Effing Awesome, The first is that true gender equality is actually...

February 9, 2012
2,302 notes

The first is that true gender equality is actually perceived as inequality. A group that is made up of 50% women is perceived as being mostly women. A situation that is perfectly equal between men and women is perceived as being biased in favor of women.

And if you don’t believe me, you’ve never been a married woman who kept her family name. I have had students hold that up as proof of my “sexism.” My own brother told me that he could never marry a woman who kept her name because “everyone would know who ruled that relationship.” Perfect equality - my husband keeps his name and I keep mine – is held as a statement of superiority on my part.

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Fanfic Symposium: When Worlds Collide (via bitterbuffalo)

OMG I LOVE THIS ESSAY SO MUCH. This is the thing that made me embrace slash a few years ago because before I was like “uh-oh I can’t do that it’s something GIRLS do D:” /coolstorybro

(via onetrueharem)

I hadn’t read this essay before. It is really excellent, and it reminded me of a conversation I had in my English class in 10th grade. We’d just started class after summer vacation, and our summer reading was The Secret Life of Bees, and our teacher encouraged us to discuss whether we liked it and why. The overwhelming response from the guys in the class was that it wasn’t a badly-written book, but they didn’t like it because it was “for girls.” With a little more probing from the teacher it was agreed that most of these guys felt that a book with a male main character wasn’t necessarily “for guys” but was “for everyone,” that is, could appeal to a wide audience regardless of gender. They felt that everyone could relate to a story about a boy coming-of-age, struggling with growing up, and possibly having issues with his father. But a book like The Secret Life of Bees, with a female main character, a largely female cast, and a coming-of-age story about a girl struggling with growing up and coming to grips with her issues about her mother is seen as exclusively “for girls” and unrelatable for boys. That was my first real eye-opening experience with the sort of quietly ubiquitous male privilege the essayist is talking about here.

(via lostsometime)

(via gematriya)