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Wednesday, August 31, 2011

The Little Hater

For the times our Little Hater gets in the way of delivering something creative...

Beating the Little Hater





Ballad of the Little Hater


Sunday, August 28, 2011

Growing up Middle Class in Singapore - Part 2

Tie

Work/Merit

I received various messages about the purpose and nature of work when I was growing up. One important idea was that work could, and should, be meaningful. It could be challenging, interesting, and, importantly, make a difference in the world. "When you grow up, you need to make a mark," my father would say to me, as a way of motivating me to study harder, or to try to get into a "top" school.

Which brings me to a second set of messages about work - that personal responsibility mattered, meritocracy prevailed and that this was a good thing. I learned that if somehow you failed to get meaningful work, that it was your own fault for not trying hard enough. This fit well with the idea that the world should (and did) reward merit, and punished mediocrity, and that this system was a good one. Along with that was the idea that merit could be measured relatively objectively, and was separate from "politics," as in office politics, which both my parents, to my recollection, spoke of in disparaging terms.

My parents did acknowledge that some people did not have the same opportunities as others to succeed under the existing system, but the solution was to give them those opportunities while maintaining the meritocracy. In other words, to make the system more meritocratic, and minimize what I think they thought of as accidents of birth. Both my parents had gone to college in the U.S. on scholarships, and my father, especially, was very grateful for having had the opportunity to do so.

As a child raised for most of my life in the middle class, I was told that I had every opportunity, and that, if I failed to take advantage, and to make something of myself, I had nobody but myself to blame if I ended up... someplace bad. It was never said explicitly in our nuclear household - I think both my parents were too liberal to repeat the cliched Singaporean/Malaysian warning that if I didn't work hard, I would end up a roadsweeper - but I think that this unspoken (unspeakable?) fear was of ending up in poverty or working a "mindless" job, or both - to become somebody to pity and/or despise.

I internalized this message strongly. At the age of about nine or ten, a partner at my father's law firm who was visiting from the U.S. asked me what I thought of affirmative action, and explained (inaccurately, and certainly incompletely) that it was a system of giving preference to candidates for colleges based on race. I immediately jumped at the opportunity to trumpet my meritocratic ideals, and emphatically denounced such a system. This drew some delighted laughter from the visitor. I don't know what his intention was in asking such a question of a child, and I don't know what impact my answer had on my parents, both of whom had attended college in the U.S. as Asian people in the 70s and may have themselves benefited from race-based affirmative action, whether they knew it or not. If they objected to my answer, they held their tongues.

I also learned how to wield these ideas as weapons. Once, upset at my father for lecturing me about some bad grade or other, I threw the idea of meaningful work being the reward for industriousness back in his face. "What change in the world does your job accomplish?" I spat, "you're just a lawyer who helps companies make a lot of money!" In essence, I was questioning his credentials - who are you to tell me how to live my life, when you have a job that doesn't measure up?

Both my parents were professionals with prestigious advanced degrees. My mother was a professor of science, having received her higher education in the U.S. and the UK. Most of her career was at the National University of Singapore. My father got his education also in the U.S. and UK, taught in a University for a while, then returned to University in the UK for a law degree, and became a lawyer. He worked for most of his career with a large firm.

I idolized my parents for their intelligence and hard work. In the universe of possible meaningful future careers, academic and lawyer were pretty much at the top of my list. They still are today.

Rarely did my parents talk about how difficult it was to make their way through college as foreign students who had been raised working class and poor. I think that doing so would have threatened both the idea that the world was at least relatively meritocratic, and that there were neutral standards of merit out there. However, there are a few memories that stand out from my childhood as a clue to how hard it was for my parents.

My mother once told me how hard it was for her to leave home. It was strange to her to think of there being a "good" school so far away. She did not know how to decide which schools were good or not. Once she had been accepted to the school of her choice, her mother, my Amah, objected strenuously to her leaving - from her point of view, she was losing her daughter, and for what? My Ah Kong, my mother's father, however, was a teacher, and supported my mother's desire to get a good education. My mother ended up going to that school and now, as an alum, helps to recruit and interview young women in Singapore and Malaysia for her alma mater.

