Her sample of the speech reflects many of the things Beyoncé explores in this album: love, sexuality, empowerment, and marriage.

“We teach girls to shrink themselves, to make themselves smaller. We say to girls, you can have ambition, but not too much. You should aim to be successful, but not too successful. Otherwise, you would threaten the man. Because I am female, I am expected to aspire to marriage. I am expected to make my life choices always keeping in mind that marriage is the most important. Now marriage can be a source of joy and love and mutual support but why do we teach girls to aspire to marriage and we don’t teach boys the same? We raise girls to see each other as competitors not for jobs or accomplishments, which I think can be a good thing, but for the attention of men. We teach girls that they cannot be sexual beings in the way that boys are.”

http://www.buzzfeed.com/hnigatu/powerful-feminist-speech-beyonce-new-album

That Time Beyonce's Album Invalidated Every Criticism of Feminism EVER

Early Friday morning, Beyonce gave us all a heart attack when she released her self-titled visual masterpiece, Beyonce.

And really, whose edges didn’t Beyonce snatch? She’s sexy, fun, talented. She’s a visionary — the videos are not only aesthetically pleasing, they are stories built from images. Her voice, as always, is perfection. She proves, once again, that she is the greatest of her time in overall entertainment. But there was something else about this album that caught our attention — something that wasn’t there in 2003?s Crazy in Love or critically acclaimed 4.

It was a womanhood I hadn’t seen before. It was Beyonce’s emancipation from social chains, from criticism, from the lines media drew that illustrate her as something manufactured or “polished” in comparison to the alternative, her sister Solange. These are boxes, they are inaccurate and Beyonce crushed them, quite literally, in this new album.



And if you aren’t woke, as Erykah Badu would say, then you probably missed the message. Yes, the album is about sex. Yes, it’s about love. Yes, it’s even about Baby Blue. But Beyonce is really an ode to womanism, feminism or whatever euphemism you might use to describe the empowerment of women, but especially women of color.


Read more at ONTD: http://ohnotheydidnt.livejournal.com/84190074.html#ixzz2nZkdg6LX

Originally published on Blackademic and cross-posted here with their permission.
Although I am not new to masculinity, I am new to being a black man.
I am new to the experience of male privilege and its consequence of authority, as well as the disprivilege of race that marks my black male body as innately suspect.
It is the delicate balance between power and criminal that has allowed me to see the machinations of misogyny in an entirely different light.
Whereas black cisgender men have generally approached feminist discourse through the academic texts and writings of black women, for me, it is my lived experience as a black female that has shaped the ways in which I embrace and practice black feminism.
Prior to physical transition, I wasn’t naïve to the ways in which certain forms of black masculinity contribute to the oppression of women.
I grew up in a family of single black women who loved – really loved – black men, even though it was their husbands, boyfriends, and sometimes brothers who were the perpetrators of emotional and physical abuse.
I watched my mother, my beautiful mother, struggle with the demons of mental illness and drug use.

@PrisonCulture on Twitter started the #myfeminismlookslike hashtag this morning and many women are sharing images of what makes them think of feminism. She tweeted: “In honor of Queen Bey’s visual album, I was thinking of what #myfeminismlookslike. So I am going to share my visual album. Join in…”

I write…a lot. I have over 700 essays here alone. But I love images too. Photographer here. And making this collage has revitalized my spirit in such a way I cannot even describe. And yes, Beyoncé is included in my perception of womanism, empowerment, inner and outer beauty, of contradictions, of humanity. And her new album BEYONCÉ truly speaks to me in a way similar to how The Electric Lady by Janelle Monae does. Music is a part of womanism for me. It teaches and it heals. And both Janelle and Bey are here. As are our foremothers. And ancestors. And contemporaries. And academics. And this isn’t an exhaustive collage. Just a taste of BLACK WOMAN EXCELLENCE. I couldn’t fit every photo even if I wanted to but they reside in my heart no less; all those not shown here reside in my heart.

I just needed a few photos to keep my fist raised and to flick my hair to. That’s all.

A Voice for Men doubles down: how dishwashers, TV dinners, and marital rape laws are rendering women obsolete. Also, the apocalypse.



We met new A Voice for Men writer Clint Carpentier earlier this week, when we took a look at a recent post of his waxing nostalgic about the good old days before marital rape laws, when wives couldn’t say “no” to their husbands and expect the law to take this no any more seriously than a husband intent on rape.

In a second posting, he’s doubled down on the whole marital rape thing and incorporated into a vast and fantastical vision of the past and future of humankind that bears so little resemblance to reality that it’s worth quoting in detail as a sort of case study in Men Going Their Own Way delusions.


Carpentier, clearly a Man Going His Own Way From Reality, begins with a brief and erroneous survey of human prehistory that he seems to have picked up at the University of His Own Ass:

The concept of marriage is relatively new to the human species, but was based on the ancient contract emotionally agreed upon by our primitive ancestors when they discovered that due to their big brains, their offspring were born less mature by necessity than other, less intelligent species; this contract promoted the exchange of three C’s (cooking, cleaning, and copulation) from the female, and three P’s from the male (protection, provision, and progeny).

So not only is Carpentier returning to his notion that compulsory copulation is proper wifely duty, but he apparently thinks that the prehistoric “wife” sat around the cave all day eating neolithic bon bons while her husband marched off to hunt mammoths for her — or perhaps commuted by foot-powered car to his job as a Brontosaurus crane operator at Slate Rock and Gravel Company.

Honored ladies of the symposium, I thank you for your invitation to speak today. I shall begin my address with no further overtures. The male of the species is perhaps more to be pitied than censured, as it is his physical inability to complete a normal, healthy menstrual cycle that is the root cause of so many of his woeful ailments.

As scientists have discovered, it is the unhealthy retention of aged or “angry” blood (generally more than 2 to 3 months old) that leads to so much of the liver agitation and spinal rage that plague our modern society. The average woman, capable of storing and regularly releasing this blood through the act of menstruation, keeps herself in constant and excellent health, and should be commended for so doing [Pause for applause].

The reason that men — poor things — commit so many murders as a sex is likely due to their failure to slough off this overabundance of old blood through the regular act of menstruation (which not only clears the body of bad blood but also the mind of anti-vitamins, as scientists have so recently and effectively demonstrated). The average male body is so overstuffed with a surfeit of old blood that he may swell as much as six feet tall, which is a height both unnecessary and grotesque for human purposes. This male blood, which is generally unable to be regularly flushed out through the womb, must find some sort of outlet, lest it tumefy and cause the man to burst (a not uncommon sight, I am told, in parts of rural Germany), which I believe is what leads to knife fights and stabbings among men. This makeshift replacement for remedy is exceedingly dangerous, but it does perform the necessary –sometimes life-saving — act of bloodletting.

It has been noted anecdotally, though not yet in a laboratory setting, that many of these men display considerably more rational and intelligent brain-power after these impromptu pseudo-menstruations. Many of you, I know, have told me stories of your own husbands behaving nearly as prudently as yourselves for days after cutting themselves accidentally in the kitchen or coming to blows outside of a public house. It remains to be seen, therefore, whether we as a group can seize upon a more regulated and humane system of replicating the effects of menstruation in our poor masculine counterparts. Imagine how improved our society might be if someday we could teach men to menstruate blood from their own wombs! [Pause for laughter.]