On Hating On Hating On Nickelback

The internet hates Nickelback.

How's that for context?

But I'm not really sure why.

I don't claim to be any sort of Nickelback aficionado. I've heard maybe four of their songs, and they were all perfectly adequate mediocre rock ballads. For all I know the rest of Nickelback's discography is a horrifying encylopaedia of musical sin. But probably not. Or at least no more than a lot of other bands.

But then why all of this internet hatred directed at them? They don't claim to be rock gods. Their music isn't great, sure, but an awful lot of music isn't.

Are Nickelback just an arbitrary victim of the internet's cruelties, a synechdoche of shitty music? Did the internet just kind of get swept up in the whole thing and a bit carried away? That's so like the internet. Or am I missing something? What, did they plagiarise something? Use two different time signatures at once? Someone please explain this to me. The internet is a scary place and I just don't understand it most of the time.

Typical

"By the way, I like your hair"
"Oh, thank you. Well, get your fill now, I'm shaving it off in a few weeks"
"All of it?"
"Yup."
"Jesus Christ. Don't"
"I've kind of already got my mind made up."
"Just don't, it'll be awful. Why are you doing it?"
"Because I think it'll look nice, and I'm trying to understand why our culture is so hung up on hair, why nearly everyone I tell acts like it's the worst thing I could do"
"I'm not hung up on your hair. I just don't think you'll look very pretty without it."
"Right."

This is not every conversation, but it's and example of the usual. I'll get into this more later.

Abercrombie Bitch

This is a billboard that is now on display above the Abercrombie & Fitch store on College Green in Dublin (the billboard pictured is in Brussels, but the billboard in Dublin is identical). It's huge and it's attention grabbing and it's in one of the busiest areas in the city. 

So from an advertising standpoint, it's pretty good, right? Well, no. All A&F seem to have succeeded in doing is piss me off. For quite a few reasons:

1. This is objectification in it's worst form

They have not only turned this man into an object, they've turned him into part of an object. The head of the image and anything below the crotch has been cropped out, and the focus of the image is clearly the man's muscular torso. 

This clothing company are trying to use an almost naked man to sell their clothes. Just... think about that for a second. 

2. This is a highly sexualised image

He seems to be actually in the act of taking the jeans off. This is probably the lowest they could pull the jeans down without his genitals being shown, and to be honest I wouldn't be surprised if some Photoshop had to be done to remove the base of his penis from the image. 

This is on display in a very public area, close to many tourist attractions and main streets. Hundreds, probably thousands of children walk past this billboard on a daily basis now and I personally wouldn't want my child to be exposed to this image in a context of normality. This is not a normal or acceptable ad.

I don't know about anyone else but attempting to make the photo look "artsy" by putting it in black and white isn't fooling me.

3. This is an unrealistic depiction and idealisation of the male form

Lots of men will see this ad. Boys and young men are particularily vulnerable to low self esteem and negative body image, and I don't think this is helping. This man is being sold as something that you want. He is supposed to be sexy. 

The message being sent out is that in order to be sexy you should have no shirt, no body fat, no chest or pubic hair, no face and indeed, no discernable identity. There is increasing body pressure on men these days and what is portrayed here is near impossible to achieve, not healthy, and in my opinion, not really very sexy. Men are being told that this is what to aim for.

Lucky for me, this ad hasn't changed my view of what a desirable man should look like, because if I were looking for a man who looked like this, I'd be searching for a while. Plus, everyone knows that all the headless bodybuilders with alopecia are either gay or taken.

4. This is not feminist

One of the most common comments I've heard about this billboard so far is "If this were a photo of a woman, there'd be outrage".

Well speaking as a feminist, I am outraged. Obviously I can only speak for myself but I like to think that other feminists wouldn't be too happy either. Objectifying men does not nullify the objectification of women, it only makes the problem twice as bad.

This is not the kind of equality we are looking for.

5. This is not a clothing ad

What are these guys trying to sell anyway? As far as I know, A&F is a clothing brand. Presumably their adverts would attempt to showcase and persuade you to buy A&F clothes. But instead they've made this man's nakedness the focus of this billboard, and the only clothing visible at all is a couple of inches of waistband, which don't even display the company logo or any other sign that they are A&F jeans. The model is actually blocking out the brand name. If I weren't familiar with the brand already I'd have no clue what this ad was even for.

