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!
Monday, May 27, 2013
Tuesday, May 21, 2013
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.
"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.
Sunday, May 5, 2013
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!
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!
Sunday, April 28, 2013
Questions
So, if you're dating someone and they tell you that they want to be a hoe, but weren't given the opportunity, and you know they're not really joking...
Are you supposed to feel happy that they chose to date you instead of doing that, or shitty that you couldn't be just a one-night stand, because apparently THEN you would mean more to them at this point in their life than an actual girlfriend would?! Or are you supposed to feel shitty that they weren't popular enough with the ladies to be a hoe so they have to be monogamous?
I feel none of those things. Just sort of angry that people don't do what they want and involve me in their silliness when all I want to do is be happy and not have my self-esteem lowered constantly for no reason. Maybe I'm over thinking things. But seriously?
There are different types of hoes. Which one do you want to be? The person who hoes out the emotions of the person that they choose to be with, or a person who fucks everything?
Are you supposed to feel happy that they chose to date you instead of doing that, or shitty that you couldn't be just a one-night stand, because apparently THEN you would mean more to them at this point in their life than an actual girlfriend would?! Or are you supposed to feel shitty that they weren't popular enough with the ladies to be a hoe so they have to be monogamous?
I feel none of those things. Just sort of angry that people don't do what they want and involve me in their silliness when all I want to do is be happy and not have my self-esteem lowered constantly for no reason. Maybe I'm over thinking things. But seriously?
There are different types of hoes. Which one do you want to be? The person who hoes out the emotions of the person that they choose to be with, or a person who fucks everything?
Friday, April 5, 2013
A Response to the Eternal Quagmire of Monogamy
Last night I was having a (somewhat) romantic dinner with my boyfriend at a sushi bar, and the question of monogamy came up. Since we had been discussing something else all day, I thought it best to leave the question (and answer) for another day. In short, I avoided the subject entirely. I didn't do this because I didn't think it should be discussed, or because I was afraid of the conclusion that we would come to, but rather because I also don't know what to think about it. That, and I was still a little shaken up by our previous night's discussion that had transitioned into the following day. The fact is that it is something that should be talked about, and there are many reasons, in my opinion, for doing so.
This is no new thing for me, this questioning monogamy business. And with so many conflicting views out there, with an overwhelming majority of people agreeing that monogamy is the way to go, how do we know what the "right" choice is? Once we make a choice to become monogamous, how do we find out for sure what fuels us in that decision-making process? Now I'm operating under the assumption that monogamy is a choice, because though science has shown that some of us may have certain genetic predispositions to monogamy, not all of us act in a consistently monogamous way. By that I mean that human beings have been shown by science to be mostly monogamous with polygamous tendencies, perhaps due to circumstances like population and male to female ratio. We as a species have not always been monogamous, because there was a time, long ago, where we numbered far less than we do now and it was in our best interest to spread our genes far and wide.
Genetic diversity aside, we do have chemicals in our brains that have been shown to aid us in our quest for a monogamous relationship. There are stimulating activities that we can do with our partners to "solidify" the bond that we have and sort of imprint it upon our brains that this person excites us and that they are the "correct" one for us, such as engaging in exercise and high-risk activities that release chemicals in our brains like adrenaline and dopamine, both stimulating. The idea of there being a "correct" person for us is ludicrous, of course, because there are many different genes that would ultimately benefit our offspring in different ways, and not all of them belong to the same person; perhaps not even the person that we have chosen to call our own.
When my boyfriend mentioned that he wasn't sure what he believed about monogamy, I experienced a little flutter in my stomach (heart?), and that's normal. We all want to believe that we are the right one for our significant other, because we've all sort of unknowingly started out on this arduous quest for a mate and have soon realized that it's a lot more difficult than we thought to stay faithful. This knowledge instills in us a sort of jealous realization that perhaps our significant other might be having similar thoughts. Of course I would never compromise my boyfriend's right to question his relationships with people for my own feelings, however normal they may be. Why? Because I know it's not his fault that he feels this way: it's science. And I'm sure he would be happy to hear me say that I also ask the same questions.
