↧
This Conservative Blogger's Tweet About "How It Ought To Be, Despite What Your Gender Studies Professor Says" Backfired Into A Huge Meme
↧
19 Tumblr Posts For Women Who Are Sick And Tired Of Bullshit
“I had a customer tell me he didn’t want an avocado because it’s a “Woman’s Vegetable”.”
On trust issues:
On harassment:
On dress codes:
On respecting women:
↧
↧
The Powerful Arguments Made By A Men's Group Fighting Against Marital Rape
Chandan Khanna / AFP / Getty Images
As of this week, a Delhi High Court bench is hearing pleas for and against criminalising marital rape in India.
An NGO named Rit Foundation, women's rights group AIDWA (All India Democratic Women's Alliance), and one individual who herself suffered marital rape are arguing that Exception 2 of Section 375 of the Indian Penal Code, under which millions of Indian women have been legally raped in their own bedrooms, should be deemed unconstitutional.
On the other side of the debate is the "Union of India", aka our central government.
On August 28, gender equality and men's organisation Forum to Engage Men (FEM) filed to be included as a petitioner against the government, and its application was accepted yesterday.
Below is an excerpt from its application, which lists reasons men should be invested in the fight against legal marital rape. It has been shortened for clarity and bolded for emphasis.
Application for inclusion of "Forum to Engage Men" as Petitioner No. 2
1. We wish for our wives and the wives of all Indian men, not to be reduced to legal objects incapable of sexual will, and with no legal ability for sexual expression. Indeed, we stand with married, and all women for effective decision-making over their reproduction.
"We believe that there are men, there are men, and there are better men."
2. We believe that there are men, there are men, and there are better men. ... We are and represent men who enter into marriage as an equal partnership and stand for the basic, indivisible, and interrelated rights of both partners to equality, freedom from violence and dignity.
3. Marriage is a partnership between equals, however men have historically assumed ‘privileges’ including the privilege of having sex at their insistence. Most women have been conditioned to accept that. ... The full legal personhood of our wives only benefits us as men and helps our marriages as equals flourish, with freely given expression to sexual desire for sex, for pleasure as well as for reproduction.
…
10. 20% of men surveyed reported committing sexual violence against the partner and 14% reported committing sexual violence against their partner in the last one year. According to a report in the British Medical Journal, Lancet, as many as 27.5 million women in India have faced sexual violence and 10% of all married women experience sexual violence from their husbands. All available evidence indicates that sexual violence is a widespread phenomenon in India for married women.
"Marriage is a partnership between equals, however men have historically assumed ‘privileges’ including the privilege of having sex at their instance [sic]."
11. The process of socialization of men happens in such a way that men feel that they are entitled to have sex with women at their will. They are socialized to believe that women are expected to have sex whenever their husbands want sex. The work of FEM members with men has shown that men, after they have participated in the educational programme for men, realize that this is disrespectful of women and amounts to violence against women.
...
13. Such men have acknowledged that they had been ‘wrongly’ socialised to have sex at their will, and with no concern for whether their wives agreed or not. They subsequently changed their beliefs and behaviours and only had sex when there was mutual consent. In many cases it has been seen that their wives have also reported that there has been a change in the sexual behaviour of their husbands, and that their sex lives have improved after their husband has been part of the programme implemented by FEM partners.
"They had been ‘wrongly’ socialised to having sex at their will, with no concern for whether their wives agreed or not."
...
17. The fourth round of the National Family Health Survey 2015-16 shows that on an average nearly 30% (28.8) of all ever married women in the age-group 15 to 49 years face spousal violence. In absolute numbers this means that nearly 70 million married women out of India’s population of 1.3 billion have faced domestic violence.
18. That FEM believes that by setting aside the exception in Section 375 of the Indian Penal Code, Section 376B and Section 198B of the CrPC and making marital rape a cognizable offence the Court will be sending a message to the married men of India that coercive sex with their wives is a criminal act. This will set a new norm, and act as a deterrent. Such an order by this Court will have the potential to benefit tens of millions of women in India, who are otherwise at the risk of sexual violence and rape by their husbands and partners every day.
Read FEM's full application here.
↧
11 Bollywood Plotlines That Were Annoying AF
There was NO way Anushka Sharma didn’t recognise her husband in Rab Ne Bana Di Jodi.
Rahul playing Anjali in Kuch Kuch Hota Hai and not realising even ONCE that she was into him.
Rahul, you swine. You only wanted your women to behave a certain way and fit society's standards. You ignored your best friend who'd been there for you throughout and now that she's wearing a saree and you're suddenly in love with her? LEAVE MY GURL ANJALI ALONE.
Dharma Productions
Naina and Rahul in K3G.
Why was Naina dragged into a love triangle for no reason? Why was Rahul never asked if he wanted to marry her? Why did Yash and Nandini think this was okay? Why did Naina have to have her heart broken because parents were idiots?
Dharma Productions
Tuffy being made to make decisions and pass messages in Hum Aapke Hain Koun.
TUFFY WAS A GOOD BOY. TUFFY DIDN'T DESERVE TO BE UNDER SO MUCH PRESSURE. TUFFY DESERVED MORE CUDDLES AND BOOPS.
Rajshri Productions/Imaan Sheikh
Everyone casually fat-shaming Sweetu in Kal Ho Naa Ho.
Sweetu, one of the most unapologetic characters in film history, was always made to feel bad for who she was and how she looked. She put herself out there and believed in love relentlessly only to be told that she has less of a chance because she's fat???? And literally NO ONE spared her. Not even her own best friend.
Dharma Productions
↧
"Top Of The Lake" Is The Anti-SVU
Sundance
Top of the Lake’s Robin Griffin — played by Elisabeth Moss — is a rarified sort of female protagonist. As a detective specializing in crimes that involve sexual abuse (and a sexual abuse survivor herself), she’s a less cartoonish version of Law & Order: SVU's Olivia Benson. She’s tough and capable, beat-up and broken. She’s made of china and steel. She’s difficult to love but impossible to ignore.
In Season 2 of the series (which Sundance is rolling out over the course of three days, starting Sept. 10, after which it will be available on Hulu), the tenuous balance between Griffin’s outer strength and inner fragility begins to fall apart. And as she attempts to solve the murder of a sex worker — pregnant with a baby who does not share her DNA, stuffed in suitcase and pushed out to sea — the trajectory of the series starts to fray as well. There are too many broken narrative threads: too much coincidence, and little coherence. This season, like the one before, is about misogyny, but it’s also about the way women are reduced to their status as mothers. It explores both what it means to be a mother and the way women, desperate for motherhood, may turn their backs on other women. It’s also about surrogacy and rape culture, race and sex work, and whether good men exist.
