“I don’t hate women, you’re just a shrill hysteric.”

I’ve been kind of unpleasantly surprised lately by people I’ve encountered in the age range over thirty and below forty-five. In recent conversation a friend of mine who is, I believe, entering her fifties said to me more or less that she is a feminist, so is her husband, and so are virtually all the women she knows who are her age. Now, granted, this is an educated white demographic with left-leaning or liberal tendencies, but the fact that such a high proportion of middle aged women identify freely as feminists in one particular social circle— that’s not what surprised me. What surprised me was to realize that I have come to know a reasonable handful of (cis)women of comparable backgrounds who are simply five to fifteen years younger and who don’t have this kind of identification at all. Or, if they do identify as feminists, they have an awfully distinct view from mine on what feminism constitutes. As this friend of mine said, it’s like a lot of the ciswomen who now benefit very directly from the so-called sexual revolution want to throw all of that away and pretend they’d be living their same lives without considering current issues and events from a feminist perspective.

This is tricky territory, obviously. Playing the game of “who’s more feminist” is pointless, and I can legitimately understand why, for purely etymological reasons, someone might want to call themselves, say, “gender egalitarian” rather than “feminist.” (The reason I fidget at when most people use that label is that incidentally, they’re often not as egalitarian as they claim, either. It’s not a label that really solves any of the problems it might hope to avoid.) I say I’m a feminist specifically because of that saying, “Feminism is the radical notion that women are people.” Patriarchy absolutely harms men, too, and it also harms individuals like yours truly who don’t categorize themselves within one specific gender. But what patriarchy is founded on is the notion that women are not people, and so calling opposition to patriarchy “feminism” is a bold and direct way to point to the root of the problem. I freely call myself both a gender egalitarian and a feminist, I’m just partial to saying feminist nowadays because of how I think too many people these days understand the symptoms of patriarchal dominance without understanding the causes.

Okay, so that definition is… maybe sorted out. But honestly, this isn’t about what ciswomen in whatever age range choose to call themselves— it’s more strictly about what they think. (I wish I could comment here on transwomen, but I know many more transmen than transwomen, so I’ll have something to say about the one, but not the other. I don’t want to put words in anyone’s mouths if I can help it.) And I’ve noticed a surprising amount of them, through various social venues to which I’m connected, indicating they find certain feminist goals outdated or incorrect; it’s about legal rights and not much else. Suffrage, abortion rights, equal pay! It’s true, only one of those things fully exists, but unfortunately, simply legislating for that isn’t going to work. Not enough people will vote in favor if they still believe “women are not people.” Yet this is where I hear many ciswomen place their priorities. Once you start getting into discussions like “is chivalry dead,” explicitly or implicitly blaming rape victims, objectifying women (or oneself as a woman) on the grounds that their sexiness is their source of liberation, etc., then you are still not getting anywhere.

All in all, I’ve found more solidly feminist views amongst people my own age. But I would like to think that this isn’t representative of an overall pattern, especially since I wouldn’t say that my entire generation is enormously enlightened about gender relations— and besides, for the past several years I was almost exclusively interacting with peers in a private liberal arts college setting, where all brands of leftism perpetuate themselves true to stereotype (somewhat). Is there really a generational difference? I have no clue. And if there isn’t, I can understand why I would just be perceiving it this way right now; but if there is, I can’t figure out off the top of my head why it would have arisen.

My updates should increase soon. I’ve actually had plenty of things that I’ve meant to discuss here, but there have been so-called real life distractions of massive proportions.

— Faxe

Love/hate affairs with durian.

An important discovery from moving is that this new neighborhood has a huge Vietnamese population, like to the point where lots of signs for things are strictly in Vietnamese, no English, and virtually every small business has a Vietnamese name attached. Funnily enough, I’d never had Vietnamese food before the move, so the fact that suddenly I’m in walking distance of about four means that on one of the first nights here I decided to try some. Phở was a pretty obvious pick, as was roasted quail (I’d never had actual quail, just eggs). There was also the highly intriguing option of a durian smoothie. Durian is a fruit that has been featured a couple times on the only two programs on Travel Channel that really interest me: No Reservations and Bizarre Foods. At least to a typical Western palate, durian is generally imagined as tasting absolutely horrible. Like, maybe one of the worst tastes in the world. As for Anthony Bourdain of the former show’s opinion? It’s secretly great. As for Andrew Zimmern of the latter show’s opinion? Nothing secret, it’s just awful, and that’s coming from a guy whose entire career at the moment involves eating (and usually enjoying) stuff that a lot of other people would consider disgusting.

