my-oddly-drawn-circus:

thecuckoohaslanded:

earthlydreams:

feminismisatrick:

misanthrpologie:

Saving Face (2012), acid attacks on women in Pakistan

Meanwhile, in America, feminists are complaining about how dress codes are oppressive.

You idiots have never experienced oppression, and pray you never do, because this is what it looks like.

As a South Asian American feminist, let me remind everyone that oppression is not a competition.

Just because we fight one type of sexism doesn’t mean we don’t care about other instances of sexism that don’t affect us directly in our day to day lives.

My heart goes out to this woman and the hundreds of other victims like her. I want to educate people about these kinds of incidents. I support organizations that help women like this.

You may think that dress code issues are trivial, but they are related to a larger issue of women’s bodily autonomy, which affects women’s health and safety.

So please, let’s try to bring awareness and bring about change instead of insulting entire groups of people because they are facing issues that are less scary than the one presented.

“oppression is not a competition”

thank you so much for this wording

Every time someone, usually a guy, complains about feminists not experiencing oppression, I can’t help but see what they are really trying to say.

“This is how men could be treating you, be grateful it’s only as bad as it is now.”

And that’s actually an attribute of abusers, I believe I read somewhere. To compare you to someone being treated worse and tell you you should be grateful you have it so good. It convinces the victim they should be silent in the face of their abuse.

It’s literally an abuse tactic. 

Every time someone says something like, “You […] have never experienced oppression, and pray you never do, because this is what it looks like.” What they are saying is, “shut up, we could treat you worse if we wanted to.”

I saw this from a submission that commented: “This post is one of the most marginalizing thing I’ve seen towards acid attacks, while simultaneously painting men as something that has to be muzzled from brutalizing women.”

I’m inclined to agree with the submitter: this commenter is literally claiming that perspective is a form of abusive manipulation, that differentiating between inconveniences and bodily mutilation is just a tactic to keep women subservient. This is so thoroughly wrong-headed as to defy my comprehension. I looked long and hard at this person’s blog to make sure they weren’t a troll. 

Equating “you’re not oppressed” to “you could be oppressed if you don’t shut up” might be the most pure and undiluted form of the strawman argument I’ve ever seen. Circus, you’re literally and actually making up threats in your own mind so you can feel like a victim, because you can’t stand being one-upped for sympathy by a woman who was burned with acid. 

That is frankly inhuman.

(via pussysista)