Queer thinking, or thinking queerly? Because classifying sexual orientation is just ridiculous...

Since the channels have been quiet for a while I thought I would throw one out there with a queer thought about the idea of classifying sexual orientation, which to me is a bit of an absurd idea. It’s like the concept of gender. What even is that? Well obviously it’s a construction created by the hegemonic forces for their own ends and means, but a lot of people fail to realise this. So to me trying to classifying sexual orientation, particularly because I find the concept of gender problematic, is pretty difficult. Maybe it even goes further than that; I find it hard classifying relations with other people in general. And I think in this sense I come across as a bit strange because most people draw quite clear lines about this sort of thing, as in, girls sleeping with girls are lesbians, for example. But the more I think about this the more I fail to see how it is even a thing. What started this all off was a conversation I had with a guy the other day who was totally pro girl-on-girl (of course) but shuddered at the idea of two men going at it. That was simply ‘gay’. To which I replied so was the meeting of vjayjays. But I only meant this in a facetious way. And I think I have a vaguely feminist notion that says to me that erecting these categories to define sexual orientation is a means of belittling women and of denying their sexual agency, which is a point I will come back to.

In actual fact, I don’t know that I understand what homosexuality is. I am pretty sure that in the oldest times there was always an orgy to be found somewhere which facilitated a whole array of sexual gluttony. I mean, there was no TV or Facebook, what else would you do with your time? And there was probably a bit of sword fighting going on as well as the apparently acceptable female fraternisation and general penis-vagina stuff. And I don’t think that was really a problem, nor that people were then categorised according to who they got off on. But nowadays we seem quite keen on drawing a line under all of this and giving everyone a set orientation. When speaking with someone about my curiosity and willingness to engage in sexual activities with a girl, they asked me then if I was bisexual. And my answer was no. But I also can’t then be straight based on common interpretations either. But as far as I see it, there are people I am attracted to, and people I am not. Further than that I can make no sense of it. But this puts me outside the realm of what we can articulated – there is no word for this kind of orientation –, which tends to make people uncomfortable. Language is the channel we collect knowledge through, and when something can’t be expressed nicely in a term, it becomes somehow incomprehensible. But that doesn’t mean that all that which can’t be expressed isn’t valid or real. It’s just undefined. And society doesn’t like having black boxes.

Coming to the feminist point, the classification of sexual orientation is just another way of men exercising their dominance over women in being those who give sex, and by creating the notion of homosexuality – that which is not hetero – the overarching male dominance is reproduced. So to put this into a more grounded context rather than vague theoretical conceptions of the (re)production of norms, let’s take a heterosexual couple and imagine how we feel about them having sex. We are probably pretty alright about it. Now think about two girls together. Can lesbians actually have sex? This is an important question to think about, and explains why I think the idea of homosexuality denies the sexual agency of women. I think the answer is yes, lesbian sex is sex, but there are many people who might say it’s not. Generally lesbian sex is seen as something less than heterosexual sex – which is the standard benchmark of what sex is. I mean, a hot dog with no sausage is just a roll right? So in the eyes of society, this isn’t damaging, but lacking, and ultimately renders the woman incapable of performing sex. A man has to do it. So that’s why I think defining sexual orientation facilitates inequality between men and women and denies women sexual agency. And I find it kind of tragic that we are all largely complacent in the reproduction of this idea. 

But now come to the case of two men (remembering the example of my friend calling this ‘gay’). There seems to be some sort of discomfort with the idea, which I understand people feel, though I don’t myself. The idea of a man giving anal, or receiving it, from another man disturbs the notion of what sex is and who can do it. It is no longer something that a man gives a women. So there is a sort of repulsion to this notion, but often men actively want to do anal with a women, which (in seeing her only from behind and utilising her rectal endowments) could be the same as having sex with a man. I think this is where my friend had a problem, because sex stopped being about the dominance of men. It put him into a space in which he was equal to the other party. In fact, the man usurps the woman in recieving anal. And thus, if (in the eyes of society) if homosexual sex is normalised, and just becomes sex without any categorisations we run into two problems. Firstly, women are endowed with the power to have sex, and therefore men are no longer dominant over them, or even needed. Women can get their own sexual gratification without being given it. Secondly, by normalising homosexual activities – in the case of two men – men become a group that can receive sex, and as such they undermine their own sexual dominance. And I can imagine this plays a role in why so many men think lesbians are hot, but gay guys are wrong. Even if it is subconscious. They just don’t want to be on the receiving end or have their power deminished.

While that turned out to be way more theoretical than I intended it to be, and certainly very opinionated, I think it is still food for thought. And maybe you might start to think differently about who has the ability to have sex, and why and what the wider implications of this are. And maybe, just maybe, we can stop calling people ‘gay’ and adopt a ‘70s-style free love policy. She says, hopefully.

