Women Archives - Brazen She

The Lie That’s Killing Feminism

April 17, 2022 by Brazen She

Internalized misogyny runs deep. Even insightful women may find themselves suspicious of women-lead movements.

Van Badham writes for Guardian Australia. In addition to the coolest name in journalism, this week she has some sharp words about the current state of the Battle of the Sexes.

Boys are yucky, and you’re just as good as they are!

She trumpets the results of a new study from the University of Bath: “Married mothers who earn more than their husbands take on an even greater share of the housework, a study from the University of Bath in the UK has found – the more they earned over their partner, the more housework they did.

“Women who earn more than men do more household labour, it concludes, because the situation implies a gender norm variation for which women feel obliged to compensate.”

She’s playing his role, and centuries of debasement mean he can’t bring himself to adopt hers. But the laundry ain’t gonna do itself.

“Why obliged? The study says conceptions of masculinity are near inextricable from the ancient ‘male breadwinner’ role.“

Oh, come now! Can men really be expected to adjust? Those creatures who forged civilization and colonized the planet navigating by the stars – Can we really expect them to behave intelligently?

Sarcasm aside, Van makes a very important point – “I’ll say what the study can’t: Women learn, as girls, there is no greater danger than a man who perceives his masculinity is threatened by them.”

Here she pokes the doughy center of every heterosexual relationship – A man’s greatest fear is a woman laughing at him, while a woman’s greatest fear is that a man will kill her. When your potential partners are also your biggest potential threat, not all the tension is sexual. You don’t need to shoot a gun to know it’s best to treat them all as if they’re loaded.

But, rather than dig into this power imbalance and why it lingers despite economic changes, Van blurs micro and macro to basically blame ‘society’: “Straight domestic relationships are where the deeply ingrained gender stereotypes go, like vampires, to feed on women’s blood and maintain eternal life.”

No! My instincts died with my innocence!

Why are these gender stereotypes so ingrained?? Could it have anything to do with the inevitable interactions of mechanistic material dynamics? Making six figures won’t make you stronger than him. The sweetest man in the world cannot gestate your child for you. If we’re talking about the mundane frustrations of family life, we must acknowledge the whole, gritty picture. Otherwise we’re just feeling sorry for ourselves.

Alas, Van’s deep digs at Liberal Feminism belie her ignorance of anything happening outside of it – “A mutant alliance of conservative radicals and biologically-determinist feminist separatists…”

Wow, you sure got my number there, Van. My husband will be very interested to know I’m not speaking to him anymore, right after you finish explaining what ‘biologically-determinist’ actually means.

“…are out to insist that the greatest threat to women is not the intimate partner violence of fact, but the swim-champ trans women of fiction.”

A link takes us to a denial of Lia Thomas’ physical advantages. Here we have an explicit demonstration of the limits of LibFem analysis – Van can’t address the physical, material factors that shape women’s domestic lives because she’d have to admit that we are different from men, after all.

Liberal Feminism long ago gave away the Different But Equal card in exchange for entrance to the Cool Boys Club. To highlight the distinction of femaleness is to admit we don’t belong.

And while chiding LibFems, Van is singing the same song, “An avalanche of actively anti-trans legislation in the United States” Pause for the obligatory reminder that outlawing the mutilation of healthy children is pro-children, not anti-trans.

“…is not an ‘over there’ problem when its scare-campaign talking points – always directed at women – are echoed both by Australia’s conservative MPs and the ambitious boys of its liberal Greens.” Leaving aside Aussie politics, it’s pretty rich to complain about scare-campaign talking points right after regurgitating one!

All this feels strangely familiar!

Perhaps these campaigns are aimed at women because there’s a movement afoot, Van. And there’s always room for a smart woman like you.

“Dare I suggest that the aggressive scapegoating of transgender women by an invested, patriarchal hierarchy is a cunning misdirection, given that more money and more power for the lucky few has still not provided women with gender equality in the home?”

Observations this astute tend to get a person labeled a conspiracy theorist. But who put the transwomen there, Van? After so many feminist gains, why are we defending the very definition of the word ‘woman’ in public discourse and law?

“’Woman’ is a problematised term not because of any transgender activism.” Really? Because ‘inclusive language’ is kinda their thing. “It’s because the modern expectations of what it means to be a “woman” are so demanding, contradictory and structurally unsatisfying, they are impossible for everyone.”

That’s why the gates are left undefended – We’ve gotten so busy pushing ourselves and hating ourselves and dumping our negativity onto other women that we’ve forgotten what it’s all for.

And Van points this out- It’s really nice to finally see someone else bringing this up. She describes how we’re immersed in a “culturally mainstreamed, ‘go girl’ liberal feminism that has massaged ‘girls can do anything’ to mean ‘girls should do everything, all the time’.

“You must have #nolimits – especially when it comes to sexual experimentation – and yet confidently enforce boundaries, ‘dump the motherfucker already’ but have #couplegoals!” Yep, those double standards are a bitch. But when even adult human females struggle to be women, the temptation for fellas to show us girls how it’s done must be overwhelming!

Oh, you’re definitely a better shot than me – I don’t even know how you did that!

Van tears into Liberal Feminist messaging with a vengeance that feels personal, “The most important job in the world is still being a mother, so be an active parent, but not a helicopter parent. You should pursue your own dreams, but think outside the box, achieve a work-life balance but also lean in, ask for that raise, #BelieveAchieve and smash the glass ceiling. With your perfect face.“

A line truly worthy of a cathartic spit-take.

“It’s the old paradox that insists the apex of womanhood is to be simultaneously virgin, mother and whore – except also now do this backwards in heels, making six figures on a keto diet at yoga while vacuuming and everything’s live on Instagram.”

Just reading that leaves me breathless – And she didn’t even mention the kids! The relentless spinning of the modern woman, our perpetual multitasking, keeps us drained and preoccupied. Which suits those who benefit from our current system just fine.

“Culture is not encouraging this because it reflects any aspiration of the modern woman to be exhausted, strung out and burdened by feelings of performance failure. It’s because the patriarchy has realised Liberal Feminism’s potential to leave women so individually overburdened, stressed and anxious they don’t revolt against the vampiric masculinities in their lives.”

Holy shit, Gary! Close the door, it’s freezing!

That, and we all have a vampire we know and love. Tearing down the patriarchy cannot begin with tearing down our homes.

Working with men to end patriarchy may seem like a paradox, but I’m starting to think it’s the only way. No one said marriage was easy. Straight women are down in the trenches on the front lines of the Battle of the Sexes, with no clear strategy and no reinforcements. If we coordinate, we can push for the basic equality we all want – Freedom from fear.

Van is good at identifying problems. Resisting the urge to put the onus on individuals, she waves instead toward the nebulous evil of ‘patriarchy.’ Because patriarchy makes women more detail-oriented and gives men a narrow pelvis… They never quite think it through, do they?

Because to do that would be to admit defeat in Liberal Feminism’s most precious skirmish – That men and women are exactly the same (aside from the obvious external differences). That femaleness is so insignificant, it has no material impact on us whatsoever.

This is the blatant lie that’s killing feminism. Adhering to this lie makes any real analysis of our lives impossible.

It blinds us to our situation. It keeps us from seeing our shared problems. Giving in to this unearned ancient shame keeps us isolated and trapped in a man’s world.

I told you, babydoll, this is a business meeting! Go and fetch me and the guys some drinks!

Sure, a lot of the crap between women and men is cultural static. But a lot of that static emanates from hard realities of material existence that no amount of Leaning In will change.

Tuning out that static is important. But those of us on the front lines have a duty to trace it to its source, to stop allowing ourselves to be distracted from what our instincts are telling us.

This vital discussion can’t be had while smart women like Van Badham are still willfully ignoring the obvious. Collective amnesia will continue to ensure life’s traps ensnare all of us, one by one.

Unless we can forgive ourselves for being female, feminism is doomed.

Filed Under: Marriage, Unpopular Opinion, Women’s World Tagged With: Culture, Feminism, gender roles, Liberal feminism, Marriage, radical feminism, Relationships, sex differences, sex roles, Women, Women's liberation, women's oppression

Carrie Bradshaw Regrets

January 23, 2022 by Brazen She

Two very interesting creators sat down to have a conversation. Well over an hour long, I was prepared to settle in for a while.

But 20 minutes in, one of them takes a tangent from their discussion of male and female archetypes, “The girl who wrote ‘Sex and the City’ is now like 50, and she’s alone. And she writes that she actually regrets being alone and not having kids.”

I’ll be right back – I need to go check this out!

Naturally, I had to go find out if this were true. Reading while listening to Jungian theory being too much for me, I had to dip out of the video before it really got going.

Ms. Bushnell Regrets

Searching for ‘Candace Bushnell regrets’ took me straight to her Twitter. Dated 29 July, 2019, Candace responds, “Hahaha! The opposite is true: I’ve never regretted not having children and I’ve felt compelled to have a career since I was a child.” Not slowing down enough to examine this, she goes on to plug her latest book, Is There Still Sex in the City?

Her tweet quotes an American journalist sharing The Daily Mail, itself a description of a London Times article hidden behind a paywall. As fortune would have it, this is the only subscription I have bothered to keep up with. Lucky us, right?

So, does the woman who singlehandedly made single life aspirational regret her choices?

The Daily Mail sure thinks so. Their headline – Sex and the City Writer Regrets Choosing A Career Over Having Children, is downright blunt.

But did she really say that? The issue lies in the characterization of Bushnell’s responses in the Times interview.

London Times Fangirling

2019 feels very distant now, but even before lockdowns and mask mandates Bushnell’s attitude had aged about as well as her fictional avatar. The write-up by Laura Pullman is glowing – They sent a fan, lest the Times have to edit out any critical thought regarding Bushnell’s cultural legacy. Despite this, her negativity and entitlement leap off the page.

