What kind of feminist are you?

Lately I've been feeling like I'm coming on too strong as either an angry feminist or a sad sappy feminist who doesn't know who she is or how she feels about herself.  But then I remember that we're all feminists, or at least we should be if we want women to continue to exist, and that we make up all different kinds of people and emotions and backgrounds.  I'm not sure exactly what I want this post to be about, but I guess I'm just feeling sick and tired, literally, and sick and tired of feeling sick, tired, and unappreciated.  My whole issue with the way the world functions is that we don't view people as, well, people.  We expect them to fit into neat little boxes, or we expect them to take what we give them, because after all, aren't we feminists the ones who wanted equality?  I have come across so many men with that point of view that I don't know where to begin.  There are men and women who feel that when dealing with women, treat them exactly as how the men they know would want to be treated is an acceptable adage.  I disagree.  I think that we need to pay special attention to both the men and women in our lives and how their unique personalities and sentiments cause them to act and react, and pay heed to them accordingly.  Even men and women that claim to be feminists can often be blinded by gender, albeit in a different way than you would expect.  They see a woman and panic!  "What do I do or say so that she'll know I'm on her side and that I'm a feminist?" one might ask oneself.  But contrary to what many people do, which is to treat everyone exactly the same, they should instead be considering what they know about how that particular person operates.  If you don't know the person, treat them with respect and an open mind until you discover things about them.  Feminist is a tricky identifier, because it challenges us to walk a fine line and reassess what to many might seem obvious: how to deal with individuals who also have a gender.  What I see as obvious: treat them as you would any other individual and take into account various factors in their environment and yours, may not be obvious to the somewhat confused, newly adapted feminist.

Today I was helping my boyfriend with his home/bus conversion project, and I realized very quickly that I'm not a carpenter, but that that is totally okay.  The thing that wasn't okay was the way that we both felt about me helping with the project in conjunction with how we were communicating with each other.  I felt like I needed more background information on how the task that I was supposed to be completing should be handled, and I wrongly assumed that he knew what information to provide me with.  He wrongly assumed that I had all of the information I needed.  I ended up neglecting to check one detail and it ended up resulting in him having to do more work.  I felt deflated and useless.  As with anything that is important to me in life, I like to feel that I'm really making a difference and that the person understands that I am also learning and growing.  I may be a smart individual, but with little to no experience installing cabinets in a school bus.  My confidence level in that regard is only as good as the constructive feedback that I receive allows it to be, for safety's sake.  I like to think that I am cautious but not frightened to try new things.  I need a nurturing environment with constructive feedback, as do most.  However, I've been walking this fine line between wanting to help and not wanting to fuck anything up, for obvious reasons.  I often choose safe activities that are helpful without having the added danger of allowing me to completely destroy something that my boyfriend has worked so hard for.  I feel that he chooses the same for me as well and I'm not quite sure how to view that.  Today, after recovering from my mistake, without skipping a beat, he ran off saying how good it was that his friend had just arrived, and then asked me to boil some water for pasta as they proceeded to finish the current activity we had been working on without me.  I wasn't unhappy to be relieved of the burden of wondering what else I might do wrong, but after removing myself from the situation, I felt a little nonplussed  by how quick he was to express his joy at being saved from my inferior job as wood-stabalizer. I don't like to make assumptions, but I think that it can be convenient for him and many other guys to treat their girlfriends as they would anyone else.  I am not more special than his friend, but I do have a different personality and my feelings are hurt by different things.  I have a vested interest in helping and a vested interest in both my boyfriend and his project, so it was hard for me to stomach the dismissal of my help, my subsequent relocation to the kitchen to boil water, and our interaction later when he explained that I hadn't been "communicating with him properly" and that's why things got "messed up."  Be careful how you choose your words, friends.

