Butch Peace

Suffragettes didn't just fight for women's voting rights.

They fought for the right for women to own property, domestic violence protections, the right to initiate divorce, the right to have legal standing in courts, the right to obtain guardianship of their children during instances of divorce.

I'm sure you've heard men complain about women always getting custody in court, but prior to World War I, in cases of separation, men obtained guardianship of kids.

The right to an equal education, domestic violence protections, the right to not just vote but run for political office, advocating against the prostitution of women.

Here's a suffragette trying to persuade a sea of men about these things:

Not only that. Back then men were not just given guardianship, but ownership. Patricide was the most severely punished crime and fathers had a right of life and death over their families in multiple european countries (i'm speaking about France specifically here). Children back then did not benefit from the status they do now and their human rights were extremely limited (when they existed at all). Marital rape was obviously legal, but so was rape of a man's own children. (even if pedocriminality has been a concept in french law since 1832 (it applied to children below the age of 11, the current age of consent of 15 was established in 1945.))

The french government only started legislating on what men do to their children in 1889 (and even then, it took a while to have a true impact on the culture. And we could argue that with the way our justice system treats these cases, we're only just now starting to punish these men). That was less than 6 mothers ago.

I really believe there's some sort of "emperor's new clothes" phenomenon happening with Gen Z discoursers where they're too afraid to question the logic of some of the discourse being thrown at them for fear of appearing to be unwoke so they just blindly parrot it not to be excluded by their peers

not just a Gen Z thing, like that’s a valid criticism of tumblr few years back, and I’m not ashamed to admit it sucked me in too. people can say whatever shit they want as long as they use the right vocabulary and an agressive tone that just implies that disagreement is out of the question. it sinks in because you will get similar messages about legitimate issues and sometimes from the same people.

The emperor's new discourse.

"Only perverts and bigots can't see the logic of this post."

I’ve literally seen mutuals ask (polite, respectful, unintrusive) clarifying questions about someone’s statements on terminology (along the lines of ‘I thought POC was the proper term for [X group], you say it’s not, could you tell me what is?’ level of question) and get targeted for abuse for being racist.

"People can say whatever shit they want as long as they use the right vocabulary and an agressive tone that just implies that disagreement is out of the question."

Truer words were never spoken. As long as you sound angry and offended, people will bend over backwards to change themselves and their opinions to make you comfortable.

"I'm not part of this group, and this person seems very angry and offended that I said x thing about this group, so I must be the one in the wrong" is the thought process. Is there a word for this? Weaponizing being offended?

Sorry not sorry but there's no "liberal" way to care about collective fertility rates

TRAs loveee to say that women getting boob jobs, laser hair removal, botox, filler, etc. and men getting gynecomastia surgery or hair transplants are all “gender affirming care” but every single one of those things is solely intended to help a person fit more neatly into gendered beauty standards and I just don’t understand how they don’t see that they’re fully telling on themselves. Like it’s one of the most blatant examples of their core belief that gender=superficial stereotypes and that their ideology is entirely based on reinforcing binary gender norms.

White supremacy and colonization really forced that male/female binary forced onto so many communities, lands, and cultures, huh?

I’m noticing that trend ☝🏾...a lot of cultures historically recognized more than the binary system that they’ve been shoving down our throats for centuries. Because they came and pushed their beliefs on everyone and made them assimilate. Come to find out that they were wrong...about a lot of things. But the irreparable damage they’ve caused 🤧.

See I look these up and it always seems to be something like “historically māhū were male at birth... performed the roles of goddesses in hula dances that took place in temples which were off-limits to women... described as not having access to political power, being unable to aspire to leadership roles, and perceived as always available for sexual conquest by men...”

Almost every time I hear about a “third gender” in historical indigenous peoples, it ends up being less like ‘we have a complex spectrum of gender and sexuality with deep respect for non-binary people’ and more like ‘well there are women who have to do woman things, men who get to be in charge of everything, and broken men who aren’t up to real men’s roles so they don’t get shit’.

I’m totally in favor of the idea of maintaining the best parts of your ancient traditions while discarding the fucked up bits, but the idea that everything was a magical utopia until the evil white men arrived is just continuing the missionaries’ work, erasing what’s left of the real history of these places to replace it with something that won’t offend your modern sensibilities.

"We have a third gender, and it's (Blatantly a place to shove gay and effeminate men so that they can fill a woman's role, including being the victim of rape, in places where women are not allowed to be.)'

You know I hate that this is a repeating trope. That we're asked to treat a horrible custom used to abuse men as some kind of enlightened position because it 'bucks the gender binary'. Like, this isn't a third gender, it's a ritualized version of a 'Prison Bitch'.

