The Freeze

I've just returned from a long trip in Europe. The end of this trip has meant saying goodbye to several precious things: weeks of vacation, an internet-free cocoon in our small Berlin apartment, and saying goodbye to a dear partner for serval months. The hole in my heart and my life is real. It will take time to heal and fill in. I find myself, my first night home and alone, browsing Amazon, Etsy, and Barnes and Noble. Instantly on returning home I am looking for a way to recreate myself, reshape myself, somehow change the way I live to reflect how I have changed while I have been away. These things, though -- these are not wisdom, these are not real, these are not substantial, meaningful change no matter how much I may want them to be. They are distractions. They allow me to feel productive while the real work of living as a more open, honest, deliberate human being drifts by undone and the world remains exactly as it was. I am following the events in Ferguson, like many young white individuals, with sadness and a sense of absolute hopelessness. I feel like the moral center of my generation has been wrenched from my hands while I stand helplessly by. I do not know how to communicate with those who are creating violence and mayhem. I do not have the vocabulary, the reference to speak to the experience of a police officer or a person of color. So, instead of doing something of value, I consume. I read Twitter, watch the news, read blog post upon blog post about "what white people can do" and every time conclude that the answer is: as individuals, not much worth anything. These two experiences are not disconnected. The drive to fill a void with consumption of popular media* is the same in both cases. The drive to cover my grief with acquisition of information or objects is the same -- and critically, it is ineffective, distracting, and disempowering in the same way. If I can mask my grief and guilt about Ferguson in the act of "getting educated" (reading Twitter) I can comfortably withhold my action from the world. I can not show up at protests, I can continue to spend money enriching those who continue the system, I can sit at home and do absolutely nothing. Reading social media is not an act of social justice. When the Big Media doesn't deliver news honestly (or is forcibly kept from seeing what's happening) reading on-the-ground social media accounts of protests is essential. It necessary as preparation and defense against the message machines set up by rich special interests. But it is not an act of social justice. I don't know what to do about Ferguson. And I don't know what to do about the grief that overwhelms me when I realize I am returning to a daily life that has been created for somebody I no longer am. But I do know one thing: whatever my ability to answer these challenges may be, the action will be driven by discomfort. The first step to change is to get real uncomfortable with the way things currently are. We all get really, really good at keeping ourselves comfortable. We have no end of access to numbing agents: media, chemicals, things to buy. The one thing I've noticed these numbing agents have in common (what's the connection between a pack of cigarettes and a new set of throw pillows?) is that they are all rooted in consumption**. SO, I have decided that the way to wisdom is to stop buying shit. I don't know what I truly want, what I feel, what I can do because I've gotten so good at distracting myself by shopping and buying and curating my own world so that I can live in comfort. I suspect we all do this. So, as an experiment, for the next 30 days I am going on a purchasing freeze. I shan't be buying anything at all, with a few exceptions. I'll let you know how it goes... EXCEPTIONS: Gas Groceries Coffee (Because coffee = time in coffee shops, which is valuable to me/vital to my social life.) ----- * I think clothes/books/jewelry/home decor are also media, in that their primary goal is to deliver & instill a particular message about the world. ** I'm pretty sure there's a political soapbox to get on somewhere in this sentence. Corporations make us uncomfortable by denying our inherent sense of moral decency (people working full time who are still below the poverty line, anyone?), and then have quite a lot to sell us in order to help soothe that discomfort...

A Note on Misogyny in Hip-Hop and Music

Today's post is a quote from rapper Dessa Darling.



"A lot of people say, 'Oh yeah, but you know I put that block in my head when I listen to that really misogynistic stuff.' I would make the following argument: If that was really racist racist content, it would be so overwhelming to you that you wouldn't be willing to listen through the offense. That reason that you can listen to it is 'cause it already got to you. You just failed that test."

-Dessa

Delirium: A Quasi-Review

Spoiler Warning for Delirium by Lauren Oliver. If you haven't read it, really, really, don't. If you have...

I read books for exactly one reason: To get to the end. My favorite sentence of a book is the last, without a doubt. It is what makes me scream or cry or smile or -- as with Delirium -- throw a book into the fire.

I have my ending preferences, of course. I will admit I'm a sucker for happy endings, but I'll gladly accept a sad one – as long as it's the RIGHT one. In Carrie Ryan's The Forest of Hands And Teeth, the ending damn near broke my heart, and yet it was truly the right ending. I accepted it and moved on.

