A few days ago, I was having a bad morning: my train tickets were expensive, my train was delayed, and my coffee was cold. But I cheered myself up by playing a game on my commute. The game is called Patriarchy Chicken, and the rules are simple: do not move out of the way for men.
Put like that, this doesn’t sound like much fun, but the joy of Patriarchy Chicken lies in its simplicity. I commute from east London to Southampton during the morning rush-hour, navigating busy tube platforms, train carriages, escalators and Waterloo Station. There are lots of bodies, moving through small spaces, walking in every different direction, trying to get to where they want to go.
And if you are a woman, you find yourself constantly dodging. Side-stepping men who are walking in your direction; being wiped out by a wheely suitcase dragged by a be-suited man; moving to the side to let faster men move past you; or just pausing to let men bustle in front of you onto the train, or into the lift, or onto the escalator, and on with their busy lives, to their important jobs.
If you don’t move out of the way for men, your commute changes. For one thing – I’m not going to lie about this – you do collide with a lot of men. This is where the name of the game comes from. You need to really commit to Patriarchy Chicken: don’t let your social instinct to step to the side kick in. Men are going to walk into you: that isn’t your fault.
Some men don’t walk straight into you, of course. Some men find their brains overridden by the unfamiliar experience of a woman refusing to give way. Last week, on a busy train platform, a man was so confused by my trajectory towards him that he stopped dead in front of me, holding eye contact, and flapped his mouth like a fish. You will find that a lot of men just… stop. It is up to you to decide how to react to this.
It’s also important to note that Patriarchy Chicken isn’t about anger. Of course, you can put your head down, square your shoulders, glower, and power through. But in my opinion, the best way to play the game is cheerfully. Smile! Make eye contact! But never, ever give way.
The point of Patriarchy Chicken is not just that you get where you’re going marginally faster (although you do) or that you irritate a number of men (which you also do). The point is that men have been socialised, for their entire lives, to take up space. Men who would never express these thoughts out loud have nevertheless been brought up to believe that their right to occupy space takes precedent over anyone else’s right to be there. They spread their legs on tubes and trains, they bellow across coffee shops and guffaw in pubs, and they never, ever give way.
Women have not been socialised to take up space. Women have been socialised to give way, to alleviate, to conciliate, and to step to the side.
piece of advice from an old tumblr person: if you are a woman and you are dating a man, do not settle down with, cohabitate with, or marry a man who needs you to do basic things to take care of him. like, if he can’t cook food for himself, go shopping, do laundry, clean a house, keep his own calendar, make his own doctors’ appointments, fill out his own forms, do his own taxes, etc. you are setting yourself up for a relationship full of you caring for another adult like a child.
partners help EACH OTHER. sometimes people have very valid reasons they can’t do those things, but they should also help YOU with things that are hard for you and easy for them, whether it’s basic emotional support, chores, paperwork, making phone calls, etc. if they say they ‘don’t know how’ to do something and expect you to do it instead of learning how to do it, they are not worth your time.
if your male partner’s parents did not prepare him to take care of himself, do not become his second mother. find a partner who can take care of you as much as you take care of him, and can take care of himself as well as you take care of yourself.
and if that means being single forever, get yourself a cat and lean in, because being a grown-ass man’s second momma is a bitch and a half. I’m married to a fairly fucking aware feminist-identified man and he still can’t take care of himself for shit and it is the one major source of tension in our marriage and it has led to so much tension now that I’m in med school that I have repeatedly seriously contemplated divorce. It’s not a small issue, it’s not trivial. You are a PERSON, not an endlessly nurturing selfless machine. You deserve to have your own story, not be picking up socks in someone else’s.
Ladies what’s that Margaret Atwood quote u know the one
“Male fantasies, male fantasies, is everything run by male fantasies? Up on a pedestal or down on your knees, it’s all a male fantasy: that you’re strong enough to take what they dish out, or else too weak to do anything about it. Even pretending you aren’t catering to male fantasies is a male fantasy: pretending you’re unseen, pretending you have a life of your own, that you can wash your feet and comb your hair unconscious of the ever-present watcher peering through the keyhole, peering through the keyhole in your own head, if nowhere else. You are a woman with a man inside watching a woman. You are your own voyeur.” ― Margaret Atwood, The Robber Bride
Adaptable girls find socially acceptable ways to internalize or channel their discomfort and ire, sometimes at great personal cost. Passive aggressive behavior, anxiety, and depression are common effects. Sarcasm, apathy, and meanness have all been linked to suppressed rage. Troublesome behaviors, such as lying, skipping school, bullying other people, even being socially awkward are often signs that a teenager is dealing with anger that they are unable to name as anger.
