no boys allowed in the room!!!!

not even hoosteen

http://children.bethelyouthonline.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/10/girls-only.jpg

YEAH! I'm in so what do we do in this here room then?

talk about makeup and boys and lisa frank stuff

User BIG HOOS aka the steendriver has been successfully banned from the thread

is this where we talk about shoes and dryer sheets

in a word: y

HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

I am down with talking about all those things.

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_0G0KeGZNnU0/SOkLif0annI/AAAAAAAAAJE/P4llZRVs8yQ/s320/8baeded0.gif

and swiffers

i hate the swiffer btw

http://i132.photobucket.com/albums/q37/abileen/LisaFrankPenguin.jpg

You hate the Swiffer? I was thinking of gettin' one tbh.

i dunno maybe it will improve your life but my mom got me one and it had a neutral effect afaic

i wish clarissa from clarissa explains it all posted here

http://i3.ebayimg.com/05/i/001/21/3c/6ea4_1.JPG

http://i2.ebayimg.com/06/i/001/3c/79/400c_1.JPG

lol

i'm glad oprah doesn't post here except i would like to suggest ban her

MJH was a bitch to me (as covered on another recent thread) so I don't have that much <3 for Clarissa :-(

JTT <3333333333333333

http://www.cmongethappy.com/ccorner/tigerbeat1.jpgp

:-(

http://www.cmongethappy.com/ccorner/tigerbeat1.jpg

we can do this here

http://handson.provocateuse.com/images/photos/james_franco_01.jpg

http://www.collider.com/uploads/imageGallery/James_Franco/james_franco_image.jpg

http://farm1.static.flickr.com/121/277978882_7d9d9521fe_o.jpg

I totally had this game btw:

http://collegecandy.files.wordpress.com/2009/01/07/girl_talk_box_cover.jpg

also we can make those paper fortune tellers and tell each others fortunes, in fact i am gonna make one right now

who are:

lisa frank
mjh
clarissa

haha what was the other game that was kinda like girl talk but it had men u could date?

x-post OK yeah, am definitely up for doing that.

GOD DAMN:

http://www.styletraxx.com/JamesFranco.jpg

i recall having this but i don't believe my mom would let me have it so i'm confused
http://www.boardgamesrus.com/images/Mall%20Madness%20G61.gif

xpost justine:

lisa frank designed crazy school supply items like some of the dolphin-festooned things you see on this thread, she was v popular with middle school aged girls in the early-mid 90s

melissa joan hart is mjh, she played the title role in "clarissa explains it all" which was a popular nickelodeon television show for the same age of girls at roughly the same time

i hate to be gabbneb, but i actually did briefly date a guy who kinda looked like james franco, esp as he is in this picture:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/olmedia/1940000/images/_1944248_mate_pa.jpg

anyways he was mad dumb

http://img2.timeinc.net/ew/dynamic/imgs/081027/Freaks-And-Geeks/James-Franco-Express_l.jpg

love u boo

awwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww

right??????

man i so rarely like a pinup type of dude it is kinda cool when i do cause then you can like commiserate about it with other girls

LOL yeah he's defintely just well . . . dreamy.

dryer sheets?

yes james franco is a universal.

he's 2 years older than me?!

dryer sheets and other products for the home lol

yeah what's the with dryer sheets? I'm allergic to most fabric softeners so I have to use hippy dippy all natural stuff that doesn't work all that great but is at least something.

how old r u

i hate dryer sheets, they are pointless

i don't like anything that makes things smell like anything!