Neither of us is religiously inclined (or should I say, neither of us has been infected with a religious inclination), and therefore know that that at least is not our deciding factor for staying monogamous, if we choose to do so. With that thought in mind, I attempt to shuffle through thousands of years of polygamous and monogamous behavior, set on figuring out what is the best choice for me. Let's face it, even though you may love your partner, honesty is always the best policy. If you do not want to be monogamous, you will not be, no matter how much you lie to yourself and your partner, or try to convince yourself that you do want to be, or that you can even make that choice and stick with it. Because couples that attempt to form a long-term, monogamous relationship overall experience a decrease in sex-drive over the years, I believe it is important to know the ways in which our brains work to help us find new and exciting ways to bond with each other.
Having experienced bouts of polygamy myself, I know that it personally makes me feel miserable to be polygamous. I have not specifically tried polyamory, but I have had more than a sexual relationship with a few people at once. I hate it. Is it biologically fueled hatred in my case? Perhaps I carry the gene that makes me predisposed to monogamy, if it does indeed exist, which studies have indicated it might. And if so, how do I find out if my lover also carries the gene? I know at the very least that he has other desireable genes, because I'm extremely attracted to him physically, in addition to admiring his capacity to learn and create. Perhaps it would be in my best interest not to know, knowing also that he must also make a choice and our choices must inform each other's, if we are to be happy and have a fulfilling relationship. The point is I can't know that for sure, but I can know something, based on my own personal experience with sex and relationships. So here are some conclusions that I've reached, for better or worse:
The bottom line for me is that we ARE beings that aren't exclusively about sex and procreation, we like to consider the meaning of many things, to explore the world and everything and everyone in it, and to make conclusions based upon scientific observation and research. We like to form bonds with people based on ideological similarities, among other reasons, and we work hard to preserve those bonds; they do give us a certain satisfaction. So, I think that in my personal journey I've discovered the joys and horrors of both monogamy and polygamy, but at the end of the day, I choose to be monogamous. I feel no biological need, in today's world, to copulate and/or procreate with many people. I think the mistake that people make is using the example of a failed marriage or a young love that ended in disaster as to why polygamy is the better option. Those people did not have respect for that person first, they didn't spend the time it took to really get to know someone and to consider if they could embrace the good and the bad things about that person, and they certainly didn't take the time to consider their own role in the relationship. They are not good examples of how a relationship can work. They are good examples of how lust mistaken for love ends.
Links to Research:
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=the-x-chromosome-and-monogamy
http://articles.latimes.com/2012/may/28/science/la-sci-human-monogamy-20120529
http://www.womenshealthmag.com/sex-and-relationships/monogamy?page=4
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/living-single/201212/are-monogamous-relationships-really-better
This is no new thing for me, this questioning monogamy business. And with so many conflicting views out there, with an overwhelming majority of people agreeing that monogamy is the way to go, how do we know what the "right" choice is? Once we make a choice to become monogamous, how do we find out for sure what fuels us in that decision-making process? Now I'm operating under the assumption that monogamy is a choice, because though science has shown that some of us may have certain genetic predispositions to monogamy, not all of us act in a consistently monogamous way. By that I mean that human beings have been shown by science to be mostly monogamous with polygamous tendencies, perhaps due to circumstances like population and male to female ratio. We as a species have not always been monogamous, because there was a time, long ago, where we numbered far less than we do now and it was in our best interest to spread our genes far and wide.
Genetic diversity aside, we do have chemicals in our brains that have been shown to aid us in our quest for a monogamous relationship. There are stimulating activities that we can do with our partners to "solidify" the bond that we have and sort of imprint it upon our brains that this person excites us and that they are the "correct" one for us, such as engaging in exercise and high-risk activities that release chemicals in our brains like adrenaline and dopamine, both stimulating. The idea of there being a "correct" person for us is ludicrous, of course, because there are many different genes that would ultimately benefit our offspring in different ways, and not all of them belong to the same person; perhaps not even the person that we have chosen to call our own.