It’s arguably trying to do too much — many of the tensions, especially those regarding the racial dynamics of sex work and surrogacy, get frustratingly lost in the tangle. Yet Top of the Lake is the first piece of fictional media I’ve seen in months that has made me feel anything. We’ve all figured out the places to find pat, soothing answers: That’s why, when the news is at its most exhausting, I turn to reruns of SVU. But when I want to see my own fatigue and conflict with the misogynist world reflected onscreen, there’s Top of the Lake. It’s a different sort of self-care; instead of muting my confusion and frustration, it acknowledges and amplifies it.
It’s no coincidence that this narrative was cocreated, written, and directed by Jane Campion — one of the few female directors who’s managed to navigate the enduringly sexist and exclusionary terrain of Hollywood. In work ranging from The Piano to In the Cut, she’s explored what happens when women trespass into worlds (physical, emotional, occupational) and access knowledge that has been hidden from them — and the violence that often follows when they do. She’s enthralled by the misogyny of these worlds, obsessed with depicting them in a way that suggests both her disgust and their endurance.
The second season of Top of the Lake explores this theme in far more ragged fashion than the first, in which Griffin investigated the disappearance of a pregnant Thai teenager in a small New Zealand town. That season, like so many projects by filmmakers who’ve recently come to television, felt like a taut and deeply atmospheric piece of storytelling. The six episodes were supposed to stand on their own: one season, and then done. But when they were both in Los Angeles for the Emmys, Campion slid a napkin under Moss’s hotel room door with a simple question: TOTL 2? Moss agreed, and Campion recruited Australian native Nicole Kidman — who’d previously worked with Campion in the 1996 adaptation of Henry James’ The Portrait of a Lady — to costar, along with Gwendoline Christie, best known for her role as Brienne of Tarth in Game of Thrones.
Robin Griffin (Elisabeth Moss) and Miranda Hilmarson (Gwendoline Christie)
Sundance
But Christie, who eventually becomes Griffin’s partner, is no Stabler to Moss’s Benson, because Top of the Lake Season Two is not a buddy cop procedural. Like Season One, its primary register is noir, with an accompanying dedication to unearthing the darkest inclinations of “proper” society — in this case, the clean, sunny streets of Sydney. While SVU suggests that New York is filled with individual sexual deviants, Top of the Lake argues that society’s natural inclination isn’t deviance, per se, so much as a fundamental hatred, mistreatment, and devaluation of women. Where SVU offers closure at the end of each 42-minute episode, Top of the Lake is diffuse and meandering. Instead of localizing blame on an individual, it diffuses it broadly: There’s more than enough for everyone.
In Season 1, that blame was spread across Griffin’s fictional hometown of Laketop in New Zealand. The police, her friends, and her family were all complicit, in some way, in maintaining a world that allowed the sexual exploitation of young girls to go unpunished and unremarked upon for decades. Still, the season ended with something like closure. Griffin, who’d survived a gang rape as a teen, seemed to be approaching some approximation of peace, perhaps even happiness. She solved the case, figured out the identity of her rapists, and found a good guy who made her feel safe and loved.
But in the beginning of Season 2, the most delicate parts of Griffin have fractured once again. (The promotional artwork goes so far as to depict Griffin as a china doll, literally broken into pieces.) On the day of her wedding to the guy from Season One, he’s arrested — and found in the company of another woman. On the beach where the wedding was to take place, Griffin watches as her wedding dress is hoisted high above a bonfire before bursting into flames: an effigy for love. In that moment she announces that she has to go back to work. Like so many women, she reacts to pain by turning inward, to the only person she can trust, and focusing on the thing she knows she’s good at.
Sundance
Griffin returns from New Zealand to Australia, where she’d worked with local law enforcement in the past. But back in Sydney, she doesn’t have any place to live, nor does she have any money, or furniture, or roots. She’s still dealing with the same institutional bullshit she did in New Zealand, with coworkers who either want to fuck or ridicule her. Her supervisor hits on her repeatedly and becomes aggressive when she denies him. He also keeps insisting that she meet with the cop who roofied her back in New Zealand for a “reconciliatory” process. And her one potential female ally in the office is secretly tasked with keeping an eye on her.
There’s a sense that Griffin, having spent her adult life dealing with this sort of thing, isn’t just fatigued, but fraying. In New Zealand, she dressed in comfortable clothes and puffy vests; her demeanor was cool, collected, even wry — the female version of the hard-boiled noir detective — even as her investigation touched on deeper and deeper forms of darkness. When she lost her shit, she inevitably regained it. In Australia, she drinks more, usually while sitting on the floor of her empty apartment. She wears a rumpled uniform of slacks and blazers. She’s often sweaty and disheveled; she spends the bulk of an episode drunk. It’s not clear that she’s even a particularly skilled detective. Everything in her life seems to be telling her she has no place here.
Yet part of what brought Griffin back to Australia was her daughter, Mary (Alice Englert), whom Griffin gave up for adoption after being raped as a teenager. Mary, now a teen herself, lives with her adopted parents Pyke (Ewen Leslie) and Julia (Nicole Kidman) in a posh, idyllic suburban home. She’s also rebelling against the bourgeois world in which she was raised, replacing her parents’ love with that of a greasy pseudo-Marxist who lives above a brothel and psychologically and physically abuses her. She’s deeply involved in his world — its affectations, its intellectual posturings, its self-righteousness – when Griffin responds to the letter Mary sent years ago, asking to meet.
At the same time, Griffin’s attempting to solve the mystery of the woman stuffed in the suitcase, pregnant with a baby that’s not hers. What unravels from there involves a network of illegal surrogates (unlike the United States, commercial surrogacy is against the law in much of Australia), a faked pregnancy, a bunch of fucked-up guys who go to the brothel, and a lot more twisty plot, only some of which ultimately makes sense.
The Sydney brothel that serves as the center of intersecting plotlines in Top of the Lake.
Sundance
The plotlines involving Griffin, her daughter, her brother, her police partner, and the brothel that serves to connect them all interweave in improbable ways. Yet I found myself forgiving those improbabilities in favor of the larger themes they yield: the persistent labels of virgin and whore and mother; the fantasies mapped onto each and the messiness that occurs when those archetypes are muddled; the surveillance of women’s bodies and sense of ownership that extends from it; and the blinding desperation that fills women who can’t become mothers in a world that doesn’t know how to process those who aren’t.