And on that note, here is what may potentially be one of my favourite songs at the moment:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YaVE4WVlsDQ

Because being a man is a lot of ball ache

So it has apparently been 12 long days since I last put up a blog post, 12 days in which I have achieved little more than consume a shocking number of Laugenbretzels and lay on my sofa testing out my new headphones (which are awesome in case you were wondering). And just to clarify to those of you who may be unsure, a Laugenbretzel is not to be mistaken for an ordinary pretzel. They are distinguished by their trade-mark orange/brown surface and rock salt covering. Bare this in mind on your next trip to the bakery. Diversions aside, there is one thing I achieved during this this period of apparent vegetation– thinking about the ways in which our society is hard on men. Promised you guys a follow up from my last post, so here it is. Sadly no half-naked women for you this week though, my apologies for that, though maybe in the spirit of equality I should post a man in his underwear? Anyway, this is kind of hard for me to write about given my lack of penis and consequential difference in perspective, but I’ll let you in on the main things I have thought about that I imagine are pretty sucky about being a man. Guys, feel free to message back about what you think about this, would be interesting to know! Essentially I think that one of the biggest issues that men face is the fact that they aren’t allowed to be in any way ‘female’ – whatever that means - and if they are, they get A LOT of stick for it. That sounds really vague I know, so I have a couple of examples to illustrate what I mean – the phrase ‘man up’ and issues about custodial and (for want of a better word) foetal rights. What I think is also something to mention is chubby boys, and how it is potentially harder for them than chubby girls…

So I’m going to start off with the ‘man up’ thing. Generally when someone says this to you it essentially means to stay strong despite whatever is happening, or as urban dictionary puts it “don't be a pussy”. Whilst at first it kind of seems that this is only said tongue in cheek and is mostly used to stop people whining, I think it is actually pretty damaging if you really think about it. It has the connotation of a strong man who isn’t emotionally crippled by things going on around him. Consequently, we seem to have this ill-founded notion that men should be emotionally untouchable and that is isn’t okay for them to cave under emotional pressure, which is reproduced by telling boys to man up. Just think about what your reaction might be if you walked down a street and saw a man crying. If you saw a women crying, I don’t think you would be that taken aback, or at least I wouldn’t, but a man might throw you. And it really shouldn’t. And what comes with this idea that being strong and manly is the idea that anything else is not – hence being a pussy – and that therefore, as a man, you shouldn’t be any other way. I’m not even going to get into the issues I have with the phrase being a ‘pussy’, but what it serves to show is that men aren’t really allowed to feel what they want when they want, unlike women (though we are painted as being hysterical because of this, which I also object too).  And I really feel that it is damaging for young boys to be told to man up and shut down their emotions, because often it’s better to let yourself break down every now and then rather than keep it all bottled up. So just a note to my future boyfriend/husband/son/every man I ever encounter, it’s alright to cry, or be keen, or anxious, or whatever it is you are feeling but feel like you shouldn’t. I would rather you just talked about it rather than a) making yourself feel bad keeping it in and b) keeping me guessing and obsessing about all the bad things you could be thinking. It’s really win-win for everyone to just be honest all the time and act on how you feel. Unless you are a serial killer. Maybe save that one for the confines of a counsellor’s office.

Another thing that I guess is really hard about being a guy is the little say you get in pregnancies. Although I like to think that when a girl gets pregnant – whether intentionally or not – that both parties get a say in what happens next, I’m not convinced that this is always the case. Sure it must be difficult for a girl when the man wants the baby to be aborted and she doesn’t, but she can ultimately make that choice to have the child or not. But for men that choice isn’t really there. They can walk away from a pregnancy at will and come back if and when they please, but they can’t have a baby if the girl isn’t willing. And I think it is tragic that there are cases when girls abort children that men want to have. And because it isn’t their body there is ultimately nothing they can do to stop this. I don’t really see that there is any solution to this, but that doesn’t make it any less shit for guys to have to deal with. And I really don’t envy them being in, or having the potential to be in this situation.

This ties in with custody rights and stay at home dads, which are also areas where women win hands down. When a marriage goes wrong – regardless of what cause – in most cases where there are children involved the mother will get custody. The following graph shows that pretty clearly:

Whilst in some cases there may be clear benefits for children to live with their mother, I am sure that in more than 17% of cases there is good cause to grant to father custody, or at least joint custody. I appreciate that it also isn’t great to ferry kids around between two parents all the time to split their time literally 50/50 between the parents, but it doesn’t seem right that women are more likely to get custody based on the old-fashioned notion of women as childcare and men as bread-winners. This also definitely ties in with the fact that it is much less socially acceptable for men to be stay at home dads. Men get seen as lazy, whipped, or weird for wanting to do this. But maybe they are actually just decent and want to spend time with their children, and I really think we should judge them less for this. When I’m older I want to stay at home with my children and I hope my husband does too. And while yes, we will probably fight horrifically about this, I wouldn’t change this for anything. Maybe I should also mention here that there may still be something to be said against wage differentials making it economically feasible for women to stay at home. But generally I think that if men want to have a fair share of their kids’ time society really shouldn’t put them down for this.

And my last point, which fits in less with the rest but is a point nonetheless is about how it might be harder to be a chubby boy than a chubby girl. Firstly, if you are a girl and are chubby, you’re probably gonna have either boobs or a bum (or both), which is probably a good thing. Secondly, there are some clothes out there designed to be flattering for your slightly-bigger-than-average physique, so you can still go out feeling like you look quite nice. But for the chubby guy, life isn’t that sweet. If you think about the average view of a man, he is somewhere between skinny and toned, and probably plays some kind of sport because he’s a man and does manly things. But the chubby guy probably doesn’t play sport, and unlike the chubby girl, he can’t use his clothing to make his bodily abundance into something attractive. He somehow becomes less of a man, which is ironic given the fact that there is well, more of him. Whilst he can just go to the gym to fix this situation, he will then be laughed at for being the fat guy at the gym (though I feel this is the best place for him). So pretty much it probably sucks to be a chubby boy. But just to note, this isn’t me saying I judge chubby boys – especially as I think what I count as chubby is pretty lenient – it’s just me appreciating that it’s probably pretty shit. Girls are allowed to be squishy (or so I tell myself), guys, not so much.

