But you see, here in America the attitude that is fed to us is that outside of America there live lesser people. “Fuck them, let them fend for themselves.” No, Fuck you, they are you. No matter how much you want to dye your hair blonde and put fake eyes in, or follow an anorexic standard of beauty, or no matter how many diamonds you buy from people who exploit your own brutally to get them, no matter what kind of car you drive or what kind of fancy clothes you put on, you will never be them. They’re always gonna look at you as nothing but a little monkey. I’d rather be proud of what I am, rather than desperately trying to be something I’m really not, just to fit in. And whether we want to accept it or not, that’s what this culture or lack of culture is feeding us.
That’s how sex is presented to boys - it’s not intimacy; it’s not the loving, egalitarian [part] that we get something out of, it’s something we do to the other. We raise women to survive in a rape culture, because we raise women to know these things. We do nothing to talk to men about not raping. But we do talk to women about how to protect themselves, which is further why we place the blame on women when something happens. ‘Well didn’t you know not to do that? Didn’t you know not to wear that dress? Or didn’t you know not to walk down that street at that hour of the night?’
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Feminist Don McPherson, on rape culture and educating boys to not rape. (via humanformat)
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It is not love to my neighbour—whom I often do not know at all—which induces me to seize a pail of water and to rush towards his house when I see it on fire; it is a far wider, even though more vague feeling or instinct of human solidarity and sociability which moves me… It is a feeling infinitely wider than love or personal sympathy—an instinct that has been slowly developed among animals and men in the course of an extremely long evolution, and which has taught animals and men alike the force they can borrow from the practice of mutual aid and support, and the joys they can find in social life.