I’ve been following the #solidarityisforwhitewomen hashtag on twitter and chortling rather gleefully every time someone tweets a total burn!
https://twitter.com/search?q=%23SolidarityIsForWhiteWomen&src=hash
I’ve argued before that feminism as a political ideology only caters to white women who work outside the home for wages, and that white women have approximately zero interest in seeing life get any better for the women who do all the shit work white ladies are too precious to submit to.
What I find really, really interesting is that not only are feminists unwilling to look at how their cushy lives are made possible by all the work that women of color do, they don’t even seem willing to reach out to those women who have broken through the cultural barriers to achieve the feminist white lady version of success. How many writers at Jezebel, Slate, the HuffPo Women, the Frisky, xoJane and any other number of feminist blogs have nannies and housekeepers who work, most likely, without standard labor force protections and benefits that white ladies pretty much take for granted?
How many white feminists writers stop in the middle of their oh-so-important work to text the nanny not to forget about Imogen’s dentist appointment and the bus fare is on the table?
If feminists were the exceptions, the wonderful employers who provided fair wages and benefits and working conditions to THEIR black women, don’t you think they would trumpet that from the rooftops?
*crickets*
Yeah, not so much, huh?
http://www.domesticworkers.org/pdfs/HomeEconomicsEnglish.pdf
I find it a little sad that black women are still trying to find some way to have a conversation with white women about how they can be included in the whole feminist discussion. Here is Mikki Kendall, the woman who started the whole hastag, reflecting on the experience.
Even now, in my conversations with other women of color it has come up often, how White the narrative around feminism is, and how that Whiteness lends itself to the erasure of the problems specifically facing women of color. Early #SolidarityIsForWhiteWomen tweets were an expression of my personal frustrations with an ongoing problem in digital feminist communities. However, the conversation rapidly moved beyond the personal into the structural problems that have kept this divide in feminism alive.
http://www.ebony.com/news-views/on-feminist-solidarity-and-community-453/2#axzz2d2EB4o50
Ah, the structural problems. There’s the rub. And here’s the truth: white women cannot participate in the labor force without having an exploitable source of domestic labor, and the culture of entrenched poverty and single motherhood in the black community continuously creates a workforce for white women to use and abuse.
It might be ugly to read, but there you have it. There are two things white feminists do NOT want to encourage or examine in any meaningful way: solidarity between men and women of color, and women of color who are closing the gap with white lady accomplishments. Both of those things threaten women’s exploitable pool of poor workers, and if those workers disappear, so do market opportunities for white women.
Someone MUST do the dirty work. Someone MUST cook and clean and tend to the very old and the very young. And that someone is NOT going to be a fancy feminist with her Women’s Studies degree and ambitions to get the top salary at that not for profit agency she works for providing services based on whatever ideological bullshit the agency has been able to spin to Big Daddy government.
And we’re talking a lot of money. One day, I will have to track down all the grants and funding directed specifically towards women, and unpack just how much cash is at stake for the professional feminist brigade. It didn’t take me long to find this site:
http://www.americasgotgrants.com/grants-for-women.php
Raise your hand now if you are SHOCKED that I cannot find a grants for men mirror site. The America’s Got Grants homepage explicitly offers “women” as a category. But not men. There are no grants specifically for men. Men have to qualify under some condition other than “genitals”.
http://www.americasgotgrants.com/
American white women get a lot of assistance in the form of cash from the Federal Government, but it’s not enough to cover all the expenses. White women still need a helping hand. Successful white women are successful because they have women of color to stand on.
Awww. That’s so sweet. I love that women of color are willing to leave their own children all day to go and take care of white babies. Makes me wanna go buy Aunt Jemima pancake syrup right now.
http://www.returnofkings.com/12753/successful-women-use-poor-women-to-advance
You know what’s really funny? That stereotype about black women being really sassy and loudmouthed and sarcastic and caustic and angry? Where is it now? Latina women have kind of the same caricature applied to them, no? If EVER there was a time to get mouthy and rude, this is it. White women have built an entire political ideology on the backs of women of color and the best women of color can do is call them out gently and respectfully?
Y’all need to get your bitch on, if you ask me.
These two tweets in particular caught my attention:
I would personally think these idea through really carefully. White feminists have a vested interest in making sure that relations between men and women of color are deeply fractured and hostile. Marriage is one of THE BEST ways to build wealth and transmit it to the next generation, in effect becoming “economically white”. I’ll add the disclaimer that not all white people are married and wealthy, and those who aren’t have the same shitty choices as any other poor person, but of ALL the families that ARE rich, MOST of them are white, heterosexual couples with children.
http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2012/08/27/yes-the-rich-are-different/
And they have their own colored folks to pick up the slack and keep life ticking along smoothly.
