FEMIYAHTZEE

By Frieda Bowel Being a female comic, I know how important it is to make sure you’re ready for the big night. Whether you’re just starting out or if you’re seasoned veteran, sometimes it’s hard to …

Piece I wrote for www.headofthecrass.com

annfriedman:

She’s a source of widespread frustration and anxiety who is demoralizing, uncaring, morale-draining, and very unpopular. He demands excellence and relevance.

She is difficult to work with, unreasonable, impossible, stubborn. He has a strong vision and insists on seeing it carried out.

She is AWOL and disengaged. He attended Sundance and SXSW.

(Source: dyn.politico.com)

jazzylittledrops:

So this video started going around my facebook today, with about a dozen of my female friends sharing the link with comments like, and “Everyone needs to see this”, and “All girls should watch this,” and “This made me cry.” And I’m not trying to shame those girls! I definitely understand why they would do so. And I don’t want to be a killjoy. But as I clicked the link and started watching the video, I started to feel a slight sense of discomfort. I couldn’t put my finger on why that was, exactly, but it continued throughout the whole thing. After watching the video several more times, I have some thoughts… 

Read More

fazstreetart:

NYC:
Stop Telling Women To Smile

April 12, 2013

7-10pm

Fresthetic

552 Grand St, Brooklyn, NY 11211

Stop Telling Women to Smile is an exhibition of new works by Tatyana Fazlalizadeh. An extension of her street art project of the same name, the show will include oil paintings, as well as photographs, drawings and prints. STWTS addresses gender based street harassment. The work was created to be placed in the street - placing the presence of strong women in that environment to combat mistreatment. This show compiles that work and brings it inside to be viewed as a whole. The project has gained attention from The New York Times, HLN, Fast Co., NYU, and more. The work presented in the show includes portraits of women of color as advocates for better treatment of women, as friends, as simply human beings.

The opening will will be held at Fresthetic in Williamsburg, BK, on April 12th, from 7-10pm. The show will feature music from Donwill and Von Pea, and the opportunity for women and men to be photographed with their own captions about street harassment. 

Tatyana Fazlalizadeh is a Brooklyn based contemporary oil painter. Born and raised in Oklahoma City, OK, Tatyana moved to Philadelphia to attend the University of the Arts, where she graduated in 2007 with a BFA and a concentration in Illustration. She creates oil paintings on canvas, working with figures and portraits to create stunning paintings that capture socio-political ideas. She exhibits her work nationally while also completing illustration commissions for several musicians, films, and books.

(Source: stoptellingwomentosmile)

angelmcastillo asked: Best fucking username on Tumblr.

Haha, thank you! :)

I am giving most of my readers the benefit of the doubt here, but to the few people who have exhausted my time with accusing me of being a “radical”, a “manhater” and a sad victim of abuse, I will only say this: I’m interested in fighting a system that routinely disenfranchises both genders on the reg.

I have experienced two kinds of dissent in the last week. One, is from a person who claimed that “feminism is no longer needed because the sexes are equal”.  And two, from a gentleman who said “Why do you hate everything about men?”  Read Lindy West’s article on misandry for a fully comprehensive explanation In this article she also describes the need for the term feminism, rather than what many people think should be just called “Humanism”. It’s semantics, but important.

Both of these things are common responses that I get when I say things, even if they are casual jokey things, as I am someone who finds it important to call out inequality, oppression, or systems of power that dismantle the well-being of others . I make comedy out of it, and I try to alleviate it’s brevity by being exasperated and ridiculous. I am exasperated everyday but that doesn’t make me a lunatic on the verge of a topless killing spree (though that does sound quite visually hilarious). Should I shut up because I’m a white woman working a cushy job while a 9 year old girl is having a clitorechtomy in Somalia as I type?  Being exasperated about inequality helps the world change and progress, it helps us evolve. No woman would be working in an office as a CEO (even though there are still only 14% of us doing so, thanks Sheryl Sandberg, I’m gonna fucking lean my ass in you better believe it), be able to vote, or to decide not to have children if there weren’t HUGE amounts of people who were routinely exasperated back in the 20s, then 60s, and on and on.  That doesn’t mean there’s not a lot more to do. There is loads to do. The insidiousness (read Caitlin Moran’s book “How to be a Woman which talks about the insidious sexism that is prevelant today) that is still so pervasive in the US in regards to rape culture and street harrassment.

