same exact topics. Of course they won’t, since PragerU is a well-oiled propaganda machine that is working to erase civil rights and feminism.

Those that fully believe in the latter (often people who have been exposed to porn as a child and saw no problem in it) will sort of use the premise of that first statement to "boys will be boys" their way into justifying leaving easy access to pornography in spaces dominated by children. (I pray for every child who liked My Little Pony and had an internet connection) Often crying puritan whenever you point out their groomer attitude towards the spread of pornography across social media.

@ellymayeusa on instagram posted a reel exposing the test she did to prove the men we argue with are bots. A lot of these profiles are convincing. Don’t waste your energy fighting them anymore. You’re arguing with a robot. The Lindsay Clancy case is a psyop.

Here is a link to provide context to the story: Mama Stanley's Edmonton Oilers petition is picking up steam | Daily Hive | Offside

A quick overview of the situation. A 20-year old woman met one of the hockey players in a bar and she stated they did engage in consensual sex. However, later on four other players entered the room and also engaged in non-consensual sex with her.

At trial, all five players were acquitted because the judge, whom herself is a woman followed the same rhetoric we often hear play out in the justice system when a woman brings forth her story about SA from a male (in this case multiple males).

The judge stated her accounts were "not credible nor reliable." She based this on video evidence which apparently contradicted her statements. The judge also admonished the woman because she bought her own drinks when she claims the players did and she returned from the bathroom naked when she could have put her clothes on and left. They also relied on others' testimony where she allegedly encouraged the players to engage with her. While the prosecution tried to argue she was only doing this out of fear, the judge said the video evidence did not provide this.

They also said she had motive to lie to hide it from her boyfriend. So she is going to lie and bring forth a very public claim about SA to hide it from her BF? Are you kidding me? What kind of backwards logic is that. Because yes, her boyfriend is absolutely not going to make negative judgments about her because the sex was non-consensual. I am shocked this judge, being a woman herself would come to this conclusion.

The woman did not receive any apologies from these men and all she did receive was apologies from the police for taking SIX years to bring the case to a close and from Hockey Canada for how it dealt with sexual assault claims in the past.

For me, this once again highlights how (rich) males continue to get away with acts of violence against women. This woman now has a life sentence of trauma while these rapists get to continue on their careers in hockey. This just screams Brock Turner or Ruben Vanstiphout who walked away because he had a "promising career." A person trusted with the most intimate elements of women's healthcare who raped an incapacitated woman was allowed to continue practicing.

These males are being signed by hockey teams and one nearly became a Stanley Cup Champion. There has been plenty of backlash and still these teams don't care. They can't rely on the same frameworks as the justice system. A team doesn't need reasonable doubt to sign players, they just need to not do it. Now, they want to have these rapists names etched on what is supposed to be some kind of "holy grail."

And yet males have the audacity to complain when women don't want anything to do with them. These stories just enrage me.

What are everyone else's thoughts?