i picked up the weekly issue of the campus newspaper on my way home and was disappointed but not surprised by its contents. it was the "sex and love" issue, and here are some of the headlines:
i take little offense from (although i may disagree with their contents of) the last two articles, although i don't believe that the school newspaper the place for articles like this. it's natural for college-aged people to be obsessed with, and curious about, sex. these texts would be great as magazine articles or blog posts, but including them in the weekly newspaper just shows bad boundaries between the university and its students. this publication represents the institution, and this is what they want people to see. i'm not sure i can make any convincing moral arguments against it, but it's just plain weird and creepy to have my school's name attached to works like this, isn't it? who's approving these, and selecting them to be published?
what i do find offensive is that the article about the sex club was the main feature of this week's issue. it's the only article that takes up a two-page spread, and the bottom half of the pages are decorated with this image: [see image]. why is the university promoting sex clubs to a student body mainly comprised of people who have just become legal adults?
as questionable as those are, none of the aforementioned articles can hold a candle to the utter insanity of the pinku article, which makes the bizarre claim that rape fantasy pornos from the 70's are "tales of empowerment and sexual liberation". i can't make this shit up.
but the news paper, with all its delusion, is no match for the sexual education center. their instagram profile features posts such as:
this isn't even all of it. coming from the organization that is meant to educate students about sex, these posts are beyond dangerous. the complete lack of nuance and unwavering support for pornography, casual sex, and violent kinks is a large contributor to the carelessness with which i treated my own body and sexuality. sec is hardly a sexual education center as much as it's a gsa and bdsm club, and what's worse is that if you're lgbt on campus, this is likely where you'd go to make friends. i went here in my first year, and much of my social circles revolved around sec and wgec (wgec is the women's center, which suffers from similar problems as sec and the wgs department).
and all this is on top of (and likely heavily influenced by) the fact that the women's studies department is run by men who will shut you down if you dare to speak against pornography, kink, or sex work. i wish i were exaggerating. i've written about it before, but this man is the department head, and the department is overrun by male instructors. these are the people who are meant to teach us about women's liberation.
what i'm saying is that the university uses multiple venues to condition students into accepting that sex work, porn, and kink as things that are normal and even empowering. what happens to women who are just beginning to become sexually mature adults when they and their peers are surrounded by a campus culture that actively promotes sexual irresponsibility?
these fucked up tactics worked very successfully on me. i was 17 when i started university, fresh out of high school (as most university students are) and completely naive to adult life. i still am. becoming an adult in a world that treats sex extremely casually and even stigmatizes vanilla sex naturally had consequences that im still dealing with. by the time i was 20, i believed that making and selling porn might empower me because as a woman, i was being sexualized and objectified no matter what. at that point, i'd already dealt with enough sexually inappropriate behaviour/advances from men who were older than me. i figured that sex work would be a way for me to control my own sexualization, and to use it to my advantage. i sincerely believed that i was the one taking advantage of men, and at times, i kind of felt bad for "exploiting porn addicts for money". how messed up is that! and i know that i'm not alone in this. by the time i was 21, i felt weird about being a porn-addicted sex worker who was still a virgin in real life. so i jumped on any opportunity to have sex, even with people i wasn't attracted to, and ended up traumatized by men who had absolutely no regard for my feelings.
i fell for the narrative that anyone who takes sex seriously is a conservative puritan who hates women's pleasure. and every year, more young women are falling for it, too. this is not sexual education or liberation. it's grooming, point blank. i know that "grooming" as a term has been thrown around and misused to refer to the mere existence of gnc people, but i sincerely don't know how else to describe what happened to me, and what the campus culture did to me. it groomed me.
what i want to see is a sex education that is not hedonistic but hollistic. a narrative that encourages women to interrogate what they want, and why they want it. did you learn your desires from pornography/erotica/fanfiction? why do you want to recreate these fictions in real life? does the culture around you affect how you treat yourself, and what you believe that you deserve? what do you really value? if you saw yourself as a whole person who is owed respect, what (if anything) would you be doing differently?
what i'm doing by asking these questions isn't "challenging women's agency" or "victimizing sex workers" or whatever the pro-sex work crowd wants to twist it into. i'm acknowledging that our desires are shaped by the world around us, and that the world around is a patriarchal one that does not care about women's wellbeing. women are intelligent and capable of thinking critically, but we live in a culture that doesn't nurture or encourage these skills. if only someone told me to pause and think about my decisions, if only someone were to expose me to different perspectives and guiding questions and inform me about what else is out there, beyond the "sex-positive whore/sex-negative puritan" dichotomy (which is a modern-day manifestation of the madonna whore complex), and encouraged me to access information contrary to what i've been told to believe. if only this happened, maybe then i could have had the mind to learn this the easy way instead of the hard way.
