What do you want to be when you grow up? is a question that becomes increasingly difficult to answer as I get older. It's especially challenging now that I'm in my second to last semester EVER of university , and relatives/acquaintances/random people I have just been introduced to insist on asking me this question. I understand that what do you plan to do in the future? functions as an icebreaker, and perhaps makes people feel like they're being considerate and interested in your life and where it's going.  But it makes me feel that I am being put on the spot in the most vulnerable way possible. It makes me want to pull  my hair out and wish for a void in the earth to swallow me up whole, rather than endure the pure torture of having to stand there in my gut-twisting, cringing awkwardness, trying to come up with an answer that makes me sound at least semi-articulate and In Control Of My Life.

What do you want to be when you grow up? I don't know. Where do you see yourself in five years?  I don't know. What career are you most passionate about?  I don't know. What is the blueprint for your future? I don't know. What do you plan to do with that degree of yours? I don't know. Maybe I'll get it framed and hang it up in my parents' house and sit on the couch in my pyjamas and cry at it every morning. What do you want to be when you grow up? A fucking unicorn.

I don't know if I'm doing anything phenomenally wrong here, but I quite frankly do not have a clue. Not one. Not even a sliver of a clue. I look around at the other also 20-something people on the brink of graduation and wonder if they have all their shit together. They certainly look like they do. Are they as confused as I am? As afraid? As painfully, desperately insecure? Do they also sometimes feel like breaking out into hysterical laughter when faced with the very thought of having to make up their minds about what on earth we're all going to do with the pieces of paper that will be granted to us at the end of 3.5 years? Are they also fighting the urge to drop everything, crawl under the blankets, and put their favourite album on repeat at full volume until the world decides to stop expecting things from us?

Or perhaps we're being asked the wrong question? I certainly don't know what I want to do for a living, but I have a pretty clear idea of some other things. I want to be happy. I want to be able to go to the movies, and to plays, and to concerts, and bookshops and restaurants. I want to travel. I want to read. I want to be surrounded by old friends and new friends and wonderful conversation and warm human affection and all the Oreo milkshakes I could possibly want. I want to be able to take my mom out on fancy dinner dates, because she deserves it. I want a giant framed poster of the TARDIS-ified Starry Night on the wall of the apartment (which I will own). I want to keep learning things. A five year projection, you say? In five years' time I want to be able to wear my own skin with the kind of confidence and security and contentment that I can only dream about at this point.

Maybe I'm not aiming high enough, or dreaming big enough, or planning concretely enough. Perhaps I'm too complacent, or too willing to fly by the seat of my pants. I don't know. And I don't know is something I seem to be saying and thinking a lot lately, like a ridiculous litany constantly looping somewhere in the periphery of my consciousness. I don't know I don't know I don't know I don't know. It doesn't help that things at home with the family haven't been entirely rosy in close to two years and counting now (ongoing financial issues, four funerals in roughly 18 months and mental illness issues aren't too fun to deal with). And it frightens me ; the idea that things simply won't "be okay" for myself and for my family, and I won't simply know all the answers, and that one day just "hanging in there" is not going to be nearly enough, and healthy escapism through songs and books and TV (something I have perfected to an art form, I'll have you know) simply won't be enough, and trying to claw our way through surviving another week, and then the next week, and the next week, won't be enough.

But I digress. What do I want to be when I grow up? I don't know. If  "happy" is too much to ask for right now, I'll settle for being "okay". "Be okay" seems like the closest thing to an attainable goal I can work towards at this point. Or perhaps we should all aspire to be more like Frank Turner, and adopt this song as our anthem of young adult angst (which isn't nearly as dramatic or exciting as adolescent angst, but it'll do) and do our own growing up, on our own terms, regardless of whether or not we ever learn to know what the fuck it is we're doing.

I Don't Really Know What I Was Doing Here But This Sort Of Ended Up Being A Love Letter To All My Girlfriends, So There We Are Then.

This post has been making the rounds on my Facebook newsfeed again, and I am too mentally exhausted after finals week to tear it apart once more, so here is my copy/pasted reaction from the first time this bullshit appeared on my laptop screen.





"I've been seeing this sort of thing waaaay too many times on my newsfeed. No. Just NO. PEOPLE can be fake. PEOPLE can be petty, competitive, jealous and prone to gossip. Starting "useless drama with you" is not a trait that is exclusive to girls. "Having fun" is not something only guys are capable of doing.
See, being male does not automatically make guys ideal friendship material. And ladies, having a female friend does not mean she is going to, at some point, attempt to steal your man or bitch about you when your back is turned. If you can't get along with a particular girl, have you considered that maybe, just maybe, you can't get along as individuals? Being a guy or a girl has nothing to do with it. The kind of friend you are depends on the kind of person you are. Whether or not you have a vagina is irrelevant".

I feel bad for girls who insist on cutting other girls out of their friendship circles, I really do. It's sad enough that we're all in our 20s and some of us still hold on to the prevailing nonsense that vagina-owners are inherently catty, petty, manipulative drama-mongerers who make for horrible friends, as opposed to guys, who just eliminate all need to deal with ~drama and who will apparently never diss you behind your back or any of the other supposedly bitchy stuff that lady people get up to.

Now, I must admit that I haven't had much experience with having very close friends who are guys. I hang out with a fair few of them, and I'd like to think I'm socially adept enough to carry on interesting, intelligent conversations with males within my social circle (and also make penis jokes when the situation calls for it) , but I've never had a guy friend on the level of the ultimate confidante supremo, or anything like that. This may change in the future, but for now I don't feel like I am missing out on much. Largely because I have enough experience with people in general to know that the trait of being a flaming asshole or a raging disgusting piece of shit is not something that is exclusively based on gender. People can be shitbags. If a person is being an insufferable shitbag to you, what you do is you call them out on their bullshit, attempt a reconciliation, and then cut them out of your life if they keep being a shitbag. What you DON'T do is take one person's shitbaggery and apply that as a given as far as an entire group of people is concerned; in this case, other girls. You're cutting down your pool of potential friendships by half the world's population. Now why would you do that?

Because I love my girlfriends. I don't necessarily have dozens of them, but the ones I do have, I consider precious to me (and I should really, really work harder at keeping in touch with them). My girlfriends are like little reflections of different aspects of my own personality, while also being fully-realized and wonderful people in their own right. I love having girlfriends, and I just love making friends with girls and women in general (god, does this make me sound creepy? I hope it doesn't). I don't have a Sex & The City-esque clique of girlfriends though - very few of them actually know each other, and I tend to hang out with them on a one-on-one basis more than anything.

But still. I love having lunch with them. I love texting them until I run out of credit. I love the slow and steady accumulation of inside jokes and references over the years. I love getting mail from them. I love making mixed CDs for them (and receiving some, too). I love swapping books with them. I love going to the movies with them. I love to let them paint my toenails. I love going to gigs with them. I love when they trust me enough to share their deepest fears and insecurities and desires and dreams. I love the doodled birthday cards they made for me when we were 15. I love when they show up at my house with gifts or letters or handmade things for no other reason than because they felt like giving me stuff. I love when they tag me on social networking sites when they've found something they think will make me laugh, or something that reminded them of me. I love quoting Mean Girls with them. I love making horrible, bad, very not good puns with them. I love when they tell me about a song that I just have to listen to because it will change my life.

