Category: General (Page 4 of 27)

[TW: suicide, physical disability]

 

Each syllable
each rounded, echoing diphthong
conveys nothing, except creating delicate
incisions in my ears

My back is bristling.
I have not felt in control of this body
ever
Let alone “at home in it”
“comfortable in my skin”

On this day my legs forget how to walk,
On this day my mind attempts to kill me
And on this day, again, I fail
To speak in ways that appease people
Whose thoughts and desires are a mystery to me.
I don’t remember doing anything with ease.
I cannot even trust my body to hold me upright.

Sexuality
is something that people who are not me
possess.
How can someone who resembles
a scuffling witch
who hobbles and aches
who stutters,
who falters and forgets
own something as
precious as this?

My humanity
and my body –
all accidentals
and false starts.
I lack identity
with your movement
with myself

By Mel Berill

[TWs: misogyny, classism, ableism]

 

come back and tell me

you don’t like safe spaces

when you know what it’s like

to feel unsafe

 

when you’ve walked down a street

where you’re not human

but a piece of public flesh

 

when you’ve explained you’re ill

for the thousandth time

and you know half the world still thinks it’s fiction

 

when you know for sure

that if some people got their way

you’d have even less to live on

than you do now

 

when your home is not

cosy and safe

 

when your words are not

worshipped and valued

 

when your body is not

important.

 

come back and tell me then

that I’m not allowed a space

where people have agreed to respect me

and I them.

 

where people try not to hurt me

and I them.

 

where I can listen to people

who need safety more than me

and let their words

sit above mine.

 

where, sometimes, it’s all right

for me not to speak

or even be there

because I’m white

and cis

and I can know that sometimes, to keep people safe

i must keep quiet.

 

when you know what it’s like to need that space

come back and tell us we can’t have it.

come back and tell us then.

 

you will, of course

you’ll come back louder, stronger

full of bile

and make us listen

in your column

on your platform

through your megaphone

’til it’s deafening.

 

that’s why we need spaces

where we can’t hear you.

and fuck you

we’re going to make them.

 

By Amy Clark

tw: rape mention, misogyny, racism body policing,

Call me Medusa,

for my monstrosity is not mine to bear

but yours to fear.

When I first started writing this article, it was going to be about the rape of Medusa and the analogy between her punishment and the treatment of rape victims in modern society. A god raped Medusa and she was punished for it with ugliness and exile from society. When women are raped today they are blamed, ostracised and ‘othered’ in an eerily similar manner. Because when the perpetrators of a crime are untouchable – whether because they are gods or simply because of their dominance in society – it is the victim of their crime who ends up being blamed for it.

But this is going to be about ugliness: about ugliness as a punishment and a weapon against women, about the power that people calling (or making) you ugly have over you and about the power that you can have over them in return.

If you’ve ever seen Mean Girls you might remember the scene where the Plastics stand in front of a mirror and say in turns what’s wrong with their bodies. They insult their nailbeds, their hairlines, their pores. Then, in a voiceover, Cady says, “I used to think there was just fat and skinny. But apparently there’s lots of things that can be wrong on your body.”

And she’s right.

Ugliness is being fat and being too skinny, yes, but it’s also having skin that isn’t white, having short hair, having outspoken opinions, saying no to a guy, wearing baggy clothes, wearing tight clothes, showing too much or too little skin, having a big nose, having a small mouth, being a feminist, being too educated, not being educated enough, eating too much food, biting your nails, not shaving all of your body hair, fucking too many people … Ugliness is everything about us that isn’t ‘right’, which means it’s every part of us that doesn’t live up to an idealised and impossible standard of what it is to be a woman or a person.

Calling women ugly is a fear tactic in itself and ugliness has been used as a weapon against us for so long. When we live in fear of being ugly we live in fear of being ‘outside’ of society and we try and try and try to do everything we can to fit into the restrictive lines of what ‘normal’ is. If a characteristic of yours is something societally viewed as ugly – and everyone has many – then you are consistently being told that you are not right and that who and what you are is not okay.

