Surviviors, fight back!
We’re gonna take, take it back!
Survivors, fight back!
We’re gonna take, take it back!
Take back our bodies, take back our lives,
Stop the racist, sexist lies!
Fight for bodies, fight for our streets,
Kick out the rapists and the sexist sleaze!
No means no, it don’t mean maybe!
Don’t touch me, my name ain’t baby!
No means no, it don’t mean maybe!
Don’t touch me, my name ain’t baby!
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Radical Cheerleaders!
Happy Take Back the Night! Surviviors, unite! <3 <3 <3
Women are supposed to be very calm generally: but women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties, and a field for their efforts as much as their brothers do; they suffer from too rigid a restraint, too absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer; and it is narrow-minded in their more privileged fellow-creatures to say thay they ought to confine themselves to making puddings and knitting stockings, to playing on the piano and embroidering bags. It is thoughtless to condemn them or laugh at them, if they seek to do more or learn more than custom has pronounced necessary for their sex.
In August of 1990 I found myself laying on my stomach in the woods with a pair of binoculars, a bottle of Canadian Club, and my friend Kurt Cobain. The reason why I had the binoculars was because I was the lookout while he ran across the street to a “teen pregnancy center” that had just opened in our town. It really wasn’t a teen pregnancy center, it was a right-wing con where they got teenage girls to go in there and then told them they were going to go to hell if they had abortions. Since Kurt and I were angry young feminists in the ’90s we decided that we were going to do a little public service that night. We drank our Canadian Club and he watched out while I went across the street and wrote, “Fake abortion clinic, everyone,” because I was kind of like the pragmatic one or whatever. He was more creative so he went over and in six-foot-tall red letters he wrote, “God is gay.
Cordelia: Why is it always virgin women who have to do the sacrificing? Wesley: For purity, I suppose. Cordelia: This has nothing to do with purity. This is all about dominance, buddy. You can bet if someone ordered a male body part for religious sacrifice the world would be atheist — like that.
Hot topic is the way that we rhyme Hot topic is the way that we rhyme One step behind the drum style One step behind the drum style Carol Rama and Elanor Antin Yoko Ono and Carolee Schneeman You’re getting old, that’s what they’ll say, but Don’t give a damn I’m listening anyway Stop, don’t you stop I can’t live if you stop Don’t you stop Gretchen Phillips and Cibo Matto Leslie Feinburg and Faith Ringgold Mr. Lady, Laura Cottingham Mab Segrest and The Butchies, man Don’t stop Don’t you stop We won’t stop Don’t you stop So many roads and so much opinion So much shit to give in, give in to So many rules and so much opinion So much bullshit but we won’t give in Stop, we won’t stop Don’t you stop I can’t live if you stop Tammy Rae Carland and Sleater-Kinney Vivienne Dick and Lorraine O’Grady Gayatri Spivak and Angela Davis Laurie Weeks and Dorothy Allison Stop, don’t you stop Please don’t stop We won’t stop Gertrude Stein, Marlon Riggs, Billie Jean King, Ut, DJ Cuttin Candy, David Wojnarowicz, Melissa York, Nina Simone, Ann Peebles, Tammy Hart, The Slits, Hanin Elias, Hazel Dickens, Cathy Sissler, Shirley Muldowney, Urvashi vaid, Valie Export, Cathy Opie, James Baldwin, Diane Dimassa, Aretha Franklin, Joan Jett, Mia X, Krystal Wakem, Kara Walker, Justin Bond, Bridget Irish, Juliana Lueking, Cecelia Dougherty, Ariel Skrag, The Need, Vaginal Creme Davis, Alice Gerard, Billy Tipton, Julie Doucet, Yayoi Kusama, Eileen Myles Oh no no no don’t stop stop…………
There is a trend in media for strong women who are outwardly so. They are witty, snarky, toned, and know how to hold a gun. The role model being pushed is that of the ultimate woman. It’s progress – I wouldn’t trade River Song for a hundred people from Hollywood’s past – but there’s a silent repercussion, a fortification of the idea that women have to be twice as accomplished to be considered half as good, to deserve this screen time at all. They are always extraordinary, always the one in a million. Importantly, there’s no variety – only one mould to fit ourselves into. A great mould, yes, but not if you don’t fit into it.
Molly Hooper is different. Molly Hooper is kind, thoughtful, always smiling, and intelligent in a way that you don’t really notice until you remember she’s a pathologist. She asks after people and cares about the answers, remembers little details because everything someone says is important. She probably still remembers how Sherlock likes his coffee. Her blog is pink, covered in kittens, and uses Comic Sans. She blunders her way through speaking, has serious foot-in-mouth syndrome, and can’t put on a pair of plastic gloves without making faces. She is one of the strongest women I have ever seen.
She puts up with what can only be described as “total bullshit.” You might say that makes her a bit of a doormat, but for people like Molly (like me), who like kindness and hate conflict, it takes serious guts to call someone on their behaviour and say you’re hurting me. It takes guts to carry that kind of unrequited love and still first and foremost be a friend, to ask what do you need? Molly Hooper makes Sherlock Holmes, a man who can barely articulate anything beyond the scientific, try to be kinder. In the end, Molly isn’t the woman who counts [like Irene Adler], but the friend.
Eve Arnold School for black civil rights activists; young girl being trained to not react to smoke blown in her face Virginia, 1960
Wow. Puts all my knee-jerk reactions to ignorant assholes on the Internet in perspective.
One of the important things about non-violent civil rights work that people did was months of work-shops where people discussed their feelings on what they were doing, made collective decisions about how their efforts would be organized and toward what goals, and then did practices like this where people practiced walking out non-violent resistance. According to Rev. James Lawson (he was interviewed for the Freedom Riders documentary), who was brought to teach because of his experience in India studying the work of Ghandi, prior to the the efforts to desegregate the downtown area of Nashville—particularly lunch counters—people did workshops for six months.
People talk admiringly about military campaigns, but instances like that had all the precision, commitment, and excellence of a military effort only toward the end of representing everyone rather than upholding strict hierarchy *and* using non-violent tools of warfare.
I don’t hold that non-violence should be considered the only option for oppressed people. But I do believe that it’s extraordinary work that deserves wider recognition. I feel like, as with Rosa Parks, there’s this tendency for the narratives of the classical period of civil rights to portray what people chose to do as spontaneous. I feel like that denial of the prolonged, patient, careful, organized groundwork really sucks.
Start out perfect and don’t change a thing. Always accentuate your best features by pointing at them. And conceal your flaws by sucker punching anyone who has the audacity to mention them.
I usually don’t talk about stuff like this on my show but I really want to thank everyone who is supporting me. If you don’t know me very well. If you’re just watching maybe for the first time or you’re just getting to know me. I want to be clear. Here are the values I stand for. I stand for honesty, equality, kindness, compassion, treating people the way you’d want to be treated and helping those in need. To me, those are traditional values. That’s what I stand for. I also believe in dance.
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Ellen DeGeneres responding to the hate group that is pressuring JC Penney to fire DeGeneres from a spokesperson gig, saying the store will “lose customers with traditional values.” (via jessicavalenti)