I love when they start watching a new TV show because I kept harping on about it to them. I love having Skype dates with the ones who are too far away. I love when they remember things I probably told them months or years ago. I love endless hours of conversation about anything and everything, because all the things we talk about are great things. I also love the pauses and natural silences in conversations, because they are never awkward. I love when they come to me for help, or advice, or to confide, or simply ask for my opinion on nail polish shades or whether they should read Jane Austen before they start watching any of the adaptations. I love when they listen, and counsel, and comfort, and make time for me. I love when we giggle for no other reason than because we felt giggly. I love when they feel the need to update me when they've seen a hot waiter in a restaurant at lunch that day. I LOVE MSN CONVERSATIONS THAT TAKE PLACE ENTIRELY IN CAPS LOCK.

I love being stuck in traffic jams with them and having nothing to do but shoot the shit for over an hour. I love when we can pick up exactly where we left off, even if our last conversation happened a year and a half ago. I love seeing them accomplish things. I love seeing them happy, and I love it even more when they want to share that with me. I love that we allow each other to have our own spaces, to drift there and back, and to have other girlfriends, without resenting each other or growing jealous or resorting to any of the stereotypical crap that gets attached to female-female friendships.

I love the mutual respect, the genuine affection, and the fact that we have yet to really tire of each others' company. I love that they become my life-cheerleaders. And I love that they make the time and space in their lives so that I can fit somewhere in there, tucked away among family and school and jobs and boyfriends and a million other things they have going on in their day-to-day existence. And I love that they have all, and I mean ALL - the ones who have lasted for years, the ones that come and go, the casual ones, the intense ones, the ones I've already lost, the ones that exist only on the Internet (hell, the ones that happen in the comments sections of all our blogs, because I consider you all friends) - have  in their own big or small ways, made me who I am. I am nothing if not a wondrously messy human patchwork of all of them, all of you.


If all that sounds like I might as well be in a relationship with my lady pals, well then, you're not too far off the mark. Maintaining a friendship is hard work you guys, if that person is worth it, you had better be ready to put in some effort (something I have not been very good at since leaving secondary school, and I have been trying to make a concerted effort to change that). And this really applies to friendships all over the board, regardless of gender ; you're not really expecting anything in return for being someone's friend (or at least I would hope so). Ideally, you're not hoping to get a promotion out of them, or free stuff, or anything like that. They're not your ticket to not-dying-alone, or eternal companionship, or validation (they can help you get there though). You work at being friends and staying friends because you value these people as human beings and you want to make room for them in your life. Because they make it better. Because they make you better. And that's rare and wonderful. And if you're one of those people who insist on not allowing other girls to occupy that kind of space in your life, well then. You really have no idea what you're missing out on.

Sigur rós @ Fort Canning Park, Singapore [23/11/2012] , Or Excuse Me I Am Trying To Have Some Feelings Over Here.

If you're a fan of the Sigur rós, there's probably one defining image above all that encapsulates the band's existence in your mind ; that iconic silhouette of frontman and Actual Ethereal Fairy Chipmunk Angel Man Jónsi Birgisson as he bends over nearly in half, frantically sawing away at his guitar with a cello bow. Seeing that image in real life was pretty fucking special. And that voice of his, heard in real time? A million times more enchanting than any recording of the band you probably own. He's not much of a banterer, but the few words he did spare ("Thank you very much for coming out" and "This is a new song, I hope you like it") were uttered in the most mega-adorable way you can imagine. We're talking MAD amounts of charisma here ; when he raised his arms at the chorus of Hoppipolla, in a gesture urging the crowd to sing along, and then cracked his first smile of the night as he heard us trying to keep up in our woeful phonetic imitation of Icelandic, I pretty much knew I was ready to follow this man to the ends of the earth, without question. (We got our first "Thank you very much" of the night after that song. I think our adorable -and fairly respectable -Asian attempts at singing in his language succeeded in winning him over). Fuck you and your perfection, sir. If there's one thing this gig did for me above all, it affirmed my utter life-consuming respect and adoration for this guy and everything he does. My heart is yours, whale man.




I've read some reviews of the gig claiming that the sound system left something to be desired. To which I say WHAT WERE YOU MOTHERBANGERS SMOKING THAT NIGHT because that shit sounded amazing. I may be a n00b as far as sound technology goes, but I thought the band sounded virtually perfect. I didn't catch a single bum note, and every song sounded several hundred times fuller and more majestic than on a studio recording. I was particularly impressed by this, considering the fact that I secretly expected the audio quality to pale a little compared to the albums, especially in the context of an open air venue. And I was so wrong. There's not one single recording of that concert  available on the Internet right now that is capable of doing justice to how good these guys sounded.



ORRI. Oh my god, the ORRI. And by Orri, I refer to Sigur rós' beast of a drummer. There is no way one man could have made the amount of noise he made that night, and not a single beat did he drop. Not to mention he was also regularly taking turns on the xylophones and that tiny piano thing (what is that even called?). As captivating as Jónsi and his tasseled sleeve and rat-tail hair were, it was often very very difficult to tear my eyes away from the far right side of the stage, where the drums were. Does Orri have a medal for being an awesome human being yet? Because he's earned one. Because fuck, he is hella good at his job.




The 9000-strong crowd was fairly decent and well-behaved, compared to the last throng of infidels I had to deal with. No one pushed, shoved, prodded or even so much as brushed up against me. No creative swearing was required. The weed smokers and hipsters were out in droves that night ; never had I seen so much fedora and feathers and sundresses in a muddy, sloping field in the middle of monsoon season, but fortunately that wasn't the sort of thing that really rubbed me the wrong way or anything.
There was a brief but intense argument between two factions of concert-goers ;  the people who had brought plastic sheets and newspapers and wanted to turn the evening into a sit-on-the-grass-and-chill listening session, and the people who were already standing up and crowding around the stage. That dilemma thankfully sorted itself the moment the band appeared onstage and EVERYONE jumped to their feet anyway. For the record, I would have personally loved a sit-down-and-chill gig, but the standing up was fine in any case.



However, I did take offense at the multitude of cameras and iPads being held over people's heads throughout the gig. Look, I'm glad someone is recording all this for posterity, but I don't need to see a tiny pixellated Jónsi on your tablet screen getting all up in my face when the REAL man is only about 100+ meters away from me. I had to spend a fair amount of time adjusting the position of my head and neck to avoid the assortment of digital rectangles keeping me from getting an optimum view of the stage. It was only when a couple of the camera-toters left early that i could see both Jónsi and Orri within the same line of sight (and got quite excited about that).  But SERIOUSLY. Chill out with the technology already.

There seemed to be an unspoken consensus among nearly everyone present that simply standing and  listening in hushed, reverent silence was the way to go. There were, as always, the handful of asshats who insisted on carrying on a conversation throughout an entire song (really? really? REALLY? REALLY?), and the idiots who took to screaming or woooo!-ing during the most quiet, haunting bits of a song.
Namely, that legendary section of Svefn-g-englar where Jónsi howls angelically into the cavity of his guitar as all the other instruments go quiet. That is not the time for you to to scream out "FUCK YEAAAHHHH!" like the dudebro you are. Don't, man. Just don't. You're killing the moment. That is not okay. That is a breach of ethics, in my book. To That Guy, whoever you are, I hope you burn your breakfast every day from now until Christmas.



