slandv:

dare-i-say-asexual:

The stories of women in my family who were forced into lives they didn’t want and didn’t utilize their passions breaks my heart. My grandma wanted to be a journalist and write about the injustices she saw inflicted on disabled ppl while she was volunteering at a state run institution as a teen. Her father decided that she was “too fat and stupid” for college and forced her to get married at 17 or else he’d make her homeless. As a kid she told me that she wished people believed that she had meaningful opinions on events around her. One of my great grandmothers wanted to be an artist but was pressured into marrying a man who beat her. She stayed up late each night when her children were in bed writing poetry and pasting it over elaborate collages she mad herself. We still have stacks of these notebooks she created but was never allowed to do anything with. My mother wanted to be an operatic singer and was considered a musical prodigy in her town because she taught herself three seperate instruments by 13. When she was 18 she met my then 30 year old father who emotionally manipulated her into giving up her dreams to start a family with him. As a kid I would hear her up at night playing the violin or doing vocal exercises until she became too depressed to practice anymore. Like idk y’all there’s a quiet type of violence in the way women’s talents are devalued and brushed aside in favor of bullying them into “traditional” roles that ultimately don’t fulfill what they wanted for their lives. We’ve lost so much art, music, writing, science, and happiness to misogyny.

jitterati:

womanhood and having a voyeuristic relationship with your own pain

naramdil:

I used to think it was important to have common interests with the person that you are in a relationship with but now I think it is more important to be similar in other aspects. like how kind you are. how you treat the people you care about, how you treat strangers. how you deal with anger. how you deal with pain. and not necessarily dealing with all these things the same way but being perceptive enough to understand what action each situation calls for. it’s important for both people to be on the same page about what that action should be. it’s important to me to have that kind of synchrony.

smallyetbeautiful:

Why are women expected to dilute and tone down their personalities to be more appealing to men. Men are never told that they might struggle to get married because they are ‘too much’. They are never too opinionated, too confident, too educated, too passionate, too strong willed… it’s always women who must chip away at their selves to become more soft and easy to stomach and pliable.