You know what, fuck this post. Maybe women wouldn’t feel the need to other themselves if so many enjoyable, genderless activities weren’t so heavily gendered to begin with. Do you know why a woman would feel the need to say, “Yes, I’m a girl and I play video games”? It’s because she or other women she knows have had their hobbies and interests invalidated based solely upon their gender. So much of this leads to woman internalizing this casual sexism, which is the most insidious part of the whole thing. Girls strive to differenciate themselves from being “girls”. ‘Yes I’m a girl, but I’m not like those OTHER girls. I’m cool, because I like guy things.’ So why do women other themselves this way? Why do they form little groups on Facebook for their interests, explicitly announcing that despite the hurdle of being a woman, they’ve overcome and somehow gotten to enjoy this activity? Because “girl” has become shorthand for “shitty” on such a grand scale that it’s embarrassing. Feminine is embarrassing. Feminine is weak. Feminine doesn’t play Counter Strike or enjoy stupid wrestling or burp loudly in public because it’s funny. Both men and women write off a girl as trying to be a special snowflake for being proud of belching in public, but here is the sad truth: belch in public as a girl and you get flack for it. You get surprise. Distaste. Most likely you get admiration from male friends, because you did something as gross and masculine as release noisy air from your dumb food hole, but are still so adorable! It becomes a badge of honor; you’re one of the cool girls who is like a guy. You internalize it. It becomes identity.
When I worked at a comic book shop from the time I was 16 until I turned 22, due to the fact that I FUCKING LOVE COMICS, I would answer the phone and have customers ask me if there were a man there that could answer his comic book questions. This was not an isolated incident. This happened monthly, sometimes weekly. I had boys sit at my counter and make eyes at my stupid pubescent face while telling me how gosh, I wasn’t like other girls. I liked comics and games and could eat a whole package of jerky myself.
That is a huge steaming pile of turds.
Girls are funny and gross and awful and beautiful and ugly and just as diverse as any group of young men. Also? They’re marginalized, fucking fight me on it.
I love video games and I have a vagina, I don’t feel the need to announce this over the head set, no. But you know what? Fuck the people judging girls trying to feel even slightly empowered doing the things pictured above if they feel like it. I’ll bet half of them are women themselves, trying to ‘outbro’ each other. “Vagina award for doing things everyone else does” Fuck you, girls get so much shit for this kind of stuff it’s not even funny. Alluding to things being equal is bullshit.
internalized misogyny, yo
(Source: kanyewesticle, via mudora17)