Thankfully, the noise-making asshats were a mild annoyance at worst, and also led to the absolute gem of random concert exchanges, as reported by Sue Fyenn :

some girl : JONSI I LOVE YOU!
some guy from the other side of the crowd: YEAH WELL JONSI DOESN'T LOVE YOU BACK

Win.



A very special mention goes out to the backing musicians ; the horn section, the two replacement dudes for absent keyboardist Kjartan Sveinsson (who decided to sit out this tour for personal reasons, the jerk - I genuinely missed his bearded presence behind the piano) , and the ladies of the string quartet (minus one). They were incredible, and an absolutely crucial part of how good the band the sounded on the night. Plus, I had never heard a string section play live before in my life until Friday night, and dear god, it is fucking sublime.



We got a solid 2 hour, 15 song set. But even then, you can't have the band play ALL the songs you want to hear. I did not get Staralfur or Untitled #4, but I did get a song I never expected them to include in any setlist ever for this tour. So that's something, huh?

The band also played us a new song, Brennisteinn (Brimstone), which is loud, brash, violent, mildly terrifying, extremely bad ass and an overall throwback to the sound of their first album, Von. The background visuals for the track were also chillingly impressive ; raw and feral and pretty intense, all set to that face-melting bassline and a bunch of cold green light in your face. If this is the sound they're gunning for in the new EP (and presumably an album AND MORE TOURING PLEASE to follow), well then BRING IT ON MOTHERFUCKERS.




It's a fact now : Sigur rós is a force of nature. Just before 10.30 pm or so, I glanced up at the sky to see that it had inexplicably turned bright orange. It looked as though it was both daytime and night simultaneously.

AND THEN THE MAGIC RAIN HAPPENED.

The magic rain story that people who were at Fort Canning that night are probably going to bore their grandchildren to pieces with in the coming decades.
It had been thunderstorming in Singapore a few hours before the gig was due to start, but the skies remained clear for the duration of the show itself, or so we thought. A mild drizzle started up as the band returned to play their encore. As Untitled #8 built up to its crescendo, the rain got steadily heavier and heavier and heavier, as if keeping pace with the music. By the time the 15-minute track was drawing in to its closing portion, we were all thoroughly,completely, magically drenched in soul-cleansing rainwater that the band had managed to summon from who fucking knows where. And then, as Jónsi drew out the very last note of the song, the rain stopped.
The rain stopped. 
It didn't trickle off or slow down, or fade. It stopped, right on cue with the final note of the very last song of the set. I noticed people who were so busy looking up at the sky, wondering what the hell had just happened, that they missed the band quietly making their exit from the stage after pulling off whatever glorious unholy spell it was that they had cast on the weather for those 15 minutes in time.



Moments later the band returned to the stage with heartfelt smiles plastered on their faces, looking genuinely pleased at us and with themselves. They took their collective bows and stood around applauding back at the crowd for a good few minutes. I caught Jónsi with his hands cupped around his mouth, presumably yelling back an "I LOVE YOU TOO" to someone or other, or simply "WOOOO!"-ing appreciatively back at the audience. And boy, did that warm me up right through my rain-drenched mud-dipped clothes.
 Hopefully, now that they know they have fans this devoted in South East Asia, fans this willing to sing along in shamefully broken Icelandic without a trace of self-consciousness, means that there will be that much more of a chance that the guys will add Singapore and/or KL dates to future tours. Because seriously guys, all these years and you never considered looking a little to the left of Taiwan on the map? FOR SHAME.


As Threatened, Here Are Some Final, Complicated Thoughts Regarding The Whole Thing


 If all of the above sounds like I have absolutely nothing to complain about, you're right. I do have nothing to complain about. My only enemy was my unrealistically high expectations that kept me from really, truly losing myself in the moment and drowning in all my feels. Not even Sigur rós could live up to the irrationally perfect vision I had in my head of how the night would go. You can't have everything happen exactly the way you want, and I had to learn that in a bit of a painful way, to be honest.

I still felt stabs of jealousy as I read twitter updates from people attending the KL gig just a couple of nights later, wishing ardently that I could be going again, with a clean slate, as some sort of do-over. To get my perfect night with Sigur rós, maybe even my ONLY night with Sigur rós in this lifetime, done just right. Done just the way I dreamed it would happen since I was fifteen years old. The songs I wished they would have played, the emotions I wished I would have felt, the unparallelled, life-affirming fulfillment I imagined I would experience. That I expected to experience, that I thought I was entitled to experience. I had fixed this in my mind to be the one event that would define and overshadow everything else that had ever happened in my life, and would ever happen in the next decade. This is the band that came into my life and completely redefined what music could be and could mean to me. I've cried buckets listening to their records.  I've made friends talking about their music. I've forced other friends to fall in love with them just as hard as I had. To say that these guys and their music mean a hell of a lot to me would be a woeful understatement (this is all very angsty and melodramatic, but you have to admit that something about post rock music just DEMANDS angst and melodrama).




 In retrospect, it was very very stupid and childish to expect so much - TOO much - out of a concert experience, and I am PISSED at myself for it. Five days later, and it still hurts a wee bit when I listen to songs that were played that night, kicking myself for being so caught up in my fantasies, for not having been PRESENT enough to fully enjoy those moments for how utterly magnificent they truly were. And they were. But I am insanely lucky to have had the opportunity to see them at all. And take nothing away from the band - they were absolutely fucking phenomenal in every humanly possible way, And I can say without a shred of doubt that I adore them even more than I ever did before.





I imagine going back in time, 8 years or so, to 15 year old me. I imagine her - me - puking her guts out with excitement and disbelief as I tell her hey, guess what asshole? We get to see Sigur rós, for real, with our own eyeballs, before we die! It happens! It's real! We won't even have to wait till we're like OLD and have enough money to fly over to Iceland and abduct them right out of retirement and make them play us a private concert as ransom (which is something I actually, seriously planned out with another individual who shall remain unnamed).

They come to us instead. Oh yes they do. They come to us.

I fucking know right?? You'll be there! You'll be there with a bunch of awesome people you love who also all love Sigur rós as much as you do! You'll even travel to another country! You'll be sick and tired and hungry for most of the weekend and you'll get rained and thunderstormed upon so much you'll forget what it feels like to ever be dry, and you'll be cramped into an impossibly tiny room in a budget hotel somewhere in Singapore and you won't be able to sleep.

But you'll be there, and you will see Sigur rós. It won't exactly be everything we ever dreamed it would be, because we dreamed too hard, and we dreamed too much. Because expectation can be a false and cruel thing. And we'll hurt a little, for a little while. But it happens to us. It happens to us, can you even believe that oh my god. And I don't know how we'll feel about this when we're much, much older, but I really hope in time we'll both learn to appreciate that night for what it was instead of for what we wanted it to be. Because we deserve at least that much.

you absolutely adorable piece of fuck

The only other gig I managed to attend earlier this year was a frustrating, painful affair that left me physically unable to listen to the band's music for a good week or so without feeling horrible.When I finally got back home from Singapore, having rested, showered, ate my first meal in ages that wasn't McDonald's, and tried unsuccessfully to stop feeling jealous of the KL gig-goers, I put on some headphones and played a Sigur rós track at random. There was a rush of warm fuzzies in my stomach, almost immediately. And I think I knew I was going to be okay with this.I haven't been able to listen to any other music since Friday, actually. so that's beyond promising.

I spent the rest of the night trying to articulate my complicated post-gig emotions at my mother, and she responded with "What are you going to do now? I mean this is it, you've seen Sigur rós live. What now?".

