Radical Ramblings by Shiuan Butler

Monthly Archives: March 2011

Young Women These Days

March 25th, 2011

I regularly hear women ask, “Do young women these days care about feminism?” Or I see them exclaim in horror, “My twenty-year old niece doesn’t even know who Gloria Steinem is!”

However, we are asking the wrong question if we keep coming at it from the angle of “Why haven’t they learned from us?” We need to instead reach out to young women and ask them how sexism affects their everyday lives. Since they are the experts on their lives and since we know sexism abounds.

Many adult women these days don’t realize how hard sexism is on young women and girls. And we need to know. Just because young women may not know how far we’ve come in feminism does not mean they lose their right to complain about sexism in their lives now. For example, did you know there’s “Facebook branding” where girls post pictures of themselves aka American Apparel style—young, innocent, and very sexual— thus intentionally creating a slutty brand of themselves on Facebook to increase their reputation among their friends? I’m talking about eight, nine year-old girls here. I was shocked when I learned that. And therein lies the problem.

We as older women are “shocked” when younger women don’t know the history of the women’s movement. They don’t realize “how far we’ve come,” “how much we’ve done for them.” Older women see that as disrespectful, arrogant, and ignorant.

Apparently, we as older women have forgotten what it’s like to be young. We need to pause and go back and remember how difficult our childhood was, our teen years, all that sexual tension, and so little information or support was provided by older adults. I think most of us have forgotten. I’m 31 and I know I’ve forgotten tons. Because the moment I moved out at age eighteen I said, “Thank god,” and I never wanted to go back there, not even mentally.

So the question isn’t and never has been, “Do young women these days care about feminism?” Of course they do. The real question is are we willing to listen to our daughters and other young women in our lives about their everyday concerns and worries and how can we empower them to speak up and stand up on their own behalf? Are we willing to share the struggles we went through as young women with them so they have a clear picture of how we got to where we are today? Because if we don’t, who will?

“Please Don’t Leave”

March 24th, 2011

When your partner begs you, “Please don’t leave,” late at night in bed after a fight what are you supposed to say? Presumably that they feel apologetic, guilty, remorseful? That would be the logical guess, but should we assume it?

Words are only words until we put them into context. We cannot separate the meaning of a string of words without taking into consideration the context, the situation and the person who uttered them. “I love you,” means very different things obviously when said by your mom versus your newly acquainted coworker. Thus, how you decide to handle it will and should be different as well. Only when you consider the entire context of the words, can you come to a correct interpretation of the meaning.

And so, “Please don’t leave,” when uttered by my current BF can and should be interpreted completely differently than when, say, my abusive ex said it in the past. Yes, they both have temper issues to varying degrees, but the ex was also intentionally and emotionally manipulative. My present BF, as infuriating as I sometimes feel with him, is not. This is an extremely important differentiation to make. Because I knew my ex was extremely manipulative, I learned to not trust him at his word. I learned to consider his motivation (getting me back) plus his manipulative behavior and realize that those put together meant that his words meant nothing. I learned that he would pretty much do or say anything to get his goal. Finally realizing that he actually did not mean a word of—”If you come back, I promise I’ll change”— was just as important as realizing now that my BF does mean those words and is simultaneously showing his vulnerability and caring.

Perhaps you already do this. If not, I believe you will greatly improve your judgment by keeping this in mind.

Why I Prefer Sex With Strangers

March 17th, 2011

I craved sex a lot when I was single. But now that I’m in a monogamous relationship with an amazing, hilarious, very young, very virile boyfriend I find I’m perfectly happy snuggling and cuddling and don’t see why we need to get all hot and sweaty and naked more than once a week. And who has the energy anyways when you’re working full-time with extra-curricular activities? As I mentioned in my recent post, Horniness Levels, he does. I’ve been thinking about it more and more lately and realized the inherent contradiction. Why did I crave sex more when I was single and dating around? They weren’t healthy relationships. They amused me and helped fill the bored, lonely times with sex that varied from awkward to humiliating. And yet I kept doing it. Why? Why am I more horny with old strangers and sexist pigs than with my own loving boyfriend? Why??

First I need to explain when I started sleeping with men 15-20 years my senior. The first time I thought he was “only” 12 years older (OK, not great) but then I found out he was actually 18 years older (!). But like anything else, once you get over the initial shock you talk yourself into thinking it’s not that big a deal. So you sink in deeper. And then you start liking the huge age difference and you can’t remember why you had a problem with it in the first place. The human mind really can get used to anything.

That started me down the path of least resistance. I started searching older men out. I wanted them a minimum of ten years older than me. Twenty years? No big deal. I felt slightly embarrassed when explaining it to my Mom when they started getting close to my parents’ age, but otherwise it felt quite normal. Almost.

There were many reasons why dating men almost my dad’s age was attractive. They usually loved me. I’m Asian, 31 (look 23), tall, athletic, have some brains and willing to do almost anything they want sexually. It’s like they’ve died and gone to heaven!