The evident push to make her likeable is undercut by her obvious, fairly generic Boomer privilege: “Bushnell enjoyed a comfortable, horsey upbringing in Connecticut with her two younger sisters and her rocket scientist father and travel agent mother. Aged 19, she dropped out of university and escaped to New York – More specifically Studio 54, the city’s most notorious nightclub.”

A ‘horsey’ upbringing? A literal rocket scientist? But she had to ‘escape’ to the New York party scene, because… college? How edgy!

I just know there’s a meaning for my life out here somewhere!

“Sitting on the sunny balcony sipping San Pellegrino, she talks about coming of age in a ‘free love kind of way’ before the AIDS crisis hit. ‘People were so interesting. The sex was good. The men made an effort. Why was it that in 1980 the men seemed really focused on making sure the woman had an orgasm?’”

I can’t say, but this didn’t die with disco. I have to wonder if it had anything to do with finding some success in the New York professional world. A drug-fueled fling is there in the moment with you, but a professional is probably looking for someone to further his own reputation. Different pools, different fish.

The Heroic Victim

Candace describes the environment she found herself in, but only has analysis for how it affected her: “She recalls how, when she was on the lower rungs of the career ladder, senior men would constantly try to coax her into sleeping her way to the top. ‘I don’t want to name every publication in New York, but every newspaper and publication had men who made it clear that that’s how they helped women get ahead.’

“It’s the reason why she worked for women’s magazines, such as the now defunct Condé Nast titles Mademoiselle and Self, instead. She laments that this meant that she wasn’t taken seriously as a writer ‘for a very long time’”.

It might have something to do with being known as a sex columnist, too. Sex makes people giggle, it might not be the best topic for someone wanting to be seen as a Serious Writer.

I feel so grown up right now!

But, never fear! Candace slogged through – “Her hard work and shrewd observations have afforded her a luxurious life divided between her home in the Hamptons and her apartment on the Upper East Side, a few blocks away from her boyfriend’s penthouse.

“Now 60, Bushnell has amassed a reported $22m fortune of her own.”

Because, as we all know, sex sells.

But that victim card is too valuable to let go of – “’I often think, what would my life be like if I hadn’t had to run the gauntlet of so much sexism? How much more successful would I be? Probably a lot.’”

I imagine we all ponder this once in a while but, if you’re Candace Bushnell, you can laugh remembering how you left a Carrie Bradshaw-sized dent in the end of the 20th century, and go back to sipping your vino.

Having It All

But her lack of impact on a part of culture she totally rejected and has built a career on vilifying really gets under Candace’s skin. “Does it frustrate her that when it comes to female success, society still emphasises marriage and children?

“‘Society definitely does do that, but we all have the right to think for ourselves. We don’t have to buy that value system.’”

Speaking for myself, I got the impression growing up that women who had kids were deluded losers with no ambition. I stumbled into it and am as surprised as anyone to find myself defending it.

Refusing to roll with life’s punches leaves little room to learn from them: “Just like high-flying PR executive Samantha in Sex and the City, Bushnell has always been vocal about not wanting children. ‘I don’t want to be shot down, but now I do see that people with children have an anchor in a way that people who have no kids don’t.’”

Our choice to take part in a whole aspect of life from which you abstain is not a static thing. There are ripple effects that creep into places you’d never imagine.

Holy shit, am I… happy??

“She also writes persuasively about how, for single women with no children, there’s no set life script to follow, no comfort of knowing what’s supposed to be happening and when.” So, no expiration date, when you’re expected to just fade into the background and let the young turks get on with saving the world?

Turn And Face The Strange

“’When I was in my thirties and forties, I didn’t think about it. Then when I got divorced [from ballet dancer Charles Askegard in 2012] and I was in my fifties, I started to see the impact of not having children and of truly being alone.’”

I think this is what The Daily Mail is referring to. Candace never comes right out and says, “Wow, I sure do regret my decision to not have children!” She simply expresses that regret, in the past tense. She was going through a divorce. Framing it as if she’s desperate and lonely forever is disingenuous – She’s back in New York now and dating again.

However, it’s fair to say that’s what she’s expressing here – During and after her divorce, she really felt that silence where the voices of their children would have been. Our genes don’t just color our skin and limit our wardrobe choices – Humans have instincts just as much as any creature, and it’s much harder to ignore them in times of crisis.

And I can’t be the only one who’s interacted with some ‘childfree’ women and wanted to ask them just who they were trying to convince.

Candace is as out of touch with the zeitgeist as she is with herself, and asking about it is taken personally: “In 2019, writing a book about relationship dynamics and sex with no mention of the #MeToo movement seems unusual. Was the omission a conscious decision?

“’Well, where would I put it?’ fires back Bushnell, defensively.” Ever image-conscious, Candace catches herself, “She changes tack: ‘You have to remember that [I am part of] a generation of women who’ve dealt with so much of that.'”

Oh Bob, you’re such a flirt!

And you totally bought into the idea of male sexuality as default, leaving any uniquely female needs or instincts completely unheeded. “In the book she also delves into what she calls ‘middle-aged sadness.’

“After one close friend takes her own life, she touches on the issue of suicide among women in their fifties – ‘If your life unravels in earlier decades, you can see a future. But in your fifties, if you’re suddenly single, you’ve not worked for years and your children have left home, then a crisis of identity hits.'”

Change Vs. Abandonment

This does sound like regret to me. Candace goes on to tell us how it’s passed now, that she’s back and better than ever. Admittedly, she doesn’t name the feeling she’s describing. And she has no real analysis of why she felt that way, or why she feels better after turning 60.

Running with the comparison she made, a mother knows before her children even exist that, someday, they will leave her. That’s the idea, really – You teach them how to live, then let them get on with it. A mother can plan for this inevitability, some of us even occasionally yearn for a day without interruptions.

Divorce is different – Your husband makes a vow, possibly in front of all your family and friends, to be with you through thick and thin, till the end. Marriage has become big business, but anyone who’s had one can tell you it’s impossible not to get a little swept up in the whole thing. We still do these ceremonies for a reason, after all.

Shock is understandable when a marriage ends. It’s not the same as spending a couple decades raising up children, who naturally look after themselves more and more.

Candace may not see the personal injustice in her situation but, as always, she’s more than ready to make it about sexual politics – “‘What is hardest about it is that when a woman, especially a woman over 50, has a hard time or things don’t go right for her, everyone blames her. It’s her fault. You didn’t do something right,’ she says, raising her voice.”

Yep, it’s called being a woman in a male-centric social system. Making a small fortune reinforcing it all these years gives her complaints a ring of petulance, and it’s easy to see why people jumped on that Mail headline.

Glamourous Passivity

Candace Bushnell has lead a generation of women down the primrose path to loneliness, and she has not learned a damn thing.

This must be where all those cocktails figure in!

She obviously absorbed some poisonous ideas in her youth, unwittingly demonstrating why her approach is a mistake: “Plus, she adds, youth and attractiveness can often get you what you want, and now those tools are waning – ‘So you feel like you no longer have agency in the world and can no longer be effective.'”

Candace literally measures her effectiveness in life by the response of men! Filtering it through Personal Empowerment branding only creates a Trojan Horse for patriarchy.

“‘But the interesting thing is almost everybody seems to get out of [the middle-aged sadness stage].”

‘I was sad and lonely – But it’s not because of my choices! And anyway, I’m fine now, also for no apparent reason!’ Her interpretation is very passive, especially for someone claiming to represent female liberation.

But she’s still so glamourous! “While in town she still goes out five nights a week – to parties, dinners, premieres.”

And maybe hipper, even – Get ready for Hipster Candace! “But New York is not what it was: ‘It’s a thousand times less fun.’ At the parties hardly anyone drinks, no one smokes, the people are no longer outrageous and everything has become corporate, she complains. ‘Everybody’s being watched.'”

Yeah, that’s not creepy at all. Can we stop and address this apparent mass surveillance? Didn’t think so.

I Hope I Die Before I Get Old

Far more urgent to mourn the loss of Boomer idealism for the thousandth time, “‘Manhattan was a place where you came to be free,’ she says. ‘Everybody who did not fit in was here. People with dreams. And it wasn’t about money, it was about passion.'”

We’d all like make our passion our job, but most of us can’t pretend making a living isn’t about money, honey.

I feel this weight pressing down on me!

But rather than bite into any of the these meaty offerings, Ms. Pullman brings us the juicy deets of Candace’s new love life – “So what makes it work with her and Coleman?

“‘At this age you want someone to be nice, you don’t want someone who’s critical or demeaning.'” I have felt this way at every age!

But to avoid reflecting on whether this approach has anything to do with finding herself middle-aged and alone, these toxic ideas are framed as just the natural order of things: “‘It feels like when one is younger there can be this competition between partners. Maybe that’s part of the sexual attraction, but that kind of stuff just doesn’t work when you get older.’”

When does this stuff ever work?? Maturity brings the understanding that competing for dominance is not how you build a lasting relationship. Maybe that’s what she’s talking about.

Second Verse, Same As The First

The Times is no help here, that preppy aesthetic is just so shiny and distracting! “He has a home near hers in the Hamptons, where they spend their days playing tennis and going on long walks.” Sounds pretty good to me, but I’m sure Candace will find a way to reframe this to her disadvantage someday.

“’I think romance is something where you’re not in a rush to get to the end. It’s just about enjoying each other’s company. It’s doing things together.’” This may be the most constructive thing I’ve ever encountered from Candace. For the first and probably only time, I completely agree.

“Would she get married again? ‘I haven’t ruled it out. It’s funny that it’s somewhere in the back of your brain. It never goes away,’ says Bushnell, basking in the sunshine.”

