Almost every doll line that tried to please this shittiest side of the female empower movement has tanked. The only line that survived was Barbie and all Barbie really did was give us more diversity while still having the core Barbie be herself. Because ya know what? Barbie has been pushing out tons of empowering messages and you still have women who only care about her appearance.
(Point in case)
The problem is that these women are toxic to the movement they claim to support because they are just as shallow as they claim these lines to be because they blamed a piece of plastic for their own issues. What has happened is trying to please these people who do not even buy the dolls because their so feminist and progressive they don’t allow their girls to play with dolls damaged the line’s messages.
Bratz suffered slut shaming for dressing like modern teenage girls when the characters were all strong females in their tv show and movies where men really didn’t matter to them. The Bratz formed a name around an insult and decided to unapologetically be themselves. Monster high was a line of monster girls with interesting story lines who preached embracing your laws instead of hiding them.
Both lines listened to the vocal minority who said their appearances were harmful or bad and tried to fit into a new look that caused them to look more cutesy and less threatening. This made the lines suffer because the original fans soon became turned off by the new looks and the directional shift. So you had the people who complained left to complain about something else and the regular fans now complained about the drop in quality.
Barbie survived because she adapted while keeping true to her own message because “gaining weight” or wearing less make up won’t make the message of telling girls to fearlessly enter male dominated fields any stronger.
Her competitors (lammily for instance) made it all about appearance and tried to set a standard for what a woman should look like. It got it’s 15 mins of fame and praise, but since that was all lines like that had to offer mainly people stopped giving a shit.
There is nothing wrong with adapting…the new diversity for Barbie is amazing because it gives girls choices yet still never made it all about appearance. But doll lines should not toss away what gave them their popularity and drew us in just to please people who feel they’re already above them anyway.
Hell, Bratz is still trying to please that minority of jerkasses and has become a total laughing stock at this point due to their movie bombing.
“[equally bland fan appeal male character] is going to be the new onceler” hes not. no one will be. nothing is going to replicate what we experienced fresh and chaste in 2012.
becoming vegan because factory farming is unethical is like deciding that since walmart and amazon mistreat their employees you are now going to get everything you need out of dumpsters
in a nutshell, instead of reforming the bad parts of your society, you
try to opt out of it in a way that has really no effect, and wouldn’t
work at all if the majority of people weren’t still part of the industry
you dislike.
there was, for a while, a real movement of people who tried to get everything out of dumpsters, as a way of opting out of capitalism. but the problem was that you couldn’t get what you need when you need it, leading to you being kind of a drain on your community, and someone had to buy that stuff in the first place for it to end up in that dumpster anyway. it was Fundamentally Silly.
going vegan to opt out of farming practices has similar problems. for instance: you (hypothetical vegan you) won’t buy honey, but the bees are being used to fertilize the vegetables and fruit you eat, they’re making the honey anyway, all you’ve done is – well, nothing, because you’re not a big enough demographic to make an impact, but even if you were, honey sales are a much smaller part of beekeepers’ income than crop pollination. and beekeeping is not a big faceless corporate interest. it’s not monsanto. it’s a bunch of single-family or partnership business with a truck or two and a couple hundred hives. the bees make honey after a pollinating run, and the beekeepers sell it for a little extra income. if you made a dent in that, you’d be achieving nothing but making joe beekeeper buy his kids’ t-shirts at k-mart instead of target.
animal farming and plant farming are deeply interconnected. plant farmers grow animal feed; animal farmers sell manure for fertilizer. most non-corporate farmers raise both plants and animals. it’s more economic and gives them more resilience.
if you were a big enough demographic to hit ‘the farming industry’ in its wallet. you would be making things MUCH harder for small farmers than for factory farms. you would be making it easier and easier for factory farms to crowd family farmers out of business. so that’s pretty much achieving the opposite of what you want, right there.
and then there’s the fact that plant farming is just as rife with gruesome factory farm conditions as animal farming, but it’s humans who are exploited in those. i’m not going to level accusations of racism here, but it really is unfortunate how little the vocal internet vegan contingent seems to know or care about the exploitation of the mostly nonwhite workers in the industry. it makes y’all look racist, whether you are or not.
look, i keep saying this, even though folks never seem to hear me: i don’t hate vegans, i’m not trying to stop you being vegan, i do not care what you eat.
my problem is with defensive internet vegans trying to promote their dietary restriction lifestyle as a solution to problems in the real world. it is not. it may create more problems than it solves, or maybe it breaks even, i don’t know. it certainly doesn’t solve anything that can’t be solved just as well without it. it can only look reasonable from a perspective of deep ignorance about where food comes from and how the farm economy works. you basically have to be young, urban, and somewhat privileged to embrace it. and it is, fundamentally, very silly.
Furthermore I’d like you to look at a sheep farm. Actually look at it.
You CANNOT grow crops there. That’s WHY there are sheep on it.
You refuse to use wool, well aside from.the fact that it’s a fantastic fiber and how polluting polyester and other plastic fibers are, it doesn’t harm the animal to remove and in fact is done for their benefit.
Above – a sheep farm (note steep and craggy hills), an uncompressed bale of freshly shorn wool and some sheep being shorn.
It’s not stressful for the sheep. Sheep are dumb. Be confident, dont hurt them and they’re good. Wool is a good fiber – strong, warm – even when wet – renewable and biodegradable.