But after Delirium, I cannot simply move on.

If you have not read Delirium (and again I say don't, but MAJOR, ENDING spoiler warning nevertheless) the basic plot is boy-meets-girl, they fall in love, boy dies and girl is left on her own. Tragic, potentially moving, certainly heartbreaking.

But, above all else, completely wrong. It was not supported by the characters, it was not supported by the world built up to that point, and it was not even supported by the plot itself. There are sad endings that are completely supported by the story that prefaces them. They shock you, they wreck you, they can leave you in tears – but they are always right. And then there are stories in which the sad ending is not merely tragic, but a complete betrayal of the characters, the story, and the reader's trust in the author to stay faithful to all of it.
Such a story is Delirium.

When I begin reading a novel – any novel – I am putting a kind of trust in the author's hands. I am giving up my money, my time, and my emotional investment. In return, I expect to be treated honorably. I expect to be given an ending that remains true to the spirit of the story and the characters. I don't like to predict the plot of my endings, but I do expect to be able to feel them before the story concludes. I can feel them because it's where the story is leading me. I create an emotional preparation for the end, and I trust the author to bring me there.

When that ending is taken from me, I must have a reason. I am shocked and my experience of the 3-4 hours I put into that book is based entirely on the ending. So if the ending is shocking, it better be shocking for something more than just shock value. I'm all for artistic freedom. Sometimes that means shock.

But if the ending is not resonant with the rest of the book, it's usually only shocking for one reason: the author is selling out. They are selling out themselves, their readers, and ultimately their artistic integrity for the sake of “literary value” or being a “serious” book. Or worse, they tack on a happy ending to “appeal to [insert choice of a) women b) teens c) children]”. And this doesn't work.

It destroys the story. It destroys the characters. And it destroys my experience of reading the book.

The price? For me, books being thrown across rooms. If an author writes a book I simply do not like, I will give them another chance. I will not speak badly of them or their book unless asked my opinion directly - karma, and all that. But after betrayal? I will never pick up another book by Lauren Oliver again. She has broken the trust I put in her an an author, and that can never be repaired.

(More to the point, I think she's a wicked woman for doing that. I mean, really?)

Learning Through Pain and Joy

You can choose to learn through love or you can choose to learn through fear. You have no choice to not learn, because everything you do - even attempts to not learn - contributes to your overall evolution. Every single choice you makes changes you. Every single thing you do creates a fundamental shift at the deepest levels of the core of who you are. Your soul is changed by each and every single action you embark on.

So what this means is that learning through love IS possible., It's simply a different method. It's a method that allows you to do everything you need to do AND be happy. Pain may be inescapable because loss is constant. But that does not have to be fear, and it does not have to be constant sacrifice and self denial. You can be happy, and content, and use that happiness and content to fuel what you are becoming.

The trick is... complicated. You must learn to bear bright and beautiful fruits without uprooting the tree. And you must learn to channel happiness not into stagnation and comfort - which, let's face it, humans are all wont to do -but rather into the same places you would channel your pain. Does loneliness have to be the prompter for innovation and beauty? I cannot believe that. I do not believe that. No, rather, joy and happiness can be even better motivators. It is simply an exercise in awareness. It is a completely different way of working.

We tend to create great things when we hurt because the need and desire to escape, process, or rationalize our pain is so intense that it drives us into things that we would not otherwise do. The man who has a lion chasing him may run faster than a man ever has in his life. And yet, might not that man run just as fast as he leaps and bounds his way to meet his bride on their wedding day? As he carries her home to their first night together as a married couple?

I think he can.

The idea that pain and suffering is necessary and constant is not one that I accept. Yes, loss and death are a part of the cycle of life. But that does not mean that creation cannot be an expression of pure joy - nothing but pure joy. It just must find a new channel to come out. We are so ingrained in our beliefs of pain as a necessary motivator (as a connection to our emotions, I believe ) that we cannot find ourselves in our joy. And yet there we are, even more present than we are in anything else. Joy can move us as far and as fast as pain can. In fact, it can move us faster and farther, because it does not attack the hand that feeds us. Pain can be there for short bursts of brilliance, but at the end of the day if we rely on pain to move us, we will eventually either run away from creation (because we will see it as a fundamentally painful process) OR we will be destroyed by our own creation, instead of being sustained and carried by it. We will, in other words, completely burn out. Pain is not something that supports a lifetime of conscious creation. It cannot. It is not a complete reality.

