INTERNATIONAL WOMEN'S DAY
IN HONOR OF WOMEN A Special Edition Digital Zine in honor of International Women's Day
Tuesday, March 8th, 2022 FOLLOW US @GIRLUPMET ON INSTAGRAM FOR UPDATES
The Divine Feminine i was born with a touch of grace that only one can win when one falls from a tree and floats in the wind i was born with my skin as soft as a rose’s petals i was born with an empathy that makes me love the devil and i can’t be corrupted, purity i embody i was born without craving anyone’s touch, without desiring anyone’s body Or I will just corrupt you, sexuality is all I’m good for I was born to be seen by the world, my body’s the show i was born so delicate that a sudden touch might break me i was born insecure, but the powers offer a quick fix i was born to feel shame because i’ve created sin my foolishness made me pick the apple from the tree i was born to be nurturing, i’m a mother to the world i was born without ambition, i would rather play along
Poem Author: anonymous
If all of that were true, then why am I so miserable? Why do I want to scream because I want to be visible? Why do I look rough when I let myself be? Why do I not like the images that I am forced to see? Why is it that I neither want to hide or want to show? Why is it that displaying all my features makes me crawl? Why am I angry at the new feeling of liberation? Aren’t we reinforcing our own miserable situation? Why am I so damn scared of what we’ve taught this generation? Owning the master’s tools for profit isn’t transformation Why do I want to lead? Why do I want to fight? What do I do with all the guilt from thoughts running my mind? Why is it that I always work double of what I'm told? And I'm still considered foolish because of how I was born? Why is it that my empathy always makes me last? it only makes me wonder, is it real? or was i asked? Why is it that I've been trained to be silent my whole life? Why do I feel dramatic whenever I die inside? Why do I never feel like my most natural state of being? if all of that were true, rebelling wouldn’t be freeing
"Y yo quiero ser más bonita" Illustration, Anonymous
"Demand, Supply, Johns & Pimps" Illustration, a.r.
Reflection About Beauty Standards
With a tremble in my voice I ask, “Is beauty related to physics?”, Everyone whips their head at me, “What a silly girl, why would you ever think that?” they say, “It seems that when one says the word ‘beautiful’ everyone starts to talk about mass and symmetry and numbers… one could get the wrong idea” And I know I’m right, because all one can dig up when looking up the concepts of beauty are concepts of physics recycled into people “Too thin, too fat, too tall, too short”, do we ever win this game of chasing beauty? I guess not, because we teach our daughters to preach the scalpel and the gagging, we teach our sons to weigh their future partners instead of appreciating them. We’re stuck, in the race of beauty, where the finish line never arrives.
Poem Author: ADM
Running on a treadmill filled with thorns, Now my feet went numb, I’m in survival mode.
by Ana Pilar Manzanares
Her Rise to Power
I’ve got scratches on my back from angry bulls, But then I remember what I’m fighting for. My spine is stronger than ever, I’ve carried your life forever. And nothing has ever stopped me so I want to take control, Take the beaten and ignored change everything they know. I want you to make me your queen, Bow down to me whenever I bleed, Praise me so much you become a part of me, Ask for my hand and kiss my ring. Because I can paralyze with the sight of my eyes, Strip you away to see all your lies, Make you love so much you forget who you are. I rebuild what you've demolished, My blueprints, unlike yours, are flawless. I’ve tamed the monsters that tried to silence me And with the snap of a finger, I made them weep. I want you to make me your queen, Bow down to me whenever I bleed, Praise me so much you become a part of me, Ask for my hand and kiss my ring. 'Cause I can paralyze with the sight of my eyes Strip you away to see all your lies And make you love so much you forget who you are.
Very Needed Superiority Complex
¡Gritarias Igual!
Essay
A Transfer of Ownership; a Ticket to Freedom
The first time I was slut-shamed I was 14 years old, and I must've been in the 8th or 9th grade. It was a Friday afternoon in my house, where a group of friends and I were hanging out, and this particular boy decided to comment on my choice of clothing for a party we had gone to the week before. I remember that as I struggled to find the right words to confront his bigotry my first impulse was to say to myself "I can't believe how threatened he is by the fact that I own my sexuality and feel comfortable expressing it through my clothing choices". He claimed I dressed the way I did because I wanted to attract attention from men because after all, "no one wears a dress like that if that's not what they're after". I wasn't as well-versed in feminism then as I am today, and all I was able to answer to his commentary on my clothes was something along the lines of "fuck you dude, that is none of your business, women don't solely exist to please and appease men". I was outraged, and I was deeply hurt that one of my friends not only entertained those thoughts about me, but that he viewed women in such a way: as vacuous attention seekers whose existence is conditional to the approval and validation of men.
Contrary to his intention, this incident did not discourage me at all from dressing or acting the way I did because, in my shallow understanding of feminism, which was extremely limited and only based on liberal feminist ideals, I thought that I was empowered, and that this incident was solely a result of the fact that I "owned my sexuality" and he felt threatened. I only came to understand how wrong I was as time progressed and I advanced through my journey in Feminism; when I discovered issues such as the systemic objectification, commodification, and dehumanization of women in society, the female and the male gaze, beauty standards and many of the other problems that plague women's lives under the network of patriarchal systems we're subverted to. This allowed me to steer away from the shallow depths of liberal and choice feminism that convinced me that if "owned" my body and chose to display my sexuality I would be empowered, and through the critical theory and feminist media I consumed I was able to become the feminist I am today: the feminist that now understands that even though this incident did happen because he felt threatened, it wasn't because I "owned" my sexuality, but because he was a misogynist.
