One patriotic expat

I still can't get over Barack Obama's stunning victory on Tuesday. It seems to me that this victory is not only the result of the presidential race. This event represents a victory over bigotry and the legacy of slavery, over right-wing conservatism, over Bush and Cheney and the neo-cons, over the empty rhetoric of nationalism, and over the thoughtless consumerism, waste, irresponsibility, and anti-intellectualism which has characterized the dominant American culture for so long. I just can't believe it. I can't believe that we have a president-elect who I agree with. After years of shouting at the screen whenever Bush or his cronies came on, I'm now just sitting there saying- yes man yes! Our next president gave the speech of a generation, and he mentioned Native Americans and gays! Unthinkable in the last decade. At last. America has signalled a will to make a change, and move into the future, at last.

I haven't been this excited about politics in a while. I mean, I always follow it, but it generally fills me with depsair. I have tried to guard against this hope, to remain on the ground, armed with my cynicism, but I, like so many others, have been completely disarmed by Barack Obama's intelligence, charm, and apparent sincerity. In fact, the more I watch him and read him, the more I believe that he is, in fact, a great man. A man who will change history and who will leave a legacy of a better America and a better world.

It sounds like I'm towing the new line some how. It sounds patriotic and standard. But I feel in a way like all those American ideals which I grew up hearing about, which I have always admired, and whose betrayal has been so painful, may be about to be rescued. For we do, like many countries, have some beautiful ideals- the most obvious being freedom, individual expression, and the rewards of hard work. The reality has gone so far astray, but people still want to believe them, and they still want to get there. At last, it seems like we are waking up from a nightmare to build the American Dream again. Perhaps it all sounds like sentimental garbage. Perhaps it's just the residue of my cultural indoctrination. But Barack Obama has inspired a new sense of hope in so many of us, and why should we be ashamed of it? Why should we adopt some post-modern malaise because we're embarrassed about sincere feelings? I'm not. I'm going to study Romanticism after all, and I freely confess that I have utterly fallen for my new president.

Amid this excitement and hope, I still know it's not going to be easy. It's not going to be perfect. It might take a long time, many things might never happen. But the symbolic turn in a new direction, by a new generation, fills me with more hope and pride in my country than I've felt in a long time. So many people voted! So many Americans decided to take back their country. It would have been nice if they had done it after four years instead of eight, but hey- the important thing is that they have finally woken up. I really believe that Obama can make a change, or more aptly, that he can inspire the American people to make a change. In fact, his victory shows that he already has.

The Hunt

I love London, even though I sometimes find just existing here stressful. There are so many people, especially in Bloomsbury where I work. My giving directions quota is way over. All these hordes of aimless tourists, needy language students and assorted randoms, it gets a bit much. So I decided a little breather was in order. Yesterday we got the train to Chingford for a tidy fiver, and roamed around Epping Forest. But first, a drink. I sat in a pub garden under a fine English drizzle and listened to a real Essexy grandad engage in eerily elaborate imagination play with his four-year-old grandson. Overlooking the plain which is best viewed from the top floor of Queen Elizabeth's hunting lodge next door, the man started spinning plots: "Watch out, here comes a highwayman!" "See the dogs, they're not after us are they?" "Look at the horses, they're coming back from the hunt!" The boys eyes widened, seeming to leap back and forth between belief and relief. When kids play with kids, there's an unspoken agreement that it's all make-believe. But grown-ups are the ones who define the real world. I kept listening, kept wondering if maybe gramps was going too far and scaring the kid, and then decided that he was probably one of the best granddads I'd ever seen.

Then the weekend was over. What else? I gave directions to two old ladies to the British Museum on my way to work today. I guess I didn't really mind.

misogyny is the new racism

This is no longer socially acceptable



Why is this?

the p0rn post

Instead of a picture to begin this post, I will start with some headlines/web addresses which appear when one googles 'p0rn.' The first site which appears, from the first click shows pictures of women with come on their faces, a special "f*cked up facials" section (this is the porn jargon for coming on a woman's face or in her eyes), women with pained expressions while being f*cked, and a left hand menu which goes from amateur through fisting, BDSM (which shows women with clamps on their breasts, electrodes on their vaginas, tied up so that their breasts are swollen, bound and gagged, tied up on crosses and other apparatus, and one with clothespins on her vagina), through to the teens section which advertises "girls next door abused." dirtylittlewhore.com is the fourth address, bitchdump.com is number 10.