1.To claim that sexism doesn’t exist and that men and women are perfectly equal is to be living under a rock of denial and privilege. (especially given that today is Equal Pay Day)    But I am making the agument that men are suffering too. It is the same stream of thought that comes from people who say “racism no longer exists, look we have a black president!”  Do you really think that racism doesn’t exist, that there is no more use for racial awareness, no reason for people to call out crap as they see it because we have a black president? Isn’t that part of the way the world works, the need to uproot horrible shit so that we can evolve, so that humans can live better lives?

Most people haven’t read basic gender studies text books, and in those you can find all of this malarchy, but you don’t even need to do that. You can learn from simple gender studies autodidactism and OPENING YOUR EYES TO THE WORLD AROUND YOU. Also, the fucking US Weeklies, Starz, OK Magazine piles of rubbish that are damaging women to the point of becoming self-harming flesh police.

The point is, all of the people who go on the defensive to try and deny that sexism still exists are threatened because it means they may be sexist themselves. It’s also a threat to their “benefits” of being the one in power, or the oppressor (yes I admit saying oppressor makes me sound like a tenured professor with coulottes who doesn’t wear a bra). If sexism doesn’t exist, then it’s perfectly ok to keep treating gals like shit, or expect shit from men. Same dif.

Because it’s Anti-Street Harrasment Week, I will go here: A person, a perfectly lovely man to his family, and to his friends, could turn around and tell me I have a hot ass and should smile more while I’m on my way see my grandfather being taken off life-support. That is institutionalized sexism. You don’t know what my day has been, where I’m going or what I’m doing but you find it in your right to invade my space and comment on my body in a demeaning way AND you think there is nothing wrong with that.  Another: A woman who makes $400,000 a year, decides to ask out a man on OK Cupid who has just finished graduate school, but expects him to still pay for their entire meal at Del Posto instead of splitting because she has the vagina. That is institutional sexism and patriarchy. It is what I decided to coin as the phrase “bodily bartering”. Not in a prostitution sense - but really the bodily bartering we do everyday as men and women. In the most extreme senses, it’s an exhaustive and sinister series of plays that do not serve anyone.  Why do you think we’re all in fucking therapy?! No one can communicate in a normal fashion or look at each other like autonomous creatures. If we all just empathized, listened to each other’s stories and communicated as HUMANS, set down our entitlements, we would be able to have a fucking conversation and maybe even some lovely concensual vee on pee, pee in vee, vee with vee, pee in a, or whatever you like.  (I also admit I’m having some heteronormative discussions here, and I in no way want to discount the LGBT community, this does affect all of us though).

2. This brings me wonderfully to my next point. The “I am a poor poor woman in a man’s world, and who will save me?!” thing that people try to pin me as. I’ve been doing a lot of thinking, and what i have come to the conclusion is this: While women have been jetting past at the speed of light, getting birth control, getting good jobs, etc. Men are looking around saying, “Wait, what about us now?”  What’s interesting about this, is that the MRAs, the people who are trying to deny women their rights, or tell us we’re all money grubbing demon-whores, are the ones whose identities lie within that power imbalance. A man who only sees himself as worthy unless women are oppressed or ridiculed or below him has some serious soul-searching to do because he’s basing his sense of masculinity on others, not himself. Why not base yourself on you? Similarly, women who only think of themselves as useless unless they are married, have a boyfriend, get the approval of men,are just as bad because they are also feeding into a system that reduces them to their oppressed gender relation to one another. It’s a lose-lose. It’s a power imbalance that isn’t sustainable. I’m not saying that even in my relationships it’s 100% equal or perfect, but generally, everyone I deal with treats me with BASELINE RESPECT in regards to being a human. We should all strive for that.  Humans are complex and small power play impabalances keep the world interesting, but when they are grossly imbalanced to the point where one party becomes particularly disenfranchised as a result, it becomes a serious issue. It’s why people are raping with abandon, why women are taking their clothes off without asking themselves why, and then 25 years later they’ve had 17 boob jobs and but no house.  We all need empathy and communication with the opposite gender, enough with the boys against girls. Let’s laugh together, play together, and have a good rowdy time together. Make babies, not have babies, help one another if we have those babies, and just sort of be normal.

Also puppies.

When I was 11 1/2 years old I was told that we were moving to Belgium.  This was at first a shock, but I had been to Europe almost every year of my small life, so it wasn’t going to be all that traumatic in the end.  I remember entering my life there and immediately became pounced on by 12 year old boys in the 7th grade.  Several of them “asked me out” , and in 1993, asking girls out meant you were just their girlfriend immediately.  I instantly thought they were all fucking with me or playing a trick on me. I got little papers with boxes to check “do you like me, check yes or no in the box”.  I always threw them out and rejected them, somehow feeling this whole dance was ludicrous or that I was being screwed with.  I was still a little girl, and was confused and suspicious. 