Mr. Franco and I are 4 mo. and 10 days apart in age and I believe he's currently attending my alma matter.

http://www.mblcosmeticsandmore.com/files/2343446/uploaded/Loves%20Baby%20Soft.jpg

?

damn erica lol

http://lee.org/journal/journal%20030104-043004/jean-nate.jpg

en vaporisateur

hahahaha touche

yall check out this creepy ad btw:

http://rgh.cc/albums/userpics/10001/%5Bcreepy%5Dloves-baby-soft-ad-c1976.jpg

(wait - I dind't actually know that . . . I looked it up just now. Just wanted to make sure you didn't think I was some franco-obsessed crazy person)

ew rapey

xp

ok yeah, that is exceptionally creepy

I know. I didn’t mean to not mention them, but I didn’t mean to mention them either. I wish I could unknow them. I didn’t know about the South Korean situation but it is genuinely terrifying the way women are treated there, for a hyper advanced country.

no of course not, i don't blame anyone for not wanting to read or talk about any of it. it almost doesn't matter what advances we make as a species, somehow the world finds new, worse ways to hurt women

the thing that struck me about the Pelicot case was that her husband originally got caught for upskirting. like if that hadn't happened, she would never have known what had happened to her. out of the dozens of men who saw his ad online, who was invited over to their home, not one of them thought to warn her or alert authorities, not one of them thought "uh this is too fucked up, even for me"

thanks for bringing this up - it's something that on one hand I have been talking about with others, and on the other, what is there is even to say now?

wasn't she getting tested for alzheimers or something because she couldn't make sense of what was happening?

Yes.

After the couple retired to the southern town of Mazan in 2013, and Gisèle fell inexplicably ill — she was losing weight; her hair was falling out; she randomly experienced significant lapses in her memory, which she called “total blackouts” — it was Dominique who took her to see various doctors. “I was persuaded I had the beginnings of Alzheimer’s or a brain tumor,” Gisèle testified, according to the Times. But now, her symptoms appear to be the result of crushed sleeping pills Dominique had been slipping into her food and drinks.

He reportedly told police that he started drugging his wife so that he could make her wear clothes and do things she wouldn’t while awake and said he never took money from the men he invited to rape her.

the unseen-portion-of- the-iceberg that are these men is always horrifying to confront

Naturally, she wasn’t the only woman he abused.

But other women featured in his accounts, too. The Guardian reports that he kept a folder entitled, “Around my daughter, naked,” which contained collages of her similarly incapacitated and nude. (She wrote a memoir about her father’s crimes, Et j’ai cessé de t’appeler papa, in 2022, under the pen name Caroline Darian.) Dominique had also taken surreptitious photos of his daughters-in-law, naked, without their knowledge or consent.

Aurore told the court that she once thought she heard Mr. Pelicot say something to her nephew about the child’s apparent refusal to play doctor with him. But she didn’t tell anyone, for fear she had imagined it. She was the victim of abuse in her family, she said, which made her worry she was prone to seeing abuse everywhere.

_the unseen-portion-of- the-iceberg that are these men is always horrifying to confront_
that's it, isn't it, I mean how likely is it that all the disgusting rapists who like doing that happened to live in her town? so actually now we all know that a much higher percentage of "your average guy" is one of those (than most people probably assumed)

that's my point! your average man in the neighbourhood, not someone who'd gone there specifically to do this. if there are other husbands in other towns doing this, it suggests there are tens of men happy to participate every other town.

sorry I'm typing on my phone and it's a bit fiddly

It’s not really class envy, but more like an alien culture … maybe it’s just me but … women opinion writers in the NY Times who discuss the challenges of motherhood while writing their dissertations … idk idk … so far removed from my reality

https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/associate-frenchman-accused-mass-rape-wife-admits-similar-abuse-2024-09-18/

Prosecutors allege Marechal met Pelicot on a website called Coco, where Pelicot shared with him images of the rapes of his wife by the men he had recruited, describing how he had drugged her.
Marechal said in the courtroom he stumbled across the website by accident and initially refused Pelicot's request to rape his wife before acquiescing. Prosecutors say Pelicot drugged Marechal's wife and raped her while Marechal watched.
Pelicot acknowledged his guilt in raping Marechal's wife and said he regretted his actions, adding that he cut contact with them after she woke up while he was in her room. Prosecutors say Pelicot was recorded in at least three of 12 assaults against Marechal's wife Cilia.
The 54-year-old has five children with Marechal and has stuck by him, not filing a criminal complaint.

ugggghhhh how is this a thing!?
that multiple men not only want to do, but go and do?
hope that woman gets some of the support she will need.