Girls, taught to ignore their anger, become disassociated from themselves.
Anger is so successfully sublimated that girls lose the ability to understand what it feels and looks like. Is her heart racing? Does she feel flushed or shaky? Does she clench her jaws at night? Is she breaking out in hives? Does she cry for no reason? Laugh inappropriately during difficult conversations? Fly off the handle over something that seems inconsequential? You can see where I’m going here…those crazy girl hormones, right? Better to just think of it as a phase.
For too many women, however, the phase never ends. It’s lives spent never expressing anger at all and believing that they don’t have the right or ability to do so without great risk.
Ok this is important. I feel like this all the time.
My life is just years and years of (barely) suppressed rage.
My boyfriend hates when I laugh during fights. Maybe I should yell or hit things instead?
^^^ I smile and shake uncontrollably and my BF used to be so confused. I knew I knew I was suppressing anger, but it took me (and him) and minute to realize I need to show anger waaay better.
I’ve said this before and I’ll point it out again -
Menstruation is caused by change in hormonal levels to stop the creation of a uterine lining and encourage the body to flush the lining out. The body does this by lowering estrogen levels and raising testosterone.
Or, to put it more plainly “That time of the month” is when female hormones most closely resemble male hormones. So if (cis) women aren’t suited to office at “That time of the month” then (cis) men are NEVER suited to office.
If you are a dude and don’t dig the ladies around you at their time of the month, just think! That is you all of the time.
And, on a final note, post-menopausal (cis) women are the most hormonally stable of all human demographics. They have fewer hormonal fluctuations of anyone, meaning older women like Hilary Clinton and Elizabeth Warren would theoretically be among the least likely candidates to make an irrational decision due to hormonal fluctuations, and if we were basing our leadership decisions on hormone levels, then only women over fifty should ever be allowed to hold office.
Reblogging hard for that last comment.
I WANTED TO SAY THIS BUT THEN SOMEONE ELSE DID and I’m damn proud.
i am SO SICK of people (including other girls) putting girls down for everything they do. y’all won’t let us win. you’ll make fun of a girl who like starbucks and victoria’s secret leggings for being too basic, make fun of an athletic or muscular girl by saying she “looks like a man”, call any girl who likes nirvana or classic rock a poseur but girls who like rap music ‘thots’, and harass “art hoe” type girls for liking popular, talented artists or yellow fucking backpacks. i swear to god, anything a girl likes becomes a meme. young girls are a joke and it’s time we get treated with some fucking respect.
time and time again have i heard “why don’t you just be original and do things you actually enjoy?” like what??? the fuck??? is this??? no girl can EVER enjoy anything that anyone else has ever enjoyed, EVER. absolutely not. and honestly who gives a shit if she developed her interests based on somebody else’s? that’s how we learn and grow and discover ourselves. i guarantee you that you wouldn’t enjoy shitting in the toilet unless you saw the rest of the world do it first.
it’s not funny, it’s pure misogyny. and it has to stop.
I detest the masculine point of view. I am bored by his heroism, virtue, and honour. I think the best these men can do is not talk about themselves anymore.
I detest the masculine point of view. I am bored by his heroism, virtue, and honour. I think the best these men can do is not talk about themselves anymore.
She got no standing ovation. She got no mainstream media lauds for her heroism. She got no kudos for leaving home, a much longer journey than that other senator, the one from Arizona, to get to DC, and there are no mainstream media stories on it that I can find… I only found out from a friend who spotted it on Twitter.
She didn’t do it for publicity.
Senator Mazie Hirono of Hawaii was just doing her job as a good politician, voting not to repeal the ACA so as to protect her constituents. She has Stage Four kidney cancer — that means scarce chances of survival — is recovering from a second surgery to remove part of a rib, and made sure she got to her seat in the Senate Chamber to vote “no” to whatever Republican wealth-care crap was thrown at her.
But you’ll only find out about it on social media. Because she’s not a pale male, maybe?
Eleanor Roosevelt and Lyudmila Pavlichenko. Lyudmila Pavlichenko was a Soviet sniper credited with 309 kills, she is regarded as the most successful female sniper in history. She visited with President Franklin
Roosevelt, becoming the first Soviet citizen to be welcomed at the White
House. Afterward, Eleanor Roosevelt asked Lyudmila to
accompany her on a tour of the country and tell Americans of her
experiences as a woman in combat. Pavlichenko was only 25, but she had
been wounded four times in battle. ↳more х,х,х | gifs from Battle for Sevastopol 2015 trailer.