If this sounds extreme, it is no longer considered so. This is normal mainstream heterosexual p0rn. This is what teenage boys (and girls) or younger find the first time they decide to google the word 'p0rn.' This is what is colonizing our culture and our sexuality, men's and women's. This is what I'm so pissed off about.

What I'm even more pissed off about is that not many people seem to care. In fact, not only don't people seem to care, people seem to like it. Guys like it and, increasingly, girls like it too. To speak out against it is to be misunderstood as repressed, old fashioned, anti-sex, or anti-free speech. To feel that it is disgusting and damaging, not only for the individuals who act in it, but for everyone who consumes it, for everyone who is influenced by it, in relationships and in daily life- is to feel oneself in the minority.

Does it have to be this way? According to one man I recently spoke to about it "If it wasn't about domination and submission it would be boring." So does that go for real sex too? Does real sex have to be about aggression and submission? Have you never had loving spiritual sex? Poor you.

Another person said to me "There's always been porn." Yes there has, and there's nothing inherently wrong with depictions of sex to facilitate arousal. But the images we make make us. The images we produce show us who we are. And we are currently woman-punishers, woman-haters, woman-degraders. Whole generations are learning about sex from porn, internalizing these damaging roles, and losing their sexualities to the porn industry. And it is, we must remember, an industry. With a net worth of $14billion, according to Forbes magazine.

A lot of people do object. But most people I know seem to fall into one of two categories. Either they know about it and don't see a problem, or they don't know about it, and thus don't see the problem. Unfortunately it is mainly men who fall in the first category and women who fall in the second.

I defy anyone to tell me that p0rn in its current practice is not applied misogyny. Just take one look at the first site which comes up when you google 'p0rn' : http://www.yobt.com/main.html
and tell me what you see. There is no love here, no pretense at equality, no respect. It is all about the utter dehumanization and degradation of women. It is the backlash against the feminist movement of the 70's. It is the message to women - hey you want your sexual liberation? Here you go, you slut. You like sex? I'll make you wish you never asked for it.

There is no equivalent for men in our society for the language of hate and degredation used against women- whore, slut, bitch, skank, ho. There are no equivalents for men for the ways women are depicted- dehumanized animals who enjoy being forced and who enjoy pain.

So some agree with me. Yeah it’s wrong, they admit, but what are you gonna do? I don’t know. I think the first thing I’m gonna do is bring it to peoples’ attention that we have a f*cking problem here, and we need to start taking responsibility for it. And then we need to take our culture back from the people who are selling this shit. We need to tell them that we’re not buying.

Lost youths

I'm feeling depressed with the world lately. I'm working myself up day by day into one of those funks which are hard to shake off, because they are so easily fed with so many examples which demonstrate that the world is in many ways a terrible place. It wouldn't be so bad if the world were inherently terrible; I could accept that more easily. It's that the world is beautiful, and that I love life, and it feels like all of its potential goodness is being squandered- not only squandered but distorted into unrecognizable forms. There are so many wrongs that need to be righted and it's hard to hope that they ever will be. At times like this I question why I even want to have children. Life is hard, we don't know what it's for, we don't know what to do with it. The world is a fucked up place full of mostly fucked-up lives. Do I want to inflict existence on my progeny just because I don't know what else to do? I am afraid to imagine sometimes what kinds of lives my children and grandchildren will have, what kind of world they will live in. The signs are bad.

In recent weeks, I've seen a few things which have upset me. One, I saw a perhaps thirteen year old boy eat a chocolate bar first thing in the morning at the bus stop and then deliberately drop the wrapper on the ground. Meaning, this kid lacks even the most basic concepts of ecology, pride in one's home town, and cleaning up after oneself, not to mention of a healthy breakfast. Basically, I interpret the whole thing, the eating and the littering, as this kid screaming out "I feel like a garbage can, people treat me like garbage, I treat them like garbage. I therefore see no point in trying to avoid wading through a sea of garbage." Though, of course, as a Brit, he was probably using the word rubbish as opposed to garbage. My thoughts filled me with despair, as did the feeling that nothing I could say could get through his wall of ignorance. Not even if I quoted to him from "The World Without Us," a depressing and compelling book which details how the sea has literally become a sea of garbage, millions of tiny pieces of plastic to be precise.