If that all sounds exhausting, try being a woman living through it. Top of the Lake is set in Australia, written and directed by New Zealanders and Australians — but those who excuse or endorse misogyny are not new revelations in the global landscape. Misogyny and rape culture are the air we breathe, the water we’ve swum in for so long we’ve forgotten its frigidity. What Top of the Lake did in Season 1 — and what it continues to do, however unevenly, in Season 2 — is poke and prod us where we’ve become numb.
But as much as the series, and Campion’s work in general, is pervaded by misogyny, that is not its defining quality. Top of the Lake is not, ultimately, the story of men who hate, mistreat, or otherwise devalue women. It’s about women’s imperfect, volatile, overwhelming strength — and how it allows them to become survivors of a world that rejects them, instead of the victims of it. ●
Robin Griffin (Elisabeth Moss) and her daughter, Mary (Alice Englert).
Sundance
↧
↧
Do People Judge You Based On Your Makeup?
What do people REALLY think of your look?
Do People Judge You Based On Your Makeup?
Boldly / Via youtube.com
↧
Priyanka Chopra Spoke About Giving Girl Love Paramount Importance And You Can't Help But Agree
“It’s important for us to pat each other on the back and say, ‘You know what? You can do it. And I’ll help you do it.’”
Priyanka Chopra was recently at the Toronto International Film Festival for the premiere of her production, Pahuna.
Jemal Countess / Getty Images
While there, she was asked to talk about the significance of women mentoring women. And here's what she said:
She spoke about the importance of "girl love".
And how she believes in leading by example.
↧
Kangana And AIB's Video Made A Lot Of Women Open Up About Everyday Sexism
“Subjected to the male gaze everyday. #CauseIHaveVaginaRe”
Earlier today, All India Bakchod released "The Bollywood Diva Song," a music video starring Kangana Ranaut calling out the various genres of sexism actresses in the film industry face.
The catchy AF song features the refrain "'Cause I have vagina, re" to highlight every instance of sexism.
All India Bakchod
The comedy collective later tweeted to get women to share incidents where they faced sexism in their own lives.
Women on Twitter did not hold back.
From being trolled...
↧
Kangana Ranaut Is A Feminist Icon, But Her Breakup Isn't A Feminist Issue
Strdel / AFP / Getty Images
"She'll say anything and everything," said a grinning gent who works at a wine shop in Bandra. He'd been watching clips from Kangana Ranaut's appearance on Aap ki Adalat on his phone.
"Her problem is that she thinks she's Salman Khan, but there's only one Bhai."
The comparison seemed a little unfair, I said, without getting into details (like Khan being the exact opposite of an outsider in Bollywood, and singularly lacking in the acting department).
"See, she thinks she can get away with doing anything, but it's not that easy," he explained.
Indeed it isn't, but Khan's version of "anything" was allegedly running over a homeless man, I pointed out.
We, the public, are shameless gossips, but Ranaut has chosen to feed the beast.
"Haan," he nodded, "so she's doing the same to Hrithik Roshan, right?"
Ouch.
Thanks to the interviews she’s done promoting her new film (Simran is released tomorrow), Ranaut is a hot topic again, but not for particularly professional reasons. Every interview that she has given of late has been a platform to talk about two men from her past: Aditya Pancholi and Hrithik Roshan, with a significant emphasis on the latter.
The largest chunk in each of her recent interviews has been about Roshan – her recollections of conversations, anecdotes about Valentine’s Day spats, allegations that he hacked her email, stories about birthday parties together, anger at his father’s inaction, and an oft-repeated demand that the Roshans apologise to her.
We, the public, are shameless gossips, but Ranaut has also chosen to feed the beast. She’s insisted on talking about this episode and hasn’t even pretended that it has any connection to Simran.
So much so that, to this wine shop Bandra man and many of the rest of us, Kangana Ranaut in 2017 is most defined by an anti-Hrithik Roshan stand, rather than any of the others she’s taken over her decade in Bollywood. And there have been many.
Str / AFP / Getty Images
Her distinctly fearless habit of calling out every layer of misogyny and oppression in a deeply misogynistic and oppressive film industry has built in us, rightly, an instinct to applaud her every word. There is no doubt that her story – that of an outsider who battled exploitation, abuse, sexism, and exclusion and rose to the top – is worth applauding.
The upside of this is that we hang on every word she says. The downside is that there is no room for nuance.
Because now, in her unprecedented position of awesomeness and influence, she has chosen to make gossip about ex-lover Hrithik Roshan the centerpiece of her persona.
We've come to expect more from Ranaut because there are so few actresses in Bollywood whom we can turn to for feminist fist-bumps – most of them are scared of the word "feminist". It feels disappointing that Ranaut just wants to discuss her heartbreak.
An effective PR strategy has equated criticising Kangana Ranaut with criticising womanhood itself.
From Vir Sanghvi to Karan Johar, there’s a long list of influential people who have sly-tweeted or commented disapprovingly about Ranaut for raking up what is essentially an ex-lovers' spat. The fact that they won’t address her directly speaks volumes about the stature that Ranaut has earned today.
To criticise her, as Sona Mohapatra discovered, is to unleash a torrent of righteous outrage. Mohapatra’s claim that Ranaut was doing a “disservice to feminism” by talking about her past relationships is excessive. Ranaut’s sister Rangoli’s counterattack (“you are a black spot on womanhood”) is equally over the top, but fits into an effective PR strategy that has equated criticising Kangana Ranaut with criticising womanhood itself.
How did this happen?
Str / AFP / Getty Images
If we discovered her as an actress in Queen, Ranaut’s celebrity status came as a result of how she gave provocative, honest answers on national platforms with casual ease.
Stand by stand, Ranaut became our feminist hero.
When she said on Koffee With Karan that she wanted to be a heroine in her own right and not via working with a Khan; when she told Hindustan Times that she’ll never endorse fairness creams because it would be irresponsible in “a country of brown people”; when she told Pinkvilla that she won’t do item songs because she wants to correct the path prescribed to Bollywood actresses; when she spoke honestly about her own struggles: Stand by stand, Ranaut became our feminist hero.
