cardprince

"One day I wanted to explain myself to myself...And it struck me with a sort of surprise that the first thing I had to say was 'I am a woman.'" ~Simone de Beauvoir

I was looking at the livejournal community ‘feminist’ a while ago, a few years probably, and there was a post about a performance of a minority group (possibly a drag show?).  I don’t remember the exact group, but it was racial as the issue of visibly white people at the event was discussed.  What happened was, white members in the audience stood at the front of the performance, blocking minorities from the front.  The poster asked the question, how do I tell my (white) friends that they should move so the minorities can be at the front?

The idea was, this was THEIR event (the minority group) so the whites shouldn’t be at the front.  Several commenters said things like ‘explain white privilege to them and why they should move, let the [x group] have their event’ and others, ‘this is [x]’s event, normally they are downcast from society, this is their one space to enjoy so they should be at the front.’  I didn’t see a single commenter tell the poster that she was out of line by even suggesting that her white friends should move.  [I would have done this, except ‘feminist’ never approved my join request, and after this blog the reason will be evident]

I have several issues with this kind of belief.  My first reaction was confusion, as I would be more than ecstatic to see men at a feminist performance, standing at the front and enjoying it.  In fact, I’d say that’s my ideal world.

( Read more... )

*When I say ‘men’ and ‘women’ assume they are heterosexual. This would be really interesting from a homosexual standpoint but this is about heterosexuals only.

A few weeks ago my car broke down and I needed to jump it. I was downtown with another friend, a girl, with jumper cables that we borrowed from my roommate. Neither of us had ever jumped a car before so I was on the phone with my dad getting some guidance. A man, sort of grungy-looking, possibly a painter, walked toward us and offered to help. I said no, but he insisted, I said no thank you again, but again he didn’t take no for answer. I was on the phone with my father and my attention was split between him and my dad. Before I knew what was happening he took the cables and started to do it himself, telling my friend and I what to do.

I was pissed, frustrated, and feeling overwhelmed that this asshole just barged in because we were two ‘helpless’ attractive young women. I can say with little doubt that he would not have done that if we were men. He assumed we needed help, as we were women therefore of course we didn’t know anything about cars. He also assumed that we would be perfectly willing to accept his help. My ‘no, thank you’s were silenced, ignored. My no was apparently useless.

 

( Read more... )

(This definitely isn’t my best….it starts off okay then goes into gibberish. I’m really confused. Which is funny considering the first sentence…)

I feel like I’m finally starting to figure myself out. Which is a little disappointing at this age…what the hell have I been doing all this time? But, that’s the way it goes.

One thing in particular I have been doing is watching how I define myself, and others. I believed in stereotypes and the like way too strongly and embodied what I felt I ‘should’ be. For example, I used to consider myself a sex-positive feminist (probably because of all my issues with sexuality) so I acted like I thought one would act, having little flings here and there. These things can be fun, and they were ‘socially educational’ for me, but they were ultimately unfulfilling and not ‘who I am’ at the present moment.

The larger story of this scenario is that I projected a label onto myself and then acted how I perceived that label to act. I used to do this a lot; labeling, ‘boxing’, and becoming frustrated with contradictions and fluidity in identities. I didn’t allow myself any fluidity so I refused to allow anyone else any.

( Read more... )

I had posted a preliminary blog to this but I made it private because it was mainly a rant, and therefore not appropriate for this blog.  [I would like my posts here to be clear and concise and not driven by emotions.]  EXCEPT.  I just decided 'fuck it', it's necessary as a background, so it's back up.  In it's ranty glory and all.

I went to a counseling session today to confront some of the issues I had posted in the previous [private] blog.  All in all I do not need counseling long term, I just needed someone to validate my experience.  And she definitely did.

I realized a few things while I was talking to her.  The main one is related to my first entry-as basically everything in this blog can be-and my feeling of being worthless, useless, and objectified.  I never saw my body as my own, rather it was an object that others expressed their wills, wants, and desires onto. 

