I may be freaking some of you out with my sudden rages of FEMINISM and SEX and ALL THAT OTHER STUFF WE'RE NOT SUPPOSED TO TALK ABOUT BUT FUCK IT I'M TALKING ABOUT IT ANYWAY.
The reason why this is so sudden is that I just go through different stages in blogging. If you flip through I go on poem sprees, then lots of introverted reflective stuff, then big political pieces, then all this shit about my hair...this is just where I am at the moment.
Another reason for this is that I've had these ideas developing for a long time - I am a teenager, after all, and I am changing colour. But I've just been far too chicken to be so open about it because I know who reads my blog. My mother :P
Only joking.
But yes, she does.
So does my dad.
Awkward.
My sister, thankfully, doesn't bother.
So I don't know where this sudden rush of bravery comes from.
Anyway.
I guess some people are surprised that I'm well, me, because I'm totally incongruous with my background. I'm smart. I'm the child of immigrant parents who were born on the tail end of the Asian post-war baby boom. I love Shakespeare and modernist theatre. I'm not pretty and I'm still a virgin. I've never had a boyfriend.
But I'm also a sex-positive feminist. I'm also a big believer in empowerment and the embracing of human sexuality. I'm also a teenager with all the curiosities and excitement and experiences of any other teenager. I'm also a person who just happens to love dirty jokes and flirting and crude humour. I'm also...me.
But my ideas don't come from thin air. I didn't wake up one day with a period and boobs and say I'M GOING TO BE A LIPSTICK FEMINIST.
Noooooo.
I think it all started in high school. High school was liberating. For the first time we had actual proper girl talk, about boys and periods and all the other stuff in between. It's not the X-rated wedding night fantasies boys *think* we talk about, but I came from a school where getting your period was akin to losing your virginity. Not that that affected me, because apparently I had already lost my virginity to a tampon.
Apparently eleven year olds forget that tampons aren't exactly a necessity when you haven't started your period yet.
It was like living in the Middle Ages and then suddenly being transported to the 21st century by a benevolent alien called GATE.
A question a lot of people who aren't accustomed to period talk (guys, women from another century) ask me is 'why/how/what do you talk about?' We whinge a lot, basically, and give each other lots of sympathy. We laugh about horror stories and freak out about if it's late/long/short/heavy/normal etc. And to be honest, we don't really think about it that much - it's so normalized in our circles because we all have it and it affects us all and we all have to deal with it and if we didn't talk about it it would be a massive elephant in the room - we've all inadvertently seen wings when people have inadvertently flashed (it happens. School skirts, despite the uniform ladies' best efforts, aren't the most convenient to be discreet in), we've all seen the pad stash in our friends' bags, we've all traded tampons and painkillers as needed.
Awkward don't know why I'm sharing this with you moment, but I don't know how to explain to freaked out boys how normal periods and period talk has become. I was quite sick a few weeks back and I've still got a residual cough, which has recently gotten so bad that it triggered a gag reflex and I was coughing up blood clots. I tried to explain this to a friend but it's hard not to sound like a bulimic vampire when you say you're vomiting blood. So this is how it went down.
'Are you okay?'
'Yeah, but there was a bit of blood'
'Wait, what?'
'Uhh...like, blood clots'
'What do you mean?' (probable internal thought: crap she's a female Edward Cullen)
'Like the blood clots in your period'
'Oh, okay then'
See? NOTHING WRONG WITH IT.
I remember in one of my first year nine English classes, as a shy, meek, sheltered year eight, and suddenly we were talking about sex. Like, sex in literature. It was suddenly such a normal thing to talk about, to analyse gender dynamics and gender roles and sexual interaction. And some of the texts we studied were pretty sexy, too.
I'm one of those liberal arts gender studies wannabes and so I write a lot about feminist theory and the representation of gender in my essays for English and Lit. My most recent thesis on Eva Luna was 'Eva Luna challenges the patriarchal view of the world and empowers subaltern characters by presenting an alternate gender dynamic of egalitarian sexual relationships', which was a feminist and post-colonial reading of the use of micro-narrative to represent and critique post-colonial South American society. It's something I'm very comfortable writing about and something I've learned in high school. I remember, vividly, when we were getting our first year eleven lit essays back and our teacher was reading the 'best bits' of everyone's essays and she read out my thesis and someone (no names, but I heard you, Darth Vader!) muttered 'she actually wrote 'sexuality'' or something along those lines - it was an essay on the artistic depictions of Venus and how this reflects changes in societal attitudes towards female physical appearance. What's the point of writing an essay about sex if the s-word is never mentioned once?
I think talking about this stuff on my blog helps me to sort things out, to become more open and confident and to approach all these taboo subjects that really need to be discussed in order to promote healthier relationships and healthier societal attitudes towards men and women and sex and identity and gender and all of that stuff - it is, weirdly, a lot easier to talk about this kind of taboo stuff in a public sphere, even though I'm very aware of my readership.
