I’ve been wanting to discuss this for a long, long time and then someone else not only beat me to the punch, but they did it better than I could.

Read this: Rape Culture in Popular Culture by Anne Thériault from Shameless magazine.

This is the part that resonated most with me:

When a man is pursuing a woman and will not take no for an answer, no matter what his reasons, what he is really saying is: “I know better than you.” The message that he’s sending is, “my opinion/feelings/beliefs are more valuable than yours.” When, in a movie or book or television show, a man wins over a woman after repeatedly being turned down, what we, as the audience, learn is, he was right and she was wrong. We learn that, at the end of the day, men know what’s best for women.

So what do men who grow up in this culture learn? They learn that women are theirs for the taking, as long as they feel a strong enough attraction to them. They learn that no doesn’t mean no, it means, keep pushing until she says yes. They learn that women are crazy, inconsistent, moody, and changeable. They learn that their feelings are more valuable than anyone else’s.

…

What we most often learn from the media, then, is that when a man won’t give up on pursuing a woman, that’s beautiful and romantic. When a woman won’t give up on pursuing a man, that’s just plain ridiculous.

As a woman, particularly as a black woman, I’ve spent my entire life being told in a million different ways that I am only allowed to love myself in relation to how much a man could desire me. The more sexually desirable I am, the more confident I’m allowed to be. The less sexually desirable I am, the less confident I’m allowed to be. I’ve heard it about my hair. It’s too curly and unruly and it doesn’t blow in the wind so it’s not sexy, and because it’s not sexy I have to hate it. I’ve heard this about the colour of my skin. I get even darker in the summer which is apparently too dark and I should be worried and stay out of the sun. Being a little black is OK, but being too black is ugly. (Exact quote from, oddly enough, a black female friend.)  I’m not allowed to like my laugh or my personality, because my laugh it really loud and my personality is really strong. This makes me “emasculating” and “intimidating” to men (again, true story) and I am therefore too much person to fit inside one man’s ego. I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve read or heard or inadvertently participated in discussions about whether black/Asian/Latin/insert-something-not-Caucasian-her women are “attractive” as though beauty is a club one buys membership into. I say beauty is a very complex, case-by-case, person-by-person, highly dynamic part of the human experience. It’s not something you parse out with your friends when you’re four drinks deep in the back of a nightclub.

What does this have to do with rape culture? Well, women of colour are more likely to be raped than Caucasian women. And trans* women are the most vulnerable group of all. Regardless of race though, sexual assault isn’t ultimately about sexual desire or how attractive you feel, or how attractive another person thinks you are, although it’s helpful to have those discussion together.

It’s about power, and forcibly taking away someone else’s power. It’s about the danger of constructing male knowledge as more valuable and trustworthy than female knowledge. This is especially the case when it comes to a woman’s ability to know herself and what she wants and who she is. And of course, her knowledge of what her boundaries are and her agency in enforcing them.

That’s what’s been on my mind this Thursday.

Know thyself, and feel confident in that knowledge because no one has the right to tell you who you are and what you want. Other than you, of course.

Stay safe and stay strong.

via flickr. click through for the original.

Doubt thou the stars are fire;
Doubt that the sun doth move;
Doubt truth to be a liar;
But never doubt I love.
(Hamlet, 1.2.123-6)

I was washing my face the other day, eyes closed, scrubbing away, when I suddenly realised that I haven’t expressed love to anyone in a long time. Or rather, that I have not explicitly told anyone I love, that I love them.

This is odd to me, particularly because I regularly declare my love of other things.

I love One Direction.

I love my fabulous collection of fountain pens.

I love my new wallet. (It was 50 cents at my neighbour’s garage sale!)

I love whole milk lattes.

Did I mention how much I love One Direction, and that Louis Tomlinson is my OTP?

Etc.

When I was growing up, my father would always admonish me whenever I used the word love to describe affection towards inanimate things.

“You can’t love a pair of shoes,” he’d say. “Love is a powerful emotion that doesn’t extend to frivolous things like your wardrobe. You really like your shoes. You think they look nice, and you enjoy wearing them. But you do not love them.”

I’d always balk of course, but being older and wiser (haha!) I now know what he was saying to be true. What I’m talking about when I say I love One Direction, is not the same thing as what I’m talking about when I tell my best friend that I love him, and that I miss him, and I can’t wait to see him in the summer.

I now feel that each time I use the word “love” to describe something that I only “passionately enjoy” I erode the meaning of L-O-V-E in my vocabulary, which is sad and makes me want to be much more precise in my use of language. I know the day will come when I really, truly do love someone, and I will be entirely willing to trade all the whole milk lattes in the world for an extra day with them. I’d even give up One Direction! (I know, can you believe it?!) Lattes are expendable. People you care about are not.

The Take Away From This

Try, for 24 hours, to pay very close attention to how you use the word love, both outloud and in your inner monologue. And when you catch yourself saying love, when what you really mean is “like”, or “really enjoy”, or “feel very strongly about”, correct yourself.

