adriana sahar ; nyfw18
Headdress, Costume Institute
Brooklyn Museum Costume Collection at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of the Brooklyn Museum, 2009; Gift of Mrs. Edward S. Harkness in memory of her mother, Elizabeth Greenman Stillman, 1931 Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY
Medium: silk, glass, semi-precious stones, metal, cotton, mother-of-pearl
“For those of you who think that radical feminists exaggerate or cherry-pick the worst of the porn industry, I have an experiment for you. Type ‘porn’ into Google and click around the most well-travelled websites that appear. With mind-numbing repetition you will see gagging, slapping, verbal abuse, hair-pulling, pounding anal sex, women smeared in semen, sore anuses and vaginas, distended mouths, and more exhausted, depleted and shell-shocked women than you can count. You will not see two people having sex; you will see images depicting a level of physical cruelty that would not be out of place in an Amnesty International campaign. One of the only studies of contemporary pornographic content found that the majority of scenes from fifty of the top-rented porn movies contained both physical and verbal abuse targeted against the female performers. Physical aggression – including spanking, open-hand slapping and gagging – occurred in over 88% of scenes, while expressions of verbal aggression – calling the woman names such as ‘bitch’ or ‘slut’ – were found in 48%. The researchers concluded that ‘if we combine both physical and verbal aggression, our findings indicate that nearly 90 per cent of scenes contained at least one aggressive act, with an average of nearly twelve acts of aggression per scene’. [x] That this is the major form of sex education for men should be taken very seriously by the women’s movement. The same men who get off from women being brutalised and called cunts, sluts and cum-dumpsters are the ones who go on to become politicians, corporate executives, judges, media professionals, policy makers and bankers. In other words, they become the economic and cultural elite that shape the material and ideological world that determines how women – and their children – will live. Most of them will become partners and fathers. To assume that porn is mere fantasy and does not impact on the way men think and feel is to ignore decades of research on how images frame our social construction of reality.”
— “Porn and the Misogyny Emergency” –Gail Dines (via sealedtome)
full offense but the increase in cop shows in recent years being concurrent with the more widespread condemnation of the police is not a fucking coincidence
“Menstruation makes women stronger. Menstruation means that, unlike men, women’s internal hormonal state changes regularly over an approximately 28-day cycle. What New Zealand sports scientist Christian Cook didn’t accept was the notion that the menstrual cycle disadvantaged women. In fact, he believed the opposite was true. Data accumulated over months working with Britain’s national hockey team clearly showed that towards the middle of their cycles, women were stronger, more powerful and resilient to stress. ‘They are almost super human,’ Cook says. ‘Traditionally the menstrual cycle has been neglected or regarded as taboo yet it shows tremendous physiological advantage, accompanied by positive behaviour and motivation for women.’ For Cook, this ongoing research is a conceptual shift in how menstruation is perceived, even for non-athletes. ‘Often there has been a focus on the menstrual cycle as being associated with moodiness and perhaps loss of productivity,’ Cooks says. ‘In contrast it seems likely it confers benefits of times of huge energy and resilience that certainly could underline very high productivity. It’s right at the top of human potential.’”
— the telegraph (via sapphonaturally)