People, significant others in particular, are sensitive to their own faults and mistakes already, even if you are not to yours.  There might be a lot of conclusions to be drawn from this interaction, but I like to think that most of them are obvious if we remove our genders from the equation.  What if we were both genderless individuals working together in close quarters, but with an added romantic twist?  Neither of us was communicating well, neither of us did the exactly correct thing, and neither of us felt great about our interaction after the situation was over.  I think there is something to be said about that, and it is that if we had just been more sensitive to who the other person was, and not what, things could have gone a lot more smoothly for both of us.  I hate to use personal examples at the expense of my loved ones, but they are all I have, and after all, they are also at my expense being that I frequently make mistakes -_-

That is all I've got in me folks, have a great Monday!  And if you're sick like me, feel better!

Pour Les Hommes...

So, whenever I teach, I try not to answer too many questions.  I try, in fact, to get my kids to ask themselves MORE questions.  And the more questions they ask themselves, the more questions they have.  If all goes well.  I want to take the same approach to femin(ism) because I want to believe that men (and women!) are just deterred by the daunting task of picking up an academic text and sifting through years of inequality, theories, and philosophies surrounding the segregation of women from most parts of society.  Well, I would argue the "misplacement" of women because there are prostitutes, and then there are wives, and then there are nuns.  You see what I mean.  Anyway, what I want to do is, after experiencing a series of almost attacks on my mind and body this week and last, and reading some great texts surrounding the issues of sexuality, gender, and equality in society, urge women and men to ask themselves some questions about their inner discourse before speaking out loud.  What I personally want, as a woman, is for you to ask yourself the following:

"What am I about to say to this woman?"
"Why am I about to say this to her?"
"Is there a deeper meaning for me in this exchange or is it purely superficial?"
"What do I gain from this interaction?  What does she gain?"
"Is whatever I'm about to gain from it worth it if she feels uncomfortable, offended, or saddened by it?"
"If this exchanged happened between me and someone else would I feel personally attacked or disrespected in some way?"
"Am I being truthful or just plain rude?"
"What might this say (to her) about what I think or feel about her?"

That's it for this post.  Just think I guess.  I have no desire to write more today.  I actually wrote this post early this morning before my day decided to head straight off a cliff.

Love.

Confusing Musings

Hey all you guys and gals, and happy Mexican Independence Day!  Which for white people basically means all you can drink margaritas and breakfast tacos all day long, maybe a Mariachi band to gaze at whilst chowing down.  In any case, hope it's great!

Mine, on the other hand, involved working all day at a Mexican restaurant so you can imagine how busy it was.  It also didn't start out on the greatest note, when I kind of flipped out after an incident made me feel a little crappy after I woke up this morning.  The short story is that ever since childhood, I've struggled with the  horrible feeling that I get when older men, or just men in general, snap at me, or get exasperated with me and act annoyed, causing me to feel a little like, well, running away from my own insecure feelings of stupidity and being less than worthy of a more patient response.

But rather than just run away, I also get angry.  I feel angry for two reasons: because I know that the history of why I feel this way has nothing to do with that person, but I also get angry because I know that it's not necessarily going to change.  Being sensitive to those things has a lot to do with who I am now.  Do I apologize for that?  As any person wouldn't, I don't really feel great about being told "how I need to be," whether it's less sensitive or more tough.  To me it kind of sends the same message: this thing really bothers you, and you've expressed it many times in a lot of different ways, but YOU need to respond a certain way so that I don't have to change how I communicate with you.  Lately I've been overreacting when confronted with these feelings, because I feel very defensive of myself.  All my life older men have made me feel awful about myself, calling me stupid and acting like I wasn't capable of the simplest tasks.  There have been multiple occasions where I've dated someone who was both emotionally and physically abusive.  Sometimes even I feel as though I'm not capable of anything.  I guess that I've internalized all of these negative thoughts and feelings so much that I tend to lash out at the next man who I feel responds with a less than "nice" response.  Which generally confuses them to no end, understandably.  The fault is also in my hands.  I just need to find a healthy balance, because I really love the men in my life, but I really don't feel like I'm being listened to!

