Warning

I ask this: why is it more socially acceptable for someone born biologically male to hate men and reject masculinism than it is for someone born biologically female to hate women and reject feminism?

And why do I feel like such a horrible person for asking?

I know part of the answer. I know that maybe as few as forty years ago, the reverse had been true for centuries: it made perfect sense for a woman to find her sex inferior, but God forbid a man be unhappy with being a man! I know that shit of that sort absolutely sucks. I know that gay liberation and feminism have changed so, so much for the better, and I love those movements as much as I appreciate their effects on my world.

BUT does that mean that what was true in the 1970s, or even what was true in the 1990s, has to be true today? Do we really have to think in the same way?

Am I fucking obligated to favor, love, and be proud of women more than men in order to rectify centuries of it being the other way around?

Why can't I just forget the past? Why can't we move forward into a place where the past, and what was true in it, don't fucking matter?

My dad ruined a song for me last night, and the worst part is that I'm the one who feels guilty. The song is Incubus's "Warning." It's a song about not letting "life pass you by." It's a song, I always thought, sung to Americans to get up off their lazy asses and stop living lives that are pre-cut to go down easier.

My father informs me that this is not possible. He informs me that because the song is sung about a "she," it's clearly about the female experience. It's about women not letting men run their lives for them. It's about Thelma and motherfuckin' Louise. It's a song, my father tells me, sung to women to get up off their lazy asses and stop living lives that are pre-cut to go down easier.

I love Thelma and Louise, but the movie's almost three decades old. Come on.

Like the whiny child I am, I sneered at my father and said, "Well I always thought it was a song about humans, not women."

"But he says 'she!'"

"And why can't 'she' be a neutral pronoun?!"

"Yeah, whatever," my dad finishes.

I shut my door because my dad was annoyed with me that I was annoyed with him being a good feminist. He doesn't realize (he never realizes) that I hate that he thinks I should be his child most embracing of such arguments. And he doesn't realize that my door almost slammed because I was afraid that he's right.

My dad and I always fight over Brandon's lyrics, and Davey's too. In my mind, both of these writers occupy a superior position in which gender is completely arbitrary.

In other words, they are my ideal.

Brandon sings about a "she" because a "she" is just as good at representing humanity as a whole as "he" has been for centuries. Brandon sings that "To resist is to piss in the wind" because he's giving humanity a cock, not limiting the power of resistance to males only, which is my dad's criticism of the song "Get up From Under." Brandon sings about his own "woman's intuition" in "Just a Phase" because the sexist decades of history for the phrase simply don't apply here: he's female, male, human, who-gives-a-fuck-what.

But to my dad, Brandon is a masculinist male who is consciously forwarding the cause of the other sex: women.

I see my dad's position as sexist, because he's the one still differentiating between the sexes, whereas I am able to forget their existence altogether. I am truly post-gender. I can see with blissful blindness to history.

All those "I" sentences: they're fine for bouts of self-celebration in a blog before dawn on a summer morning. But I would never tell them to my father. Why?

Why am I so afraid of being called sexist? It's probably because I am. Most people would probably tell me it's sexist not to give women the advantage, not to favor them as the superior sex, not to apply a sort of Affirmative Action program to women throughout life, because they've been the underdog for so damn long.

What my father told me last night bothered me the whole time I slept. I had bad dreams, and I woke up with that song in my head, and guilt in my gut. I am a bad representative of women. I have failed my sex.

But I never wanted to be of this sex!!! Sometimes I want to scream that so loud that it aches in my chest and brings tears to my eyes to hold it back. I hate being biologically a woman. I hate being constantly forced to be socially a woman. I wince every time my mom calls me "chica!" I am so fucking tired of being expected to be a representative of a population I don't feel I belong to.

See how I'm failing even more?: Instead of immersing myself in my group and bringing them up to a place of equality with my efforts, I'm leaving behind the group and just jumping to that imaginary place of equality all for myself. My post-gender idealism is just me being another apathetic young American who doesn't want to face the facts of continuing sexism. I'm nothing but a lazy, failed feminist.