My father would sometimes allude to the racism of white people, specifically certain partners in his law firm (this was before he made partner himself), and professors in the US and UK. "They think they're smarter than me just because they're white," he said. He told me he had to work much harder, and be much smarter, than his white counterparts, just to prove he belonged, and deserved to be there. Even after he made partner, he told me, some white partners in the firm would treat him with condescension and hostility, especially refusing to credit him for his ideas for directions the firm should take.

As I reflect on work now, I want to hold on to the idea that work can be meaningful, but let go of the idea that there is a hierarchy of work, that only certain people (hardworking, smart people) deserve to do meaningful work, and that anyone who works at a job they dislike does so because they didn't try hard enough or weren't smart enough to do anything else. It is very difficult to let go of this idea, however. Not only was I raised with it, but it is constantly reinforced now. It's an easy thing to fall back on too, when my ego is shaken by the daily indignities of living in this society - I may have it bad, but at least I'm smart enough to not be working at that guy's job.

It is important, as a mainly raised middle-class child, that I did still get some glimpses of my parents' insights and experiences from being raised poor and working-class, even if they came with a heady chaser of meritocratic ideology. I think that I would also like to talk with them more about their experiences becoming middle-class, especially to see if they feel like they have lost something in the process. I know that I feel a sense of loss having left Singapore to come to the U.S., in order to go to a "good" school, and then "make it" in a major center of capitalist power.

Wednesday, August 24, 2011

Koans for the 21st century

The Texting Monk - Vientiane, Laos

What was on your original facebook profile before facebook was invented?

Is the bearded Bodhidarma's non-existent beard ironic?

What runs a search, the user or Google?

If a flash mob happens in downtown New York and nobody posts it on youtube, did it really happen?

What is the sound of no artist on pandora?

Tuesday, August 23, 2011

Identity Politic wishlist

1. Enough critical mass of queer Buddhists of colour to organise for a regular meditation sitting group in Sydney

2. Working with a group of people who were raised (upper-)middle class on engaging and challenging class privilege (rather than just paternalistic work on poverty)

3. Mix-gender queer dubstep party

4. Intellectual discussion group on sexual ethics with other young gay men

Monday, August 22, 2011

Growing up Middle Class in Singapore (Part One?)

A note: Right now I am on a project of thinking about class more. As part of that project, I am hoping to reflect and write about how it was to grow up middle class, and what it is like now to be a middle-class professional. I think that part of what perpetuates the invisibility of class, and thus a lack of public discussion of how we can end class structures and oppression, particularly in the United States and Singapore, is the reluctance or inability of middle-class people to talk honestly about our experience of class, and to acknowledge the ways we both benefit from and are oppressed because of the class structure.

There is a lot of fear, shame, and guilt associated with encountering class difference and thinking about class. This is not unique to middle-class people, but I think that the way it manifests for the middle-classes is in silence and/or a superior distancing attitude from people they consider to be of a lower class background, and from poor people. I hope to unlearn and undo these rigid patterns of thought in myself by openly talking about class and its role in my life without denigrating the intelligence, goodness, and value of working-class or poor people, or of other middle-class people.

Auntie

Pedicure on Orchard Rd

When I was six, my family moved to Singapore, and hired a live-in maid. Her name was Belan, and she was from the Phillipines.

Because it would have been near unthinkable for a child to call an adult just by their given name, my brother and I were told to call Belan "Auntie." However, unlike other Aunties in our life, my brother and I did not append her name to this title, so she was just an unadorned "auntie," not "Auntie Belan." This was the same way we would address older women that we barely knew or with whom we had a merely commercial relationship ("Auntie, soya bean how much?"). Thus was she marked out as always a stranger to us, even though she lived in our home.

Auntie had a small bedroom with a very small window. The room barely fit her bed, a small plastic dresser, and, as I recall, a chair. I believe she also kept some laundry supplies in her room. I would often see her ironing and folding our clothes in her room. Unlike my brother and my bedroom and my parents' bedroom, Auntie's bedroom door opened into the laundry and trash area connected to the kitchen, rather than into the living room. It was distinctly the "back" of the house. Of all these details I cannot be too sure - the various apartments we lived in blur together, as do the various work lives of the four different live-in maids we had over the course of our childhood.