My issue with Veganism-As-A-Cult is the lack of critical thinking. By all means eat what you want, wear what you want to wear but a blanket ban on all animal products because they’re HARMFUL is in itself an extremely harmful philosophy.
Do you refuse to eat plants that were pollinated by bees or fertilized by manure since they’re a product of animal labour?
Honey doesn’t hurt bees. Wool doesn’t hurt sheep.
What about animals that are going to die anyway? We are currently in the process of exterminating possums in our country as they are a pest and destroyer of our native species. We kill them humanely but they’re still going to die because its them (introduced pest) or our endemic endangered species. We use the meat for pet food and the fur for a lot of things now – in making yarns or fur items – because the alternative is to let it rot. Which is just bloody wasteful tbh.
What would (generic) you prefer we do here? Let sheep die of over heating or the weight of wet wool? Force bees into swarming (90% casualty rate) so we can avoid taking their honey? Leave pest animals to rot and encourage the use of set-and-forget traps since there’s no incentive to check them?
What’s the humane option?
see: why I hate militant veganism
Veganism, as I have encountered it, tends to be a thing that morally smug white people try to spring on others as a quick fix solution for the world, and I resent it more every day.
You can be vegan as an individual choice. You can be vegetarian as an individual choice. I mean I’m vegetarian, but for religion. I wouldn’t expect someone who isn’t the same religion as me to follow my dietary choice.
But the people who do it for some moral high ground actually don’t really care about good things.
Here’s a cool trick to see if a man actually respects you: try disagreeing with him
A friend of mine did something with online dating where, before meeting a person, she’d say no to something minor without a reason for the no. For example: “No, I don’t want to meet at a coffee shop, how about X?”, or “No, not Wednesday”, or “No, I don’t want to recognize each other by both wearing green shirts”. She said how the potential dates reacted was a huge indicator of whether she actually wanted to meet them, something I readily believe.
I’ve mentioned this to a few people and sometimes I get very annoyed and incredulous responses from guys about how are they supposed to know that it’s a test if the girl is being unreasonable? How are they supposed to know that and let her have her way? I find it difficult to explain that if you find it unreasonable for someone to have a preference of no consequence which they don’t feel the need to explain, then you are the one being unreasonable. You can decide for yourself that it sounds flaky and you don’t want to date her, but you don’t have a right to know and approve all of her reasons for things in order to deign to respect that she said no about it. Especially in the case of someone you haven’t even fucking met yet.
The point isn’t to know it’s a test, the point is that if you would only say “yes” if you knew it was a test, then what if it’s not a test, but because she hates coffee shops, or because she’s attending a funeral Wednesday and doesn’t know you well enough to want to share that, or whatever else? Because if you’re making rules for when other people can have preferences and not explain why… yeah, that is a thing they can reasonably want to avoid.
@ all the angry dudes in the replies: the point is not to trick or manipulate men. The point is to see how a potential romantic partner reacts to a minor inconvenience. If they say, “oh, ok, would seven work instead?” or “well there’s this Armenian tea house I’ve been meaning to try out, want to go there?” then that’s a good sign that they’re safe to date. If they throw a fit and/or demand to know every little detail about your rationale over something as simple as rescheduling dinner plans, that’s a bad sign. A really bad sign.
It’s like this, dudes. Women in Western society are socialised to cooperate and compromise. Some men are socialised to get all their own way, all the time. These dudes are incredibly dangerous to women their partners,* and the only way to tell them apart from the OK guys is to pay close attention to how they react. If you’re one of the OK ones, this isn’t about you. Learn to take “no” for an answer, and you’ll be fine.
*Updated to reflect the fact that abusive men can target any gender, and the fact that I used this screening tactic to good effect during my Big Gay Slut phase.
The thing a lot of the men reblogging don’t get – they think this post is telling women to lie. They think this post is telling women to start a fake argument and to be manipulative.
Actually, this post is doing the opposite. This post is telling women to be straightforward, and forthright, and upfront about their values and opinions.
This post is telling women, “I know you’ve been socialized and conditioned to nod and smile at everything a man says your whole life, since you were 4 years old and your grandma told you that little girls should be seen and not heard. I know that by now it’s second nature to you, and you probably don’t even realize you’re doing it half the time. You don’t even realize that the laugh that just came out of your mouth is a laugh of appeasement, rather than a laugh of genuine humor. ”
It’s telling women, “Force yourself to resist your conditioning. Consciously make an effort to be open and honest in that initial conversation, when you’re making small talk, about small things. If he says something you don’t quite agree with (and he inevitably will, because nobody agrees on everything), don’t smile and concede the point like you’ve been trained to do. Consciously make a point of vocalizing your real opinion.”
It’s telling women “If a man doesn’t respect your real opinion about a small, insignificant issue when you first meet him, then he’s not going to respect your real boundaries later on when you’re in a serious relationship.”
You know what I love about this post? It did the exact same thing as was described. This post has weeded out the controlling assholes who would pitch a fit if a woman said no and asked to change plans, or offered alternate ideas.
You showed yourselves and played yourselves, boys, in your replies with all your bitching and temper tantrums.
There’s no reason you shouldn’t use this tactic on women also.
^^^^
Women are not immune to being manipulative, controlling, or expecting their way 100% of the time.
Site Title 