That fucking "free speech"

"Free speech" is designed for freedom of the press.. freedom to speak out against the government.

But to the average American, it's the freedom to "speak".

Even under that manipulation of the definition, people still don't seem to get what it is.

It's um..words. The second you do something with those words is the second it loses its speech and becomes action. Sending threatening letters to abortion doctors is an action. Chasing after pregnant mothers walking to a clinic is an action. Picketing outside a clinic so you're in everyone's fucking way is an action. Making porn where you call a woman a "slut" then demand anal is an action. Wanking off to it is an action.

Why is it that we typically hear "free speech!" as a justification for hateful, oppressive, and aggressive words that are almost always accompanied by hateful, oppressive, aggressive actions? And what ever happened to the ol' "If you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all"? A lot of people who hide behind "free speech" don't say very nice things. Why is it so damned important to uphold their "right" to subject us to hearing it? I'd rather listen to a fart.

Think it, write it, say it all you want, but once you use it to bully, harass, intimidate, dehumanize, or demean another person, you can't hide behind your little words because you've just made a loud move.

Know the difference between saying it and meaning it. One is speaking, the other is acting. And it's "free speech", remember, which is durr, not "freedom to behave like asshole".

My Tax Dollars

If you're out of the loop on what the American government pays Chinese children in sweat shops to make these days, rest assured they've been using those raw bloody hands to sew up some quality Halloween clothing:

Mrs. Potato Head

They paid about $2.50 for the entire felt-fabric outfit, but you'll pay a nice $35 in duped douchebag and pornified fees. The shipping and handling covers the extra 4 minutes you'll be spending on their site and bandwith, wanking off to the picture.

Meanwhile, I'm jobless because I need a degree to prove my creativity, know-how, and artistic talent to overtly masculine agencies that have deemed my work too juvenile or question the prestige of my resume.

Porn and Love

A friend once said to me, “Porn can be separate from love.”

I knew it wasn't true, but I wasn't able to word why, even in my own head. I had been pondering the idea on and off since I started hating porn at all; I figured I had it when I started calling myself a “radical feminist”, but clearly not.

My mind has blown into a spurry of epiphanies.. my world has concocted the offspring of the original and biggest big bang. Here it is, and here I am. It feels good... again.

In the universe there are an infinite amount of small specs of light shining in the vast darkness that seems to have no end. It's possible for one light to shine against another.. though rare; and ultimately pointless to try and continue to shine against more- the idea comes from the lie that it's possible to find them all; our ego, our salesman, the liar.

A relationship is two worlds. They collided to create that light amongst all the other particles that make it up all together. They are love, it is love.

One world.. love.. is a woman. The other world.. in the case of porn use... is hate. They are not colliding to mix a bang. They are two separate specs of light that cannot possibly replicate the other, nor merge, nor know “all” the other lights. They are paying the salesman and believing the lie that they can and that it has a point.

When men use porn, something that degrades women -what we all internally know is happening during porn's filming- they are deliberately trying to show women, to show their partners, that they hate them. They don't want to love them and they don't want their partners to love them, either.

..and it works. If it didn't, if it wasn't supposed to, if that's not how men wanted it, then women wouldn't have a problem with it. Forums wouldn't be flooded with “Help! My boyfriend uses porn!” or “Why does he look at porn?” or “He won't stop using porn”.

Many learned and enlightened people understand this on all levels and realize the pointlessness of evil that porn is. Lundy Bancroft, Robert Jensen, Andrea Dworkin, Catherine MacKinnon, Gloria Steinam, Gail Dines... to name a few famous ones. Even George Lucas criticizes it in his movie, “THX 1138”. I was quite surprised to see he understood that.. since I was under the impression the man was pretty full of himself and his masculine puritan “Star Wars” genre.

Women respond to men's hate with love, often times (the exact same way a man respond's to woman's hate.. or anyone's hate of any person regardless of gender). The women who “have a problem with porn” are the women who want the men they are with to love THEM. So they hurt, but ultimately ignore/endure/tolerate it in the hopes that he will stay, despite the abuse. She wants happiness, and happiness comes from being with him.. whatever the cost. It's what makes love so pure.

That's why women stay in abusive relationships. It's why women “willingly” become strippers, porn actors, and prostitutes. It's why people put themselves through evil and painful things- for an ultimate want... or need. The need to feel loved.. happiness.

