no boys allowed in the room!!!!

We are all learning, and trying to live out our lives more freely of centuries of constraint; and resisting internalised misogyny (in whatever form it takes) is hard work.

On one level, "fuck judgement" because who has time for that shit, but on another level, if person find perself judging people guilty of "judgement" based on whiffs and latency, person is peself partaking in the same negative form of "judgement."

Person has a choice: person can start the judging game all over again, "judging you, judging me" in an endless cycle. Or person can work on judging others less perself, and trying more to forgive/accept/not sweat the people who may be overcorrecting for years of being judged perselves, and found wanting.

cmon, i'm not a prescriptivist. i hope after...8? years here people understand that :(
i know you were working on pronoun usage, but it made me feel kinda misunderstood and generally bummed. it's not like i've changed my name 1000x.

which was not a personal dig btw!! i just haven't changed my name at all and was wondering why i hadn't.

i guess the flip side of this is that i have been totes undercover for 8 straight years! that's pretty awesome by itself.

anyway, wish i had never brought it up, the end.

I struggled a little to love your choice w/r/t all the food stuff, LL! I hope I always respected that it was your decision, but it took me a while to completely internally, like, understand it because I had never seen that role modeled in a way that didn't ALSO have a bad power dynamic. So I really learned something from you. Thanks for that!

glad to be of service :)

Lol the other day a female friend was telling me about how she used to joke that someone should invent a vibrator that's built into, like, a weighted pillow so it's like being in bed w an actual person, and I cracked, "Will it also ask me what's for dinner?" because just ugh.

OK, sorry, that was completely clumsy impersonal pronoun use. Because "person" in that sense was an abstract person, could be "you" could be "I" but just trying to say, like, judging goes round in endless circles and that's a bad and unhelpful thing.

Like, I feel like, as one of the loudest "gender is a social construct!" voices, like I'm included in the whiffs and the latency. And just trying to say that when it seems like I'm being really judgey (that was such a great memeword? whatever happened to judgey?) about people conforming to gender roles, it's coming from a deep place of gender confusion of "gender! what the fuck is that about, and why do people keep using it to try to beat me with?" rather than the "wow, girly girls are so fucking terrible" that it might be read as.

Girly girls confuse the fuck out of me, because I am so *not* one of them. I resist being made to be one, because that simply isn't who/what I am made of. But I also recognise that Gender Roles are used to universally beat women with, and "girly girls are terrible: don't be like them because gender roles are constructs" is just the other end of the bat which has always been used to beat me.

Like, we (specifically LL and me, but also every woman in the world) are arguing with a bunch of phantoms built from patriarchy and our own fears. And it's too easy to project those phantoms onto ourselves or each other. I was trying to say "I feel a bit hurt by that statement, but instead of having another round of projection and hurt feelings, let's put it into the general abstract instead." Guess I failed really, really badly at that, huh?

OK, I am going to get off ILX for a bit because I have had a really heavy session and I am feeling fucking frail like I am going to burst into tears for family-related reasons nothing to do with ILX, but I apologise unreservedly, if you thought I was having a go. I was trying to do the opposite of having a go, and ended up hurting you anyway. I'm sorry.

it's ok -- hope you feel better soon.

http://www.collectorsweekly.com/articles/selling-shame-40-outrageous-vintage-ads-any-woman-would-find-offensive/

I told my mom tonight that I'm going to a casual event next week for an organization I applied to work for, so it may be that the event is like a pre-interview for me. She told me not to wear "that short black skirt that makes you look naked."

*wears skirt*

I love that skirt but I didn't really need her to tell me not to wear it to an envelope-stuffing party in a case where that is not a euphemism for anything.

ugh moms policing our outfits/bodies into our adulthood

how do mums rule & suck so much at the same time idk

IO from where i sit it seems like your mom is suuuuuuuper envious of you.

oh snap

Well?