So yeah, that was just a few things I can imagine being less than optimal about being a guy. Though plus side, some men can grow cool beards and then stroke them when thinking to look like they are all deep and philosophical. And you don’t have to sit on public toilet seats to pee. There are pros and cons to everything I guess. And here’s something to break the silence: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lh6Pw9eVAk8

Porn, slut shaming and Robyn Lawley; because being an acceptable girl in the 21st century is bordering on impossible...

It might just be because of Erdbeerwoche, but this week I have literally been experiencing internals torrents of rage because of the way society is reproducing notions of how the female body should look and how women should behave. While I don’t doubt that male self-confidence is ground down through similar processes and that they too experience injustices on a gross scale, I can’t really comment on this as I don’t know what it’s like. So instead I am using this blog post to explain why it’s so hard to be a girl, and why these difficulties are entirely socially constructed and ridiculous. I was going out the other night and having a ‘fat day’ and couldn’t pick what to wear because I decided that everything made me look horrid. And then I was overwhelmed by how ridiculous I was being and how there is actually nothing wrong with me. Not even just nothing wrong, but things that are entirely right. And I only thought I was having a particularly porky day was because every day I am fed images and notions of how I should be, and more importantly how I shouldn’t. So when I say it’s painful to be a girl, I don’t mean this as a way of venting about the ongoing torment of menstrual cramps, which admittedly do suck. I mean the emotional stress that girls of younger and younger ages are experiencing because they fail to fit into the box that society says they should. There are three things that I think really epitomise the issues surrounding female body image and the expectations society makes of women, which are porn, slut shaming (or a general over-attention to women’s sexual activity) and plus size models.

I’m not anti-porn per say, if you want to spend your getting off on watching other people go at it, that’s your business (as long as it’s not done in a peeping Tom sense), I mean the word voyeurism was clearly invented because enough people did this to need to name it. What I do have an issue with though is the kind of porn I think a lot of people are watching, and how this is altering the notion of what kind of sexual activity is to be expected, and the impact it is having on children. I was recently watching a BBC documentary about this exact idea, and unsurprisingly, for a lot of kids porn is the first way they learn about sex. Even if it isn’t sex education in schools isn’t comprehensive enough to provide an actual understanding of sexual activities for children to learn that porn isn’t necessarily the real deal. I remember when I had it in school there was some laughable animation with a man standing up in a bath with a cartoon-like beer belly hanging over his man parts, which in due course did in fact find a vagina after the scientific discussion of the process of arousal had occurred. Other than that we weren’t really told much. So of course kids are going to look to porn for answers. And when they do they are often given a really warped display of what sex is like. I am trying not to generalise all porn, but often it shows girls with modified bodies being dominated by men. And often it seems to me that the aim isn’t the equal sexual gratification of men and women, but rather that the purpose of the encounter is for the women to serve the men. I don’t even know where to begin with how much I disagree with this portrayal of sex, as it should always be a two-sided thing (or if it’s an orgy satisfy all involved parties).  I think this is particularly damaging as girls and boys are growing up and thinking that the things they see in porn are the things that they need to do to satisfy someone sexually, which isn’t always right, and certainly not a good reason to do them.

I think another major problem I have with porn is that it is often relatively violent towards women, or violating to say the least. I have never seen anything hard core, but someone told me that there is porn where girls are knocked out and then men essentially rape them. And people are watching this with the sole purpose of getting some kind of sexual enjoyment out of it. That bothers me. I know that if you imagine any kind of strange sexual fantasy, there are probably either people out there doing it, wanting to do it or porn made of it. But I worry that the instant accessibility of such material might be really damaging to the children who get introduced to sex through it. In the same documentary there was also an interview with a surgeon who said that girls as young as 13 I think it was were going to her to ask to have labiaplasty despite the fact that they were not even fully grown yet. This is medically dangerous, not to mention totally unnecessary.  Porn was just teaching them that apparently their vaginas aren’t aesthetically pleasing enough, which is a ridiculous thing to be worried about. I’m sure that when I was 13 I had better things to think about. Like how beautiful I thought Mikey Way was. And it’s this image of the female body that is really damaging to young girls as boys start to expect it, and girls therefore try and force their bodies into this mould.

The idea of society reproducing ideals feeds into my next issue – slut shaming and the sexual expectation of women. So my issue with slut shaming – other than the fact that it exists – is the fact that it only exists for women. I can think of a fair few words that denote a woman who is sexually promiscuous, with slut just being the most obvious choice. But when I try and do this for men, all I come up with is player, which isn’t necessarily a negative characteristic, whereas being slutty certainly is. And as I get older, I am failing to understand what being slutty actually means. As far as I understand it, it is used for girls who sleep with a lot of people. I just looked it up on urban dictionary and it says “a woman with the morals of a man”. So if this is bad for women, who are only mirroring the behaviour of men, is it not also equally as bad for guys to sleep with a lot of people (because it was their moral in the first place)? I know the answer most people would give to this. It is ridiculous. In my previous blog post about things we shouldn’t have to justify to others I explicitly say I think sexual activity is just entirely up to the free will of the individual and not to be judged. Even in terms of sexual non-activity. It’s pretty shitty that as a girl if you have sex you are a slut, and if you don’t you are a cock tease and/or frigid. Apparently there isn’t really an appropriate way for us to engage in sexual activity. Men simultaneously expect us to give it to them and be virtuous. Go figure.

