Tickling conveys incredibly confusing messages around consent, pleasure, discomfort, autonomy and agency to young children. Kids may ask to be tickled, but when they say to stop, or say no more, the tickling often continues. Sometimes tickling is used as a threat, although intended jokingly, it may be enacted as a form of punishment. This…
Listen more than you speak. Reflect on what oppressed people say. Speak up against oppression. Becoming an ally is an important step in undoing cultures of oppression. Thanks to Anne Bishop for compiling this list on steps people of privilege can take to support oppressed people and work to end oppression. – Brett Goldberg Read…
Make no mistake, the police are the enforcement arm of a racist, sexist, transmysognist, and ableist State. Disarming the police, abolishing the prison-industrial complex, and establishing community-based systems of accountability and restorative justice is fundamental to anti-oppressive struggles, anti-racist movements, and furthering gender equity and reproductive justice. This article provides tangible and immediate steps that…
Just as the male-as-neutral form of our language invisiblizes numerous demographics of people, the way that language casually infantilizes women perpetuates rape culture and normalizes sexism. To refer to a woman–a female-identifying person over the age of 18–as a “girl,” is not only disrespectful, treating them as a child, removing agency and autonomy, but it…
Racism in the United States is in many ways a gendered oppression. The threat of rape, specifically of white women, has been used to justify mob violence against black men for centuries. Dylann Roof used the need to protect white women’s purity as justification for opening fire inside a South Carolina church, murdering six black…
Benevolent sexism is a double edged sword; utilizing positive traits to perpetuate women’s subordination and dependence on men. Roof, who murdered nine African-American people during a church service, is reported to have said that white women need to be protected from rape by black men prior to opening fire. It is rhetoric as old as…
SPOILER ALERT: Maybe the finest, most feminist, moment in Mad Max: Fury Road comes when Max, with only three bullets in his rifle, misses the mark twice; rather than taking a third and final shot, full of masculine hubris, hands the rifle over to Furiosa, who not only hits the mark on the first try,…
Undoing our culture of sexual and emotional violence requires a return to basics, reevaluating of the values and lessons we convey to children. Through stereotypical gender roles, pop culture, and even our language, boys are taught that they have a right to women’s bodies and sexuality; that their value is correlated with sexual experience, while…