But what were the reasons that I, a young, mostly reasonable, woman wanted to date my “dads?” In the past, sex for me had meant being fetishized—for being young, hot, Asian/Oriental. They objectified and used me sexually. Being fetishized made me feel special and being used started to turn me on. Not only did it start turning me on, I started being addicted to it. I needed the feeling of being used and abused just as much as I needed the sex. And simultaneously, if I was loved I didn’t feel turned on anymore. My BF’s almost too sweet—therefore he wasn’t turning me on after the first few months of passion died down. I realized with horror that healthy relationships don’t turn me on—only abusive ones do. That’s why I wasn’t horny anymore.

I wanted to dare to go down the path of learning how this came about. I hate that I’m not interested in sex with my loving boyfriend and would be more “into it” if he was abusive. I want to be horny in a healthy relationship. What’s wrong with me? Or rather, what must have happened in my childhood to have set up this situation?

I thought I must have a classic case of rape victim syndrome, that I became addicted to my ex’s abuse. But would my abusive ex’s mark have been so deep if I did not first have early childhood abuse for it to hook its claws into? I just don’t see my best GF, for example, getting turned on by that stuff. She would have broken up with him the moment he stopped being nice.

I googled “child sexual abuse” and came upon these questions to ask oneself when searching for clues about one’s potentially abusive past:

Q: Why do I want to recover (more) memories?

Part of me certainly still does not want to. That’s why I’m still reluctant to go on the counseling intensive. However, the main reason I’m delving into this is so I can have a distress-free sex life with my boyfriend.

Q: What do I hope that recovering memories will do for me?

Same as above. I think I can heal from much of the hurts from my childhood and patterns formed without necessarily knowing “exactly” what happened. However, sometimes I feel cheated out of my childhood. I wonder what kind of girl I was like. What did I like? What did I enjoy playing? I have no idea. I feel if I dig up some of the bad it can’t help but reveal some of the good too.

Q: Why do I wish I could know for sure whether I was abused?

It helps me in stopping to blame myself for some of my self-destructive decisions I made in the past regarding sexual relationships with strangers. When I first came upon this suspicion and my counselor told me it could be likely, I felt a huge wave of relief. It sounds strange, but I had always felt secretive and bad about them. For the first time, I felt there could be a rational and clear explanation for how and why I came to make those harmful decisions.

Q: What problems and suffering in my life now do I believe will be changed by remembering abuse?

I hope to improve my sex life with my boyfriend. And not just to make him feel better by having more sex with him. But also I want to stop depending on fantasies and fetishes to be turned on. I have felt what it’s like to have healthy loving sex with my BF in the past, but only briefly. I want to have that again. I want to clear my mind of the cobwebs formed by tangling my current sex life with past abuse and discover what I’m really like.

This obviously was not an easy post for me to write and just as hard to publish. Pressing that publish button this time was the hardest yet. But I was reminded again of why I’m doing this. Self-venting? Not exactly, as that’s what BFs and journals are for. They certainly don’t require a “publish-to-the-world” button with it. Once again I’m telling the hard stories in my life, not just the happy ones, because people learn more from mistakes then successes. And obviously you fail many times before you have a big success. My goal is three-prong, to show you:

1. If you have ever felt any of the feelings or thoughts above it’s because of something that happened to you and not because you are a bad person.

2. You should not feel guilty or horrible for having these feelings or thoughts.

3. Your life does not need to be controlled by these feelings or thoughts, nor do you have to base your actions on them. There is healing from it.

not caring + boredom = cool

March 8th, 2011

Not Caring

Society teaches young people that they are not supposed to care, about almost anything and everything. Except for consumerism and brand names and fashion, of course. Those things they should care a lot about. But otherwise for everything else in life they are supposed to act like they could care less— too cool for school, nothing you say can affect them, things like that.

Ironically, at the same time peer pressure is huge and young people care desperately about what their peers think of them. Reputation is king. And now in the age of Facebook, such preposterous things as branding themselves on Facebook using slutty photos of themselves aka American Apparel is popular.

Cigarette smoking and alcohol go hand in hand with non-caring. The whole attitude that goes with smoking is an air of not caring. “I don’t care that it’s bad for me. I don’t care that I’m under age. I don’t care about you or what you think.” When you drink and start to feel buzzed that’s when many people can finally let go of their inhibitions. They don’t care about what others think about what they say, how they look. They can finally feel “free” of societal pressures and fears, and feel free to be “themselves,” with the help of some drug-induced numbness.

Boredom

Young people are bored 98% of the time in school. I know because I was, except for my amazing teachers during an experiemental 6th grade program. And along with being actually bored at school young people are pressured to act like they’re constantly bored as well. Most young people have mastered the “bored look” by the time they’re seven.