So my last point is about the idea of plus size models, which is quite frankly a bullshit idea. Robyn Lawley is all the rage at the moment in the plus size model world, and quite rightly so because she is beautiful (and of course because her name is awesome). Her tumbler is also the epitome of food porn and worth checking out. I have a big fat lesbian crush on her and no shame in admitting it. But I don’t understand why she is labelled plus sized. She is only a size 12 and like 6ft or something. So definitely on the slimmer side of slim. Considering that the average dress size for women in the UK is a 16, it seems absurd to have plus size models who are smaller than the average person that they are advertising clothes for. In addition to this, I don’t understand why it made the news that Debenhams were introducing ‘real size mannequins’. Surely mannequins should be a reflection of the customers they are targeting. If I can’t imagine myself wearing it after seeing it on the mannequin capitalism is doing something wrong. Why the accurate reflection of what people look like in clothes is news worthy is beyond my comprehension. It worries me that because of this women and young girls feel the need to constantly obsess about their weight and be thinner. Unless you are damaging your health significantly by being morbidly obese, you’re probably alright as you are.  

Robyn Lawley in all her plus-sized glory. 

And on that note before I just get more angry about all of this I am going to stop. Essentially what the point is is that as a girl nowadays society is probably being fed ideas that you are doing something wrong and these ideas are most likely to be ill-founded and stupid. So we should stop paying so much attention to them.  I’m going to follow this up next time with some things that society does that damages men, so come back later if you like to hear me rant. Or, maybe come back just to check out some good music as I always sign off with a link to a song. Here is one for today:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5_h0hlCktyA

The original is great, and so is the remix.

When you go home for a weekend and realise your life is awesome

I might not identify with any specific religious tendencies, but I’m pretty happy to use Easter as an excuse to have a break, and in my case after a two month holiday from uni, a break from a long break. So, finding myself in a protracted state of breaking I figured it was a good time to go home for the weekend to visit the fam and also drop in on a certain best friend’s 21^st birthday. But after booking my tickets I was really reluctant to go back to Norwich as I don’t really have much time and I’ve got work to be doing and the idea of a 15 hour bus journey wasn’t really doing it for me. So after intentionally missing my bus home I decided to stay in Bonn. Until the next day when I booked myself onto the first Eurostar back to England. Queue second impulsive decision of the week (first being skipping my bus).

I’m usually the most awful impulsive decision maker ever – taking the fringe as a prime example – and at first this trip was literally turning out to be a nightmare; I sat at 7am and booked myself on a 10am Eurostar after convincing myself that it was okay to spend so much on a train and that I could make it to the station in three hours. I was feeling as if I had made a good call. Until I realised that my 10am train actually left from Brussels, not Cologne. And there is no way of getting to Brussels from Bonn in three hours. Especially when you haven’t packed. And my ticket was non-amendable. It was literally one of those moments where I couldn’t believe how incompetent at life I am; the train journey was meant to be two hours, and I even thought to myself whilst booking that it must be a pretty quick train to get there that fast all the way from Cologne, but somehow the obvious impossibility of this surpassed me. So after realising I got this wrong, I rang Eurostar to amend said non-amendable ticket. Which to my surprise was in fact possible (the man on the phone that morning is one of the most beautiful people EVER). Really regret not asking his name actually and writing to his boss to tell him/her what an absolute babe he was.

But anyway, digressing aside, I ended up having a train ticket that I could make in time for that evening. After almost missing my train to Brussels (which I didn’t thanks to a convenient delay) I figured everything was cool and I’d be home in a few hours. That was until Eurostar was monumentally delayed and 14 trains were cancelled and I was stuck in Brussels for ages. I did eventually get onto a train and ended up in London. Later than the last train to Norwich. Eurostar were pretty good about it and offered to pay for all stuck passengers to get a hotel (and apparently there were 10,000 of them). Considering I was only coming home for two days this was really annoying as it meant I would get to Norwich a day later. But there was nothing to be done about the situation, so I was just like yeah okay and asked the manager to book a hotel for me. And then I randomly bumped into a group of people from Sprowston. The world is so small, and at this point in time it was the most fortunate coincidence ever. So since there were five of us from Norwich, we convinced Eurostar it would be cheaper to get us a taxi to Norwich than pay for us all to stay in hotels, which they agreed to. The taxi was literally £500, but it wasn’t out of my pocket and it got me home by around 4am so I didn’t lose out on half a day to more travelling. I genuinely have never been so happy to get into bed in my life.

Getting to the actual point of this blog post, when I finallllly got home, I realised that my life is genuinely amazing and the people in it are the best. I had always had the sneaking suspicion that this might be the case, but this weekend really confirmed it. And as I get older I start to like Norwich more and more actually. And here’s why…

So when I first got home I went to the beach with the whole family (which actually sounds less impressive when there are only six of us), but it was the first time in ages that we have all gone out together. Pretty sure it has literally been years. While my initial plan of dragging everyone to the beach seemed like a total fail as the tide was right up to the sea wall (so no beach to walk on), further down the coast was alright so we went for an amble along the beach. And it was really cute and genuinely lovely to see everyone hang out together. There are a number of things that mean that my family aren’t perhaps as tight as others, but I think this is becoming increasingly untrue, and it’s so nice. And I love the beach too, it’s like the feeling of knowing your home and safe and comfortable, whilst at the same time you know there is a whole world out there and you’re just on the edge of a tiny part of it. Even if it’s cold and raining it is still amazing, and if you ever see a storm at the sea side you realise how uncontrollable and unpredictable the natural world is. Literally have so much time for the beach (excluding Sherringham, pebbles are pants). I plan to spend approximately 80% of my summer at the beach this year given my current state of being unemployed for the first summer in so many years. While this is totally plausible for me (spending my summer at the beach), I realised that there are people who never go to the beach. And I feel like they are sorely deprived individuals. Even if they say they don’t really like beaches, I don’t believe them. They just tell themselves that to cope with the tragic reality of their situation. It is one thing I have missed since going to Germany; the Rhine is lovely, but it’s got nothing on Cart Gap. Or Happisburgh – the geographer in me loves looking at how the houses are falling off the cliffs, which is admittedly tragic for the people that live there, but still an awesome show of coastal erosion. Queue nerd-out. So essentially, home is awesome because the family are here and Norfolk is genuinely beautiful. I feel like it gets a bad reputation – which I have probably promoted at times – but there is something so awesome about it. I maintain that when I’m older I am going to live near a coastline somewhere, though maybe not in England.

