woman 2 woman

01/16/2022

I'm glad Madonna is still kicking against the pricks. This is her magnificent speech while accepting Billboard Woman Of The Year. ..............
"I stand before you as a doormat. Oh, I mean, as a female entertainer," Madonna said. "Thank you for acknowledging my ability to continue my career for 34 years in the face of blatant sexism and misogyny and constant bullying and relentless abuse."

Recalling her life as a teenager when she first moved to New York:

"People were dying of AIDS everywhere. It wasn’t safe to be gay, it wasn’t cool to be associated with the gay community," Madonna recalled. "It was 1979 and New York was a very scary place. In the first year I was held at gunpoint, r***d on a rooftop with a knife digging into my throat and I had my apartment broken into and robbed so many times I stopped locking the door. In the years that followed, I lost almost every friend I had to AIDS or drugs or gunshots."

"In life there is no real safety except for self-belief."
"I was of course inspired by Debbie Harry and Chrissie Hynde and Aretha Franklin, but my real muse was David Bowie. He embodied male and female spirit and that suited me just fine. He made me think there were no rules. But I was wrong. There are no rules -- if you're a boy. There are rules if you're a girl,"
"If you're a girl, you have to play the game. You're allowed to be pretty and cute and sexy. But don’t act too smart. Don’t have an opinion that's out of line with the status quo. You are allowed to be objectified by men and dress like a slut, but don’t own your sluttiness. And do not, I repeat do not, share your own sexual fantasies with the world. Be what men want you to be, but more importantly, be what women feel comfortable with you being around other men. And finally, do not age. Because to age is a sin. You will be criticized and vilified and definitely not played on the radio."
Madonna also opened up about the time in her life when she felt "like the most hated person on the planet," she said, as she became emotional..
"Eventually I was left alone because I married Sean Penn, and not only would he would bust a cap in your ass, but I was off the market. For a while I was not considered a threat. Years later, divorced and single -- sorry Sean -- I made my Erotica album and my S*x book was released. I remember being the headline of every newspaper and magazine. Everything I read about myself was damning. I was called a w***e and a witch. One headline compared me to Satan. I said, 'Wait a minute, isn't Prince running around with fishnets and high heels and lipstick with his butt hanging out?' Yes, he was. But he was a man.
"This was the first time I truly understood women do not have the same freedom as men,"
"I remember wishing I had a female peer I could look to for support. Camille Paglia, the famous feminist writer, said I set women back by objectifying myself sexually. So I thought, 'oh, if you're a feminist, you don't have sexuality, you deny it.' So I said 'f**k it. I'm a different kind of feminist. I'm a bad feminist.'"
"I think the most controversial thing I have ever done is to stick around. Michael is gone. Tupac is gone. Prince is gone. Whitney is gone. Amy Winehouse is gone. David Bowie is gone. But I'm still standing. I'm one of the lucky ones and every day I count my blessings."
"What I would like to say to all women here today is this: Women have been so oppressed for so long they believe what men have to say about them. They believe they have to back a man to get the job done. And there are some very good men worth backing, but not because they're men -- because they're worthy. As women, we have to start appreciating our own worth and each other's worth. Seek out strong women to befriend, to align yourself with, to learn from, to collaborate with, to be inspired by, to support, and enlightened by," she urged.
"It's not so much about receiving this award as it is having this opportunity to stand before you and say thank you,"
"Not only to the people who have loved and supported me along the way, you have no idea...you have no idea how much your support means," she said, tearing up for the second time. "But to the doubters and naysayers and everyone who gave me hell and said I could not, that I would not or I must not -- your resistance made me stronger, made me push harder, made me the fighter that I am today. It made me the woman that I am today. So thank you."

03/15/2021

Yup

03/08/2021

Feminine is not a gender – it is a dimension.