In the same way, calling someone ugly or calling some characteristic ugly is a gross way of perpetuating so many different forms of discrimination in society. When women bleach their skin, it is because darker skin is considered uglier. Women shave or bleach their body hair because hairiness is an ugly quality for a woman to have. Queer and masculine women are ugly because their presentation does not fit with the stereotypical concepts of femininity and what it is to be a woman. Ugliness and what is ugly is not a subjective opinion, it is a response to age-old and pervasive discrimination, oppression and elitism.

But where does Medusa fit into this?

DuBois has said that ‘The myth of Medusa, is a myth of fear of women, fear of […] their self-sufficiency, their buried power’. DuBois is not talking about Medusa when she was ‘beautiful’, when her existence fell within the norms. All of Medusa’s ‘power’ comes when she is made ugly and exiled from the rest of the world. And the power isn’t because she was ugly, but because she was unapologetic about her own monstrosity. Her ugliness wasn’t something she could change or cover up – she was unequivocally and irrevocably ‘other’ – it was something that terrified and (literally) petrified the rest of society.

Whilst it’s hard to talk about ‘buried power’ without sounding like a pretentious self-help guru, what I and many others have found is that we have to stop apologising for ourselves and the parts of us that are ‘ugly’. We accept ourselves as ‘other’ because the ‘normal’ that we’re supposed to fold ourselves to fit is just a load of impossible restrictions that have nothing to do with subjective beauty and everything to do with damaging and systematic discrimination.

As much as I wish it was true, practising radical self-love and refusing to apologise for whatever is monstrous about you doesn’t give you the power to turn people to stone when you glare at them. Deciding that you won’t accept the body policing that society tries to impose on you wont suddenly mean that you love yourself, because ‘ugliness’ is too ingrained for us to magic it away.

There’s the cliché that as long as you’re confident, people will think that you’re beautiful. This is bullshit. Confident women get insulted and called ugly all the time. But when you tell people that you don’t give a fuck – when you show off your unshaven armpits in pride, when you say your opinions loudly and don’t shut up when people disagree with you, when you wear the hotpants and don’t apologise for it or try to cover up – at least people are fucking terrified.

 

 

by Martha Rose Saunders

A few weeks ago, I discovered that the “other” inbox on Facebook existed. When I opened it, scrolling through the hundreds of messages sent to me by strangers over the course of five years, I started crying. Amongst the incomprehensible scam mail and bizarrely misguided attempts at flirting from mysterious sleazy men were the messages I’d been waiting to read all my life. They were messages sent by strangers and friends of friends who’d seen comments I’d written on Facebook threads or found my articles shared, thanking me for taking the time to call someone out on sexism or classism, admiring me for having the courage to stand up for what I believed in, wishing they had done so themselves. There were messages from men I’d deleted for their continued sexist behavior, sending me messages months later to tell me how much I’d made them think and apologizing for the harm they’d caused. Tears streaming down my face, I read paragraph after paragraph of praise, gratitude, support, and love.

 

The complete emotional collapse I experienced made me realize how much I had come to hate myself for my outspokenness. I know I’m something of a joke among both friends and enemies. I know you mock me both to my face and more viciously behind my back for my feminism and my proclivity for Facebook ‘debates.’ What I didn’t realize is how much I’d internalised that rhetoric and allowed it to harden me.

 

I can think of almost nothing that gets you more shit than being an outspoken young feminist. By the time I left sixth form I was hardly a radical, merely a normal teenage girl who happened to have Labour party membership and a vague understanding of sexism which didn’t extend to much more than actively complaining about having my tits grabbed by a stranger in a nightclub. By that point, I had already had a personal parody twitter account set up about me called Shut Up Martha (tagline “just shut the fuck up, nobody cares”) and a small cohort of boys who laughed and mimicked my voice if I spoke in Politics class and took it upon themselves to inform fellow men who deigned to flirt with me at parties that I was The Feminist and thus they should avoid me at all costs.

