On Quarantine and realizing the slurs don't work anymore.

[FloralBunting]

So I'm reading lots as I can't leave my piggin' room, and I'm coming across all sorts of Anti-Woman arguments in my travels. There's the obligatory 't*rf' nonsense, of course, but then you get into it with proper MRAs and hoo boy, they love to toss out 'frigid' and 'ugly' with abandon.

I recall when I was younger, the sting of a slur like that would stir a fear of ostracism within that I couldn't even really explain, and yet, I turned 40 and I don't even know how or why, but I began to realize I didn't care anymore about those barbed words.

I guess we forget that these things still have so much power, in the young particularly, and one of the reasons any totalitarian scheme breaks the connections between generations is so the younger people never find out from the older ones that eventually those words lose their grip on you.

Magdalen Berns was called so many slurs, and she knew that there are so many more important things to fear or care about. Anyway, I was reading something earlier and this classic film clip sprung to mind, so, as undainty and unpink as I may be, I'm going to see myself saying this, in the same delightfully dismissive manner as Glinda the Good Witch of the North does here, whenever some Anti-Woman hobgoblin throws a nasty word at me.

I hear you, yes those words really work on young women.

Trouble is all men want is to have their willy rubbed and their emotional lives revolve around it, unknown to them. So they’re driven by mysterious forces and it wasn’t until menopause that I found this became clangingly clear. Now I’m not in the market those words have zero power over me.

I love that Floralbunting and I think you're right about making younger women not want to associate with older women because we know all the old games /tricks.

It does strike me that the most abusive TRAs display they worst of 'typically' male behaviour. (and of course once you've seen it you cannot unsee it)

I bear the so-called slurs "prude" and "frigid" proudly.

There is nothing so stifling as being needy for sex/a man/a male lover/ a husband, which I was for the greater part of my youth. Not for sex itself, but for someone to love and be loved by.

That need was miraculously fulfilled once I had children. It disappeared completely. I think this is the case for many women.

That's why I can confidently claim: there is nothing so absolutely liberating as not needing a man. For ANYTHING.

Call me prudish, frigid, old-fashioned, old, ugly, anything you like -- it's water off a duck's back, and I think that is what annoys the MRAs most of all: the knowledge that we don't really need them, and can see through all the stupid and damaging games they played when we were young and silly and needy; we can identify those games, and we see right through them. They are so transparent!

I find myself yelling silently in films when I see some pretty young thing being swayed into having sex with a man when you KNOW he is a bastard and she'll end up hurt and/or damaged.

Here's to not being emotionally or sexually needy for men. It's a pity that so many women have to go through that rite of passage before their eyes are opened.

(I actually have a few wonderful male friends, men who know me and appreciate me for whom and what I am, and vice versa; men who are not in thrall to and led by their genitals. Such men are rare, but for me they are models for what men should actually be.)

I guess we forget that these things still have so much power, in the young particularly, and one of the reasons any totalitarian scheme breaks the connections between generations is so the younger people never find out from the older ones that eventually those words lose their grip on you.

There is a reason why older women are painted as witches. Has-beens. Ugly. Dangerous/Irrelevant (it's never quite clear which one). Hags. Crones.

Too many see through the narratives and slurs pushed onto younger women in order to enforce compliance.

They've lived to see how false they are.

I'm of the belief that the reason older women are made to seem "invisible" is because of the power they hold to seriously disrupt the enforced status quo of male wants.

Witches don't give a fuck what anyone calls them.

They're not "nice," they're just right.

I remember the first time I read the words "Begone foul dwimmerlaik" and understood them perfectly.
I was more a Lord of the rings girl than a yellow brick road sort.

Re: "frigid", just how is "You don't fancy me" supposed to be an insult?! 'Tis ridiculous.

Fabulous OP Floral that clip has cheered right me up.

“bear the so-called slurs "prude" and "frigid" proudly.“

Me too!

Bewilderness, to be fair, the other clip I had in mind was "You shall not pass" as i am more LotR than Oz myself, but I just loved the laughing dismissal in this one, and the 'Rubbish!' at the beginning.

nothing to add Floral but agree.

I still remember the sting of "schoolmarm"

(Most) men thing that being unattractive, unsexy, undesirable to a man, is the worst thing that can befall a woman.

It comes as a shock when they discover: we don't actually care.

Glinda rocks, always has done. She has a magic bubble FFS! Only Monkey's cloud comes close.

You're quite right OP, I'd laugh in the face of slurs like that, I really couldn't care less. I can recognise bullshit men that spout stuff like that a mile off, it reflects badly on them not me.