Auntie did almost all of the work of maintaining the household, including all of the cleaning, cooking, laundry, and some of the grocery shopping. When we ate, my nuclear family would eat first. Auntie, having cooked the food, would set it out on our dining table, and would usually retreat to her room while we ate. When we were finished eating, Auntie would clear the table, and then prepare a plate for herself to eat in her room or standing in the kitchen. She then put away the leftover food, and cleaned all the dishes.

Auntie took on a caretaker role for me and my brother for the hours between when we got home from school and when my parents returned from work. This was not a happy role for her or for us. She rarely seemed pleased to see us when we arrived home and, similarly, we were rarely pleased or delighted to see her. Our relationship was arms-length, cold. When I saw other children being physically affectionate with their families' Filipina live-in maids, I felt a kind of shocked dismay each time. It seemed unnatural to me, and a little unsavory, like hugging someone you had just met on the bus.

Auntie had one day off a week - Sunday. On that day, my mother or father would sometimes cook lunch for the family - usually a noodle dish. I think my mother would then clean up, or perhaps rinse the dishes and leave them for Auntie to clean fully and put away. I do not remember my father helping with the cleaning. Although I now see preparing food for one's family and friends as an expression of care and love, I also realize that for most of my childhood, there was at most only one day a week that one of my parents prepared food for us without a financial transaction taking place.

Auntie was a working class young woman living in a house with two early-middle-age professionals (my parents). A native Tagalog speaker in a country dominated by English and Chinese speakers. A Catholic living among atheists. A single woman with no children, she was suddenly faced with caring for a six and a three year old. I don't know how much she got paid, but I can't imagine she was raking it in, since her salary just came off the top of whatever my parents earned, with the agency that placed her with us taking a cut. It was not a great setup, and she sometimes expressed her anger at her situation by telling me stories of Filipina maids who had gone off the deep end and gone on murder sprees, killing their employers, their employers' children, and even other Filipina maids (this was the kind of story that the Singaporean media loved), the implication being that if we did not behave ourselves, she might snap in a similar way.

To us children, Auntie was a person with no backstory, and little context outside of the work she did. We never met her friends, her family. Unlike everyone else in our lives, she seemed un-tethered, completely outside the network of kinship and acquaintance about which we were often kept updated as a way of signalling social connection (Are you still in touch with so-and-so? Did you hear his wife just got out of hospital? Her sister just moved to Penang, down the street from such-and-such you know. Her nephew is friends with your cousin etc. etc.). Even now, as far as I know, I have no way of finding out what has happened to her. She lived with us for four years, and, once her employment with us was over, she was out of our lives.

I'll probably write more about this and other memories of growing up middle class in Singapore in subsequent posts.

Sunday, August 21, 2011

On Identity, Wholeness and Self...

"I was trying to figure out what it meant to be gay. I soon discovered that I had to figure out what kind of lesbian I was going to be. It was obvious to me almost immediately that I was very different from most other girls. I didn't really fit into either role of 'butch' or 'femme'....In the first few months of coming out to other lesbians, I realised that I was as much a misfit into the gay world as I was in society at large. I was half butch, half femme, neither here nor there. At that point in my life, I didn't understand that playing roles in any relationship is false and will inevitably lead to the relationship's collapse. No-one can be any one thing all the time. There is a great deal of lying done while a role is being played in any relationship, homosexual or heterosexual. As I had tried to fit into the sample size clothing, I also tried to fit into a preconceived idea of what it meant to be gay. And any time I try to fit into a mold made by someone else, whether that means sample size clothing or a strict label of 'butch or 'femme', I lose myself."

- Portia de Rossi (Unbearable Lightness, 2010)

On meditating...


You have just accepted an invitation to be with yourself.
There is nothing between you and god.
Let your intention be love and all else will follow.

Let the darkness soothe you as you abandon your defenses
slowly and lovingly, because it’s safe now.
It always was and always will be.
Let your heart open to itself and feel the fear dissipate as
you sit and sink into the Now, free and unafraid.