But, for the first time, I think I'm starting to grow the will to say this: I don't care.

There are times when you have to struggle in order to get through, and there are times when you just have to let go, because you're too close to a situation to see clearly. If I were born biologically male, the subject of feminism would (for reasons I don't like) be something I wasn't born with, and that I could actively, consciously, take up as a passion.

But I wasn't born with a dick, so somehow that means I'm supposed to be more invested in feminism than anyone who was.

I know I'm not being reasonable, and that in the future, I'll probably regret a lot of things I've believed. But I really need the mental space right now to say, "I am not a woman. I am not a feminist. And I don't even particularly like women." Right now it doesn't matter that it's also true that I'm not a man, nor a masculinist, and that I don't particularly like men. That wouldn't be carving a mental space out of the solid rock I've been handed. But disliking the gender that's been weighing me down for twenty-one years? That's creating mental space for myself.

Maybe it's just a first step. But it's a step I need to take.

And it's all because my dad won't let me believe that an Incubus song is about a person, not a woman.

I fucking hate gender.

I'm pissed off, and I'm going to try to go back to sleep.

A Handful of Self-Indulgent Ponderings

1. At what point does something I feel become fact? With moods and passions so fickle as mine, how often do they have to occur before they are real? How can I tell a person that I'm attracted to them, when I know that 90% of the time, I feel no attraction towards any living thing? In this scenario, it's not a lie, because I am, sometimes, attracted to them. 10% of the time. That's about the percentage that I consider myself truly attracted to a person. Once you break 10%, you've made it farther than the vast majority of the human race. You're in the 99th percentile of my sexual appreciation of humans. But is that enough to become a fact? Is that enough for me to declare to a person, "I want to be with you?" Or is that too much of a commitment? Is that saying, "I want to be with you 100% of the time?" Because that will always be a lie. I need alone-time, and I need more of it than do most people. I'm probably in the 99th percentile of Americans who need alone-time.

How can anyone trust what I say, when it's only true a percentage of the time? There are so few things I can say that are true about me 100% of the time. One of them is that I am constantly changing.

My world turns itself inside out on a regular basis. Three weeks ago, I would have described myself as someone who felt like they were dying, felt that there was no hope for me doing anything good in the future, and who hates being lonely, and hates talking to people. This week, I would describe myself as someone who has hopes for the future, loves having their loneliness as their constant companion, and loves sharing words with people that mean a lot to them.

If I said today that I hated being lonely, I would be lying. It's not true today. If I had said three weeks ago that I hated being lonely, I would have been telling the truth.

If my history is anything to go by, I'll be back to hating life in a week or two. And then a couple of weeks after that, the world will be full of happy giddiness again.

These changes happen between morning and night on some days. Other times, the cycles take weeks. My only constant is that I'm inconstant.

How can I ever present myself to the world, knowing that in a few days, or a few hours, what I've presented will then be a lie?

I think about these things in relation to my gender, especially. It is a fact that I am genderless. When I am all alone, with only Sing the Sorrow, and all the petty circumstances of the world fade away into the sweet blackness, I am genderless.

Therefore, I would like to present myself to the world as genderless, an androgen, what have you.

But suddenly throw me in a circumstance where my gender affects how I interact with others, and I will usually end up caving, and admitting that my genderlessness is a lie, an ideal that can only be upheld in the 30% of my time that I spend in my head alone. Put me in a situation where it would be easier to get along with the group if I'm just "one of the gals," then I'll morph into a girl, and to claim that I'm genderless would be to lie. Put me in a situation where I'm dressed up in a way that's deliberately contrary to how young women usually dress, and the guy at the cinema box office mistakes me for a boy, then I have to admit I feel good about the mistake; I have to admit that, in that moment, it's not genderlessness that I want, but to be a real boy. When I can only get off by imagining I have a penis, in that moment, it's a fact that I wish I were born with one. When in the morning, the idea of having sexual organs at all makes me want to die, it's a fact that I don't wish I were born with a penis. Where is truth? Is truth what is true in the state of sexual, spiritual, intellectual excitement? Or is it what is true when all excitement is gone, and the only thing around and inside me is the stillness of death?