Joy, rather, or even cycles of pain and joy, is what supports a lifetime that completely embraces all the oppportunities open to it and does not shut down to the creation that is attempting to flower it's way through it at every second and every moment of every single day of our time here on earth.

Joy is what moves us through loss and suffering and the great agonies of this life. To love and to care is to accept the wound that will follow. This is the great gift of love; to love is always a selfless, self-sacrificing gift, because it gives even with the knowledge that the more giving it does, the stronger the hurt will be when it eventually ends.

Creating through joy. This is the possibility that this beautiful new wold offers us.. We just need to learn how to do that.

The Shame Culture of Feminism

Before I begin, I should mention that the article mentioned here comes from "The F Bomb" which is a website that - IMHO - by no means sets the standard for most feminist sites. However, they did manage to nicely demonstrate the one aspect of feminist culture that I find to be abhorrent - shame culture.

Most feminists protest against the shame culture of their youth. They rebell against the shameing, sexual and otherwise, of the previous generation. Most adult feminists I know want nothing more than to prevent themselves from passing down that ingrained notion to another generatin of girls - AND boys.

And yet. I can walk into almost any feminist website on the internet and find a gem like this, which I think sums up the issue nicely:

"Also worth noting: the girl whose parents were open about sex remained a virgin, where I think most people would assume the opposite result. In fact, not fealing shame about something like sex definitely makes people feel more confident in their ability to make decisions about it and stay true to themselves." (Source: http://thefbomb.org/2010/09/easy-a-and-teenage-sexuality/)

Yes, her parents talking to her about sex enabled her to stay a virgin. Did you hear that? It is a grand thing, is it not? The height and glory of parental involvement in sex is not producing a teenager and eventual adult who is capable of relating to sex and sexuality in a healthy and normal way, it is producing a child who is able to, against all odds, remain a virgin - and in doing so "stay true to herself".

What if she had decided to have sex? What if she had said to herself, "I feel emotionally ready to have sex, I have a partner I feel safe and comfortable with, I know how to keep myself and my partner physically safe, and I want to have sex."? We are to assume, it seems, that this version would not be "true to herself". Because, after all, girls selves are inherantly and unshakeable virginal, are they not?

This disturbs me. It disturbs me as teenager reading feminist blogs and articles, and it disturbed me more a a very young girl reading feminist publications. It was where I was left, after my first kiss, after my first make out, after my very early sexual experiences. Had I wanted them? Had I felt ready? Had I felt safe?

Yes.

And yet I could not shake this notion that I had not been "true to myself". I could not shake this idea that I had betrayed some great confidence - not the confidence of my parents, family, or community, who were all just fine with it all - but the confidence in myself. The confidence to say "no", because after all, isn't that what "Strong girls" were supposed to do? Say no?

This seems like a virgin/whore shame culture espoused by the mainstream media and internalized by a child. And yet, I watched no TV. I read no magazines; I did not follow the trends. Every drop of shame that fell from me came from one source, the one I had immersed myself in - feminism.

The point here is not my personal experience - I got over it. Yet this is an experience that I have shared with many of my friends who were also exposed to feminism at an early age, always to nodding heads and perfect relating. And so it seems to be that feminism, somehow, has managed to enforce the exact same beliefs that it claims to despise. There are generations of girls and boys who will continue to suffer this until somebody has the sense to think about what they are saying, and take the step back to weed out the cliches, the catch phrases, the ingrained beliefs.

It's time to say what needs to be aasaid, not spew back phrases taught in gradeschool that do no more to dispell shame culture or this idea of virgin/whore than they did ten, twenty, thirty years ago. Really, all I'm asking for is that adults think before they speak. Is that so much to ask?

We interrupt this dissertation...

To bring you another, rape-related Topic of Interest. Writing the Duende, to clarify, is not and will not be a blog about rape. It's a blog about whatever currents sweep me up in them, and right now that's the national hubbub around rape.

I've been talking about rape in the abstract and political senses, so here's another side to it: Banned books. Specifically, Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson:

http://literatisliterarylibrary.blogspot.com/2010/09/bring-on-banned-books.html

The Crisis of Men and the Faults of Feminism - Or, "Bitch, make me a sammich"

I am not a man. I have never been a young boy in America, and in this life time I never will be. I therefore do not speak from direct personal experience, but from observed phenomena and conjecture.

With that being said, I will now have a self assured make out session with my pet theory.

