12
ReviewsMiss Lister’s Guest House
I don’t usually read lesbian romances, and Miss Lister’s Guest House, with its association with the Gentleman Jack TV show and its fandom seemed like a recipe for a huge waste of time. But someone I respect recommended it, I read it, and I loved it.
Yes, it follows the romance genre structure, but the book isn’t about how one lesbian struggles to find love. The story is about lesbian community, how we help each other, how we build it because we love women.
That’s what’s missing from the lesbian romances I’ve tried: the women are isolated, trying to live their lives just like straight women, but with one difference. This book shows how lesbians aren’t like straight women, we don’t solve our problems in the same way, and we have something to offer to the non-lesbians of the world.
I’ve got a happy and loving relationship, thanks very much.
But if I didn’t and I was “underfucked” then so fucking what? A woman’s value isn’t in getting “fucked” by a man. It isn’t tied to men in any way whatsoever.
Her value is in her courage, her intellect, her kindness, her honour, her creativity, her tenacity...imagine saying this and having NO awareness that you sound exactly like those pathetic male Incels. Coming from a woman this is just so depressing. Get some self worth for fucks sake.
As an aside, I love JKR - she is all the things a woman should aspire to be - all the things listed above. She is incredible.
But if I didn’t and I was “underfucked” then so fucking what? A woman’s value isn’t in getting “fucked” by a man. It isn’t tied to men in any way whatsoever.
Great point. It's also low key homophobic bc you know they're talking about PIV "fucked" and not lesbian sex, which has literally been proven to be more satisfying for women. Like, significantly more satisfying. And I'm not even a lesbian, it's just a fact that they have better sex
Exactly. Like, even in my straight relationship, I don’t necessarily want to “get fucked”...I want a mutually enjoyable and respectful encounter with someone I trust and love...they’d probably call me “vanilla” or a “prude” idgaf and honestly I think the way people my age (28) and under, or even the way peeps under 35 seem to see it...it’s disturbing 🤷🏻♀️ Porn has totally warped everybody - has made monsters out of boys and has stripped girls of their humanity...brainwashed everyone (well, those who can’t think critically) and made sex a depraved and soulless event where girls as young as 13/14 are getting choked and hurt during sex, and boys at young as 6 are being exposed to porn. It’s vile.
Sex positivity SHOULD be about fulfilling and mutually enjoyable sex between consenting adults, it shouldn’t involve violence, promiscuity (inc men) and empty, meaningless encounters IMO.
The misogyny (and homophobia, as you said) of the above statement is just so so sad. A woman can have a perfectly fulfilling life without any Male interaction whatsoever.
Also, like, in my relationship we have plenty of sex, but we also talk for hours (long, interesting and diverse topics), do nice things together, cuddle, watch rubbish tv, listen to music...we don’t need to have sex, there’s no pressure to have sex. I’m very very lucky though, my partner finds porn to be degenerate and disgusting (for moral, spiritual and philosophical reasons - like me, he thinks it’s partly responsible for the destruction of society - I know this is incredibly, incredibly rare and know I’m very fortunate (the best part that he brought up his disgust with porn and hookup culture before I did! He was exposed to it when he was very young (and experienced SA) and he said it really fucked him up for a long time) - an ex of mine was a porn addict and it was genuinely disgusting. He was also an abusive and coercive PoS.
What annoys me is when men denounce porn only out of their own interest - fear of getting limp dick. Not concerns about morality or sex trafficked women or exploitation or misogyny. Eww.
A woman wrote that comment?????? Jesus.
Ironic given us old terfs have been far more sexually active than these terminally online kids at the same ages, statistically speaking.
If anything we're overfucked.
We definitely have more orgasms lol
The way they talk about sex with men like Orgasm Central honestly makes the new stats track.
Feminism was born because of men literally and metaphorically fucking women.
Women's history needs to be part of every curriculum. The ignorance we have of our own oppression and struggle for rights is ridiculous and a void that has been exploited by men, especially in the last 15 years of Oppression Olympics, when young women have been brainwashed into believing sex based oppression isn't a thing, and that 'cis hetero patriarchy' is the worst thing ever (the greatest sufferers being transbians, ie straight -- mostly white -- men).
it used to be. Now replaced by "Gender Studies". Gag me with a spoon.
