r/Feminism

Anyone who is shocked by this is either not paying attention or is willing to accept misogyny as a prerequisite for men running for office in any party.

Hi, I'm French, and I want to talk about something that bothers me every time i come across a comment or a post or a line in a movie (!) about it :

We all know the stereotype : French women are "naturally" sensual, sexually available, always up for it. You see it in movies, in jokes, in how foreign men sometimes approach French women abroad. It feels harmless, even flattering to some. It isn't.

This stereotype has a specific historical origin that has been deliberately buried.

During and after the Liberation of France in 1944, American soldiers committed mass rapes against French women. This is documented by historian Mary Louise Roberts in "What Soldiers Do" (2013). Military publications, soldiers' letters home, and internal communications actively described French women as "easy", "welcoming" and "sexy" , a narrative that served two purposes simultaneously: recruiting enthusiastic soldiers and retroactively erasing the violence committed.

This is a mechanism feminists of color have analyzed extensively for other groups, the hypersexualized Black woman, the exotic Indian woman, the "passionate" Latina. Violence is rewritten as natural availability. The stereotype erases the crime and then legitimizes its repetition.

The silence of the women concerned reinforced this erasure. In 1944, denouncing your liberator was socially and politically impossible. The gratitude owed to the Allies suffocated any possibility of naming what had happened. Those women took that silence to their graves.

What remains is a stereotype so naturalized that a 1997 blockbuster like Titanic can casually drop "it's easy to find a woman in Paris who's okay with getting her clothes off" and nobody blinks. Because nobody in that 1997 audience made the connection between "the sexually available Frenchwoman" and the military construction of 1944. The original violence has been completely laundered through decades of repetition.

The practical consequences are real. French women abroad regularly face harassment from men who have internalized this stereotype as a description of reality. Men who "know" that French women are "like that."

In France ( north west ) the saying still is " In front of Boches( germans/ nazis) hide your jews, in front of the americain hide woman/ your woman ".

My sister is a wanna be trad wife.

Her manly masculine Boyfriend is a head smaller than me wearing my going out heels. (Im a tall women).

Size isn’t everything. But he is so proud of his gym gains. Gains a lot of women in my gym can match, because training isn’t gendered.

Wherever they are he is playing the provider. My parents bought the home they live in.

He is a finance bro. I earn more as a specialised engineer.

Her boyfriend doesn’t cry (according to him) but he has the emotional maturity of a toddler when things don’t go his way.

My sister is running in circles around him to make him happy. And she demands I and my family do the same.

She tells me because I love her I need to respect her provider.

Her provider doesn’t even own a car because he enjoys running up the miles on my parents BMW.

I do not respect him. At least not the way she expects me as a women to respect him as a man.

Also she wants me to find a provider too. If that needs to be a man who makes more money, is taller and lifts more weights… well there are very few who’d match that.

ive been learning more and more about patriarchy (i have my whole life but really learning the ins and outs more recently) and it has opened my eyes to just how much is rooted in patriarchy (and racism, ableism, etc). literally everything is. in nearly every conversation i have, i pick up on internalized or subtle sexism, misogyny, and patriarchal patterns. depending on who im talking to or the context of the conversation, i may point it out but it’s gotten to the point that there are so many moments and calling it our would just can lead to annoyance and frustration for others of constantly being called out by someone who’s “too woke”. and i dont mind doing this or having this outcome i guess it starts feeling pretty nitpicky after a while.

anyway, im reading “will to change” by bell hooks and theres a line that stuck out to me that was something along the lines of “many can criticize patriarchy but cannot live/dont know how to live outside of it” and i noticed this is true for me. i do the classic micro feminist things and am aware of my own patriarchal views and biases but is there any other way to move through this world participating less in patriarchy? this might be a silly question. maybe the answer is playing the system. like having the awareness, educating others, calling ppl out when necessary. just wondering others’ thoughts.

Rape, among other acts of wartime sexual violence, was frequently committed against female Vietnamese civilians during the Vietnam War. It was an aspect of the various human rights abuses perpetrated by the United States and South Korea, as well as by local Vietnamese combatants. According to American political scientist Elisabeth Jean Wood, the sexual violation of women by American military personnel was tolerated by their commanders.[3][4][5]: 65  American professor Gina Marie Weaver stated that not only were documented crimes against Vietnamese women by American soldiers ignored during the international legal discourse that occurred immediately after the conflict, but modern feminists and other anti-war rape campaigners, as well as historians, have continued to dismiss them

Hi everyone! We're EUobserver, and we recently interviewed an MEP leading work on women's health across Europe.

One thing that really struck us while reporting the story was how many experts still point to the same problems: women are often diagnosed later for certain cancers, many conditions that primarily affect women remain under-researched, and women's health is still frequently underfunded compared with other areas of medicine.

We'd love to hear from you not just about the article, but about your experiences.

👉 What do you think is the most overlooked issue in women's healthcare today?