And that was just where the weekend started. Saturday was designated as Abee’s birthday (though it’s actually Monday).  She didn’t know I was going to be there and it was AWESOME. Was so nice to see her and literally all the best people in Norfolk came out for it (plus a few extras from various places in England). It takes coming back after being away to realise who is important and who is worth making an effort with, which is actually a really big thing on a year abroad because it’s too hard to hold onto everyone. But everyone I saw on Saturday, including the new faces, were genuinely lovely. I genuinely am convinced that people are fundamentally good. Or maybe I just pick friends because I see this in them. Either way, I couldn’t have asked for a better set of people to have spent an evening with.

Initially it started as a ‘I’ll just stay for predrinks as my bus leaves at 4am’ kind of night, and turned into a ‘impulsive decision three night’ where I decided to miss my bus (again) and go out with to the waterfront instead and go back to Bonn a day later. I don’t think I have ever really made such a good call. It was just a perfect evening and everyone was so happy and I fricking LOVE the Waterfront. It is like the grimiest place ever and they play rock music and all the emo/punk-rock tunes from our teenage years and there are like a billion bearded men there – it is basically heaven on earth. And nobody is grope-y and girls aren’t objectified due to their possession of a vagina. It’s great. It is also the kind of place where you see like a billion people you know, which is sometimes awkward, but more often than not amazing. I keep a token bottle of Hooch in my room to remind of the good times when I’m away from Norwich (Hooch being my drink of choice in the WF). And it is also a place where awful dancing goes, so I am definitely in my area of expertise (as I told my friends today, what I lack in skill I make up for with enthusiasm). Definitely danced off the calories I drank in alcohol.

So really what I realised this Easter is that my life is just filled with really, really lovely people and awesome places and it is perhaps as close to perfect as it could be. And I am so lucky to be able to do things like pop home for a weekend just to go out with friends and take a trip to the beach with my family. And live in Bonn too. And plan trips to Budapest. And just being able to fill my life with different and amazing things all the time. For a long time I don’t think I realised this was the case. But now I definitely have, and I plan on making the most of it. Starting tomorrow, because right now I really, seriously need to sleep off my hangover. And I am feeling a bit squishy on the inside, which is not an emotion I am accustomed to so I feel the need to stop writing. Sorry if that was a bit boring, as it doesn't really engage with any wider ideas or questions, but I'm just in a happy place and feel like it's always good to share the love a bit. 

True to form, here’s some music (perhaps not of the waterfront variety though): 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3NPxqXMZq7o

You can thank my friend David for that one. 

I worry about my children (even though I haven’t had any yet)

Being one of the most broody people in the world, I spend a lot of time thinking about the billion children I’m going to have and what it might be like for them when they are growing up and how I am going to love them so hard they won’t walk straight. And yes, I do think a lot about how cool it would be to have a baby bump and be a grumpy pregnant lady, which I personally think I am going to nail. I really feel sorry for boys not getting to experience this; I reckon it’s worth all of the periods. Whilst this first requires me to meet a man with keen swimmers (hence why I like beards, sign of some good testosterone right there), I genuinely believe that people are what life is all about which makes having kids the most logical and important life ambition, to me at least. And plus kids are just ridiculously cool. They are cute and excitable and curious and not half as scared of the world as I am (hopefully). 

Cute photo of my granddad and sister, painfully cute. Little kid hands are so small...

But that’s a total aside; this post is about reasons why I worry for my children (ignoring how I have not in fact been impregnated as of yet). I know that are an infinite number of reasons why people worry about having children, which are often to do with financial stability, readiness – whatever that is – and fear of screwing kids up. And while I don’t deny that I really want to give my children everything they want in life (whilst simultaneously not spoiling them), that’s really one of my last concerns when I really think about it. You can be poor and happy, even if it’s not the most preferable circumstance to be in. What I worry about is, given the world that we live in, how my children can grow up happy and good and not hurt themselves and other people because of things they are told are right or wrong. I know that this sounds kind of vague, but just keep reading to see what I mean. It might sound kind of hypocritical because some of the things that worry me I am totally complicit in, but maybe that’s why I am actually aware of them.

So I was pre-ing (vortrinken) last night and found it amusing to play with a cardboard biscuit box (it’s a good life being as easily pleased as I am) and it got me to thinking about how when I was little I would sit in the plastic laundry basket once my mum had hung the washing out and how she would drag me around the garden in it which I found absolutely hilarious. Apparently box-shaped items are my thing. I used to have so much fun playing with essentially nothing, just running around and picking stuff up in the garden or making dens. I really was one of the most well-tanned children ever. But I think it’s kind of sad that often children now don’t do this. Every time I see a mum give her kid an iPhone to play with whilst on a bus a little piece of me dies on the inside. While I know it’s personal choice about how to bring children up, and while I am not trying to generalise how all parents behave and the morality of this, I can’t help but worry that when I don’t bring my kids up to sit in front of the TV for hours and play on an X-Box that this will set them apart from other kids. I have recently realised how important being healthy is, and I want to teach my kids that early on and make them be active. But not in a cruel-forced-exercise kind of way, but in a showing-them-the-fun-side-of-playing-outdoors kind of way. But at the same time I don’t want to deny them what other children have and mark them as the weird backwards kids who are stuck living in a different generation. But at the same time I do really want them to be wild kids and be stuck in a different time. I want them to know it’s okay to do what they want, but then make them do what I want too. It seems unlikely that in all cases these will be the same things, which might be problematic.