It used to be available as 'women's studies' but it was never a standard, required part of everyone's curriculum. I'm aware that in the USA, there isn't nearly enough taught about the history and treatment of Black, Indigenous, Asian and Latino populations. But there is still far more taught about those histories in basic curriculum than is taught about women's history. How many of us ever learned about 'separate economy laws,' or can reel off the names of major case decisions the way we can cite 'the fugitive slave act' or 'Brown vs the Board of Education?' It was shocking to me to realize in my 50s that despite going to a woman's college and considering myself a feminist, I was woefully ignorant about what women were actually subjected to or the many waves of conflict to change our status. As a result, there are many women who exhibit the same contempt towards those they owe their rights to, because they have no conception of how bad it was.
I remember reading the cranky GC radfems of ten years ago. Sometimes they cited their own aphorisms. One was: "The interests of any group that includes at least some men will always outweigh the interests of any group that is 100% female." I have seen this play out many times.
Now, race is a huge, terrible problem, in the US and elsewhere. I wouldn't wish to diminish it. But I keep feeling like the broad left, maybe society in general, is way more comfortable acknowledging the existence of that problem than that of the sex problem. It's almost invisible, like people have blinders to it. So it "makes sense" to people, without thinking about it, that we would have this focus on race be so much greater than the focus on sex (if any). Because things that only affect women/girls -- half the population -- are "different." They're still shunted away to the margins because they're "special," "different," those "other things." Not general human concerns, which are concerns of males, or of mixed-sex groups, but never of female-only groups.
By the way, I sometimes see people who don't like "feminism" (whatever they think it is) cite Margaret Atwater's statement that she didn't want her work called "feminist" as a haha gotcha, proving that she was opposed to the feminist project. As with Chantal Akerman, who didn't want her films to be called "women's," neither of these women was opposed to feminism at all - they just knew that their work would be ghettoized, relegated to that other, sidelined space for "women's" things if it got labeled that way. And they didn't want that, because they wanted wide audiences for it.
These two points have in common the weird peripheral space that social discourse reserves for anything labeled "women's," pushing it off to the sidelines, while still embracing all kinds of stuff labeled "men's."
Yes, it's very much the 'man as universal, woman as subsidiary' mindset that still underlies everything. So things that effect males -- race, class, religion, sexual orientation -- must be taken seriously by all of us, but things that effect females alone are only pertinent to females (and even then, only a fraction of us take ourselves seriously as, you know, full human beings). We have to demand that everything described with 'human' and 'people' ALWAYS includes both sexes, from anatomy to history. Isn't it interesting that in our uber-"inclusive" world, that still isn't happening?
That "only a fraction of us take ourselves seriously as..." thing is an unusually perceptive observation. Kudos to you, whatever they may be!
The uber-"inclusive" world -- I've said for some years now that nothing is inclusive until everything female has been excluded. Which sort of reveals the agenda if people are paying attention. (A big if, I know.)
Thanks, and yes you're absolutely right, and no, most of them are too busy virtue-signaling to pay attention, alas.
You are right, of course.
Being 20 years older than you, I lived through those decisions. And yet? I cannot name them. There was no birth control, especially for unmarried women, there was very little health care that a woman could request herself (we'll have to get your husband's signature on this), there were financial constraints on women, no credit, no mortgages without a cosigner, educational restraints (why train women? They'll just get pregnant), work restraints (can't hire a woman, they will just get pregnant), and despicable social norms that put women in jeopardy if she spoke up (Me Too).
For one brief decade or two, we seemed to be progressing...
I'm so glad I grew up in the 60s and 70s and by the time I need birth control I could get it easily. Same with getting a bank account or a mortgage, or a degree, though I have sampled first-hand the misogyny inherent in, for example, doctor-patient relations, which is still alive and kicking like a horse. And then came "girl power" in the 90s, and I realised there were women a generation younger than me who took those things for granted, knew nothing about second-wave feminism and precious little about the plight of so many women world-wide, and thought they could have it all as individuals if they just wore a power-suit and high-heels.
I am your age also, and I remember all these things. I am always appalled by young people (both young men and women) who know nothing of this.