She's grown from strength to strength in a near-unbroken string of films with her in the lead, no male superstar billing above her. She's fought misogynist relatives, directors, producers, actors, and even misogynistic audiences. Some battles she's lost, others she's won and, through it all, she's survived. And now she is flexing her muscles, as is her right.
But now, with us all hanging on her every word, the really relevant point about heroines being treated shoddily by the film industry has remained restricted to lip-syncing All India Bakchod's lyrics in "The Bollywood Diva Song", while her interviews have been dominated by details of how Roshan allegedly blubbered to Ranaut.
Talking about a past relationship is not inherently irrelevant. Consider, for contrast to the Hrithik story, Ranaut’s relationship with Aditya Pancholi.
It says a lot about our acceptance of violence against women that Pancholi hasn't shocked the public as much as Roshan has.
Ranaut met Pancholi as a teenager who had just arrived in Mumbai looking to make it as an actor. She says he offered her an apartment and that was the start of an abusive relationship, with Pancholi stalking her and even hitting her on some occasions. Ultimately, it was a police order that would force him to stay away from her.
(Pancholi's response to these allegations has been to circulate copies of his daughter's Aadhaar card to prove Ranaut is not a year younger than his daughter, as she has claimed, but a year older. Classy.)
Even if the story is approximately a decade old, it is a brave one for Ranaut to have shared, and an important one to hold in the public consciousness. Indian society mutely accepts violence against women and the predatory advances of sleazy men who present themselves as guardians. Women are socialised into accepting victimhood, to which Ranaut's response was:
It says a lot about our general acceptance of violence against women — and Pancholi’s reputation perhaps — that these revelations haven’t shocked the public or got tongues wagging with as much enthusiasm as the details Ranaut has served up of an extramarital affair she claims she and Hrithik Roshan had.
Unlike the episode with Pancholi, there's no larger takeaway from the Roshan–Ranaut exchange. It’s an extramarital affair that ended in an ego battle.
This is sad for Ranaut and she has every right to talk about it, but let’s be clear on one point: By doing so she's adding to gossip fodder, not feminist discourse.
But to point that out, or to levy any criticism of her at all, is seen as being anti-Ranaut and therefore anti-woman in general.
So then you try to stand with her, only to feel that prickling sense of hesitation – because what exactly are you standing up for? Extramarital affairs? Better security protocol for Gmail? What is it that's expected of us, beyond an ear for her story of past heartbreak?
The fact is, Ranaut isn't obliged to be a feminist icon every time she steps out of her house and in front of the microphone.
Ranaut isn't obliged to be a feminist icon every time she steps out of her house.
She can also be an apolitical woman who wants her ex-lover to acknowledge her.
She can be a strategist who believes there's more to gain from talking about herself than her film.
She can be a diva who is difficult to work with, just as she may have to beat her head against patriarchy’s inability to accept the idea of a woman with a working brain. One doesn't make the other invalid. All of them together make a human being.
In the last five years, India has seen the mainstreaming of demands for women’s rights. In the same period, Ranaut has been one of our brightest lights in the struggle to get society to value women's stories. Losing sight of that just because she wants to indulge in a little gossip and some ex-bashing would be a shame.
But lauding the gossip and ex-bashing as feminist discourse would be just as shameful for our collective ability to see nuance in feminism.
Now to say a prayer for Simran and hope it has the feminist gaze and sensitivity that we’ve come to expect of a film that boasts of Ranaut and only Ranaut.
↧
↧
A March For Black Women On A Jewish Holiday Has Sparked A Fight Within This Feminist Group
A March for Black Women being held on Yom Kippur has sparked a bitter feud amongst members of one of the largest feminist organizations in the US in the latest round of racially charged infighting among progressives.
Members of the National Organization for Women (NOW) have recently engaged in a heated debate through emails and on social media posts about the organization's support for a march that is being held on the holiest day for the Jewish community.
The conflict and chaos within the ranks of the leading feminist group have led members to accuse one another of racism, white supremacy, and anti-Semitism.
The March for Black Women has been organized for Sept. 30 in Washington, DC, by the Black Women’s Blueprint group, with NOW listed as one of several partners supporting the event. NOW has also formally endorsed the march, with President Toni Van Pelt saying, "as feminists we support the march because white supremacy pushes us all downward."
Van Pelt did not immediately respond to a request for comment. However, in a private email seen by BuzzFeed News, NOW board member Jocelyn Morris praised staff for their handling of the complaints. "The members we lose over this we will replace with the ones we recruit at the March," she wrote.
Van Pelt also responded to the email chain, telling NOW members, "Carry on."
In a statement to BuzzFeed News, Morris said, "NOW had nothing to do with the date choice. Jews are only 10% of the USA population. The planners have apologized for overlooking the Jewish holiday, but will March for Black Women."
A NOW protest in New York in April.
Drew Angerer / Getty Images
Marilyn Fitterman, a longstanding NOW member, quit the organization on Wednesday because of its endorsement of the March for Black Women being held on Yom Kippur. (Yom Kippur, which means the Day of Atonement, is the holiest day for the Jewish community, during which Jewish people fast and refrain from working).
In a Facebook post, Fitterman said, "NOW has ringingly endorsed the black womens March being held on Yom Kippur. I will no longer belong to NOW after having spent more than 40 years as an activist for NOW. DISTRESSED. NEVER AGAIN"
Her Facebook post generated a heated debate in the comments, with some NOW members accusing Fitterman of "racism and white supremacy."
"I'm really offended by the RACISM and WHITE Supremacy embedded in Ms Fettermans SMOKE SCREEN of a REASON for quitting NOW!," Desiree Jordan, a NOW member, wrote in the comments.
"I could 'flip the script' and INDICT the JEWISH FAITH as being RACIST and EXCLUSIONARY simply based on the fact that one has to BE JEWISH to celebrate YOM KIPPUR," Jordan continued. "As a WoC [woman of color] I am NOT *invited* to celebrate YOM KIPPUR. Sad thing is I must accept the FACT that NOW is PACKED with (both overt and covert Racists) 'Ms Fetterman's.' [sic.]"
Jordan told BuzzFeed News on Saturday that Fitterman was "using her religion as a reason to dehumanize women of color who are simply marching."
She said Fitterman's reasons for quitting NOW reeked of white supremacy.
"Despite seeing what happened in Charlottesville, where white supremacists marched saying, 'Jews will not replace us,' Ms. Fitterman would actually quit NOW after 40 years. That to me that is a slap in my face," Jordan said. "To me, she is a hypocrite."