It's unfortunate when a man will use porn and never stop. He does not want to love her, but she so badly wants his love. These are colliding lights that cannot merge because they are in separate lights in the universe. The lights can discover another light but they can not be the same as the other light they discover. The same action means something completely different and they will never mean the same in one universe.

This doesn't mean men and women can't be together. It simply.. in a strangely complex and seemingly “backwards” way means that porn can never be separate from love because it IS separate from love and therefore incompatible with love's universe. It will never be part of love... it cannot exist in a loving relationship.

And that... all things of the abuse and exploitation and selfishness and hate aside... is the simplest way to explain it- all this time I could only explain it in a way that others did not understand because the way I understood and could word it was different. Perhaps now people will understand this way.. or I will simply figure out how to describe it in the language they understand but cannot explain how they understand it until I present them with that way.

It feels very.. good .. to have realized this. The more ways I realize it, the more I know I can help stop it and bring balance to not only this universe, that universe, but also mine.

Love not lost

When you start having opinions, you start to lose friends.

It's a really big issue- opinions. It's a bigger issue if you ever use drugs. Your friends won't like that as they sit at home, downing a bottle of cheap vodka or making cheap, college-grade mixer drinks like "screw drivers". They like their depressants, dead brain cells and history of violence-inducing toxicity only when it's in the form of a legalized liquid. Pot's okay to try, or something, 'cause the cool kids accept it.

Your friends don't like it when you think. The phrase ought to be: Friends don't let friends think and drive. Driving's okay, thinking's not.

In the end, you realize your friends are pretty thoughtless creatures that just kind of get born, eat and shit here and there, breed more thoughtless offspring with thoughtless mates, then die and take up more space in the ground we can't afford to offer.

They're really boring. Exciting things overstimulate them. Flashing lights cause seizures. Thinking causes concussions.

The ones that go with you are the ones you love. They're family.

Self-Silenced

It seems like many (radical) feminists write in spurts, then take "breaks"- some announced, most unannounced but then apologized for if the blog is popular enough to need it. I obviously don't need to apologize to anyone but myself... but it's tiresome and weighs down one who fights for equal rights/equal opportunity, regardless of how many or which particular trade that may specifically fall under...

We feel silenced. There are certain trades, or subjects, rather, that are more acceptable than others to speak about; such as animal rights or economic equality (between gender, anyway). Typically, the economic equality between gender is the more acceptable subject than economic equality between races, or even less common between sexual orientation which is less common than religious identity and less so than marital status which is more likely to be discussed than economic equality amongst age groups which I rarely hear about beyond the comparison of a teenage McDonald's employee and a 30-something executive with a BA or Master's in some-worthless-fancy-degree-or-another.

Still, regardless of how (temporarily) popular or "hot topic" our issue is, those of us who have fought for it since we learned about it and will continue to do so until we see the changes we want to see get tired every now and then of being told to shut up either via a literal "shut up" with perhaps so many vulgar words in between or a beat-around-the-bush shut up through a change of subject, interruption, cough, or willful ignorance.

Yes, indeed, can anyone.. even the white, heterosexual, Christian male with 3 sons.. can be forcefully silenced through a mean of physical force or verbal force. Over time, depending on one's "place" in society greatly varies how long and how much it takes for someone to begin to silence themselves. Over time, over weeks and months and years of piling hours upon hours of "conversation" and debates with people who change the subject, interrupt, cough or ignore the topic, it's pretty impossible to not at least once in a while (or year) silence ourselves when these people begin their old hat tricks once more... call it PTSD. Our "trigger" is their typical and all-too-common reaction to our outcry of injustice which leads us to the eventual same result they want: silence. After years of aggressive silencing, the new people we meet don't even have to try anymore. Oppressors in the past have done all the work for them and all they need to do is find that trigger which seems to come quite naturally (thanks to conditioning) and we'll take it from there.

Hit the dog enough with a rolled up newspaper and the mere sight of a newspaper makes it cringe. It takes a while to retrain ourselves from cringing and silencing.. and when the newspaper is constantly being used, it's even harder, rather completely impossible, to fully break the cringing habit.

