You know what, fuck this post. Maybe women wouldn’t feel the need to other themselves if so many enjoyable, genderless activities weren’t so heavily gendered to begin with. Do you know why a woman would feel the need to say, “Yes, I’m a girl and I play video games”? It’s because she or other women she knows have had their hobbies and interests invalidated based solely upon their gender. So much of this leads to woman internalizing this casual sexism, which is the most insidious part of the whole thing. Girls strive to differenciate themselves from being “girls”. ‘Yes I’m a girl, but I’m not like those OTHER girls. I’m cool, because I like guy things.’ So why do women other themselves this way? Why do they form little groups on Facebook for their interests, explicitly announcing that despite the hurdle of being a woman, they’ve overcome and somehow gotten to enjoy this activity? Because “girl” has become shorthand for “shitty” on such a grand scale that it’s embarrassing. Feminine is embarrassing. Feminine is weak. Feminine doesn’t play Counter Strike or enjoy stupid wrestling or burp loudly in public because it’s funny. Both men and women write off a girl as trying to be a special snowflake for being proud of belching in public, but here is the sad truth: belch in public as a girl and you get flack for it. You get surprise. Distaste. Most likely you get admiration from male friends, because you did something as gross and masculine as release noisy air from your dumb food hole, but are still so adorable! It becomes a badge of honor; you’re one of the cool girls who is like a guy. You internalize it. It becomes identity.
When I worked at a comic book shop from the time I was 16 until I turned 22, due to the fact that I FUCKING LOVE COMICS, I would answer the phone and have customers ask me if there were a man there that could answer his comic book questions. This was not an isolated incident. This happened monthly, sometimes weekly. I had boys sit at my counter and make eyes at my stupid pubescent face while telling me how gosh, I wasn’t like other girls. I liked comics and games and could eat a whole package of jerky myself.
That is a huge steaming pile of turds.
Girls are funny and gross and awful and beautiful and ugly and just as diverse as any group of young men. Also? They’re marginalized, fucking fight me on it.
I love video games and I have a vagina, I don’t feel the need to announce this over the head set, no. But you know what? Fuck the people judging girls trying to feel even slightly empowered doing the things pictured above if they feel like it. I’ll bet half of them are women themselves, trying to ‘outbro’ each other. “Vagina award for doing things everyone else does” Fuck you, girls get so much shit for this kind of stuff it’s not even funny. Alluding to things being equal is bullshit.
internalized misogyny, yo
(Source: kanyewesticle, via azuli)
I need feminism because there are too many men who react with anger and behave as though they are being personally victimised when women express that they somtimes feel unsafe around some men, or feel frustrated that some men expect sex in return for kindness or free…
— New York Times columnist PAUL KRUGMAN, on Real Time (via inothernews)
(via wilwheaton)
Having been told I don’t know shit, and that some children do die from chicken pox. So let me expand on previous post.
Yes, some children do die of complications from varicella. Some children also die of complications from the common cold. Statistically speaking, the number of children who die of chicken pox complications is minute, and much lower than the number of children who die from vaccine reactions. Which is why I said that you should weigh out risk vs benefit in those situations. I clearly explained why I chose not to vaccinate my daughter for varicella: she is healthy, she has no health complications like asthma or CF which might make it hard for her to recover from a common childhood illness such as varicella, and the risk that she might have an adverse reaction, in my opinion, outweighed the benefit of the vaccine.
Roughly 10 children PER YEAR in the United States die from complications of chicken pox. Which returns me to my original argument which is: informed consent. If your child is immunocompromised, PLEASE get them vaccinated. My point here was that we over vaccinate and vaccinate too early, not that no one should ever be vaccinated. Why am I repeating myself?
Also: as I said, the varicella vaccine makes you more likely to get shingles in your elderly years a disease which kills more elderly people than the vaccine prevents from dying of chickenpox.
Also, in 2010, 18 children died after being administered the Hep B vaccine. It is HIGHLY linked to SIDS.
The FDA’s VAERS (Vaccine Adverse Effects Reporting System) receives about 11,000 reports of serious adverse reactions to vaccination annually, some 1% (112+) of which are deaths from vaccine reactions.
You don’t get to tell me that I MUST give my child a potentially fatal/neurologically harmful drug to protect her from a disease that is highly unlikely to kill her. If she gets the chicken pox I will keep her away from your “super special snowflake” child.
Finally - there have been numerous studies regarding populations which were 100% vaccinated for illness who still contracted the illness for which they had been vaccinated (see: http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/00000359.htm)
Edited to add: Telling someone “you don’t know fucking shit” is not a good way to establish dialogue in which you want to educate them further and sway them to your perspective. Just for future reference.