 

 


Too cool for school

When I was in school, there was a lot of pressure to be popular. You knew all too well if you were popular or not and if you weren’t you felt like crap and accepted your fate. I definitely was not cool. Somehow I missed that class, but my parents also didn’t help. They wouldn’t buy me new clothes every season with the corresponding fashion, so one year I simply rolled my pants-length jeans all the way up to my knees, in a last resort attempt to fake a pair of fashionable cut-offs. (My dad obviously did not understand that for a girl fashion meant survival.) They were awfully tight, but my eleven-year old self was desperate to come up with cool cut-off shorts not being able to buy them myself. So at age eleven I was laughed at by beautiful, popular, blonde Adrian for rolling up a pair of jeans all the way up to my knees. In addition, I didn’t have the confidence or the non-caringness down either. You need to have a certain amount of confidence to pull off the act of not caring. I didn’t have that mask of confidence to paste the cool look onto. I was timid and terrified. I wished I could do it, but I just couldn’t manage it. I would have given anything to be “popular,” get a boyfriend, and walk down the hallways knowing that others looked up to me—not for my grades, which I had—but for my cool factor.

So what?

What does all this mean? That young people make bad activists? No, not at all. But we adults do need to learn how to educate young people and young adults and help them become aware that Young People’s Oppression and Young Adult Oppression do exist. We need to learn how to make them aware that the issues in their daily lives are directly connected to a larger oppression and that they share similar struggles with other young people/adults. We as adults need to think about and remember all of the supposedly “minor” issues that we all dealt with as young people and young adults. Only after we recognize how we have experienced young people’s oppression can we then talk with young people and help them identify what they are experiencing. To help young people make the important realization, just as in any oppressed group, that they are not alone with their struggles and that there is nothing wrong with them. They are battling  a larger oppression out there on a daily basis and made to feel as if their struggles are their fault.

 

Young People These Days

March 2nd, 2011

Yesterday I realized the main reason why most young people and young adults have a hard time relating to feminism and the women’s movement is because they can’t tell why it’s relevant to them. In other words, they don’t know why they should give a damn. And that’s because the rest of us feminists are not doing a very good job of explaining it to them. (It’s not true that all of us are not doing a good job. I think 24 year-old itinerant feminist Shelby Knox, for example, is doing an amazing job.)

However, I’m frustrated and pissed off that the only feminists I see over and over again are the white nerdy girls. Nothing against them. White nerdy feminists are very sweet and extremely smart. But where are my sisters of color in the picture? Busy dealing with racism, that’s what. We need to figure out how to connect with other women out there that do not get good grades, that do not feel immediately comfortable in the usual “feminist scene.”

I’m frustrated that the Asian American community and blog scene seems to be dominated by pop culture or male culture. And the feminist spheres are not putting ending racism as their priority. They do not seem to know how to include, or are not interested in trying to bring, women of color to the table.

So how do we solve this problem? Well, slowly. I have lived long enough in my 31 years to know that real change takes time. Meanwhile I see this issue as three-prong:

1. We need to start talking about Young People’s Oppression*

It’s a problem when we in the feminist and activist circles are constantly talking about sexism, racism, gay oppression, classism and yet young people’s oppression and adultism are still strange, new terms and concepts to most people. If we explain young people’s and young adult’s oppression to students in their teens and twenties they will then have an awareness of what they’re dealing with in their daily lives, why they feel the way they feel, and have a foundation to base other oppressions, such as racism and sexism, on. But without that initial understanding and education of young people’s oppression they won’t care to hear about other -isms.

2. We need to have cross-race events

That means we need to hold speaking events across races. We need to have a Black and Asian activist speaking and traveling together to schools. Or white and latino. Whatever. But only in this way will it be drilled into people’s heads because they will tangibly see two people whom they originally thought were “different” and with “different” causes and goals actually working together on one cause. Hmm…

3.We need to speak out in white feminist spheres about sexism and racism. We need to speak up in our own people of color communities (Black, Asian, Latino, Native) that sexism—or male domination—is not OK.

We need to train our white sisters about what does the intersectionality of sexism and racism really mean in real terms in real life. It means realizing your arrogance, trying on humility and assuming that you know less than you think. And that it is your responsibility to undo your racism. At the same time we women of color need to take on the responsibility of training our white sisters how to do this. It’s not easy. But who else is going to do it? Fortunately or unfortunately, we’re the best ones for the job.

 

 

*Young People’s Oppression is the systematic discrimination of a group of people based simply on their age. Did you ever feel it was unfair that you had no say on most parts of your life simply because you were young? A friend of mine actually let her daughters push the grocery cart up and down the supermarket aisles and pick whatever it was they wanted to eat. But that’s the exception. Most of us didn’t get to choose much in our lives growing up. I know I was dying to move out after high school. Not because I was psyched to go through another four year learning institution, but because this was my ticket out of my parents’ fiefdom. I never wanted to be told what to do again. Or maybe you needed to be reined in and your parents had better judgment than you 99% of the time. But more likely there are also plenty of cases of neglect, physical or drug abuse, that we wouldn’t have chosen but had no choice to live with because we were two or five or ten years-old. Or even a lesser case of mom marrying a guy you’ve only met a few times and then suddenly he’s moved in and gets to tell you what to do? No wonder young people are absolutely furious. As adults we grow up and quickly forget how frustrating that constant powerlessness felt. We don’t want to look back. Soon we start doing the same thing to young people around us—and that’s adultism.

Radical Ramblings by Shiuan Butler