I'm here, and I'm just as strange as you...

“[TW: street harassment] The street harasser communicates to women that the street belongs to him, not her; that she is not free to go where she likes, when she likes; that if she behaves as though she is free, he will prove to her that the street is his by sexually violating her. Sexual harassment by “the man on the street” is so frequent in women’s lives that we have learned to see this behaviour as normal for men and inescapable for women.”

“This is why it hurts the way it hurts. You have too many words in your head. There are too many ways to describe the way you feel. You will never have the luxury of a dull ache. You must suffer through the intricacy of feeling too much.”

“Every morning I sit at the kitchen table over a tall glass of water swallowing pills. (So my hands won’t shake.) (So my heart won’t race.) (So my face won’t thaw.) (So my blood won’t mold.) (So the voices won’t scream.) (So I don’t reach for knives.) (So I keep out of the oven.) (So I eat every morsel.) (So the wine goes bitter.) (So I remember the laundry.) (So I remember to call.) (So I remember the name of each pill.) (So I remember the name of each sickness.) (So I keep my hands inside my hands.) (So the city won’t rattle.) (So I don’t weep on the bus.) (So I don’t wander the guardrail.) (So the flashbacks go quiet.) (So the insomnia sleeps.) (So I don’t jump at car horns.) (So I don’t jump at cat-calls.) (So I don’t jump a bridge.) (So I don’t twitch.) (So I don’t riot.) (So I don’t slit a strange man’s throat.)”

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Poor people used to live in slums. Now the ‘economically disadvantaged’ occupy ‘substandard housing’ in the inner-cities. And a lot of them are broke. They don’t have ‘negative cash-flow’, they’re broke. Because many of them were fired. In other words, management wanted to ‘curtail redundancies in the human resources area’, and so many workers are no longer ‘viable members of the workforce’.

Smug, greedy, well-fed white people have invented a language to conceal their sins. It’s as simple as that.

The CIA doesn’t kill anybody, they ‘neutralize’ people, or they ‘depopulate an area’. The government doesn’t lie, it engages in ‘disinformation’. The Pentagon actually measures nuclear radiation in something called ‘sunshine units’. Israeli murderers are called commandos, Arab commandos are called terrorists. The Contra killers were known as ‘freedom fighters’. Well if crime fighters fight crime and firefighters fight fire, what do freedom fighters fight?

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Here is the thing, okay? Coming into a feminist conversation with, “Have you considered that sometimes women acquire free drinks at bars?” is like walking into graduate school during Philosophy finals and saying, “Have you considered that the color blue that I see may not be the color blue that you see?”

Imagine you are the guy who just walked into that Philosophy class and laid that shit down. Imagine the class full of students who have worked very hard and committed themselves and sacrificed to be here, students who have spent several years of their lives learning about this subject. Imagine now their feelings when you go to the head of the classroom with a smirk on your face and demand the professor give you an A for effort. Imagine now that they think you are a douchebag asshole, because they do, and because you are. You are a douchebag asshole because you are obviously so self-centered, arrogant, and completely ignorant of the world around you, that you thought you could walk into a high-level course with no background and no work and say something profoundly simplistic and totally unrelated and also everybody should congratulate you for having done this thing, so brave, so provocative.
[….]
You are not asking us a real question. You are simply illustrating, for all to see, your own ignorance. You are saying, “I have not considered the implications of the question I have just asked. I have not taken the time nor effort nor commitment to sit down and ask myself this question. Instead, I have come into your philosophy classroom/office/feminist blog and shat out my question with a smirk, because I believe that my two seconds of thought are worth more than your long-term analysis, because I believe I am worth more.”

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“Trans men are MEN. Not special edition sparkly vampire fluffy unicorn womyn-space-compatible men-lite. It is utterly, utterly, utterly fucked up to even suggest that they should be allowed in womens’ spaces, especially at the expense of trans women.”