What now indeed, mom. Well mom, there's the usual stuff like graduating with my degree and getting a job I love doing and making something of myself and being a good person. And then maybe I'll just go see Sigur rós again. And again. And again. And again. Maybe once on every continent. Now that it's happened once, another chance doesn't seem as distant or hopeless as it was even 6 months ago. And next time - whether "next time" is going to be Sigur rós or anyone else I'm just as madly in love with - I'll be wiser and more receptive and less self-centred and more there. More present.  And I will let go of what I think I want and what I think should happen and what I think I should be feeling and just focus on the magic that is already there, because it is there, in spades. In avalanches.

Thank you thank you thank you thank you, you glorious beautiful talented wonderful fairy chipmunk musical deity motherfuckers. I'm glad you guys exist in the world, and make the music that you make. And I heart you all so hard it hurts.


credit for all gorgeous photographs from Fort Canning go to ciaomyshiningstar and the lovely auroraborealissandwich (with her gracious permission - many thanks again!)

Loving An Imperfect Thing , Or "Supernatural" : A Long Overdue Rant.

*SPOILER warning for all aired episodes of Supernatural, up to the season 7 finale.
**except for you, Sue Fyenn, you need to read this anyway. 
***additional warning for the fact that I initially wrote this only for myself, which means this entire post is pretty much just a gigantic brain dump of thoughts, and probably isn't very eloquent or organized.
**** this is going to be LONG. If Supernatural means nothing to you, then I am so sorry. Cookie? 

Supernatural is a thing I may have mentioned once or twice around these parts. I've been watching it regularly for the last seven (going on eight) years, and have devoted many, many, many hours of my life to reading fan fiction, crafting character-themed playlists, watching crappy camera phone recordings of fan conventions and trawling through the actors' and producers' Twitter pages (creeper love is deeper love).



For the blissfully unaware, Supernatural is essentially about the relationship between two (really hot) brothers who traverse the great American Midwest in a bad ass Chevy Impala, armed with rock salt and holy water, shooting demons in the face and saving innocent people from unspeakable horrors that range from werewolves to mythological gods to serial killer circus clowns. Despite being aired on the CW, and despite featuring lead actors who would look much more at home on One Tree Hill , Supernatural is a lot better than it seems. The early seasons in particular grapple with issues of faith and family, the sacrifices that come with being a hero and doing the right thing, and my personal favourite theme : the brothers being forced to deal with the reality that the world is not a simple binary of good/evil, and that morality comes in nearly infinite shades of grey, and that anyone - be it the monsters they hunt or the humans they save - is capable of falling anywhere on that spectrum. The later seasons bring in heavy elements of Judeo-Christianity - the apocalypse, heaven and hell, sin and purity, destiny and free will, and as always, the brotherly bond between Sam and Dean Winchester. All very complex, heavy duty themes, but in the middle of all this the writers have time to also provide us with a scene in which the anthropomorphic personification of Death eats deep fried pickle chips out of a paper bag.

God, I love this show.

And yet, as much as I love it, I can't deny that there are some pretty serious flaws that I have either never noticed before, noticed but did not want to acknowledge, or noticed but did not know how to articulate. I can't say that I am now any more eloquent than I was a few years ago, but in any case I'm now here to totally call out Supernatural known henceforth as SPN) on some of the things it has been doing wrong over the last seven seasons.

a. Women, sexualized violence & generally shitty character development.

Before I say anything more, I'm going to ask you to watch this video. Context and some knowledge of the show helps, but is not necessary.








No seriously. Watch it.



Have you watched it yet?




No it's fine, I'll wait.






Done? Great!

The video you have just watched (or not watched, in which case you are a horrible person and we can't be friends anymore) is titled Women's Work, and is soundtracked by Hole's Violet. Created by LiveJournal users sockpuppett and sisabet , Women's Work is arguably the most controversial piece of fan-created media in the SPN fandom. Using footage from the show, these fans spliced together images of nearly all the women that had been featured on SPN up to that point : victims, love interests, demons and supernatural creatures, to show how the female characters are all either "victimized, sacrificed, abandoned or demonized" and are sexualized violently at every stage.

I will carry on doing this in numbered lists because I am way too lazy to start organizing all this in a nice, cohesive, academic way.

1. It's safe to say that nearly ALL women featured on SPN, whether as a one-off or a recurring character, eventually get killed off. At this point in time there are a grand total of zero women in the main cast, and none in the recurring line up either. That's ZERO, in case you were keeping count. Zilch.

2. So yes. On this show, all the lady persons die. Some people may counter this with a statistics based argument, something along the lines of "Hey! Men die on SPN too -  in fact, you'll find that more men die on the show than women". Which is well and good, except for simple arithmetic which will reveal that more men die on Supernatural because there are more men featured on the show, period. See No.1 for further clarification.

3. But the key difference doesn't lie in numbers and representation, it lies in the way that death and violence are filmed and portrayed in the show itself. When a dude dies in SPN, it is simply that - a death. It may be gory or gross in some way, but ultimately that's all there is to it. When a woman or girl dies or is attacked on SPN? It's a parade of cleavage and ass shots, naked-in-the-shower shots, clothes-slowly-being-ripped-off shots, long and lingering camera angles that film every implied-rapey moment. You will know exactly what I'm talking about if you've watched the video embedded above. It can all be equally as violent as the male deaths, but with an added element ; the women's deaths are sexualized. Every depiction of a female victim on the show is pretty much torture porn.

4. I will admit that the creators of the show also take the female gaze into account ; the long, lingering shots of Jensen Ackles' lush face and Jared Padalecki's mile-long denim-clad legs aren't exactly accidental (and I enjoy the hell out of them), but the sexualization of the male characters is simply never ever ever on the same level. For just one example, take demon Meg's torture scene in episode 6.10 "Caged Heat".  She is entirely nude with nothing but a thin leather strap across her chest and hips, and the other demon in charge of torturing information out of her is busy inflicting pain (off-screen) somewhere around Meg's lower abdomen and/or genital area. To say that it merely implies penetration or rape would be an understatement.

Compare this to pretty much any other time either one of the Winchester brothers have been attacked, assaulted, tied up, strapped down, or beaten and tortured to within an inch of their lives. They are always clothed. Their vulnerability is never sexualized. Their fear is never fetishized. Their pain is never porn-ified. The double standards are jarring, when you allow yourself to acknowledge them.

5. Leaving aside sexualized violence, we move into the territory of sexualized evil, or SPN's impossibly simplistic madonna/whore dichotomy. Most women are either virginal victims or angelic mother figures ; see especially Mama Winchester's ghost and/or memory appearances as a a barefoot paragon of maternal virtue clothed in a flowing white nightgown of feminine innocence - utterly Taylor Swiftian music video in its proportions). And if they're not mothers, girlfriends or victims, they are evil lady sex demons who wear really low-cut dresses and grind up all over the Winchester boys and talk in breathy, flirty voices because they are evil and use the evil sex to take advantage of the noble heroic menfolk. See especially : pretty much every female demon featured on the show, every other assorted female supernatural creature which uses sex to lure, trap and kill men.