My verdict: phở is fucking incredible (as though something seasoned with that much cilantro wouldn’t be), and I loved the quail but I could have eaten just about anything covered in the sauce it was in, so I don’t know if this fairly assesses my feelings on that fowl. Durian, now… I can’t say I’ve truly tried durian because the smoothie leaves out the textural component, but I’m very undecided. It is not the worst thing I’ve ever tasted by a long shot, so in that sense I can’t side with Mr. Zimmern. On the other hand, I had garlic ice cream once and this kind of tasted like that, with an after-odor of rubber tires, so while I had several sips of it, I’m not really sure that I’m adding durian to my list of favorites. Or my list of anything I want to eat. But: I’m glad that I gave it a try.

Which all brings me to the real point of this post, which is that I really hate the Travel Channel, but I’d like to right now say a little happy blurb about those two individuals and their programs in question. Andrew Zimmern first because his situation is pretty simple. He’s insanely bourgeois-American in most of his travels but I get a kick out of this fact because despite that trait, he doesn’t manifest it by being disdainful and exoticizing of most places he visits and food he eats. Rather, he’s got this kind of “golly gee!” enthusiasm that entertains me immensely, and his stated goal shows, in my opinion, that his heart is absolutely in the right place. I think one can overstate the importance of trying different cultures’ foods; the injustices of the world are founded in a lot more than culinary difference. However, culinary elitism is a comparably discreet way by which prejudice gets manifested these days. I’m a picky eater, in terms of how I like my food to be prepared, and when I get used to one way of doing things, or one particular dish at a food source, I stick by that rather than try something else. On the other hand, I like to think I’m not one of those people who hear about some kind of culinary “oddity” and decide it’s weird simply because it violates some kind of unwritten dietary law— religious, personal, or otherwise. I tried pork liver as part of my housemate’s dish during this meal, and I’d never eaten liver in my life, and I really liked it. I never thought I could even like organs, but I liked that anyway. There are any number of other foods that I’ve seen Zimmern eat, or that I’ve just heard of, that I would totally eat just to see what they were like, even if I decided I hated it. Exceptions being where I know, based on all testimonials, that my palate is going to have a bad reaction to the specific texture or flavor in the first place. Textures, especially. So yeah. Check Zimmern out sometime? He’s genuine even when he’s naïve. I like him.

As for that other daredevil foodie of the Travel Channel, Mr. Anthony Bourdain. Well. His show I both enjoy more and feel more undecided about, peculiarly. No doubt, whatever his political views are, they strike me as radical-leaning in some regards— not that he’s clearly adherent to some of my own philosophies, or even that he’s wholly anti-reactionary. The guy has been able to pal around with the likes of Alice Cooper and Ted Nugent, with whom I frankly doubt that I could. But still— he produces virtually the only travel program in existence, on that channel or elsewhere, where I feel like the people he hangs out with are actual people and he’s having a good time, not forcing it for the camera. When something turns out shitty? You know about it, and not like he’s a diva throwing a fit. His capacity for sarcasm is limitless without becoming overly insincere. My primary concern or complaint was just, for a while, that he slightly romanticized Third World living as opposed to middle class American** living— or even to the lives of poor Americans. Someone so in love with the Other that he turns orientalist without meaning to? Someone so (rightfully) resentful of much in the US that he finds every last one of his fellow citizens irredeemable? Someone who can only comment as thoughtfully as he does on many aspects of the lives of the underprivileged because he himself was born to at least some degree of privilege? These thoughts ran through my head often when first watching him. Sometimes, they still do. On the other hand, the more that I’ve watched, the more I’ve seen him do programs on cultures in the US where he’s been just as enthusiastic about the people he meets regardless of nationality; he seems to mostly have a chip on his shoulder about privileged Americans, which does include himself, but hey, I am the last person to say that privileged people can’t have hangups about their privilege. At least they acknowledge it. And, I think at least sometimes, he does. So I recommend his show as well, even though what I’ve mostly said here is reasons why I wouldn’t discourage watching it, not reasons encouraging. Well… whatever.

This entry took forever to write because I’m still working on how long I want this kind of thing to become. I know I’m going to have a lot more to say soon, on topics thoroughly unrelated.

— Faxe

* I always thought “condom” would be a better nickname for “condominium,” but I occasionally have a sense of humor that makes me laugh at things like where in Master and Commander, Aubrey mixes up patois and putain. I like to legitimize this by the fact that I’m painfully amused by any wordplay whatsoever, from a linguistic perspective. … This may not be that legitimate since it means I’m That Person With the Terrible Puns.

** I would like to use a better term than “American” because of yes, that well-established problem of “the Americas are two fucking continents, not just a country.” US-American? USAian? Us (as opposed to Them)? Oh, I crack myself up. No, I really don’t know what to use, though.

Queer as youth, defined (part one).

Loosely defined, anyway.