I was thinking about my orgasm problem [in that I 'cannot' have one] and it clicked...  Since I never felt like I was in control over my body, and part of becoming orgasmic is losing control/allowing yourself to lose control, I denied myself pleasure because it ensured that *I* was the one in control [NOT my body OR someone else].  How silly.  However, apparently this is common with women.  I don't expect to be able to orgasm any time soon, but at least I'm taking steps to rectify 'the problem'.





In order non-related news....I bought a fourth of shrooms :D 

 

I went to LovEvolution on Saturday, rolling of course.  The pill hit me in strange waves, it peaked then died then came back after a few hours.  The effect with this pill was different than any other.  It was pretty clean, which was wonderful, but I found myself thinking a bit differently than I usually do.  I was overwhelmed, but it was a calming overwhelming.  I looked out at thousands of people and thought, my god...these are all complete human beings just like me with their thinking and their problems and their issues and their love and their pasts and their childhoods...  Instead of thousands of beings appearing as a landscape that you quickly look over, I was inclined to stare at every single one of them and wonder who they were.  [This was a little dizzying]

When I got home I got makeup in my eye so I pulled my eyes down to try to get it out and looked at myself like that for a while, with my stretched out face.  Then I started pulling my face around in different ways, making my lips bigger, eyebrows higher, cheekbones more defined...just experimenting with how I could make my face look.  If the sperm had been different, the egg different, if my parents hadn't had sex exactly when they did...  I would be a completely different person yet somehow still the result of my parents.  [It's almost like having several siblings who are just like you, but not...]  I stretched my face to a certain position that made my lips longer and my eyes a little more slanted and thought FUCK that could have been ME.  For some reason this girl I was looking at also seemed a bit taller [like I was supposed to be].  I just imagined myself as her, the face was very exotic, a little odd looking but still somehow striking.  I thought I would probably have had a complex about my face and not accept it's uniqueness.  And my height, I probably would have been self-conscious because of it.  And I would have dealt with all these things and moved past them, as humans should.

It was just really trippy.

Who could you have been, who are you going to become, who ARE you?

---

( sexual interest [doesn't need to start with sex] )

[This is actually a backdate and sort of odd but I wanted to post this one before I post my latest drug epiphanies.  I think this might end up being one of the those writings where I read it in a few months and think, wtf was I thinking?  But it seems pretty right to me at the moment.  This is where I am in my development I suppose]


I got high as all hell last night [so much for quitting] and I was hanging out with A Boy.  A very special boy.  A very special boy in the sense that I've learned more about men and women from him than anybody else.  And not by the things he says, but by the things he does.  I've had men try to tell me about 'men', but they've never bothered to show me.  [Or, perhaps, I never bothered to look because I was too busy trying to listen.]

We were watching a movie on his laptop which was on a stool.  He had to fix the cords for his speakers so he turned the stool, taking the laptop with it, away from us.  I, in my drug-induced state, started to say, 'why did you turn it away?'  Until I realized at the last second that-DUH! he could move the laptop to face us because it was not attached to the stool.  I saw the laptop/stool as its own, whole, complete being.  He saw it as two distinct parts.  Granted I was high but to me this signifies the main difference in male vs female thinking.

You can also see this in pornography and in general the objectification of women.  Our society is largely still constructed by what the male gaze wants to see.  If it was the female gaze I hardly think women would bother shaving their delicate parts, legs, or wearing chemicals on their face to cover "flaws" in the numbers that they do now [although this is a form of female competition so you could argue it is female-induced, but I'll get into that in another blog].  Women in porn can be reduced to "tits" "ass" "fuckhole" "skinny bitch", you see where this is going!  She is literally described, her whole being, by a single body part or characteristic, "type."  She becomes neatly categorized..'.whats your flavor?  Asian?  Fat ass?  Big boobs?'  Etc.  Women have never had the luxury of treating men this way, do you think they would if they could?  I don't.  [Call me a gender essentialist if you want!]  A woman can certainly reject a man, but she can never degrade him to the status of an object.  She can never reduce him to something less than he already is.  [But can she make him more?  That is the question...]