Seeing this ad, I do not want to buy a pair of A&F jeans. I pity anyone that does.

Today was a waste of underpants.

I don't really understand how it's after 8pm already. I woke up, had some toast, went on the internet, and that was 10 hours ago. I literally took a sip of my elevenses tea between those two sentences. I really may as well have not gotten dressed.

How do I keep wasting days like this? I have a dozen things that I could be doing, and that I'd like to be doing, and yet here I am, in bed still. I have editing and writing and sewing to do. I was in the mood to go to the beach but no one was free and I didnt want to go swimming alone in case the beach was deserted and I drowned.

I should have an alarm that goes off at 12:30pm everyday and if I'm not out of the house then I'll have to force myself to leave and go for a walk and do some photography or something.

No-one wants to go to the beach anytime soon because it's forecast to rain. We'd be swimming. I kind of don't understand why everyone is so deathly afraid of rain. I used to get caught out in the rain a lot when I was in my early teens but thinking about it I haven't been properly drenched in years. It's kind of sad, getting rained on is a pretty human experience. I love the feeling where you're so drenched that you figure there's no point trying to stay out of the rain anymore. I'm going to start neglecting the weather more.

Really I'm just writing this so that I'll have something to show for my day.

Few updates: My hearing is back, apparently the only way to avoid it happening again is to not get water in my ears. So that sucks, but the hearing loss is easily resolved.

My internet names are now all under Ren instead of Laura because the more I thought about it the less I liked how easy it was to find me online if you wanted to.

I've been writing and filming a bit, but not much. It'll pick up in July. I finally got enough money together to order my camera, which I did yesterday. May the rack focus commence!

Other than that, I've just been napping and eating junk food with Aine.

In One Ear

So my hearing has gone a bit weird this last week. At first it was just the right ear, and now it's both. There's kind of a constant white noise going in the right one, too. This has led to a lot of smiling and nodding politely, a lot of laptop volume turned up far too high,  and very little leaving the house.

My bus ticket has finally run out, and I lack the necessary €86 to get another one (Dublin Bus fares have just become bloody extortionate at this point). I want to go to the library and pick up my library card, and maybe go to town and buy some black and white film, but I'd have to cycle which I'm quite afraid to do right now. The cat is sitting at my knees and I can't hear him purring unless I press my ear into his side, so I doubt I would hear a car coming if I was on the bike.

I guess my main point here is that I am extremely bored and being deaf would fucking suck.

Art for Art's Sake.

I just got back from the cinema. Áine and I went to Snow White and the Huntsman as an excuse to eat ice cream and hot dogs and drink a litre and a half of Diet Coke (watching my figure, y'know?). Last week we went to Dark Shadows for the same reason, but the cinema didn't have hotdogs then and we were majorly pissed.

And a trend I've been noticing in these films lately is that now that CGI technology has come as far as it has, they're just kind of sticking special effects in for the craic. This is the part where I would include a spoiler warning but the special effects I'm describing have absolutely no bearing on any plot or character points.

I would love to have been in the production meeting for SWATH when some producer was flicking through the script and spoke up with "Look, I'm just spitballin' here, but could we have someone melt at some point? We could work that in somewhere, right? In the Dark Forest or something, all kinds of crazy shit happens in there."
And all the lackeys would have nodded and said "Yah, I love it, I love it". And the producer, buoyed by the approval of his idea, would have said "And I was thinking, just stick with me on this one, guys. While she's delivering this speech, what if she was just like, standing in a fire? Just, y'know, crisping up and blistering, real slow like". And the lackeys would have applauded and nodded. And one of them would say "That is pure Snow White gold!" to a snort of appreciation or two. At which point the producer would have said "Speaking of white gold....". Meeting adjourned.

In Dark Shadows, the first time I saw the porcelain cracking effect on one of the characters, I thought "Wow, that's really cool. It's an interesting way of conveying this characters emotional state right now. It kind of gives her this superhuman humanity". And if it had been left at that, it would have been a cute little moment. But then in the last twenty minutes of the film, this whole "The characters skin cracks open" thing was brought back in and by the end of it she looks like a fuckin' egg that got dropped on the floor a few times. And I was thinking "Oh so when they kill her she's just going to like shatter into hundreds of pieces. That'll look pretty cool."