A couple weeks ago, I was sitting on the upper deck of the bus. Across the aisle, two teenage girls were talking and laughing, one of them playing music on her phone. At times it seemed so loud, I wasn't even sure if it was coming from her phone, or from something more powerful. I had my headphones on, and I could still hear the music plain as day. I took a headphone out of one ear, and said to the girl "Is that your music?" with a little smile. She looked at me, immediately quizzical and confrontational. "What?" "Is that your music?" I said. "But you got your earphones on, isn't it?" she asked. "Yeah," I said. "But I can still hear it." "How can you hear it if you got your earphones on?" she asked, pushing up her face. "Because it's really loud," I said. "Do you think you could turn it down a bit?" "It's not even loud!" she said aggressively. Then looked at her friend and laughed. "I asked you politely," I said. "You could respond politely." She didn't answer.

The last and most disturbing event was also on the bus. Three twelve or thirteen year old boys piled onto the back of the bus on the upper deck. They were laughing and joking and shouting, as kids do, but literally everything they were saying was an obscenity. High pitched voices, horseplay, and "you cunt! oh, you cunt!" "stop it you twat!" "Oy, your mom's a bitch!" "Fuck you! Your mom's a dog. She takes it doggy-style." Not yet full grown-men, already fully trained woman haters.

The thing that is the saddest is these kids, the litterer and the swearers, the rude girl, are not entirely to blame. They are, in a sense, victims. They are sponges who soak up the culture we immerse them in. A culture that values above all style, surface, sexiness, and possessions. A culture which places little value on being smart or spiritual or basically caring about other people. These youths are mirrors we look into and recoil from because we don't recognize what we see. There is sickness and corruption here, in our culture, in our world, and we ought to take responsibility for that. We ought to stop wondering what wrong with these kids and start wondering what's wrong with all of us.

The Return of the Blog

Ok, I admitted in my last post that I was a bad blogger, but this is getting ridiculous. I haven't written anything since September, and I decided it's either recommit or delete. And well, here I am.

The trouble with me is I don't do what I really want to do. I want to do lots of things: be a great writer, have my own farm, blog regularly, take pictures, bake my own bread, actually bake my own everything (maybe have my own little line of cute cupcakes and cookies - I would love that). Or... you know be an academic, learn Slovak, start painting again, or pick up the banjo. Today I was thinking that instead of continuing to agonize over the decision to start or not to start a PhD (this has been going on for years), I should just become like a serial Master's student. I did one in comparative lit., but what if I do one next in history, then sociology, then philosophy. Or maybe I should do the philosophy first... I have trouble making decisions. Actually my main trouble is I make a decision, tell everyone, and then change my mind. It's just the way I am. As my friends and family have learned. Thus, they take every decision I make with a full tablespoon of salt. And really, it's not that I don't do what I really want to do, because if I really wanted to, I would do it, right? So I must not actually want to do it. What I actually want to do must be this- spending most of my free time reading in bed, listening to music, and cooking. It's not a bad life really.

My sister is mainly responsible for The Return of the Blog. She gave me a wicked pep talk and apparently likes my blog entries- and doesn't think they're just some self-reflective crap. Anyway, I'm going to continue- at least once a week, to launch my observations and neuroses here. And I'm going to try not to worry about if I sound too British or too American. I do feel that I'm getting a little more American the closer we get to moving to New York. Then I'll no doubt be writing lots of posts about New York and London, how they're similar, how their different. I can't wait to be able to do that properly. I reckon I'm sounding rather British at this point. But what if I say hell yeah, moving to the city is going to rock!

Who am I?

Ok, this is definitely self-reflective crap. So I'll go now. Gotta heat up the kale curry I made and prepare to defend the existence of kale curry to meat-eating boyfriend.