I feel like girls are still so suppressed in their opportunities to express themselves as women, as people, as human beings with desires and feeling and emotions. There's so much guilt surrounding female sexuality, female appearance, the female biological function - it's actually ridiculous. I'm so tired of feeling guilty about how I look, what I think, how I behave, what I want, how I feel. I hate the connection between pleasure and shame and the consequences this has on all people - men, women, straight, gay - we'd all be so much better off if we were more open about something that is so natural and uncontrollable. I sometimes think that what girls think is okay and what is not is getting very confused with what society thinks is okay and what is not. I know it's hard to differentiate but I don't think it's healthy for a girl to take a particular attitude 'because people will think I'm a slut/nun/insert derogatory term here', as opposed to 'I do not want to do this because it makes me feel weird/uncomfortable/insert word that isn't 'happy' here'. And I do not for the life of me understand why my liberal attitude towards sex and gender somehow makes me less sexy than girls who never ever ever ever talk about it.
I am what you might call an educated woman - well, on my way to that, anyway. I'm more educated than a lot of women out there, which is sad, considering that I haven't even graduated from high school yet. I'm not a huge fan of the education system, and I don't judge my education on the pieces of paper I get that tell me that I've finished my
Anyway.
I consider myself an educated woman because I recognize the danger of ignorance and actively attempt to improve myself through knowledge and learning and experience. Ignorance leads to fear, to misconceptions, to poor judgement, to irrationality and violence and suppression. My love of knowledge and my lust for experience defines me in all ways - as a woman, as a teenager, as the person that I am becoming. By not talking about things, or talking about things in hushed whispers, we spread unfair, untrue and harmful myths and mangled half-truths about sex and sexuality, which have the most profound impact on the most vulnerable people in society - youth, women, and marginalized sexual identities (gay, transgender, etc.) We're not going to make sex, or pleasure, or sexual relationships, or sexual attraction, or the sex industry, or sex crimes, or sexually transmitted diseases, just evaporate by refusing to ever acknowledge or discuss them - and for the first five on that list we shouldn't really want them to evaporate. Like at all. Instead of bashing ourselves over the head with man made constructs like religion and morality - which are really just manifestations of societal fears and attitudes and general ignorance - we should have open dialogue so everyone's on the same page.
I value communication above all things - which is why I feel intensely uncomfortable when I'm in situations where I feel like either I can't understand people or people can't understand me or both; I am irrationally afraid of language and cultural barriers and in all my relationships I feel like I'm so weird and different and unorthodox that I can't always voice my opinions and my feelings even when I've pretty much heard EVERYTHING (seriously. Some people have told me the randomest shit and I've dealt with it, and I can't tell them nothing). I need to talk - a lot - and this is me, just talking. Talking about the things I'm not allowed to say, or I'm too afraid to say, or I have nobody to speak to.
I am so thankful that I'm part of the generation that has grown up with the internet. I've had home internet connection since I was about seven years old. Which I thought was pretty cool, until I realized that my four year old cousin has an iPad and my one year old nephew can use a smartphone better than I can.
But yeah. Internet. Exposure. To ideas.
So here is where I get my ideas from! (in no particular order, and I've definitely forgotten at least a few things)
Belle de Jour
Don't ask me how the hell I stumbled upon Belle de Jour, but it was one of the best things that happened to me. Belle de Jour (who I've talked about earlier when I was discussing scars) is a research scientist in England who worked briefly as a high class escort between submitting her PhD. thesis and having her PhD. awarded. She challenges pretty much every stereotype about sex workers out there - she's not poor, starving, abused (I mean, I know that happens but there are exceptions to the rule), and she did it because she liked it. And she's a feminist, too - well, she has what I consider to be feminist ideals even though some "feminists" whack her over the head with morality. She prizes what anyone should prize in women - intelligence, sophistication, empowerment, education, conversation. Belle de Jour was the first bold statement that women can like sex, should like sex, and that sex and attraction is so much more than what you look like. She's my height with horrible acne scars too. People used to pay her 300 pounds an hour for her time.
She also challenged that whole 'guys are only after sex' stereotype that is told to EVERY SINGLE TEENAGE GIRL ON THE FACE OF THIS EARTH. Sure, I'm kinda starting to realize that teenage boys are kind of preoccupied with sex (actually we all are, but girls are expected not to be) but as Belle de Jour so classily put it, if guys were only interested in the physical stuff, they wouldn't hire prostitutes. They'd just 'wank and save the money'.
She said it, not me.
Garfunkel and Oates
Garfunkel and Oates are an indie comedy duo who are MIND NUMBINGLY HILARIOUS and...very, very dirty. They're a new generation of younger people - messed up children of baby boomers - who are open about life, about sex, about hilarious experiences and encounters. It's the first time I've seen crude humour oriented to a primarily female audience - it's okay to like Garfunkel and Oates and have boobs.