THIS IS THE BIT WHERE SPOILERS KIND OF BECOME AN ISSUE.

 But no, when she dies, she just kind of dies. She may as well have not had half her face missing at all for all the damage it did her.

And then, for no plot-advancing reason whatsoever, and with no apparent foreshadowing, Chloe Moretz is just a werewolf. She just fuckin' is. And the thing is, that her being a werewolf offers her no advantage in fighting that Blonde Witch-Egg-Porcelain-Doll Hybrid. She gets her ass handed to her either way, so my question is this; why make her a werewolf at all? Why not just have the human character come out and fight the BWEPDH? Is it to add an extra layer of mythical creature goodness to the film, like when you dust icing sugar on top of a tiramasu? Or is it, as I suspect, just to give the special effects editor something else to do? I swear if I was sitting in front of a computer for months at a time rendering Chloe Moretz into a green werewolf for absolutely no fucking reason whatsoever, I would want to be getting paid a serious amount of money. A girl can dream.

ROUND ABOUT HERE IS WHERE I STOP SPOILING SHITTY MOVIES FOR YOU AND LEAVE IT TO THE SPECIAL EFFECTS SUPERVISOR.

So, while I'm all for CGI and special effects and all of the wonderful things they have brought us, can we just like, ease the fuck off a little, guys? Because all we're doing is distracting the audience from what's happening in the film with no advantage to the advancement of the plot or character development. Because all of a sudden instead of watching the film I'm like "Oh wow, look at that. Those are some pretty cool effects. I wonder if they had to animate each hair individually on that, like with Sully in Monsters, Inc." and my suspension of disbelief is thrown all outta whack. Sigh.

Also, as a sidenote, and on a somewhat related topic.... You know those moments you occasionally have in films where your suspension of disbelief goes completely out the window and you kind of realise that all you're watching is a bunch of actors on a set with a camera being pointed at them? I had one of those in SWATH. I realised that what I was looking at was a camera's view of about twenty horses clumsily balleting through mud, with some really quite nervous actors sitting on them, and a director sitting at a monitor a few feet away going "Mmmm, yeah. This is pure Snow White gold."

Naming No Names

I was majorly pissed the day I found out that if my older brother had been a girl, may parents would've named him Laura, and it was because of this that he pushed for them to name me Laura. Which they did.

Dad wanted to name me Nancy. I always kind of remained quietly thankful of this but only a couple of years ago did I bother to ask him "Why Nancy?", to which he replied that Nancy is a commanding sort of a name. "You know when Nancy's walked into the room." Sometimes I kind of think that Nancy wouldn't have been so bad, because at least there's not many Nancys (Nancies?) around these days and there would perhaps have been more scope for nicknames. That said, primary school would have sucked even more because there wouldn't have been many Nancys around and there would have been more scope for nicknames, most of which would involve the word "pants".

When I was in playschool there was another Laura, so at the suggestion of Dad they called her Laura and me Lally. Which I hated, and to this day still do.

The thing is that I often consider adopting a different name, either socially or professionally. But I'm not really sure why. Maybe it's to kind of distance myself from my past or my reputation. But that's a bit pointless because if I were known as, say, Nancy, I'd still have the same past and reputation. It would just mean that instead of being "That weird girl Laura who ___" I'd be "that weird girl Nancy who ___". To a certain extent I hide behind names on the internet (Citeogín, lawlii, moopsykins, etc. etc.). And even then I still ask things anonymously wherever possible. I mean I could make the "in case I get famous I can avoid stalkers" argument but to be honest I doubt I'll ever be worth stalking.

And what's the big deal anyway? A name's a name's a name. Someone on the internet figures out my name isn't Citeogín at all, it's Laura Forsythe, and it goes no further than that. So what's the difference between being Laura Forsythe and Nancy Moonbeam in the end? A name's just a word you use to describe yourself.