When my boyfriend mentioned that he wasn't sure what he believed about monogamy, I experienced a little flutter in my stomach (heart?), and that's normal. We all want to believe that we are the right one for our significant other, because we've all sort of unknowingly started out on this arduous quest for a mate and have soon realized that it's a lot more difficult than we thought to stay faithful. This knowledge instills in us a sort of jealous realization that perhaps our significant other might be having similar thoughts. Of course I would never compromise my boyfriend's right to question his relationships with people for my own feelings, however normal they may be. Why? Because I know it's not his fault that he feels this way: it's science. And I'm sure he would be happy to hear me say that I also ask the same questions.
Neither of us is religiously inclined (or should I say, neither of us has been infected with a religious inclination), and therefore know that that at least is not our deciding factor for staying monogamous, if we choose to do so. With that thought in mind, I attempt to shuffle through thousands of years of polygamous and monogamous behavior, set on figuring out what is the best choice for me. Let's face it, even though you may love your partner, honesty is always the best policy. If you do not want to be monogamous, you will not be, no matter how much you lie to yourself and your partner, or try to convince yourself that you do want to be, or that you can even make that choice and stick with it. Because couples that attempt to form a long-term, monogamous relationship overall experience a decrease in sex-drive over the years, I believe it is important to know the ways in which our brains work to help us find new and exciting ways to bond with each other.
Having experienced bouts of polygamy myself, I know that it personally makes me feel miserable to be polygamous. I have not specifically tried polyamory, but I have had more than a sexual relationship with a few people at once. I hate it. Is it biologically fueled hatred in my case? Perhaps I carry the gene that makes me predisposed to monogamy, if it does indeed exist, which studies have indicated it might. And if so, how do I find out if my lover also carries the gene? I know at the very least that he has other desireable genes, because I'm extremely attracted to him physically, in addition to admiring his capacity to learn and create. Perhaps it would be in my best interest not to know, knowing also that he must also make a choice and our choices must inform each other's, if we are to be happy and have a fulfilling relationship. The point is I can't know that for sure, but I can know something, based on my own personal experience with sex and relationships. So here are some conclusions that I've reached, for better or worse:
- The main purpose of sex is to procreate, however pretty we dress it up, and since that's true, we must consider whether or not we want to have one or all of our offspring with our current partner (or partners, I guess).
- We must not lie to ourselves about what we want. My boyfriend wondered whether or not one person could succeed in satisfying the lust of another. I don't know the answer to that for sure, but I suspect that it's different for everyone. Once you examine what it is that you really want, you will know the right thing to do. He told me that he believed in an objective reality, but it seems that in the realm of sex, love, and babies, there may not be one.
- Monogamy is something that you should not compromise on. Your life is about making YOU happy, first and foremost, and I'm sure your lover would not want you living a lie (or to be living within your lie). Saying "I'll do it but I don't want to" is a recipe for disaster, whether you're for monogamy or against it.
- There is solid proof that human beings are not exclusively monogamous, but evidence for about when we started leaning more towards monogamy. That being said, we still practice polyamory and polygamy enough to consider it's benefits and drawbacks, both from a social and biological perspective. For me there was a deep dissatisfaction that I felt, and I wasn't sure why. I wasn't fulfilled in other ways that were important to me, I guess. For me those include: respect for my partner, and my partner having respect for me, bonding activities other than sex, the opportunity for comfortable exploration of sexual activities, and the satisfaction of working hard at something that can be really fulfilling in many different ways. Once you grow out of the stage of life where you unwittingly stifle the bejeezus out of your partners, you too may achieve nirvana.