teenage women are more than capable of thinking critically about themselves and the world, but they aren't geniuses. they'll come to their own conclusions with the skills they have and the information they've been given. young women need to be given access to multiple viewpoints, the tools to interrogate these viewpoints, and the space to do so without fear. someone who is only given two very shitty (but seemingly polar opposite, despite being two sides of the same coin once you study them further) options isn't gonna look for a third option if they haven't been taught to think dialectically. give women the frameworks they need, and watch them impress you with their brilliance and nuance.
february 17th 2024
with lent around the corner, a lot of christians are thinking about what to fast from. it's traditional to give up food and fast for forty days, but it's more common now for people to do something less extreme, giving up something like chocolate or social media instead. i'll be one of the christians who gives up social media this lent.
last year, i looked down on christians who fasted from social media for lent. scripture asks us to "afflict yourself," but abstaining from social media is no affliction. how do i justify this to myself? am i no better than the people i judged last year?
what's obvious is that i'm not in the same situation as i was last year. last lent was my first lent as a willing christian, and i was still very much in my honeymoon phase with the church. in any case, it's unfortunate that my health conditions prevent me from fasting from food. i would have done it last year and this year if it were safe for me. i need to choose something else that has a similar impact on me, but without hurting me.
the point of fasting is to turn away from temptation and reconcile with god. we offer this sacrifice to show sorrow for our sins, and to participate in the suffering that jesus experienced when he spent forty days in the desert. lent is a time for us to prepare ourselves for easter, so when we give up something small, we are thanking jesus for giving up his life for our salvation.
fasting isn't meant to be used as a method of self-punishment or inflicting harm on ourselves—god is the only one who can serve justice in such a manner. a lenten sacrifice is not meant to cause misery, but a sense of yearning. we crave whatever it is that we are fasting from, and we feel empty without it. our fast then encourages us to turn to god to fill that emptiness instead. a lenten sacrifice rids us of distractions so we can commit ourselves to god more faithfully.
i tried to achieve this last year by giving up drinking anything that wasn't water, including soup and smoothie bowls and other food items that can be considered beverages in the loosest terms. the one exception was cereal with milk because it's a safe food and part of my routine, and abstaining from it would put me under undue psychological stress (plus physical stress, because i'd probably actually starve if i couldn't eat cereal). i was using less milk that i normally would have, though, if that makes any difference. i did this to fully appreciate food and drink not as a given, but as a gift from god.
giving up social media (or any bad habit, for that matter) doesn't have the same effect as giving up something harmless or healthy. fasting from food is objectively bad for you, and no reasonable person would want to give up eating for forty days for the sake of their own health. this is why last year, i was somewhat against giving up social media for lent. it's hardly a sacrifice to abstain from something you shouldn't have been doing in the first place. that's just a new years resolution; lent as an excuse to finally get your ass into gear.
but now i'm the one giving up social media for lent, and i need to justify it to myself.
i've struggled with idolatry so intensely and for so long that it's become a pathological issue. when my psychiatrist said she highly suspects that i have bpd, i told my campus minister about it and asked her if there were demons in me and if a priest can get rid of my bpd. she said that although i am sick, and jesus is the divine physician, he won't heal me instantly. he works through healthcare professionals, so i need to seek treatment from them. if my idolatry is a result of a sickness i have, then i must do my best to cure that sickness and reconcile with god. nothing will change if i just wait around and pray that my bpd will go away.
i suppose that since i'm in different circumstances this year than i was last year, i also need to approach lent differently. "giving up something harmless/healthy to prevent myself from treating lent like a new years resolution" was a great approach when i was in my honeymoon phase with god, but now i need to crack down on these massive barriers in my spiritual life. the reality now is that i don't pray regularly anymore because why would i pray to an empty sky when i can send my friends a text instead, and get an instant response? i rely so much on external validation, and so much on other mortals, that i forget that other people are limited and imperfect. i treat them like they're god, and then when they can't be infinitely generous and compassionate like god is, i become extremely upset with them. i can't be attached to my friends the way i am now, and love god at the same time. it's just not possible.
i can reframe this in any way i'd like, to make me feel better about it: i'm not just giving up social media; i'm giving up instant communications with my idols. i'm giving up my 24/7 access to external validation. i'm giving up my distractions and my barriers from loving god, so i can see myself the way god sees me. i'm inducing a sense of emptiness to make myself rely on god more. but no matter how i cut it, i'm just giving up something i should have stopped doing long ago, without waiting for lent to come.
i'm still conflicted on the matter but generally i'm just thinking, so what if i'm not doing the perfect thing for lent, for the perfect reason? it's not good that i need lent to force to take my faith more seriously, but i'm making efforts to repair my relationship to god. i can't take back the past but i can repent and do better in the present.