( Read more... )

Disclaimer: This is a backdate, happened sometime in May.  I will write a follow up later but I wanted to post my thoughts as I actually experienced it.

Last night I went to another Davis party and had another experience that made my brain waves all a flutter.  It's some sort of epilogue to my previous entry about the 'Myth of Female Sexuality' but I have in no way figured this out-I'm just realizing I may not need to.  Sometimes things in life just don't make rational sense.

I went to the Whole Earth Festival, which was awesome, and after there was a party on the co-ops on campus.  There were fire spinners, techno buses, and the usual drunk and horny college students.  My friend, lets call her 'Sally', decided to get on top of the bus...she was a little more drunk than I thought she was but she did it anyway.  Another girl got up, 'Dina', and she was wearing a short tube dress.  There were about 4 girls on top of the bus in skirts or dresses, no shorts underneath.

Sally started gyrating to the music because when you're drunk and you're with a boy you like that's what girls tend to do.  Somehow it quickly turned into some sort of 'show'.  Partly because people tend to be a little exhibitionist when they're drunk, and partly because a crowd had gathered when they learned a girl was humping air on top of a bus.  One thing led to another and I started hearing, 'yeah!  take off your clothes' and such.  She complied, sort of, teasing-that sort of thing.  'Take off your top!  Show your boobs!'  Both of the girls I knew on the bus were pressured, yelled at even, to strip.  Dina, the more sober of the two, I don't think gave any show at all.

When Sally refused to comply with the crowds demands a female audience member shouted, 'get off the bus!  you're no fun!'

( Read more... )

One of the things I've realized this summer is that I am so attracted to Gender Studies because of the issues I've always felt being female.  I'm fairly sensitive and objective.  Which might seem like a contradiction, but that is in fact what I am.  From my youth I've always noticed Gender differences, and I've always internalized them.  The first time I remember my first bloom of feminism must have been in grade school...3rd grade perhaps?  The teacher had chosen 4 boys in a row to call roll, and I pointed this out.  Instead of chastising me and saying my observation was useless and silly, the teacher, a woman, acknowledged that I was correct and asked me if I wanted to take role.  Perhaps she had noticed gender disparity in her life, or perhaps she was just a good teacher and knew not to crush a child's opinion at such a vulnerable time.

Either way, that was the start.

The next instance I remember must have been when I was 9-11 or so, pre-adolescent, before breasts, that sort of thing.  I was playing shirtless with my brother on some rocks in the middle of a river, enjoying the sun on my skin and bouncing from rock to rock with a big stick I had found [my mother has a picture of me somewhere, shirtless in pink shorts with the stick raised triumphantly above my head].  My mother lamented and made a comment to my father that soon I wasn't going to be able to wander shirtless.  It was clear to me then that I would never be as free as I had been in that moment.  I was going to become a slave to my body, my breasts, and there was really nothing I could do about it.

And I hated it.
( Read more... )

In case I find myself with nothing to write about, these are some options for me, and all things I feel somewhat strongly about.

female sexuality
male sexuality
anal sex
hooters
pubic hair
oral sex
communication/honesty with sex
slut-shaming
objectification or self and others
internalization of social conditioning
female genital cutting
male genital cutting
growing up female
what is feminism
sociobiology/gender essentialism
"the game"
male and female strippers
hating women/hating self
orgasm problems
male manipulation

I am about to enter my first quarter of 'real' college [more real to me at least] and the purpose of this blog is to chronicle my thought process change.  I'm entering as a Junior, a Women & Gender Studies major with an Anthropology minor with an Evolution focus [woot woot!]  Considering the first few times I've ever laid foot on the campus I've had some sort of mental breakthrough or experienced something that was profound, if only to me, I figure a blog is in order.

Comments and thoughts are greatly appreciated...most entries will be related to feminism, sex, and self-analyzation.

This is pretty much NC-17 as I am horribly honest! 

Also- most posts will stem from personal experience.  I think one of the best ways to learn is to share your own experience and how it relates, so if you're uncomfortable with knowing that much about me that is something to consider as well...