This Post Is For Girls

lazyxfemme

 livebloggingmydescentintomadness

Girls, if something about a guy scares you or makes you uncomfortable, get away from him as fast as possible. Listen to your instincts. Don’t make excuses. Just run.

 livebloggingmydescentintomadness

Because like a thousand people have felt the need to add comments like “Boys, if a girl scares you” or “People, if a person scares you” and “this goes for everyone” and “this shouldn’t be gender specified” I am going to make it very clear that this post is for girls. 

THIS POST IS FOR GIRLS.

Why? Because girls are socialized to not be rude, not ‘be a bitch’, to not hurt a man’s feelings, and that they’re being silly and overreacting if something they can’t explain makes them afraid. Because girls are preyed on by men who use every one of these things to their advantage, who lure girls into their control and molest them, rape them, beat them, and kill them. Because it happens every fucking day and girls need to know that if something feels wrong, they need to get the fuck away from that man.

You don’t like that this post is gendered? I don’t like that girls are abused and date raped and murdered every fucking day and they are STILL pressured to “give him a chance” when a man makes them uncomfortable. So get off your pretentious fucking high horse and support girls instead of telling me “this goes for everyone”.

 Sly Sez:

An older boy sexually assaulted me when I was 15 thanks to my being socialized to “be a lady” and “not hurt his feelings.” Instead of telling this gross creeper in no uncertain terms to keep his disgusting hands off me, I tried to hint obliquely that I wasn’t interested.

I’m throwing a content warning on this because I will be describing a sexual assault incident.

This guy was a blind date, a friend of my friend’s boyfriend. He was also the older brother of a guy I knew from school. The four of us went to a movie. He started touching my thigh and trying to kiss me. I asked my friend’s boyfriend for the keys to the car, hoping Mr. Handy would want to stay and watch the movie while I sat in the car and drank beer. 

Unfortunately, Mr. Handy followed me to the car. He either took the beer from me or I set it aside, not wanting to spill it in the car. He asked me if I wanted him to put on a condom. I said no. He assumed this meant I was on the pill. I told him “no, I don’t have sex on the first date.”

Which leads me to another thing. How about if we stop pushing the idea that being a virgin is somehow “uncool?”

He grabbed my hand and put it on his penis. I hoped that if I did what he wanted he’d leave me alone. I had an extremely low self-esteem. I didn’t feel like I had the right to say no, I don’t want this. It’s like I became a robot or everything became dreamlike. He “repaid” me for the hand job by shoving his fingers roughly into my vagina. When I got home, there was blood on my panties.

It’s hard to explain why I let this happen. I didn’t want it. I wasn’t really afraid of him. I could have kicked him or started screaming or gotten out of the car. I just went numb. I was molested by my aunt’s first husband when I was very young. I don’t have any specific memories of the event, but it may have contributed to my freezing up when this creep assaulted me. 

I started acting out after this event, cutting class, cutting myself, doing drugs. I didn’t even realize that I had been sexually assaulted until many years later. This was the 1980s and because there was no PIV activity, nobody thought of it as sexual assault.

Women and girls are overwhelmingly targeted as potential victims by gross creepers like this guy. So, yeah, this post should be for girls.

Peter Pan Syndrome + Trauma = Gender Medicine for Females

A response to the following post from Eliza Mondegreen's Substack post about E. Page's interview in Esquire Magazine.

 https://elizamondegreen.substack.com/p/i-could-not-picture-myself-as-a-woman

"I could not picture myself as a woman aging."

The title suggests a degree of Peter Pan syndrome as well as untreated trauma and psychological issues. E. Page discusses panic attacks and eating disorders. Somehow, the cure for these issues is a mastectomy and cross-sex hormones to emulate the appearance of a male. E. Page does not look so much like an adult male as an androgynous adolescent. 

Androgynous adolescent is the goal appearance of many females with restrictive eating disorders (anorexia.) 

I was 32 years old when I was sexually assaulted in 1997. At that time, the En Vogue treatment was to prescribe drugs (SSRIs and benzodiazepines.) Not one doctor listened to me when I told them that I had been sexually assaulted. Their goal was to shut me up.

