8m - Tumblr Posts
Other women are not your enemies. We’re sisters. We must take care of each other despite our differences.
(TERFs fuck off btw. This post is not for you.)
Mexico was painted purple by feminists today 🥰
Today, the feminist movement took the streets of mexico, with women marching for their rights and against the epidemic of feminicides that is taking place in the country 💕💓😭
When the march began to be organized in social networks, people were "worried" and critizised the lack of empathy (from feminists) with the women (specifically) who'd have to clean the streets after the marching - the cleaning ladies showed up to show their support tho 💖♀️
This was today and I'm filled with pride, I wasn't able to participate and it breaks my heart. However tomorrow is the mexican feminist strike - just like Icelandic women did in 1975 - tomorrow, Mexican feminist groups have called for a full on strike: no women in schools, work places or even on the streets. Women won't buy or sell anything tomorrow, or actively participate in the mexican society in any way, including social media. No internet tomorrow for us. So I wont see ya until the tenth. ✊✊✊
DESTRUYELO TODO MUJER.
Nunca más tendrán la comodidad de nuestro silencio.
¡Y QUE CHINGUEN A SU MADRE LOS QUE NOS QUIEREN SILENCIAR!
Guadalajara, 2020.
Gritamos por las que ya no están.
After a march (March 8th) and after a #daywithoutwomen (March 9th) in Mexico, the onslaught of mockery, belittling and offenses against women and the whole feminist movement are rampant on social media pages.
Yes, there are messages of support. Yet, I find it easier to see messages of negative kind, even when I'm not actively looking for them.
One of the most used subjects to villainaze the movement, THE PURPOSE of it, is the damage over the monuments and "symbols".
Well, I say "FUCK THAT!" and here is why. In English so everyone can read it.
The 6th stanza in our national anthem says:
"Antes, Patria, que inermes tus hijos
Bajo el yugo su cuello dobleguen,
Tus campiñas con sangre se rieguen,
Sobre sangre se estampe su pie.
Y tus templos, palacios y torres
Se derrumben con hórrido estruendo,
Y sus ruinas existan diciendo:
De mil héroes la patria aquí fue."
Which roughly translates to: 《Before, Oh Homeland, your unarmed / sons bend their necks under a rule of control, / your crops shall be watered by blood, / in blood the foot shall be stomped. /And your temples, palaces and towers / shall be brought down with a horrendous roar, / And their debris shall exist preaching: / Of thousand heroes the homeland was made. 》
Pretty awesome, right? This whole stanza is practically saying "Yo, we not going down without a fight, we gonna f*ck you up before looking down our feet", summing it up is a 'Death before being a mere servant' debacle. Which is pretty hard core (Our whole national anthem is like this! We telling "hey, if you ever cross a line, we fucking you up so hard, your next generation will feel it").
But, what I love the MOST of this stanza is the last part. The last four verses are quite powerful too and the reason we have the right to paint over and "vandalize" the monuments we fucking want.
It starts 《And your temples, palaces and towers / shall be brought down with a horrendous roar》. The symbols, images, the faces of our country, they all represent the ideology and the ideals of our society and government; they all should be brought down when their purpose is defeated or tainted. Before "bending the knee", before being dominated by false rulers, when blood has been spilled and injustice is rampant. We shall bring all this tainted ideals down, destroy all that represent it. With no fear, without apologies, at the point where we no longer agree with those ideas, we break them.
Then continues: 《And the debris shall exist preaching: / Of thousand heroes the Homeland was made.》. The 'destruction' of an idea is not the end, it should never be the end. After bringing down those monuments, those images, they should serve us as a a base to reconstruct a better ideal. We should change and evolve, so should our institutions.
Symbols are useless to a society when they have lost their meaning and their weight, they are hollow. And for us, all mexican women, all Mexicans, they have become empty images put on by a government that preaches peace when 10 women are murdered daily under gender violence, justice when rapist and murderers are freed or not even prosecuted.
So, no, we don't give a shit about the wall, the door, the statue; we give a shit about OUR safety and EVERYONE'S safety. We don't care how many images of the country we "damage", we will bring them down and demand the change of such archaic and useless methods/ideas.
We aim to change, move. Not to be stuck in place. We aim to build.
And in Spanish that translates to:
No bajes la mirada, no te dejes vencer, no te dejes subyugar. Pelea, Lucha. Tira, derrumba, elimina, destruye lo que tengas que destruir, no importa que sean los monumentos de un estado construido en ideas arcaicas. Construyan una patria a la que puedan amar, a la que puedan hacer crecer en vez de estancar
#8M2020: Queremos vivir, no sobrevivir.
Women have always been a part of our stories, although mostly got treated as villains worthy of punishment.
Don’t believe me? Let’s start with Lilith whose crime was refusing to submit to Adam’s will, asking to be treated as the equal she was. Or perhaps I should mention Eve who often gets blamed for the banishment from paradise, however Adam also ate from the forbidden fruit, yet nobody ever judges him, just Eve.
Maybe we should move towards the Greek tradition. Nowadays certain retellings about Persephone make a villain of Demeter. Why does the only way that story gets told now is by villainizing the mother who just wanted to find her child? Sound familiar? Unforgiving for the abduction of her daughter, she took away all crops and threatened to barren the earth as punishment for her loss while she kept looking with Hekate’s help. Demeter was in such uproar that it forced Zeus’ hand and made him; the king of the gods; go down into the underworld to bring Persephone back with her mother.
What about Aphrodite? Usually reduced to vain and envious, the story of her infidelity to Hephaestus often gets remembered, yet most that condemn the affair tend to forget that he was the one who demanded for her hand, that she didn’t want him and it was Zeus who practically sold her to him.
Perhaps we could talk about Alcippe who was attacked by one of Poseidon’s sons and when her father killed the perpetrator, he was the one put to trial, for seeking justice for his daughter. On the note of Poseidon, let’s not forget that he cursed Pasiphae to lay with the bull and bear the minotaur in payment not for a crime she committed but for her husband’s crime, she was punished for a man’s actions. What about Medusa? She was assaulted by Neptune inside Minerva’s temple and then punished for his actions; or perhaps a blessing to make sure no other man would ever touch her without consent.
Helen of Sparta (yes, Sparta and not Troy) was abducted not once but twice, first by Theseus and later by Paris, however she usually is the one getting blamed for the Trojan war.
The disregard and mistreatment of women are not new but they aren’t old news either. Mothers searching for their children get judged and women forced into roles they never asked for themselves get criticized, but how would we feel? It’s not okay that these stories, these myths can represent the experience of so many women nowadays.