Hannah Girasol
Hannah Girasol is the web name of Hannah Witton, a UK vlogger who is super funny and entertaining and just yeah. Cool. She's part of the Garfunkel and Oates generation - wrong continent, but same ideals. It's okay for women to explore, to experiment, to be open about who they are - to fuck things oup epically and see the funny side!. And she has a sex education thing which is soooo much more comprehensive than the school's USE CONDOMS OR DIE classes (sex ed, seriously...I did not need to know half the things they taught us and the other half was mysteriously omitted in the name of morality. You could have told me about boner hugs before I found out the hard way...pun intended...)
Laci Green
Laci Green is a Berkeley graduate, social justice activist and sex educator and founder of Sex+ which is a weekly YouTube series about, well, everything - growing up, expressing yourself, gender roles, body issues, social attitudes and their impact on sex and gender and life...everything. It's everything you should know that nobody really knows. Unlike my sometimes unjustifiably polemic rants, all her videos are super researched and ridiculously funny. And kind of crude. I don't mind.
Emily Maguire
Emily Maguire is an Australian writer who writes journalistic pieces on the status of women in Australian society and also released a non fiction book called Princesses and Pornstars (re-released as Your Skirt's Too Short for younger readers). As my copy of The Female Eunuch is still in transit, this is the first academic-ish book I've read on feminism, and it's really helped me to form my own ideas and to grow, as a person and as a woman and as a feminist.
Me!
I guess the biggest influence on yourself is, well, you - your experiences, the people you know, etc. I'm growing up, and I've had experiences - weird ones - and everyone I meet and everything I do shapes and alters and influences me, as I find out what I like, what I want, and how I feel about things.
STUFF THAT I'VE REJECTED AS GOOD INFLUENCES ON MY PERSONAL DEVELOPMENT
Dita von Teese
This might be slightly irrational but I don't think that Dita von Teese is really the sex positive icon that she's made out to be - she seems to me to be a highly insecure woman who is overly reliant on physical appearance, and in her interviews she doesn't really have any strong opinions on women and sexuality. Sounds harsh but...it's nothing personal.
The copious and ever growing number of evangelical Bible-believing Christian blogs
Even when I was into abstinence I rejected the idea that sex, or certain types or situations of sexual activity, was *wrong* - I just bought into the whole romance of the 'wedding night' thing and this was before hormones - and brain cells - *really* kicked in. I'm all for religious freedom and I have quite a lot of friends (you wouldn't believe it, but it's true) who are vtms and/or Christian and that's fine, because that choice is about freedom of sexual expression and I am all for that. But the way people whack you over the head with it just because you don't see virginity as a 'gift' or you don't believe you're going to burn in hell because you gave a few pre-marital handjobs is just ridiculous, and it's a violation of my right to religious freedom - atheism, which couldn't give a damn about what goes on behind closed doors. I think abstinence can be healthy if it's a fully conscious decision (i.e. not something you're pressured into but something you genuinely believe in, hard to tell I know but I don't think it's a decision God/Jesus/Mary/parents/church people/society/boyfriend should make for you) but I hate the way that more sexually liberated women (and it's really only women) are demonized by these people who use a major religion as a tool to exploit societal fears and attitudes and to promote their own (and very unrelated to religion) ignorant opinions and impose them on other people. In my scandalously atheist perspective of life and love the idea of saving sex for just one person makes it special and sacred and etc, and marriage can be involved in that. But saving sex specifically for marriage, rather than for a person, is a patriarchal construct designed to deny women the right to explore their own sexuality and bodies and the right to give and receive pleasure freely. The obsession with purity - is it impure, to feel good after winning a prize, or coming first in a race, or the rush of endorphins after exercise or the emotions of friendship? No. So what's impure about feeling good about sex and romantic relationships?
Teen Magazines
My sister and I used to be kind of semi-avid collectors of Dolly and Girlfriend, and for most girls the Dolly Doctor sections are the only socially acceptable (actually, not really) access to specific questions about life and love and bodies and emotions and all the other stuff teenagers have to deal with. But I just felt like the emphasis was on appearance and makeup and clothes and how to make yourself look better and bigger and smaller and what to do with boys for the benefit of...boys and that was really when my makeup obsession and insecurities started. I also felt like it was aimed at a kind of white, high socio-economic status audience...put it this way, these magazines read like something I would write if I was commissioned to write something for the girls I grew up with. And I don't cherish a soft spot for most of them. So yeah.
Also, the whole 'retouch free zones' made me feel worse. I couldn't even blame Photoshop for the obvious physical differences between me and the people splashed on magazine covers. I do not understand why the knowledge that Miranda Kerr looks THAT HOT WITHOUT ANY HELP is supposed to make us feel better.
Wow. This was um. Heavy. And it took me all day to write. And I'm sorry if I'm freaking you out.
Not really.
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