As long as people see the gender wage gap as normal, society has a problem.
Eva Cox -The reality of the gender wage gap
Danielle Sucher › Jailbreak the Patriarchy: my first Chrome extension
Jailbreak the Patriarchy genderswaps the world for you. When it’s installed, everything you read in Chrome (except for gmail, so far) loads with pronouns and a reasonably thorough set of other gendered words swapped. For example: “he loved his mother very much” would read as “she loved her father very much”, “the patriarchy also hurts men” would read as “the matriarchy also hurts women”, that sort of thing.
This makes reading stuff on the internet a pretty fascinating and eye-opening experience, I must say. What would the world be like if we reversed the way we speak about women and men? Well, now you can find out!
I don’t use chrome, but I like this idea very much indeed.
the ch!cktionary: This Is What Slut-Shaming Looks Like
That’s the reason I stopped SexAndTheIvy.com. Because I didn’t have any recourse or protection (legal or otherwise) and I was sick of being constantly afraid for myself and those around me. So I adjusted accordingly and made myself as non-controversial as possible in order to not attract this type of attention anymore. And even that didn’t drive them all away. The haters won. If you were expecting a happy ending to this entry, I’m afraid there isn’t one. I wake up everyday hoping they haven’t decided to target someone new. When I turned in the second, more honest draft of my essay to Sarah, I was scared, not just of the reactions from readers but of the potential backlash. Because I know the second I start to feel safe, the moment I start to believe that I’m flying under the radar, that’s when it’ll happen again. This is what slut-shaming looks like. It’s not just a slur, a curse word, something uttered and forgotten. It’s about breaking your faith in humankind. It’s about reminding you of the depths of people’s malevolence. It’s about instilling fear so that even if you have a voice, you shut yourself right up because you know what happens when you use it. And at some point, you become so paranoid and terrified that they don’t even need to police you anymore because you start to police yourself.
This post really hit home for me the pervasiveness of the label ‘slut’ in essentially disciplining women. Strangely, I think the word ‘prude’ is similarly disciplinary in that it pressures women to have sex (though obviously not ‘too much sex’, whatever the hell that is).
While I try to mull over the solutions, I am planning on going to the Canberra SlutWalk on June 4, despite its controversy within feminist circles. Mostly because ‘the bitch deserves it’ is not an adequate response to rape, nor to online harrassment for that matter.