It’s the simple things in life, don’t you think, Pussy?

It’s very like the urge to bask in the sunlight, to pause as we go about our lives and steal a moment of simple warmth. We can laugh at ourselves, remind ourselves of our dawn jog and regimen of vitamins, and go back inside. But the instinct remains, and the simple joy of a sunny day is so elemental it doubles as a universal artistic symbol.

Parenthood is similar. Existing independent of the sexual politics we pile on top of it, creating the next generation evokes deep instincts that our culture has no notion of. It’s safe to assume that not doing so eventually does, too.

Female Conditioning, Rebranded

I do feel a little sorry for Candace. Not only is there no social network to support her in anything other than enthusiastic rejection of maternity, there’s really no cultural framework in which to understand her struggle. If she did come right out and name her feelings, the shame would rain down from all sides.

Regret in general is frowned upon – We’re all living our best lives! Unless you’re caught up in a public shaming, expressing regret is seen as admitting defeat.

And Candace Bushnell admitting defeat would be news. It would be red meat for the culture vultures who circle feminism, plucking off the weak-minded. Because we have no way to understand the complex lives of older women other than to judge them.

Candace painted herself into a corner, but she’s made it so glamourous that other women still want to follow. She could be a strong voice for the truth about women’s lives, but she’s too dependent on her brand to ever admit she might have been wrong.

Candace’s shame reflects her female conditioning, and we must be unashamed. She will never learn anything, but we can begin the work of narrative-building. The current climate of clamping down only makes this more urgent!

Defy Your Conditioning

We’ve all used the anonymity of the online world to disguise our most distinguishing feature sometime, but one great thing we could do for ourselves is to just lay it out there. When participating in the public forum, don’t downplay your experience as a woman.

You mean I shouldn’t hide this??

Not to make everything about our sex, but the impulse is to downplay, disguise, disregard our thoughts or experience when they mark us out explicitly as female. There used to be an exception for Lady Things – Women’s Issues were thoroughly cordoned off from Serious Culture – And we don’t even get that anymore!

But maybe we could turn this to our advantage – Lacking any specialized spaces or resources doesn’t mean we don’t need to take care of business. We’re just gonna have to do it out in the open. And we’re gonna have to support each other.

I’m afraid Candace Bushnell can’t be helped. But women like her can serve as a good example of a bad approach. What I learned from this Times article is that it’s more important than ever not to let them dominate the conversation.

Filed Under: Aging Gracefully, Everyday Misogyny, Fight Despair Together Tagged With: Candace Bushnell, Capitalism, Carrie Bradshaw, Culture, Feminism, Motherhood, Parenting, patriarchy, Relationships, Self Care, Sex in the City, Women, Women's liberation, women's oppression

Gender Dysphoria Is Normal

December 11, 2021 by Brazen She

“Being a girl and hitting puberty is so traumatic.”

Can I just de-blume the blossom?

An anonymous Tumblr post expressed a common shame in simple words. It rippled through Gender Critical social media in the form of screenshots after the original post was quickly deleted.

Her spurt of stifled frustration struck a chord, breathlessly relating a firsthand account of female suppression: “You go from being a genderless little free thing to being hit with shaving and makeup and growing breasts and skincare and menstruation and suddenly being sexualized,

“When like a few years ago you could take your shirt off to play in the stream and trade cards with the boys and come home covered in mud and not even think about it.”

But eventually you realize everyone around you is thinking about it. Compliments focus on appearance or social skills, while questions often get uncomfortably personal. The sudden societal burden can combine with newly dawning self-awareness to create a perception of generalized critical observation.

Others have expectations you can’t meet, and a young person might not consider that those expectations are unreasonable. Especially when most people they know seem to be doing fine. Suppressing stories like this one furthers the myth that most girls are just fine with ‘femininity.’

“And then you spend years hating being a girl and hating everything puberty did to you and wishing you could be a boy or be completely genderless again and it takes you many years to come to terms with yourself,

“Or you simply try to Lean In to everything and do makeup tutorials on YouTube and claim it’s for fun. How can this be treated as normal?” This hatred-denial continuum seems to mimic the classic whore/virgin dichotomy, doesn’t it?

We’ve been over this a thousand times!

The bitter invocation of Cheryl Sandberg taps a deep well of bile from digesting many betrayals. Powerful women often become so by learning the boys’ game, which many of us are just not very good at. They join in the elite chorus of supposed meritocracy, clinging to their ego-driven narrative as tightly as any man.

Naturally, the framing of this as a Women’s Issue had to be squashed: “To be honest, this sounds like the kind of thing a transgender or non-binary person who is AFAB might feel once puberty hits. I mean, it doesn’t necessarily have to be that, but it’s just what comes to mind.”

This person admits to not knowing what they’re talking about, but feels free to weigh in on this young woman’s life. And irony and misogyny continue their slugfest for supremacy.

But there were some responses claiming more authority: “100% this. I am trans, and this is what dysphoria feels like.”

“This is gender dysphoria.”

Let’s assume, for a moment, that this is true. If gender is a social construct that’s imposed on us, it makes sense that a one-size-fits-all approach will cause some people issues.

“I suppose it could be. Is it also possible that cis kids could struggle with puberty?” A reasonable suggestion! Let’s see how they disregard it –

“Sure it is, and plenty of cis girls complain about how society’s perception of them changes and the pressure put on them to act a certain way increases. They don’t, however, spend years hating their bodies and never fully recover,” Thanks for the heads-up that you have absolutely no firsthand experience with this topic. Women’s body issues are their own cottage industry!

Ugh, I’m hideous!

“…looking back and wishing they had never gone through puberty and that they still looked genderless. OP is trans/nb, 99%.” Oh, right, I forgot gender is innate and springs forth from deep-seated personal essence. It’s so easy to get confused when they oscillate more than Brian Eno.

And, of course, someone stepped in to tell her what a weirdo she is: “Look, I agree puberty isn’t fun but this is not a normal reaction to it. The person who wrote this seems like they are probably trans or nonbinary. Most people (regardless of gender) struggle with some aspects of puberty but it doesn’t make the majority of us hate who we are/our gender.”

Struggling with sexual stereotypes is the basis for a lot of friction and static in women’s lives. Far from demonstrating a lack of womanhood, it may be the most common shared experience. It speaks to the shame surrounding it that this sensation was only recently named.

But someone else came right out and said what they were all thinking: Fresh meat! “Maybe you are just a boy/genderless? Plenty of cis women can probably relate to not liking gender stereotypes or oversexualization but cis women don’t hate being women lol”

Plenty of women hate sex stereotypes and still find joy in womanhood because we’ve learned not to take them personally. We understand that stereotypes are like Bigfoot – Lots of sightings but very little proof. We understand that our culture’s idea of what women are is generic and shallow, disconnected from the reality of our lives.

I hope the young woman who wrote this has found a more understanding audience, but I was glad to see it floating around. The more stories like this are shared, the more obvious it will become that ‘gender dysphoria’ is a normal part of growing up.

Leave me alone – Today I identify as wallpaper!

Individuality is our strength, but conformity makes us disposable. This is exactly how Patriarchy wants to see us, and normal mental development plays right into its hands.

Part of it is the shock of sudden self-awareness that strikes with puberty. Younger children are less conscious of how they are seen by others, dwelling blissfully in the warm glow of their own ego. Around the age of 12 or so, neurological development reaches the conceptualization of those same passions in everyone else. Suddenly the world is looking back at you, and just when you’re least prepared!

In the cataclysmic shifts of body and mind, chunks of once-established reality come into question. Social pressure can be one of few beacons of certainty.

The gender industry relies on these stories remaining shameful secrets. This young woman’s experience may be more extreme than some, but these commenters used women’s isolation in suffering to tell her she was alone. Divide and conquer. Rinse, repeat.

It’s normal and rational to get jetlag on the trip from subject to object. It’s painful to squeeze an entire human being into a shallow stereotype. If this is gender dysphoria, we all have it.

Sometimes all these layers feel so stifling!

Embracing this would defang it, robbing this discomfort of the power to overtake our psyches. Rejecting the stigma of failing to adhere to ‘feminine’ ideals is an important step on the road to liberation, and it would show young women that we all carry this burden.

Struggling as most women do doesn’t make you less of a woman, and we are stronger together.

Filed Under: Everyday Misogyny, Found In The Wild, Queer Ideology Tagged With: Anxiety, children, Culture, Dysphoria, Feminism, Free speech, Gender dysphoria, Gender Ideology, Mental Health, patriarchy, Women, Women's liberation

How Feminism Fails

November 27, 2021 by Brazen She

“Among the ‘strong-minded women’ who met to attend the convention was Amelia Bloomer – The lady who goes in for breeches and buncomb.”

Sir, thou dost wound me mightily!

Dress historian Abby Cox quotes a catty article from 1853, describing feminists as women who subscribe to pants and nonsense – You know, that crazy stuff about women being full people who deserve rights.

“I didn’t actually wanna bring it up, because of some personal biases towards it. It gets brought up a lot when people talk about feminism and clothing in the 19th century, so [it was] kinda me being like, ‘Ugh!’

“I also just kinda hate the 1850s as an aesthetic period, so I’ve never really been interested in studying it.

“However, for this discussion, it is important. It was a brief moment in sartorial history. It happened in the United States, it was tied into women’s rights at the time. However, it was a failure.”

Learning from feminism’s failures will keep us from repeating the past. No one remembers the 1850s for the drastic shift in women’s attire. Women’s pants came almost 100 years later, modeled by movie stars during the Great Depression.

Abby’s flustered, but she tries to explain why Bloomers didn’t change Victorian fashion, “They were too contrarian. They were too shocking, and so people didn’t take them seriously.

“By not operating within a broader social acceptability, how can [they] make any sort of progress towards equality?” Dropping out doesn’t solve anything – Just ask your nearest Baby Boomer.

