Since Taipei

In the months since my return from Taiwan, I've been wearing the yellow Obey hat regularly. It was only in December that I decided to look up the brand and research their philosophy. To quote from their website, Obey is about 'biting sarcasm, verging on reverse psychology'. I tend to stay away from sarcasm because it's based on repetition, and tends to reinforce the very thing that it sets out to undermine, and Obey is really no different, except this message is powerful and often goes unsaid, so I decided that I would become one of the people doing it justice. I needed a new hat anyway, and I'm glad I have one that makes people think.

Anyhow, I've learned that being open and warm is the best way to meet new people. The hat has had the function of opening me up, because I seek genuine connection, and don't want to shut people down via the use of negative slogans. So I let my face bely the word above it.

This evening I was walking around in my neighbourhood singing Lady Gaga's Paparazzi, a sign of growing relaxation within myself, since I hadn't felt comfortable to sing in public for a while. Being made vulnerable by being exposed to the public mental health system, I somehow listened more than I intended to the words of my mother, who claims that singing in public is 'not quite alright'... and now I'm finally dispensing with this fraudulent consciousness that crept up on me. A guy I didn't know even said 'Hey, pretty girl', so I must be doing something right.

I used to enjoy it when people gave me compliments on my looks, but now I find it almost always problematic. Women are conditioned to care about their appearance rather a lot, and people (both women and men) are always commenting on it. Women cheer each other up by saying 'you look nice today' or something of the sort. We are overly looks conscious. I prefer to be complimented on my sparkling intelligence.

Postmodernism & Gay rights

For as long as I can remember, I've loved a postmodern way of doing things. Being aware that any text has a specific context and none can carry an objective truth, I've learned to indulge some people their absolutist fantasies some of the time. But most of the time I can't be bothered. It's for this reason that I'm reluctant to engage in conversations of wide-ranging patterns; my point of view is considered obsolete at best, and emotionally corrosive at worst. I've grown content to gather steam at my own pace in my own blog, and leave the generalising to others. Reality seems a messy tangle of contradicting rambles, somehow managing to co-exist within the same vicinity as long as they don't rub up against each other directly. It's the insistence on the real, on reality, on the realness of things, that gets me.

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Why are some countries (UK, New Zealand) welcoming same-sex marriage, and some (Uganda, Russia) are criminalising GLBTs? I believe that the latter is a backlash to the former. It was easier to ignore the growing power of GLBTs in (mainly) developed countries when they didn't have equal marriage rights, but this final legal barrier has made us more visible, and so the countries whose citizens are still stuck in homophobic mindsets have finally decided to react against these new laws. 

On being constantly held back

One evening, not so long ago, I passed a girl I had gone to high school with in the street. She was in conversation with another girl and couldn't dedicate much time to reading me as a series of symbols and signs, however I could tell her subconscious was chewing upon my 'Feminist' shirt. I could tell she had many unresolved questions about what feminism could mean for her. She had been willing to assume new levels of authority and responsibility but she had been denied her chance to rise - this much I could tell in the dim lighting. I said Hello, and she said "I thought you looked familiar" but she had passed by already, before we had a chance to establish a dialogue on anything related to feminism. She reminded me of my own struggles with the system - constantly trying to push forward, create a new space of dignity and respect for myself, and being constantly knocked back. We had a moment of mutual empathy. And then the night swallowed her up.

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My favourite film of 2013 was Philomena. It stayed with me for days afterwards due to its magnificently drawn characters.

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I figured it out: When I was in those Bulgarian taxis I was accustomed to equating a certain level of misogyny with a rapacious attitude, which led me to believe that I was in danger although I most likely wasn't. I was overwhelmed by the degree of hatred those men evinced, and catastrophised. 

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Men's Rights Activists demonstrate that they have no empathy for the feminist struggle for equality at all. They are too selfishly obsessed with their own sense of disempowerment, which they attribute to the growing power of women. I've spent too much time trying to puzzle out the value of their arguments - value that isn't there. I would do best to focus on my own staunchly feminist narratives.

Snippets

When I went to Melbourne, I looked at the world with fresh eyes. I was particularly interested in how women held themselves on the street as I passed them, and here's what I noticed: All of them had their gaze averted downwards, as if apologising for their very existence on the city pavements. Was this how Sydney women acted too, and I was just too accustomed to it to notice it happening in my hometown? It must be so, I reluctantly concluded, as the women kept their heads low, frustratingly avoiding eye contact of the sort which could prove to be an empowering moment shared between two individuals belonging to minority-status groups.