Soon though, I would “date” some of them, which just meant hand holding and saying hi in the halls and stuff. Both of us too shy and confused to know what we were supposed to do.

Fast forward to ages 13-14 and everything changed dramatically. Yes, perhaps this is just a cliche story of every girl’s “coming of age” and what it means, but I remember it in a much more sinister light.  I developed breasts far too early, and they were far too big for my little frame.  I remember walking down the streets in Waterloo, and often Brussels, and being leered at by men sometimes 25-30 years older than me, and it was constant. I read somewhere about what “rape” was. I was horrified and one day realized this could happen to me. I wore drapey clothes covering my form (which was easy in the 90s cause grunge fashion allowed it anyway).  Most say, well this is just part of life, this is just part of being a woman. But feelings of my former full self were still there so I was mourning a former time of autonomy. I was now chopped up and seen as a half human, a plate of raw meat for rabid dogs. I was utterly confused and conflicted. 

At 15 years old I once got cornered by a group of 5-7 Moroccan men in the middle of Brussels where I was walking alone to meet some friends.  In heavily accented Moroccan/Belgian French I was taunted, ridiculed and touched.  There was still a part of my small full girl self who found this absolutely absurd. Why was I being taken like this? I knew it was my body, but my neurons and cognition still fired. My obsession with Kant and Nietzche, poetry, theater, educational advancement, were all there in my brain, and yet here I was turned into some rag doll.  I don’t know how, but my eyes burned and I yelled out “arrête!” which means “stop”. I bolted away, they didn’t follow me, and I went to go drink a Stella at “Lop Lop” with my friends and forgot the whole thing.  This scene repeated over the next few years in different variations several times to me and my girl friends.  We would sometimes talk about how gross and disturbing it was right after, but we never really talked about it. It became normal. I didn’t know it at the time, but it would lodge in my brain and surface later in more sinister ways - ways that I would take on myself.

Flash forward to my first time living in New York, and I was an older teenager with more insecurities than I ever knew possible.  Where did they come from? I’m not saying that the harassments I received as a younger woman were the entire portion, but they must have contributed, right? I just don’t know.  Either way, as soon as I graduated acting school, I was officially a half-person.  I dated more older men than I ever thought possible, what I liked about them was they worshipped my body, but I could also talk to them about articles I’d read in the New Yorker.  Needless to say, my intellect for them was “cute” and nothing more. In retrospect, they were thinking “Oh good, my play toy can talk!” I know this because I’m now the age of many of the men I dated when I was 19 or so and I know men my age, my peers who make jokes and talk about young women in this manner. I was merely a prize they’d won in the young chick lottery. I was lost in a world where I thought my value was in my body, and I thought that sex and my attractiveness were what mattered. It wasn’t my successes, my art, not my brain (which was still so strong, and so capable), not anything. I was NOT self-aware when I was that young. I knew the good things about me, but I couldn’t use them.  I don’t hate men AT ALL. I love them in fact, I wouldn’t have dealt with them, and still kept dealing with them if I didn’t. We just live in a culture that forgoes any sense of obligation to educate girls and boys about treating the opposite sex with respect, treating each person as a whole, thinking, cognizant being.

Many people I know have given me crap lately for the way I’ve become such a passionate feminist, and I’ve even gotten this charming line from several men: “You’re pretty, you don’t need to be a feminist!”. What a load of shit. I wish we could change the dialogue, I wish people didn’t scourge the word feminist and that people opened their eyes to educate themselves before blurting out their prejudices about a goddamn word. It is not a label for me, it is a policy and an outlook that I follow because I want a better world for girls and for boys.

Although I’ve grown up, and woken up, and reclaimed the self I had when I was a tot, I’m more angry and sad in many ways than I was when I was in my younger 20s because I am clued into the machinations of our current world.  But I am happier in more ways I ever knew possible because I am full again. The grey mush inside my skull is truly what matters, and the fun part is that I can still wear makeup and be beautiful and still have fun with my body. I still love animals, I’m curious, passionate, and laugh really really hard. I am a full human person once again and that makes me the luckiest girl in the world.

katespencer:

When I was 10 years old, some moms in my fifth grade class organized an end of the year pool party for our entire grade. It was one of the first times I can recall being sent into a tailspin of anxiety for weeks, because it meant I had to wear a bathing suit in front of my classmates. After many…

menagainstassholesandmisogyny:

Penises Are Funny

Penises are funny. Of the two types of human genitalia, penises are, by far, the
funnier. Anything that dangles, by its nature, is funny. Elephant trunks are also
funny for the same reason. Harold Lloyd dangling off a clock face ten stories above
the ground: funny….