The title of this blog is cheeky, I admit. I say that I don’t mean for this to be a queer blog, or a blog about any one thing, and yet “queer as youth” doesn’t seem very arbitrary. Well, I do happen to be queer, and I do happen to be young. 22, to be precise. And those specific aspects of my life loom a little larger at the moment than other aspects, so I guess it’s not that they’re a perfect summary of myself, but they’re a good starting point for discussing What I Am Up To.

I did also say, in the Rules, no personal details. That’s not entirely true. I’ll say this much, to help clarify how my queerness and youth figure so heavily in my mental state right now— I graduated college this past May, and this weekend I’m moving in to a condo in one of the allegedly better cities to be queer and young, where I’ve visited constantly but never actually lived. This process still isn’t going to be easy.

The First Myth About Youth: The world is your oyster.

It’s anything but. Of course— and this is a big “of course”— I can’t comment on what it’s like to be much older than how I am now. I can also only comment with a bit of accuracy on what it’s like to be much younger than how I am now. (Memory, neurologists and generally sciencey people agree, is too fickle in these modes to be trusted.) So I will never say it is HARDER to be in my approximate age range than in any other. But I simply mean to emphasize that it is not easy. I routinely run into people much older than me who direct me to the fact that I am young, I have my life ahead of me, things will be okay, whatever my problem is— or who even get grumpy, sometimes pissed, that I am young and have a complaint.

Young people routinely run into all kinds of trouble in their lives, and routinely do not pull out of it. It would be a mistake to categorize something like heroin addiction as purely a youth problem, but how many young people in the United States and elsewhere have addictions of that kind? Or are massively poor? Or are uninsured? Or raising a child they didn’t plan for? Or raising a child they did plan for and can’t support? I rankle at “you young whippersnapper” treatment because I freely admit having a lower likelihood of collected tough life experience than an older adult may have, but that’s only statistical, not personal. I do not, in fact, have a heroin addiction, or any children, at this age— yet I face the very real problem of having been raised with money (to some degree), and now having virtually none. This was the case for most of college, in fact, and I have already learned a great deal about balancing a household budget as a result, but this does not change how poverty largely stares me in the face today.

My father is and was of that common opinion that a good education will open all the right doors for you. This would be a gross exaggeration. I am privileged by my education for some reasons, including a much higher chance of getting gainful employment than someone with “only” a GED, but the economy is not stacked in my favor, and my degree— a bachelor of arts in philosophy and linguistics— is best served for any financial benefit by my attending graduate school. I do not know if I really want to do graduate school. On the one hand, yes, but on the other hand, remaining in academia means remaining ivory tower, and I’m extremely tired of that. I am extremely tired of anyone who claims radicalism but fixates on radicalizing minor issues that they only have the level of awareness to radicalize BECAUSE they are privileged enough to intellectualize all of one’s life experiences that way. Case in point, the kind of antics that went on at my college like students literally not bathing, as a radical statement. Chain smoking, as a radical statement. It isn’t that I don’t appreciate one’s right to avoid conforming to some standard of cleanliness, or one’s right to treat one’s body how one pleases. However, not everyone has that kind of convenience in their lives. Lots of people have to bathe or shower because if they become too dirty and develop odors, etc., they might easily get fired from their job over slovenliness. Lots of people in disadvantaged positions smoke as a stress relief— I’d even wonder about a kind of self-destructiveness, that would certainly be me if I got poorer— but also a lot of people can’t afford to actively pursue their own death as a statement…

That’s a tangent I’ll go on further in one of my innumerable “I hate hipster” posts. The point is that there’s stupid bullshit that goes into doing the academia game, and it’s such a giant circlejerk the more entrenched that you get, for all my interest in highly book-smartish things, I’d like to eschew the circlejerk very much. It WOULD open doors for me. It would also close others. But this means I’m in a scary place now— I have a job, thank goodness, but there’s the huge question mark of did my college education do as much for me as it ought? I am not as disadvantaged as I would probably be if I weren’t white and I had no education whatsoever— but even so? I haven’t been feeling terribly advantaged, either.

It’s taken me too long to write this post so far, and I fear that it’s getting derailed, so consider this a sort of Part One to several subsequent rambles on queerness and youth and how they gloriously combine.

— Faxe

House rules.

And no, not House rules like “oh wow, I love that snarky medical drama.” I actually haven’t seen House. Ever. Despite enduring love for both principal actors, and for the Sherlock Holmes parallels.

Before I start regularly updating this thing, I’m establishing some rules right away. “Rules” being shorthand for “policies that I’ll do my best to follow and make sure everyone else is following, for an enjoyable writing and reading experience.” All of this presupposes my having readers, which at the time of this writing, I’m not sure I do (blog’s less than a day old, natch), but whatever. Anyway:

1. You don’t need to comment, even if you like what I’ve written, and neither do I need to reply to your comments, even if I like what YOU’VE written. Let there be a general understanding that as in many human interactions, demonstrating one’s affection is nice but sometimes able to be left implicit. (And, sometimes, it gets creepy when there’s a lot of it.)

