Commentary.
In February, I posted two pieces in Bed-Stuy on Tompkins and Halsey. These two pieces got the most attention of any pieces I’ve put up so far. Within a few days, someone had written his response to the work directly onto the posters. From there, a woman wrote a response to him. And it went on and, on with different hand-written comments creating this kind of interesting discussion. The pieces remained up until a week or so ago, when the phallic image was drawn. That’s when I decided to try to take them down.
The “Stop Telling Women to Smile” piece remained in tact enough for me to include it in the exhibition. I thought it was important to present in the show, so that people could view these written reactions.
I love when assertive women scare men to such an extent that they have to resort to infantile shit like this.
They think it will shut women up, but it really just fuels everything further, I hope they know that.
The “devolution” of the poster is more interesting to me than the originals, which I’ve reblogged before.
The fact that a man decided to comment on the poster physically, and was the first to do so, says a lot. Whenever women defend ourselves we get these counter arguments. We get people in general, and not just men, trying to cut down our personal initiatives. And when women, like on the poster, attempt to hold a real discussion we get the brunt of the “dick solution” where we are told that we hate men, we haven’t had a “dick that was good” or we get a penis drawn on the poster meant to make a social commentary about our “place.”
I’ve reblogged the individual posters before because I understand them as a victim of the suggestions. But I’m reblogging them now to show the attempt to keep women in their societal place in our culture.
I mean, I can’t really pretend to be surprised by this. The fact that a man saw a poster made by a woman demanding not to be treated like an object in public and instead of absorbing the message or internalizing it, he covered it with his own excuses for why his behavior is acceptable despite the poster telling him to STOP.
And of course, when women respond, his instinct is to cover them with penises. Because men are also really mature and think the world revolves around their stupid, shriveled cocks.
This photo — taken by Bug Squad’s Kathy Keatley Garvey — captures the moment after a bee sting when the honeybee attempts to fly away (with the barbed stinger still lodged in the victim). See that trail of goo? It’s actually the bee’s abdominal tissue.
If guys were as mad about rape as they are duck face we wouldn’t have a rape culture problem.
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Jamie Kilstein (via stuzie) Other things most straight white guys get way more upset about than they do about rape:
(via blossom-bamford)
(via iphisquandary)
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Stop telling women that we should find ourselves beautiful and that we should love ourselves when you are standing right there, judging us on how our knees look in short skirts and how prominent our boobs are in a sweater and how much makeup we are or are not wearing.
Instead of us working harder on “love your body” and “find your inner beauty”, the rest of the world should be working harder on “stop telling women their bodies are a shameful place to live but that if they’re strong enough, they will learn to embrace that shame.”
This is my body. It’s not “beautiful”. I don’t “love it”. I don’t have to. I don’t have to have any strong feelings about my body. And whatever feelings I do have are not somehow invalid if they’re not glowing reviews.
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| — | Elyse Mofo, “Don’t Tell Me to Love My Body” (via nightrevelations) |