You may meet your pain along the way; a fleeting thought, a tightening of the chest,
or perhaps a dead weight which you have always felt and carried.
Greet them like old friends for they have been with you your whole life
and whether by some blessing or grace, you have been entrusted with them.

Step into the shadows
and discover the light you have been searching for.
Embrace your darkest self
and discover what courage may dwell alongside your fears,
what joy may lie among your sorrows
 and what peace may be found amidst the chaos of your existence.

Abstinence from Porn



It is amazing how so many men in general are colonised by porn.

A friend of mine (who does not watch porn) told me about a recent sexual encounter of his, with another gorgeous younger man. This younger man, in his early 20s, was unable to reach orgasm with the conventional, lovingly hot sex they were having, and then later confessed, "Well... I really need to watch porn in order to cum."

As Marnia Robinson has reflected (her husband's thoughts) about it in her piece on Sexual Superabundance:
"an Internet user can see more hot babes (or whatever gets him going) in an afternoon than his ancestors saw in a lifetime."

This level of habituation to such a myriad of partners means that many consumers of porn are gaining HAREMS of sexual partners in their minds, and then losing the capacity to experience fulfillment with even just one...

Now I am not against multiple sexual partnerships per se, but the incapacity to be present with a single partner seems like a sorry place to begin one's forays into multiple ones... I am thus not 'anti-porn' in the sense of wanting to ban it or destroy it, similarly to how I am not anti-sugar... However, there is something a little bit sinister, for example, about the globalisation of high-sugar Coca-Cola (and the concurrent obesity-anorexia pandemic), just as it is with pornographic colonisation of our minds with high-speed internet access...

(incidentally, for an exploration of 'sexual anorexia' metaphor as pertaining to porn consumption, check out a link to this New York magazine article, "He's Just Not That Into Anyone"...)


Anti-porn, Pro-porn

I think we need to be more critical about how the ways we consume sexual imagery can and DO impact how we relate to others in real life. It is also pitiful that the debate on porn (to the extent that the average person is engaged in any debate about it at all) is polarised into the 'anti-sex/anti-porn' and the 'pro-sex/pro-porn' camps. While I recognise that these are but straw-people whose arguments against or in favour of porn are far more complex than my diluted reflections would indicate, I still think it is helpful to paint these broad brushstrokes to understand why I take the position I do (my attempted "Middle Way" view).

Anti-porn arguments are varied, of course, but, at their best, typically include feminist and anti-colonial objections to how the structure of the industry as it stands typically degrades and humiliates women (and men/women of colour). For a multi-billion dollar global industry, it is disproportionately owned and run by (white) men who control female labour (and that of workers of colour). Men do the hiring, men control the cameras, and men make up the bulk of porn's consumer base. Then, of course, there are the equally important criticisms of the contents of pornographic imagery, which disproportionately fetishise depictions of the subjugation and humiliation of women, the exoticism of people of colour, phallocentrism, and the privileging of male ejaculatory orgasm (as the 'culmination' of sexual interactions). These are, of course, important criticisms of porn, but these are but limited criticisms, as I will explore in a moment, and in future posts.

Sex-positive pro-porn arguments, at their best, tend to defend porn as a medium of sexual expression, arguing that while the porn industry may be, currently, disproportionately run by men in exploitation of women's bodies, this patriarchal structure is certainly not LIMITED to the porn industry, nor is it ubiquitous in ALL visual depictions of graphic sexuality for the purpose of titillation (which, for now, is my working definition of pornography). Indeed, there are plenty of far more egalitarian gay and queer porn, as well as women-owned pornographic enterprises. There is also the democratisation of pornography, to wrest it away from big producers into the hands of 'amateurs' who simply want to document their sex lives and post reflections of their fragmented exhilarations on sites like XTube. There are some ways that porn can be and has been used to assist in the exploration of sexuality for 'average' people with 'average' bodies, for people with non-normative bodies, and people with marginalised or non-normative sexual expressions. For both reclaimant producers, as well as renegade consumers, porn may well be very empowering in these ways.

