… I started to notice how much the girls at my school suffer because of the pressures associated with our gender. Many of the girls have eating disorders, some have had peers heavily pressure them into sexual acts, others suffer in emotionally abusive relationships where they are constantly told they are worthless…
What I hadn’t anticipated on setting up the feminist society was a massive backlash from the boys in my wider peer circle. They took to Twitter and started a campaign of abuse against me. I was called a “feminist bitch”, accused of “feeding [girls] bullshit”, and in a particularly racist comment was told “all this feminism bull won’t stop uncle Sanjit from marrying you when you leave school”.
Our feminist society was derided with retorts such as, “FemSoc, is that for real? #DPMO” [don’t piss me off] and every attempt we made to start a serious debate was met with responses such as “feminism and rape are both ridiculously tiring”.
The more girls started to voice their opinions about gender issues, the more vitriolic the boys’ abuse became. One boy declared that “bitches should keep their bitchiness to their bitch-selves #BITCH” and another smugly quipped, “feminism doesn’t mean they don’t like the D, they just haven’t found one to satisfy them yet.” Any attempt we made to stick up for each other was aggressively shot down with “get in your lane before I par [ridicule] you too”, or belittled with remarks like “cute, they got offended”.
I fear that many boys of my age fundamentally don’t respect women. They want us around for parties, banter and most of all sex. But they don’t think of us as intellectual equals, highlighted by accusations of being hysterical and over sensitive when we attempted to discuss serious issues facing women…
We were told that our “militant vaginas” were “as dry as the Sahara desert”, girls who complained of sexual objectification in their photos were given ratings out of 10, details of the sex lives of some of the girls were posted beside their photos, and others were sent threatening messages warning them that things would soon “get personal”. Read full article here
5 Responses
Dear girls,
I feel your pain. The backlash against women trying to stick up for themselves has been around for a long time and will continue. The boys in your peer group know that you are not equal to them because you are ten times better than they will ever be as far as being decent human beings!
SO proud of these young ladies. As the mother of a little boy I vow to teach him not only respect for women but repect for everyone.
Wonder where these boys learned it is their innate right to subject their female peers to misogynistic and degrading insults? Surely not from our male supremacist system which has countless methods of maintaining mens’ lie that women and girls aren’t human but supposedly merely exist to be males’ disposable; interchangeable masturbatory objects? Malestream media and popular culture is saturated with misogynistic images/lies that only males are default human and females supposedly exist to be males’ disposable sexualised slaves! So not surprising therefore that these boys are already enacting their pseudo male right to dominate and oppress their female peers.
Clearly these boys have learned their male supremacist lessons very well and are ensuring their male pseudo sex right to degrade and dominate females is sacrosanct. Or perhaps these boys know they will never be the equal of these brave young women who are showing they will not be males’ disposable sexualised fodder.
Males who feel threatened by women’s and girls’ demands for autonomy and fundamental human rights always respond with personal attacks because these males know that male supremacist structures and systems support and uphold these boys’ pseudo right to dehumanise girls because their sex is female.
This is why the Feminist Society was viewed as threatening to these boys because it challenged their pseudo male right to dominate and humiliate girls because their sex is female.
I’m sorry ladies but until we teach our young girls to carry themselves with respect, and dress like a woman vs. a cheap slut, what do you expect from the boys? Girls don’t get respect because they don’t even respect each other. We see women KNOWINGLY sleeping with married men, girls fighting other girls, bullying, videotaping fights, with MOTHERS sometimes there to encourage the fighting.
Where do we get off blaming the boys? We need to look at ourselves first instead of sending mixed messages. Nothing is going to change until women learn to be kind to each other, and respectful, carry ourselves with respect to be role models for men and boys. Let’s not put all of this on the males.
We women have to bear much of the responsibility for where we are today. Instead of taking the positive behavior of men many women have chosen the negative behavior of men and act as if this will garner respect. We need to look at ourselves and stop blaming men.
Hm, “Mary”, this group of girls set out to respect each other and look how much respect it got them. Obviously they should have consulted you first, so you could tell them all the ways they’re doing feminism wrong. Or is the fact that they were doing feminism at all your problem in the first place?