6. It would be pretty irresponsible of me to assert that ALL women in the SPN-verse are reduced to virginal innocents or sexualized villains. Because of course there are some truly wonderful female characters...who all got written off the show. There was Bela ; intelligent, cunning, self-serving, snarky, thoroughly fun to have around, and in the end, utterly tragic. There were the two incarnations of the demon Ruby, who had wonderfully shady motivations and loyalties and could have been one of the most complex, interesting characters on the show. There was the demon-hunting mother and daughter duo of Ellen and Jo Harvelle. Jo in particular could have served as a wonderful foil or counterpart to Dean's journey ; she too lost a parent as a child and was thrust into a world of knowledge and responsibilities she was never ready for. But nope. Jo was introduced as a love interest, put on the shelf when the vocal majority of the fans didn't warm up to her, was brought back a few seasons later, killed off, and then brought back again as a plot device. We could have had it all Jo. We could have had it all.



In fact, SPN has a pretty established tradition of female characters serving as plot devices. Mary Winchester and Sam's girlfriend Jess were both killed off (or more suitably, fridged) in order to provide the Winchester men with their Man Pain, their angst, their motivation to hunt down all the evil in the world. Even according to the show's Big Bad Demon, both those women died simply "because they were there". We never really learn anything about Jess. We do learn some awesome things about the boys' mother, Mary. But even that comes after three whole seasons of the angelic-mom-in-white-nightgown routine, before the writers could find anything substantial enough about Mary to include in the main story arc. All other women in the show rarely, if ever, have a backstory or motivations of their own, or they are written out or killed off before any true potential can be reached. This show truly is about the Winchester boys - their conflicts, their struggles. Their issues are the most complex ones, handled with the most gravitas. Which is a shame, because I think the women on SPN have some pretty kick ass stories to tell, if only the writers would let them (we will always have fan fiction, I guess).

b. Ethnic representation

I'm not American, and it's probably not in my place to comment on ethnic representation in a show from a foreign country which I know best only through its popular culture. But even I have to say that for a show that so prides itself on its sense of mythic Americana (the beer, the music, the roads that stretch out into the horizon) and puts so much effort into creating a real sense of small towns and roadside diners and general American-ness, the America of SPN is surprisingly and blindingly white. The handful of African American characters present in the early seasons have all been killed off, or are essentially missing ; Gordon, Rufus, Agent Hendrickson, Missouri Moseley, Cassie. All characters who were dynamic and interesting and had terrific potential (Hendrickson in particular - can you imagine the Winchesters having a legit FBI agent on their side? And Gordon - a ruthless vampire hunter who must deal with the ultimate hunter's nightmare of turning into the very creature you kill for a living. STOP MURDERING THE INTERESTING CHARACTERS YO).
This post does a much better job of breaking down the race and culture issues in SPN - including the fact that the show has delved into Native American mythology and beliefs quite a fair bit, but has yet to feature more than a couple actual Native American people on the show.

Let's not even talk about the Asians.

Actually let's talk about the Asians.

There haven't actually been all that many actors of Asian descent featured on seven years of the show. The only references to Asian people and culture came in the form of porn. No really, porn. Dean's favourite Busty Asian Girls skin mag, and the hentai sites he frequents when he gets bored or horny or both. Until Kevin Tran appeared in the most recent season. And boy, was Kevin Tran a walking grab-bag of super Asian stereotypes - he was in AP Calculus, he wore sweater vests, he studied all day, his greatest interests in life were getting into an Ivy League school. His best friend (or at least his only friend that we see) is an Asian girl who also studies a lot and wears knee socks. But the season 8 promo clips show us a Kevin who has shaved his hair off, is shooting people in the face with holy water, and seems to have taken up the hunting lifestyle. And I am clinging on to the last shreds of hope that SPN will do something to truly subvert stereotypes and make Kevin Tran as awesome as he deserves to be.

c. The writers, producers and main cast are all part of one big boys' club.

The main characters are all male. The directors are all male. The creator is male. The show was pitched and created with a male target audience in mind, before the fangirls ruined everything and embraced it for their own, because demographics be damned. Sera Gamble was the only main female producer and head writer on the show for 7 years before she too stepped down, leaving behind and even greater sausage fest than the show was before.
I certainly don't believe that all the men working on this show are being intentionally sexist ; the cast especially seem like smart, funny, charming, humble, passionate people who are genuinely appreciative of the fans. So no, I don't think any of them wake up in the morning and go "I would like a cheese bagel for breakfast and also I am going to be a misogynistic piece of douchewaffle today". A lot of our prejudices and perceptions of the world and other people are ingrained, and we don't realize we're being offensive or bigoted until it's pointed out to us, or if we're self aware enough to catch ourselves in the middle of sexist/racist/classist/other-ist thoughts and behaviour. And sometimes I think the dudes of SPN could use someone going up to them and saying "Hey, great show! But the way you guys portray gender and race is kind of problematic - mind if I give you some suggestions?".



In any case, more female input could seriously help the show get over some of it's more problematic aspects. Sera Gamble once spent an entire writer's meeting trying to change a single detail about the character of Ruby the demon ; Gamble wanted the demon to possess the body of an already-deceased woman instead of a living one, so that things would not get icky later on when Ruby would go on to do the The Evil Sexing with Sam (we're talking issues of rape and willing consent - a woman possessed while still alive can hardly be in a condition to agree to sex with Sam Winchester). This is something that the male writing team entirely overlooked, because it didn't even occur to them that this would be a problem..

d. Representation of fandom within the show itself. 

Supernatural has grown to be one of the most meta shows on television - there are dozens of references and inside jokes about the fandom, and an entire episode dedicated to Dean and Sam being zapped into a parallel universe where their lives are the subject of a TV show called Supernatural. It's amazing and weird and hilarious by turns. The show even found time to insert a fangirl character into the proceedings - Becky Rosen. Slavering, obsessive, ultra horny, socially awkward Becky Rosen who spends all her time writing Dean/Sam slash fanfiction and feeling up the real Sam when she finally meets him. Becky was pretty funny until that one episode which shall not be named, which essentially involved her drugging, abducting, almost-raping (?) Sam and trying to get him to marry her while he was under the influence of a love potion. That's when it stopped being funny. That's when you started wondering whether the show was still laughing with you, or if they'd started laughing at you. That episode was a mean-spirited, disturbing, problematic mess.

So here's the deal. Can we have more girls like Charlie please? Because here's the thing Supernatural, this is what most of your die-hard, super-invested female fanbase is like. Young women in their late teens to early/mid 20s with Lord of the Rings themed desktop wallpaper and Hermione Granger bobbleheads and unhealthy levels of attachment to their computers, who can quote any given cult sci-fi TV show at the drop of a sonic screwdriver (HA see what I did there). Icing on the cake? Charlie was lesbian. Like many, many, many other Supernatural fangirls. Charlie did not die in slow, horrible, fetishized ways. Charlie got to keep her clothes on. Charlie walked away not just alive, but as a heroine.  Charlie's sexual orientation was not the butt of jokes, fetishized or paraded around in a show of OMG LOOK HOW PROGRESSIVE AND LIBERAL WE ARE, and neither did it define her entire identity, because she was so much more than your token homosexual character. Charlie was amazing. Charlie is what this show is capable of when it's on top form.

e. Misogyny within fandom

Which is made worse by fanservice on the part of the writers. The Supernatural fandom has a hard time embracing female characters who are not older/mother figures, because any woman who does not fall within those tropes poses a sexual threat to the brothers' relationship. Not all fans are like this of course, but the ones who are have been vocal enough about their disapproval, resulting in at least two female characters being written off the show due to "poor fan response", namely Jo and Bela. Now, fan whining is bad enough, but it makes it worse when the writers simply erase these characters without ever really giving them the room and opportunity to develop into fully-realized creations (and perhaps even win fans over?). I can't say I know how TV works, but surely there's a limit to how far the creators are willing to go before they stop pandering to anything the fans want?