To a limited extent, I would agree with both these basic (Marxist-feminist) anti-porn critiques, as well as these (queer, sex-positive) pro-porn stances. However, they are still both limited in that they focus disproportionately either on abolition or on reclamation of the pornographic enterprise (these days, arguments tend to veer toward reclamation), or else the arguments that I have delineated are primarily about "Western" or Euro-centric pornography, which is most of the porn that I have consumed (I include ALL porn that is accessible in the "West" in this delineation, including Asian porn featuring Asian bodies, as they have been made available through the filters of my liberal democratic nation-state's internet providers). We need to consider on more morally-neutral, and even compassionate ground, the correlation between pornography and Addiction.

In other words, while I see porn (particularly mainstream, heterosexual porn), especially problematic as an institution of cultural production, and while I simultaneously ALSO believe there may be a value in exploring our own desires through the use of porn (thank you basic psychoanalytic theory), the fact of the matter is that these considerations and introspections are not typically encouraged by porn producers. Indeed, it is in their very best interests to discourage the studious or mindful engagement with porn, either during, or retrospectively, for this would surely undermine pornography's basic project: To Increase Desire.


Intimacy

This sort of dualism, of having to 'pick' between anti-porn and pro-porn stances in the consideration of how or whether to consume porn, does no justice to the reality of the complexity of the relationship between consumer and product. To put it another way, I am not so much anti-porn or pro-porn, as I am pro-intimacy.

From a Buddhist perspective then, pornography is de facto problematic, in that it is constructed to capitalise not only on our existing desires, but also to produce more desire, with the neuro-biological and social consequences of building up levels of insatiability. We can be hooked onto a computer screen or magazine, not only without ever having to interact with the human beings who facilitate the arising of our desires, but also by actively severing the link between sexual desire and interpersonal communication/physical touch.

This is a truly unfortunate amputation.

For me, anyway, part of the joy of sex lies in the pleasure of mutuality, of the bonds that come from gaining familiarity with another's sexual Being (through speech, touch, and the cadences of relationship), who in turn practices reciprocity and learns the naunces of our own libidinal waves... The oxytocinic nature of interpersonal sexual bliss. There is a sublime quality to this process of mutual education (learning and teaching by doing) that is cut off when we distill the sexual encounter to more dopaminergic drives (the encouragement, as porn does, of novelty rather than familiarity, distance rather than closeness, and the laziness of No-Relation rather than the hard work of Relationship (no matter its form; casual, romantic, short-term, or long)).

For more information on the neurochemical underpinnings of this, check out Marnia Robinson's writing
Porn and Perception: Is Your Limbic Brain Distorting Your Vision?

To those who may pick up on a hint of sex-negativity behind my rejection of porn, I will link you to an article I wrote back in university on Phone Sex, which stresses the sublime-ness of interpersonal sexuality, even without direct physical contact. I want to reiterate: I am not against Simulacral Reality; but I am intentionally stressing the hierarchical nature of sexual development. Porn is a sort of 'base' sexual pleasure. Not 'wrong' (once again, not a moral judgement), just a less sophisticated way of engaging our sexual selfhood.

I'll probably write a future critique of Marnia Robinson's uncritical acceptance of monogamy- and hetero-normative views in the structure of her own critique of pornography, but for now, her insights into the neuro-chemical bases for porn's contribution to sexual disharmony and disequilibrium are pretty sound, in my opinion.

In my own experience, my consumption of porn in my life has compromised my capacity to be intimate with a man... I begin to compare what I am doing with someone in person with what I've seen in porn... Which may not be bad, as far as demonstrably loving depictions of sex may go, but becomes particularly problematic given the 'escalating' nature of pornography (as sexual-methodology) normalises mindlessness and diversity over one-pointed concentration and remaining present with your partner(s). The longer I go without watching and getting off to porn, the more free I feel to be in the Flow of the What Is of partnership.

I love myself more, my own body is beautiful; Men around me are more radiant. My energy levels are up. I do not automatically leap to the sexualisation of all men I meet in person, and instead feel freer, energetically, to simply 'play' with my interactions in real life. I am more harmlessly flirtatious (rather than lost in self-recriminations for not being hot enough). I feel more sensitive to my partners' pleasures. I slowly wean myself off of other addictive behaviours, other sexual compulsions. My heart is more open. My capacity to love another is deepened.


