This weekend I will be testing for my black belt after eight years of Taekwondo classes. During those eight years, I’ve grown into the person I am today. Not only have I learned how to kick, punch, and block, but I have learned compassion, respect, and confidence. Each Saturday, I spend hours practicing self defense, meditating, sparring or even teaching entire classes. It is one of the most rewarding activities I have ever participated in (and prevents the extracurricular section of my college apps from remaining blank). Unfortunately, the only aspect of taekwondo, or martial arts of any kind, that people pick up on for women, is self defense.
For example, one day this past year, I participated in a jujitsu class:
“Kick her Brian! She’s a black…
CocknBullKid has made a couple of important transitions recently. First, she’s changed her name, dropping the pronoun (she’s CocknBullKid, not The CocknBullKid). And secondly, she has emerged from a creative cocoon with a suite of bright, breezy and ultra-colourful pop songs that exist at least five giant leaps away from the savvy, autobiographical electro tunes like ‘On My Own’ that got her a slot on Jools Holland even before she signed to Island Records. “The music I made at first was cool, but it was work in progress. There was only so far I could take it. I knew I was capable of more. I wanted to make music that reached people further than E9, or whatever the cool postcode is now.”
As many of you, as frequenters of the Internet, probably know, in 2007 young adult author John Green and his brother, an environmental blogger named Hank Green, started a video blog called Brotherhood 2.0. They quickly developed a kickass community of followers, who grew to be called Nerdfighters, who fight against WorldSuck. Fighting against WorldSuck- all of the non-awesomeness in the world- is what we as activists do best. The two brothers always advocate equality of the sexes, respect for different sexual orientations, respect for the environment, and social awareness in their videos. Here are two of my favorites that most strongly relate to these important messages, one about girls not acting dumb to get guys, and another against homophobia.
It began as a whisper, of one woman leaning into the ear of another, “Do you feel it?” she asked.
Then whispered to another, “Do you feel it?” and it began to spread, this whisper, from one woman to another, to another, whispering, “Do you feel it? Do you feel it?”
The question was asked, once, then twice, then ten hundred whispers around the world; women wondering what it was they were feeling. The whispering pulsed as the need for the answer grew.
“Do you feel it?”
The rhythm became stronger, bolder, as it spread to their hearts; knowing not which was the whisper and which was the heartbeat, for the two became one. More and more women began to feel the pounding of a need, not yet understood, and the rumbling began to…
We don’t live in a vacuum. Our ideas, our lexicon, and our beliefs are shaped by outside forces like society, culture, environment, and religion. Fields like sociology and anthropology prove that.
Words matter. You said something heterosexist because your parents / the media / your religion told you; you weren’t born a bigot. Forces like that reflect and shape your ideas. When people, especially celebrities, say transphobic things they fuel transphobia and other people think it is ok because their ideas aren’t challenged. Their bigotry is reinforced every day by outside forces like that. We are conditioned to say things that hurt other people, but we don’t change it because it seems like it doesn’t affect your reality.
That’s where privilege comes from. If the dominant culture…
From a very young age my mother instilled in me a certain logic, if you can call it that. There were clothes that could be worn to school, to friends houses, out to dinner and to events and then there were what she called “play clothes” – clothes for lounging around the house, playing outside or engaging in any kind of athletic activity. The two were not to overlap. From the moment I would get home from school I was told to go upstairs and change into my play clothes before doing anything else. I never found this to be unusual since the only time I would see my mother in anything but her play clothes (jeans, a sweatshirt and slippers) was when…
More Than A Vagina: A Critique of the Vagina Monologues
For anyone who doesn’t know, The Vagina Monologues is an episodic play written by Eve Ensler. Each monologue deals with an issue relating to the vagina. Topics cover everything from love and masturbation to rape and mutilation. Every year my university puts on a production, and I’ve seen it twice now. Two viewings were enough for me to know that the play makes me feel uncomfortable.
It’s not the open discussion of sex that caused the discomfort, but the generalization of women, the idea that a vagina is what makes a woman, and most of all the reduction of all women to vaginas. Women are more than vaginas; I am more than my vagina. The Vagina Monologues presents the idea that all women have vaginas so all women can associate with anyone…
Theoretical Girl is a singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist from Southend-on-Sea who makes electro-folk-pop on her 8-track in her bedroom. She has been doing so since 2006.
Theoretical Girl has released six limited edition singles, It’s All Too Much (Fake Product), Red Mist (Half Machine Records), The Hypocrite and Another Fight both on Salvia/XL Recordings and Rivals and Red Mist both on (Memphis Industries) all to high critical acclaim. Also out is a limited edition 7” split covering a Tokyo Police Club song ‘Nursery, Academy’, available exclusively from Pure Groove and a Japan only release of acoustic versions of ‘The Boy I Left Behind’ and ‘I Should Have Loved You More’.
In August 2009, Theoretical Girl released her debut album Divided on Memphis Industries and garnered some rave reviews including an…
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