I also really worry about how I don’t think that people are taught that they are beautiful anymore, or how to appreciate that others are either. I have a ridiculously wide spectrum of what I find attractive, where by wide spectrum I essentially mean all-encompassing. I think this is probably because my mum is the loveliest women ever and thinks the world of pretty much everyone (until given a reason not to) and I adopted this from her. And whilst this means that I am often very naïve to situations in which people treat me badly, or perhaps that I am more accepting of being treated this way, I wouldn’t want to change this. I try not to be judgemental and to stay open to how other people might behave, as I feel this is the only real way to be ethical. It’s really important to me that people stop being evaluated on how they look, or for people to not feel defined by how good other people think they look. In my opinion it’s actually someone’s personality that makes them ugly, not how fat or thin they are for example. And I want my kids to know this, but given the photo shopped world we live in I can’t help but imagine they will get to a stage where they don’t think they look good enough, or that others look good enough, and that this will be really damaging. I know so many people that feel like this and I just want to shake them so hard until they stop being so ridiculous. But I know it’s not easy to get a thought out of someone’s that’s been so deeply ingrained. I somehow feel like capitalism is also a lot to blame for this in trying to sell us the life that we are told we should want – a bit on Benjamin wouldn’t go amiss here – but I feel like if I start talking about this I won’t actually stop. So I’ll just leave it as I worry my children won’t know be made to feel they are good enough and won’t appreciate the beauty of other people. This goes for many different levels.

‘Manly’ and ‘feminine’ behaviour also gets to me. I really can’t stand the way that children are taught that they should or shouldn’t do things on the basis of their gender. This by the way is a bullshit concept. While a man’s body is physically different from a woman’s, there is no such thing as ‘manly’ or otherwise. I really worry that my children will not be aware of the constraints of such concepts, and that they might let them dictate how they behave. One of the biggest issues I have with this is the way that boys are often taught to objectify women and be insensitive. To put these two things into context, I’ll take the examples of cat-calling and crying. As a girl I am distinctly aware that when I walk past builders, I am in some way going to be objectified for having a vagina. I literally cringe in this situation and I don’t really see why some men think it is okay to do this. I would never walk up to a guy and be like ‘mate, nice penis’ whilst staring at his crotch. It’s not okay for anyone to be on the receiving end of this. If I have a son and he cat-calls, there will definitely be an incidence of at least verbal castration. It isn’t okay. And on the other side of this, I think that men get stick for being too sensitive if they show any level of emotion like crying for example. Apparently it’s too ‘feminine’ to actually show that you care about something. And I hate this. I want to live in a world where it’s okay for boys to cry or to say what they are feeling and not feel ridiculed for it. And again, I know that in teaching my children the values I think are right, they might get stick for it. And I don’t want that either. Just in general I want my children to know that it’s okay to not always be okay, or to say what you really think, because I never knew this. And in trying to hide what you feel you get a bit twisted on the inside. And it’s like when you knot something up, doing it is really easy. Untying it is a bitch. And I want my kids to just be themselves and not constrained by stereotypes of what they should be.

Essentially, I don’t want my children to ever suffer because of the choices I make on their behalf, or because of what other people tell them they should be. But at the same time I want them to adopt the morals that I feel are right. It’s difficult to simultaneously have to live in a system and disagree with it, which for my children means I worry that I can’t resolve the problem of them living the life I want and simultaneously letting them be autonomous in their life choices and not be excluded from their peers as a result of my parenting. And this is not even to mention how I know that the world they come into is likely to not be that nice because of social, political and environmental problems that are ever-worsening (which again I could talk about at length). But despite all this, I still seriously can’t wait to have kids. A lot of people find this kind of scary, especially a lot of guys I know. But just as an FYI type thing, broody guys/men who are good with kids are so attractive. Though coming from me that probably doesn’t mean much!

True to form, here’s a link to a little piece of happiness… 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YMKZIaIN7O4&list=RDYMKZIaIN7O4

Things I learnt from my first semester abroad

I’ve just spent the last week in quite possibly the best city in the world, Bristol (obviously), and I’m so sad to leave because it is beautiful here and filled with some of the best people in the world and I’ve never felt this much at home anywhere else. With perfect vegan burgers for breakfast, smooth ciders and sweaty dungeon-like nightclubs, I couldn’t really have asked for a better time. But I am consciously aware that I’m not the same person I was when I left Bristol last June. And with my departure from this bohemian city comes the official end of my semester break (almost), which has left me thinking about how I’ve changed throughout this semester, hence this post about things I have learned from my first semester abroad. Mostly I think these are good things. I don’t want to be that person who claims that they ‘found themselves’ when they went abroad, but in a way this is true. Here’s why…

1.       Giving people a chance is really okay.

I always had the policy that if you don’t let people in they can’t hurt you so for most of my life I have been really reserved and guarded and shy, and just genuinely terrified of being intimate with anyone. I don’t really mean that in a physical way; it’s really easy to get with someone, but emotionally that’s really tough. I think most people can relate to this to some extent, but I was like this to an extreme level, and still am to a large extent. I have always been horrified that someone might actually find out about all of the things I try to hide. And, taking 2^nd year of uni as an example, this really wasn’t working out for me. It’s just not sustainable to closet everything. To quote Rae (My mad fat diary):

“There are times when I can’t stop speaking, when a million words leave my mouth in a matter of seconds… a million words that mean nothing… but when I want to find some words that mean everything, I just can’t speak. Like: I miss you. Like: I love you. Like: my world is falling apart and I need you by my side.”