Final Iterations

I have no intention of ever advocating for banning pornography or judging others (in a moral sense) for using it. In a sense, I see porn in a similar way to drugs... It can enable pleasure, and insight, but not without negative consequences, and it certainly need not be the exclusive or primary catalyst for these pleasures and insights. I personally am opting for an abstinent approach (difficult as this is, and relapses do happen), but I honestly think that we need to, particularly within self-professed 'liberal' spaces, start considering a harm reduction approach to the use of porn, one which does not simply assume a consequence-less-ness to its use, or an uncritical acceptance of its sex-positive qualities.

The more aware we are of the ways we have been conditioned by sex-repression AND by its reactionary sex-positive expressions, the more we can decolonise ourselves from the false advertising that is pornography.

Reach out and touch somebody, and allow ourselves to be so touched in return.

Clinging and Desire



The Distinction Between Clinging and Desire

"At a... conference in New York City... some-one asked the writer and Buddhist scholar Stephen Batchelor about this issue:
"I have no trouble understanding the idea of non-attachment in meditation,” the questioner said, “but when it comes to my marriage and family, I don’t get it. Why is non-attachment even a positive thing to aspire to?” Attachment, even desire, seemed to the questioner like something to be supported in the inter-personal realm, not something to be overcome.

Stephen motioned to his wife, Martine, who was just coming into the room. “My wife says it is like holding a coin,” he said, and he held out one arm with his palm up and his fist closed. “We can hold it like this,” and he emphasized the closed nature of his fist, “or we can hold it like this,” and he opened his hand to show the coin sitting in the center of his palm. “The closed fist is like clinging,” he said. “But with my hand open, I still hold the coin.” Buddhism, Stephen seemed to be implying actually imagines that desire can be held lightly. The distinction between the closed and the open fist is the distinction between clinging and desire."


- quoted from Mark Epstein's "Open to Desire"



Four Noble Truths

The Buddha's Four Noble Truths are:

1. Life is Duḥkha (suffering/unsatisfactoriness)
2. Duḥkha (Suffering/Unsatisfactoriness) is caused by Tṛṣṇā (thirst/clinging [to conditioned things])
3. The Cessation of Tṛṣṇā leads to the cessation of Duḥkha, and this Cessation is known as Nirvāṇa (extinction, as in a candle flame)
4. There is a Marga (path) that leads to this Cessation

Epstein's rendering of the term Tṛṣṇā requires a differentiation that we do not typically make: which is the distinction between Clinging and Desire.

Desire itself is not the problem, which is the argument Epstein makes in his book, and which I agree with. It is when desire itself cannot be lightly held, when it turns into a grasping, a clinging, that problems arise.


Instead of a Coin, A Butterfly

If it were, say, a butterfly instead of a coin in Bachelor's metaphor, any literal grasping would also be a literal death of the very object which we were attempting to possess. The butterfly is killed by our clinging.

On the other hand, to have open palms signifies both our capacity to receive, and is also itself an act of giving (of space, of freedom, of 'allowing'). It is in this open palmed version of beholding and apprehension, that the butterfly is not killed; it is free to come and to go, and we become but the temporary beholders and beneficiaries of its beauty, with nothing destroyed.

This is, to me, the basic building block of spiritual growth. We first apprehend our motivations, and our ambitions. This act of apprehension is itself the cultivation of the union of both wisdom and compassion. Simple as it is, it is a radical departure from the severe world-denying and beauty-shunning asceticism that characterises much of false and/or institutionalised spirituality...

Of course, it is understandable why this falsity exists in the first place.

After all, the act of apprehension itself is difficult. Far easier to have closed palms in the first place, than to have beauty settle upon then but to then be refused the opportunity to hold onto it. One cannot grasp the sublime, and so any beauty that can settle upon our own impermanent lives is tinged with sadness.

However, I believe that this is easily remedied.


Right Understanding

To take the analogy of the coin one step further: Many of us are afraid. Given our circumstances and our conditioning, perhaps we are even correct in assuming that if we opened our palms, all we have cultivated or earned would vanish from us, as in what would happen if we had our hands clasped tight with our palms faced down.

