Men who want to flirt with women have to realize: Women live in a state of continual vigilance about sexual safety. It’s like having a mild case of hay fever that never goes away. It’s not debilitating. You’re not weak. You’re not afraid. You just suck it up and get on with your life. It’s nothing that’s going to stop you from making discoveries, or climbing mountains, or falling in love. Sometimes you can almost forget about it. It doesn’t mean it’s not there, subtly sucking your energy. You learn to avoid situations that make it worse and seek out conditions that make it better.
If a female stranger is wary around you, it is not because she suspects you are a rapist, or that all men are rapists. It’s because a general level of circumspection is what vigilance requires. Don’t take it personally.
If this frustrates you, try to remember that women are blamed for lapsed vigilance. If a woman does get raped, everyone rushes to see where she let her guard down. Was she drinking? Was she alone? Was she wearing a short skirt? Did she go to a strange man’s room for coffee at 4am?
A woman must be seen to be vigilant as well as be vigilant. If she is deemed insufficiently vigilant, she will be at least partly blamed for any sexual violence that befalls her. If she’s regarded as downright reckless, that “evidence” can be used to completely exonerate her rapist. If it comes down to a he said/she said dispute over whether sex was consensual, as so many rape cases do, the dispute becomes a referendum on whether the woman seems like the sort of reckless person who would have sex with a stranger.
If a woman does go back to a strange man’s hotel room at 4am, even if she only wants a coffee and conversation, she’s more or less given him the power to rape her. No jury is going to believe she went up there for anything but sex. So, don’t be surprised if a stranger reacts badly to that suggestion.
Yep, that’s right- on this day in 1630 (29th May) the world became a whole lot more fabulous as Charles Stuart, later to become King Charles II of England, was born.
Of course, we all know what he looked like, because he’s one of those iconic historical…
TRIGGER WARNING: cissexism, transmisogyny, sexual assault.
“Deciding to simply exclude trans women to make some cis women feel more comfortable is, in many ways, worse than patriarchal attacks on women because it’s one group of women deciding to “sacrifice” another group, doing the work of the patriarchy for it. I’ll give an example - at Pride London 2008, stewards took it upon themselves to exclude trans women from the female toilets in Trafalgar Square. THey did this the only way it really can be done - they decided to tell anyone they thought was a trans woman not to use those loos.
The upshot is that lots of trans women, who didn’t look like what the stewards expected trans women to look like used the loos anyway - I was one of them, and some cis women were, as I understood, turned away because they didn’t look sufficiently cis. However, the experiences of each group when challenged were different. I understand one butch dyke, when told to use the men’s, was let through after reacting angrily and even threatening physical violence. One trans woman, however, lacking the cis privilege to simply assert her gender identity and desperate for the toilet, went in the men’s toilet, where she was sexually assaulted.
When you exclude trans women from women’s spaces, be very clear that what you are doing is setting yourself up as the gender police, turning often vulnerable women away out of fear of a stereotype about who we are perpetuated by patriarchal society.
Exclusion of trans women is misogyny, and it hurts all women. Stop it.”
I adore my friend. I really do not think I could have gotten through this semester without him. I don’t think I’ll be able to get through the masters program without killing someone if I didn’t know him. He will be the only person who will prevent me from chucking a…
Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien (at least 4 times) Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte Harry Potter series - JK Rowling To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee The Bible - Council of Nicea Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman Great Expectations - Charles Dickens Little Women - Louisa M Alcott Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy Catch 22 - Joseph Heller Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger Middlemarch - George Eliot Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald Bleak House - Charles Dickens War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy David Copperfield - Charles Dickens Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis Emma - Jane Austen Persuasion - Jane Austen The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne Animal Farm - George Orwell The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood Lord of the Flies - William Golding Atonement - Ian McEwan Life of Pi - Yann Martel Dune - Frank Herbert Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens Brave New World - Aldous Huxley The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov The Secret History - Donna Tartt The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas On The Road - Jack Kerouac Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie Moby Dick - Herman Melville Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens (couldn’t finish) Dracula - Bram Stoker The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson Ulysses - James Joyce The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome Germinal - Emile Zola Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray Possession - AS Byatt A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell The Color Purple - Alice Walker The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert (couldn’t finish) A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry Charlotte’s Web - EB White The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks Watership Down - Richard Adams A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas Hamlet - William Shakespeare Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl Les Miserables - Victor Hugo
Eight, a small bit over the average :( This must change!
Thirteen. That’s not so bad. As an English major, though, I feel like I should have read a lot more.
26, but I was a bookworm when I was younger (though I mostly read SF which barely figures on this list). I have read, literally, hundreds of books and used to go through 2 or 3 a week. Of course, the internet didn’t exist then.
(Also, this is an odd list - “The Chronicles of Narnia” and “The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe” are listed separately.)
STOP WHAT YOU’RE DOING. read this. I started following this girl and her whole dash ended up these. And her last post. I can’t even say words. Anons took her life. If that okay with you, then carry on with your day. If you agree this is unacceptable and okay, then reblog and spread the word. What you say can actually change a persons life! So help out
^ same
Excuse me while I sound insensitive:
As much as I care, TURN ANON OFF IF YOU’RE RECEIVING THESE MESSAGES GOOD GOSH IF SOMEONE SENDS YOU THESE MESSAGES ON ANON, TURN IT OFF. Or at least explain to me why you’d keep it on even when you receive these messages!
There is something about being anonymous that turns some people into cruel uncaring jerks and there is no appealing to their better nature as I doubt they have one. So reiterating the above, when the anons turn toxic turn them off. And if they carry on regardless, block them.