I experienced panic attacks approximately every 20 minutes from the time I woke up to the time I went to sleep. Did I consider suicide? Hell yeah I did. It wasn't only the doctors that didn't listen to me either. My own family members told me that I had "gotten over it" when I was sexually assaulted fourteen years previously and I'd get over it again. I never mentioned it again.

I do not respond well to psych meds. SSRIs make me manic and psychotic, two things that I am usually not. I have paradoxical reactions to benzos. Valium is the only one that doesn't trigger rebound panic attacks, and it makes me thick as a brick. These drugs are not a solution to trauma.

After a year of struggling with no help whatsoever, one day the panic attacks stopped. I gave thanks to whatever powers there may be. I have no intention of arguing whether or not such powers exist. That really isn't the point. 

I wonder if my sexual assault happened now if I wouldn't have been pushed in the direction of transition even though I never expressed a belief that I was male or a desire to be male. I had a deep-seated hatred of my body that was there before the assault and was exacerbated after the assault. I was fully aware that what happened to me happened because I was female. Not because I "Identify as" female, but because I am objectively, biologically female. 

Never mind that I have never wanted to be male (other than when I was menstruating, a hell that I endured once a month for 40 years, and even then my proclamation that I wished I could turn into Guy rather than Sly was mostly a joke.) I genuinely wonder if the Gender Idealogues wouldn't have used the behaviors and distress of a trauma sufferer to push me down the path to transition and I wonder just how many trans-identified females are also suffering from PTSD.

~Sly Has Spoken~

Stock image by Julia Henze

Purchased from 123rf.com

Lesser-Known Symptoms of PTSD, and Why the Borderline Personality Disorder Diagnosis is Crap

It doesn't, actually. it creates scar tissue.

Free Use image by Alexas Fotos.

https://pixabay.com/illustrations/time-heals-all-wounds-consolation-1087105/

https://themighty.com/2020/04/ptsd-symptoms-we-dont-talk-about/?utm_source=newsletter_mental_health&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=newsletter_mental_health_2020-05-06&$deep_link=true

This is a good post. One of the things I like to talk about is the theory (which I believe is correct) that "borderline personality disorder," a label that is applied disproportionately to girls and women, is a subtype of PTSD. Everyone labeled with "borderline personality disorder" has a history of trauma. Their behavior doesn't come out of nowhere.

It took me forty years to realize that the main reason behind a lot of the acting out I did in high school was the fact that I had been assaulted by a creepy guy that I agreed to go on a date with. This was 1980, and back then, it wasn't considered sexual assault if there was no intercourse. Without going into details, what this 19-year-old guy did to my 15-year-old self was clearly sexual assault. I kept it hidden and blamed myself for not fighting back harder and for being stupid enough to go out with him in the first place. I knew nobody would take my side and would blame me.

I started cutting class, cutting myself, and doing a lot of drugs. Rather than anyone asking me if anything had happened to me, all I ever heard was "you used to be a good kid and now you're a bad kid. You need to straighten up and fly right." Surprise, surprise, at sixteen I was labeled a "hysterical neurotic" by one of the most inept clowns of a psychiatrist that I've ever had the displeasure of meeting. I was later given the equally useless label "borderline personality disorder." 

"Borderline personality disorder" is the modern "hysterical neurotic." It is a way of writing off girls and women who are acting out because of trauma. It is a label that needs to be retired.

If you're interested in reading the piece that I wrote about the traumatic incident, the link will follow. Fair warning that it isn't pretty and it doesn't have a happy ending.

https://blog.reedsy.com/creative-writing-prompts/contests/28/submissions/8426/

Ornery and Sly

Telling it Like it Is

Ornery Owl

Free Use Image by Open Clipart Vectors on Pixabay

Sly Fawkes

Image copyright Julia Henze, purchased from 123rf.com

Sly's FOAD Thursday: To All The Asshole Ex-Boyfriends Who Abused Me: Fuck Off and Die

This is my response to a post on Feminist Current. One of the topics was misogynistic behavior towards pregnant employees at Google. 

The tech industry is guilty of a lot of misogyny. I worked in tech for a little over a year back in 1997. I tried to be "one of the guys" because I had very low self-esteem and wanted to fit in. I also had as yet undiagnosed type 2 bipolar disorder and was drawn to chaos, possibly because I really had never known anything else. I was in my early 30s, but I was very naive.

