enoughtohold:

one more thing, i can’t help but notice that a lot of tumblr’s popular ideas about what 30+-year-old women — and it’s almost always women — should be doing instead of having fun online seem to line up pretty closely with very conservative beliefs about what women’s options should be. especially that women should have children and that once they have children their lives should revolve around those children completely, with no time for breaks or hobbies or internet discussion or other selfish, frivolous, unmotherly activities. to be a mother or a woman old enough to be expected to be a mother is to be a specially regulated class of person, judged by her performance as a self-sacrificing caregiver and exemplar of chaste maturity.

it’s hard to escape the influence of these ideas. but if you don’t hold yourself to this standard at age 22 or whatever, if you want more than what patriarchy has planned for you, then it’s worth it to try to let go of this standard when it comes to older women too. and not only because you will one day be one of them. but also because it’s the right thing to do.

eldersarahlyons:

im still super fuckin salty that 2 of my instructors for my psych degree specifically mentioned not wearing makeup and feminine clothes as a sign of “deteriorating mental health.” specifically, that if a woman walks into your practice, and you’ve never seen her before, and she’s not wearing makeup or dressing up or shaving, then she’s going to be a “difficult case” and when she starts to do these things it’s a sign that therapy is progressing well.

especially since when i was at Rock Fucking Bottom ™ i was over-performing femininity as a) a way to dissociate from myself, my trauma, and the dysphoria i was experiencing and b) a last-ditch effort to get Approval, Validation, and Attention when i felt like i was unattractive and worthless. don’t let anyone tell you that “psychology used to have a misogyny problem and issues with pathologizing gender nonconformity, but it’s solved now because more women than men are earning psych degrees!!” because the problems are still very much there, they just change forms every couple of decades.

solacekames:

solacekames:

One of the most depressing parts of volunteering for social justice causes is noticing how the labor of older women is systematically taken for granted, unappreciated, and unrewarded. If you’ve been doing this for a while, you’ll notice it too, I promise. Whether the cause is religious-progressive, economic, political or otherwise, older women will be doing most of the foot soldier work of a nonprofit organization. In the urban South where I live, these are predominantly older African-American women. They’re the ones that are out knocking on doors in all weather, staffing phone lines, passing out food, maintaining databases, fundraising, teaching.

Young people will have more immediate spare time and a ton of energy, and they often pull heroic week-long or month-long stints. And then they move on. But the older women are the ones who stick around and provide continuity.

Since we have a big election coming up next year in the US and I hope everyone will get involved in social justice political volunteering like voter registration, here are some tips on how not to be an unthinking jerk when it comes to appreciating your older women volunteers:

• Commit yourself to sustainable, inclusive, community-based, intergenerational social justice. If you’re a college student from out of town, make sure you learn about local issues.
• Stop every once in a while and think if you’re subconsciously favoring and promoting the rarer younger men volunteers. Acknowledge their work, but don’t put them on a pedestal.
• How are you valuing your volunteers’ labor? No, they don’t expect to be paid, but have an informal way that shows you care. Give out certificates. List their names on your organization’s websites. Have potluck volunteer appreciation parties.
• Schedule in breaks for people to rest. Make sure you have snacks and water for long efforts. Making your efforts friendly for disabled people makes them friendly for most elderly people too.
• Don’t freak out if someone shows up with a kid. Sometimes childcare plans fall through. Ideally, you’ll have a small kid-friendly space, just somewhere where the kids can be supervised and safe. Keep a box with an activity book and maybe an old tablet that runs some educational games.
• Cut the soccer mom jokes. Those jokes are boring anyway, and the soccer mom might be a lesbian Latina socialist who’s proud of cheering on her kids.
• Ask volunteers how to make their work more helpful and efficient and listen when they give their opinions. Disregard the seagulls (people who fly in, make a lot of noise, crap all over the place and fly away again) and focus on the people who are your long-term dedicated volunteers. These people often don’t give their opinions because they’re not sure they’re going to be listened to. So ask and listen!

I wrote this post a couple of years ago, before the last election, and thought I’d go ahead and retweet it with a statement from a specific organization at a specific place in time. I don’t mean to single out the Boston DSA because these problems are endemic to pretty much all organizations. The statement below simply goes to show that any mass organization which describes itself as progressive/revolutionary/etc. feminism can easily follow this same dynamic behind the scenes.

Statement on Women in DSA Leadership – Rosie Bz and Annie DF – Mar 14

https://medium.com/@breadandrosie/statement-on-women-in-dsa-leadership-f697aa83cb78

In a little over a weeks’ time, the 1,100 members of Boston DSA will be electing a new Steering Committee. Elections season is in full swing, with candidates releasing parts of their statements on social media. It is an exciting time for the chapter, but a bittersweet one for us as we end our respective tenures on the Steering Committee. The bitterness of this moment is sharpened by the reasons that we have chosen not to seek reelection.

