On Kindness

on kindness

equal sign, jhope @btsinthemoment / everything everywhere all at once / P.O.P, jhope @doolsetbangtan / dogfish, mary oliver

unmade bed no. 27

rec list on compulsory femininity/the beauty myth

text:

the beauty myth: how images of beauty are used against women by naomi wolf

femininity and domination: studies in the phenomenology of oppression by sandra lee bartky (especially foucault, femininity and the modernization of patriarchal power)

race, beauty, and the tangled knot of a guilty pleasure by maxine leeds craig

objectification theory: toward understanding women’s lived experiences and mental health risks by barbara l. fredrickson

beauty work: individual and institutional rewards, the reproduction of gender, and questions of agency by samantha kwan and mary nell trautner

unbearable weight: feminism, western culture, and the body by susan bordo

wounded beauty: an exploratory essay on race, feminism, and the aesthetic question by anne anlin cheng

selling feminism, consuming femininity by amanda m. gengler

choosing to conform: the discursive complexities of choice in relation to feminine beauty practices by avelie stuart and ngaire donaghue

globalization and beauty: a historical and firm perspective by geoffrey jones

video:

sexy inc.: our children under influence (30 min. documentary)

the sexy lie (10 min. ted talk)

missrepresentation (full length documentary, available on netflix)

this is by no means a complete list of everything that’s been said on the topic but it’s a good place to get started for everyone who wants to educate themselves on it!

so is writing everything in lowercase a socialist lifestyle because you aren't capitalising anything? it's the anti-capitalist agenda?!

not to be sappy on main BUT one thing that i really loved when studying linguistics was that the more important a word is, the earlier the concept of this thing was given a word. for example, the word water is similar in many similar languages (aqua, agua, água). so, the more important a word is, the more languages it’ll be similar across and the older this word will be, theoretically and generally speaking (many other things also affect this)

AND SO in my years studying linguistics, there was one word that was nearly identical across so many regionally different languages (though there are outliers of course), from europe to most of asia to subsaharan africa to indigenous languages. across nearly all languages this is the first word people learn how to say and maybe the first word humans in general officially named and defined:

mamãe - portuguese 

妈妈 (māmā) - chinese

ਮੰਮੀ (mamī) - punjabi

mamah - mayan (yucatec)

мама - bulgarian, russian, ukrainian

ماں (mäm) - urdu

মা (mā) - bengali

mẹ (may) - vietnamese

ママ (mama) - japanese

అమ్మ (am'ma) - telugu

mama - quechua

મમ્મી (mam'mī) - gujarati

അമ്മ (am'ma) - malayalam

amá - navajo

엄마 (omma) - korean

eme - native hawaiian

onam - uzbek

aana - yupik

mema - tagish

μαμά (mamá) - greek

mama - swahili

أمي (umi) - arabic

mayi - chichewa

माँ (ma) - hindi

mam - dutch

ម៉ាក់ (ma) - khmer

แม่ (mæ̀) - thai

அம்மா (am'mā) - tamil

අම්මා (ammā) - sinhala

amai - zulu

ama - basque

आमा (āmā) - nepali

အမေ (amay) - myanmar (burmese)

mamá - spanish

mom/mum- english

this isn’t actually the first word because we teach babies this word (most likely), but because the “mama” or “ama” sounds are the easiest things for babies to say, and it’s nearly always the only thing they can say at first, and adults across all languages defined their language around that.

babies all over the world for thousands and thousands of years all started out blabbering sounds like “mama” and mothers everywhere were all like Oh Shit That’s Me! I’m Mama!

weird how every single thing we ever experience is cosmically mundane but individually profound