Take the demon Meg, once again. She has been a recurring character (in at least two incarnations) for seven-going-on-eight years, and there is still little absolutely no backstory about her. While the angel Castiel (who showed up in season 4) has had more than one episode dedicated entirely to him and/or his POV. Guess what? If Castiel had been played by a woman (or as a genderless angel inhabiting a female human body) the character would be dead by now ; not just because of the way fans would respond, but also because of how the writers would portray the character anyway. As it is, the currently very male Castiel is easily one of the show's most wildly popular characters and the Castiel/Dean slash pairing is well on its way to a glorious pedestal in internet fandom history. And just for the record, I love Castiel and the actor playing him (Misha Collins is a flawless human being and if you don't like him then you're just wrong, go sit in the corner and evaluate your life choices). But even I can't deny that gender has a LOT to do with the character's current level of popularity among fans.




In fact, there is already an in-show example of this - Anna Milton.

Anna was a fallen angel living life as a mortal, until she regained her angelic swag (and her memory of her true identity), but instead of resuming her rightful place in the grand scheme of things, Anna began to question orders, to doubt God, to contemplate the real meaning of being alive, of having free will and choice, of leading an existence of substance and purpose as opposed to simply taking orders from Heaven. In other words, Anna went through a character arc almost exactly parallel to that of Castiel. And more than that, in fact ; when we first meet Anna, she is a mortal who has already revoked her angel status, has already sacrificed everything to live life as a human and to go through love, pain, sickness, sorrow, joy, death, etc - all experiences that she cannot have as an immortal celestial being. Anna was ballin' awesome. And then Anna died.



Yup.

f. Sexist language and gendered insults. 

Bitch. Slut. Whore. Sam is "gay" or a total "chick" because he is more emotionally vulnerable and open than his brother. Being possessed by a demon is likened to rape or having sexual intercourse with another man (or you know, "Gaaaaaaaaaayyyyyyyyy!"). I understand how the language is tied in with the macho-ness and general hypermasculinity of the Winchester family (leather jackets big guns classic rock muscle cars giant hamburgers punching shit in the FACE). But seriously, gay jokes? Can we just not?. And it's a shame too, because with Dean and Sam Winchester, the show has actually subverted your macho male hero type to a degree ; there's Sam who is sensitive to other people's emotions and always ready to TALK ABOUT HIS FEELINGS and cry if needed. And Dean is essentially the family's mother figure - nurturer, caregiver and all-round maternal in his role towards Sam. And both brothers are incredibly emotionally vulnerable. Why undermine all this wonderful character development with OMG U IZ SOO GAY?


So after ALL that, why do I keep watching? Partly because I genuinely do love the show, flaws and all. And also partly because if I stopped watching a show for all the reasons stated above, I probably would not be watching any TV at all. These things aren't issues exclusive to Supernatural. It's all of TV, all of film, all of media. As the wonderful makers of the Women's Work video stated, they could have very easily made the same video using footage from any other genre show on TV ; some episodes of Buffy, the X-Files, and certainly any one of the dozens of procedural cop/crime shows floating around. I guess I'm thankful that there is always online fandom to critique, analyze, subvert, interpret, and most importantly and wonderfully of all, create their own versions of the show.
If you're anything like me, you're horribly protective and clingy about Things that you love, almost as if you had written and constructed and created every aspect of it yourself. So it can be hard to acknowledge, let alone accept that a Thing that you love has deeply problematic flaws. But it needs to be done, and this article by Social Justice League just sums it all up perfectly.

"As fans, sometimes we need to remember that the things we like don’t define our worth as people. So there’s no need to defend them from every single criticism or pretend they are perfect. Really loving something means seeing it as it really is, not as you wish it were. You can still be a good fan while acknowledging the problematic elements of the things you love. In fact, that’s the only way to be a good fan of problematic things."

In the meantime, I'll be catching up with season 8 of Supernatural with all my fingers and toes crossed. Because I'm still a sucker for you, Show. And the admittedly shitty things you do will never negate the awesome parts. I just may have to remember to Internet-smack you upside the head once in a while. We're good, guys. We're all good.

You know. For now. 

On Blogging: A Semi-Serious Contemplation That Degenerates Into Dick Jokes

2012 marks the fifth year of my blogging career. I am not the most prolific blogger, nor am I even close to being Internet famous. And to say that I blog only for myself would be sort of a lie, because I am all too concerned about page views and comments (not that there are too many of those, mind you) and people who might stray over here from my Facebook profile (HEY YOU, YEAH YOU). So yes, every post is typed out with an audience in mind ; in the case of this humble little shindig, I'm talking about the two, maybe three regular readers who still have it in them to read and leave comments on the things I put up. I LOVE YOU GUYS.

There was a point earlier in the year when I very nearly decided to quit blogging. I only update once or twice a month in any case, so would it even have made a difference if I just gradually faded out of the scene entirely? Two factors eventually convinced me to stay and keep on keeping on :

1. I would be losing my single best outlet to unleash my feelings about British actors, music, and other pop cultural developments in my otherwise unexciting life (family and close friends can only take so much fangirling at any one time) and

 2. It is incredibly flattering and more than a little inspiring when people - either in real life or through random bursts of Internet kindness from strangers - tell you how much they enjoy reading your stuff and how funny you are, and it's all wonderfully ego-stroking but also terribly heartwarming.

One other thing that solidified my decision to keep blogging, comments or no comments, paltry page view stats be damned, is the top keyword search stat on my homepage...dashboard...thing. A staggering number of people (I won't reveal exactly how much, but it is hilariously astonishing) come to my blog in search of one thing above all else. This is the top search keyword that has brought me the majority of page hits over the last few years. Are you ready?

michael fassbender naked

                                         michael fassbender naked


 micheal fassbender naked


michael fassbender



naked


MOM HOW PROUD ARE YOU OF ME RIGHT NOW.

You know what pervs? Here, let me just give you what you came here for.

CLICK THROUGH FOR FULL-FRONTAL FASSJUNK



Or not. You know I was kidding right? I'm not actually going to put up an image of the Fassbendong (Fasspenis, Michael F. Assbender) anywhere on my blog. You have Tumblr and Netflix for that, and I have standards, paltry as they may be. But I genuinely appreciate the horny enthusiasm. You guys are the worst (by which I mean THE BEST).

Om Nom Nom : Some Thoughts On Girls, Food, Eating & Our Bodies

Now. You should all go read this super thought-provoking article from Rookie Mag (and go check out the rest of the site, because it is probably the best thing on the Internet, and it does not matter one whit if you do not fall within the target demographic - hell knows I'm a few hundred miles away from "teenage girl" by this point). There are some problematic aspects within the writer's ideas (chiefly, the tendency to over-generalize) but it did get me pondering pretty hard.

image from Eating : A Manifesto

              " Girls and women of the world, could we stop apologizing for wanting and eating food?    Because this is one of the most ridiculous things that we do collectively as lady-people, and not only does it annoy the shit out of me personally, but it is also INCREDIBLY SAD. Could we stop feeling “guilty” for wanting an effing brownie? Or a plate of fries? Could we stop actively seeking permission from our friends to go ahead and “be bad” and order the cheesecake? Could we all just go ahead and order whatever it is that we feel like eating, instead of saying, “Oh, I feel like a pig, you guys are just getting salads”?