 I fell in with a very interesting crowd. They all watched a lot of porn. The only other female in our little group was in an open marriage. She came from a very messed-up background. Her mother prostituted herself sometimes and had sex in front of her young daughter.

I made two big mistakes. The first was going to a Halloween party at this lady's house, but the bigger one was bringing along my ex-boyfriend whom I'd just broken up with because I wanted to be "open-minded" and show that we could "still be friends." He had been verbally abusive to me, but I felt guilty about breaking up with him.

Sometime during the party, one of my co-workers kissed me. The kiss was consensual, although I wouldn't have done it if I hadn't been completely smashed. My ex-boyfriend started making a scene, and I made two more big mistakes.

I didn't want my ex-boyfriend to get in a fight with my co-worker, so I drove drunk back to my apartment. I thought my ex-boyfriend had left. I crawled into bed with my clothes on. I woke up with my clothes off and him on top of me. I yelled (or slurred) at him to stop. When he was done, he said: "well, now we're back together again."

I had horrific panic attacks one after another for a year afterward. The doctors tried to medicate me, but I tend to have paradoxical responses to medications and most of them only made the panic attacks worse. Xanax made me suicidal. My family told me "well, you got over this sort of thing before, you can do it again." (I had been sexually assaulted when I was 18 by a guy I met while waiting in line for concert tickets. That one told me he hoped I would get pregnant so we'd have to stay together.)

I never went to the police. I knew they'd only say I deserved it because I was drunk and I let him into my apartment.

I was in an extremely vulnerable state of mind, and that's when another pervert predator struck. I've mentioned that one before. He is the one who would force me to watch bestiality videos and to kiss his feet under the threat that he would withdraw his "love" from me. He flaunted another girlfriend in front of me. I ended up with scars on my arms that will be there for the rest of my life because I couldn't imagine life without this creep and I cut my wrists.

Not that other industries don't have their creeps and abusers, but the tech industry is rife with them. The guy who raped me was in school to get a degree in programming as well.

I'm not saying every man in the tech industry is guilty of misogyny. I am saying there is a lot of misogyny in the tech industry.

~Sly Has Spoken~

Image copyright juliahenze@123rf.com

I didn't want to

I didn't want to

I didn't want to!

I know this song could never be made today, and I know that some of the lyrics are not politically correct, but their heart was in the right place and the song made me laugh when I really needed to. R.I.P. Brad Nowell and Lou Dog. Hope you're having fun on the other side, writing more bawdy songs with heart.

Real Cie Reviews: Wyrm's Warning

Note to Sly's Feminist Book Reviews readers:
This novelette is not specifically targeted as a feminist story, but I have chosen to share it for a couple of reasons.

First, the heroine is a realistic young woman who has to endure terrible behavior by awful, entitled men with very little chance of being able to retaliate. She lives in a feudal society where women are seen as property to be done with as males see fit. There is no respect at all for women and girls, but the heroine, Tala, still manages to shine, not because of superhuman abilities but because of a genuine strength of character.

Second, the author is genuinely thoughtful in his writing of female characters. His motivation is not lurid or prurient. He manages to both realistically portray the wretched way that girls and women were treated in medieval society and to create a heroine who shines without being a Strong Female trope. Although the story was not written with the intent of being a feminist story, it contains feminist elements and is respectful to its female characters.

Rating: 5 of 5 stars

The following is a duplicate of my review on Amazon and Goodreads for this novelette.

The author really knows how to get inside his characters' heads and describe their motivation. Unlike many male authors writing a female character, he doesn't linger on unnecessary descriptions of her anatomy. Tala is an ordinary young woman who lives in a time and place where women are treated as objects to be done with as males see fit. She faces manhandling by the old woodsman whom she is attempting to assist, and worse from the realm's boorish prince and corrupt priest.

One night while leaving the old woodsman's cottage, Tala is attacked by an unknown creature and mysterious changes begin to take place in her life, subjecting her to moments of terror and rage as she tries to comprehend what is happening.

Tala is a brave and level-headed young woman who faces truly awful situations both from the supernatural realm and the natural world in which she resides. Although there are uncomfortable scenes in this story with regards to men's treatment of women and girls as sex objects to be used as a man sees fit, these scenes are never gratuitous or unnecessarily explicit. 