Try, for a week, to say “I love you” to one person each day, and really, really mean it. Of course, not every conversation needs to end with a death-bed monologue about your undying passion for the heart of your lover. Instead, try just saying what you mean, and meaning what you say, and being honest with the fact that you feel as though your life is made better by having that person in it. It’s really nice to hear that, and it feels fantastic to say.

Try, for however long it takes until you believe it, saying “I love you” to yourself in the mirror, at least once a day. I’ve been doing it for two weeks now, and I still feel extremely ridiculous when I do. In fact, I say it very quietly, so no one hears me. Isn’t that awful? I don’t know where I picked up the idea that it’s not OK to find yourself valuable and worthwhile and totally lovable, but I picked it up somewhere and it stuck. So now I’m trying to undo it and it’s difficult, but gratifying, and it gets a little easier each time. I also wrote “you look fantastic today” on my mirror in big, bold, pink window marker in my best writing. It’s a nice reminder of something I occasionally forget.

Much love,

(No really- love!)

via weheartit

I used to think that the notion of a romantic partner was redundant.

I’ve always believed in the importance of self-sufficiency of the mind. Not self-sufficiency in the “every man for himself,” kind of way; that is called isolation.

What I mean when I say self-sufficiency is that even if you never hear it reinforced out loud, you can still look in the mirror and see a confident person staring back at you. Self-sufficiency means that your sense of self, and the love that you feel towards that person, exists independently of outside judgement, both good and bad.

In this way, the integrity of your self is not only preserved, but bolstered. You go from being a candle in the wind, to being a force of will in your own right.

When I came to my conclusion about what being an independent person means to me, I’d return time and again to one particular follow-up question: “If I love my life as an independent person, why do I need another person to complete me?”

What I was thinking about when I’d think of that question was the standard definition of what it means to be in love. This was back before I learned how to think critically, and realised how our cultural dialogue surrounding relationships is largely unrealistic. It took me a while to figure out the problems with the “incomplete till you have a diamond on your left hand” idea of what real love is.

Love is an abstract concept. It is a general sensation centred on the ideas of feeling valued, being embraced and truly fulfilled friendships, just to name a few examples. Then, to feel some semblance of control in our chaotic world, we attach concrete blocks onto it, of what it must be, what it cannot be and what it has to be in our lives. We impose extreme specificity to the abstraction of love, and that extreme specificity limits what love can be when we actually experience it.

“My ideal partner has to have such and such hair, and such and such income and such and such pair of shoes and such and such dentist, and if the reality deviates, then it’s all wrong and I can’t enjoy it.”  How so very absurd that we reject the glory of the moments before our eyes in order to live in the fantasies in our heads, and then wonder why we feel a dissonance in our existence. How so very absurd it is to reject the opportunity to enjoy reality and instead be trapped and limited by fantasies.

The idea that I had to choose between being fully myself and being in love with another person ended my last relationship. I’d spend sleepless night agonising about all the joy I was deriving from my partner.

“I don’t NEED him!” my mind would cry in the middle of the night. “I have to be a totally complete person, and there is no way I can be that complete person and enjoy the presence of another human being at the same time!” How absurd.

via evelinaj

I rarely enjoy cuddling, have never liked getting massaged, hate holding hands and public displays of affection irritate me. I also can’t stand being touched while I’m deep in thought (and I’m usually deep in thought). Instead of recognizing it for what it was, and coming to an understanding of my physical needs and boundaries, I chose to be convinced that the only way to enjoy a physical connection with my partner was to hold their hand while walking down the street. Because I didn’t enjoy that specific action, that one particular idea that physical intimacy has to look like XYZ, I concluded that the ABC I was feeling was all wrong. I concluded that I didn’t enjoy the general emotions and sensations of being in love, and that particular partner had to be rejected. I single-handedly decided what the relationship had to be, not realising that love is a group activity, and then got really confused when there was no space inside my fantasy for my partner. I made no space for renegotiation of how we physically interact. There was no space for growth, no space for expansive experiences. I missed out on a lot of what it was and could have been, in exchange for the fantasy of what it had to be, and went to bed alone each night, clutching desperately at that fake story, cursing it for not being everything I had decided it had to be.

Also, I realised I’m a lot gayer than I originally thought, but that’s actually rather incidental to this point. I learned a lot during the experience and it was valuable; I liked being around him, and we’re still good friends.

Here’s what I realised in conducting my breakup post-mortem analysis. (What? Don’t tell me I’m the only one who writes a personal report after a major event!)

1) I am not an independent person, despite the fact that I am a self-sufficient person, and

2) Needing other people to complete your life does not mean that you are incomplete as a person because,

3) There needs to be a distinction between being a complete person and having complete experiences.