And if we stick a pin in why for a moment, let's talk about what. I sometimes toy with using the Irish version of my mother's maiden name, for alliteration. Or any of the contractions of Dolores used in the opening paragraph of Lolita, because I love Lolita. And sometimes I just think of a random one and figure I'll use that. Like Kit. Or Andi. Or maybe some word that kind of relates to my name in an extended way, like Ren (Laura as a name stems from a contraction of Laurencia, the middle syllable of which is Ren).

And if we stick a pin in what for a moment, how? My mother, at some point or another, started using the Irish version of her name. So some of her family call her her given name but most of her friends and colleagues use the Irish version. And if you take into account the fact that at work she kept her maiden name after marriage but socially she took my Dad's the whole thing gets rather confusing and if I'm being honest if some day a lawyer or a garda asked me my mother's legal name I don't think I'd be able to give them a two-word answer.
I once did a film course with a girl, who at the end of the two weeks said "Oh and I doubt it'll ever be relevant but my real name's Tamara".

Thing is, my mother moved away from home at 17 to a city where she didn't know anyone, and her new name at least related to her old name. So maybe she just turned up in Dublin and started introducing herself as the new name. But I'm pretty sure the ship has sailed for me on that front because like it or not I'm stuck in Dublin for the next three years at least, at which point whatever recognition I have in the film industry will be under the name Laura Forsythe. Maybe I should have just gone into college on the first day and asked everyone to call me Kit. But then inevitably someone from secondary school would find out about it and I'd look a bit douchey, and what on earth would I do about Facebook?

In addition to that if I were known socially as one name and legally as another, surely it'd get a bit complicated if I got ID'd anywhere and the name on my passport was different, or if I booked a flight with someone or something. Some people I know are involved in politics and so they have two facebook pages, a public one under their given name and a private one under their Irish name (how on Earth does anyone in a unilingual country ever manage to pull this off?).

So I suppose I'd best either accept my current name, boring and reputation-laden as it is, or just take the douchey plunge and start asking people to call me Ren and hope it catches on. Or I could insult my parents and deed poll that shit. That'd be much easier.

Toothpicks

One day in college there was a pack of toothpicks in my bag that broke open. I pulled 37 toothpicks out of my scarf and another 20-odd from the bottom of my bag. I put them all back in the pack but I couldn't find the lid so I went to throw them away.

My friend said not to throw them away, that he'd take them, so I gave them to him and we headed into the lecture.

A while into the lecture my friend pulled out the toothpicks and started laying them out on the table in a kind of pattern. I was sitting next to him and I was bored, so I started laying toothpicks out as well. We sat in silence for a while each working on our own little toothpick doodle and eventually the two bunches branched out and joined together to form one bigger toothpick doodle. Once that happened we both spent a little while perfecting it and then we left it be for the rest of the lecture.

At the end of the lecture he turned to me and said "We just accidentally made a piece of art together without really communicating with each other at all"

I took a picture of the toothpicks on the desk and then we cleared them back into the pack. I've since lost the picture.

He said "What do you think it is?" and I said "A firework"

#whyamisoobsessedwithsocialnetworking

My introduction to social networking came in 2005 with Bebo. I used it but I didnt do social networking on the internet much beyond that and videos of kitties on YouTube for a while.

Since then I appear to have accumulated a facebook, a twitter (deleted then recreated), two tumblrs, three youtube channels (one of them is inactive as I forgot the password), a formspring, a vimeo, a spillit, a vyou, a skype, various forum usernames, and this pretty little blog you see here (plus one blog that I had in 2008 and subsequently deleted). I deleted the bebo in 2010. I'm also probably forgetting some.

And, with varying degrees of frequency, I use them all. I am a social networking fiend. I have literally never committed to anything like I have committed to the internet. So, what the fuck is wrong with me, and indeed everyone else who overuses social networking?

I think the primary raison d'etre of social networking is abundantly clear: we want to know that we are not alone. There is huge comfort to be found on facebook. I post a status and other people care about my opinions and want to engage with me enough that they like and comment on it. I come across a page with thousands of likes and discover that I'm not crazy, lots of people will look in the fridge repeatedly when hungry expecting to find different food (let's leave aside for a moment that according to Einstein that's exactly what insanity is).

Perhaps I'm just self-obsessed. I post random tidbits from my day and rant about my opinion and answer anonymously submitted questions through various media and I hope that people will read and watch and comment and follow and interact with it because I'M SO FUCKING IMPORTANT AND INTERESTING.

