Pet Peeve

You know what's more harmful than a chain mail that tells you that - unless you share this a one-eyed clown is going to appear in your cupboard and hack you to death with an axe made of human bone?
It's a shared post that promises some miraculous event if you are good enough to share it with your friends. Now, don't get me wrong - these posts often have a feel good vibe, and I'm a sort-of believer in karma - (there's a scientific cause&effect explanation in there somewhere), but I cannot tolerate them.
I do not want to log onto my facebook and find that my friends have posted a image telling me angels have seen my plight and can grantee me that it's over.

Because reading a text post online, superimposed onto some generic background of a woman in a white-dress with pearly wings, does not automatically mean that the things I have been struggling with have vanished.

Tomorrow I will wake up with the same problems I went to bed with. My mother will not be miraculously cured over night, my insomnia and own health-problems won't dissipate with the rising of the sun, and the looming deadlines I will no doubt struggle to meet won't magically be set back a convenient few weeks.
What's more, the gall of these images to then tell me to selflessly 'Share' the post in order for it to reach out my friends is just frighteningly sickening.

At the least I have the good sense not to fall pray to this bollocks -  I'm not going to wake up tomorrow expecting to find out someone discovered a miracle cure and that the world is now dandy. I am not going to approach life with the understanding that my struggling is over - because that would be like throwing someone overboard a ship and telling them that it's ok - they are no longer drowning.
Perhaps on a psychological level it might help, until of course - because they stop thrashing around in order not to drown - the rocks in their pockets drag 'em under.

Not only that, but it's presumptuous - what kind of person creates a post that claims to grant wishes or give blessings? Either someone naive, or with enough of a raging god-complex to think they can do it...Or worse, someone who does it for the notes. For the small spark of fame they won't actually have, and the self-satisfaction of seeing desperate people gobble it up.

The moral of it all - don't write these things, they're harmful and upsetting and don't serve nearly enough of a good purpose to warrant their existence...And if YOU see a post that promises miracles, look out for the key instruction which suggests it would be for everyone's benefit if you reblogged/shared/liked/sent it on...Because unless it contains a police-warning, or a helpful lifeskill, I wouldn't trust any Angel that dictates the measure of a person's worth and deserving through their ability to share spam.

Why I need Feminism

So on a recent assignment, one my tutors marked me down and stated that he had found my work dull, and unfunny. At the time I received the feedback, I was upset. Not because of the criticism per say - the work was hardly my finest...But in particular because of the position that my tutor held, his sex, the comments he had made, and how they - however truthful - made me reflect on the kind of life I've lead.

Please note, I am not calling my tutor sexist, rather examining why I reacted so badly to his comments. And how he, as male, might not be able to appreciate how deeply some of his comments affected me.

This is one of those things that happens to me late at night. When I become reflective and truthful, and have meaningful thoughts that I feel confident enough to share. Apparently this is the only time I feel safe enough to do this, and tomorrow God knows I’ll regret putting it up. Tomorrow I’ll feel ashamed.

And that is part of the problem.

One of the things that I have trouble dealing with nowadays, is the unbearable feeling of powerlessness that comes with being a young woman.

From a young age, I remember being confident. I remember knowing what I wanted in life, and knowing how I was going to get it. Right up until I was in my late teens, I saw life as a list of achievable goals.

I suffered my first conscious post-pubescent form of sexual harassment when I was fifteen.  The incident left me shocked, and frightened, and made me look back on my life. I realised then that I had been taken advantage of several times in my life already, from as young as the age of eight. I only became aware that I had been sexualised all my life then, and to my horror now what I felt wasn’t disgust…But shame.

I was ashamed that at eight years old, an older boy who should have known better, made me take my clothes off in-front of him and sexually assaulted me.  I was ashamed.

Life changed then. I became increasingly frightened of men. Figures of authority in particular made me feel uneasy – I couldn’t be alone with teachers for long, I got frightened if I brushed past them, or they touched my arm. Old men, young men, even boys. I received a black-belt in Karate, and yet my stomach would still drop if a group of boys looked at me as I walked past on the street.