Gisele Pelicot for person of the year. What a brave person she is.

Yep. Was saying that last night. She didn't have to wave her right to anonymity and I think most people wouldn't have but her doing so made this so powerful and real. I am in awe of her.

Gisele Pelicot for person of the year. What a brave person she is.

She’s right up there with Mamie Till-Mobley in terms of public personal fortitude in the face of tremendous evil.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c785nm5g5y1o

You just keep scrolling and scrolling. And this was to ONE woman.

they didn’t even catch all of them :/

Those were the ones they had video evidence of iirc? 🤮

Anyway.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n24/sophie-smith/sleeping-women

Police inspected Pelicot’s computer after he was caught ‘upskirting’ several women in a supermarket in 2020 and one of them, Nathalie, decided to file a complaint. ‘Luckily,’ she said, ‘I didn’t just say to myself, “Ah, it’s just some old guy,” despite the fact that he played the victim.’

Her willingness to allow the videos to be seen must, they argued, either be an act of revenge (that word again) or evidence of her ‘exhibitionist tendencies’. They tried to conjure her as a patriarchal grotesque: at once a woman who enjoys sex too much and a woman who speaks out against the men who wrong her. A woman who must expect humiliation, who gets what she deserves.

Much has been made of how many of the accused were normal men living ordinary lives: a journalist, a plumber, a nurse, a soldier, a councillor, a lorry driver, a prison warden, a carpenter. One was quite literally the bloke round the corner: he and Gisèle would exchange greetings at the local bakery. Only two have a previous conviction for sexual violence, six others for domestic violence. Friends and family members of several of the men acted as character witnesses, including the partner of Cyril B., who testified that he is not ‘macho’ and that he had never forced her into any unwanted sexual encounters.

Don’t the Pelicot trial and the Jackson Brodie novels show, from different ends of the culture, that an essential feature of male power is being allowed to choose not to listen – to reason, to conscience, to evidence, to a woman’s testimony, whatever its form? And don’t they also suggest that essential to that power, too, is what women – what all of us – are expected to ignore?

What are we​ taught not to see? What do we see and are taught not to talk about? If we want to understand the logics of a ‘rape culture’ that produces the ‘Monster of Avignon’, the scores of men he convinced to join him, the website on which they all met, the terms in which they made their excuses, the porn they and millions of others consume, the desire that this porn both writes and represents, the desire of men to get from women what they know they don’t want to give, the getting it because they can, the fantasy that the women they took it from wanted it anyway, the women who are taught to stay quiet, who are kept quiet, and the ones who are ignored, defamed or humiliated when they do not – if we want to understand this ‘culture’ (or rather, this way that we distribute power) might we need to think not about the ‘monsters’, but about the gruff, decent guys, the guys we love and forgive, the guys who are ‘not like that’, for whom we silence small anxieties about coercion and hurt and trust precisely because we are so relieved they are not monsters?

A group of researchers at the University of Cambridge recently reported on a study in Northern India where remotely operated drones were meant to be used to monitor wildlife. They found that the technology was used instead by local government and male villagers to surveil and humiliate women. Some women who worked together in the forest felt so intimidated that they softened the singing they used to deter attacks from predators. One was subsequently killed by a tiger. The lead researcher, who I have no reason to think is anything other than a very good guy, commented: ‘Nobody could have realised that camera traps put in the Indian forest to monitor mammals actually have a profoundly negative impact on the mental health of local women who use these spaces.’ Really – nobody?

Thank you for sharing.

I don't know. I should be shocked. When I first transitioned, when I first started to realize the enormity of what patriarchy does to women, I would get angry, I would get upset, and my wife would dismissively say "Welcome to being a woman." This, of course, made me angrier. I'm still angry, often, but I've learned to be careful about how I express it. Not just around men. Around other women. People you trust, people you admire, people you respect... I don't know Kate Atkinson. I haven't read her work. Reading at all is hard. In fiction, so often people talk about things I try not to think about.