The bottom line for me is that we ARE beings that aren't exclusively about sex and procreation, we like to consider the meaning of many things, to explore the world and everything and everyone in it, and to make conclusions based upon scientific observation and research. We like to form bonds with people based on ideological similarities, among other reasons, and we work hard to preserve those bonds; they do give us a certain satisfaction. So, I think that in my personal journey I've discovered the joys and horrors of both monogamy and polygamy, but at the end of the day, I choose to be monogamous. I feel no biological need, in today's world, to copulate and/or procreate with many people. I think the mistake that people make is using the example of a failed marriage or a young love that ended in disaster as to why polygamy is the better option. Those people did not have respect for that person first, they didn't spend the time it took to really get to know someone and to consider if they could embrace the good and the bad things about that person, and they certainly didn't take the time to consider their own role in the relationship. They are not good examples of how a relationship can work. They are good examples of how lust mistaken for love ends.
Links to Research:
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=the-x-chromosome-and-monogamy
http://articles.latimes.com/2012/may/28/science/la-sci-human-monogamy-20120529
http://www.womenshealthmag.com/sex-and-relationships/monogamy?page=4
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/living-single/201212/are-monogamous-relationships-really-better
Wednesday, March 20, 2013
Back Ye Feminist Slut!
So, I'm really sick of thinking about this, but I have to get it off my chest. I have been called a slut this week SO MUCH that I literally am quite befuddled as to how and why this word is still being bandied about so carelessly by people that I thought knew better. Have we, as self-proclaimed feminists and lovers of the opposite sex, just learned how to desensitize ourselves to a word whenever we feel the need to hurt someone else's feelings? Why is that our go-to word?
So, the situation(s) is (are) this: I have this friend, who shall remain nameless (and friendless, consequently), who felt the need to, after waiting a total of one hour before I responded back to him about a hangout sesh that as far as I knew had no timestamp attached to it, REEM me for about 4 more hours instead of just waiting to see why I hadn't responded. I was fully intending to hang out with him. Little background on this: he decided that he was in love with me within the first week of us knowing each other, and somewhere in there decided that I either owed him something because of that, or that anything that I did that WASN'T with him made me a huge "slut." So consequently a lot of name-calling, slut-calling, and general consensus that I was an extremely shitty person ensued. What had I done you ask, that he even KNEW about? I slept with someone in the apartment that we shared that I had known since before he moved in (he lived in the closet of our other roommates room and I barely knew him), I was always busy with my own life in a new town when he tried to hang out, and I hadn't returned his affections. Thus, I was a slut. The more reasoning I tried to do with him, the more stupid I became and the more he berated me about how "promiscuous" I was, even though he really would have no information with which to make that judgement.
Similarly, I ran into a situation with an ex this same week where he took it upon himself to make sure that I knew what a whore he thought I was. All of this came about because he had found out about a time, awhile go, where I had slept with a mutual friend of ours. We actually had a threesome with another friend of ours. I tend to be a very open and experimental person sexually, and sometimes I go through phases and sometimes I don't feel like experimenting sexually. Either way, I did not cheat on him, and in fact before this happened he had dumped me for his ex, as was his usual practice upon reaching the fourth month of our on-again off-again relationship. The way that we met? He was at a party hitting on me and trying to sleep with me while he was dating her, and then afterwards proceeded to cheat on her with me for an extended period of time.
Upon me trying to say that I was sorry and I understand why he was hurt that we kept it from him, but that I didn't feel I had to apologize for doing the actions that I did, his exact words were "just shut up for once slut."
All of this was punctuated by a conversation between a democrat and a republican that I read online which, during all of the usual name-calling, resulted in the word "feminist" being randomly peppered in along with all the other derogatory words for good measure. Excuse me, but when did not being (or not pretending to be for women's rights) a feminist ever get you laid?! And on top of that, when did being a "slut" just mean that you didn't choose to have sex with the man calling you a slut, and so therefore it made it okay to call you one, and when did a man becoming upset at not being the object of your affections justify him believing that you owe him something?