...I want women to allow themselves to want food. I want women to be hungry and ask for what they want to eat without apologizing. I want women to stop looking for permission from others before they eat something that is not a carrot or spinach."


Food, and women's relationships with food, is a topic I've been chewing on (HA see what I did there) for the last few days, and this article is nearly a perfect summation of all the food-related experiences I've had with the women in my life, particularly within the family circle. GUILT is the primary emotion I associate with food, in general. Many girls and women I know either justify or rationalize what they choose to eat ("I'll only have half a plate of rice", "I was at the gym for hours yesterday so it's okay to have one slice of pizza, right?") or nitpick about calories, or try to laugh off the social stigma of having an extra helping of chicken curry or nasi lemak by making jokes about how many rolls of fat they'll gain by the end of the week.

Why, only a couple of days ago I was at the movies with my brother, and we decided to have cheeseburgers and fries for dinner. I spent most of my meal wondering if people were staring at me and my burger in disgust, probably thinking shit like "Oh god look at her stuffing her face, does she really need that". SHAME. I was ashamed to be eating a cheeseburger in public, and I felt a sick desire to run up to everyone who even so much looked in my direction and start justifying why I had decided to purchase said cheeseburger ("You don't UNDERSTAND I had a very small LUNCH please stop JUDGING me OH MY GOD"). And yet I knew it was ridiculous to feel the way I did. Why apologize for your food choices? You certainly don't owe perfect strangers a justification for your daily calorie consumption.

I spent years and years at various family functions watching aunts and girl cousins hanging around at the buffet table, talking about how they are either on a diet or planning to go on one.Watching them fish around for the tiniest piece of masala chicken they could find. They would refuse to take any servings of rice, because the CARBS are EVIL, and they'd come up to me and tell me how much thinner they had become since they cut rice entirely out of their diet. My cousins would hover around, talking about how much they'd love to go for a second helping of mutton briyani but they were too embarrassed to walk up to the main table and put any more food on their plate. And their shame would bleed into me, too. I am still not 100% comfortable with eating in public.

It was always heartbreaking and frustrating to watch, because these girls genuinely loved food, but were held back by shame and the fear that some family member would walk up and make some half-joking but profoundly damaging comment like "Hey isn't that enough crab curry for a girl your size? LOLOLOL, etc.". It is equally heartbreaking and frustrating to watch my perfectly healthy-sized 17 year old cousin examine herself in the mirror and sigh about how FAT she is, while other cousins, in some sort of bonding session, also poke at their arms and bellies and legs and cry out that they are UGLY and DROOPY and FAT and EWW LOOK AT THE STRETCH MARKS while another 8 year old cousin watches in the background, already learning the Say-No-To-Rice-And-Hate-Yourself-In-Front-Of-The-Mirror routine. And I won't lie - I've taken part in these sessions myself, and sometimes still do. It's a seemingly never ending cycle of shame and guilt and depriving yourself of things you like but hating yourself anyway. It doesn't help that there are various other assorted family members who have no qualms about making casual comments to let you know that you've put on weight, or that you should lose weight, or that this outfit fits you better since you've become less fat. Is it any wonder why we have such fucked up levels of body positivity? Our relationship with food is not only tied up with  the usual things, like the pressure of conforming to an ideal body shape or size, or being able to fit into certain clothes, but also the fear of looking piggy or greedy or indulgent or poorly-disciplined in public.

To be fair to my cousins, they are absolutely wonderful and supportive when it comes to other girls' bodies - mine, for instance. They are effusive with their compliments and cries of "No no you're totally gorgeous!"  or "OMG you look so good! But here let me suggest a colour that would look even better on you". They are intelligent, confident, assertive and bold in every other way. It's the loathing of their physical selves that really seems to get them down, even if they appear to be half-joking about it most of the time. And it isn't their fault in any way, shape or form. It's the world  - starting with our own families, unfortunately - screaming at them to be thinner, but not too thin, to have meat in all the right places, but not actually get fat, to eat more but stay skinny, to be more acceptable, because the way they are isn't good enough for some reason.

My saving grace lies in the form of my friends. They all have varying issues with their body and image, because we are all not perfect. But body shaming or using food to send each other on guilt trips is a no-no, and I am supremely thankful for this. We order whatever we want. Feel like a cheesecake? Let's go have some cheesecake. Want a milkshake? Order the damn milkshake. Salad and mineral water for lunch? Your call, it's all good. You're boycotting fast food restaurants for health and/or ethical reasons? No problem, we'll just have Thai food or some shit like that. There is no shame-induced calorie counting, no talk of "OMG I am so fat!" or "I really shouldn't be eating this but...". There is plenty of conversation about everything else on the planet, and when food is mentioned, it's always along the lines of "can I have a bite of that?" or "are you going to finish those fries or what?" or something. The only time anyone chooses to order small portions or skip dessert is when we're on a budget, not that hungry, genuinely monitoring what we're eating, or if that's just what we want.

In fact, I am almost insanely lucky to have, in the last couple of years, friends at uni who have built up such a warm, healthy friendship around food. Food and eating is our primary bonding mechanism ; sharing recipes, telling each other about new dishes we've tried, making plans to visit interesting restaurants and food stalls around town (without them, I would have never known about the awesome joint in Subang Jaya that serves pork patty-wrapped-in-ham-wrapped-in-bacon burgers and sweet jeebus it is the best thing ever). It's healthy, and positive, and most importantly we all help each other stay in moderation.

And so here's what I think A Healthy Relationship With Food should ultimately be about : a positive relationship with food, in the sense that you know and eat what is good for you and your body, and have an Oreo milkshake or something once in a while if you want to, without beating yourself up about it. Moderation and positivity. And also exercise (bleerrgh). [Being a perpetually broke college student, I still reserve the right to do stupid things like skip breakfasts and eat instant noodles until all my hair falls out, though. So there.]

Not to go out and eat ALL the chocolate cake, no. Stuffing yourself with sugar and refined carbs just to defeat The System, or thinking that indulging in a brownie makes you inherently better or smarter or more evolved and liberated than a woman who is eating a celery stick is not the point. There are no winners here. Thin women don't necessarily have it any easier than any other-sized woman. As I mentioned earlier, we are living in a world that is screaming at us to be perfect, when absolutely no one is. And it's also the same world that shows us ads for like, oh I don't know, double deluxe jumbo chocolate syrup chip fudge chocolate pudding deep fried cake ice cream, with buzz words like "INDULGE!" or "SURRENDER!" or "LET YOURSELF GO!" and generally wraps all our food up in layers of shame and guilt and loss of control and makes it seem like eating dessert is the most sinful, depraved thing we could do, and usually we should feel bad for wanting the double deluxe jumbo chocolate syrup chip fudge chocolate pudding deep fried cake ice cream, but hey it's okay to INDULGE! just this once. It's a very fucked up relationship with food and eating (and by extension, our own bodies) that society has ingrained into us ladypersons, and in my experience it affects us all in different ways, with different levels of intensity. Like I said, there are no winners here.