But I think I have finally got to the stage where I have a handful of friends that I can call when my world is crumbling, or when it is amazing, because I don’t doubt that they have my back anymore. I finally realised that there are times that it’s okay to lean on people, which my year abroad taught me because there were moments when things were too hard. Times when there was nobody around me that I felt comfortable with, when I couldn’t stand the idea of going out and having to make so much effort to have a conversation with people who wouldn’t understand what I was saying anyway. And what I found the most hard, is realising that to German people, I have no personality. I used to have an issue a lot of the time where when I was talking to someone I would simultaneously be telling myself to stop talking because they weren’t interested in what I might have to say. And this still happens sometimes. And I’m still socially awkward. But despite all of that I realised that people don’t think half as many bad things about me as I do and the only way to get over times this hard is to let people in a bit. Giving them a chance is really alright. And going on a year abroad and making a whole new set of friends, who are in many cases somehow undefinably culturally different, you realise that it’s okay to invest in people, even though it might not always work out that those people stay in your life and that you might look like a fool during the process. So essentially I have learned not to be (so) socially awkward and I now make the effort to get to know people. And I let them know a little about me too, or enough at least. And yeah sometimes I seem like the weird keen English girl, but being keen shouldn’t be a bad thing. I am keen. I think most people are lovely so of course I want to get to know them better. It’s their problem if they find this weird. I’m actually alright and it’s their loss to miss out on this.

2.       German bakeries are AMAZING.

Laugenbretzel is all I need to say on this matter. British bread is shit.

3.       Germans are taught to communicate better.

So Germans are always stereotyped as being very direct and blunt, often to a very intrusive extent (which is comical given that a German boy actually, though admittedly jokingly, told me I was intrusive). Stereotypes are always based on some observation, and in this case its relatively accurate. Germans are direct but I don’t think that this is a bad thing. I think that this directness comes from being taught that it’s okay to have an opinion and to express it. At university (in the geography department at least) there are lots of small seminars in which you are assessed for presentations and group discussions. I find this to be the most painful thing in the world, but it makes it clear why a lot of Germans are a bit more direct, which seems way nicer and genuine than the English culture of acting nice whilst entertaining a different opinion on the inside. So essentially it’s just that Germans are taught that it’s okay to say what you are thinking and to disagree with those around you.

Whilst on the topic of communicativeness, one of the major things I have realised is that I am not very articulate at all. This probably relates back to how much I am a closet person, but I really can’t express myself very well at all. Add this to speaking in a foreign language and it’s just a ridiculous problem. One which I haven’t solved as of yet. I just write so much better than I speak, in both English and German. But I’m trying to change this and get used to articulating myself, and these horrid presentations help. I know in the moment I will be praying for the ground to swallow me whole, but after this fails to happen I’ll realise that it was good to be pushed this way as I can’t spend my whole life not verbally expressing myself.

4.       There are enough hours in the day to do everything.

In Bonn I do the same amount of credits as in Bristol and actually have a lot of work to do, but despite this I have learned that there are in fact enough hours in the day to do everything (as many hours as Beyonce has indeed). So it is my full intention to do everything: uni, have a job, volunteer, see my friends and do absolutely nothing and lay around for hours listening to music and reading. And when someone asks me if I want to go on holiday or to a festival or go chill out in a park, the answer is yes. Always. Because there is time for this. And time for more too. It probably helps that I am naturally an early riser and have acquainted myself with those ungodly hours that a lot of people seem to be entirely unaware of. 7am is actually a pretty good time of day, you should try it. Essentially there is just no reason for my life to be less than awesome. I am definitely up for testing its potential.

5.       Life at home goes on without you.

Whilst this seems obvious it is entirely not unobvious at the same time. When you get home you realise that everyone has been getting on with their lives as if your absence wasn’t such a gaping hole in their lives. At first this kind of stings when you realise that they will replace you with other people and things. Then you realise that this is just how it has to be. And that your life is going on without them too, so it’s not one-sided at all. You can’t fit into the same life again because you aren’t the same and neither are the people around you. Stuff happens in between. This is sometimes good and sometimes not, and coming to terms with this is important. I realised it’s not okay to live life thinking about all the choices I didn’t make, that’s way too tiring.

6.       My friends are beautiful.

Whenever I go home it’s always really hard to keep in contact with everyone as there are like a billion people I want to see and a never ending list of things I want to do. Some people have been surprisingly rubbish at answering my texts to hang out or chasing me up, but mostly my friends have been fantastic. I realised that my friends are all beautiful and that putting an ocean between us changes everything and nothing all at once. And I love them. I just generally love everyone. I might be a bit naive in this way, but I’d rather that than cynical.

I realise now that I have actually learnt way more things than this since going to Bonn but I’ll stop myself there. I’ll just post a part two later. And most likely parts 3 and 4, and so on. But in conclusion I’m less cagey and have realised that people are amazing and that I have got the most incredible opportunity at the moment to do a ridiculous amount of things. And I should take this.