The continual oppression of women and other folks in our society has, unfortunately, not been absent from the culture of the SC. This has made the steering committee an inhospitable place for many of us. Despite a commitment to socialist-feminism and anti-oppression in our chapter’s statement of purpose, women, non-binary folks, people of color, and trans and disabled comrades are perpetually expected to bear the brunt of the chapter’s administrative and emotional labor.

As women, we have experienced the trenchant effects of sexism. It is a constant struggle to find white cis-men willing to take notes for meetings, volunteer for Child Watch, offer to book rooms, arrange the logistics for events, and generally follow up on commitments that they make. To date, the child-care offerings at every single Boston DSA event in the past 12 months have been bottom-lined by a woman. Although there is a Planning Committee, the monthly General Meetings have been exclusively bottom-lined by a woman.

Whether these men are on the steering committee or not, it contributes to a culture in which women leaders and rank-and-file members are routinely expected to deal with the specifics of projects, leaving men to focus on the “bigger picture” aspects of organizing, including the shape and future of our chapter. A repetitive trope within Boston DSA are events where the men want to present or speak, but hand off the coordination and planning of the event to women.

While we acknowledge that this work is often thankless, we are not hoping to receive gratitude or even pity with the examples given here. We firmly believe that administrative tasks such as the ones outlined above are a form of organizing and should be seen as such. Without microphones, powerpoints, volunteer coordination, communication, Child Watch, and agendas etc. our meetings would cease to exist.

Unfortunately, the gendered division of labor within our chapter — that is, the division between who is involved with administrative and emotional labor and who is not — indicates that such roles are not seen in a positive light. With a lack of men willing to take on these roles, the women in our chapter are stretched thin. This is unacceptable. In a society where women not only sell their labor in the workplace, but are often disproportionately responsible for labor at home, our double oppression is further intensified via the labor we partake in as DSA organizers.

In addition, the men who rely on us to bottom-line administrative tasks are often the same men who rely on us for emotional support, or lash out at us when we express a political opinion they they disagree with — sometimes in explicitly aggressive tones. We have also encountered men in our chapter trying to downplay the importance of liberation for women and gender non-binary folks under the banner of ‘idpol’, with their reductionist views failing to recognize that trans and other comrades are more likely to belong to the most mistreated sections of the working class.

From conversations with other women organizers in our chapter and around the country, we know that our experiences are not unique. While there is much discussion within DSA about the need for more diversity, we’ve seen little evidence that people are committed to doing the hard work to make it possible for women and other oppressed groups to take leadership roles without feeling tokenized, burnt out, and thoroughly discouraged. As socialists, we are supposed to work to dismantle oppressive structures, yet DSA only seems to be replicating them. Both of us have considered resigning in the past year, and we helped form our women’s caucus and mental health working group to address these issues. We ask all men who have declared their candidacy to think about their contributions to the daily life of DSA, and whether they can point to tangible actions that show support for women’s liberation.

anneapocalypse:

As a sidenote: I really would like to see us think more critically about the argument that fandoms as a whole relate less to female characters because female characters are almost always worse written than male characters.

I will never argue that there isn’t bad writing for female characters in our media, however:

I submit for your consideration that we are also conditioned to be far more forgiving of bad writing for male characters. 

In a fandom at large, we are far more willing to do the legwork to “fix” poorly-written male characters–to fill in the gaps in their arcs, to write in miles on miles of backstory where canon gives us none, to headcanon fathoms of hidden depth where canon does not supply it. Hell, we do this for well-written characters! It doesn’t even have to be about fixing anything. Whatever canon supplies us, fandom is sure to add just as much of their own and then some.

But not for women. Female characters, rather than getting this kind of treatment from fandom, are more likely to be ignored and dismissed entirely. It’s not simply that their writing is weaker. It’s that they aren’t considered worth the effort of further exploration.

But the fanon that adds depth and nuance to male characters becomes so widely-accepted, so axiomatic that often it feels like those characters must be better-written that they actually are. That they must be deeper, more complex, better developed. We don’t recognize how much of that depth and complexity is of our own making. We aren’t taking credit for our own work.

And in fandoms where there is a lot of communication between creators and fans (which, this days, is basically every fandom thanks to social media), I’d argue that this can have a reflexive effect. Creators note which characters get the most discussion and fan attention, and are therefore more likely to give those characters further development in the source material. So if you actually feel that creator neglect of female characters is a problem, ignoring or dismissing those characters in fan activity is the opposite of a solution.

I would also argue that the prevalence of this argument has a really deleterious affect on the corners of fandom that do enjoy focusing on female characters and their relationships. By dismissing female characters as “badly-written” and therefore not worthy of the interest and exploration and transformation that is widely considered fandom’s very purpose, we also dismiss the fans who do want to put the legwork into finding depth in those characters. We dismiss the women who relate to female characters more, and we dismiss their genuine love and passion for these characters as a chore rather than a joy–and that is, frankly, a little insulting.

I’m glad to see these things being discussed, but I am continually disappointed to see this argument repeated uncritically. I don’t think it presents a particularly accurate or illuminating picture of the situation and I don’t think it’s terribly helpful.