China Fortson-Washington, a NOW member who is campaigning to be the organization's president, also criticized Fitterman's decision, calling it "white privilege."
In a lengthy Facebook comment on Fitterman's post, Fortson-Washington said, "AGAIN, the internal white privilege and racism in NOW rears its ugly head! How dare an event that is set for Black Women is scheduled on a holiday that is celebrated by less than 10% of the women in America (and rarely celebrated by Black Women) should be cancelled in its entirety! Now please tell me that isn't white privilege. Black Women are asked to take a back seat again."
She also noted that NOW had no input into the decision or the process of setting the date for the march. "This March for Black Women will not have any adverse affect or take anything from the Jewish holiday that is celebrated," Fortson-Washington said.
On Saturday that she was privy to the internal emails between NOW board members and Van Pelt, which she said "reveal their unbelievable, blatant anti-Semitism."
Perri Fitterman said the responses by Van Pelt and Morris, the NOW board member, showed "virulent anti-Semitism."
"We are being accused of exerting white privilege simply because we want to practice our religion," she said.
In another email seen by BuzzFeed Nws, one Jewish activist called NOW's decision to march on Yom Kippur "insensitive and inappropriate."
"Would you ever march on Christmas!" she wrote.
According to Perri Fitterman, several Jewish organizations expressed their support for the Sept. 30 march, but had said that since they could not march on Yom Kippur, they would organize sister marches on the following Tuesday.
"NOW did not do that. They said, 'Yom Kippur is fine with us," Perri Fitterman said.
"My mother, a past president of NOW in New York state, organized the very first women of color coalition during her term in the office. And they're calling her a racist," she said, adding that she, too, was considering quitting the organization.
But Jordan — who has been a NOW member for three years — was also considering quitting the group unless the organization used this as "an opportunity to address racism within its ranks."
Jordan said that NOW has had "its problems with racism" which is why the "Ms Fittermans of NOW are quite vocal about using their religion as a reason not to support the march."
A member of Black Women's Blueprint, who did not want to be identified, told BuzzFeed News that NOW was being blamed for something that they did not organize.
"We own that march," the source said. "They should not attack NOW."
She said that the organizers did not intentionally set the march for the day of Yom Kippur, but were determined to go ahead.
"We would march on any day. We would march on Christmas Day and Christmas Eve," she said.
"Oppression doesn't sleep, we don't sleep" she said, adding that many members of the Jewish community were actively participating in both the March for Racial Justice and the March for Black Women.
In August, the organizers of the March for Racial Justice, which is affiliated with the March for Black Women, issued a statement addressing the scheduling conflict.
"The organizers of the March for Racial Justice did not realize that September 30 was Yom Kippur when we were factoring in these and other considerations and applying for permits," the statement said. "Choosing this date, we now know, was a grave and hurtful oversight on our part. It was unintentional and we are sorry for this pain as well as for the time it has taken for us to respond."
Members of NOW who spoke to BuzzFeed News dismissed the idea that infighting within a prominent feminist organization fed into right-wing groups' criticism of liberals grappling with identity politics.
"The right wing has more dissension amongst themselves than the left wing does and we all know it," Perri Fitterman said. "There is no organization ever where everybody is going to agree 100% about everything."
Jordan said that this was not infighting but rather a historical fight "that goes back to the very beginning of feminism where white women thought they could attain freedom without working for the freedom of women of color."
↧
Kim Kardashian Opened Up About Her Relationship With North And It's Adorable
“She was like, ‘Mommy, this will keep you safe when you go to Paris.’”
Kim Kardashian-West is up close and personal on the cover of Allure magazine this month for their Best of Beauty issue.
Allure
As well as a flawless photoshoot, Kim gave an interview to the magazine in which she spoke candidly about her family life, her relationship with Kanye, and her views on gender equality.
"I don't really live by society's ideals," she told the magazine. "So what I would hope is just that women are equal in every way."
"Whether it's equal pay, equal rights – I just feel like women should have the same rights as men. I definitely think that women should have the right to what they want to do with their bodies, and I think that's really frustrating when certain rights are being taken away. I feel like we're just moving backwards when we've come so far."
Allure
She also spoke about her relationship with her four year old daughter, North, and revealed what lessons she's most excited to teach her as she grows up.
↧
Amitabh Bachchan Should Have Consulted A Feminist Before Tweeting This Photo To Celebrate "Pink"
The stalwart was oblivious to the lack of female representation as he tweeted a picture meant to extol a film about women empowerment.
Amitabh Bachchan claims to be a supporter of female empowerment. Last year in the movie Pink, he played the role of a lawyer fighting for three women in a sexual harassment case.
Rashmi Sharma Telefilms Limited
To celebrate the one-year anniversary of Pink, Amitabh Bachchan tweeted this picture of the movie's crew.
He called them "the team of Pink".
There's just one teeny-tiny problem with the picture. NONE of the women who featured in or worked behind the scenes on the movie are in this picture.
And the irony isn't lost on people.
↧
In A Move From The '50s, Uber Asked Husbands To Let Their Wives Take Time Off From The Kitchen
Twitter did the job and shut shit down, after which Uber eventually apologised.
On September 17, Wife Appreciation Day, UberEats in India decided to post this ad to promote their latest offer.
Just in case you flinched and checked to see if you'd turned up in 1817 by mistake, here's a reminder that this happened in 2017.
Dharma Productions
And Twitter was having none of it.
As the ad gained attention, people from outside India weren't sparing the company either.
↧
↧
Ellen Pao’s Story Is Messier Than Her Book Makes It Sound
Ellen Pao leaves the San Francisco Superior Court Civic Center Courthouse on March 27, 2015 in San Francisco.
Justin Sullivan / Getty Images
Anyone who’s been curious about the Ellen Pao story has been eagerly awaiting her memoir, Reset: My Fight for Inclusion and Lasting Change, which was finally released this week. To recap: In 2012, Pao filed a $16 million gender discrimination suit against her employer, the legendary venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers — and the ensuing five-week gender bias trial in 2015 became an obsession of the tech industry. Reset has a lofty aim: to give Pao a platform to finally explain how she established herself as a champion of diversity and equality in the workplace.
But the reality is much more complicated. Reset scans as strategically engineered to burnish Pao’s narrative, which has been reshaped by time and the collective memory of her trial to turn her into a figurehead for the diversity movement in tech. But Pao is a contradictory figure — one who, even in her own memoir, contradicts herself and remains reticent about details that don’t serve her rebranding purpose.