This quote stuck out to me.

Should I have paid more attention in Case Histories to what had seemed Jackson’s complex and interesting relationship to manliness – his worry, for example, that by being in touch with his feelings he was ‘turning into a woman’?

Heaven forbid.

I think there's opportunity in a statement like that. A lot of men do talk like that. A lot of men do think like that. When I read about the culture-bound syndrome of "koro", I think about how some of the behavior I've seen from some of the men I've known. My fear was always of appropriating women's identity, of appropriating women's spaces, but so many men are _afraid_ of "turning into a woman".

They're afraid. Afraid of themselves. And they just keep hurting women and hurting women and even when they thought I was a guy, to say anything, to say anything at all... "What are you, gay?" I guess. I guess I am. So much of my life has been spent trying to appeal to the better instincts of people who wouldn't _listen_ because I wasn't _enough of a man_.

I never understood that. I still don't.

Ahhh that's depressing to see on Atkinson's part. I stopped with that series and I don't remember the specifics but it would be on brand for me to get depressed with that character direction and just drop it. Depressing because I was a big fan when I worked at her publisher. I used to give people copies of Not the End of the World.

...the desire of men to get from women what they know they don’t want to give, the getting it because they can, the fantasy that the women they took it from wanted it anyway ... if we want to understand this ‘culture’ (or rather, this way that we distribute power) might we need to think not about the ‘monsters’, but about the gruff, decent guys, the guys we love and forgive, the guys who are ‘not like that’, for whom we silence small anxieties about coercion and hurt and trust precisely because we are so relieved they are not monsters?

Yeah, that.

Gyac that was an epic post 💜

Very sorry to have ruined this thread by posting about this highly upsetting case in the only thread where people have bothered to mention or care about it

gyac i wasn't saying that at all

it is important and necessary to talk about

but i'm a delicate pansyass who can't mainline reality like that without all my demons perking up to remind me that life is irredeemably fucked forever

and i like this thread and i like you all (the internet strangers type of like) and i admire the heck out of your capacity to face these things and call them out for the outrageous mundane evil they are but i am not built like that

the correct course of action would have been to post my own positive stuff here to try to balance the darkness but my life is shit, so idfk

much love to everyone here

i hate that nobody outside of women acknowledges or talks about this shit

i hate that i'm a delicate pansy (lol) who struggles with confronting how truly awful patriarchy is

i hate the way patriarchy makes _us_ responsible for this shit, the constant sense of being overwhelmed and the constant, universal sense of... not belonging, of _taking up space_

i value everyone's presence here so, so, so much

particularly since, well

there are a lot fewer of us here than there used to be

being a woman in a space where it feels like we're quarantined to, like, one thread is hard

it's up to us to womanspread i guess (maybe there is a better term for that)

glitterbomb the shit outta this sausage party with feminine rage & joy

that sounds kind of pointless and exhausting tho, unless by doing so one is racking up mental health points. i barely have enough energy to attempt vibing a little bit sometimes! i haven't got resources left over to confront internet dudes re: their internalized patriarchal brainsludge.

please don't anyone take anything i say too seriously okay

it's all love and tired confused good-ish intentions

and mental illness lol

in girly news i bled through my underwear & clean sheets right the fuck onto my new memory foam mattress topper, so that's pretty metal

i have banjaxed my pinterest algorithm btw. i open it up and say "please show me owl gifs and unusual bean recipes and pretty yarn" but all it's giving me is ai clips of women dancing with, then morphing into animals while simon cowell and them lose their minds, to wit:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UewscI_1hQY

Cat the feeling you’re describing is not “being a pansy” — it is being triggered. And it’s ok to be triggered and you should let yourself feel the feelings but also recognize that what’s happening is not a mystery and doesn’t require any type of apology. No amount of cute wording will change that! 💜

My goal in healing from traumas has been to be the sort of person who can confront it head on and speak about it calmly. And I’m working on it!

I’m glad to be confined in here bc there’s not a litany of hyperbolic disgust toward the men responsible for the Pelicot case, just facts.