In previous posts, I noted the number of men committing rapes recently. These are typically college age men, in their late teens and early twenties. (I do not speak for all rapes, rapists, or forms of sexual abuse. These are merely the rapists I am concerned with, for the purposes of this post.) It is a disturbing trend, particularly in a generation that has supposedly been taught to respect women and girls as equals.

However, there is something far more disturbing. I am 16 years old. I have male friends of all ages - from 20 to 13. In these men and boys, I have noticed a direct correlation between respect for women, and age. The younger the boys, the less the respect. It can be argued, perhaps, that a 13 yr old treating females a certain way, is due to immaturity and will soon be grown out of.

If we're talking about frogs in desks and pig-tail pulling, that's true -- but I'm not. I'm talking about sexual objectification, name calling, physical abuse, and the playing of video "games" such as Rapeplay (why does that even EXIST???). Further, I have observed a number of the same boys for the last four years. Those same thirteen year old boys I noticed being disturbingly disrespectful in middle school, are now seventeen years old. Their behaviour hasn't changed.

To illustrate this point, I direct your attention to the recently popular (but thankfully, receding) "Bitch, make me a sammich" so-called joke. It's a one liner, it's a put-down, it closes a conversation - and it's a blatant, one-up-ya power play directed exclusively at females. Any woman who protests this line, is immediately attacked by male AND female members of a group, as being "unable to take a joke".

Of course, this is life. Right? Perhaps unpleasant, but decidedly typical, especially in teenage circles. Well, I disagree.

I've been bullied. Not in a little kids, rough and tumble way, but in a brutal, pointed, changing-schools-to-get-away kind of way. For most of school, I was decidedly unpopular. I was the twelve year old who analyzed her classmates looking for trends in gender dynamics -- how many friends do you think I had? So, I'm used to being shot down. Used to being laughed at, ignored, teased, and one-upped in conversation again and again and again. I don't say this to beg for a pity party, but to point out: THAT is the run-of-the-mill brutality of adolescence. I've seen it, I know what it is.

"Make me a sammich" is not that. So why? Why is it different? It's different because it's not the victimization of one person, or the elevation of one person. The thousands of variants on "I'm pretty, you're ugly", for example, are individualized. They put one specific person (the bully) above one other specific person (the bullied). Your hair, your braces, your slutishness, your fat ass. Each case is an issue between two people.

The sammich line goes farther, and deeper. In a group of adolescents, Jason may use it to silence Tasha - but the "joke" isn't about Tasha. It doesn't put Jason above Tasha, it puts the males of the group above the females, for no other reason than the fact that "we are males, and you are females". It is, in other words, sexism in it's most pure and blatant form.

It is easy to take this fact and go down a typical road - sexism is bad, they need to stop being sexist, there is danger here, etc.

But I think a closer look at this is required. It is not, after all, implying that women are sexual objects, or naturally submissive, or incapable of contributing to the work force. It is instead bringing back an idea that is ancient to my generation: that women belong in the home. I realize that to those even 20 years older than us, it may not seem that outdated... but to my generation, it's midevil.

So, why bring it back? Because it's a "cold" issue, ie one that you can bring back without being so politically incorrect that the opinion of the group turns against you. It's nothing more than a canvas on which to paint the larger message of: Men stand above women. It's not just a power play, it's a declaration of dominance, control, power.

And yanno what? You can say that's been happening forever, but the truth is, it hasn't. Have men (and women, for that matter) been playing out that notion for centuries? You bet. But the verbal, universally used declaration of men-are-better-than-women hasn't been verbalized on this scale in the past several decades. I'm not talking about a joke that some people happen to use, here. I'm talking about a line that everyone used -- in it's peak just a few months ago, it was as widely used as "That's what she said" or "Your mom" in their respective days.

I've rambled slightly, so to sum up the above quickly: Boys and young men are increasingly asserting their social and physical power over women, even as their economic, social, and educational advantages decrease and even reverse. This begins in words, but it's a pretty quick step over to physical abuse, and then to rape.

I don't think it's very difficult to make the next logical step: Boys and men are being threatened by the rise of women, the success of feminism, and the gradual but undeniable deconstruction of a patriarchal governing system.

Why? Because they're lost, and feminism has shifted the focus so much on to women, that no one is standing by to help the boys as they try and find their place in a suddenly "broken" world.

More on that in my next post. In the mean time, you REALLY want to read this: http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/the-new-girl-power-why-were-living-in-a-young-womans-world-2074042.html