I think that's probably very astute.

speaking of moms, just got off the phone with my mom and she told me that she heard my voice inside her head this morning when she was looking at a big pile of women's mags she had been stacking in the bathroom (a longstanding habit) and decided to throw them all away and not buy/subscribe to any more. she said they were "garbage". ha!

yes! i am so happy about this for so many reasons!

Aw that has made me pleased :)

awesome!

https://mobile.twitter.com/DrJanaFunke/status/426712817920913408/photo/1#tweet_426712817920913408

^^^^hope this link works bcz this is the best female orgasm ever

Woooooow.

Who is TINA?!

I don't know but she's electric!

awesome

On one hand it's sort of trippy and awesome but on the other, weird and inhuman and dangerous and off-putting...the all-seeing eyeball, really? I can't make out all the type but I did see something about only 30% of women having orgasms during "marital roles" lol.

i like the eyeball

eyeball reminds me of odilon redon, i love it

eyeball makes me think more of that inner full-on consciousness that I feel with an orgasm
but ymmv obv, interpretations subjective etc

Kinda Odilon meets The Residents. The best kind of surreal.

yeah!

love the pic
the caption is kind of great too
"keep going you are about to give me an all consuming nervous explosion which permeates the entire being both physically and mentally"

"Tina" + zaps makes me think
http://static2.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20120317224227/lyricwiki/images/1/1a/Teena_Marie_-_Starchild.jpg

Whatup in grilz thread news for me: My therapist was like 'lol are you serious' when I told her nothing gets my goat more than when my boyfriend says during an argument that I am 'being irrational,' because it's not only untrue but also sexist. I was like 'don't you know the history behind men being rational and women being emotional and blah blah blah' and she was like, 'ok...everyone has their thing.'

I had kind of a stress mental breakdown a few months ago and he sometimes calls it 'the period of time where you were really irrational' and I ask him not to say that.

feelings!!!

Trying to figure out if I even like this therapist, if she's even helpful, or if she's just a person I can feel guiltless complaining to about work and my failed marriage of quite a while ago

that said it was like a funny moment between us, or maybe a real moment, because it was the first time anything I said provoked a reaction other than pity-empathy

I would not continue to see that therapist but ~ 60% of my issues stem from shit like men calling me irrational for having feelings they find disagreeable or inconvenient so ymmv.

I think those real-person moments that the human being pops out from behind the therapist empathy mask are actually the ones that I end up basing my "is this therapist gonna work?" feeling on.

That said, it would irritate the shit out of me if I'd specifically asked my partner not to use a word/trope that bothered me, and they carried on using it, regardless of what the word was, but moreso if it was that one.

personally i'm not paying a therapist to judge what pisses me off, that would make me even more irate, quite rationally so

i feel like carl does, that i would not want to see that therapist anymore. it's possible i value ideological commitments too highly in a therapist, but i am honestly a little confused by a woman who does not understand irritation at being called irrational by men. does she hail from some other, better planet? what happened?

ok, it was starting to make me feel...."irrational"! I think I am going to ask around for different names of therapist.

What is even a good way to do that other than luck of the draw??
Open up a phone call with 'do you think it is sexist to call women 'hysterical'? well, what about 'irrational'?'

haha we should draft an "are you feminist enough" therapist questionnaire

i think both of those are good ideas!

when i lived in Buffalo i started therapy and just happened to start seeing a therapist who specialized in treating young women who were rape and incest survivors. that wasn't the reason for my therapy, and i think i was older than the majority of her clients, but she was the best. i don't know that the word "feminist" was ever uttered in any of our sessions, but she tended to approach the world in a way i recognized/vibed to.

I literally googled "feminist" and "therapist" and "London" and came up aces.

I am having a really hard time finding a new therapist and it sucks.

haha we should draft an "are you feminist enough" therapist questionnaire

― horseshoe, Sunday, January 26, 2014 8:35 PM (3 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Not even kidding, that would be a really worthwhile project and a great resource.

I literally googled "feminist" and "therapist" and "London" and came up aces.

Did that in Chicago, too!

just posting real quick to say all the women of ilx are megababes. that's all. mwah.