Here's a little background on the situation: when I was 10, my dad wasn't really around and I ended up being forced to spend a lot of time with  my stepfather, who, though I was only 10/11 at the time, punished me like a tiny child and talked to me as though I were a very stupid adult; everything that I did was "wrong" and came complete with a laundry list of why my response was totally illogical and how I needed to change how I looked at literally everything.  It was rather traumatizing at that point in my life, and has caused me to regress a little when I get spoken down to.  I ended up respecting him in certain ways because he was very intelligent, despite being a devout Catholic and a serious misogynist (neither of which is very intelligent, but he knew a TON about traveling and food and the world, and that was cool to me).

That's another aspect that is hard to distinguish from current situations that I experience: because these men were/are very intelligent, or to me they seem to be so, I literally extrapolate from that that I must be unintelligent.  This causes me a lot of inner turmoil, because I hate when I act unfairly out of defense, but I really do not want to be confronted with negative, unproductive ways of communicating with me...  I just shut down inside.  I have repeatedly tried to explain myself to no avail to a lot of men in my life, and a lot of them have expressed only sympathy, maybe because they differentiate between me as being a sensitive woman and them as being a man who will (and does) react the way he wants to.

What I want, more than anything, seems to be empathy.  I want someone to literally put themselves in my position and to try to understand that really nobody wants to be snapped at or spoken down to in a condescending manner.  A LOT of women that I've brought this up to have expressed similar feelings that I can only imagine come from years of the same treatment that I seem to have received.  It's quite discouraging to note that a lot of them meet with the same resistance and feel that they can't talk to their loved ones about it.  I haven't bothered recently either, but I've also been told that my reactions are unnecessary.  In no case is name-calling or handling the conversation in an unproductive way as I did encouraged, but we are all human at the end of the day, or night.  If we can't ask our lovers to return the empathy that we express, that is when we truly become too sensitive and even weak.  

I don't really remember the last time that I was perfectly happy or content, or not too tired or hungry or sore, but I always try to answer people with patience and understanding.  I may be tired every single morning and have a long work day ahead of me, but I try to express love in the hopes that it will be returned.  I want someone to hear me when I have a problem, just as I try to do for them.  Instead all they seem to hear is "please go out of your way to argue with me about this new inconvenience that I've presented you with."  I'm not an inconvenience, and neither is adjusting your perspective on a situation that, for whatever reason, KEEPS OCCURRING, whether you want it to or not.  If you love someone, it will hurt you that they are hurting.

Bottom line: A lot of women, not all but a lot, struggle with these issues from years of emotional abuse, with people who didn't take the time to patiently explain to them that they were intelligent, or worth it; that what they are feeling or what they have to say is VALID.  You've spent a blip of time feeling annoyed or inconvenienced by their sensitivity, but they've spent their whole lives feeling bad about themselves!  We have literally had to try to convince ourselves that we aren't stupid or ugly.  It is hard!  Take the time to be patient with your women, your sisters, your mothers, your lovers, your aunts and cousins, and we will respond favorably.  I promise.  I am NOT saying that this is true for ONLY women at all, so please don't think that!  Men have valid feelings and are oftentimes sensitive and have been made to feel unworthy their whole lives as well.  I have deep empathy for them and I will try to lift them up with a kind word.  I am simply speaking from the collective experience and perception of many women out there.

Thank you and have a wonderful evening contemplating your own self-worth.  I hope you find peace when you discover that you are great, if you haven't already!  Don't let your struggles with self-confidence, self-worth, and loneliness get you down like I sometimes do.  But if you do, I hope you find empathy and love.

I should also add that it upsets me to NO END when I see women berating or freaking out at their men!  Seriously, you don't deserve friends, let alone to get laid with that negative attitude.  We're all in this together!