Reducing women to objects in pornography is a precondition to make the violence they endure look acceptable. When women stop being people, acts of violence against them stop being harmful, as objects cannot be harmed. The legitimation of VAW in pornography is also supported by two latent assumptions. First is the idea that pornography is a “distortion, reflection, projection, expression, fantasy, representation or symbol” (MacKinnon, 1984, p. 326) of reality and, therefore, not real. Yet, “fantasy expresses ideology” (MacKinnon, 1984, p. 327); it expresses the reality of the subordination of women entrenched in the way we understand sex, in and out of pornography. In fact, the second assumption that legitimizes VAW in pornography– that is, that “women enjoy sexual mistreatment” (Dines, 2010, p. 64), consent to their own humiliation, and never say “no” to degrading acts– shows how eroticization and women’s subordination are strictly connected, with the latter becoming “socially real” through its enactment in pornography (MacKinnon, 1984, p. 327). The illusion of consent covers the sexist nature of these acts and allows the refusal of sex not only to become indistinguishable from the desire of sex, but also normalized and eroticized. In pornography, even women’s “no” is part of the fantasy, and force is no longer seen as force “because it is inflicted on women and called sex” (MacKinnon, 1984, pp. 340–343). Under this pretense, almost everything becomes justifiable, including degrading and violent acts such as shoving a woman’s head down the toilet, gagging her, or making her ingest her own vomit. While women become powerless in pornography—as willing actors who ask to be acted upon—men become powerful and always obtain as much sex as they want, how they want it. For a short time, men “get to see what life would look like if only women unquestionably consented to men’s sexual demands” (Dines, 2010, p. 63).
— “I Don’t Hate All Women, Just Those Stuck-Up Bitches”: How Incels and Mainstream Pornography Speak the Same Extreme Language of Misogyny (Alessia Tranchese and Lisa Sugiura)
women reacting to this all have meaningful insight into why it’s happening. meanwhile, men:
The average man thinks he’s smarter than the average women. And women generally agree.
By Lisa Wade, PhD
It starts early. At the age of five, most girls and boys think that their own sex is the smartest, a finding consistent with the idea that people tend to think more highly of people like themselves. Around age six, though, right when gender stereotypes tend to take hold among children, girls start reporting that they think boys are smarter, while boys continue to favor themselves and their male peers.
They may have learned this from their parents. Both mothers and fathers tend to think that their sons are smarter than their daughters. They’re more likely to ask Google if their son is a “genius” (though also whether they’re “stupid”). Regarding their daughters, they’re more likely to inquire about attractiveness.
Once in college, the trend continues. Male students overestimate the extent to which their males peers have “mastered” biology, for example, and underestimate their female peers’ mastery, even when grades and outspokenness were accounted for. To put a number on it, male students with a 3.00 G.P.A. were evaluated as equally smart as female students with a 3.75 G.P.A.
When young scholars go professional, the bias persists. More so than women, men go into and succeed in fields that are believed to require raw, innate brilliance, while women more so than men go into and succeed in fields that are believed to require only hard work.
Once in a field, if brilliance can be attributed to a man instead of a woman, it often will be. Within the field of economics, for example, solo-authored work increases a woman’s likelihood of getting tenure, a paper co-authored with a woman has an effect as well, but a paper co-authored with a man has zero effect. Male authors are given credit in all cases.
In negotiations over raises and promotions at work, women are more likely to be lied to, on the assumption that they’re not smart enough to figure out that they’re being given false information.
Overall, and across countries, men rate themselves as higher in analytical intelligence than women, and often women agree. Women are often rated as more verbally and emotionally intelligent, but the analytical types of intelligence (such as mathematical and spatial) are more strongly valued. When intelligence is not socially constructed as male, it’s constructed as masculine. Hypothetical figures presented as intelligent are judged as more masculine than less intelligent ones.
All this matters.
By age 6, some girls have already started opting out of playing games that they’re told are for “really, really smart” children. The same internalized sexism may lead young women to avoid academic disciplines that are believed to require raw intelligence. And, over the life course, women may be less likely than men to take advantage of career opportunities that they believe demand analytical thinking.
Lisa Wade, PhD is a professor at Occidental College. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture, and a textbook about gender. You can follow her on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.
I can NOT fucking believe i am watching this shit happen in real time.
Overnight I've watched the wiki page for 4B go from a single line of text describing it as a feminist movement and four more lines beneath it explaining the rules, to now it being a several paragraph screed about how it is a terf riddled, transphobic, transwomen hating movement made intentionally and with the sole purpose to stop women from having sex with transwomen.
The article editing history shows this all being done overnight. It also shows it mostly being done by a single user who INTERESTINGLY ENOUGH has been flagged multiple times for getting into editing wars on the CIRCUMCISION and FORESKIN wiki pages!!!! You cannot make this shit up!!
American women only briefly floated the idea that they shouldn't have sex with anyone that can get them pregnant in a time where pregnancy could be a death sentence and like fucking LIGHTNING these folks come out the gate to shut it down in every way possible.
women please take self defence classes and do not listen to men that tell you it’s futile to fight against a man. learning to defend yourself from men is not the same as when men fight each other, you are not trying to beat the shit out of him, you are trying to hurt him just enough so that you can get away. you can learn techniques to prevent a man from grabbing or choking you or how to escape a grip on you. men can knock you out or kill you if they land a proper punch but you can reduce the chances of that happening. even if you’re very small, it really doesn’t hurt to be able to dodge a punch from a man but it’s something you have to practice. it doesn’t matter how strong he is if he misses.
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“Our brains were two million years in the making. That long, slow accretion doubled our cranial capacity. And the first thing we did with it was say thank you. We drew the megafauna and the megafemales, sculpted and carved them. The oldest known figurative sculpture is the Goddess of Hohle Fels, and 40,000 years ago someone spent hundreds of hours carving Her. There is no mystery here, not to me: the animals and the women gave us life. Of course they were our first, endless art project. Awe and thanksgiving are built into us, body and brain. Once upon a time, we knew we were alive. And it was good.
And now we leave the realm of miracles and enter hell.
Patriarchy is the ruling religion of the planet. It comes in variations―some old, some new, some ecclesiastical, some secular. But at bottom, they are all necrophilic. Erich Fromm describes necrophilia as “the passion to transform that which is alive into something unalive; to destroy for the sake of destruction; the exclusive interest in all that is purely mechanical.” In this religion, the worst sin is being alive, and the carriers of that sin are female. Under patriarchy, the female body is loathsome; its life-giving fat-cells vilified; its generative organs despised. Its natural condition is always ridiculed: normal feet must be turned into four-inch stubs; rib cages must be crushed into collapse; breasts are varyingly too big or too small or excised entirely. That this inflicts pain―if not constant agony―is not peripheral to these practices. It’s central. When she suffers, she is made obedient.”
― Lierre Keith, ‘The Girls and the Grasses’
The lie that testosterone is going to harm your gorgeous body is the most sinister thing I can think to tell young men. Testosterone is not going to make you sick, harm you, or turn you into an unrecognizable monster.
Testosterone is going to make you happier than you’ve ever been in your life. Testosterone is going to make you look down at yourself and finally smile, because the yearning is over. Your skin and your bones finally fit just right, instead of feeling foreign and out of place. Testosterone is going to let you finally reach an enlightened, happier version of yourself. Why would you ever tell someone the opposite if it’s not out of hatred and wishing to see them suffer?