Don’t even get me fuckin started on “two spirit.” 

How long before we start seeing shit like "The Ottomans had a third gender called Eunuchs"?

the medieval Italians had a respected 3rd gender called ✨Castrati✨ that participated in religious ritual singing 🤗

"The connotation of the word “māhū” is often a negative one. This word has become a derogatory term toward someone who is gay."

"The literal translation of the Hawaiian word Māhū is “in the middle.” It generally refers to a person whose biological sex is male with masculine and feminine gender expression"- https://www.moscasdecolores.com/en/gay-dictionary/hawaiian/mahu/

https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/māhū

Noun:

"homosexual

effeminate boy or man

hermaphrodite

eunuch"

Yeah not a third gender lol. It's just someone who is generally male and takes on more feminine traits. You call that a third gender? If so, why are the traits binary? Either feminine or masculine.

gendies will be like: ' so uhhh in this rigidly patriarchal culture, only men were allowed to do the most 'honorable' and valuable things like cooking and women were essentially seen as second class/incubators/things for men to use, i.e. they couldn't own property or were seriously disadvantaged in one way or another. so you see, men who were unsatisfactory in their rigid 'male' role b/c they had no interest in women (and therefore producing another male to have the resources they appropriated/what they owned as a male) were given this lesser role of 'fake woman/third gender' and that's how you know that nonwhite cultures love & accept everybody! 🥰"

I wonder if women who identify as men see males as the "basic, default person" in a way. TIFs dysphoria sometimes begins with discomfort toward their breasts because they've been sexualized, or the trauma inherent in puberty and getting their period, or the expectation to wear makeup or objectifying clothing - and then they think, "Well, men don't have breasts or periods. They don't have to wear makeup or clothes like that."

I wonder if it's less about truly "feeling like a male" and more about seeing the male as the standard person who does not have all these additional problems and expectations and identifying with that.

What men don’t understand about misandry is that the vast majority of it still exists to benefit them. I’m sure this is why a lot of radfems laugh and say that it isn’t real.

Do you want to know what the #1 biggest, most widespread form of misandry is? The ubiquitous belief among older women that men genuinely just are not capable of behaving like compassionate, normal human beings. The kind of thing married women going up in years will adopt in order to deal with their inadequate family lives. That they don’t do better because they can’t. It is the twisted reaction you get when you must live alongside an oppressor class that prioritizes itself over you every single time.

I won’t go into precisely what my traumatic experience was, but I will tell you the shocking reactions I got when my father hurt me afterwards instead of caring for me.

“Well honey, don’t be mad at him! He’s a man, and men just don’t understand that!” – the reaction to my father throwing away sentimental items I needed to cope

“The thing about your Dad is that he is a man. They can’t deal with this stuff. Next time, just call me.” – the reaction to my father screaming at me for having a panic attack.

“Guys are just babies.” – the reaction to my father refusing to comfort me when I bawled

“I mean, men just don’t think about stuff like that.” – bonus from years ago when my father waited until my mom was away to attend a funeral to change a feature of our house they’d disagreed over for some time. For some reason my Aunt was certain it was a coincidence and that he didn’t realize what he’d done.

It’s a self-soothing justification. It’s not that your father or your husband doesn’t love you enough to ever prioritize you over his momentary comfort, it’s just that he can’t improve! He’s giving you his best already! You are so lucky to have him!!!!

The vast majority of misandry is what women tell themselves and each other just to survive peacefully under oppression. It literally exists to uphold the patriarchy so that we don’t have to confront the grim reality of male supremacy and what it means. Men don’t have to work overtime to maintain their place on the foodchain, because many of us? Just do the work for them. It is literally because of misandry that men are not facing epidemics of lovelessness and revolt. We expect of them what they tell us to, and then they reap the rewards while crying about it.

Misandry like this is a mechanism of survival, not because men are actually different, but because they insist that they are different or else.