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You make poetry impossible
It slips through my fingers when I hear your voice
Whereas before I tried to trace
The symphony muddled up in the noise

An end to the slut-shaming

I used to be one of those people who policed women's sexuality. Whenever people made remarks which identified them as more than conventionally sexual, I would frown and make remarks of disparagement. All my friends did it too - we would self-consciously slut-shame together. We were intelligent, but we were dumb.

Even as the media tries to tell us that Miley Cyrus' act is "too much" sex and not enough restraint, our attitude towards sex is quite conservative. I remember going to a fetish-themed party some years ago, witnessing a man and a woman wearing some leather pouring milk on each other and simulating sex on stage, and wondering if we will ever get to the point where mainstream performers have live sex to please an audience. At the time it was a shocking thought, but now I have no doubt it will happen, and I say bring it on.

Fifty years from now, people will look back at what we found shocking and laugh at what prudes we were. At how stifling the norms were, and how stifled we felt. Well, maybe they won't laugh. More like feel sorry for us.

I am in favour of everyone being a lot more sexual with one another. We should stop seeing sex as getting in the way of the rest of our neat lives, and actually enjoy the sexual dimension of our experience as much as we dare. As much as we want to.

I look forward to the day when a tongue-kiss replaces a hand-shake, and when public nudity is not just reserved for a tiny percentage of beaches, but is part of everyday life.

Power

Lost again. Somewhere in between the postmodern paralysis and the repetitive activities she comes alive. But she doesn't know how to articulate this space. She doesn't know if she's ever done so before. Probably not. It's important to remember that each moment is unique, comes once in a lifetime. Even so, she's hosting a veritable tableau of experiences of deja vu. She suspects that her mind has grown lazy, and that is why they are infecting her, but there's not much she can do. Not much she intends to do. Life insists she places herself in the position of victor, resumes the battles no matter how many indignities threaten to make her come undone. People ask her to smile - no, demand it! She can't hide from their indiscreet meanderings into her sensibility. They'll encroach upon her boundaries with regularity, and there's not much she can do about it.

And yet, somewhere between the spaces of discomfort, she lives and breathes pure magic. It's all in the power to transform her gaze, to change her focus. From acutely focused to gorgeously dazed, the choice is hers to reinvent her selves. She keeps searching.

The exhausted activist keeps going

I realised that ignoring the problems of the world won't make them go away. I need to go on fighting. I can, however, change my attitude to a more self-loving one. I can congratulate myself more on the things I do well, and be kinder to myself when I stuff up.

I was just reading a post from The Militant Baker in which she admits that she is always fighting an uphill battle ("just to feel okay"), but that she knows that if she doesn't do it, no-one else will. I can relate to this... I may take medication which "stabilises" my mood (oh, the horrors) and acts as a mild antidepressant, and my experience with the mental health system has self-censoring my rebellious urges all over the place (don't worry, I still manage to be very non-conformist ;) ), but activism makes my life more meaningful, and isn't the thing to excise from it.

Incidentally, I made a new friend over the past few months, which has lifted my spirits. The benefits of this are impossible to overstate. I have also gotten back in touch with an old friend who lives in another country, but we find the time to communicate via Facebook or Skype and he is an inspiration to me. Add an old high school friend whose irrepressible energy is a delight to be around on those occasions that I do see her, and my life is looking better these days than it did at the start of the year, when I made my lonely journey to Bulgaria in an attempt to start a new life.

Life in Sofia consisted of a very closed social circle consisting of my grandmother, uncle and a friendly neighbour. None of these connections were particularly robust, and so it is perhaps not surprising that I fell apart.

Earlier today I was watching Pantene's feminist commercial for the Philippines -

- and I realised that I had let a neighbour in my old block shame me for my confidence. Upon getting a new haircut, she tried to make me feel bad about going about the world with my level of self-esteem by exclaiming: "I know you! You're going to go out there and show it off, aren't you?"

Yet I deserve to feel good about myself, appearance and the ideas that zigzag underneath it, from the tips of my Adidas or Diana Ferrari shoes to the hint of a fringe that the Taiwanese hairdresser gave me which sometimes curls high above my hairline. I'm going to keep respecting the way I look and what I wear. I'm not going to let other people undermine my confidence.

The internet keeps surprising me with its choices of which injustice to draw out next, especially in the field of feminism. There are some issues which feel very familiar, and others which catch me unawares. For example, did you know that female characters are grossly underrepresented in crowd scenes? That's what Geena Davis taught me here: 

I never, ever would have thought to analyse crowd scenes in animations for gender imbalances, but there you go. It's a testament to the multiple talents of the people who are making the feminist movement come alive today that they approach the empowerment of women and men in such diverse and interesting ways. We are much stronger together than alone.

Hope you're having a happy holiday season! :)