I am tired of the mere title "radical feminist" sending more than 80% of the people I meet into a state of twitching eyelids, curled lips, and "Oh my god, you need professional help" attitudes- Did I abuse someone here? It wasn't a radical feminist that beat my brother, calling him a "little faggot" when he was 5 years old. A radical feminist didn't smack around his daughter, using his fist to create fear upon her if she looked him in the eye because "women don't look men in the eyes- what makes you think you deserve to look at me in the eye?" I don't know a single radical feminist that purposefully starves their pet(s) or trains them for dog fights, grinds their bodies into glue, injects hormones, antibiotics, or other putrid chemicals into their systems to sell them off for mass market. I don't know any radical feminists who support natural disasters happening to people who are not of their sexual orientation or support slavery and deportation of "filthy immigrants" nor have I heard one single radical feminist make the claim that "immigrants are taking our jobs!".

Radical feminists are not the ones to be feared.. nor are they the ones people should be disgusted and wary of. They're not a dirty word, a tainted image, and they have never proven themselves to hold such a name. For thousands of years Christianity has beaten, raped, and enslaved people openly and un-apologetically yet we still hold them in a primarily positive light. For thousands of years, weapons have only gotten more extravagant, and pointlessly so, wielded primarily by the wrong hands for the wrong purposes yet we hold the 2nd Amendment so tightly that one would think it's the most important one that actually holds significance and meaning to us today- that we actually know or have any concept of what it's like to need protection from a constant oppressive threat that is so threatening our daily existence cannot possibly thrive if we are not armed with a firing and/or automatic weapon. Freedom of press? Fuck that! I can write all the male-minded, conservative, anti-drug, anti-sex propaganda I want in the vast majority (and the best-selling) news papers published- What I need is to get me sum moar guns! The motherfuckin' QUEEN OF ENGLAND could march in my house and push me around! It's my right to own that goddamn AK47 and it's the best, and most important, right we got!

I think we need to redirect our anger... redirect our disgust and twitching eyes. I think we need to interrupt the people who insist that hunting 10-point bucks is not a game but "population control" with a gag or low chuckle. Perhaps an "LOL" would do just fine. We know the irony, we shouldn't waste anymore time debunking it when they haven't allowed us ANY time to begin with explaining why it's obnoxious. I think we need to start coughing when Christians use "fag" and proclaim that "God hates..." -COUGH HACK WEEZE "aaaagh my throat burns!!!" PANT COUGH.. "No no no, I'm sorry..!" -COUGH COUGH- "... go on..!!" -COUGH COUGH-. Don't let them finish the sentence anymore... they don't need to. They shouldn't even begin it. I think we need to start being willful ignorant when people insist that gender matters when it comes to what you can and can't do, or what you can and can't be paid or learn or succeed in. I think we need to enforce willful ignorance when people attempt to bestow the profound knowledge upon us that "men suffer from sexism too!" or when they try to edumacate us about "reverse racism" or "reverse sexism". I think we need to drop our jaws in astonishment and say "Well I've never seen that!" or "If that were true, you'd be able to do something about it legally!!!" or perhaps the good ol' "Well my black friend was once denied a job because he was black so my example of what would be considered an exception to your rule is so important that it DISproves the vast majority!"

..Maybe we shouldn't say anything. Maybe we should just let them finish their aimless thought, sip our beer or coffee, then ask nonchalantly ask, "Hey have you seen previews for -insert popular, talked about 'must see!' film here-? Wanna go see it with me on Saturday?" Or "That reminds me of this time I was walking home from school and slipped on a big ice patch RIGHT BEFORE the road. I was really lucky I didn't slide out in the middle of the road and get run over. It was a busy road."

Does an eye for an eye make the whole world blind? Sometimes. Usually. Other times, it simply puts another eye in the other socket so the person can finally see with two instead of one. Sometimes they were blind to begin with and it wouldn't matter how many eyes you take away, replace, or swap out because they gouged out their own a long time ago and there's nothing to take and therefore nothing to remove. Sometimes what seems like "eye for an eye" is not revenge, but the equally fruitless effort of asking the blind man, "Can you see it now?".

Sometimes it gives a pleasant surprise. Sometimes it lets us see that the people are not actually blind, but simply closing their eyes. Sometimes it lets us realize that what we were taught, "Treat others as you want to be treated", is playing out in their favor after we treated them how we wanted them to treat us- it didn't work for us, but the phrase will work for them if we give them nothing more than what they asked for.