february 12th 2024
this weekend, while complaining about my male wgs prof to my older cousin, i was finally able to articulate the problem i have with male feminists. i was talking about a specific instance in which my male wgs prof told me not to speak against makeup in class because some women like wearing makeup and i shouldn't offend them–and then it dawned on me that what i was saying would be offensive… if it were coming from a man. and i suddenly understood exactly why men can't be feminists.
the reason it came up is that we had a class activity in which each of the students had a few minutes to speak about what feminism means to us. among other things, i mentioned that i don't agree with choice feminism. my prof asked me to elaborate because he had never heard of choice feminism before then, so i used makeup as an example: choice feminism would claim that anything a woman chooses to do is empowering. therefore, if woman isn't explicitly forced/coerced into wearing makeup, but she chooses to do so of her own volition, and claims that makeup empowers her, then wearing makeup is a feminist act for her. feminism then becomes a matter of giving women choices and agency. this sounds great in theory, but it completely disregards that women's choices are influenced by the world around us, that our actions affect other women, and that girls are conditioned from a very young age to feel insecure without makeup on–so of course women feel more confident/"empowered" (empowered to do what, i have no idea) when they have makeup on.
all this being said, my professor had to publicly disagree with me in front of my classmates because it looks bad for a man to agree that women's choices are subject to criticism, and that women shouldn't wear makeup. in such an instance, his silence would come off as him agreeing with me (or at the very least, tolerating what i said), and then it would appear that he, as a man, takes issue with women's choice to wear makeup. coming from a man, it has a vastly different implication than a woman taking issue with the beauty industry.
feminism—at least the branches of feminism that still have teeth—demands that we criticize women's complicity in our own oppression. as feminist women, we can empathize with each other. we understand what it's like to grow up as a girl, to go through female puberty at such a young age, and to relate to/reconcile with our changing bodies as we grew into women and began to feel boys' and adults' attitudes towards us change. in the span of just a year or two, we went from being the smartest and strongest kids in our class to being smaller and weaker than the boys, sexually harassed by boys and men, and having our ideas dismissed (much more than they were before). nearly all women have experienced the fall of grace that is becoming a teenage girl. we've done what we could to try and prevent ourselves from falling even further—we shaved our body hair, we beat our faces, we tried to make our bodies smaller. men enforce pedophilic beauty standards because they're pedophiles, and women agree to these standards in a desperate attempt to return to the former glory of girlhood.
when a woman says "women shouldn't shave," she is most likely someone who has shaved, waxed, and plucked just about every part of her body before. when she stopped removing her body hair, she was forced to go through the hard work of accepting her grown-up female body as it is. she has been shamed, gawked at, and made to justify her choice to herself and to those around her. and, after all of this, she is still telling another woman, "look at me, and look at what i have done. this is a difficult choice to make. i know this because i have made it before you, and someone else has made it before me. this is how we set ourselves free." this woman is someone who can empathize with other women and lead them by example.
men can't possibly contribute to feminism in this way. they don't bring personal experience to these discussions. all they can do is tell women what to do, which is what men have been doing since the dawn of civilization. a man can criticize a woman's choice to shave or wear makeup, but it would be incredibly difficult to do so without implicitly stating that a woman needs a man to tell her what's best for her. this is also why male contributions to feminist thought/knowledge/theory will always rub me the wrong way. it's very hard to believe that a woman didn't already think about this particular aspect of feminism before, and that she wasn't just as capable of communicating it as he was. men can't generate feminist knowledge; they can only regurgitate it and take credit for it. i have the same issue with male wgs professors—why is a man standing in front of all these young women and telling us about feminism? what makes him an authority on feminist thought? were there no women who could have taken this role instead, and done a better job at it?
so i've established that i don't think that men can/should contribute to feminism intellectually. but that doesn't mean that men can't meaningfully contribute to feminism in other ways—men still have a duty to women's liberation. men are responsible for keeping other men in line. it isn't women's job to fix men and to resocialize them into something that feminists can accept. men must do this work and hold themselves and each other accountable.
whether this means that men can be feminists is merely a semantic issue. personally, i prefer that men call themselves "pro-feminist" or "feminist allies," as a way to acknowledge that they can't be as involved in feminism or participate in feminism as completely as woman can.
that being said, it's great to get men on our side, but purposely expending our energy towards recruiting males or, god forbid, compromising on our feminism to pander to men, is a disservice towards women as well as a colossal waste of our resources (not forgetting that time, energy, and mental/emotional capacity are very important resources that every woman should put towards our liberation). feminism ultimately doesn't need men. the idea that men need to be on board with feminism for it to succeed stems from the idea that women aren't competent or powerful enough to liberate ourselves.