One thing I've never forgotten though, through all these years and all this time, is the way I felt as I justified my personal choices under the pretext of "owning my sexuality" at the ripe old age of 14. I was naive and gullible to the versioned ideals of feminism that taught me that as a 14-year-old I had the right to do anything I wanted with my body within a sexual context, and that convinced me that being empowered meant for me to "own my sexuality": both of which were surprisingly compatible with me physically presenting to appeal to the male gaze and to the racist, pedocentric, heteronormative and misogynistic beauty standards Latin-American women, and likely all women are programmed to cater to. I remember feeling as though by claiming that I had ownership over my body and my sexual expression I was achieving something, and I remember feeling as though this incident were I had been critiqued for "showing so much skin" was somehow incontrovertible proof that I had finally shown the world that I was empowered, that I was in control, and that I was confident enough to express myself in a sexually nuanced way, but I was wrong.
You will never hear men say that they "own their sexuality", or anything of the sort, simply because their sexuality is not treated as a commodity by society in the first place. This lie that I had been spoon-fed by the misogyny-infiltrated and versioned flanks of the feminist movement, was merely a simple demonstration of the way in which women are manipulated to buy into the very misogyny and systemic oppression they know so well. It was a repackaged and re-branded way to perpetuate the objectification and commodification of my body that I thought I had been fighting so hard against, and that so many women have fallen victim to, specially those who upon their Feminist Awakening don't traverse any further than the liberal feminist ideals and the choice feminism that are tools to the very systems they're subjugated to. These women, including my 14-year-old self, become direct contributors to the eternal and cyclical perpetuation of their own oppression, tracing the path to their so called "liberation" by adopting the way in which the patriarchal systems we live under, and the men we live with, have treated our sexuality all these years.
Historically the largest constituent of men's sexuality, that is cis-het men, has arguably been the ownership over women, their bodies, and their sexualities that they've maintained over the years. This can be widely seen in a vast array of settings, such as Pop culture, religious groups, sociocultural institutions such as marriage, and is even present in the vernacular that men use to address and speak of women. Phrases like "my woman" and "my girl" are often heard, and signal to the way in which even today, Cisgender Heterosexual men's sexuality is centered around the ownership and power they hold over women. This can be traced back to misogyny, and even the capitalist system that dictates the course of our lives, but the most relevant issue is that the delusions of liberal and choice feminism have prompted women to seek the path to their own liberation and to the liberation of their bodies by adopting the attitude men have held for centuries.
I thought I'd never be one to get caught up in the semantics of things when there's so much out there to fight for, but surprisingly that was the starting point for battling and deconstructing my internalized misogyny and the vestiges in me of the capitalist system we've deemed sufficiently competent to dictate even the way any woman or misogynyaffected individual perceives the path to their own liberation. As a gullible 14-year-old, with tremendous conviction and passion I believed everything the mainstream "feminist media" told me, and I took any sort of feminist-adjacent thought as incontrovertible truth, but what I did not understand at the time was that by saying that I owned my sexuality I wasn't making a groundbreaking discovery, or liberating myself, I was perpetuating the way millions of women's bodies and mine had been systemically commodified and objectified with one common goal: the upholding of the patriarchy for the dehumanization of women.
The fine print of liberal and choice feminism that no one seems to speak about is the way in which these ideologies silently promote you to gradually assimilate into the patriarchal environment we exist under, and in the case of the commodification and objectification of my body there were no exceptions. The language and ideologies that I was using, and that I was so convinced of were not discouraging me from commodifying and objectifying my own body, and they were not promoting me to liberate myself from the shackles of ownership and domination that I thought I was fighting against. This language and the liberal feminist ideologies I was using at the time were promoting me to perceive my own sexuality and my own sexual liberation in the same way men perceive women's sexuality, they were instructing me to own my body and sexual expression in the exact same way that men have. This is why during all the time I spent "owning myself and my sexuality" I wasn't discouraged from continuing to present to appeal to the male gaze or cramming myself in the box of what beauty standards told me I should be, it was a transfer of ownership that guaranteed that this time I was the master of my own oppression.
This is probably one of the most empowering delusions I've ever encountered in my feminist journey: to employ language that trains us to think we're belonging to ourselves when we're not a commodity in the first place. This type of language and ideologies are extremely dangerous because not only do they lure us into a false sense of security and empowerment, but they covertly allow us to contribute to the upholding of the very same systems and ideologies that oppress us. Under a patriarchal society, where the individuals in control will always be Cis-Het white men, everything is created and processed through the male gaze, the white gaze, and the cis gaze, and this is not only enforced through the beauty standards we are subjected to, but through the network of patriarchal, whitesupremacist, and capitalist systems we live under. This is the reason why liberal feminism and choice feminism will never be enough, because they prompt us to assimilate into a system that was not created for us and that will never function for our well-being. Instead of teaching the young girl I used to be to fight for the creation of a better system, they taught her to fight to become systemically parallel to men in the most undesirable ways, to climb up a system with a goal of equality that had no solid foundation. The solution will never be to “adapt”, whatever that may mean, or to improve our current system, but to contribute to the creation of a new and fair system, one that leads to a society where a 14-year-old doesn't have to commodify her body and claim she owns it so that men won't.
my body, your choice
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