Sometimes we realize that people don't want more than what they ask for. Sometimes we realize that people don't appreciate gifts, or something they didn't ask for, that they don't like surprises and that we shouldn't bother surprising them with enlightenment, time, effort, hurt and frustration, or even a fraction of all the negative and egotistical and self-centered oppression they throw upon us.

Sometimes we realize that no matter how reasonable, fair, selfless, and optimistic we try to be about the world and about someone, there are people who simply do not take these with a genuine smile and a "thank you"... they have no intention of taking these feelings and gifts at all. They don't care and they never will. Whether we give them an eye for an eye will make no more, less, or any equivalent difference if we choose to believe that an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind and thus refrain from doing so.

I have personally learned that most people are so unreasonable and uncaring. They will never stop enforcing silence amongst people like me unless they choose to on their own free will after they figure out how my way of thinking and my enlightenment can benefit them personally. These people will never treat me any better. Matters not what I do or don't do or say or don't say to them. They're too wrapped up in their own Me and I Box.

I find it much easier to do what some people might consider to be "eye for an eye" and give them as much, usually less, than what they give me. I like good, positive presents that are given as gifts- presents given with the intention of making me happy without expectation of a reciprocated present. Since this is not what they give, they cannot possibly appreciate it when it is given to them. Therefore, it's not worth the effort.

Stopping the cycle of silence is far more important... a simple way to do so is sometimes being more "silent" by simply walking away and carrying our thoughts and conversation onto someone with more patience and insight into a life or lives outside of their own. We remain loud, but turn our cries to those who can hear.

I realize that I self-silence because I was silenced to begin with when I spoke to someone who was deaf.

Celebrity Crushes

Here today, gone tomorrow. Celebrity crushes are just a different kind of porn.

Remember "soft core" porn? Whatever that is, nowadays. That's what a celebrity crush is. Millions of anti-social people feel entitled to coral a human being around, force them into photographs, positions, and words on screen for our enjoyment. You can easily find pictures of your "favorite" celebrity shirtless, naked, or at least semi-bare to fulfill your giddy little sexual fantasies. Just like pornography, these photos or videos are used as tools for an orgasm- when it's over, we close the window or finally pay attention to the actual storyline of the movie.

Celebrities are not regarded as human beings, much like women are not regarded with humanity in pornography. Most celebrities, at least male, are allowed a semblance of humanity and can easily demand respective roles and refuse nude photographs, but this doesn't stop the paparazzi from harassing them by pacing outside their homes like wolves, ready for a photograph. And people just eat it up.

Celebrities do have privacy rights, like any human being. Clearly, because they perform in front of us, we feel entitled to their bodies and their actions- our society believes they work for us, for our pleasure. Unlike porn, celebrity crushes span out across all genders, color, orientation, and ages. Anyone can be oppressed because anyone and everyone who becomes a celebrity becomes itemized. Soon, Brad Pitt is no longer the breathing, thinking human but a photo on the internet or a capture on the screen. Since that is all that we see, that's all we can ever attach to his identity.

Some people may honestly be curious about his personal life, but not many people are really interested in what causes he believes in, what sort of political system he'd follow, what his religion is or isn't and why, his childhood (people who do research this do it for a collector's value, just to say that they know it, not because they actually care), his humanity.

I'm disgusted by the sexual idolization of celebrities the same way I am disgusted when men wank off to pornography. I'm disgusted when I see women 30+ years old at a Jonas Brothers concert or wailing over Robert Patterson because they think he's attractive- without his fame, this is called pedophilia.

I think it's gag-worthy when men post half-naked or naked photos of Beyonce or Jessica Alba on their phones, wallpaper, or in poster form. I think it's horribly demeaning to both the actress(es) and to their potential girlfriend, wife, or any woman, to idolize this woman while in a relationship. It's a form of infidelity.

But what it mainly is is objectification. These are human beings, not posters, jpegs, or sex-scandal videos. They think, feel, and act like anyone else. They are not our property, they are not things.

People who lust after them do not see their identity. Most of us know them through photos or movies- lines they were told to say, feelings they were told to act, songs they wrote previously and perform in a different state of mind or being. We do not know them personally through these things, so we put a personality on them based upon what we would want in someone. This is exactly what men do when they view porn. And the effect on us, mentally, is exactly the same- we warp ourselves to believe in this fantasy persona and lose perception on reality.

