352
Happy 1st Anniversary, Ovarit!
Posted July 29, 2021 by Ruby [speaking as admin] in Announcements

“Men have the power of naming, a great and sublime power. This power of naming enables men to define experience, to articulate boundaries and values, to designate to each thing its realm and qualities, to determine what can and cannot be expressed, to control perception itself.”

-Andrea Dworkin, Pornography: Men Possessing Women

Over and over again across time and place, women’s voices are silenced, deleted, removed, and erased. We’re harassed, banished, beaten, and threatened. We’re cancelled, interrogated, sacked, and deplatformed.

Yet we persist.

A little over a year ago, June 29th, 2020, r/GenderCritical was banned from Reddit for upholding a single untenable truth: it’s impossible to change sex. Resisting popular dogma (“trans women are women”), we remained a rapidly growing force against gender ideology and the re-imposition of patriarchy’s definition of “woman.” When J.K. Rowling published her controversial essay our numbers swelled as support grew for gender critical thought and women’s right to speak up and challenge the propaganda being sold.

And then, in an instant, the community was gone without warning or notice. No appeal could be made to restore it. We could have walked away, closed our mouths, shut our laptops, and stopped making memes. We could have found other more popular causes or interests, relaxed into dissociated groups, or joined other popular male-run media.

But we didn’t.

Andrea: “Male supremacy is fused into the language, so that every sentence both heralds and affirms it. Thought, experienced primarily as language, is permeated by the linguistic and perceptual values developed expressly to subordinate women. Men have defined the parameters of every subject. … whatever contradicts or subverts male naming is defamed out of existence; the power of naming itself, in the male system, is a form of force.”

Within a month of being banned from Reddit we launched Ovarit.com with 18 circles to replace many of the banned gender critical and women-only subreddits...and more. Within six months we had added another 18 circles.

In the past year we’ve invited over 5,700 users who’ve collectively made ~35,000 posts and ~440,000 comments. In support of each other, you’ve given each other more than 5 million upvotes.

Andrea: “As Prometheus stole fire from the gods, so feminists will have to steal the power of naming from men.”

When we are silenced we must speak louder. When we are quieted we must roar. When patriarchy and power conspire to muzzle our messages and suffocate our spirits we will fight back and let them know

We’re OVARIT

This is just the beginning.

12 comments

MizunaOctober 30, 2023

Thank you for all the hard work that goes into keeping Ovarit up and running!

Iota_AurigaeOctober 30, 2023

Cheering for our incredible admin team!

RuneOwlOctober 30, 2023

Good luck, hope it’s not too much of a headache. We appreciate you! <3

UnicornOctober 30, 2023

Thank you and all Ovarit devs for your efforts! Hope everything goes well!

a_shrubOctober 30, 2023

My reflex as a once full stack web developer is to offer if there's anyway I could help, but also realizing that sometimes more hands aren't always helpful and there are security concerns as well. But if there might arise something that could use a pair of fresh eyes or just some programming grunt work, I'm happy to submit my credentials for volunteering, health permitting. I'm mostly familiar with LAMP stacks, but have the theoretical foundations of a computer science degree for generalizing to various code bases, languages, and frameworks, etc.. I once found a bug in the Zend Optimizer even! ;P

UnicornOctober 30, 2023

Ovarit is open source. I'm sure they'd be happy to get more people helping with the codebase. :)

https://ovarit.com/o/Ovarit/159688/ovarit-runs-on-open-source-software-interested-in-contributing

ProxyMusicOctober 30, 2023

Good luck. Best wishes. And THANK YOU!

SmartierthanthouOctober 30, 2023

I appreciate you all so much!!

[Deleted]October 30, 2023

Godspeed

proudcatladyOctober 30, 2023

Godspeed! You got this

DoomedSibylOctober 31, 2023

Adding my thanks to the general chorus.

stygiOctober 31, 2023

Thanks for all your hard work!