ok yes, so society places unfair beauty standards on men “be tall, be muscular, but not too tall not too muscular, etc.” but the fact of the matter is that when men don’t obtain those standards it’s ok! society doesn’t say “well you’re useless now” even when looking at the ugliest man society will say “well he’s smart, he’s funny, he makes a lot of money” what have you, even if those things aren’t true, ugly men are still given value and ugly women are not. so if we could please stop saying things like “well yeah, but society gives men unobtainable beauty standards too” that would be great because they are just not the same.
unattractive men retain their humanity, unattractive women do not
In Uttar Pradesh, you can walk into a store and buy video clips of horrific attacks shot on mobile phones. Now anti-rape campaigners are fighting back.
Geeta*, a community health worker from Muzaffarnagar, a district in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, was leaving the village where she worked when she was raped by four men. Early last year, the mother of three killed herself after a video of the assault was circulated on WhatsApp.
Just a week later, Muzaffarnagar was back in the news when a video of a young woman’s 2013 gang rape went viral. The victim, whose husband later abandoned her, tried to commit suicide several times. Less than six months later, a 17-year-old girl was abducted, gang raped, and blackmailed with a video that was subsequently shared on social media.
These are the known instances in a phenomenon where the majority of the cases go unreported. In all these incidents, the victims of these horrific crimes had been intimidated, blackmailed, and shamed with videos made on mobile phones—footage that was later circulated within their village and the wider community.
“We are working on such cases all the time now,” says Rehana Adib, a women’s rights activist in Muzaffarnagar who has worked on all three cases. It can even happen, she adds, in cases where a woman is simply conversing with a man on her phone, which is frowned upon in more conservative and rural parts of India. “Everyone has a mobile phone, and if a woman is even talking to a man, he can tape it and use it to blackmail her. It’s because these women bear the burden of the entire family’s honor. If that is seemingly violated, there’s no going back, she cannot be forgiven, and the family’s honor can only be restored once they are rid of her.”
Adib had reached out to support the woman who had been raped in 2013, but says that her team has not been able to trace her whereabouts for the past few months. “Her phone is off and her family won’t tell us anything. We don’t know if she’s been banished by them or if she’s even alive.”
In August, the Times of India found hundreds—possibly thousands—of rape videos were being sold across Uttar Pradesh. The clips were sold under the counter for as little as 50 to 100 rupees ($0.75-$1.50), readily available to download on to phones or pen drives at local kiosks and paan-cigarette shops. “Porn is passe,” one shopkeeper told the Times. “These real life crimes are the rage.” A subsequent Al Jazeera investigation found that local police were oblivious to the underground trade happening under their noses, with one bewildered senior officer asking, “Rape video, what is this?”
In the public outrage that followed, police announced a statewide crackdown on the trade. Uttar Pradesh police spokesperson Rahul Srivastava told Broadly: “We had to pose as decoy customers and seized hundreds of CDs, pen drives, and laptops and even arrested some of the traders who were selling porn and rape videos together.”
“Porn is passe,” one shopkeeper told the Times. “These real life crimes are the rage.”
This is what happens when porn gets normalised and people get desensitised to it. Men start looking for more and more extreme stuff. Now they can’t even watch what they believe is simulated rape porn, they can only get off to rapes that they know are real. Good job, pro porn folks.
Anonymous said:
Being anti sex-work is such a white rad fem bullshit thing. Like I love my job. I get paid so much more money than I eva would have without it & it's so gross when people who aren't SWs and call themselves feminists are anti something that they've never experienced. It's like how white rad fems ignore POC because none of the issues directly effect them. The only way to be pro-woman is to be pro legal SW so we have all the rights of every other job &minimize trafficking
I don’t know what the context of this ask is because I haven’t talked about this in a long time but I am completely against the sex and porn industries and you won’t convince me that’s a “"white”“” thing when Nigerian women are being trafficked and forced into prostitution in Italy and the rest of western Europe, when the sex industry in east asia was built buy colonialism and orientalism, when the us (and other western) military pushes millions of women in occupied territories into extreme poverty which leaves them more vulnerable to traffickers and forcing women into prostitution as there is little (or no) other way to survive in war torn countries. All of this contributes to the sex industry / sex tourism so no, being against such industries is not a “"white”“ thing and if you’d read the work of nonwhite radical feminists / postcolonial feminists you’d know that. I will always prioritise the safety and wellbeing of women forced into the sex industry (especially those from nonwestern countries) over the small minority of women who are there by “choice” (even this is arguable because economic coercion.) To be pro woman is to eliminate the economic coercion which forces women into such industries to survive and the colonialist exploitation of nonwhite and/or nonwestern women and their countries.
It’s a privilege to love your job as a sex worker and it’s a privilege to get paid at all. Most sex workers don’t.
^^^^^^^
Damn straight.
If you think that sex work is so empowering, you should watch movies like “Las Elegidas” and “Paradise Suite”. See how women are treated in countries like Mexico, how they’re dragged to the world of prostitution against their will (often by their boyfriends) and how everyone in the neighborhood is aware of it and still do nothing and how men are the ones who often provide from it and make money off of it? Just fuck off.
does anon not realize how astronomical the sex trafficking rates are for women of color? does anon also not realize that sex trafficking goes up in areas where sex work is legalized? does anon care about anyone but themselves? the answer to all these is no
i like how space doesn’t care about me. it’s impossible to disappoint the sun
This is why I like pets.
Me: Hey guinea pig, today I screwed up bigtime at work and my boss really chewed me out. I feel completely humiliated and like a total failure.
Guinea pig: Prrr? Squeek. [Translation: I do not understand human language, nor do I have any concept of work, success, failure, conflict, or shame. But you made a noise so I’m making a noise back.]
Me: Thank you. That puts everything in perspective.
i’m trying to get a hold on the ‘random guy on the internet’ demographic by reading askreddit threads and some of the stuff i’ve found about how fathers and sons watch, read and interact around porn has been…disturbing, to say the least.
all this is only the tip of the iceberg. from maybe a 5 minute internal search. it’s like ‘watching the questionably portrayed violent rape of women on camera is what we do, son’. the very last stage of familial male socialisation. it’s terrifying to think that the men we know might behave like this in private. that they’re enabling damaging and violent thought pathways in their own sons, that they’re steering them into lives full of sexual violence and emotional distance towards women. that this is a facet of ‘dude culture’ that’s just taken for granted.
