A woman's handy guide to navigating the patriarchy

[sqbr]

So I woke up at 5am this morning coughing and couldn't get back to sleep, and filled the time with whatever random links I came accross, as it happens a whole bunch of feminist discussion. This combined with various ideas and stuff in my head to create A woman's handy guide to navigating the patriarchy. Definitely a first second draft, what with the whole "made at 5am" thing, and obviously it's a bunch of huge generalisations, it's satire. (And much snarkier satire than I do normally, being up at 5am makes me cranky)

I've had the idea for a flowchart illustrating the fact that women are screwed whatever we do for a while, mostly inspired by various commenters on posts about sexual assault going "But if she'd just...". Specifically, the realisation that the level of attention we're expected to give men to be "polite" is higher than the cut-off for the level of attention which counts as "leading a guy on, it's your own fault if you get assaulted".

Some specific links which got me thinking for various reasons:
Comics oughta be fun!: a serious note and various follow on posts
Versions of Equality
Why I never want to hear the term 'high maintenance' again
Why I am not a feminist
WARNING: has fairly graphic rape description Real consent manifesto and it's comments (especially the guy who kept saying "But if she'd just used a safe word...")

Stupid muse giving me ideas I'm ill equipped to implement, I suck at diagrams. Cam helped a lot in making it clearer, and the "worthy of respect" box was his idea :) There's a lot more things I could add, but it's complicated enough as it is!

Comments

Re: My actual reply: Part 2

[alias_sqbr]

I feel that truth is found in living and in feeling, not in empirical or psychological analysis

Ahaha, yeah, that is pretty far from the way I see things, I'm all about the rational analysis and have a deep distrust of emotion. (Which is funny, since I think yours is the more stereotypically "female" view :D) But we all think in different ways, and I'm sure your way works for you.

I will note that this post was one of the rare ones I make which did express unfettered emotion to some extent, it's just that that emotion was anger and bitterness. (This is one of the reasons I distrust my emotions, a lot of them just aren't very nice)

I used to deliberately not express my opinions about this sort of stuff because I knew it would piss people off and I'm a big sook about conflict. For example, the last time I went through a big period of introspection and discussion on a topic like I am currently with feminism etc was about five years ago, about atheism, but I kept it all on atheist discussion boards and almost never mentioned it on my blog. Since then I've decided that's dumb: this is my blog, and if I feel like discussing something and people don't like it they don't have to read it. Otherwise I'm pretending to be something I'm not. Interestingness is definitely a secondary priority, though I do try to put stuff that a large number of people may find uninteresting/annoying under a cut.

You may be amused (or..something) to note that I've occasionally thought to myself "If Nick can use his lj to post whatever he's thinking about without thought to whether or not people want to read it, then so can I" :)

EDIT: Now that I think about it, the train of events was this:
I decide I need to be less emotionally repressed and express my negative emotions
I realise that the one thing that I most often bite my tongue about, and about which I have this huge unexpressed sense of frustration and anger, is racism
I start looking into and talking about racism
As a result I somewhat incidentally learn more about feminism
I get pissed off about that too

So there you go. I do tend to express the underlying "Sophie Smash Patriarchy!" anger through a filter of calm rational argument (for various reasons, partly it just helps me figure out what I really think), but the emotion is definitely the impetus.