Well, my bottom line is doing just fine!

But in the 2021 hustle economy, everyone’s a salesman. We’ve learned to sell ourselves to college admissions boards, to employers, to potential clients and subscribers, and to each other. Branding is the name of the game, and Bloomers were terrible branding.

We can do better.

The Medium Becomes The Message

“I’ve been reading news articles from the 1850s, and what’s interesting is that when these newspapers are talking about Amelia Bloomer, Susan B. Anthony, and this reform movement, they don’t ever actually talk about their points – The messages that they stand for.

“What they talk about is what they’re wearing, specifically the Bloomer outfits with the tunics and the trousers. So, they’ve gotten attention, but it wasn’t the attention that they wanted. It wasn’t the attention that worked.“

My heart ached for the sweet Aussie lady in my video this week, pleading for empathy from Katy Montgomery. She spoke from basic truths but stumbled defining her terms, and Katy’s fidgety obfuscation was a perfect example of the kind of willful misunderstanding we’re dealing with.

The kind of willful misunderstanding that broadcasts ulterior motives.

To actually make progress toward the liberation of female people from invisible cages, we gotta sell it: “Susan B. Anthony stopped wearing this outfit. It was distracting from the actual message and what she wanted to promote.”

Flexibility of method is imperative in support of the message, because context is queen. We gotta know our position backwards and forwards, but we can’t assume that being right is going to be enough!

But it’s not fair!

Style Over Fashion

When we come prepared, the debate is short – Bad behavior follows the exposure of logical inconsistency, and the reasonable party becomes readily apparent.

“This whole contrarian idea, it doesn’t work in this society – You have to fit in, and then make changes. This whole Bloomer thing is a perfect example of that. These clothes turned them into, for lack of a better term, a bit of a freak show.“

Abby means this quite literally. She quotes the Brooklyn Daily Eagle from 4 February, 1853: “During her stay in the Capitol, she called on a tailor and got measured for three pair of tight-fitting cassimere trowsers. The tape with which he took her dimensions is kept in a glass case, and exhibited to bachelors at a shilling a sight.”

Nothing if not for your pleasure, right fellas? Gross.

Abby argues for practicality, “The original idea of creating the Bloomers could have come from this very genuine place, and I can see where, initially, getting the attention could be a viewed as maybe a good thing.

“But then, when they’re not making headway and people are not moving past their clothing, then the message of equality is lost. Susan B. Anthony made this realization, and she stopped wearing the outfit.

“She started wearing a red shawl, and she became known for that, that was how you recognized her.” Ironically, it was Contrapoints who I heard say something about creating the taste with which you are to be enjoyed, something like that.

Refusing to accept the cover story we are fed is not enough. We must create our own context for our side of the human story. We can shift the angle by keeping our balance and refusing to be moved.

You Catch More Flies With Honey, Honey

“The Bloomers thing is something a lot of people like to hold onto because it’s this interesting thing, but I think it just doesn’t fit into the context of the female experience.” The strongest forms of feminism grow from the seed of women nurturing ourselves, rather than the embers of our patriarchal trauma.

…Did you say something, Gary?

Abby tells us the story of the Pattle Sisters, “Notorious for their artistic and eccentric friends. They wore clothing they created themselves that went against standards of the time.

“It wasn’t masculine clothing that they were wearing, they were just designing their own kind of scandalous dresses. And they pursued their own artistic and creative endeavors,” such as early fantasy photography.

As a bonus, she also explains away the bogeywoman of ‘White Feminism,’ apparently without realizing it – “Their social position gave them the space to be this way. Historically, we see women in higher social positions having room to be more eccentric, and pursue progressive agendas. Once the upper classes accepted these ideals, acceptability would trickle down to the middle and lower classes.”

Today’s scandal is tomorrow’s old news.

Context Is Queen

Looking through the lens of Class is illuminating, but the lesson these stories teach us defies social hierarchies. It might be easier to shake things up using your social clout, but sometimes an idea just doesn’t fit.

Akhenaten was Pharaoh of Egypt when he launched his new monotheistic religion, but his ideas were buried after his death in 1334 BC.

Divers pulled the first computer from an Ancient Greek shipwreck, its devastated designer’s name long forgotten.

There are piles of good ideas whose time or place had not come, dooming them to history’s trash heap.

And women are not ideas!

“Forty years later, we have split skirts for sport. It’s not like women didn’t wear bifurcated garments in the 19th century, it was the context of how they wore them that matters.”

Exactly. Feminism should be built in the context of women’s needs, not as a reaction to men.

Women Are Not Men

The Bloomers Revolution was undercut by the very notion that imitating men would bring freedom. We still seem to buy into the inherent assumption that women should be more masculine to be taken seriously. Many sacrifices have been made pursuing men’s vision of freedom, precious skills and knowledge wasted on a fundamentally flawed goal.

This brutal (and, again, seemingly willful?) oversight is not some historic relic. There are destructive consequences when the gaping holes in current feminist philosophy become doorways for those curious enough to go looking for them. Waiting on the other side are some pretty savvy right-wing weirdos, ready to validate whatever instinct is bothering you.

The Prattle Sisters’ fairy pictures are more fun than Suffragettes in their underwear – And they don’t force you to into awkward situations! The humanity of women is a basic truth, and it should be an easy sell.

Feminism should be piecing together women’s vision of freedom, but we have lost the thread in the hustle and bustle of the larger cultural argument a long time ago. Many of us aren’t even sure exactly what we’re fighting for, but we’ll know it when it’s gone.

Filed Under: Everyday Misogyny, Women of History, Women’s World Tagged With: Abby Cox, Amelia Bloomer, Culture, Feminism, history, Networking, Suffragettes, Suffragists, Women, Women's liberation, women's rights

Female-Presenting People: What Leftism Isn’t

October 30, 2021 by Brazen She

“We define our sexual orientation as one thing and you’re changing it to another, and that’s the issue.” Self-described “old-school lesbian YouTuber” Arielle Scarcella sits stubbornly at the center of our cultural confusion.

I shall not be moved!

“Now we have people telling us things like we have ‘complicated relationships’ with genitals? I don’t think me being a lesbian is a complicated issue. I think it’s just me being attracted to females,

“…Or female-presenting people.”

Posted back in December of 2019, Arielle becomes unusually quiet here. She hangs her head and mutters, “There’s nothing complicated about the fact that I like – that, that I’m attracted to boobs and vaginas. I mean, it’s that fuckin simple sometimes.”

She tries very hard to keep it that simple.

I don’t mean to imply that Arielle is somehow not really a lesbian. I was touched by her confusion and pain – It’s a pain straight women have been feeling for a long time: I’m attracted to men, I just don’t like them very much!

Arielle wants to see her sexuality as straightforward – Being attracted only to other women makes her a lesbian. We’re about the same age, I remember when this was assumed. Homosexuality was a fact of life, and female homosexuals were called lesbians. A straight man being a lesbian inside was nothing but a cheap punchline.

Although she’s been on the scene since 2009, Arielle is fairly new to politics. She built her personal brand on frank talk about lesbian sexuality, assuming a liberal social environment that’s beginning to dry up. After making waves when she “left the Left,” she still spends a lot of time critiquing them. The ‘Woke Left’ is the ex that Arielle just can’t get over.

I wonder what Bernie’s doing right now!

Which is weird, because she doesn’t seem to know who she’s talking about.

Which Way Is Left?

According to Brittanica, “Left, in politics, the portion of the political spectrum associated in general with egalitarianism and popular or state control of the major institutions of political and economic life. The term dates from the 1790s, when in the French revolutionary parliament the socialist representatives sat to the presiding officer’s left.”

Fun fact – It’s not random, arbitrary directions or concepts!

But Arielle talks about ‘The Left,’ ‘The Woke Left,’ and ‘The LGBT Community’ interchangeably as she describes distancing herself from all of the above: “I don’t think like these people, and I no longer want to be associated with them.”

Fair enough, right? But then she says things like, “The Left is so far left at this point that they are suggesting conversion therapy,” such as insisting anyone with a sexual orientation is a ‘genital fetishist,’ “and hiding it behind the idea of ‘queer progressiveness.'”

…The egalitarians are so egalitarian, they’re using social pressure to enforce conformity? You keep using that word – I do not think it means what you think it means. And she is far from the only one I have heard use it this way.

Britannica continues, “Leftists tend to be hostile to the interests of traditional elites, including the wealthy and members of the aristocracy, and to favour the interests of the working class. They tend to regard social welfare as the most important goal of government.”

Taking a Political Compass quiz, Arielle and of one of her new ‘right-wing’ friends casually agree that taxes are useful because they fund government programs. Arielle says she supports things like publicly-funded museums, because “Art is important.”

Sage wisdom, indeed. And upon discovering she qualifies as a ‘Left-leaning Centrist,’ Arielle still fails to find any definition for any of these words!

The book matches my dress! Cute, right??

She also glosses over the binary axis of the quiz – Social is laid across Political to arrive at a grid point, allowing extremes to cancel each other out. Someone who wants to drown Government in the bathtub but doesn’t give a shit who you sleep with comes out as a moderate on tests like this, too.

No True Authoritarian

Arielle repeatedly ignores giant clues that she’s not dealing with Progressives at all – “Why is it that the only things required to include all people start out female-based? ‘Feminism’ equals ‘equality for all,’ and women are expected to just sit back and take what’s given to us.”

“Shaming women for their sexual choices is not activism,” Depends on what you’re agitating for. “And it’s certainly not progressive.”

Ding ding ding!

But Arielle resists making inferences about the movement she helped build, “I don’t think the trans community at large is doing this, it’s the loud extremists. But those are the ones being heard, unfortunately.” She doubles down on the ‘few bad apples’ hypothesis before admitting it’s taken her a decade to speak up about it.