I watch a lot of detective shows from Europe and there is the recurring plot of sex-trafficked women from Eastern Europe. One of my best female friends is Bulgarian, and we have a running joke about how any time a Bulgarian woman is a character in these shows, she is a sex trafficking victim. So in some ways it isn’t shocking… but that’s also part of rationalizing the problem.

who are the 70,000 men in the rape Telegram group?!!? i would not mind if that were made public.

i would not mind if their dicks all caught fire

thank you, La Lechera 💙

I’m glad to be confined in here bc there’s not a litany of hyperbolic disgust toward the men responsible for the Pelicot case, just facts.

― Piggy Lepton (La Lechera)

all of these allies who want so badly to be "one of the good ones"

i wasn't any different. it took me a long time to be able to say that, all that fear that if i perpetuated that same patriarchal bullshit, it would mean that i was _really a man_. i didn't do what the men in the pelicot case did, but this idea that i'm not _like them_, that it's _nothing to do with me_ - no, i don't accept that. their dicks could all spontaneously combust tomorrow and i genuinely don't know that it'd make a difference. (maybe it would. maybe they'd figure out their penises aren't as important as we were all taught.) if i wasn't better than them, if i ignored, excused, explained, that suggests to me that it's nothing to do with being a man. and that _men don't have to be like that_.

except nearly all of them are, at least the white, cis, straight ones. they don't fucking _listen_, and they blame us.

i do believe, i do have faith, that one day men will start understanding. even though i didn't ever understand back when i was trying to be a "good man".

i have to admit that i am not sure i have that same faith or belief. at least not within my lifetime. the global appetite for sexual violence isn't going to disappear or even fade because of logic, facts, or words. :(

A large part of why this awful story continues to have this terrible hold over me is the sheer scale, but it’s also the commonality with things that have happened to me and my loved ones irl. I am not going into details here on the public thread - and I know that some of you know this anyway - but to summarise some of the elements:

- being betrayed and gaslit by someone you love
- “This isn’t happening/you’re the one with the problem”
- the part where they’re trying to call her an exhibitionist for wanting the evidence to be seen, rather than wanting to shine a light on the deeds of the perpetrators
- the whole nightmare of people around you being fully aware of what happened and that’s not a problem for them, in fact some of them contributed to it

None of these things are even remotely on the same scale, but the thing that ties them together is that part of my own realisation as to what happened being slow to surface - idk trauma literally preventing me from seeing the truth or some shit? - so when I read this woman’s story I can’t get over it. The scale of the betrayal itself would be enough to kill me, even before you consider the facts and the public nature of it all.

And yet in my rage towards these men I find strength in reading about her even though we must all know one does not move on from these events. Her whole world has been shattered. The bedrock of everything she believed has been destroyed. Every memory from her time with this man is now tainted. Years of meaningful life are now rotten and irrevocably sullied.

I found reading the posts of others in this thread comforting, because the silence on ilx as a whole on this story has been kind of confounding. To me, this is one of The Stories, and not even a mention across the board is kind of grotesque to me, a reminder that we often live in fundamentally different realities. And again wrt this thread, the comments are in their own way somewhat comforting because it’s a reminder that this is all too common, but also that we can survive. (But also whoever mentioned the lack of facts such a discussion would draw on ILX -LL? - yeah, that.) I guess I’m fucked if I know, just that silence on something this huge is palpable to me and I don’t like it.

No, none of that is nice, and I don’t expect it to be easy reading for anyone, nor was it easy for me to write. Like that is fine! People all have their own individual thresholds of comfort and discomfort. I guess I’m just asking what should I have done? I really barely post much anymore as it is compared to how much I used to, I think I checked the other day & it’s been single digits for weeks now, maybe longer? I already have difficulty sharing anything meaningful about myself online because of how that information has been used against me in the past.