However, I believe that with Right Understanding, by 'holding' our desire correctly, palms faced up, with proper understanding of the distinction between craving/clinging and desire itself, it is like unclasping our hands, and noting with sure relief that the coin does not fall...

Friday, August 19, 2011

Tuesday, August 16, 2011

Filthy Tissues

I
sift through a crowd of all my world...

On some other side,
or perhaps in some clearing,
I find my guts wrapped in plastic bags,
fluids mopped up in tissue,
and I have no choice but to
eat them, in front of
a thousand hysterical eyes...
some faces screwed up in disgust or pity,
some vomit up reminders of their own humanity
at the sight of my bouquet feastitude.

I swallow the last of my innards
and feel strong.

I look at each of the faces in the surrounding mob,
and soak in their embarrassment,
their anger,
their bewilderment, amusement, and disdain

and breathe back to them all my love...
not even forgiveness, for there is no wrong
they have committed,
no crime in them that I have witnessed.

I leave behind empty bags and filthy tissues
and it seems
some of the crowd
are eager
to have themselves a taste.

Monday, August 15, 2011

"Modern Day Gender Equality – Uniting or Alienating?" panel discussion @ University of Sydney

What a privilege!

I was invited to speak at the University on a panel on "Modern Day Gender Equality - Uniting or Alienating?" It was hosted by the Women's Collective at the University of Sydney, and I was one of 5 panelists.

It was a real honour! I was sharing a stage with several remarkable people:

Professor Raewyn Connell, from the University of Sydney, an absurdly prolific writer on gender relations (and recently on masculinity) and international professor,

casual professor and media spokesperson Jane Caro

Alan Cinis, a Greens Council member for the district of Leichardt,

and

Nina Funnell, who is a journalist and researcher at the University of NSW (at the moment, I think she is working on a project on "sexting," or cell phone sex-text messaging, among young girls).


***

I had 3 main initial observations of the evening as the scene was set and began to unfold...

1. The audience was composed mostly of young people, presumably university students.

2. Amazingly, while a majority of the audience was female, a good quarter of the room was male (as far as gender-reading goes, anyway)! It was amazing! It has never been my experience, when I was at university, to see that large a proportion of men interested in an intellectual discussion on gender.

3. I was, as far as I know, the only queer person and person of colour on the panel, Les Sigh...

[16/08/11 update: Professor Connell is a trans-woman... my apologies for my cis-gender presumptiveness!]


***

The panel discussion was arranged in a Q&A style, with the facilitators Kate & Georgina posing questions for us as panellists, and then us choosing to respond or not.

A variety of issues were discussed...


Raewyn Connell



Professor Connell was quietly intellectual. While she contributed the least in terms of stage time, I felt that she always had incisive points to make. In particular, I was really pleased at her continuous nudging toward an intersectional (in terms of sexuality, class, region, etc.) and global (transnational) understanding of gender equity.



Jane Caro



Caro focussed primarily on the continued work that needs to be done (in the name of feminism) in order to achieve full equity for women, particularly in the public-professional domains, where women are still underrepresented in positions of high political power. While I definitely appreciated her important re-emphasis on the work that needs to be done in particular around the reclamation of the identity politic of 'feminism' away from stereotypes around 'man-hating' and 'bra-burning,' etc. (especially given my current professional work on young gay men's issues, and most of my social circle being men), I did take issue with one of her points around feminism being the world's MOST noble cause. I chipped in with my two cents about anti-colonialist, anti-capitalist, anti-racist, etc. social justice issues. Caro, quite charitably, responded with an acknowledgement of the extremity of her polemic (she used to work in advertising). Then she also spoke out about the specific, somewhat unique nobility about feminist, and gay and lesbian social justice causes, as they involve often having to speak out against the oppression that is often perpetuated by our own very loved ones, our immediate family (rather than, say, an oppressive boss, or slave owner, etc.). She called this challenge the unique 'nobility' of gender- and sexuality-based social justice movements.

I suppose I tentatively concur.