As for why that might be, she answers this in a video from a year earlier, in 2018 – “What other lesbians, and even gay men at this point, aren’t telling you is that they are fucking terrified to even touch on any trans topics; How often other LGBTQ YouTubers agree with what I’m saying but avert their eyes and don’t say anything, because they’re terrified of being labeled a transphobe.“

But in taking the long way around, Arielle seems to have missed this connection. She claims, “No one wants to talk about the fact that trans activists are making shirts with slogans like, ‘Kill All TERFs.'”

…There are evidently some corners of cyberspace Arielle has yet to discover – Plenty of us are talking about it!!! But that Cancel Culture censorship your friends are all terrified of keeps most of us from ever being heard at all.

Female-Presenting People

Navigating by instinct, Arielle seems to be caught in the false dichotomy of Right vs. Left, conservative vs. liberal. These simplistic labels blur social and political concepts, turning social liberals into political conservatives when Gender Studies overtakes Poli Sci.

I’ll be good, I swear… Just let me sit down!

Arielle’s relaxed social views are intact, but she only has her own perspective to defend them with. Underneath all her steadfast posturing, Womanhood for Arielle is determined by her own impression. This reasoning falls apart under the slightest pressure – It’s very White Feminism to insist you support transwomen, so long as they spend thousands on hormones and surgery!

Arielle’s impassioned defense of ‘gatekeeping’ and boundaries is undermined by her self-serving adherence to presentation. If you pass, you get a pass!

She even pulls Rose of Dawn in to tell us why the female gender role doesn’t need redefining – A hypothesis that any brand of Feminism would disagree with! Liberation of female people from our oppressive social role was the whole point of all this, remember??

But Arielle is happy to let Rose cling to the very traditions that oppress him, because Good Trans keep the questions at bay. She seemed to be on the edge of something in December 2019, right before she ‘left the Left.’

But she hasn’t changed her views much, remaining pro-choice even as she grows more pro-gun. She just stepped back from the community she helped build, filling the space with criticism. Arielle is reinforcing a refuge of reasonableness for herself as the stability of her position is assaulted from all sides.

Having founded her identity on her membership in the LBG(TQI+) community, she’s tethered to the sinking ship. Deeply enmeshed in the performance of her sexuality and unwilling to face her own contributions to the current situation, Arielle is still following the will-o-the-wisp that found her surrounded by “the mentally unstable.”

But if she admits that even the most attractive transwomen are men, Arielle has to ask herself some uncomfortable questions. Her advocacy will always be shallow because she contradicts herself on a fundamental level.

Some men have figured out a way to get at women like Arielle, to cloud their vision with the smoke and mirrors of ‘gender reassignment’ – Some men have learned to present as female. This disquieting spectre, and her own complicity in creating it, keep Arielle cuddled up to the pussy where she feels safe.

She’s naturally protective!

Truth Will Set You Free, But First It Will Piss You Off

The Left ‘left the Left’ a long time ago, and anyone who stumbles into material analysis gets mobbed. Arielle could be a powerful advocate for women if she hadn’t been betrayed by her government and her community. Watching her struggle to make sense of it all reminds me of the importance of definitions.

Identity Politics has flipped the script, enforcing an oppression hierarchy and placing transwomen – Men – at the top. Those with clout have used it to create an illusion of oppression.

Arielle Scarcella is a perfect example of how entwining politics and identity leaves us vulnerable to manipulation. If she could loosen her grip on that one word – Lesbian – just enough to admit there’s no True Trans, she could become the spokeswoman lesbians deserve.

Filed Under: Everyday Misogyny, Politics, Wokism Tagged With: conservatives, Culture, Feminism, Gender Ideology, liberals, Politics, trans rights, Women, Women's liberation, women's rights

Witches: The Heroine’s Journey

October 9, 2021 by Brazen She

“Magic is a female fantasy and a male nightmare.”

Did you know witches are human Rorschach tests??

The Witch has endured for millennia as a symbolic challenge to male supremacy. She represents our innate understanding of the power structure we live in, her different forms expressing our shifting feelings about Woman regaining her place on even footing with Man.

Magic was traditionally Woman’s purview – Our friends the Ancient Greeks, founders of Western civilization, worshipped a Goddess of Magic called Hecate. Hecate’s three faces are reminiscent of the traditional phases of a woman’s life – Maiden, Mother and Crone.

Kristen Leo rambles pleasantly for over 15 minutes before making the interesting observation that men and women tend to portray magic differently. She says of magical stories written by women, “magic is a medium through which characters can empower themselves and help others.”

Kristen points out that men’s depictions of magic focus on revenge and curses – “It’s really fascinating how often we see female empowerment, when it’s expressed symbolically through witchcraft, being perceived as a threat by the male psyche.” The evil witches of so many fairy tales show us men’s perception of women’s challenge to their authority.

Out Of Sight, Out Of Mind

Joseph Campbell famously distilled all of Myth and Legend into one storyline: The Hero’s Journey. In collating so many ancient tales, he managed to leave the female perspective out of his sweeping synopsis of symbolism entirely.

He did eventually realize he’d forgotten half of humanity, describing Her importance, “If the male is on top, and the female subordinate all the way, you have a totally different system from that when the two are facing each other.”

He wades into some pretty deep mystical waters, describing how we made sense of ourselves in the early days through symbolism: “Everything in the field of Time is dual – Past and future, dead and alive. They always come in pairs.

“Most of us put our minds on the side of the ‘good’ against what we think of as ‘evil.’ Put your mind in the middle. That’s to say, ‘I know the center, and I know that ‘good’ and ‘evil’ are temporal apparitions.'”

It’s all relative, darling!

That is to say, on a deep level, we understand that our perception is not reality. But our perception is all we have to go on, so we struggle to express concepts that lay beyond it. Larger patterns and systems are described in broad strokes, the meaning lost as cultural understandings shift.

This is the crack that allowed male supremacy to creep in. Traditional philosophy tainted the ancient symbol of Woman as Lifegiver by declaring all Life sinful. You make life? Who wants that?? If I weren’t alive I’d be with God right now!

Woman’s embodiment of natural forces, her evident closeness to the life-giving Earth, was defanged for the purpose of harnessing and taming it.

“When A Woman Thinks Alone, She Thinks Evil.”

During the surge of development known as The Enlightenment, the infamous Witch Trials were a violent but symbolic reinforcement of Patriarchy. The power structure resorted to blood sacrifice to reestablish itself amid the chaos.

But that overcorrection was itself an admission of insecurity.

It took them quite a lot of effort to push us down, you see. Brutality is the classic method, but progressive civilization demands increasing decorum. Violent coercion is so barbaric! The assault became psychological – Every idea must be made consumable by Patriarchy or snuffed out.

Wit And Folly uses Star Wars as the standard modern telling of The Hero’s Journey. We’re reminded that Luke’s final act against his enemy is not revenge, but compassion for his dying father.

Joseph Campbell tries, in his own way, to impart that the two Journeys need each other, because their balance is the resolution of the human story.

But lately, most prominent women display a single-minded assertiveness traditionally used as shorthand for masculine greatness. We are told this is progress – The Witches are all good now, nothing to see here!

The Hero’s Journey wears a feminine mask, but the destination of the Hero’s Journey is compassion and deference – For Woman, this is a road to nowhere.

Finding Woman’s Road

Building on Campbell’s work, Maureen Murdock gave us The Heroine’s Journey – “Today’s heroine must utilize the sword of discernment to cut away the ego bonds that hold her to the past, and to find out what services her soul’s purpose.

“She must realize resentment toward the mother, put aside blame and idolization of the father, and find courage to face her own darkness.

“Her shadow is hers to name and embrace”

I just gotta be me!

In rejecting the passive role of subordinate, she learns to be assertive. Suppression of the Witch is to deny Woman her own Journey.

With And Folly also pulls from Navajo legend, where Woman (the Earth) speaks to the Sun, her lover: “Remember – as different as we are, you and I, we are of one spirit.

“As dissimilar as we are, you and I, we are of equal worth. As unlike as you and I are, there must always be solidarity between us. Unlike each other as you and I are, there can be no harmony in the universe as long as there is no harmony between us.“

Our society is in a death spiral because, in his lust for power, Man villainized Woman and all she stands for – Even Life itself.

Dr. Campbell tells the story, “Whenever one moves out of the Transcendent, one comes into a field of opposites.” Woman, giver of Life, brings us into this world of duality, where we experience isolation and suffering.

But Old Joe is optimistic, “I think it’s a really childish attitude to say ‘No’ to life, with all its pain. To say, ‘this is something that should not have been.'”

Man remains a petulant child so long as he refuses to accept his own suffering. For most of history, he’s been determined to distract himself instead, through conquest or inebriation. Whatever he couldn’t forget, he blamed on Mommy.

You’ll always be my little boy…

The Witch Within

I recently asserted that the female mind does, in fact, exist. We tend to be caring, but sad. To me, this looks like the legacy of civilization strapping us to the birthing bed. But life in a female body creates a different perspective that’s sorely missed. Universal rejection of that perspective makes civilization into a death cult.

We need to recognize that Woman is not lesser. Women are not weak, and feminine traits don’t indicate weakness. The Hero’s Journey demonstrates over and over and over that compassion demands strength.

But he will never reach his destination until he accepts that the Heroine waiting there can’t be his subordinate. She is the Witch in all her liberated glory, enduring her own adventure to face him. She is the giver of Life, the inspiration of all his striving. And no amount of sky scrapers or oil rigs will change that.

The Witch is just Woman, the real one outside of Man’s head. If we are brave enough to sharpen our sword of discernment – our critical thinking – we can begin adding the Heroine’s Journey back into the human story. If each of us embarks on her own adventure, we can begin to regain some collective balance.

