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5th March is paperback publication day for Unkind - on how #BeKind might not, in fact, be making everyone more kind. Order it here! geni.us/UnkindOrder
Victoria Smith
16.9K posts
Victoria Smith
@glosswitch
Author of Hags: The Demonisation of Middle-Aged Women and Unkind: How Kindness Culture Punishes Women
Agent: @LittleHardman Email: glosswatch @ gmail.com
- "The talkativeness of women has been gauged in comparison not with men but with silence. Women have not been judged on the grounds of whether they talk more than men, but of whether they talk more than silent women." Dale SpenderThis is creative😂😂
- I can't stand the way the men in the Pelicot trial get to tell everyone about their sad childhoods, as if now is the time and place. At what point is a man's complete and utter lack of empathy for a woman enough for us to say "no - all of our compassion is for her"?
- I find it amazing that this has become so completely normalised at the same time as celebrity feminism fusses over The Handmaid's Tale (which they've some how conveniently decided is only really relevant to abortion)Lily Collins and Charlie McDowell have welcomed their first child via surrogate.
- The magazine that's spent decades telling you you're too fat, too old, too unfashionable, too unsuccessful, too poor and too unfeminine now wants you to know you're too obsessed with "narrow ideals of womanhood"'Excluding trans women from a female-only gym reinforces narrow ideals of womanhood' cosmopolitan.com/uk/body/a64156…
- "Drag queens helped me with my eyeliner" is not a reason to force women to get changed in front of male employees
- Men shouting at women to shut up - blocking passageways, banging on windows, throwing eggs, waving banners threatening decapitation - is exactly what it looks like. It has been happening in plain sight for years, at universities, at feminist gattherings, at party conferences.
- If you are a man who tells female rape survivors who want women-only spaces they're just "obsessed with what's between people's legs", you're not too far along from the abuser who tells his victim that she "loves it really"
- Not all men are a threat to women. Often it's hard to tell which ones are, but sometimes there are signs e.g. defacing feminist statues, waving placards threatening to kill women, having a massive public tantrum about not being allowed into female-only spaces etc.
- Actors "nobly" distancing themselves from JK Rowling should at least have the honesty to say "I don't care if rape victims can't have female-only spaces" and "I'm quite happy for half the human race to henceforth be known as menstruators and uterus havers"
- It's funny how women don't get credited for their contributions to, say, the moon landings or discovering DNA, but it's widely accepted that we invented biological sex five minutes ago, just to be mean
- As well as male patterns of criminality, we could also talk about male patterns of entitlement. When a man steals a place on a woman-only team or shortlist, it's part of the history of men edging women out of public life on the basis that everything should go to them first.
- This really struck me from JK Rowling"s excellent interview. It's clear she understands how those who target children from unloving or cruel backgrounds often do so by convincing them it's care or love thetimes.com/article/57517a…
- In ancient Greece, people couldn't own property, couldn't vote, and weren't allowed to participate in the government. Aristotle believed people were inferior to people, with pregnant people serving as mere vessels for the life principle delivered by people