Life suddenly stopped being a list of achievable goals. I became aware of my sex, I became aware of the feminist movement that was happening. I became aware of how little representation women had in the jobs I was interested in, and how tough it would be for me to make it if I wasn’t a skinny blonde in a mini-skirt. The media told me that to be a woman and to make it, was to be cold, calculated and ruthless. And society told me that by thirty if I didn’t have a family I was ‘frigid’ and ‘strange’, and if by thirty I had a family but no job I was a ‘dizzy housewife’.

The nightmares about rape started when I was sixteen. I dreamt of being attacked. I dreamt of being drowned, and suffocated, and being unable to move. My insomnia which had always been bad, got worse. My depression was treated as a young girl acting out, and wasn’t taken seriously. I stayed in an emotionally abusive relationship, where my boy-friend constantly pressurised me for sex, as something that I ‘owed’ to him, and silenced me by saying that I wasn’t funny, and that humour was best left to him. His jokes were offensive, repressive, and people always laughed. 'Men are funnier' they say. Women can't make people laugh. When I made motions to break up with him, my ‘friends’ called me a bitch.

At eighteen I learned the true meaning of feminism. Up until that point, feminists had been painted to me as 

domineering female Nazis with only one agenda. To repress men. I realised then why the thought of the repression of men had upset me. Not because I thought that people should be equal, and that no sex is better as I do now…But because at that time I strove to be a ‘man’ in every sense. I did manly sports, played men in school plays, even acted as the male role in a female group. I didn’t want men supressed, because I was striving to fit in with them, and if they were down low – where the hell did that leave me?

I’m still afraid of men. Even now. My tutor made a few jokes in class about himself and a couple of the female students (all harmless jokes, I might add), and I sat and squirmed inside because nice as the guy is, I still see him as a threat. A powerful, male figure in authority who outranks me in both academic and scholarly ways, but also has the potential to overpower me physically. A man who's jokes I laughed at even though they made me sick, because in my mind I am aware that both as a man and my tutor, I need to 'appease him' in order to succeed. Sick, right?

The worst is still the nightmares. Occasionally my boy-friend has to shake me awake and hold me while I cry. Sometimes I wake up from a nightmare where it was him who was hurting me. The love of my life, and my brain still wants me to be afraid.

How is it that society could poison the person I was, so full of hope and ambition, a dream to save the world and the determination to be able to do it. How is it, that instead of doing that, I wasted a decade of my life being frightened of 49% of the world’s populous? A fear that will live with me for the rest of my life.

People ask why I need feminism? I need it, because if I ever have a little girl, I don’t want her to be afraid like I am. And if I have a boy, I sure as hell don’t want him to have to hold his girl-friend in the night whilst she explains that’s she’s just had a dream where he raped her.

   

Female Characters

I get as sick as everyone else when a weak, predictable female character is thrown into a script in order to fulfil a boobs quota, but recently I’ve started to notice that a lot of people are actually reading too far into scripts. Saying that a female character is weak, or predictable because she falls in love and this changes her, or defines her actions…Now, regardless of how the character is written – she may be full of flaws in other respects – I just want to say that having a female character’s arc revolve around a man does not make her any less of a strong character. Especially if her actions are driven by love of him, then she is no different from the millions of male characters who are defined by their love for female characters.

Because I mean, come on – tell me this plot isn’t familiar to you –

A guy loses the woman of his dreams and goes on a spree for revenge, becoming a killing machine in order to get his vengeance.

Or perhaps

The love of a man’s life is kidnapped, and he forgoes all other aspects of his life in order to get her safely back.

Or even

A man suffers a loss of love which turns him bitter and guarded, and goes on a long journey of self discovery where he’s given a second chance.

The fact of the matter is that people affect other people. The presence of a male in a female arc will often have a different result to another female character – that is because women and men are different! And that is ok! So stop hating on that, there are plenty of other things you could be picking at.

The Art of Procrastination

With this blog having now served its original purpose of being the platform for my Author Studies homework, I have found myself missing the almost therapeutic process of confining random ideas to a needless word-limit, and posting them on the internet for a limited viewership. Which perhaps sheds some light on why, in his busy hour, I find myself once more drawn to it…but with a less productive purpose in mind.