It really sucks that whenever we talk in the media about women of color, it’s usually along the lines of poor, illiterate, uneducated, exploited, blah blah blah and here I am doing the exact same thing. That’s not to say we SHOULDN’T be discussing the social and cultural aspects of race and gender, but when that’s ALL we discuss, it’s a problem.
So let’s end today talking about the enormous strides women of color have been making in the managerial and professional occupational categories. It ain’t great news, but it’s good.
The employment of women of color increased dramatically in the period between 1990 and 2001. The rate of change for African American women is the lowest increase at 43 percent and the rate of change for Hispanic women is the highest at 104 percent.
Although women of color still remain a relatively small percentage of all officials and managers, their increase in the decade between 1990 and 2001 is dramatic. Their rates of changes range from 75 percent for African American women to 135 percent for Asian women.
http://www.eeoc.gov/eeoc/statistics/reports/womenofcolor/womenofcolor.pdf
Women of color continue to push their way to the top of the economic ladder, and in one sense that’s really great. Our entire economy and society is built on the assumption that the cream rises to the top. The barriers we put in place against the truly smart and capable and intelligent and ambitious for spurious reasons like race or ability or class or gender hurts our whole society.
We need our human capital. But all that human capital starts out in the same form.
Women of color scrambling their way to the top still need their toilets scrubbed and their kids fed and the laundry done.
It comes back to the same question: who is doing the grunt work?
If women of color think feminism is going to help them untangle the web of domestic labor and race and social conditions, they are sadly mistaken. White women have no incentive to do so, and don’t even want to have the conversation.
They can’t afford to. How are white ladies supposed to storm the barricades without colored women to man the fort?
http://impactofilms.com/maidinamerica/
Some of the biggest advocates for feminism seem to believe that in order to feel powerful you have to make another woman subservient, and that is not what feminism is about at all.
Tori Amos
Oh really, Tori?
I wonder what your housekeeper thinks about that?
Lots of love,
JB
judgybitch 
Oh, the gender pay gap again. You killed that dragon already, didn’t you JB?
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I don’t look down on housework and rearing children, that’s my current job, but feminists sure do. So this whole idea that being a domestic woman is oppression *and then* requiring other women to do it *for you* so you can be “liberated” just shows the huge flaw in feminism. It also shows how completely fantastical their ideas are “Women don’t have to stay home!” actually, yes we do. It’s just a matter of if it’s us or if we are outsourcing to other women.
I do remember, though, watching an interview with a feminist author on Colbert where she said if women want to be domestic they need to work outside the home. Meaning maids and childcare providers are less oppressed than SAHMs because they bring home money. Feminism really boils down to being able to make money. That is where their values lie. But before they argue that they are helping to “liberate” these women by giving them jobs outside the home I’d like to know how “liberated” these women really are, aka how much they are making. I’m betting it’s not all that much.
Western middle class+ white women are really the most “privileged” of all of us. Funny how they like to say they are the worse off. There’s a word for that: spoiled.
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The problem I have with “feminism” is simply that there are so many varieties of it; 1st, 2nd, 3rd generations; neo-feminists, Marxist feminists, “feminazis” and so on. It’s no longer a unified movement, and I really can’t get my head around it.
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As Esther Vilar said: “Feminists only want to work if the work is a pleasure”.
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This isn’t really about the pay gap, though.
It’s about feminists claiming they represent the best interests of all women, while happily employing women of color to do all the shitty work and then telling WOC to shut up already when they want to talk about it.
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I understand that, but you still referenced the pay gap. Not arguing with your statements, but it drives me nuts that you have to bring it up. It should just die already.
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I am going to be very politically uncorrect now: feminism is about WHITE women because only white women can be feminist. Not due to economic reasons but for phenotype reasons.
Only beautiful women have power (all the power) over men.
White women tend to be beautiful (not saying ALL white women are beautiful, just that they TEND to be) And the most important thing: white women tend to age gracefully and very sexual. Not the case of women of other races, sorry. In general. I know there are exceptions.
When you go to a country with a huge amount of women in their 40s that still drope dead gorgeous… it is, for sure, a very feminist country.
Some may say: “Hey, so then, what happens with Russia? Russia is not a feminist country at all. In fact it is very male chauvinist country. And Russian women are white and gorgeous”.