Summon your inner Witch – The world is counting on it!

Filed Under: Everyday Misogyny, Feminism In Action, Women’s World Tagged With: Culture, history, Joseph Campbell, Kristrn Le, patriarchy, Personal Growth, Relationships, Wit And Folly, womanhood, Women, Women's liberation, women's oppression

The Female Mind Exists, After All

September 11, 2021 by Brazen She

Feminism is stuck in a rut. We seem to have settled for joining the world, rather than changing it.

I’m just exhausted from carrying it on my shoulders!

In seeking equal treatment, we have slowly conceded our identity, piece by piece. We’ve taken on masculine affectation to fit in. Our attempts to avoid being framed as needy and demanding have played into our critics’ hands, and we’ve abandoned most of our ideas for change.

We don’t have equal pay, political parity, or even workplace day care. Neither do we have our own spheres of unique experience and expertise. In not sticking up for ourselves moment-to-moment, we affirm the general message that we are not important.

We love to crow that motherhood doesn’t make a woman, but it does make us different. We recite that biology isn’t destiny, ignoring that it is our origin. Biology is what makes us women, our hypothetical motherhood is the foundation of our oppression.

All this forms the basis of a life experience different from men, synthesizing an identifiably specific psychology. Whether we like to admit it, or not.

“Relatively small differences across multiple traits can add up to substantial differences when considered as a whole profile … Data suggest the probability a randomly picked individual will be correctly classified as male or female based on knowledge of their global personality profile is 85%.“

Female Psychology Is Real

Men are the ones who taught us to categorize everything by Better or Worse. Being different from them means only that – We are different.

“There now exists four large-scale studies that … converge on the same basic finding: when looking at the overall gestalt of human personality, there is a truly striking difference between the typical male and female personality profiles.”

Fuckin told you so!

Scott Barry Kaufman over at Scientific American takes parsing these differences more seriously than most women I know – “At the broad level, we have traits such as extraversion, neuroticism, and agreeableness.

“But when you look at the specific facets of each of these broad factors, you realize that there are some traits that males score higher on (on average), and some traits that females score higher on (on average), so the differences cancel each other out.

“This canceling out gives the appearance that sex differences in personality don’t exist when in reality they very much do exist.”

In my experience, this discussion is shut down hard by slinging accusations of internalized misogyny. But rejecting everything unique to women is to reject women! Evidence that femaleness leaves a mental mark is piling up, we just don’t want to see it.

I think this is because we have failed to deal with our collective trauma. Having been used and abused since before recorded history, we tried to escape by running toward modernity. Acknowledging that this legacy of abuse still afflicts us stirs up an avalanche of uncomfortable associations.

Our female brains have been used to justify stunting our education. But by pretending they don’t exist, we allow that owning one would be a handicap. Those who stubbornly insist on respect for their womanhood are cast as crazy. But maybe only a crazy woman would, since there’s a good chance she’d be making her stand alone.

The very idea of getting in touch with our primordial selves is a concept imported from male culture. Women’s primordial nature is tainted by terror, shame and betrayal. Ancient goddess myths hold few truths about who we are – They were probably written by men!

Don’t you like my hunting outfit??

We need to take inventory of who we are now. We need to acknowledge and unpack our historical trauma, and the terror it triggers in us.

While each individual may not feel or embody each of these things, there’s about an 85% chance most of us relate to most of them. 85% is a huge number! Women exist, and it’s time we spoke up before we forget that we can.

Who Are Women?

Scott’s Scientific American article is very informative: “The existence of biological predispositions does not mean that sex differences are fixed and unchangeable after birth.” So, biology isn’t destiny.

But practice makes perfect: “Some psychological sex differences are specially designed by evolution to arise developmentally and only after particular milestones. … Sex differences appear during puberty or other critical periods when genes become sensitive to activation by major maturational events.”

Many women say they have no maternal instinct. Here we have an explanation for this, and how it can be activated in certain circumstances. “Human psychology is highly sensitive to developmental and socioecological contexts.” This means mothering can be a choice, just like we always said.

However, feminine psychology is not the externally-imposed yoke some would have us believe. Scott shares some startling information gleaned from thousands of individuals around the world, “Surprisingly, several large cross-cultural studies have found … Whether scientists measure Big Five personality traits, such as neuroticism; Dark Triad traits, such as psychopathy; or self-esteem, subjective well-being, or depression, empirical evidence shows that most sex differences are conspicuously larger in cultures with more egalitarian gender roles – as in Scandinavia.”

When given freedom of expression, we are more uniquely female, not less.

I hear my Mother calling!…

Interestingly, the psychological traits most prevalent in women are

Empathy
Sexual disgust, and
Depression

We’re more likely to be disgusted by receiving a random dick pic, and then more likely to feel bad about it. Sexual disgust and depression look like echoes of our past as frustrated brood mares.

Empathy is more interesting, first because it counterbalances the other two, less constructive tendencies. Awareness of others’ feelings will give you pause before lashing out in disgust or expressing your foul mood.

It’s also the only way to communicate with an infant. Mothers who connect effectively give their children an early advantage. Generation after generation, they formed the aggregate that is our inheritance.

So, we are loving, but isolated and sad. Sounds about right to me.

Where Do We Go From Here?

We have taken our own identity for granted – Society could never just pretend we don’t exist! Except that’s exactly what’s happening, as we are legislated back to the Victorian era.

We have leaned on the harsh material reality we claim to despise, neglecting to develop anything else of our own. Our material existence called into question, we find we have no other hard lines drawn.

But the border of womanhood turns out to be defended by something steadfastly sovereign. This invisible barrier prevents us from meeting male society’s expectations, though we spend our lives trying. Each of us can look inside ourselves and see dark, neglected corners of our psyche – Pieces of us that find no expression in our daily lives and languish, undeveloped.

Is that… vulnerability??

The time has come to invoke these hidden parts of ourselves, and to be uncompromising about it. Look to the parts of your psyche that make you squirm – Those are the parts you were taught to reject. Plunge through the barrier of unsettled feelings, and on the other side is unclaimed territory.

For me, part of this has been attending to the sensory overload I’d been living with most of my life. What I thought were panic attacks faded away like fog in sunlight when I stopped trying to keep up and started listening to my body.

Being uncompromising is really the hard part, and learning where to draw lines takes time. But the personal truly is political, each of us a point in the larger picture. Maybe being the change we want is a big ask, but we can begin it.

It begins with adopting the practice of listening to your intuition. Stereotypical, I know, but intuition is something all human beings possess. And it’s actually proven pretty reliable, even in a lab.

A fun little piece called The Focused Leader has this to say: “Hearing your inner voice is a matter of paying careful attention to internal physiological signals. These subtle cues are monitored by the insula, which is tucked behind the frontal lobes of the brain.

“Gut feelings are messages from the insula and the amygdala.”

According to Dr. Judith Orloff, who has made a career developing empathy, “Intuition comes through as neutral, non-emotionally charged, and almost impersonal – just information. Fear, on the other hand, has a high emotional charge.”

“Women’s intuition” has its roots in our empathic abilities, and important information is lost if we ignore it. I think a lot of women’s unhappiness comes from suppressing our own perspective, and no amount of success is going to fix it. We were miserable in the kitchen and now we’re miserable in the meeting, because we didn’t choose either of them.

In order to choose our own path, we need to get to know ourselves.

Materially Speaking

Nothing threatens the power structure like women mobilizing. Which is probably why we can’t seem to get any real traction.

Things in the US look pretty grim, Executive Orders from the Oval Office aren’t subject to a vote. Our Federal protections have been hollowed out with the stroke of a pen, and we’re still reeling from that as we try to take in what happened to women in Texas.

Hey Leo, what about this pose??

We should be campaigning for equal participation in medical trials.

We should be demanding recognition and compensation for the work of mothering and caretaking.

For now, we are looking at a fight for our basic legal status. Collecting self-hating trauma victims isn’t easy but, if we can unite in our empathy, I think fighting these battles will begin us working through our trauma. We have to deal with it before it destroys us.

Next week, we will learn more about the history of women’s oppression, and see how it informs our current moment.

Filed Under: Feminism In Action, Inner Growth, Women’s World Tagged With: Psychology, Women, Women's psychology

Devon Price Demonstrates Her Masculine Essence

August 7, 2021 by Brazen She

Denial is a helluva drug. It can turn abuse into love, rage into wisdom, and women into men.

Without my Lovie, I just don’t feel safe!

Since I spent my writing time this week making videos, I was probably a little too happy to find Female Socialization is a Transphobic Myth by Devon Price. Devon thinks she’s a man, and she loves sharing how her masculine essence insulated her from growing up female.

I’m going to introduce Devon by way of a random anecdote she probably should have cut: “I remember deciding one day in middle school that I was going to emulate my favorite fictional character, Hannibal Lecter.

“I inhaled Thomas Harris’ books, and tried to speak and carry myself like the classy cannibal: aloof and well-read, fussy and austere with a deep-seated penchant for violence. I spoke in a practiced, artificial elegance.

“I got into fights that year, stabbing a boy who had been teasing me in the thighs with a pencil several times. Nobody messed with me again after that. I was proud of myself for living like a masculine, queer-coded villain.”

I wonder why no one messed with her after that! I, too, was once a small girl empowered by imitating nasty old men. I still haven’t managed to exorcise Lewis Black from my internal monolog, but that’s my cross to bear.

Devon begins her article with a conversation between teachers, “Skyler’s school has just gone back to in-person classes after a year of remote learning, and an old, familiar demon is back to torment her: the presumption she is incompetent because she is a woman.

“Every day is a battle for her dignity. She was free from all this sexist bullshit last year, but now it’s like she’s teaching with a set of weights on.