Procrastination. It is an acute art, where by you put off a boring or trying task by trying to distract yourself with other boring tasks. No other time on earth do people actively seek out the mundane as quickly as when someone is procrastinating. Which surely means that procrastination actually must be a time which produces the greatest results – think of all those times when you’ve cleaned the house, paired your socks and taken the dog for a three mile walk to avoid doing your tax? Or the times when, rather than face a brain-numbing essay, you’ve started that book you couldn’t get down on paper, or written a song which previously got stuck in your throat.

People view procrastination as sort of parasite that burrows deep down and settles into your psyche where it inevitably turns your productive brain to mush, but I find it to be total opposite. I do my best work when I’m procrastinating. I force myself over bridges and blocks which – had I had something interesting to do – I would have never bothered to fight over. Procrastination is the metaphorical kick in the arse that tells you that you would much rather be fighting a horde of angry Vikings off single handily with a wooden spoon than trying and finish your final draft. It’s like internal hypnosis where, once you’ve broken free and have started on the task that you so diligently tried to put off, you realise that you’ve been screwing with yourself. Because really – let’s be honest, it wasn’t that hard or boring to begin with, but you had time and if you had finished it early none of the other shit in the house would get done.

Therefore, I conclude and uphold that procrastination is a devious and magical art, and I shall not be convinced otherwise. I shall continue to procrastinate for as long as I conceivably can, and shall be the better off for it.

Of course that might just be procrastination talk…

What is Inspiration?

 

A Writer Should be Invisible – Agree/Disagree

I have never agreed with Barthes' principle of ‘killing the author’, most predominantly because I find the concept ‘killing’ anybody, even if it is only metaphorically, to be somewhat crass. After all, to kill the author you are not only disregarding their life, but also denying them the chance to dictate the meaning of their own text.
Of course, Barthes' theory wasn’t about denying the author so much as enabling freedom in creative and critical interpretation. However, I feel that knowing the intention of the author can in no way impede how a text is reviewed critically. And I feel this because a text is an extension of its writer; the author lives in any work they produce. Emily Dickinson herself, who strongly disagreed with the idea of publication, felt that many of her poems were so much a part of her that they had no place in being priced, critiqued or shared with anyone outside of her immediate circles.
By stating that the author has no right to the text, you are cutting away the heart of the text itself, and replacing it with a heart of your own imagining. In this sense, you are becoming a metaphorical author, a phantom filling an empty space and taking ownership. At which point Barthes dictates you, as the author, are no longer relevant. Meaning that no theories are relevant, because by becoming a part of the text you are no longer welcome to it.

In conclusion, I feel that if you have the imagination and ability to fill the empty spot of an author, who has been forced out their own work, then perhaps rather than a hostile take-over, you should be focusing your energies on writing your own work instead.

Is it necessary for a writer to write about the social/political issues of their time?

Our fear of atrophy has always had a crippling, or perhaps enlightening effect on what we write. A happy ending, for instance, is pleasing because we ultimately know that life is brief and wish to limit the amount of stress within it. We want to wish that this eventuality might be real, even though realistically the concept that a person may remain consistently happy at infinitum is naïve at best.  

However in parallel to our fear of atrophy and the unknown beyond, comes a morbid fascination with death, and pain, and violence. They turn our stomachs, and yet we return to them, we identify with them, we are gleefully fulfilled by these horrors.

Is it surprising then that a writer might reflect these things from the society around them? I do not believe that a person can write and not bring in elements of the world they were raised in - grievances of the time, such as money, battle, and social change. Writers like Tennyson, who reflected the Industrial era through his Arthurian sagas, and Cheever who delved and explored the depths of the miserable, unfeeling money-machine that modern society had become. Even Emily Dickinson found herself caught between the violence of her era and the hypocritical religious aspects of her society which counterbalanced and contradicted one another.

The idea that you can witness horrors, that you can exist within a society and be unaffected by it in your work is ludicrous. Wether you support it or not, it will affect the way you write. An era’s ideologies are born from the societal and political climate after all, and these will shape the morals we are raised on, which ultimately shape us. In this way, it is not necessary for a writer to consciously write about the social/political issues of the time, because regardless, they will always reflect them.