radfemrage:

I wish a woman had been there when those men and boys first thought, ‘this must be what it feels like to be a woman’. I wish they had consulted an actual fucking woman. I wish someone had told them we don’t feel like women half as much as we feel fear, outrage, frustration, helplessness. Identify with our corrupted childhoods.

Identify with our indoctrinated and justified fear of abuse, harassment, violence and rape.

Identify with our inability to exist peacefully without constant, considered effort to keep making men hard - lest we lose our worth.

Identify with mestruation shame, pregnancy scares because no one taught us proper conception, the abortion struggle, and childbirth.

Identify with the process of self hate, self regulation and self maintenance by which we are forced to mandate ourselves. If you feel drawn to pinks and purples, fucking go for it. Heels, dresses and makeup? Help your fucking self. Submissiveness, passivity, victimhood? Sure, take mine.

But don’t you DARE tell me that THAT’S what it feels like to be a woman.

RFR:

Women were there. They said no. They’ve been saying no the whole time. The men responded–then as now–exactly how they do when told “no” by a woman. This is the ultimate mansplain, right?

Further–some men/boys come to the conclusion that they must really be women because they have fear, outrage, frustration, helplessness from having been hurt and humiliated by other men, especially sexually–which is considered a natural part of the female experience but nearly unthinkable as a male experience.

But of course, being female isn’t only or inherently about the way they’ve oppressed us on the basis of our biology. We don’t actually exist to be raped.

If I have learned anything from the process of coming back to myself and accepting my female body as female, it is this: what we are is powerful beyond the measure of men. The way we are targeted–that list you made–can be read against the grain to reveal WHY they do these things to us.

I won’t write about it in much detail on the internet because I will only say the core of these things to other women. But I’ll say that the way I meditate my way into my body and out of my dysphoria, teaches me a lot about the nature of being female.

The real nature of being female isn’t about the violence they do to us. It is about what they are trying to destroy by doing it. The particular ways they harm us are loaded with reversals–designed to confuse us. Trauma in itself is a confusion engine, but this is a very specific set of lies we are being indoctrinated in, made to somatize.

(via shamelesslyunladylike)