Well, it depends of what you call “feminism”. Russia it is not a patriarchy at all (it seems it is) Russia it is a heavy matriarchy (the Motherland) Women are goddesses in Russia, and they are worshiped as such. All that myth about Russian men beating their women it is “mail order bride” bullshit.
Just watch a litttle Russian pop in Google. Or go to any Russian nightclub. Women join the military and everything they like. They behave the way they like. The only difference with Western European women is that they are not agressive to men. They are extremely respectful to men. They let men believe that they are the kings. And men love it. And they are more family oriented than their Western sisters. This is true. Just one word: conservafeminism.
Only white women are divine (with exceptions)
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Hmmm, I dunno, I think race is a separate issue entirely.
This isn’t necessarily a case of white women vs black women, it’s an issue of rich women vs poor women. Now, it just so happens that in our society, most rich women are white and most poor women are black, but that’s not really due *to* feminism. The issues of why race plays a role in economic status is a separate matter entirely.
Now you’re absolutely right that rich feminists (who are typically white) depend a great deal on the existence of poor female labor to do their “dirty work” for them, but I don’t think they particularly care what race they are. In other words: so long as the black women who make economic gains are balanced out by other white women suffering economic losses, the rich feminists (white AND black) will be fine.
They’re just inherently selfish people. They have no particular loyalty or “solidarity” with other women, or with other white people for that matter. They don’t care who it is that’s going to take care of their children and do their dishes, so long as it isn’t them…
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Its an interesting topic because at the end of the day, gender feminism is a rich white womens game for sure.
I think equality feminism ie: the right to vote, hold political office, attend higher (even lower) education, be legally responsible to sign contracts, have bank accounts, etc. crosses all class and race.
Gender feminism, which we see more and more now that equality feminism has done its job,does not. It is all about special treatment not equality and that special treatment is reserved for rich, white women. Its concerns are government mandated quotas for fortune 500 CEO positions and congress seats. How that helps the minimum wage nanny or housekeeper is anyone’s guess.
All this navel gazing about women working outside the home, well women of the lower economic class have always done it. That latino, black or eastern european women raising your kids or cleaning your house, chances are her mother and grandmother did the same thing.
While rich white women shriek over a mythical wage gap, close to 50% of Black men without a high school diploma are unemployed. Hundreds of millions in grants and special funding for women to engage in useless gender studies careers, but nothing for say trades training for men of color.
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A country with huge amounts of gorgeous mature women: Sweden. Very feminist and very WHITE country.
The end of feminism will be the next one: feminist white women they go for the black guys. Because the size.
Then, a mainly white country like USA will become a mulato country like Brazil.
Brazil is a very male chauvinsit country but extremely laid back when it comes to sex. It is a “non conservative” male chauvinism. Women in Brazil are very sexually free but they love to please their men. They are delighted of making lots of sandwiches and “feijoada” to their men.. Feminism in Brazil? No way!!
That is the future
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#solidarityisforwhitewomen is perfection because it exposes the large inherent leak in the feminist ideal system…. that is, outsourced parenting.
You see, stay at home moms became poisonous to feminism when feminism sought to attack male power structures. It should be obvious why, because stay at home moms cannot be recruited to, actually, you know, stand and attack male power structures because they’re spending their time raising children. Raising kids is no small task, it’s a huge task, and it takes a serious time commitment. Why this has to be stated, I don’t know.
So, with SAHMs deemed personas-non-gratas, feminism became free to create their ideal picture of a mom as someone who breaks through that “glass ceiling” while raising kids.
What was never addressed is that it is physically impossible to both raise children on your own, with no outside help, and at the same time have a power career that attacks male power structures. The two are incompatible. Oh, yes, feminists attempted for many decades to hide this fact, but now it’s as plain as the camel toe on the boss.
You simply cannot be a full-time-mom and full-time-man-in-mans-world, and that’s what the feminists wanted to be true. But it’s simply impossible. So what did these women do? Well, they did what any saavy corporate lackey did, they outsourced their own job for as cheap as possible and tried to look like geniuses for doing so.
20 years from now, the chickens of raising children through outsourcing your parenting job will come home to roost, we’re only beginning to see that now with the millenials. Gen-X’ers now consider day-care-raising of kids to be normal. In fact they often scoff at the idea that day care is paying someone else to parent your kids.
So yes, when you see “the help” realize that feminism is selling them bullshit with a bow, it is f-ing hilarious.
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“Someone MUST do the dirty work. Someone MUST cook and clean and tend to the very old and the very young. And that someone is NOT going to be a fancy feminist with her Women’s Studies degree and ambitions to get the top salary at that not for profit agency she works for providing services based on whatever ideological bullshit the agency has been able to spin to Big Daddy government.”