The cover of Ellen Pao's new memoir, Reset.
Penguin Random House
The book starts by tracing Pao’s “American dream” ascent, from growing up the daughter of first-generation Chinese immigrants in New Jersey to landing a coveted job as a partner at Kleiner Perkins. But the details are bland: She lives in an idyllic neighborhood in the suburbs, where she and her two sisters are the only Asians in the community, but she isn’t terribly offended by the occasional bigotry the other kids display. Instead, she learns to keep her head down and work hard, and she uses this strategy to excel academically and get degrees from Princeton and Harvard in electrical engineering, law, and business.
When Pao describes her time at a law firm, her anecdotes sound like a metaphor for sexism, rather than describing specific sexism itself. Pao keeps her subjects anonymous: She tells stories of a coworker peering down women’s blouses and a partner who stares at a colleague while licking an ice cream cone. It sounds gross, but it’s hard to connect with; and it feels like she’s tiptoeing around something — perhaps accidentally offending someone in her past.
It is only in the book’s middle section — when Pao recounts her experiences at Kleiner Perkins and at Reddit, where Pao was interim CEO for nine months — that she finally finds her voice. She is sharper and specific; she finally drops her reluctance to tell us which powerful person did exactly what. She trains a wry eye on their eyeroll-inducing behavior: “As a non-managing partner, I would presumably be left to die, flu-ravaged face pressed against the window of the conference room,” Pao writes of one rich VC's obsession with stockpiling Tamiflu for managing partners and their families if the contagion ever arrived. “I was probably labeled a buzzkill” for instituting a rule to ban hard alcohol at the Reddit office, she relays, “but I didn’t care.” Even then, it’s worth noting that it is only events that Pao has already blown the whistle on that she chooses to depict in even more colorful detail in her memoir. The rest of it reads as image control, or contradiction.
Case in point: Pao says she’s a “board games and soda” girl and raises her eyebrows at the excesses of the Kleiner partners, yet she lives in the same San Francisco apartment building as Al Gore. She’s offended by the guys sitting in the "skydeck" (the top row) at business school passing a dildo around, but thought a coworker setting up a porn server at a tech startup she worked at was “dopey, but not terrible.” She talks about being awakened to a “distinctly religious experience” during the trial, which has the flavor of someone considering a run for office.
“Sometimes I even go back and question the things I saw and heard, because I feel like the Ellen Pao story has become so powerful and taken on a life of its own.”
Pao also conducts her post-trial life with a level of caution that would make any PR crisis manager proud. In her memoir, she describes launching the nonprofit Project Include using a formula that is familiar to PR practitioners: a carefully crafted press release, a prearranged interview with a trusted journalist, and a hypersensitivity to the nature of the feedback. (“We were covered positively in all the articles I read,” she writes in Reset.) In a lot of ways, she is much closer to a political figure like Hillary Clinton than a writer and activist like Gloria Steinem. (Pao declined to be interviewed for this story.)
Reading Pao’s book brought back memories of my intense reporting experience covering her trial back in 2015, which journalists with whom I reported remember well. “It's fascinating to me that the public's version is that Ellen Pao was robbed and should have won, but inside the trial room it really wasn't that clear,” said Shalene Gupta, who covered the trial for Fortune magazine. “Sometimes I even go back and question the things I saw and heard, because I feel like the Ellen Pao story has become so powerful and taken [on] a life of its own.”
Indeed, the anecdotes Pao told during the trial, much like the anecdotes in her book, felt at times overly simplistic: Women at Kleiner Perkins were asked to do administrative tasks like note-taking during a meeting, or asked to sit in the back row during a company offsite. But under cross-examination, Pao admitted she sat in the front row on another day of the same offsite. Did that really mean being told to sit in the back row was any less humiliating, though?
Ellen Pao speaks to the media after losing her lawsuit against Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield and Byers in San Francisco on March 27, 2015.
Beck Diefenbach / Reuters
Granular questions like this made it difficult, listening to testimony, to get a clear handle on whether the discrimination Pao was alleging crossed into illegal territory. “She was suing for gender discrimination, but it’s such a small field,” said Gupta. “When one of 16 people is promoted, how do you make a case that you didn’t get your promotion because of gender discrimination?” But you can look at the composite field, Gupta pointed out, and you see that only one woman in the history of the company was promoted before the case. “So something is going on,” she said. “But then you get into all these details about the person and how likable she is — could it be this? Could it be that? You aren’t able to see the forest because you’re examining each tree.”
Complicating matters was the fact that Brunswick, the crisis-management firm that Kleiner Perkins hired during the trial (which is mentioned in Pao’s book), often called reporters up after their stories published, nitpicking details and pressuring us into making small corrections here and there — at times not because what we’d reported was inaccurate, but because it “lacked context.” Representatives would also email corrections as we were tweeting, which ratcheted up the anxiety we felt in covering the trial. “Sometimes I thought, was I an idiot who just got wrapped in Kleiner Perkins’ spin machine?” Gupta said.
“Many people thought [Pao’s case and the trial] was simpler than it was,” said Jeff Elder, a former reporter for the Wall Street Journal who also covered the trial closely. “When Ellen lost and hung her head in the courtroom, it felt like a defeat for women. And the hits just kept on coming.”
“When Ellen lost and hung her head in the courtroom, it felt like a defeat for women. And the hits just kept on coming.”
Pao’s suit unfolded against the backdrop of what, in retrospect, foreshadowed the populist culture wars we are smack in the middle of today. Just look at what happened in the 2016 presidential election. The misogynistic abuse leveled at Pao at the time mimics the rhetoric from far-right internet personalities in the Trump era, who keep nudging the boundaries of acceptable conversation toward increasingly racist and sexist expression.
Pao certainly doesn't fit the mold of who we are taught is the ideal female colleague: noncombative and eager to help. She describes herself as “introverted” and “bad at self-promotion”; she has been described by others as overly negative, yet later having learned “how to activate her aggression.” But would she have gotten access to the halls of power at Kleiner Perkins at all if she wasn’t willing to be a little aggressive? Would Hillary Clinton, for that matter? And why do we subject women to this line of scrutiny, when similar traits from men make them “ambitious”? Could this be a reflection of society’s unreasonable and contradictory expectations of women? (Yes.)
