the idea that restrooms, locker rooms, etc need to be single-sex spaces in order for women to be safe is patriarchy’s way of signalling to men & boys that society doesn’t expect them to behave themselves around women. it is directly antifeminist. it would be antifeminist even if trans people did not exist. a feminist society would demand that women should be safe in all spaces even when there are men there.
btw this is maybe the single most key distinguishing feature of the terfy strains of radical feminism, the seed all the rest of it springs out of: they have absolutely no faith in the ability of feminism to actually destroy patriarchy. they do not think feminism can truly build a better world. they cannot really even imagine that possibility. they think patriarchy is an inevitable natural consequence of unchangeable biological facts, and therefore the goal of feminism can only be to mitigate the worst effects of patriarchy, not to get rid of it.
they can imagine a society where women get some designated safe spaces without men around. they cannot imagine a society where the presence of men is not inherently a danger to women.
BTW for anyone too lazy to do the math a wage of $125 a day works out to about $15/hour for an 8-hour workday so….. someone in 1923 definitely had a vision of the future
For those who (like me) worried that the image might’ve been faked because it first came from a Reddit post, this was in fact scanned and recorded by the Library of Congress, so it’s legit.
A hideous Jew, in the most amazing waistcoat I ever beheld in my life, was standing at the entrance, smoking a vile cigar. He had greasy ringlets, and an enormous diamond blazed in the centre of a soiled shirt…
For some reason or other, the house was crowded that night, and the fat Jew manager who met them at the door was beaming from ear to ear with an oily, tremulous smile. He escorted them to their box with a sort of pompous humility, waving his fat jeweled hands, and talking at the top of his voice. Dorian Grey loathed him more than ever.
This is a recurring character who is shown to bow and scrape before anyone who he thinks might be able to give him some advantage, and who tries to emulate English nobility but gets it wrong because he is ‘the wrong sort.’
Harry, the Jewish theatre owner, is also shown to be taking financial advantage of a young actress’s debts to keep her ‘bound to him.’ Harry’s insistence that he wants to ‘introduce’ her to Dorian is a clear implication that this theatre owner is also a pimp.
It is a ‘Jewish doctor’ who is responsible for infusing the blood of others into a man to make him totally evil.
Some people have argued that he was parodying George Eliot here, and that since ‘he had a Jewish friend,’ specifically a novelist who he called ‘The Sphinx,’ gosh, he couldn’t be antisemitic (I know, I groaned out loud too), but read on, friends! It only gets worse from here!
It should be noted that Wilde was hardly unique in his anti-Semitism. It’s actually fairly difficult to find literature from this era that DOESN’T make use of rabidly anti-Jewish tropes (in all honesty, this brand of anti-Semitism remained common within Anglo-Irish literature until the outbreak of WWII, take a flying guess why).
I don’t mean this as a defence of Wilde in any way, I just want to point out that this hatred of Jews was positively endemic.
Oh, I know, I absolutely know. I’m just personally really fucking sick of seeing all of these queer/LGBTQ-positive posts holding up Wilde specifically as some sort of like, cinnamon roll of sweet-yet-sour-acerbic-gayness, some sort of Harmless Sassy Granddaddy Gay, and just never acknowledging that – among other things – he was a really terrible antisemite. The same sort of ignore-dem-flaws idolizing of him happens in the communist/socialist communities, which is doubly ironic considering, you know, how many of the same people praising Wilde will breathlessly talk about the book Revolutionary Yiddishland and how important it is, etc. etc.
As an English Education major, especially, this sort of blind celebration of Wilde annoys the absolute piss out of me. Wilde was a horrible, horrible antisemite who went out of his way to include these sorts of themes in literally everything he fucking wrote. Not talking about this, like, ever, unless someone Jewish brings it up, is not only frustrating and hurtful to people who hear ‘oh it’s okay if you’re an antisemite if you’re queer, we’ll give you a pass,’ but it’s really bad scholarship. If we’re gonna talk about what Wilde wrote and why, his antisemitism is a big part of that. Heck, he even blamed his gayness and his suffering for his gayness on ‘THE JEWS,’ you can’t separate anything he wrote from his hate of us.
(None of the above is really aimed at what you said, @tikkunolamorgtfo, so please don’t take this as me ranting at you or yelling at you, just sort of – near you – because I just … have a Big Feeling about the way Wilde is talked about. He was a pretty horrible human being who gets a pass in the gay community and it makes me wanna yell a lot.)
“A man has to be what he is, Joey. Can’t break the mold. There’s no living with a killing There’s no going back. Right or wrong, it’s a brand. A brand that sticks. Now you run on home to your mother. You tell her everything’s all right.There are no more guns in the valley.“
While we’re on the topic of Climate Change, this post and article is worth reading (from my science blog above).
That’s 36 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than it should be at this time of year. I’m especially troubled because my Actual News-Reading Friends are reacting to this with “wait but is that normal, or is it actually global warming?”
Which means that sources like the Washington Post are doing a terrible job of explaining what this actually means. Which is probably a huge part of why people are generally not very concerned about climate change, especially not compared to how bad the situation actually is.
The graph above shows that every single year on record, the amount of ice in the sea has grown and melted at about the same times and in the same amounts. Except this year, when suddenly, instead of a bunch of ice forming in fucking winter, it’s… Not. It’s remaining at summer levels, basically.
This is not just part of global warming, it IS global warming. This is the core of the whole thing. The amazing amounts of carbon dioxide that we’ve been dumping into the atmosphere at an increasing rate for the past 100 years have been trapping more and more heat inside the atmosphere.
This has finally reached the point of Horrible Vicious Cycle. Because when it gets too warm, the polar ice caps melt.
When they melt, the oceans become much warmer and more acidic and can’t sustain life well.
When the oceans get warmer, they stop helping cool the atmosphere. Having large bodies of cold water lying around is GOOD if you want an area to be cooler. Having large bodies of warm water lying around does fuck all for cooling anybody down.
The less the oceans help cool things, the more our carbon emissions affect the atmosphere. Because they’re no longer partly being counteracted by the oceans.
Which means global warming accelerates.
Which means ice melting accelerates.
Which means the oceans get even more fucked up.
Which means global warming accelerates even more.
The reaction to this should not be “wait but is this just a thing that happens, the newspaper didn’t really say,” it should be a massive, front page, global headline of “OH FUCKING SHIT.”
