By Seattle Slim
Yup... I said it.
I've been on my baby board for months and in that time I've seen so many ideas that just seem so ass backwards. You may think I'm exaggerating a bit, but from what I've seen, I am seriously concerned about womanhood these days. After all, these women have procreated or are trying to. They are going to pass their bullshit on to their kids.
Several weeks ago, a girl asked our board if she should strip or be a prostitute because she couldn't find work. When someone suggested school she guffawed, but prostitution was put on the table in the first place? They told her to go with stripping, and some suggested prostitution under the right conditions. They said it was safe and when I mentioned that stripping actually isn't all that safe, they wanted her to ignore that fact because it was "fun."
Still other women said they would be a stripper if they were thinner or had flatter stomachs. This is what we strive for? One could make the argument that this is only the trajectory of this board, but if I had a dollar for every time I heard a woman talk about how she wanted to be a stripper, as if it's some awesome life goal, I'd be burning hundred dollar bills on a yacht off Ibiza. Other women have gotten on and said that women who have talked about the sexism they face as females is a "self-fulfilling prophecy," whatever the hell that means.
Back when I first started frequenting the board, this video of seven little girls basically pussy popping was completely disregarded as something fun and exciting, nothing sexualized or nothing to prove the sexualization of little girls.
There was one discussion started by a black poster about her black friend who was promiscuous, and exhibiting some very harmful sexual tendencies, at least from a friend's standpoint.
When I mentioned that black women are at greater risk for HIV/AIDS and other sexual diseases, the white women in the forum would shrug it off and use themselves as examples. These are women who would later then deem themselves feminist.
When one talks about pornography and how exploitative it is, it seems like women are the first to defend an establishment that is in many ways not only racist, but extremely one-sided in how it only caters to men and has continued to be exclusively catering to men.
I believe in gender roles. I'm not interested in even being like men. I want equality in pay, and equality as a human being, but I'm not interested in "being like men". I'm a woman, and that to me, is something truly special. I appreciate the grit and the calculation that I bring to the table, because it's different from my man's grit and calculation.
And while we as women have achieved so much, there is still plenty of work to the be done, especially when it comes to the issues women of color face.
But I can't turn my back on men. I do believe in teamwork. I do believe in our boys. I find that as I get older, I get tired of the media telling men what's masculine and what's not, as if they know any better:
It's disheartening to read about women portraying their husbands as neanderthals. These are the same women that already have lowered standards because they see their men as such. How can you rise above, if you don't have to rise?
We may have gotten to a place where we can do so much more than our mothers and grandmothers and their progenitors, but do we really have the right to aim low? Don't we owe them more?
This label is fluid for me, as you can have several schools of thought within an ideology, but at the end of the day, I believe that women, especially women of color, need to be less preoccupied with being "one of the boys" and setting the bar within our own sex.