We are not islands, we’re connective tissue. Someone taught us how to move about the world and how to communicate and how to feed ourselves. Some things in life are group activities, and love is one of them. That can’t be co-opted, and you can’t single-handedly write the story in the dark recesses of your mind. It is unfair to those you coerce into participating with you. Two complete people make the fullest experiences when they come together. We need other people to have robust lives, and that truth exists in tandem with self-sufficiency of the mind.

Flocks of geese fly in a V formation to maximise their aerodynamics. They fly together at all times, in family units, and take turns being in the lead, so that they can make journeys that they’d never be able to if they went alone.

That is what love is for, all kinds of love. With the support of those going in the same direction, you can travel much further, and with significantly less struggle, if you work together and maximise your aerodynamics.

 Love, when it is done properly, is like an interdependent migration to warmer weather. You can’t be a strong person without strong relationships and you can’t have strong relationships without being a strong person. The problem I had with my way of thinking is that I thought those two couldn’t coexist in the same space.

So I’ve stopped justifying my desire for companionship, and I’ve also stopped thinking that I have to choose between companionship and self-sufficiency. You can’t fully do one without fully doing the other. To fall in love, you must live. And to truly live, you must fall in love, because you will miss a lot if you’re too preoccupied with keeping you ball perfectly balanced, all by yourself, all the time.

No amount of pre-emptive angst will ever fully prepare you for life. You have to get out there and you have to do it with other people. Take it from your resident over-thinker.

The story of the handsome prince is just that- a story. It’s just one way of thinking about love, and if it isn’t working for you, you can write your own. Living in real life is what will inform the story you construct, and you cannot construct the narrative beforehand. That is a good thing. You’d never be able to figure out all the juicy details that make the story rich anyway.

Much love,

Trust- (n.) reliance on the integrity, strength, ability, surety, etc. of a person or thing; confidence.

“Do you have a profound trust in yourself, that you’ll not only survive this, but that you’ll come out of it happy and better than you were before?”

If the answer isn’t yes, what can you do to change the way you’re thinking about the situation?

Well, if I were you, I’d start with figuring out what’s at the root of your non-trusting in your own brilliance.

If it’s because you believe in a higher power, and you’re genuinely secure in not relying soely on your own judgement, I say stick with that. If you’re happy, and you’re not hurting others, keep on marching to the beat of that soundtrack.

But if you’re facing something right now, and you don’t truly believe in the brilliance of your unalienable magic, why?

Are you so tired you can’t even muster up the strength to try? Sleep.

Are you so stressed you can’t even calm your brain down for long enough to work through your own thoughts? Go for a walk. Maybe even a run. Either way, get out of your mind and into your body. If your mind were so great right now, you’d be able to think straight!

Are you having trouble visualising what “better” looks like? Get a stack of magazines, or scour the internets to make a vision board! Pinterest is  great for things like that! Check out my Pinterest  boards for some ideas.

Do you feel disempowered, as though you can’t really influence your own life? Keep reading this  blog, because influencing your own life is what I’m all about! :D On  a more serious note though, this book changed my life. I  am genuinely a different, and entirely more empowered person because of it. If you can’t get your hands on that book, I refer you, yet again, to the ineffable motivator that is Ashley, from the Middle Finger Project. Flip your insecurities the bird!

Do you feel unloved? Well I love you! I send love in your direction, to all my Beautiful People in fact, at all times, on all days, at all moments! I meditate for love and success in all our lives every night before I go to bed. Every Sunday, I write “May all my amazing blog readers, in all their beauty, create their own versions of heaven in this lifetime,”  on a Post-It note and I release it to the Universe! Did I never tell you that? Well it’s true.  Each and every Sunday, I spend about an hour sending  good  vibes your way. Mostly though, we often feel unloved because we’ve not loving others properly. Do you hug to embrace, or hug because it would be socially unacceptable to refuse?

Do you feel bitter and resentful that you’re in the situation you’re currently in? Then remember that the world doesn’t actually owe you anything…it was here first. Also, feelings of bitterness and resentment are powerful repellents. People can tell when you’re judging or hating, and it’s driving them away, I promise you. The other thing too is that mishaps in life are mandatory, but being miserable is  entirely optional. If you can’t  control  what’s happening  to you at the moment, at the  very least, you’re allowed to choose how you react to it.

Do you feel lost in life? Take it one day at a time, tackling one goal at a time. It’s tough, I know, to feel as though you don’t know what you’re going to do next. BUT! Do you know what you’re doing right now? I mean really, truly, in all the roles and responsibilities you currently  face in  life, are you doing  your best?  Do you have good grades in school? Are you a good partner? Are you a caring friend? Are you a good steward of the environment? I think we often feel unsure about the future because we’re not living fully in the present. It’s hard to extrapolate a sense of certainty on a graph with a shaky starting point.

Okies! Trust- the word of the day.  Do you want it? Well guess what- it’s already in you to discover.

Om  shanti shanti,

A.Y. Daring