february 2nd 2024
about a month ago, my psychiatrist told me early in the morning that there's a very high chance that i have borderline personality disorder. my favourite person left me on the evening of that same day, and i have only myself to blame for it—i've come to realize that i was abusive towards my fp. i don't like knowing that i'm capable of becoming so monstrous. i'm not so sure that i could ever forgive myself for it, or allow anyone to get close to me again. i can't risk treating anyone else the way i treated my fp.
i'll finally be in treatment for bpd this week. it's so frustrating that it's taken this long. my relationship with my fp has been my main stressor since october 2022, and it has been snowballing ever since. i first reached out for professional help in march 2023, and it took all the way until december 2023 for someone to finally tell me that i have bpd. and i need to wait until january 2024 to hear my treatment recommendations, and then see the psychiatrist again in march to confirm that i have bpd and nothing else. if it didn't take a whole year for me to finally get some semblance of understanding of why i feel so out of control, maybe things wouldn't have happened the way they did. my fp and i could have still been friends.
it's not like we didn't love each other, or care about each other. it's not like we didn't put in the effort to fix our relationship as much as we could. she was so understanding towards me and showed me so much grace that i didn't deserve.
coming to terms with having a personality disorder, and with having lost my best friend to said disorder, has been torture. i wish i had some wisdom to share about the human condition, about psychiatry, identity, and about love itself, but i'm in the thick of it right now. i spend most of my time mentally replaying every bad thing i've done to my fp. i can't believe i got away with being so terrible for so long, and i feel awful that she stayed with me through all of it. she must have loved me so much, and believed so strongly in my recovery, that it somehow made all the bad times worth it to her. that's what she'd say to me: "i stay with you of my own volition because the good outweighs the bad." the fact that i betrayed her makes me feel so sick. i led her into believing that i could get better, only to continue getting worse and worse until she couldn't take it anymore. it must have been so hard for her to be let down like that.
january 3rd 2024
most accessible porn addiction recovery resources have been entirely unhelpful to me, as they're all directed towards men. arguably, female porn addicts struggle a lot more than males do... but there are hardly any woman-centered porn addiction recovery resources that specifically address the needs and struggles of female addicts.
i saw a statistic in my "anthropology of sex" class that it takes four to five months for young men to recover from porn addiction. but recovery, as defined by males, refers to the ability to hold an erection without the use of pornography. even recovering addicts are not concerned with much more than their masculinity. the masculine attitude towards porn recovery is that men need to recover from porn induced erectile dysfunction, increase their willpower and confidence, and regain their sexual vitality. they only want to beat their porn addiction because they can't get hard anymore. i haven't seen many male porn addicts who are very concerned about the way they see themselves in relation to women, mending their relationships with their own sexuality, and advocating that the victims of porn (ie sex workers and prostituted girls/women) are liberated from the industry and compensated for all they've been through at the hands of porn users. and if some porn-addicted men do care about these things, their concern only seems to run as deep as their worry about their own success in interpersonal relationships with women. they want to be able to obtain a sexual relationship with a woman. it doesn't matter to them whether these relationships are healthy or respectful to the woman involved.
porn changes how you see women. men don't suffer from that because the way men see women and intimacy is already fully backed by patriarchy. they're not the ones feeling the pain of being made into a sexual object for the consumption of others. women have gotten addicted to depictions of ourselves as victims, which is infinitely more painful and difficult to recover from than the mere limp dick syndrome that porn addicted males are so loud about.
when i first started using porn, i was aware that porn degrades women, but i didn't understand the full extent of sex industry's harm to everyone involved. to avoid disrespecting women, i almost exclusively watched porn without any women in it. seeing women in porn felt like seeing myself in porn, and it was difficult for me to feel anything but discomfort with the fact that she was being made to perform her sexuality for a camera. if it was gay or solo male porn, i didn't care much about those things--i know it's bad, but i'm really not above hating and disrespecting men.
in this post, i won't get too deep into what porn did to me. that's for another time, maybe... but i'll make some broad statements: it wasn't good for me to consume depictions of casual sex without any vulnerability or love. it wasn't good for me to see such intimate imagery of people who are complete strangers to me. regardless of the sex of the actors, it was not good for me to repeatedly consume content in which sex was treated so casually. it caused me to treat my own sexuality in ways that were careless and self-destructive.
my own recovery wasn't about restoring my confidence, willpower, or sexual vitality. it was all about desiring better things for myself than porn. it was about self respect. a huge part of my recovery was based on wanting to make my friends proud, wanting to respect women more, and wanting to be a female porn addict who recovered and can talk about the experience... so here i am, talking about it!
october 7th 2023 (crossposted on dreamwidth.)