02/25/2021

It’s a full 🌕 this weekend!🕺🏿😉💃🏾

02/21/2021

Carolyn Gage deconstructs the mythologizing (and the massive omissions) of the history of Sacagawea. "Sacagawea was born into the Shoshone tribe in Idaho around 1788, and when she was eleven or twelve years old, she was in a Shoshone hunting camp near what today is Three Forks, Montana, that was attacked by the Hidatsa.... In this raid, four Shoshone men and four Shoshone women, and several boys were killed. Sacagawea was taken captive and enslaved.

"Remember, she’s eleven or twelve years old. And these Hidatsa force her to walk with them back to where they live in North Dakota, which is about five hundred miles away, as the crow flies. So here’s this eleven or twelve-year-old child who has survived a massacre of family and friends, and she’s now enslaved, and she’s having to march for hundreds of miles back into North Dakota from Montana, and when she gets there, she is—you know—she’s still an enslaved child.

"And then, one night, there is this French trapper who shows up in the village, and he plays some kind of gambling game with the Hidatsa, and he wins. And to pay off their debt, the Hidatsa give him Sacagawea. Who is twelve by now, or possibly thirteen. So now she’s his slave. He already has bought another Shoshone captive girl, “Otter Woman,” from the Hidatsa. He calls these enslaved children his “wives.” It is a formalized child-r**e arrangement brokered by adults. And, sisters, remember, every single time you read or hear something about Sacagawea’s French trapper husband and you do not raise hell, you are actually participating in legitimizing this child-r**e arrangement. He was her owner, her captor, and her ra**st. Period.

"Sacagawea conceived around the age of fourteen, and the reason we know this is because she was pregnant in the winter of 1804-5, when Lewis and Clark showed up in the Hidatsa village and started negotiating with Sacagawea’s perpetrator for his services as a guide. Lewis and Clark were the two men leading this expedition commissioned by the US government. They were leading twenty-nine white men and one African American man, who was enslaved. Sacagawea’s perpetrator told Lewis and Clark that the pregnant child was his wife, and he negotiated a fee for her services as a Shoshone translator—a fee that would be paid to him, of course. As her captor’s so-called wife, Sacagawea never received a dime for her services—or any form of compensation—for the work that she did.

"So here we are, with this fourteen-year-old, pregnant girl, in the company of thirty-two men, most of whom speak a language she can’t understand. She is the only Native American among them, and the only female. She gave birth en route, and, according to Lewis, who attended the birth, it was a very painful and violent delivery. Afterwards, she became desperately ill with what, from Lewis’ journal notes, appears to have been a severe pelvic inflammatory infection, possibly due to her enslaver’s continual postpartum r**e of her. In his journal, Lewis expressed a suspicion that she was a victim of a transmitted venereal disease. She came very close to dying, but she managed to recover. She spent the rest of the trip with her baby strapped to her back.

"Sacagawea trekked on this expedition for two years, four months, and ten days. Sisters, she walked eight thousand miles with these white men and the African American enslaved man… with a baby on her back. She forded rivers and climbed steep mountains and crossed deserts and swamps in snow and rain and sweltering sun. She translated for the men, she foraged for them, she cooked for them, and she did the sewing, mending, and cleaning of their clothes… you know, the “women’s work.”

"There have been whitewashing and mansplaining efforts to downplay her work as a guide, but the truth is, she was responsible for pointing out the pass they should take through the Rockies and the pass they should take into the Yellowstone basin… the Bozeman Pass. Kind of a big deal, locating these passes.

"Oh, and by the way, the only reason we have the record of this expedition is because Sacagawea had the foresight and agility to rescue Lewis’s journals when they were tumbling out of a capsized boat. For her pains, she had a river named after her. But no pay."

https://carolyngage.weebly.com/blog/the-true-story-of-sacagawea?fbclid=IwAR33ykTKk8h_x4deodk0l0FbvpM4-YQodDU0cII-cEg3mgelwmuFDMwFQHs

02/18/2021

02/12/2021