Just to clarify on that point that you didn’t intend it, cat, I believe you. Here’s my perspective: it’s kind of, something, to make one of my three or four daily posts in the thread and then be subject to a “posts you had second second thoughts about” post quite soon after. I think it’s perfectly fine to feel uncomfortable about the nature of that post, because it is about something terrible. I’d just ask you to reconsider how that came across to me. Thanks. That’s about as best I can phrase it & I gave a lot of thought to it. I also don’t want to get into a back & forth. I just want that acknowledged & we can hopefully move on.

PS - why is that thread even open? I thought the other one got locked because it was being used for posts like that.

I can relate with a lot of that -- I used to get REALLY SUPER triggered by stories like the Steubenville case or documentaries like Audrie & Daisy for precisely the reasons you describe. At the same time, I kept watching because I wanted to witness for them, to be willing to hear what happened to them and be the adult I needed when I was their age.

Gisele Pelicot joins Chanel Miller as one of the bravest people I have ever seen in my entire life for their absolute refusal to accept shame -- someone somewhere will always try to spew the shame, but neither of these women are letting it get to them. That's super inspirational to me.

On a separate note, I realized last year that being cruelly (IMO) dumped by 3 men at the same time (the men I was playing music with) for spurious reasons has left a lasting bruise, one that won't allow me to trust men I don't know very very very well. Even if it's to play music with them. If these folks can leave me in the dust like this, anyone could. And I should have known that, but I foolishly ignored red flags here and there because I wanted to play music with people so badly. I even wrote the whole story out so that I could prove that I had done nothing to deserve this, which was clearly a trauma response if I have ever seen one. That people who seem completely trustworthy could violate the cardinal "campsite" rule of human interaction -- that is still shocking to me, even if it shouldn't be.

I came here to post how the NYT has an “Ideas” article about how the sexuality of women in their 50s is now aesthetically acceptable. … like that’s a great “idea”? … and now thinking about that in the context of the discussion on this thread … it really demonstrates misogyny at work.

The thing that the lack of discussion about the Pelicot case elsewhere on ILX demonstrates to me is… well more than one thing…

Thing 1 (n.b. yes I still listen to the Nirvana Unplugged album): there is an awareness of lanes on ILX in terms of identity politics and there is a discomfort about not staying in one’s lane in terms of identity. There was way less awareness and discomfort in the past that resulted in examples of misogyny, fat-shaming, racism, ableism, etc. ILX women have done a solid job over the years of letting the men know when they are straying from that lane. Part of that “staying in one’s lane” structure is not pointing out an injustice on behalf of the more vulnerable “other”, but letting them point it out on their own terms. … the white knight issue. Of course the problem that can occur is the vulnerable “other” feeling like this injustice is otherwise invisible or acceptable, as no one else has pointed it out. … which also hurts!

Thing 2: multiple identities/intersectionality … maybe it’s not being discussed because it’s French … as ILXors we have multiple identities/affiliations right? We have our gender, our sexual orientation, our regional identity, our political priorities, our other interests … And we discuss things pertinent to those affiliations on threads related to those things. Because this was a French story, that didn’t implicate professional athletes, cultural figures or products, or some other common topic, it is less likely to be brought up …

Thing 3: It really hurts when something momentous like this happens and it is something that strongly affects you, but everyone else ignores it. And ideally, everyone who cares about you should pay attention, but they don’t. And you feel betrayed or you feel resentful that you have to yell and scream and call it out. And I respect y’all for doing that.

Xp,LL re band breakups … I have been there too … and it can hurt as much as a romantic break up. I am definitely down to discuss this either here or offline!

It wasn’t a breakup — I got cold dumped via text and none of them ever contacted me again! There had been no previous discussion about anything regarding my suitability or skills or behavior. It was utterly out of the blue after three years.

Also yeah I’m 3/yell & scream 🤷🏻‍♀️

Im not looking for an analysis of what went wrong — what went wrong was they cold dumped a person (me! Of all people!) after 3 years with no warning or follow up whatnot. That’s what went wrong. I’m not in doubt about that. I’m pissed that it eroded my sense of trust in people, leaving me worse off than I was before I met them.