And obviously, there is a bit of self-indulgence here. I probably wouldn't engage in these activities to the extent that I do if I didn't think that someone, somewhere, was picking up what I'm putting down.

But, for me, and I think for most people who engage in social networking (and there are quite a few of them), there's more to it than that. I like interacting with people and self-indulgent as it may be interacting is better than not interacting as far as I'm concerned. The world is changing and the internet is playing a huge part in that and I like seeing what's happening and feeling like I'm a part of that. I like looking at things that my friends, and indeed total strangers, are doing and creating and experiencing and though it seems a bit mundane at times, thats what life is, really; talking to people about their feelings and opinions and activities and how their girlfriend is and that really great pasta they had last week.

If I may indulge my Amanda Palmer obsession in the form of a case study for a moment....

She's a musician who is very active on twitter, maintains a blog, has a youtube account with a couple hundred videos on it and probably some other stuff that I'm not even aware of. For all intents and purposes, she's a celebrity. But instead of trying to distance herself from the hoi poloi she engages with them. She interacts with people on a basic level and tries to share as much of herself as she wants to, and it's created a new kind of celebrity in my opinion; just a cool girl who makes music and travels and shares these experiences with as many people as she can. She's grateful to her fans and I suspect that she's on a secret mission to let each of them know individually that she knows they're there, and appreciates it.

Obviously, not being a celebrity of any kind except for that one photo of me that got quite popular in canada, none of that applies to me. But like it or not the internet is really fucking big news these days and I want to be a part of it. Obviously, there's a line to tread here- no-one wants to hear about the cheese toastie I made this morning and no-one wants to hear about the corrective surgery I had for a rectal prolapse (for the record I have not had a cheese toastie today and have never had corrective surgery for a rectal prolapse). There's sharing, there's undersharing, and there's oversharing. Also, in an effort not to flood everybody with this shit, I segregate my social networking to a certain extent. I doubt whether any single person knows how to find all of the accounts/pages listed above. I'm not really sure I know how to find all of the accounts/pages I've created over the years. That way people see what they want to see, and dont have to engage with me on twenty different platforms. At least that's my intention.

In addition to this, let's face it, I plan on working in media, and social networking is changing the entire industry faster than you can shake your keys at. News is changing, books are changing, music is changing, films are changing, and most of it's going down on the internet. It would be stupid of me not to pay attention to and engage in what's happening in social media. 

Now if you'll excuse me I have to take my dailybooth photo and tweet so that people know this blog post exists. Get in touch.

The Cardinal Fuck-Up of Trying To Turn A Hobby Into A Job

The thing about me, right, is that I do an awful lot of things, creatively.

I play a couple instruments, I write, I draw, I paint, I make clothes, I take photographs, I do a lot of social-media type stuff, I cook, I take an interest in other people's art and food and social media-type stuff.

But I don't really do any of these things very well, very often, or very consistently. Most of them don't even qualify as hobbies because a hobby is something that you actually do with something resembling regularity.

But I do enjoy all of these things, and I wish I could do them all more, and better, but I can't because if I try and focus on music I'll get distracted and start making a dress, and if I start making a dress, all of a sudden I'll wanna go write a short story. This is a cruel chain of events that usually ends up with me cleaning my room and drinking lots of tea and going on the internet.

But filmmaking is obviously different. Because I decided to turn a hobby into a career (I hope), and study it at college, there's a pressure there. A huge amount of dedication is required in order to keep up and really get the most out of the experience. And the main problem, the thing that's worrying me most:

It's all starting to feel a bit like work.

Of course I enjoy making films and learning about how to do it properly and I enjoy writing scripts and I enjoy reading about the various things that I need to read about for my course. I just don't enjoy it as much when I have to have it done by a certain time and be graded. And, like I said, I have creative ADD. It's tough to stick to something this completely for this long.

I'm hoping I haven't fucked myself over. I'm hoping that by the time I get my degree I won't be so exasperated by the whole thing that I never want to pick up a camera again. I'm hoping that over the summer I'll get to do my own thing, filmically (it is a word, I checked) and fall back in love with it. If not I'll get some boring desk job and not really care about it and do all my creative type hobbies on the side. But that's not exactly what I'd like to happen.