No, Pao is not the “perfect” poster woman for gender equality, even as she tries to herd her image in that direction; her book is just the latest effort to come across that way. The result, as it always has been with Pao, is kind of…awkward. Sometimes it doesn’t translate. But in our scrutiny of Pao as a public figure, we must also examine ourselves. What the mirror of Ellen Pao shows is that we as a society have a long way to go before we fully accommodate women of all types, personalities, and levels of ambition. We need to work to give every woman a seat at the table, no matter who the table has historically been set up for. ●
↧
Aahana Kumra Was Body-Shamed Because Internet Trolls Are Jobless AF
But she gave it right back to them.
This is actress Aahana Kumra, best known for her role as Leela in Lipstick Under My Burkha.
Balaji Motion Pictures
Last week, she posted this picture of her in a bikini on a boat.
For commenters on the internet, however, a woman having a good time is fodder enough to comment on her life.
↧
This Has Been One Of The Worst Weeks For Women In India
From campuses to courtrooms, here are nine attacks on women’s safety and freedom in the past week.
There's no denying that India has always been unsafe and oppressive for its women. The past week, however, has seen rapid developments for the worse, with the judiciary, police, educators, and our own citizens fighting against the liberties of one-half of the population. Here's the horrifying rundown.
Police were caught on camera lathi-charging female students, who were protesting against a student's molestation at the Banaras Hindu University.
Despite there being video proof of the lathi-charge, the vice chancellor of the university later said he had "no idea" if force was used on girls.
With attention on BHU, more instances of sexism toward its female students came to the fore. The university's vice chancellor justified them as "for the girls".
BHU
In its acquittal of accused rapist and Peepli Live director Mahmood Farooqui, Delhi High Court said "a feeble no may mean yes".
↧
Reese Witherspoon Explained Why Female-Led Movies Are So Important And You'll Love Her Even More
“The way society changes is if we have different perspectives, and you can really only do that if you start hiring more women directors or people of colour.”
Reese Witherspoon, queen of being legally blonde, is currently making the interview rounds to promote her new movie, Home Again.
The movie is about a woman who separates from her husband, moves to LA, and finds ~romance~ with a younger man, and judging by the trailer it's adorable AF.
And in an interview with ITV's Lorraine, Reese explained why it was so important to her that this movie was made.
"We always see older men with younger women on screen, and I think maybe it's because people don't think about it," she said.
ITV / youtube.com
"The way society changes is if we have different perspectives, and you can really only do that if you start hiring more women directors or people of colour," she continued.
ITV / youtube.com
She also talked about her reason for starting her production company, Hello Sunshine, which specialises in producing female-driven films like Wild and Gone Girl.
Fox Searchlight Pictures
↧
↧
This Is How Feminists In London Showed Support For Women Who Travel From Ireland To England For Abortions
Jacob Sacks-jones / BuzzFeed News
Protesters drew more than 200,000 chalk marks on the pavement outside the Irish embassy in London on Saturday to represent the number of women who have travelled from Ireland to England, Wales, and Scotland in the last three decades to access abortion.
The protesters gathered to show support for the March for Choice march in Dublin, also on Saturday, where between 10,000 and 20,000 protesters were expected.
The eighth amendment to the Irish constitution, passed in 1983, made abortion illegal in almost all circumstances, including in cases of rape and incest. The procedure can only be carried out in Ireland if the mother's life is in immediate danger.
Since then, 205,704 Irish women have had pregnancies terminated in Great Britain. That figure includes women from Northern Ireland, where the Abortion Act 1967, which allows the procedure in the rest of the UK, was never applied.
Sophie Walker, leader of the Women's Equality party, addresses the crowd outside the Irish embassy, 30 September 2017.
Jacob Sacks-jones / BuzzFeed News
"A woman cannot have full equality so long as she does not have full control over her body," Sophie Walker, leader of the British Women's Equality party, who spoke outside the embassy on Saturday, told BuzzFeed News.
"I think it’s important that we build a movement now," Walker told us. "It’s time for people to come together as a movement right across the United Kingdom, in Northern Ireland, and in the Republic of Ireland.
"Because the more that women take up space, the more that women shout together, and the louder they are, the clearer we will be heard."
Saturday's event in London, organised by the London Ireland Abortion Rights Campaign (LIARC), sought to highlight the important role the UK plays in Ireland's abortion debate.
Jacob Sacks-jones / BuzzFeed News
"These women have been exiled and completely let down by Irish and Northern Irish governments," Hannah Little, a LIARC member, told BuzzFeed News.
"A lot of people still don’t know that 12 women travel every single day to access abortion."
Little hopes that showing how many Irish women travel for abortion, and the barriers they face in accessing it in England, such as cost or inability to travel, will help make English women more aware of the difficulties faced by those in Ireland seeking abortion.
Campaigner Hannah Little
Jacob Sacks-jones / BuzzFeed
"It’s incredibly frustrating for us to hear people in the UK talking about Planned Parenthood and the crackdowns in the US when those issues exist within the UK too," she said. "We would like to see a lot more solidarity with women’s groups here."
Little said the London demonstration was of particular importance for Northern Irish women, who don't have the same access to abortion as women in the rest of the UK. "For far too long Northern Irish women have been marginalised," she said.
Claire Tracey, who helped draw the chalk marks on the pavement, agreed. "That there’s a part of the UK where women don’t have reproductive rights is kind of crazy," she said.
Jacob Sacks-jones / BuzzFeed News
Barbara Davidson, who's also of LIARC and is originally from Northern Ireland, told us: "I think the Northern Irish Assembly would have to pay attention if decriminalisation happened in England, as well as listen to the human rights bodies who have condemned laws in Ireland north and south."
Even though abortion is accessible in England, Scotland, and Wales in a wider set of circumstances, it is still subject to criminal sanctions rather than being regulated by the healthcare system.
Campaigners have been seeking to remove criminal regulations around abortion in the UK in order to remove barriers faced by many women here.
Jacob Sacks-jones / BuzzFeed News
A member of the campaign group Speaking of IMELDA – "IMELDA" stands for "Ireland making England the legal destination for abortion" – said it was important to make more women in the UK aware of Irish women's plight.
"A lot of women in England maybe don’t know how backwards Ireland’s abortion laws are – and Northern Ireland’s abortion laws," said the woman, who asked not to be named.
Women from Speaking of IMELDA.
Jacob Sacks-jones / BuzzFeed News
"I think it’s really important to have solidarity across the UK and the island of Ireland, because this is where so many Irish women come to," she said. "We need that support from our English sisters and our sisters living in the UK."