My mad fat diary is worth watching by the way. Cute and cringey is how I would describe it. Apologies for spelling/grammar mistakes, I’m too tired to proof this at the moment. But good news, it’ a bonobo kind of evening…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XFSGQZVsBJA

Venezuelans are happier than Brits, apparently…

This blog post is apt for two reasons; firstly, I said I would write it in my January blog post as the other side of the story, if you don’t know what I am referring to go back and read it! Secondly, I’m sure you’ve all seen the #100happydays posts on various channels of social media (Sarah Feldman’s is a personal favourite), and I think it’s great that for once people are thinking about what’s good in the world.  And there is so much of it in so many forms we often overlook it entirely. I’m going to make a sweeping generalisation that if you’re reading this, your life is probably pretty good, or at least has the potential to be (based on the assumption that internet accessibility suggests relatively good socio-economic conditions and a high degree of autonomy). This isn’t disregarding the fact that bad things happen, because they do. But I like to think of the glass as half full. This begs the question, what makes us happy? Money? People? Personally, I love a pun…

I think I found this a little bit funnier than the average person, but then again I literally cry at Dinner for One, which says enough about my sense of humour…

So excusing my digression, there is a growing amount of academic attention being paid to studying happiness, but it seems to me that it’s pretty hard to measure something so intangible and subjective, especially as I’ve always thought of happiness as a temporal state rather than a base condition. But nevertheless, the general practice is to use happiness studies, which essentially are surveys asking people to reflect on their satisfaction with life, and then as with any survey a small sample becomes representative for the whole population. An example of this is the World Values Survey. All the ‘facts’ – which I use carefully as I am actually sceptical about the reliability of such surveys (just think that there are governments commissioning these surveys who can’t even offer their citizens clean water) – that I am going to refer to next come from the World Happiness Report 2013, so they are pretty much as up to date as they can be given the scope of the project. It’s an interesting report, definitely worth a read if you have time and are really nerdy, which a lot of my friends are (and I’m assuming you guys read my blog at least due to the sense of obligation, but hopefully due to an actual interest). And as an aside – I love nerdy people, that wasn’t a put down.

Whenever I have a conversation with my mum she raves about how awesome Denmark is and how she wants to move there EVEN MORE THAN IRELAND (anyone who knows her will currently be like dhihrsighizdrhf). And apparently she is well informed as people in Denmark are in fact on average the happiest in the whole world, closely followed by those in Norway. Scandinavian countries are firmly up there in the top ten countries with the happiest citizens, which, being firmly left-wing, I like to think has something to do with the relatively low levels of inequality (relatively being the operative word). Sadly for people in Togo they are on average the least happy. Excluding the obvious, I don’t know why that might be having only just googled where Togo actually is (though it did not surprise me that it was an African country that came in last on the happiness scale), shame on the geographer I know. Just out interest for you the UK comes in as the 22^nd happiest nation, and Germany the 26^th. Go figure. Venezuela is in fact generally happier than the UK coming in as the 20^th happiest nation. Now I’m no expert on Venezuela but find it interesting that a country with a dubious political atmosphere ranks in higher than the UK, though again inequality is lower, which I still maintain plays a big role in happiness. I also figure that this survey was done before Chavez died, so it would be interesting to see how Venezuelans would rank their happiness now.

This brings me to the central question here, what actually makes us happy? Considering that Denmark is ranked the happiest country on average, it’s probably a safe bet that money plays a role in determining happiness. And this is true; money facilitates access to basic goods like food, water and housing, which are all vital to health and personal safety, and thus staying alive. But studies have shown that beyond this material goods become less valued, and the value of every pound – in terms of its impact on happiness – decreases the richer you are. To put this into context, a pound means more to a farmer from Togo than an IT consultant in Denmark. And I hit the nail on the head with the link between equality and happiness as studies note that people’s happiness is partly driven by their relative income. If you can see that your life is comparably as good as those around you you’re likely to feel pretty good, hence why Venezuelans are likely to be happier than Brits. There is a YouTube video showing an experiment with monkeys; when a monkey does what the researcher wants he gets a bit of cucumber. His neighbour does the same, and gets cucumber too. They seem quite happy with this arrangement. It’s like being paid for going to work. But then the researchers start rewarding the neighbour with grapes and the first monkey gets angry as he is getting a worse deal that the other (assuming that monkeys feel grapes are better than cucumber). Evolution hasn’t overcome this trait as of yet, no one wants to feel like they are poorer than those around them.

But if money only makes us happy to a certain extent, what else is doing it for us? Well, there are a number of things that are likely to make us happier relative to people who do not have them, namely being married, religious, physically healthy, more educated, employed and having friends. Denmark’s happiness, according to the happiness report, is explained more by social support than GDP, which seems totally reasonable. It’s all about the people.

Right now I’m feeling pretty satisfied with my lot, only missing out on being married (which might happen) and being religious (which is a personal choice). What I think makes me happy too is autonomy and my ability to choose where my life is going. Yes there are constraints to this, but generally I can do what I want. And generally so can you (based again on the assumptions of your ability to be reading this). So for us, life is pretty sweet. Just take a minute to think about that. Maybe start your own #100happy days if you feel like you need to share what makes your life incredible. I’m going to share a bit of my happiness with you in my usual fashion with a link to a YouTube video suitable for a hungover Sunday afternoon, happy days:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=13EifDb4GYs

Not only does Moby make good music, but he’s ethical too. He did the soundtrack for Earthlings, a film about meat production in America. Not recommended if you are squeamish.