Then one day, we are presented with the truth- "Wait, Tom Cruise is a Scientologist?! But he's so handsome!" What did you think he was? A dashing pilot who would fly the world for you? Do you really think Jessica Alba is just Invisible Girl and that docile and obedient? The average woman isn't a size 0, leggy blonde with pouty lips?

People don't like the plane crash into reality. They prefer the Photoshop.

Most of the time, it isn't worth connecting with the fellow human being because they aren't actually living in the real world. Most people would consider a celebrity crush to be a minute part of humanity, when the reality is that mental state it induces disconnects us from ever truly bonding with one another. People don't understand how to communicate when they grow up in a world where everything is implied, our bodies are available to those who want it sexually, and our minds and actions are dictated by what someone else desires, not by our own free will. There is no room to grow, no room to see outside patriarchal expectations (that no one can ever accomplish).

Imagine how great it would be if we lived in a world were everyone was treated with humanity and decency. No one's body was owned by anyone. People were valued by what they do and how they think and not by how they look.

..Speaking about celebrity crushes just seems like basic feminism, basic humanism. It's no wonder it's so rare for men to actually understand why pornography is degrading because they haven't even gotten past the simple fact that women are not here for their pleasure. With having a celebrity crush being so widely acceptable and encouraged, it's probably hopeless for women and children to have humanity.

The United States regales celebrities higher than any other country. We're a fairly backwards nation.

This World

... Where I live. Everyday, I come home to an apartment that is never quite clean. Every weekend, I clean it. The next day I wake up, it still seems dirty. There's litter on floor. Dirt tracked in from outside.

I wake up. I feed the cats. They're too impatient to wait so they jump all over the counters, biting and scratching, as if it's their last meal. They are fed three times a day.

Time for homework. Hours of homework. My whole day, and most of my evening, will be spent doing homework. My attention will be constantly pried away by myself, my roommate, my surroundings, my partner. I never quite feel alone. I never quite feel at peace, at focus. I never feel quite relieved.. always burdened.

Every month, I am threatened for eviction. Every month, I have to worry about whether or not my homework will get done because we may no longer have electricity. My roomie does not pay his rent, his check bounces. He is in charge of electricity, but this is yet another bill he cannot afford.

He spends his money on himself. Food he purchases on a whim, video games, DVDs. I feed, clean after, financially pay for his cat in every way. I have done this since last year August when the cats arrived. Every month, I have had some sort of discussion with him, either in person, written letter, or e-mail about his lack of responsibilities. I am consistently pegged off as merely nagging, some sort of gold-digger, or untrustworthy because I threaten to find her a new home if he cannot and will not afford to take care of her.

Every day, I listen to him slam doors, sometimes every 30 seconds- a habit he promised never to have when we moved in together, knowing it caused stress, trauma, and sometimes panic attacks on me, for my father and mother used door and cabinet slamming as terror tactics. They knew it terrified me. They knew it kept me awake at night.

Every week, I listen to the cries and moans of this apartment complex. Doors slam, people scream and fight, children cry and women wail. This place feels like a mental institution.

These sounds... are ones of the damaged. Victims of abuse. Broken souls who will most likely never get out of this life, move on to something better, somewhere safe, or someone who will treat them with a shred of humanity.

I grew up like them. I cried out and sobbed as if there was no one on earth who could hear me.. but I wanted so badly for someone to notice.. for someone to just pick me up in their arms and tell me that everything would be okay. I needed to know that I was not ugly, that I was not the reason they hated me, that it was not my fault they hit me, insulted me. I needed to know that I was loved.

I needed to be loved. But I wasn't.

Today, I cannot feel love. I cannot believe that anyone loves me, even if they tell me. I cannot love anyone else. I care about people. I respect people. I fight for people who need it. But I cannot say that I love them. I do not feel that way; the words feel dishonest.

When someone tells me that they love me, I don't want them in my life anymore. Do I want love? No. I need love. But I have discovered that no one person on this planet is capable of providing that need. Love comes and goes, like happiness. It never stays... it starts out powerfully enough to fool us, and then we are broken.

These people crying here- we all cry together. But we'll never make it out of this void. We are just women, children. If there is one thing I have learned in this world, it is that we have a place. We are not human, we are "the other". As such, we will always be deprived of human emotions, giving and especially, receiving... especially when it comes to love.

I listen to these screams, pleas for mercy, disillusioned tears.. and I realize that it is only a matter of time until I am once again like them.

This world... is hopeless.