i hate everthing right now, so please just let me be pissed off

[twentysixacid]

so i was talking to my mom this morning (err...i guess now it's yesterday) about my youtube comment fiasco, and she aid something along the lines of "it's the individual women like us [me and her, who all the boys are afraid of]  have done the most to advance feminism by attacking the injustices we encounter in out lives, while the gung-ho revolutionaries have only served to damage the cause." my mother said that. terrifying, no? i mean, how fucking warped a statement to make. to me, that's like saying martin luther king jr. shouldn't have become an activist, because all the negative attention he drew from racists damaged the civil rights movement. of course individuals made a hiuge impact, the most famous incident being rosa parks and her singular refusal to give up her seat for some white guy, and sit ins by individuals attacking the system from within were huge boons to the cause. but famous MLK did something. today, he is the face of the civil rights movement, the man remembered as a hero for the national attention he called to racial inequality. he did not damage the cause. and yet by being impassioned about the greater injustices done to all women, those "gung-ho" feminists are somehow in the wrong. fuck that shit. i mean, there's a perfect example of misogyny being so ingrained in human culture that its infected the women it holds back. how many individual women do you think would have had the courage to attack sexism on their own every time they saw it? the historical precedent was certainly not in their favor. a few centuries earlier, they likely would have been burned at the stake for witchcraft. i know i wouldn't have done it if i hadn't known other women were being very, very vocal about how they agreed with me and about how fucked up the whole situation was. it took mass numbers of women protesting and being radical to get the nineteenth amendment--susan b. anthony's "illegal voting" just got her fined (though props to her for never paying that fine) and didn't bring about the change she wanted. what she needed was a bunch more radicals like her all trying to do the same thing, to vote in the elections, and that only would have happened with the more "gung-ho" suffragists.

argh i love my mother and i hate to see this. she's my hero (along with the ruler supreme of badassery, hilary clinton), and i want to believe that she's right, but at the same time...well, i just hate feeling like she's been manipulated, or thinking that she's given up somehow.