Last week the Irish government confirmed that a referendum on repealing the eighth amendment in the Republic of Ireland will take place in either May or June next year, although the terms of the poll are yet to be confirmed. Many worry that any new law that passes could still pose too many restrictions on women's ability to access abortion in Ireland.
"It feels like it’s starting to happen," Little said. "But [Ireland's prime minister] Leo Varadkar is yet to come out with a strong pro-choice message, and I personally feel let down by that. He’s letting down 50% of the citizens he’s supposed to be working for, but it doesn’t seem to be on his agenda."
Jacob Sacks-jones / BuzzFeed News
↧
17 Times The Internet Was Really Good At Roasting The Shit Out Of Fragile Masculinity
“In high school one of my guy friends said, ‘I wish I were a girl so I could use an umbrella’.”
↧
Glorifying Selflessness In Women Is A Way To Make Us Do All The Work
Tim Lane / Getty / BuzzFeed
My great-grandmother never made a single selfish decision in her life. From the moment she woke up (earlier than everyone else in the household, to begin the morning puja) to the moment she went to sleep, she focused on everybody else’s needs. She was the first to serve food and always the last to eat. She was the one to receive guests, the one to clean the teacups, the one to bathe the children.
The rhetoric of selflessness has always been preached to women.
She never knew what it felt like to say “I’m going for a walk because I feel like it,” or “I’m going to watch a movie today.” There was nothing that she felt entitled to in her 84 years of living. She was the kind of woman that most Indian women are taught to emulate.
The rhetoric of selflessness has always been preached to women. It’s in our religious texts (Sita sacrificing her family in order to prove her purity), in the films we watch (Mother India showing us the archetype of Indian womanhood), in the news that we read every day (young girls staying home so that their brothers can afford school fees). Unconsciously or consciously, women are held to a higher standard than men.
For instance, every time a woman is molested after dark, men take to Facebook to express their opinion in droves. They almost always say the same thing — “if you don’t want to be molested, you should stay at home”. You see, men can’t control themselves, and so we are expected to sacrifice the small pleasures of life, like drinking a beer after work with our friends. It’s for the greater good!
The day Indira Nooyi was named President of PepsiCo, she came home at 10 PM to her mother saying “You forgot to buy milk.”
It’s the same in the workplace. Take Indra Nooyi, who is easily the most successful Indian businesswoman in the world, and one of the most powerful women in the world. You might call her a role model. But the day she was named President of PepsiCo, she came home at 10 PM to her mother saying “Go buy some milk. You forgot to buy milk.” When Indra asked why her husband couldn’t buy the milk, she was told, “He’s tired. Listen, you may be President of a company outside this home, but here, you’re the wife, you’re the daughter, you’re the mother.”
So she went out and bought the milk.
Some might take this story to be inspirational and cite it as an example of humility. I see it as another example of the way that we are kept in our place, reminded that we cannot put ourselves first. Would anybody expect Indra Nooyi’s husband to do household chores when he got home from work? Would anybody question whether he was fulfilling his husbandly duties? Would he admit, as Indra did, that he felt like a bad parent for being too busy to pick up his children from school?
No matter what we may achieve, women are still the ones who have to go buy the milk.
When I tell older people “I don’t want to get married right now,” or “I’m not planning on having children,” they look at me in complete disbelief. I try to explain my reasoning, but they cut me off with “That’s selfish. Don’t you think your parents want to see their grandchildren?”
Selfish. It’s a word that is weaponized against Indian women in a variety of ways; a word that I instinctively flinch from.
As I look at the men around me, I see how loud they are at work, how assertive and demanding. I see how instead of selfishness, this is viewed as ambition, how it is framed as something desirable. I see how they behave at home, how they throw their clothes on the floor, how they leave the dirty dishes on the table. They never offer to lay the dishes, or wash up, or even push their chairs back in. From a young age, they are taught that women will clean up their mess.
The invisible, intangible burdens weigh even heavier. I see how my friends patiently take on the lion’s share of emotional labor, supporting and comforting their boyfriends through the bad days. I see how little they get back. Sometimes it’s painful to witness.
Sometimes it’s funny, and we learn to joke about it with each other. I tell my friends about the time a DJ invited me on a date and I showed up only to realise that he was the house DJ that night, and that he expected me to stand and listen to him for three hours. They tell me about how their boyfriends don’t seem to care about their hobbies or take an interest in their art. We find solace in group chats with other women who share our plight.
The dictionary tells me that the word selfish means “lacking consideration for other people.” When I read that, and think of the Indian women I know, I want to laugh.
This inequality naturally extends to the bedroom. There’s a lot of talk about the modern, sexual woman, the Sex and the City prototype, who is liberated enough to demand oral sex, or multiple orgasms from her man. However, Indian women have a long way to go before they achieve this kind of outspokenness.
In heterosexual encounters, pleasure is seen as the exclusive dominion of the man. Dr. Mahinder Watsa, sex columnist for Mumbai Mirror, says that men are such in a rush to get off that they don’t attend to their female partner’s needs. Many women I know are afraid to bring up the topic with their boyfriends, so they fake it or become resigned to an unsatisfying sex life. It’s just another one of the many sacrifices we make.
I’m not sure what being selfish means for an Indian woman. The dictionary tells me that it means “lacking consideration for other people.” When I read that, and think of the Indian women I know, I want to laugh.
I think especially of the mothers I know, the ones who get up early to pack their sons’ lunches. The most credit they seem to get is a Facebook post on Mother’s Day. “To my dear mother, who does everything for me.” Sometimes, these mothers don’t even see those posts because they’re not on Facebook. I wonder if heaven will recompense these women for the work they did, because this world doesn’t.
Women are not inherently better than men. We are as mortal as men: as full of weakness, foolishness, and vanity.
What I do know is this: I’m tired of the narrative that women are selfless. It’s easy to place Indian women on a pedestal, to say that they are somehow better than men, and thereby to argue that they should be the ones to nurture everybody at the expense of their own well-being. Sometimes, when I tell men I’m a feminist, they say “Well, I agree that women are better than men.” It is an answer that frustrates me, because it is such an easy way to evade responsibility.
No, I want to say, women are not inherently better than men. We are as mortal as men: as full of weakness, foolishness, and vanity. We have the unrelenting human desire to be selfish, to prioritize our own desires and place ourselves first. It’s just that — as my great-grandmother knew — we are not afforded that choice.
↧