On the other hand I really and truly cannot speak for the struggles of those girls and women with eating disorders or other food-related mental/physical health issues. In fact, I can't speak for ALL women at all.  I don't have enough knowledge about your personal experiences or world views to be able to make one sweeping generalisation of EAT WHATEVER THE FUCK YOU WANT LADIEZZ! But I can at least try to start with myself. And the thing is, it's all probably so much easier said than done. Food and eating can be a very loaded, sensitive topic, and a lot of people are going to have to work through issues and emotions that are a lot more complex and cannot be solved by just telling them to stop feeling bad and eat the damned cookie already. Which is why the other really really important thing, I think, is that we've got to try and never judge, shame or criticize other girls for what they choose to eat, whether it's a cupcake or a carrot, a hamburger or hummus. Our bodies, our choices. And mutual respect is key. As that Rookie article so succinctly puts it, for girls "to take pleasure in food [whatever that food may be], without punishing ourselves [or each other] for wanting it."

Shit I See On My Facebook Newsfeed #1

I see a lot of shit on my Facebook newsfeed ; cat pictures, random doodle comics, passive aggressive status updates, melodramatic status updates, attention seeking status updates, jokes that are so dumb they're actually funny, pictures of macaroons (seriously what is the big deal) and buttloads of Instagrammed things. I usually scroll past all those fairly easily, and they don't bother me all that much. What really gets on my nerves though, is shit like this, and the thousands upon THOUSANDS of likes and shares they get :




Citation required.
No, seriously. I'd love to have a look at this "psychologic" study that so clearly and firmly delineates the time span of your emotions and levels of attraction to someone, with seemingly no due importance given to individual context or circumstances. And stop trying to distract me with candy-coloured font. It's not going to work.




Dear "Male" Who Wrote This,
I too, am fedup. Utterly fedup. Done. Finished. I am fedup with this never ending whinefest about how girls only go after assholes and jackasses and the nice, sweet, sensitive guys never win. Generalizations and simplifications don't help anyone. Both men and women are capable of treating each other like crap, for one thing. For another thing, there are about 3 billion or so "Females" that populate the planet, and we are all -shock horror gasp- different. We all want and like different things, and make different decisions because we are people who have gone through different, unique experiences and not a homogenous collective organism. Hell, there might even be some of us out there who are in relationships with nice, sweet, sensitive guys. You're not looking hard enough. Or just not looking? Sure, there might be some girls who get attracted to a certain brand of a-hole, due to whatever issues or complexes she may be dealing with, but that's her business. Or maybe, consider the utterly radical notion that maybe she just doesn't want a relationship with you.




"Every girl's dream"? Really? Really? Really? If a guy ever calls me at 3am, EVER, there had better be some crazy ass life/death situation going down. Sleep is of supreme importance to me, and I don't take interruptions very well. Mats Hummels could be serenading me outside the window at 3.30am on a school night with a Nutella sundae in each hand and even he would very likely get punched in the face for all the trouble he took. I have no objection to the ice cream and cookies (or the "I love you"), just bring them to me during regular office hours, or with a minimum of one hour's notice. 3am my ass.




Ah see, REAL boyfriends, as opposed to FAKE boyfriends (really, how old are we, twelve?) calls and texts you ALL THE TIME (to find out exactly where are you are what you're doing who you're meeting?) CRIES when he doesn't get to see you, gets JEALOUS (when he sees you having any form of social interaction with people who are not him?) is OVER PROTECTIVE (once he starts telling you where you can go and who you're allowed to talk to, we're in trouble) and LOVES YOU (aww). I'm sorry, I may be reaching here, but none of this comes across as warm, healthy or loving to me. I actually laughed out loud the first time I read it. This is crossing over into clingy, hysterical, emotionally unstable stalker territory.If this is what a REAL boyfriend does, I'll take the fake one any day of the week.




Oh dear. I never realized there was a set of Facebook viral image-approved criteria I had to meet in order to be a woman. Gosh, I don't think I'm doing enough to really be called woman. I'm just thinking about all those times I pulled on doors that said PULL. Or that time I walked into a room and totally knew exactly why I was there. Or that other time when I was really upset about something and I called my mom to talk to her about it. Because these are all things that PEOPLE do, or don't do. Oh and there was that time - HOLY CRAP WHERE DID MY VAGINA GO?

Also ; "I count on my fingers in math". Because delicate ladybrains just aren't equipped to handle hardcore complicated shit like NUMBERS, am I right, girlfrandz??? LOL xoxo!!




Now this is some generic sitcom level comedy right here. The PREGNANCY = DUMB WOMAN bit is particularly infuriating, because to me it somehow implies that the dude was smart enough to get laid, the woman was stupid enough to be seduced AND presumably not remember to use contraceptives. I realize this is just some silly meme diagram and there's no room to include things like "what if the woman made a perfectly independent decision to WANT to have sex?" and "uhh, since when was remembering to practice safe sex the exclusive responsibility of the lady, here?". And of course, everyone knows dudes and their bodily fluids don't contribute a thing to babymaking. No. Immaculate conceptions all around, thanks very much.
The MARRIAGE = DUMB MAN bit isn't any better either. It's 2012. Are we still going with the whole idea of men are commitment phobic caveman slobs who will avoid being tied down for as long as possible? Stereotypes don't help ANYONE, guys.






Credit goes to Jennifer for calling bullshit on this one a few weeks ago. In her own words :

"The chances of a smart girl going out with an asshole is very slim. Hence, smart. I blame movies for that stereotype. '95%' is bullshit. So degrading la this formula. And as a general, all girls who're smart and nice are ugly? Or hot and nice are stupid? Or smart and hot are mean? Assholes should stop making up facts like these just because they can't get any. Utter nonsense."


The prevailing nonsense that guys make better friends than girls has been infuriating me for years already, and this post was the last straw. Here's what I had to say about it when I first saw it :

"This photo pissed me off, so I had to say something about it. I've been seeing this sort of thing waaaay too many times on my newsfeed. No. Just NO. PEOPLE can be fake. PEOPLE can be petty, competitive, jealous and prone to gossip. Starting "useless drama with you" is not a trait that is exclusive to girls. "Having fun" is not something only guys are capable of doing.
See, being male does not automatically make guys ideal friendship material. And ladies, having a female friend does not mean she is going to, at some point, attempt to steal your man or bitch about you when your back is turned. If you can't get along with a particular girl, have you considered that maybe, just maybe, you can't get along as individuals? Being a guy or a girl has nothing to do with it. The kind of friend you are depends on the kind of person you are. Whether or not you have a vagina is irrelevant".


Now, I can imagine what sort of reaction this may get.
1. That I have no sense of humour.
2. That these are just jokes, and a little bit of fun, and not meant to be taken seriously.
3. That I have no sense of humour. And I'm bitter. And probably a virgin. I am a humourless bitter virgin.

To which I say;
1. I urge you to read the rest of my blog, for you will see that I have a spectacular sense of humour.

2. The very fact that these things are treated as jokes is infuriating to me. The more you dismiss shit like this as irrelevant to the way people feel, think about, and relate to men and women in the real world (and it is SO relevant, I say to thee) the easier it becomes to throw around generalized, shallow, stereotyped and often plain offensive statements disguised as jokes or "fun" [bitch, go make me a sandwich, etc], that don't do anyone any favours.  And I am not laughing at any of this. Not even a bit. And I have not even talked about the -mostly female - population of my Facebook feed that take images like this SERIOUSLY.

I already have a folder of similar images and posts saved up, which is actually somewhat depressing, but I'll be here to call out all the bullshit so you won't have to.