Sometimes I think that my desire to be a man is actually merely a masked desire to have more of a sex drive. Wouldn't that be great? Wouldn't it be wonderful for me to actually tell someone I want to be with them, and actually mean it more than 10% of the time?

I wonder if I'll ever know the answer to any of these questions.


2. I am wearing a pair of blue jeans today that I bought and wore in my freshman year of high school. That's eight years ago. What does that say about how dynamic a life I lead? I thought I went out into the world and accumulated and learned new things. But it turns out, I just come back to Rohnert Park and fit right back in the same pair of pants I left behind.


3. I learned today, for the hundredth time, that I'm basically the younger version of my dad. I was doing some contemplation on my favorite subject, my mind. I was thinking and realizing that something I can define about the way my mind works is that I simply reject manipulation, guilt trips, drama. It's like I have this switch in me; when none of that stuff is going on, everything's bright and fine, no worries. But the very second that someone even brings a touch of manipulation or guilt tripping into the conversation, I completely shut off. Just one drop and that's the end. I snap shut. I shut down. That shit just Does. Not. Work with me. It's the least effective way to get through to me ever.

And as I was gathering all these thoughts in my brain, I realized that I'm pretty damn sure my dad's said the exact same thing to me about himself. I'm fairly certain I've both witnessed that reaction, and heard him describe it. So basically, my emotional patterns are carbon-copied from my dad. Funny how that works, isn't it?


4. The only way I can fall asleep is by imagining death. Some nights it's suffocation, some nights it's icy ocean water filling my lungs. Lately, it's been blood flowing out from my veins, draining my body, dripping down my hands and from my fingertips.

5. The end :)

Drama makes me sick to my stomach. It stops NOW. What the fuck have I become, anyways? It stops now, until the world stops spinning. Resolution.

k-e-l-l-y

Um, we're ditching the name Shelley. Because if Davey Havok knows me as Kelly, then that's what I am.

Just kidding. I have other reasons. Really.

Back to my birth name for now, plus Blake is still cool for those of you lurkers who know me as that ;)

Someone send me to a shrink, seriously.

The world is okay today because Boudica brought me a dried leaf from outside. She's a contender for the position of My Favorite Vegan Hunter.

mope mope mope

This is stupid, but I am absolutely gutted by the fact that my cats hate me.

They're over there, being resentful to each other, too, sitting quietly and tensely, shooting me death glares every so often. Two nights ago, Boudica was sleeping on my feet just like always. As soon as the suitcases were brought out, she cut me off, so to speak. Somehow it's my fault that the other residents of this house are gone. And somehow it's not enough that I am the one who didn't abandon her. So I'm getting the silent treatment.

This is upsetting because it's just the most physically obvious manifestation of the pattern of my whole life right now: there is no cat by my feet. It's just further proof that there's something inherently wrong and poisonous about me. My friends turn away, my family turn their eyes askance, and employers never call me back after hearing my voice. I wish I knew what it is about me that makes people (and cats) run for cover.

June the second

Look who's lookin' hardcore!





Today's my first birthday, and I look it. A year ago from right about now I had my Spiritual Rebirth while listening to "The Great Disappointment" on repeat for three hours. Not a hxc song, but one a pretty darn good one. Thanks, AFI.

a message from Oscar

"Truth in art is the unity of a thing with itself: the outward rendered expressive of the inward: the soul made incarnate: the body indistinct with spirit. For this reason there is no truth comparable to sorrow. There are times when sorrow seems to me to be the only truth. Other things may be illusions of the eye or the appetite, made to blind the one and cloy the other, but out of sorrow have the worlds been built, and at the birth of a child or a star there is pain."
- Oscar Wilde, from De Profundis