Ta laf dats truez.
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Come on JB, white feminists have always adored WoC – they make lovely pets.
White feminist women, and perhaps all white women in thier wake, are on a fasttrack to bogeyman status thanks to 100 years of documented exploitation of, well, pretty much everyone.
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Couldn’t agree more.
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Does it drive you nuts that they’re still talking about the pay gap in the media, commerce and society in general? Maybe you should give your friendly local political rep, boss and news desk a call to let them know it’s been referenced already.
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This isn’t necessarily a case of white women vs black women, it’s an issue of rich women vs poor women. Now, it just so happens that in our society, most rich women are white and most poor women are black, but that’s not really due *to* feminism. The issues of why race plays a role in economic status is a separate matter entirely.
Spot on. That’s not to say that many white feminists don’t harbor not-so-subtle racial biases, but you’re point is correct: socioeconomic class, rather than race or ethnicity, are the primary drivers here.
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I love that women of color are willing to leave their own children all day to go and take care of white babies.
You’d probably not be surprised at how casually frontal many upper middle class white women, whether they’re committed feministas or simply garden-variety arrogant bitches, are about the whole black mammy thing. My wife has, on at least two occasions, been outright propositioned by said type of women to care for their spoiled, arrogant offspring for some paltry amount of pay, based on a blanket assumption that my wife, as a black woman, somehow is desperate for income.
The first time she got such an offer, she began her reply with “Now see here, bitch…” and it went quickly downhill from there (I doubt the object of her wrath ever pulled such a stunt again). The second time I just happened to be on the other side of the room and in response to the “how’d you like to be mammy to my chillens?” question, my wife replied “let me ask my husband what he thinks.”
When the feminista saw my white self, clad in business attire, sidle up next to my wife, you could’ve mistaken her face for a surface map of Mars. She quickly made her exit without saying a word. If only I had my digital camcorder to capture it for posterity…
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What you wrote about Russian women is not true. Women are not worshiped, spousal abuse is still rampant. In the military women are an exception, serving in auxiliary units only and not in the front line. And Russian women are very aggressive towards men, a Russian gold digger is a true phenomenon, flying from one man to the next to use him. It’s well more complicated than you described.
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I just want to point out that finding how much money is available for female charities, as well as what the women working in those charities make, is pretty easy to do. You probably already know this, but for the people at home: Charity funding sources are supposed to be a matter of public record, because they don’t pay tax. Some charities will refuse to provide financial info because they think they don’t have to, but they do.
To find out where the money for any charity goes, find its form 990 tax information. Guidestar is an excellent free resource to help you locate these forms. Maybe a charity won’t give John Q. Public its financial info, but it can’t stop you from accessing its tax information.
The leader of a woman’s shelter I worked for briefly made six figures. Granted, her life probably consisted of running that shelter, but that’s definitely a high salary. I wonder what her charity could have done with an extra 50k a year?
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Lots of the feminists simply didn’t have any children (or at most one). THAT was another, very common “solution” to the inconvenient truth that a woman can’t be both a full-time mother and a full-time worker (moonlighting at one is more likely, with almost entirely blowing off the one less important to her common also).
I’ve considered getting a T-shirt to wear around post-wall voluntary-barren feminists that reads “My children won’t work to pay your Social Security or pension”. Apt…
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Spaniard August 26, 2013 at 16:58 #
“I am going to be very politically uncorrect now: feminism is about WHITE women because only white women can be feminist. Not due to economic reasons but for phenotype reasons.
Only beautiful women have power (all the power) over men.
White women tend to be beautiful (not saying ALL white women are beautiful, just that they TEND to be) And the most important thing: white women tend to age gracefully and very sexual. Not the case of women of other races, sorry. In general. I know there are exceptions.
When you go to a country with a huge amount of women in their 40s that still drope dead gorgeous… it is, for sure, a very feminist country.”
Boy, you can’t possibly be talking about women in the U.S.
With not that many exceptions, most white women here over 40 pork out to Goodyear blimp size, cut their hair, and add hundreds of items to their checklist for male romantic partners (as their personalities get ever nastier). Sure, black and Hispanic women average even worse for becoming mobile suet storage facilities, but Asian women do better than white women.
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Probably a lot of Russian gold diggers in the “mail order bride” scene.
But, my experience in the Russian world is that they are very family oriented. They find strange to start thinking in motherhood at 30 or even more. Of course, they try to get the best guy. But the average Russian woman does not divorce from hubby “for sport” becsuse they deply believe in the family. And the Law in Russia is not as good to women as in Western Europe or North America in case of divorce.