There are jokes about male authors writing women in an overly sexualized fashion. Michael J. Allen manages to avoid being on the receiving end of the joke by writing his female characters with empathy rather than salacity.

I finished this story in one afternoon. It is a compelling page-turner.

~Cie~

FGM in Midwest America (Trigger Warning)

thesinisterspinster

 regina--gorgeous

'FGM happened to me in white, midwest America'

A Christian doctor removed my clitoris when I was three years old as a ‘cure’ for masturbation, writes Renee Bergstrom

THE GUARDIAN

 revengeofthehorsegirl

 layingdownsomebatfeets

More of this

 taramaclaywasaterf

Of course men had to make it about themselves so much that goddamn moderators had to step in and shut it down. Of fucking course.

 slysfreespeechspace

This is horrifying. Girls and women are treated with so little regard. When I was seven years old the doctor discovered that I had an imperforate hymen. With no warning and no anesthetic, my father held my hands down while the doctor cut through the imperforate hymen. I screamed bloody murder. I also repressed the memory until after I had given birth to my son when I was 25 years old.

The first few times I felt that I “should” give into intercourse when I was a teenager, it hurt like hell. My female friends thought I was being overly dramatic. When I went to the student health center after being raped, I tried to talk to the medical student on duty about pain during sex, and he tried to explain to me that when a virgin has sex for the first time. I burst into tears and said that he didn’t understand anything I was saying. I had an infection as well and let him examine me (a nurse was in the room) but I was extremely traumatized.

I had a nervous breakdown during that year. I tried to tell my father what happened, and he told me that I shouldn’t have “put myself in that situation.” (I was drunk and went with a guy to his place.) The guy came back later and said that he hoped he’d gotten me pregnant so we’d have to stay together. I told him to get away from me and never come back again. I didn’t go to the police because I knew I wouldn’t be believed since I’d been drunk when it happened.

I’m sorry to have gone off on a tangent. I just remember all my life not being treated well by doctors or listened to because I’m a woman. And people wonder why I went close to 30 years without ever getting a pelvic exam. 

What this woman went through is even more horrifying than what happened to me.

Source: regina--gorgeous trigger warning sexual assaultfemale genital mutilation misogyny

Children of the Sex Trade Documentary

Can we please stop pretending that prostitution is a "victimless crime" and "empowering to women?"
The Left has a real problem with wanting to appear "sexually liberated," to say that there is nothing wrong with "sex work" and that anyone who is critical of the sex industry is nothing but a big nasty old SWERF.
While it is true that there are some people who make and sell independent videos featuring themselves, possibly performing solo, possibly with partners, and these people are all consenting adults who are enjoying themselves and are not being coerced in any way, these individuals are in the minority. I am not talking about these people.
The majority of the "sex industry" is made up of trafficked persons who are not having a swinging old time making money having free-wheeling, happy-go-lucky sex. Many of these trafficked persons are children.
Stop defending the rights of punters/johns to buy sex without fear of repercussion. Studies have shown that "sex workers" in places that have legalized prostitution across the board are treated reprehensibly by buyers and not protected by law enforcement.
The Nordic Model is a better approach. It protects trafficked persons from being punished for prostitution while punishing those who purchase sex.
The "Happy Hooker" is a myth. The majority of people forced into "sex work" by economic circumstance or by other people are far from happy.

~Sly Has Spoken~

Image copyright juliahenze

purchased from 123rf.com

Sly Fawkes Talks: Another of the many reasons why

Another of the many reasons why I'm a feminist

Why I marched in protest of the new fascist, woman-hating regime, even though it damn near knocked me out (but that's a story for another time)

Why I will fight for equality until the day I'm carried out feet first for the last time

Trigger warning for discussion of sexual assault

My maternal grandmother was coerced into a sexual relationship by her supervisor, who threatened her with loss of her job if she didn't comply. He knew she had two daughters depending on her paycheck. My mother told me that he even made my grandmother have sex with him while she was on her period, as if he wasn't humiliating her enough. My grandmother later had a psychological breakdown and ended up in the mental hospital for several months, putting added stress on my mother who was trying to finish high school as well as care for her younger sister.

I hope the bastard who did this is burning in whatever hell there may be.

~Sly~

Copyright: juliahenze / 123RF Stock Photo