Is there a condition, symptom, or broader issue you wish received far more attention from doctors, researchers, policymakers, or even the media?

We'd genuinely like to learn from your perspectives as we continue covering women's health.

It's honestly so disgusting to see so many young boys fall into all those disgusting (incel; no better word to describe it, culture). Their defense is "getting falsely accused 👉👈😰" and spamming sexualizing abusive words of one's mom and dad. Saying that "fcked you mom" or "hope your dad 🍇s you" which shows how awful indian men are. Men have found their haven. Please never go to India.

Suggestions for a last name, I am wanting to change my last name legally since I reject the tradition of taking a man’s last name. Since I can not track down a female last name in my family due to this tradition , I’ve decided to make my own. I don’t need it to have any special meaning, just flow well and not be after a man. My first name is Clover, I like nature themed names but don’t want it to sound like a stage name.

With the men's world cup in full swing, a reminder that Ronaldo SA'd Kathryn Mayorga in 2009 and got off with barely a slap on the wrist. We have to keep fighting for a world where men are held fully accountable for their actions and women are not shamed into silence. Justice for Kathryn Mayorga. Justice for every woman who has suffered at the hands of men, for the ones who speak up and the ones who never could.

I’ve never been the feminine type of person, i hated being forced to wear dresses back in my childhood, hated my name, hated being labeled just because of whats between my pants. Everytime i wore skirts i’d cry to mirror that it’s not my trueself, i did everything to make people see dont want to be potraited as a woman. I changed my name, my pronouns, to the point where in highschool even my teachers would call me by my preffered name. It’s been fine like this past 4 years till 2025.

I met a guy and he changed my way of thinking about this. He’s a cis man, lots of abs, tall, handsome. We got together, been happy for a year now. Now we talked a lot about this, and he told me that he hates his gender, that he doesnt see himself as someone associated with gender rolls and all, but everything id label as nonbinarity happens in his mind. not outside of his appearance, but the way he thinks about himself and others and this type of stuff. he inspired me a lot to start liking my feminine side. And i want to try changing something not outside of me but keep it everything inside. Not abandoning nonbinarity, but reshaping it into something completely else. I want to try and go back to my original name, pronouns, and everything, but im so scared of being judged. where i live in 2020/2021 everyone because of tiktok was trans or gay only to turn into cis straight person a year later, and the idea of people thinking of me this way scares the shit out of me. I know my friends are really understanding and will support me no matter what, my boyfriend included, but i dont even know where to start. how to achieve femininity, how to reshape all of this into being a woman but keeping my nonbinarity private only to myself and my thoughts.

Hi, so, last night i had a fight with a guy i know, and he has some sort of obsession with praising christianity ( he aint even christian). I told him that i view every religion as mysoginist, since they almost all, set some sort of standarts of females begin less than males. He sent me some tiktok with words of: Btw christianity is the only religion to not put down women. To that i replied with parts of bible that reffer to women as less. He kept telling me its all a metaphor and to mind the time it has been written in, WHAT?? what makes ME so different from any other girl that suffered from begin viewed as less hundred ( and more and less) years ago?? he then kept getting more and more upset saying how i hate men and how im selfish cuz i hate on the religion my country and the whole europe were built on ( hes referring to the fact that we have the privilege to live in a good situation and much more others cant) and called me ungrateful cuz if i apparently lived in radical islamic state i would just get k*lled for saying this?? i told him how the only reason we as women are the least opressed in functional society weve ever been is not thatnks to his beloved religion, but to the weomrn that got tired of it years ago and fought for our rights. This got really out of the theme, but basically the question is, am i really confusing the bible so much? esp the old law. Could u guys please give me more parts of bible that both praise women (as he says) and put women down ( as i say)?? please tell me what am i missing, i wanna understand what genuinely gives him that prespective.

i apologise for my bad grammar and forming, english isnt my 1st language

Something I keep noticing at work, in sports, and in everyday conversations is how often a woman's success gets quietly reassigned. She gets promoted and people whisper it was because of her boss. She wins an award and someone mentions her mentor. She builds something incredible and the story somehow centers a man who gave her a chance.

This isn't just a pattern. It's a systemic way of shrinking women's accomplishments to make them more comfortable for people who struggle with the idea of female competence standing on its own.

I've watched talented women across so many fields spend enormous energy just proving ownership of their own work. The emotional labor of constantly having to reestablish credibility is exhausting, and it's invisible to most people who never have to do it.

What makes this especially frustrating is that many men who do this aren't even aware of it. They genuinely think they're being supportive by saying things like "she had great guidance" or "she was in the right environment," as if the woman herself was just a vessel for someone else's influence.

Has anyone else experienced this directly, at work, in school, or somewhere else? How did you handle it, and do you think the conversation around women owning their success is shifting at all?

I identify as a bisexual man.I come from India. I find nothing shame in these protest. But there are lot of women shame this. I as a man confused what to support or what not to. I am willing to be educated on this issue. Can anybody explain?