 

The Feminist – that was my identity now, and I could be nothing more. A radical change in people’s perception of my personality occurred. Never mind that my most frequently complimented traits before I became The Feminist were my sense of humour and my laid back, logical approach – that didn’t fit people’s idea of me, and my real personality didn’t matter any more. The Feminist is angry, shouty, humourless and irrational – so that’s what I am now. I’ve gone from popular, funny, chilled, and well liked to an “arrogant cunt,” a “cocky fucking bitch,” a “fucking pathetic” “Feminazi” who needs to “shut the fuck up, nobody cares.” Last week someone on Twitter informed me that “everyone knows about you and tells me about your fucking shitty pathetic internet activism.”

 

This isn’t unusual. Most of my outspoken female friends find their acquaintances taking to cyberspace to punch them down the second they get up and start talking for themselves, from the Tab commenters who spew misogynistic bile at Women’s Campaign members to my friend who found herself the subject of bullying tweets for appearing on a pre-election debate on TV this week – tweets by people who hadn’t even watched the show or heard what she had to say, but merely opposed her right to express political opinions full stop.

 

I won’t waste my time elaborating on why this is blatantly a manifestation of the archaic, sexist sense that women should not be confident, opinionated or strong. Nonetheless, somewhere along the way I absorbed it. I hated myself so much. Every time I put forward my opinion, shared something, commented on something, the core of me felt deeply, deeply ashamed. I would listen to the assaults on my character and believe them, go to bed after a Facebook debate in floods of tears and racked with self-loathing.

 

I cried that week in my little University room last term because those messages made me realise that I mattered. For every person who’d tried to stamp me out there were ten who rushed to support me, hold my hand and love me. For every man who’d felt threatened by the fact I dared to criticise him, there was one who’d written to thank me for the impact I’d had, tell me I had made a difference to him, and that he respected me.

 

I’d allowed people to turn me into exactly what they wanted me to be; an angry girl, hard as nails, tumbling through life lashing out and screaming into the wind. I saw myself as part of a constant losing battle against the few people who bullied me, instead of as part of a chain reaction of people, constantly touching each others lives, constantly changing one another for the better. But simultaneously, the vitriol I received in response to the most mild sentiments I expressed about gender only radicalised me further, proving beyond doubt that my sex was affecting people’s perception of me more than I ever realised. Most young, political, feminist women you’ll meet are tough, angry and cynical because we have to be. If I wasn’t, I would crumble in the face of the pure, unmitigated hatred I receive.

 

What I would want to share with people from my experiences, is this; next time you’re about to criticize me, or another outspoken woman, (or man for that matter) for being too “politically active” on the internet ask yourself;

 

“is what I’m saying about her coming from a place of misogyny? would I say this about any of the men on my feed throwing their opinions all about the place?”

“why could she be so angry and defensive about this? what kind of crap has she had to put up with, growing up in a sexist world? could I just be unhelpfully adding to a toxic culture that is constantly trying to put down outspoken women?”

“literally why do I even give the slightest shit about what this poor person is doing with her own time on her own personal social media accounts? what is making me care so much? what the fuck is wrong with me? do I need a hobby?”

 

And what I’ve learned, and what I want to tell the other angry girls on the internet – keep going, and know that you are loved. Know that you are making a difference to people. Know that every misogynistic twat who tries to knock you down is only doing so because by speaking against him, you make his dying order crumble. Know that every time you stand up for what you believe in, you are making a difference to people. Tell each other how much you admire each other. Become each other’s support system. And know that every day you are revered, quietly.

 

Know, finally, this – a message sent to me by a stranger in 2013.

“For each and every one of your comments, there were many more that were never written because of lack of energy or conviction that it would change anyone’s mind. You just made the world a little bit better and people like you deserve to be commended.”