lovebeyondmeasure:

Quick, messy graphic to explain a concept that seems obvious to me:

We shouldn’t be helping women because they’re related to someone else. We shouldn’t be helping women because someone else cares about them. We should be helping women because they are people. 

We should be helping women for their own sake.

Why is that a hard concept for people to grasp?

lord-kitschener:

oh fucking fine

trafficked women in ukraine are clearly a bunch of urban outfitters-wearing white fairy vagina spoiled hipster bitchcunts heauxs who make frida kahlo “grrl power” shirts for etsy who need to drink bleach and are considered 100% white everywhere in the world because everywhere in the world is like america

there tumblr look at me I socialed the justice 

give me my radikewl activist asspats now

molhouse:

other women are not my competition. i stand with them, not against them. 

thenewwomensmovement:

thescarletwoman:

thisisrapeculture:

xtremecaffeine:

and-other-good-intentions:

So I saw a post on how American Apparel markets unisex clothing, but I couldn’t actually find a unisex section on their website. I did however notice this. The sweatshirts one is particularly illuminating.

Selling men’s clothes to men, and selling women’s bodies to… ?

American Apparel is really fucking horrible for many, many reasons, but here’s another example.

American Apparel’s advertising is a PERFECT example of the way that we sell products to men through advertisements and sell women’s bodies to men even though they’re being used in advertisements for women’s products. It’s a fantastic example of how the female body is treated differently than the male body, how it’s seen as intrinsically sexual, and how this is totally normalized within our culture. To be clear: i’m not saying there’s anything wrong with women’s bodies being sexual, or women being seen as sexual beings. We are sexual beings! What I am saying is that there’s something deeply problematic when that sexualizing is only happening for women, and when that sexuality turns into objectification through a male gaze. To illustrate, here’s a screencap from the AA homepage right now:

because a picture of a woman’s ass that she is spreading with her fingers and the slogan ‘get wet’ is not an objectification of women’s bodies for the male gaze AT ALL, and we would totally see these types of images and ads for male swimsuits too! -________- 

Yeah, if you’re still spending your money there, stop.

oh-my-siren:

sidatron:

defeatmenot:

eldorado-lu:

She’s a member of AKB48 who was caught coming out of a male idol’s house. At first people thought she’d be forced to move to one of the sister groups or something not as harsh, but she was made to shave her head (she says it was her idea, but i mean c’mon) and then management uploaded a video of her asking for forgiveness and it’s all so ridiculous. She was also demoted to trainee level, after being in the group for 8 years. So if you could go to their YT channel and flag the video as abusive so YT removes it, that’d be great. 

EVERYONE: Please go here and flag this video as abusive content against vulnerable individuals.  We need to get this taken off youtube IMMEDIATELY.  PLEASE.

Jesus fuck!

I heard about the “scandal” yesterday, but never did I imagine that they would do something like this. That video was one of the most upsetting things I’ve ever seen in my life.

Please report it and spread the word about how wrong it is to do something like this to a poor innocent girl who has done no wrong!

disgusting

and who wants to guess that the guy’s punishment it zilch. or maybe along the lines of having to write ‘sry lol’. a woman cannot have a relationship without it destroying her image and career. men don’t go through even a fraction of that.

The guy’s management doesn’t have a rule against dating, so he would get no punishment.  But also, when asked about it, his management just said “His personal life is his personal life.  He said they are just friends, nothing more.”  So not only is his personal life private, where hers is a means to be shamed publicly for, but he also denied that anything even happened.  Why couldn’t she get that same luxury?  This whole story makes me sick and sad. 

theguywhokillsbadguys:

A friend shared this Jezebel article with me. It shares Jezebel’s Dodai’s perspective on a white English teacher’s perspective teaching in South Korea and observing her Korean  charges get plastic surgery.

As one of those ~white feminists~ myself who spent two years in South Korea - admittedly a small portion of time, and from a similarly outsider lens - I understand the impulse to find the South Korean plastic surgery obsession problematic and impose a Western lens on its intensity. But I think Dodai’s secondhand interpretation, a telephone of sorts, and the OP’s interpretation is kind of fucked up.

For starters:

(1) South Korean women themselves were not invited to speak about the topic, to offer their perspective and place this within a context of what a ‘beauty ideal’ means in Korea. There are plenty of South Korean women I know who are available, organized, feminist, would probably be interested in speaking to an outlet with Jezebel’s range, and often speak excellent English (or are native-born English speakers) who could have easily cleared up or at least clarified Dodai’s misconceptions. Many are even on Tumblr and Facebook.

But instead of actually talking to these women, Dodai perpetuates a fucked up Othering by deciding to take the white English teacher’s word for it, and then putting her own spin on it. When this is the Internet, and they are available, and even if their analysis would not be in Western feminist terms, it would certainly be a counterpoint to Dodai’s projection.

Which leads me to my next point.

(2) Dodai, who has never visited South Korea, and has appeared to only consult some before/after pictures on Tumblr blogs with no context whatsoever, is making a huge Western feminist hullabaloo about a phenomenon she is interpreting through a Western lens. One of the biggest mistakes is assuming that the eyelid surgery is to look “more Western”. OH MY GOD THIS BOTHERS ME SO MUCH while of course we cannot discount the role that white discourse has played in the entire world and the hegemony of racialized white privilege, I guarantee you this is NOT the rationale of South Korean women: “Oh I’m doing this to look more white”. South Korean beauty standards may be fucked up and patriarchal and limiting women and all of that sexist jazz, but ASSUMING THAT IT IS BASED ON A WESTERN IDEAL IS ITSELF A CHAUVINIST ASSUMPTION.  If anything, from what I have observed, and is open to debate, there is more an idea of what it means to be the most “Korean” - and that involves very light skin. This is obviously a form of racialization based on skin tone but it is not the same thing as what we mean when we talk about “whiteness” in the US.

(3) On the whole, in my honky opinion, I would agree that there is very much just ONE beauty standard in Korea - rather than a multitude - but perhaps that should be taken into consideration with the fact that Korea has a long history of ethnic homogeneity to this day, so comparing a Korean peer with an American peer may not be a contextually great comparison or even fair. It also ignores the role that nationalism plays in things as complex and simultaneously subtle and UNsubtle as the beauty ideal - and Korea is a very nationalistic country.

TL;DR Jezebel fails again.

Also, I am terribly unimpressed (and unsurprised) with how certain observers of the events in India have managed to twist the situation into a typically racist and sexist narrative of “wow,they really treat their women badly over there, in stark contrast to the gender-equality utopia we’ve achieved in the enlightened west.”

Uh huh.

Uh huh.

Shut up now.