When I interact with the youngsters and I get the opportunity, I mention to them that when I was younger, birth control was illegal for single women. Their eyes widen in disbelief.
This is maybe a stupid question, but I have been thinking about it a lot lately.... do you know how I actually go about learning women's history?? Go to a library? Are there old school uni textbooks from before the gender takeover that I can look for?
Edit: I mean like, I'd love to become an expert on the topic but don't even know where to start to educate myself.
Gerda Lerner’s The Creation of Feminist Consciousness and Dale Spender’s Women of Ideas and What Men Have Done to Them are good places to start. Then you can find interesting women and read their work or biographies.
I was going to recommend Spender's book - it's an amazing overview of women's intellectual history. (Reflecting Men at Twice their Natural Size is also an extremely useful read.)
That's a great question and a hard one to answer because there aren't a lot of good 'survey' books out there. But more books are being written about various niches and time periods. I accidentally discovered about separate economy laws when I was googling various 'first woman to' queries and stumbled on a legal timeline and realized I'd never heard the term. So just looking up different topics online may open up various resources. I've also learned a lot from reading women's biographies (check out a dictionary or encyclopedia of famous women, preferably pre-2010 so men aren't included, to get ideas of who to read about), because a good researcher will include a lot of historical sources and material. This would probably be a good discussion/question topic for the 'Feminist Books" circle!
Marilyn French wrote a three volume history called From Eve to Dawn which gives a good overview.
Breaking Down Patriarchy is a podcast that talks about women's history and women's issues. The first season goes through women's history literature. That was kind of how I started.
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I fear that's too optimistic. Plenty of women know our history well and still interact with men because they believe in 'good ones'.
And there will always be the boy moms who think their sons are different.
'I raised my son to be a feminist! He doesn't even watch porn!!' LOL. Yeah I'm sure your son doesn't know how to hide his activity on the internet, something all kids learn at about 8 nowadays.
If women's history was taught to everyone, the boys would get it too. Maybe that would help.
How can you say a dumbass phrase like "underfucked women" and call yourself a feminist? It's nonsensical
Lol a pick me's worth is tied to how much she is used by men. Men fuck animals, corpses and socks. Congrats on having the same worth as a crusty sock.
Every time I see a woman mock another woman for not getting dick I think about the shaved orangutan saved from that brothel in Indonesia.
This little pick-me doesn't realize that "incel" was originally coined by a woman who started an online group for women who weren't getting any. Then the term was stolen by violent, desperate men OF COURSE, because women create things and men steal them and claim them as their own.
God, libfems sound like the worst douchebag misogynists when they struggle to find things to criticize about us. Then they have the complete lack of self-awareness to criticize antifeminist women playing the “cool girl” and invoking “not like other girls” tropes. Irony.
the pickmeisha is off the charts and makes me nauseous honestly. they'd sell out all of womankind for a crusty, porn-addicted, basement-dwelling skinny dependent man who never showers
It reminds me of that article that was like, how to turn a feminist into your personal playboy bunny or whatever.
they really think being voluntarily celibate is an insult
Or having sex with only one or two people, apparently. She didn’t say “virgins” she said “underfucked” which to me implies that women should be having wild crazy sex and one night stands to be fulfilled. Great, sure, I’ll get right on that. Maybe if I had lots of sex with strangers I would chill out and shut up and realize that misogyny and erosion of hard won rights isn’t so bad actually!
i've never been happier than in my fulfilling long-term monogamous rs (despite it being with a man) which also correlates with the most sex i've been having in my life. and this is also the most radfem i've been, ever.
even the old libfem me having endless casual sex for male validation can't compare to my sex life rn.
YES! School those handmaidens, Queen! 🤣
Its disgraceful how so many young women who identify themselves as "feminists" spit on any woman over 40 and/or laugh off the concerns of any woman that doesn't fit into their political bubble.
The implication being, getting fucked will make us less angry and more docile. Sis, if you're not angry, you're doing feminism wrong
For my own personal satisfaction, for some years now I have kept track of the number of orgasms I have in my journals with a certain personal symbology that has meaning to me. I am quite satisfied with my totals and averages, and do no consider myself to be "underfucked", thanks. Even though the record was only begun relatively recently, by the numbers it's already orders of magnitude more pleasure derived on my own than all of the dudes combined who might have made any effort in that direction in the past, of which there is no shortage of them and their incompetence either (one I even had the misfortune of being married to).