I need to stop worrying so much.

Boozin', Prayin', and Learnin' (or, A Subjective Analysis of the Link Between My Alcohol Drinking Habits And My Last Year In Catholic School)

I had originally written about three quarters of quite a long blog post about my opinion of denominational primary education in Ireland, but then I realised that it was pretty boring and long and I wasn't really going anywhere with it, so I'll just stick to this one tidbit from sixth class.

When I was 12 and making my confirmation, we were all herded into a classroom after lunch and handed a piece of paper. It was the pledge. I don't remember the exact wording of it, but it was something along the lines of "I promise to God that I will never take drugs and will not drink alcohol until I am __ years of age. Signed, _____". We were told that we could fill in whatever age we wanted, but were strongly recommended to put 18. So far so good. I don't recall being informed that I didn't have to do this if I didn't want to. It's possible that I was and just plain don't remember, this happened like 7 years ago, but given my overall experience at school of being told when things were and weren't optional I don't think it's outside the realm of possibility that they just didn't say anything.

At this point I'm pretty sure we'd done some health education thing on drugs (I remember making a "pass on grass" poster). But that particular day it hadn't come up. All this pledge stuff was sprung on us. So I'll get to my main point: I am all for encouraging children to adopt healthy attitudes towards drugs from an early age. I see why never taking illegal drugs and not drinking until age 18 is a sensible concept to introduce to children. Great. What I'm not all for is this concept being introduced in the form of a covenant with God instead of a decision made independantly by the child after being taught about the consequences of drug and alcohol abuse.

I can't remember whether or not I was fully atheist at this point, but the fact of the matter is that once I realised that my beliefs differed from those that this pledge were based on, that agreement I had entered into was just a laserprinted piece of nothing.

I signed the bit of paper anyway, and I put down 13, figuring that at least I'd be able to keep that and still be able to have a sip of champagne at new year's and all the other little things like that. In the end I tried a bit of my Dad's Guiness a few months before my birthday and that was the end of that.

Pledge or no pledge, I ended up with very unhealthy drinking habits, some of which still remain. I started drinking at a very early age, in what I now realise were very unsafe circumstances. It took me a long time to find my limits, and even having found them I still exceed them on all too regular a basis. I'm not trying to play the blame game and I'm not suggesting that my primary school curriculum is at the root of all evil.

But I just think that I would have had a healthier attitude towards drugs, alcohol in particular, if I had been better educated about certain things earlier. Things like the strength of spirits, units of alcohol, body weight, what actually happens if you drink too much, the situations you can get yourself into. I think that the possibility of a naggin of vodka leaving me puking in the street would have scared me more at age twelve than "You shouldnt drink because drinking is bad and God doesn't want you to" ever did.

Again, obviously my secondary school had a responsibility, my parents had a responsibility, and above all I had a responsibility. My main point is just that what's the point in having substance abuse education at primary level at all if you're just going to ignore logic and bring religion into it?

How I got into feminism

For the purpose of clarity I'm going to start by saying that I was always a feminist. I can't think of a time in my life when I didn't believe that men and women should be equal for as long as I'd known that men and women could be treated unequally. But insofar as believing that men and women should be equal makes you a feminist, most everybody is a feminist.

When I talk about "getting into feminism" I'm talking about the time when I started to feel really strongly about it, and started to educate myself about ways in which women were treated in an unequal way, how we could go about changing that, and actively engaging in trying to make a change.

As a kid I was always vaguely pissed off when people assumed my favourite colour was pink, and that I couldn't play football (I wasn't good at football but this was more due to a total ineptitude at almost all sports on my part than to a lack of a Y chromosome). But around age 15 or 16 was when I started to get scared, upset and angry at how women are treated and began to try and take on a responsibility towards feminism.

I was in a mixed school and by now most of the year had reached sexual and intellectual maturity. What had previously been boys saying "get back in the kitchen" because it was just what you said to be controversial, and because they didn't know better, had become men who were smart enough to know what these jokes really meant about society's attitude toward women, making sexist jokes when they should have known better. I was sick of being told that I didn't know anything and should be making sandwiches in the name of humour by people trying to wind me up, and acting like I was overreacting when I did get wound up.