“’My students have never treated me like that,’ I say.”

Devon’s friend is confused. Thankfully, Devon is there to explain, “Even if it is annoying for me to bring up, I find it’s important to acknowledge the status I have.”

Is it annoying to acknowledge your privilege? I don’t have much experience in that area. Being privileged sure sounds awful!

But Devon has the secret: “’I have never had a student question my knowledge,’ I tell her. ‘People get quiet and listen when I talk. They ask me for advice. They call me Doctor.'” Because they can sense her man essence!

I’m sensing bullshit!

“Even when I was young and had long hair and wore dresses, students had no difficulty listening to me. “ Oprah said we teach people how to treat us. Everyone listens to her. Is she a man, too? Someone should tell her!

“When I talk, people listen. When I walk down the street, people get out of the way. When I present myself as an expert on a subject, people believe me.” So, it’s true! Carry yourself with the confidence of a mediocre white man, ladies! Just try a little harder and everyone will respect you.

“When I am uncomfortable or unhappy, people bend over backwards to accommodate me. I rarely have to assert a boundary more than once.” Not sure you should be bragging about having people bend over backwards for you. How are you communicating your needs? They might just be dealing with a high-strung, high-maintenance weirdo…

“I have to confess I find it irritating and offensive when cisgender women assume I have led the same kind of life they lead.” Do you, though? Do you have to say this again? Our attempt at empathy grinds your gears because you’re Not Like The Other Girls, we get it.

Don’t worry, keep writing stuff like this and the charity won’t last long. “It feels very invalidating to be treated like just one of the girls no matter how frequently I articulate that I am not one.” What exactly do you think a girl is, anyway?

She’s not very clear on this, but she is careful to project her biases onto the entire rest of the world: “There’s this assumption,” Where? Over there? “…that every person who was assigned female at birth was undermined, disbelieved, talked over, deprioritized, and physically intruded upon throughout their whole lives, and that everyone who was assigned male at birth was believed, heard, valued, and rewarded for their brilliance.”

I guess we know which side Devon wanted to be on!

As is the custom for transgender rationalization manifestos, Devon’s article is overly long and repetitive. Her circuitous prose is brimming with redundant personal anecdotes because, just in case you weren’t convinced by conjecture, she throws in emotional appeals for good measure.

I’m skipping around a bit, for brevity and sanity’s sake.

It’s easy, because Devon’s writing is littered with gems like this – “This idea that sexism is linked to one’s genitals or one’s assigned gender at birth gets a lot more dangerous.” That’s right, people need to remember that sexism has nothing to do with sex!

And to make sure they don’t feel left out, she reaches over to blame transwomen’s problems on feminists: “Since TERFism lauds feminine suffering as a sign of moral virtue, any woman who didn’t experience a traumatic ‘girlhood’ must be suspect.” Shockingly bad analysis here from someone who probably knows better (that’s what inspires her to pretend she doesn’t!) Anyone who got through girlhood unscathed must have grown up on another planet.

Come, my love! The time has come to fuck with Earth!

And her goal is to alienate every single Earthling. The purity politics run deep – “Many trans allies … still dabble in the idea that a person’s gender assignment at birth determines how they grew up and who they are at their core. People who claim to support trans rights throw around the words ‘afab’ and ‘amab’ as if they tell you anything about a person’s life or identity.”

How awful! What uncouth asshole is inferring anything about anyone based on their background or physical state?

Devon name-drops several prominent trans figures, but the TERFs are a mob of faceless hobgoblins: “They describe ‘female socialization’ as if it were some singular, universal experience that cuts across all classes, races, cultures, and families, but somehow never across assigned sex. What it means to be a woman or a man varies across culture, time period, class, and social circumstance.”

Ah, this old gem. Regardless of any linguistic sleight of hand, despite ever-shifting behavioral and social norms, somehow they always know whom to draft and whom to rape. Weird! It’s almost as if sex and the social roles built on them are, in fact, two different things!

But Devon has plenty of straw men to burn. “If people viewed you as a girl when you were a child, the logic goes, you learned what it meant to be a girl. You absorbed the lessons and traumas of girlhood, and they will never, ever go away. This is a laughably simplistic understanding of how humans develop.”

“Though we may remember our early childhood experiences … our minds aren’t locked in amber … So to speak of ‘gender socialization as a single, linear experience that ends in childhood is inaccurate.”

What brand of gaslit bullshit is this? No one is saying adults don’t still experience sex-based discrimination. That’s feminism’s big issue! Get that windmill, Devon! You’re so brave.

“Human development never ends. Our brains are forever adapting … the best predictor of a person’s actions is typically the social context they are presently in, not their personality or identity.

“So even if a person used to move through the world being seen as a “girl,” they can quickly adjust, behaviorally, to being deferred to as a man.” TRANSlation: Downtrodden people are resilient if you stop treating them like crap.

“If a person were ‘raised as a girl,’ so to speak, their actions and sense of entitlement can rapidly shift once they are given the power a man has.” Treat a woman like a full human being and she’ll begin acting like one. Yes, I hear Victorian men found this especially vexing.

My degree says you’re an idiot!

Devon seems to get a real kick out of interpreting things upside down: “I’ve seen this play out many times. A transgender man will come out of the closet, start presenting and behaving in a more masculine way, and suddenly everyone treats him differently.“ But why couldn’t they see his masculinity before?

“Colleagues think his ideas are brilliant and his manner of speaking is compelling. Guys start regaling him with lurid stories about sexual conquests, and women start crossing the street to avoid him at night.” In her zeal for inversion, she seems not to notice she’s providing evidence for that sex-based socialization her title says doesn’t exist.

And she keeps twisting common wisdom to fit her narrative. “The trans man is being ‘male socialized’ – because socialization is an ongoing process that never stops, for anyone.” Yep, our approach to life is a choice we make every day. The self-help industry makes bank reminding people to be proactive.

Devon’s main point comes down to a nebulous but palpable male essence. She can’t stop giving us examples of masculinity as some sort of magic respect pheromone: “People appreciated his work more, simply because he was a guy.

“The scientist even overhead people gossiping about him, saying that his research was much more well-done and impressive than the work of his sister. Of course, the scientist didn’t have a sister – People were speaking about his own pre-transition research, which was done under his old name.”

What a relief to finally be seen! Thought the scientist. Masculinity was the missing ingredient all along.

THIS IS FEMALE SOCIALIZATION. And yes, it continues all our lives.

Not to worry – As soon as she’s done explaining away girlhood, Devon gets right to explaining why we share it with transwomen – “Numerous trans women have been vocal about losing what semblance of ‘male privilege’ they enjoyed upon coming out – To the extent they ever enjoyed it at all.”

Her own pernicious female socialization betrays her, reminding her not to assign the TW too much privilege while describing their loss of privilege. It’s only because everyone can see their woman essence!

Pictured: The Author, waiting for someone to see her essence

“They’re on the receiving end of misogyny, but when they name that misogyny, they’re accused of being dangerous pretenders who are appropriating womanhood.”

Yeah, reality bites. No one can see your magic gender essence! Acting all shocked and entitled when no one listens to you spout nonsense is generally the territory of men. But take off the dress, take off the misogyny. Right, Devon?

There are many more anecdotes, and I had prepared responses to most of them. But it all amounts to the same thing over and over – If you emulate stereotypically masculine or feminine behavior, people will respond accordingly. And this proves Devon was really a man all along!

I spent way too much time yesterday untangling Contrapoints, whose motto might as well be Boys Can’t Be Pretty. It’s tearing him up inside, because that’s his dearest wish in the world. In the same vein, Devon’s motto could read, Girls Can’t Be Strong.

But the sickest part, of course, is how these people have themselves and so many others utterly convinced they are tearing down sexist stereotypes. By embodying them to their utmost while insisting they don’t exist.

How long until the fever breaks and everyone admits the Emperor has no clothes? Is it possible for a metaphorical fever to cause literal brain damage?

This unsustainable state of affairs can’t go on forever. I wonder how people like Devon will rationalize their next identity.

“I never wanted to be good at girlhood.” Pity you never thought you ask yourself why.

Filed Under: Everyday Misogyny, Queer Ideology, Women’s World Tagged With: Boys, Devon Price, Female socialization, Feminism, Gender Ideology, Girlhood, transmen, Women

Women Are Not Men!

July 10, 2021 by Brazen She

What is Woman?

Somehow, they always seem to know when it counts…

After centuries of having this question answered for us, we have struggled to rise to the opportunity of defining ourselves. It’s become an individual project, each woman left to figure it out alone because the thing we all have in common is portrayed as our greatest weakness.

The primordial origins of what it is to be female have been weaponized against us so effectively that we are terrified of them. To even suggest that the potential to gestate offspring is fundamental to femaleness is controversial, and feminism has traditionally been about exploring all the other things women can do.

The legacy we inherited is strangely silent on the subject of motherhood. Implying pregnancy is a uniquely female problem automatically puts people in mind of conservative family cults. ‘Is a childless woman somehow less of a woman?’ comes the perennial question.

Of course not! Biology may not be destiny, but it is our common starting point. Our hypothetical ability to bear children is understood by those around us from the very beginning. It is the wellspring of the endless conditioning we all face.

Our assumed reproductive capacity is the rationale for misogyny. It is the foundation of the patriarchy we are fighting every day!

Feminism’s unwillingness to directly address this fact is its fatal flaw.

Radical feminism is supposed to be about getting to the root of female oppression. Yet, somehow, it’s unpopular to point out that the root of women’s oppression is our unique childbearing abilities. Men simply can’t do this, and they’re still fuming over it!

A pregnant woman is a vulnerable woman, a new mother even moreso. Creating the next generation takes a lot out of you, and our male companions have taken disgusting advantage of this process.