We, as a people, have come further than this, I know we have. So stop. Just stop. You know what you're doing and how you are setting people back and your entire SPECIES at that, and you need to take a step back and GROW THE FUCK UP.
And love each other.
So, the situation(s) is (are) this: I have this friend, who shall remain nameless (and friendless, consequently), who felt the need to, after waiting a total of one hour before I responded back to him about a hangout sesh that as far as I knew had no timestamp attached to it, REEM me for about 4 more hours instead of just waiting to see why I hadn't responded. I was fully intending to hang out with him. Little background on this: he decided that he was in love with me within the first week of us knowing each other, and somewhere in there decided that I either owed him something because of that, or that anything that I did that WASN'T with him made me a huge "slut." So consequently a lot of name-calling, slut-calling, and general consensus that I was an extremely shitty person ensued. What had I done you ask, that he even KNEW about? I slept with someone in the apartment that we shared that I had known since before he moved in (he lived in the closet of our other roommates room and I barely knew him), I was always busy with my own life in a new town when he tried to hang out, and I hadn't returned his affections. Thus, I was a slut. The more reasoning I tried to do with him, the more stupid I became and the more he berated me about how "promiscuous" I was, even though he really would have no information with which to make that judgement.
Similarly, I ran into a situation with an ex this same week where he took it upon himself to make sure that I knew what a whore he thought I was. All of this came about because he had found out about a time, awhile go, where I had slept with a mutual friend of ours. We actually had a threesome with another friend of ours. I tend to be a very open and experimental person sexually, and sometimes I go through phases and sometimes I don't feel like experimenting sexually. Either way, I did not cheat on him, and in fact before this happened he had dumped me for his ex, as was his usual practice upon reaching the fourth month of our on-again off-again relationship. The way that we met? He was at a party hitting on me and trying to sleep with me while he was dating her, and then afterwards proceeded to cheat on her with me for an extended period of time.
Upon me trying to say that I was sorry and I understand why he was hurt that we kept it from him, but that I didn't feel I had to apologize for doing the actions that I did, his exact words were "just shut up for once slut."
All of this was punctuated by a conversation between a democrat and a republican that I read online which, during all of the usual name-calling, resulted in the word "feminist" being randomly peppered in along with all the other derogatory words for good measure. Excuse me, but when did not being (or not pretending to be for women's rights) a feminist ever get you laid?! And on top of that, when did being a "slut" just mean that you didn't choose to have sex with the man calling you a slut, and so therefore it made it okay to call you one, and when did a man becoming upset at not being the object of your affections justify him believing that you owe him something?
We, as a people, have come further than this, I know we have. So stop. Just stop. You know what you're doing and how you are setting people back and your entire SPECIES at that, and you need to take a step back and GROW THE FUCK UP.
And love each other.
Saturday, January 12, 2013
What's in a Name?
"What's in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet"
-Romeo & Juliet
Hey there. I'm back. And since no one reads this, I'm betting no one missed me! But I missed me writing, and that's all that matters. I recently noticed something that I think has been bothering me for most of my adult life, though I hadn't realized just how much. It's hard to pinpoint the exact time that I must have noticed this strange social phenomenon of assigning an identity to a woman's name, but it might've been around the time that the Ting Ting's came out with that "That's Not My Name" song...
Anyway, I recently watched a movie based on the famous Manga series Berserk. It was fantastic, but there was one ink blot on an otherwise perfect canvas: the Princess in the story, Charlotte. Perhaps because she had the same name as me, and perhaps because I had noticed other literary Charlottes (besides Charlotte Bronte, bless her heart) in the past being subjected to identity reassignment surgery, I became irritated by her apparent lack of strength. Physically speaking, she was clumsy and weak, and emotionally speaking she was extremely shy, blushed a lot, and behaved with perfect inferiority in a man's presence. I noticed that Sex and the City's Charlotte is quite incapable of choosing husbands who want the same thing that she wants, and that her husbands are very controlling. She is the picture-perfect example of the old docile housewife stereotype, even going so far as to give up everything that sex could be for her to please her husbands.