I was reading the prescribed feminist poetry for the Leaving Cert (cue more sexist jokes in English class) and it really got me thinking about what it meant to be an active feminist.

I was nestling into my own corner of the internet, outside of facebook and monkeys riding on the backs of baby pigs, and so I was reading and watching more about what feminists were saying and doing and thinking, and learning about what problems are around currently that were making us unequal, and what was being done about it. I read about anti-porn feminism, sex-positive feminism, slut shaming, women in the media. About rape culture. About burkas, genital mutilation, missing white woman syndrome. About women.

I had taken up debating at school but always found myself more engaged with debates at parties and in the back of class when we should have been working. "What's the harm in ___?" "What pay gap?" "I don't really think that, I'm just poking fun". I got very heated in these debates with all the furor of a teenager pissed off with the world looking for something to believe in.

By now I had "filled out" and was developing my own sense of style in how I dressed. Alcohol started showing up at house parties and I started going to pubs with my friends every once in a while. I was uncomfortable with the reactions I was getting in a social context. I was annoyed that I couldn't walk down the road without being beeped or whistled at. I was sick of strange men in bars trying to grab my arse. I was scared by stories from friends and peers and experiences of my own, which ranged from lads making inappropriate comments about about breasts to people being raped or almost raped. I was angry that I lived in a society where none of this was unusual.

So I educated myself about it. I tried to learn and understand specific ways in which society treats women unfairly. I learned about the way in which we're all products of a culture where there is a constant undercurrent of misogyny. I learned about what I could do, and I formed my own opinions on what I agreed with and didn't agree with, what really was "harmless fun" and what was just blatant sexism. To me that was the difference between being a "feminist" and an "active feminist". Engaging with it properly.

I'm not saying that I know everything. I'm not saying I'm somehow more of a feminist or any better of a feminist than anyone else. I'm just trying to explain how I got to this point, where I'm comfortable openly describing myself as "feminist", where I'm aware of ways in which people can be sexist without even realising it, and willing to call people out when they are sexist.

I'll wrap up by saying that feminism isn't about being angry. It isn't about hating men. It isn't just for women, or young people, or activists, or politics. It's for anyone that wants to be as informed as possible about the culture we live in, how that culture shapes us, and how we would like to shape that culture into an environment that's better for everyone. Go read a blog. Watch youtube. Google it. Find your stance (I'll probably write another post at some time in the future about key issues where there's division among feminists, and recommend some reading/listening/viewing material).

In fear of yuppiedom.

I'm going to give this blog thing another bash. It's going to be rambly and irrelevant and not very dependable and only interesting sometimes. It's going to be me, but on the internet.

Earlier today I wrote a film about fears. The biggest fear I have right now is that I'm going to wake up tomorrow and discover that I've become a 25-year-old yuppie who hasn't travelled much and has stopped giving a shit about feminism and art and all that other stuff I'm into right now that hopefully isn't some coming-of-age phase, because I like feminism and art and all that other stuff.

I had an English teacher once who said she regretted waiting around so long to write. That she had all these ideas for writing when she was younger and then decided not to write them because they sounded stupid but now she never can write them because she's not in that place anymore and she'll never feel that way again. That's resonating with me a lot lately because I keep rejecting film ideas and being afraid to make anything that's truly my own, because, well, they're shit ideas, but I'll never be the way I am now again, and I'll never have these shit ideas again, and maybe I should start making that into something. Because making a shit film is better than making no film and if I keep waiting around for a great idea I'll probably never make anything ever. If that makes sense.

And now is the time when I'm finally old enough to travel on my own and I should start doing that because I dont want to lose interest in travel. Mostly I need to just stop being afraid that I'm going to get mugged/raped in the middle of Prague for long enough that I actually manage to go to Prague.

And I should go to more art exhibitions, and films, and concerts. And I should really get back on track with the whole "throw out all the shit you haven't used in the last four years" jag I was on last month. Kind of almost minimalism, but not quite.

This is just a vague rambly worried to do list to stop me waking up tomorrow and being a 25 year old yuppie, and I could go on but there's a freshly boiled kettle downstairs and my room has to be cleaned and I have essays to do and the cat's taking a nap and I might go nap with him.