But never mind suggesting we should be controlling that conversation. Maybe after we get parity in the Fortune 500.

I understand the gutwrenching, involuntary internal scream in response to, ‘Do you think you might settle down?…’ On top of the social suffocation that is Parenthood, kids have only become less affordable since people started asking me that. I get how plenty of other Pushing-40s have passed that off-ramp and not looked back.

But if we are really so enlightened, if we have cast aside the shroud of ignorance and revealed Woman as just as capable and intelligent as any man, we should be able to look honestly at who she is. Where we come from will always be part of who we are.

Someday, I’m getting out of this dump!

Maybe think of motherhood as women’s hometown. Some of us are happy there and stay there our whole lives, others leave early and never look back. Some of us yo-yo for decades before making up our minds.

At 20, I was a Leaver. I was way too focused on being a nervous wreck to worry about family planning. I probably should have, but I’ve always been determined not to be resentful of my son.

We are responsible for making choices, and I would never force motherhood on anyone who didn’t want it. It’s fucking hard! And if your heart’s not in it, please don’t bother.

But whether or not we realize our reproductive potential is strangely beside the point.

The very existence of that potential – our Hypothetical Motherhood – has been enough to justify thousands of years and millions of lives. Have a baby, don’t have a baby – I look forward to celebrating our freedom of choice when all women share it.

Sadly, that’s not looking likely anytime soon. Women’s liberation, our personal bodily autonomy, is out of fashion in the Western democracies. We’re being brushed aside, yet again, in favor of the latest iteration of Male Supremacy. Quelle suprise.

And we’re letting it happen because we’re too afraid to face who we are. Better to be erased from law and history than admit what a female is.

Men have no problem confronting their maleness, they assume it’s just how things are! They turn the thermostat down and get up and leave without a word, frustrated by the suggestion of alternatives. Men have written endlessly about what it’s like to be a man. They have expressed every possible permutation in loving detail, indulged in their darkest thoughts without a shred of shame.

The ‘male gaze’ is everywhere, many young girls absorb it and internalize it. I know I did. Again, we are isolated, separated into body parts and spread across camera angles.

What is Woman? Is it any wonder we don’t know?? Men feel perfectly entitled to their maleness, our intimate companions spread their hairy flatulence across the couch without a care in the world! The confidence of a mediocre white man truly is something to behold.

Don’t worry, you’ll get him next time!

But all the gender-bending going on has me imagining a different kind of swap – What if masculine traits made you look less intelligent, less competent? Why is a deep voice perceived as authoritative instead of dopey? Why is it what a fat bitch and not what a hairy neanderthal?

Because our social narrative says so. Being female is not a weakness, and birthing children sure as hell isn’t.

Women have had to be extremely adaptable in ways that men haven’t, and now our ability to go-along and get-along has been turned on us, too. We have been tricked into exchanging too much of ourselves for admission to a world that already belonged to us.

Soon they’ll be taking reproduction from us, too, and women will become the Neanderthals – A forgotten branch of humanity that contributed nothing of much importance.

We need to return to our roots if we want to nurture womanhood, but we’re too afraid to go there. The core of Women’s Liberation should be freedom to be women, and we don’t even know what that means! It cannot be simply to have a job, and not a penis. We are losing because we don’t know what we’re fighting for.

Women are not men. We have a different starting point that results in a different spin on life. If ‘woman is not a feeling,’ what is she?

It’s discouraging and not a little embarrassing that Feminism has no answer for these questions. Woman as adult human female is a bit circular, really, because what is female?

‘Of or denoting the sex that can bear offspring or produce eggs.’ I hate to get essentialist, but I am not the one who brought the conversation to this granular level. We didn’t ask for this role, but let’s give it all we got!

Women are the sex class that can produce offspring. We have to figure out what that means for our future, or let patriarchy decide for us. Again.

Filed Under: Motherhood, Unpopular Opinion, Women’s World Tagged With: Feminism, Identity, Motherhood, mothers, Women, Women's liberation

Pockets And Women’s Liberation: Why Not Both?

April 17, 2021 by Brazen She

“All this time, we have been quietly permitting society to convince us that, in discarding the torturously repressive corset, we have definitively thwarted the patriarchal hold over female liberty Once And For All…

“While in actuality, our material freedom has been gradually snatched from right under our noses in the form of expensive jeans with fake pockets requiring additionally expensive handbags!

“Do with that information what you will.”

Oh, snap – A challenge!

It sounds too simple, but the erosion of women’s pockets through the 19th and 20th centuries follows our struggle for liberation. The more autonomy women have, the fewer and smaller the pockets.

Bernadette Banner’s brief history condenses our struggle into a single point – The harder we fight, the more privacy gets taken.

Seated primly before the camera, dark hair scraped back from her magenta jacket, Bernadette clearly knows what she’s talking about. The video is a collaboration with Yale Press, publishers of The Pocket: A Hidden History of Women’s Lives.

She speaks passionately about the “vast spacial luxury we were once afforded.”

The switch to sewn-in pockets has been so complete, removable pockets sounded weird at first.

But until the 16th century, everyone’s pockets were basically little flat bags tied to a belt and tucked under your clothes. Men attained sewn-in pockets in the early 1500s, while women continued wearing the older style under their many billowing skirts.

The thing is, pockets are pretty simple. They didn’t change much for a very long time. And for about 200 years, women seemed to like their tie-ons just fine.

Bernadette explains how they were made of different materials and personally decorated, “As they weren’t always seen, there wasn’t pressure for them to adhere to very specific designs according to fashion and to change them out according to the season.

“A pocket is a personal item, worn next to the body and often out of sight. And, perhaps most importantly, is representative of a material autonomy that many women, for much of history, were not able to partake in.

“The items kept in a pocket were personal, concealed, and uncontrolled by anyone but the wearer.”

Sewing them into the clothes made them more secure, but less personal. Being part of a garment meant they had to follow its form, and that form usually worked against us.

Where the hell am I supposed to put pockets in this?!

Mary Wollstonecraft published A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in 1792, and the demand for better treatment only grew louder. Naturally, fashion in the early 1800s took a sharp turn toward slim silhouettes, making pockets less private.

The inevitable accessorizing of handbags was rejected at the time as, “Not a fair representation of the substantial pockets which our ancesstresses wore; they were proper pockets.”

At least that writer had cultural memory to base an opinion on. We have forgotten so much!

Working-class women kept on wearing their handmade tie-ons, but trend chasers had to work harder and harder to keep their pockets from spoiling their Look. The feminine conflict between looking good and carrying your stuff was born.

The pocket switch for women’s clothes really took off around 1850, coincidentally just as the Industrial Revolution was making ready-made clothes affordable. Suddenly, a young woman with a job could buy more clothes than her mother ever owned!

In the 1880s the invention of the bicycle opened up new horizons, sparking a pretty serious anti-feminist backlash. It’s hard to imagine bikes being controversial, but no detail seems too small for patriarchal meddling.

“The latter part of the 19th century also sees a relative slimming of skirt silhouettes. Primarily during the last decade, the area across the hips in particular becomes so tightly fitted as to complicate the wearing of a tie-on pocket.”

No privacy for you, ladies! During this same time, women were gaining admittance to higher education and the marketplace, as well as clamoring for the vote. Is it a coincidence that merchants and thought leaders – All of them men! – might find reasons to constrict us in other ways?

Call me paranoid, but it got pretty ridiculous. “It was also quite common to hide pockets in hilariously illogical places, such as in the center back seam in late ’90s and early Edwardian skirts. Pockets could live under ruffles or drapes, even near the hem, just to ensure that one did always have at least one pocket, despite complex fitting restrictions.”

Thank goodness! I was nervous there for a second.

I sure wish I had a pocket for all this loot!

Supposedly, women’s pockets dwindled because manufacturers found them unprofitable. Strange that men’s clothing makers didn’t think of this, why throw money away?

Victorian women wrote quite a bit about how few pockets they had. Elizabeth Cady Stanton wrote three essays herself. “But pockets of this period were still mind-bendingly large to our modern sensibilities.”

Bernadette takes out a phone, a book, a bag of snacks, a water bottle, and a man’s pipe – All out of one skirt pocket!

The tie-on didn’t really die until the dawn of Modern Era, around 1900. Young women rejected them along with corsets and petticoats.

But putting our pockets in the hands of manufacturers left us with no control over how they’re made. I’m not saying I want to hand-sew all my own pockets from scraps, but add tie-on pockets to the list of practical female-centric clothing you won’t find in any store.

“So, how did our pocket problem somehow get worse? How did the dilemma progress from just number to rapidly diminishing pocket size?”

Bernadette has one, opaque answer to this all-encompassing question: Fashion!

The demand for slimmer and slimmer silhouettes took every nook and cranny for keeping things. But she admits that even modern skirts and women’s coats lack storage, and somehow men’s tight fashions compensate with pockets in other places.

She even suggests men have never been required to carry handbags because they are easily stolen.

“People wearing feminine clothing in the 21st century are instructed that, in order to be ‘fashionable,’ our natural bodies must be a particular shape. And fashion forbid we obscure that, even just enough to be able to store a mobile phone!“

The shape of my body is none of your business!

Because if a woman keeps something private, she has a secret. Every inch of personal space is hiding something. The more independent we are, the more scrutinized we are. You know, to make sure we’re using our freedom right.

And if a man can’t own you, he should at least get an unobstructed view of your butt, right?

Fashion is not your friend. What if we treated Fast Fashion like Fast Food, and learned to make our own at home? Sewing is another girly thing we gave up to join the Boy’s Club, but what if there’s more to it?

Filed Under: Everyday Misogyny, Fun Facts, Women of History, Women’s World Tagged With: Fashion, Pockets, Women, Women's history, Women's liberation

Brazen She