LL — I was mainly offering to commiserate and agree your former bandmates acted shitty to you

That’s what I need to hear — acknowledgement that it was shitty. Thank you.

I don’t have the “clout” I once had, but I could put it out there that these dudes are assholes … idk

I appreciate the offer — def not my style or I’d have spoken up about it myself. Being free from having to give up my creative energy to them is enough for me.

i have to admit that i am not sure i have that same faith or belief. at least not within my lifetime. the global appetite for sexual violence isn't going to disappear or even fade because of logic, facts, or words. :(

― Piggy Lepton (La Lechera)

oh i don't believe it because i think it's true or that there's evidence for it. i believe it because i _need_ to. because it keeps me out of despair. it's so easy for me to draw conclusions from what i've seen, the men who treat me like a traitor to their kind, to the extent that a lot of people seem to genuinely want to kill me _just for being a woman_, the way the few men who genuinely listen so often turn out not to be men after all, the sheer extent to which men will fuck up their own lives rather than just _listen to women_...

the "stay in your lane" thing is a good point. of all the threads here i don't want to talk here too much, simply because, quite honestly, issues facing trans women are talked about more here than issues facing cis women. i don't think that's right or fair. there are way more cis women in the world than trans people, and there's this tendency to want to talk about trans issues to the _exclusion_ of issues facing cis women, who, unlike me, have been told their whole lives that they don't have the _right_ to speak. people have only been telling me that for five years.

i also, before transition, i didn't want to _listen_ to women. i thought, genuinely thought, that if i listened to women i would be invading women's spaces. i don't know for sure, but it occurs to me that some cis men might see it the same way. i didn't understand back then the difference between talking over someone and listening, and i feel like a lot of men seem to have that same conceptual problem. like, to me, "no boys allowed in the room" doesn't mean that men aren't allowed to _read_ what we have to say here, just, like, shut up and listen, they might learn something.

(as always i have difficulty taking my own advice lol)

i mean, i don't know everything. it's frustrating to me that men _aren't_ paying attention, _aren't_ listening, don't seem to _understand_ that the pelicot case is not an exception, it is a _rule_, the rule of patriarchy...

and people change when they have to (or else they die, i guess), and i guess a lot of gen x and early millennial guys don't have to change the way i had to change. my hope isn't so much that men under patriarchy will suddenly start seeing us as human beings. it's that they'll one day figure out that patriarchy _isn't working for them either_. they can blame us for protecting ourselves as much as they want, but it's not going to make their lives better. we can't be who they want us to be. we can't give them what patriarchy tells them is _their birthright_. there's something david lynch said in the third season of twin peaks that gets quoted a lot in the circles i run in. he said, "I told them, 'Fix your hearts or die.'" that's not a _threat_. that's, well, a fact, a fact that's true whether they believe it or not.

they _are_ the ones with the power, and their lives could be so fucking much better if they could just... walk away. not all of them _can_ walk away the way i walked away. when i talk to men i try to focus on that, not because i'm being... disingenuous, or trying to appease them, but because i genuinely believe it. i genuinely believe that a man's life is better when he rejects patriarchy. i listen to so many trans men and they're just like any other men, not better or worse, except because of their lived experience they _understand_ things, they've had to _think_ about things, that most men don't. they're not _special_. any man can do it. some cis men _are_, and they're a tiny minority, and nearly _all_ of them are queer, but i think as time goes on, as patriarchy gets more rigid, inflexible, more and more men will walk away from it.

if i have to come up with a reason to believe - and i do - that's the reason.

btw, much respect to those who yell and scream. it's _necessary_. those of us who do get punished a lot for it - the word "hysterical" springs to mind - but sometimes, it's necessary.

gyac, thanks for posting. I'm so sorry you have experienced what you have. I'm totally with you that this is a huge public story that says a lot. I'm not greatly surprised by the lack of male discussion on it here. tbh I don't even know what I could say about the crimes - it's horrific. it's like there's too much evil to process.

although I am at the point of ignoring awful world events myself at the moment so I can't say anything.