2. I will correct my own posts for spelling and grammatical problems, for the sake of facilitating easier communication in a kind of general Standard American English paradigm. Please be clear about what you write in response, by similar reasoning. However, please do not a) correct others’ writing for them, b) expect me to correct others’ writing for them, or c) advocate linguistic prescriptivism. You will drive this linguist up the wall.

3. This might be a blog where I write about Whatever Comes To Mind™, but please don’t contact me with suggestions for a topic, unless you have a stated/mostly serious explanation for what you think is interesting about that topic. Otherwise I won’t know why you or anyone else would care. (I mean, I can guess, but I won’t put words in your mouth, either.)

4. Sometimes, people leave unintelligent comments. One may even suspect these people of generally not behaving intelligently. (See further down for what qualifies as intelligent vs. not.) Please do not respond with ad hominem attacks. They may actually be intelligent, and even if they’re not, you only perpetuate the hostile environment they’ve created by dwelling on it. Please, DO debate with these people if you feel like it. I know I would. However, the following categories of profound unintelligence I encourage you to simply ignore since I will wind up with plenty of regular entries that constitute a default response by me, the blogger, to that unintelligence— to the extent that nothing else needs to be said without just troll-feeding: “I failed gender issues 101,” “I lolz in the face of gender issues,” Republicans, Libertarians, Ayn Rand, Ron Paul, Project Chanology, 4chan in general, Twilight, hipsters, Hot Topic rebellion, religious fundamentalism, Dawkins atheists, creepy fandom, spamming. This list can and will include whatever else I think to add.

5. Call me on something that you think undermines my stated form of radicalism. I’m not perfect.

6. If you like what I have to say, feel free to link to an entry or this blog in general from somewhere else, like your own blog or website. Please credit Queer As Youth and/or Faxe Owen (or Faxe O. or just Faxe), and if pressed or in some kind of personal desire to provide a descriptor for Q.A.Y., call it an “experimental blog” rather than a “radical blog,” “feminist blog,” “queer blog,” or what have you. However, if you do happen to operate a radical, feminist, queer and/or other cool type of blog yourself, mad props, and chances are that featuring me on your site would flatter me immensely.

7. I swear like a sailor when I’m in the mood. And sometimes when I’m not. If this bothers you, don’t read. I make a point of NOT swearing or using language in a way that perpetuates institutionalized hierarchies of sex, gender, race, or what have you. If this bothers you, don’t read, and in fact, I probably won’t read YOU, either. In calmer writing, I will not use any word that I know to be a slur unless I am discussing the slur as a slur, and even then I will try to handle the matter with sensitivity. In LESS calm writing, I might take a ride on the copious irony train and fail to avoid all potential toe-squishing, but if I thus use a phrase like “all womens is bitches,” please at least be assured it isn’t some SHOCKING UN-PC MOMENT LULZ but rather a mockery of the statement uttered by others under any circumstance, deliberately or accidentally misogynist as the case may be.

8. You may request my AIM handle via e-mail, either for future discussion or for if I’m not busy and you just would like to become actual acquaintances. I will block you if you exploit this. I have Skype as well, but I will not give out that handle unless we have already talked extensively over AIM or similar venues beforehand.

9. I speak and read both French and Russian at good enough levels that especially in the former case you may feel free to comment or contact me in one of those languages. Other languages besides those and, obviously, English = not such a good bet, for all that I’m a polyglot.

10. Do not expect to see any details about my personal life beyond moments that I consider worth sharing as anecdotes or as a starting point for other discussion.

As for what constitutes “intelligence” on this blog: I don’t refer to some kind of cognitive ability. When I ask you to be intelligent I simply mean that if you do have the means to communicate with me using language, be thoughtful— genuinely thoughtful— about what you are saying and be aware of what you could call the three Ps: position, power, privilege. All somewhat the same issue. If you flagrantly or accidentally ignore the three Ps, that may generally constitute unintelligence, and the question then just becomes how badly you ignored ‘em.

I may always add other stuff here, but none yet.

— Faxe

I decided I had shit to fling on the Internet.

Hey, whoever.

I don’t anticipate this blog to become wildly successful, but who knows.

If blogs can have a genre, consider this the kind where there’s really no specific focus, but you, the devoted reader, decide that the brilliant author is so awesome that it doesn’t really matter what they’re saying, YOU JUST HAVE TO FIND OUT what insightful, ingenious, or incredible thing they’re going to write next, ZOMG. It’s kind of like keeping a LiveJournal, which I do in fact have, only rather than tailor my language to a specific set of readers, this is me distinctly NOT tailoring my language and just plain writing about literally anything.

For now, consider the “About the Writer” a partial introduction, but I’ll have more later. You get a now-proverbial cookie if you guess the origin of my pseudonym.

— Faxe