I always noticed Russian women very respectful to men.
An if you go to any Russian nightclub you will see all that gorgeous (extremely, unbelievable) women, dressed to kill, war olours with that impossible high heels, dancing in the dancefloor and all men around worshiping them, but not pussybegging. At all.
I met more women shooting in the Kalashnikov club than men.
Women tend to be very homophobic also, and that is a difference with their Western sisters. Pro Gay Rights Activist they did not understand that Yelena Isinbaeva was being extremely soft comparing to what most od Russian women think about gay people. They think that Spain, for instance (a country that, in other ways, they love) is a “sick” country for allowing the homosexual marriage. I find it funny.
This is my experience.
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LOL!
I do not about U.S. but in Europe, especially Scandinavia, women age so fine.
In Russia they used to become “matrioshkas” but not anymore. You cannot believe the amount of fine milfs you can see there.
Asian women are sexy, but 30+… dramatic down hill. Same happens with the Arabs, the blacks and the browns. I think.
But, what you tell me, is strange… I mean, if women go so downhill 35+ in US, how it comes they have so much LONG power to men? If you live in a society where women are just “springtime fruit”, you cannot never take women very seriously. You just enjoy the season fruit, you see how that fruit gets spoiled in the next season and you wait for the nex arrival of fresh fruit. Just when the fruit is “all season fruit” (at least until the end of the Fall) that “fruit” has long power over you.
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Russia has the biggest life expectancy difference in the world (13yrs). Those bloody Russian men oppressing those poor women.
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I always say there are two types of feminist:
Ugly feminists
Rich feminists
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rich white girl miley cyrus likes to use black women as accessories and stage props. seems to enjoy smacking her stage props on the ass too.
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Very often the two are combined. One of life’s more enduring mysteries…
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It just goes to show you what some people will do for the right amount of money (and then promptly complain that they’re being “exploited”).
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Not only the “mail order bride”, but in Russia itself too, although I would agree that it happens to more affluent Russians in those night clubs that you mention, rather than to rank and file ones. Divorce rates are high too, almost as high as in the west, except most divorces are initiated by men and not by women like in the west. Alcoholism is the huge problems in Russia, especially among men. Russian women are judging men on whether they are heavy drinkers or not, having a non-alcoholic husband is considered a good catch.
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It’s the other way around. Russian man’s life expectancy is barely short of 60. The reason is alcoholism.
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Feminism is a movement aimed at middle class women (usually white) so that they can get out there and compete with men and prove they can do whatever a man can do. It’s about ‘freeing’ women from basing their lives on babies and from the ‘patriarchy’ (which in actual fact gives women many protections and privileges if not abused) and the freedom to sleep with every Mark, Mike and John they take a fancy to. It also gives women the right to pop pills that hurt their bodies and flush their unborn children down the toilet. Women of lower social class and women who prefer traditional female roles are not part of their agenda. I fit both of these descriptions. Feminism serves no purpose to me, in fact, it’s a nuisance.
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Very well said indeed.
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This commercial came out right around the time you created this post. Just found it. It summarizes everything you wrote about very nicely. Notice the well off kids (all girls, of course and all white), the mommy using Skype to say goodnight while she is on a business trip and still wearing her power suit, no daddy around, and the well dressed babysitter who is a woman of color.
AT&T commercial.
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Wait, at just what level do people begibän hiring nannies? I always thought it was something the super-rich did and below that was daycare centers or (not sure if this is the english term) daycare mommies (really a mini daycare center with only one employee).
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And this is why it is hilarious to see how angry and bitter white women get when they see a white man with a hot Asian woman or a hot brown woman.
I am a white guy and frankly, I hate the vast majority of white women because they act like a bunch of spoiled little brats.
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When I lived in Venezuela, women expected that I would have a fleet of servants attending to my basic hygiene. The fact that I wasn’t comfortable with that was seen as an economic slight. Of course the economy adapts to whatever pathology white affluent women are peddling. Those of us who are not particularly affluent may be easily accused of false advertising. As usual, those on the bottom of the economic totem pole suffer from the childish idiocy of those at the top at that includes white women. I predict that brown opaque contact lenses will someday be in vogue by necessity.
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This is such a hidden gem of a post, and something I’ve honestly never thought about, which is pretty bad. It does irk me that the only acceptable critique of feminism is “lack of intersectionalityyyy~~” according to feminists, when we both know intersectionality would make the goals of these white feminist ladies impossible.
Wonderful writing and topic.
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