consider the bank.
You know, a few months ago this dude friend of mine showed up to hang out with me all dejected. Over a couple of drinks he explained his long face — earlier that night, he’d been walking down the street behind this really cute girl, and when she looked back at him over her shoulder, he thought it was in interest and smiled at her. Now, this guy is tall and skinny, can most commonly be found in glasses and t-shirts scrawled across with math jokes, is kind to animals, considers himself a feminist. What he doesn’t consider himself is threatening, so he was surprised, confused, and even hurt by what happened next: the girl in front of him responding to his called greeting of, “Nice skirt,” by taking off down the darkened street in a dead run.
“Yeah,” I said, “she probably thought you were going to rape her.”
“But that’s not fair,” he said. “I’m a good person; I’d never rape anyone! How could she think that? She doesn’t even know me.”
Out here in the wilds of the internet, I often find myself making arguments about shit like feminism and rape culture unilaterally. For one thing, there’s so much (like, so much) out there arguing unilaterally against this shit that I feel it’s necessary; for another thing, ‘round these parts there’s a lot of people jumping to hostility when it’s painfully clear they don’t have a handle on all the facts. But I’m more lenient with the people in my real life, especially dudes like the one mentioned above. I’m willing to extend to them a patience that I wouldn’t with strangers on the internet, because they matter to me, and it matters to me that they understand. So when my friend sat there that night, whining over his beer and responding to my attempted explanations with, “But I’d love it if a girl smiled at me on the street, or even catcalled at me! Fuck, even if a dude did it, I’d be flattered,” I decided to spend some time thinking about how to clear things up for him. It took awhile, but I finally came up with a metaphor to get the job done:
Consider the bank.
OH MY GOD IM SORRY BUT IF THIS DOESNT MAKE THE WORLD A BETTER PLACE I DONT KNOW WHAT DOES???????????????????????????????????
RE: Big Girls In Costumes [x]
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I want to stress this again: In many, many parts of the country right now, if you want to go to see a movie in the theater and see a current movie about a woman — any story about any woman that isn’t a documentary or a cartoon — you can’t. You cannot. There are not any. You cannot take yourself to one, take your friend to one, take your daughter to one.
There are not any.
By far your best shot, numbers-wise, at finding one that’s at least even-handedly featuring a man and a woman is Before Midnight (on 891 screens) so I hope you like it. Because it’s pretty much that or a solid, impenetrable wall of movies about dudes.
Dudes in capes, dudes in cars, dudes in space, dudes drinking, dudes smoking, dudes doing magic tricks, dudes being funny, dudes being dramatic, dudes flying through the air, dudes blowing up, dudes getting killed, dudes saving and kissing women and children, and dudes glowering at each other.
Somebody asked me this morning what “the women” are going to do about this. I don’t know. I honestly am at the point where I have no idea what to do about it. Stop going to the movies? Boycott everything?
They put up Bridesmaids, we went. They put up Pitch Perfect, we went. They put up The Devil Wears Prada, which was in two-thousand-meryl-streeping-oh-six, and we went (and by “we,” I do not just mean women; I mean we, the humans), and all of it has led right here, right to this place. Right to the land of zippedy-doo-dah. You can apparently make an endless collection of high-priced action flops and everybody says “win some, lose some” and nobody decides that They Are Poison, but it feels like every “surprise success” about women is an anomaly and every failure is an abject lesson about how we really ought to just leave it all to The Rock.
Fuck special snowflakes who think like this.
Gurl bye
Your ass ain’t fucking special because you don’t wear makeup.
You’re not fucking better than the woman with large breasts who wears tank tops.
You’re a piece of shit because you are putting sexist stereotypes onto other women in some anti-feminine bullshit.
If you don’t like it, why’d you comment on it? I think it’s awesome and you’re probably one of the girls up there that wears makeup and shortshorts and tiny tanktops. And most kids today wear makeup because they think they aren’t pretty and need it. So deal with it. And get over yourself.girl bye.
lemme tell you something: I wear tons of fucking make up. I wear short dresses. I walk around with a face that looks about as fake as it can get outside of a fucking barbie doll. and I like it that way. and, despite what you seem to think, no, it’s not because i think i’m ugly. i just fucking like makeup (and trust, i’ve spent years examining my own motivations and how they’re tied to internalized self-hated, fatphobia and misogyny so don’t EVEN cause you don’t know what you’re talking about).
I also read ravenously; engage in discourse regarding philosphy, art, economics, politics, race, gender, sexuality; make subversive art; and love comics and film and music. I’M A FUCKING PERSON IS WHAT I’M SAYING.
like how fucking deep is this goddamn image when the spine of the book JUST SAYS THE WORD ‘BOOK’.
this kind of bullshit narrative, other than furthering a misogynistic dichotomy that pits women against each other, is also a complete fucking fallacy. A huge majority of average women DON’T DO THIS. you aren’t the lone plain jane in an army of cake-faced, bottle blonde barbies—if you look around, you’ll see that most women just throw on jeans and tops and very little makeup.
I get that this kind of shit is an attempt to fight back against media-made images of what womanhood is supposed to be. I get it. (thought isn’t it interesting that the “weirdo” in the picture is still thin and conventionally attractive??)
but attacking other women who you perceive as being stupid or carbon copies because of their fucking appearance doesn’t fight back against shit. it actually does EXACTLY what the patriarchy wants us to do—engenders more hatred and competition between women.
but you know, whatever, continue to think you’re so goddamn special. i’ll be over here reading AND wearing hot pink lipstick and having a hell of a time doing it.