Anyways, certain symbols have been eclipsed by other symbols, and that's approximately the extent of what I'm willing to say about that.
I love JKR's twitter. I wish she'd go on podcasts, so I could hear her fire. (I know she's done one or two w journalists but her parts came in chunks, and id like to see her talk to different people)
👏👏👏
Get her, JK!
Yep, NO ONE gets a pass for supporting gender identity ideology and/or 'sex work' - man or woman! I love that JK is an equal opportunity educator of the masses.
Good lord. WHO. IS. SUPPOSED TO BE. THE ARBITER. OF who is "underfucked?" Sick.
As if being fucked is what all women aspire to. Men will fuck anything. Please.
No, a man's dirty dick is not going to make me content with my oppression.
X2 One of my most fucked up childhood memories is watching my uncle scare away with a machete some “guys” who were raping a cow on his farm.
It was the first time I was thankful that I never was into men.
Gross! I have heard that some countries in South America had to specifically ban unmarried blokes from owning female farm animals like goats, cows and sheep due to how common it was for them to sexually abuse these poor animals...
Why only female animals? Like an animal being male is going to stop a perverted man
Source?
well i am from colombia, i don't really know if there are any such prohibitions, but zoophilia is a known problem.
usually people make fun that the “costeños” (people from the caribbean coast) are the ones who commit these acts, but my uncle's farm is in antioquia (quite far from the coast).
According to what my aunt told me at that time it was a very common problem especially for teenagers, the main victims are usually cows, donkeys and chickens.
nothing more to say, i never went back to spend vacations there, it was disturbing.
That is really disturbing
Colombia Donkey Love
I had the misfortune of learning about this years ago.
I was skeptical because I am not one to just believe things about groups of people. Because often it's racism & lies.
But This is a very real thing. I watched it and had the strangest feeling. Something I've never felt before & is hard to describe.
https://youtu.be/0rgzmxn-M0Y?si=s6hII6z_jTYZDXZp
I read it on a Wikipedia page if I remember well... I will post it if I find it again it was a long time ago since I read it...
Thanks! I want to followup on it
Followup?
Like, look into it and know who advocated for the law, etc
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One of the small but alarming incidents I've read about in recent years is that a rural resident kept a horse out in a field by his home (farm?), on a major road, and received a letter from a man who said that his horse was attractive and that he wished to "date" it (and would pay for it). The owner, appalled, replied absolutely not, and received complaints from the other man, claiming that the owner was "discriminating against" him on the basis of his "sexual orientation." Eyeroll.
But efforts like his seem to get a lot of encouragement from the weird discourse we're living with at the moment. Which works energetically to blur the boundaries between concepts like actual "sexual orientation" and, say, "sexuality," because the agenda is to weaken social and personal boundaries. Clearly this sick man thought of them (and tried to pass them off) as the same thing.
🎯
What a terrible day to have eyes. D:
OMG WHAT A TERRIBLE DAY TO HAVE EYES IS RIGHT
Amen. How many stories are there annually about a man getting stuck in a tree or a sheep or a gerbil or a wall or killed by a horse or something from trying to fuck it? They will fuck anything it’s not a compliment.
We've all heard about what men get up to.
I should not have laughed at that
Its all that libfem pick-mes aspire to; their self-esteem is still dependent on male validation.
Everytime they open their mouths to insult us, they show more and more of their own misogyny. Pathetic. Better underfucked than undereducated!
Lol, exactly. What a waste of life to hunger after male attention (which is about as readily available as any resource could be) instead of your own success, goals, education, creativity or understanding of the world....how vapid and sad.
Seriously. Male attention is rarely flattering, it always makes me feel gross. Most men are not picky when it comes to who they’ll have sex with. Date, maybe, but most men will self admittedly stick their dick into anything female with a pulse (and sometimes even that is optional)
Seeing some libfem on Twitter wear being “fucked” frequently as a badge of honor or some kind of cool kids club thing is such a self burn. If women want to live like that, more power to them, but I dont think it’s aspirational or some kind of point of pride