The thing that bothered me so much was not simply that she was as her name suggests, petite and feminine, which for any Charlottes who haven't looked up the meaning of their name, is what you will find under "feminine of Charles." This led me to try to look up the meaning of the masculine version, Charles (or Carl). I was shocked (and by that I mean not at all) to find out that it literally means "man" or "free man."
Point being: it seems to me that people have been taught to somehow presuppose and assign gender characteristics to a person's name based on what they've been taught that the name suggests. I am none of these things, and I've met some Charles' who are far from what society would consider as possessing "manly" traits. This phenomenon is dangerous and leads to social stratification.
In my hunt for the truth I came across an article that suggested that women who apply for a job and who possess a very feminine name such as "Emma" or "Ella" tend to be overlooked or stereotyped and pressured into taking jobs that are generally reserved for women who are easily objectified. Names like Candy, Kiki, and Vanna were thought to be possessed of "dumb" women, while names such as Mildred were thought to belong to "hardworking" women. It doesn't just go as far as the intelligent vs. dumb stereotype, but there are many aspects and facets to this name discrimination phenomenon. Perhaps we have been informed by historical figures, historical meanings of names, or celebrities who literally give us a bad name, but whatever it is, women (and men!) everywhere are experiencing the negative affects of this whether we realize it or not. So be aware!
And remember, don't date a Susan ;)
-Romeo & Juliet
Hey there. I'm back. And since no one reads this, I'm betting no one missed me! But I missed me writing, and that's all that matters. I recently noticed something that I think has been bothering me for most of my adult life, though I hadn't realized just how much. It's hard to pinpoint the exact time that I must have noticed this strange social phenomenon of assigning an identity to a woman's name, but it might've been around the time that the Ting Ting's came out with that "That's Not My Name" song...
Anyway, I recently watched a movie based on the famous Manga series Berserk. It was fantastic, but there was one ink blot on an otherwise perfect canvas: the Princess in the story, Charlotte. Perhaps because she had the same name as me, and perhaps because I had noticed other literary Charlottes (besides Charlotte Bronte, bless her heart) in the past being subjected to identity reassignment surgery, I became irritated by her apparent lack of strength. Physically speaking, she was clumsy and weak, and emotionally speaking she was extremely shy, blushed a lot, and behaved with perfect inferiority in a man's presence. I noticed that Sex and the City's Charlotte is quite incapable of choosing husbands who want the same thing that she wants, and that her husbands are very controlling. She is the picture-perfect example of the old docile housewife stereotype, even going so far as to give up everything that sex could be for her to please her husbands.
The thing that bothered me so much was not simply that she was as her name suggests, petite and feminine, which for any Charlottes who haven't looked up the meaning of their name, is what you will find under "feminine of Charles." This led me to try to look up the meaning of the masculine version, Charles (or Carl). I was shocked (and by that I mean not at all) to find out that it literally means "man" or "free man."
Point being: it seems to me that people have been taught to somehow presuppose and assign gender characteristics to a person's name based on what they've been taught that the name suggests. I am none of these things, and I've met some Charles' who are far from what society would consider as possessing "manly" traits. This phenomenon is dangerous and leads to social stratification.
In my hunt for the truth I came across an article that suggested that women who apply for a job and who possess a very feminine name such as "Emma" or "Ella" tend to be overlooked or stereotyped and pressured into taking jobs that are generally reserved for women who are easily objectified. Names like Candy, Kiki, and Vanna were thought to be possessed of "dumb" women, while names such as Mildred were thought to belong to "hardworking" women. It doesn't just go as far as the intelligent vs. dumb stereotype, but there are many aspects and facets to this name discrimination phenomenon. Perhaps we have been informed by historical figures, historical meanings of names, or celebrities who literally give us a bad name, but whatever it is, women (and men!) everywhere are experiencing the negative affects of this whether we realize it or not. So be aware!
And remember, don't date a Susan ;)
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