publishers will talk about representation and "#OwnVoices" and push books about gay theatre kid humor teifling pirates having queer gay sex written by a woman from Massachusetts with a gummy smile who calls herself a "Disaster Bisexual" on twitter and women will read the books and write rave reviews on goodreads about how it was so refreshing to see good queer representation and how much they squee'd and fangirled so hard when gay pirate 1 called gay pirate 2 "his silly stinky little guy" that they woke up their husband. and people will say that if you read these books youre a morally good person and the Trumpers Will Not Win and then other women will comment about how the books about gay pirate buttsex between two "feral unhinged germlin mode queers" are the only things keeping them from killing themselves and making their family watch. and then you will go to half price books and see the gay pirate book front and center on a display for 8 months and there will always be two women standing around it talking very loudly about BTS and House of the Dragon and then after the trend dies down 18 copies of the book will take up half a shelf in the sci-fi/fantasy section and they will never move and it will just be like that for years and its all because another #OwnVoices cozy historical romantasy came out but this time its about fantasyworld Tibetan Monks having gay sex on Not Mount Everest and the whole cycle repeats again but this time with publications and goodreads articles talking about "timely" conversations about race and queer identity. but this time it will be shortly lived because it will come out that Jenny Luizou the author of the monk gay sex book is actually another Massachusetts woman with a too gummy smile and is actually not a nonbinary bipoc Chinese person from Kazakhstan but everyone should have known this anyway because she calls herself a "disaster bisexual" on twitter sometimes. the pirate gay sex book is still taking up half a shelf during all this

it’s not about that i know how to do laundry. it’s that when i was four i knew how to fold clothes; small hands working alongside my mother, while my older brother sat and played with his toys. it’s that i know what kind of detergent works but my father guesses. it’s that in my freshman year of college i had a line of boys who needed me to show them how to use the machine. it’s that the first door they knocked on belonged to me. it’s that they expected me to know.

it’s not that i know how to cook. it’s that the biggest christmas present i got was a little plastic kitchenette i never used except to climb on. it’s that my brother used it more, his hands ghosting over pink buttons and yellow dials. it’s that when my work needs cake for a birthday, they turn to me. i get it from costco. i don’t even like cooking. a boy burns popcorn in the dorm microwave and laughs. a week later, i do the same thing, and he snorts at me, “just crossed you off my wife list.” it’s that i had heard something like this so many times before that i laughed, too.

it’s not that i don’t love being feminine. it’s that i came home with bruises from trying to be a trick rider on my bike and heard the word “tomboy,” felt my little mouth say, “but i’m not a boy, i’m a girl”. it’s that they laughed. it’s that until i was sitting in my pretty dress and smiling with a big pretty smile and blinking my big pretty eyes, i wasn’t given back the title “girl”. it’s that until i wore makeup and styled my hair i was bullied; it’s that when i don’t wear makeup i’m a slob, that my mental health diagnosis hangs on the hook of being dressed up. it’s that my therapist sees me returning to bright red lipstick and tells me i am looking happier and i have to explain that i am more sad than i have ever been. it’s that i dress myself in as many layers as i can every time i ride a train because it’s better to be laughed at than harassed. 

it’s not that i know how to clean, it’s that my brother’s chores were outside where i wanted to be, and mine were inside. it’s that i would have weeded the garden better than he did if they had just let me. it’s that i am put in charge of fixing other’s messes, expected to comply without complaint.

it’s not that i can’t open the jar. it’s that you ask my brother first every time. it’s that i am pushed into docile positions, trained to believe that my body when it’s strong and healthy is ugly, trained into being less, weaker. it’s that the jar is also science, is also engineering, is also every job, every opportunity. it’s that you laugh faster when he tells a joke, that you take him seriously but wave off me, that when he raises his voice he’s assertive but when i do i’m hysterical. the jar is getting into a car with a stranger as a driver and wondering if this is our last ride. the jar is knowing that if something happens to us, it’s our fault. 

it’s that i’m weak and i don’t know if it’s because i just am or i was trained to be. it’s that we need to sit pretty with our pretty smiles and our pretty words trapped pretty and silent in our throats, our hands restless but pretty when idle, our bodies vessels for nothing but a future white dress. it’s that we are taught someone else needs to open the jar for us.

here’s the secret: run metal lids under hot water, they’ll expand faster than the glass they’re around. here’s the secret: when you keep us under hot water, we do more than boil. we expand over our edges. and we learn how to open our mouths, our claws, our screams hanging in kites over cities. just give me a chance. give me a chance when i am four when i am seven when i am twenty-three. i promise i can be amazing. give me the jar. i’ll show you something.

i fucking hate how western countries say “sex work is work” and then legalise prostitution. but what happens when, for example, in germany there are not enough german women who want to become prostitutes? are they advertising prostitution to women? do they start marketing campaigns to show how cool it is to be a sex worker? do they introduce more different people (men, old, kids) to prostitution? do they open SCHOOLS to teach more people how to be a sex worker? you know, just like they do with other jobs?

NO THEY FUCKING DON’T. THEY KIDNAP PEOPLE FROM OTHER COUNTRIES AND MAKE THEM SEX SLAVES!!!!!

I just want the world to treat butch lesbians better honestly

They so often get the brunt of everything and so rarely get a place that is soft and safe for them be