Nina Funnell



I related well with Nina, in part because I'd actually worked with her previously on a Men and Feminism workshop that we co-presented at last year's "F Conference" (on Feminism) in Sydney, and in part because she is also my contemporary in terms of age. She talked about the meaning of 'mainstream media' and her support of affirmative action, women's autonomous spaces, and the ways that we might consider moving away from conceptions of the 'media' as a strictly monolithic entity.



Alan Cinis



I must admit that I did not relate to Alan's words quite as much as I would have liked; I think this was in part because, as he himself admitted, that he had some trouble hearing or understanding the questions, but I suspect it's in part because I disagreed with the fundamental position he was taking, which was encouraging a sort of individualism... In response to the question posed "Does affirmative action around gender work?" his response was Yes and No (true enough), but that we best understand it by looking at the individual merits of people, rather than simply through gendered lens (somewhat true... but of course the point here, one that he did not address, was the problem of both unconscious and structural sexism, so that the very merits we supposedly herald in all persons are ignored or passed over when they are traits exhibited by women applicants, if any even apply at all!).

At the same time, it was really good to be in the presence of another man who was at least willing and wanting to engage on the issue of gender in a way that was critically self-reflexive (he talked about his relationship to a former acting career, and the specific sorts of expectations of male as compared to female actors).



Me



When I first spoke, I first acknowledged my very real nervousness around being surrounded by quite conventionally 'successful' individuals (two university professors, a politician, and a journalist). Whew! But fortunately, I felt like my area of interest and focus was on the role of men in feminism, something which most of the other panellists had not categorically prepared talks around.

My 3 main points:

1. Our role as men is to listen to the concerns of women, and to engage and support feminist projects which are about the emancipation of all people from oppressive gendered systems (which, as they stand under patriarchy, disproportionately disenfranchise women and materially privilege men).

2. Part of this engagement is also about rehabilitating ourselves from problematic conceptions of masculinity. I mentioned the importance of male 'safe spaces' where we can allow ourselves to love other men without alcohol, and without homophobic/heteronormative qualifications (i.e. without the "No Homo" bullshit).

3. Not to misattribute our alienation as men to the important work that feminists have historically done (which, indeed, have paved the way for us to have language around this very alienation).

I also talked a little bit about the profit-driven industry of pornography and its role in enslaving men by commoditising our sexual desires, selling them back to us (i.e. selling us DESIRE itself), and then numbing us to relationships (rendering us socially awkward) by habituating ourselves to levels of stimulation that are usually unmatched by our interactions with others in-person.

This was also the first time I have EVER spoken about porn in this way in a public/group setting. It was an interesting exercise in humility, and also some good training for how I might want to bring it up in the future (without coming across as anti-sex, anti-depictions of sexuality, anti-pleasure, etc. etc.) Anyway, I think I did a decent job of conveying this point, and this was my covert anti-capitalist critique of the evening...

Professor Connell very wisely raised that these 'crises of masculinity' (of which my fretting about porn was but one example) have been going on for a long time in history, and that it is not uniquely in the age of feminism that men have started worrying in this way. I did suggest, in response, that while men have obviously waxed lyrical about our concerns which were unique to us as men across history, I don't think that we have, trans-historically, framed these concerns in emancipatory language (about our liberation as men from the problems of our socialisation into male gender, as gender, and as part of a larger project of gender equality and full liberation per se).

Also, inspired by Martin Luther King's rhetoric on extremism ("What kind of extremists will we be?"), I discussed the problem of assuming that "unity" is necessarily better than "alienation," when indeed, to be unified in support of oppressive systems (e.g. heteronormative patriarchy) is a LESSER unity, requiring first that we be, correctly, alienated, in order to then later unify under something more grand (e.g. queer-/feminism), which itself will be a unity that will meet its limits (e.g. racist/classist/nationalist assumptions, etc.), require a later alienation, followed by broader unity (e.g. under intersectional, self-reflexivity), meet its limits (e.g. impotent immobility), unify under something more grand etc. etc. ad infinitum.

And throughout all this, never compromising on the insights gained from previous unities and alienations...

We pick our alienations, and then we work with them accordingly. I suppose this was my attempt at speaking 'integrally' (integratively) without strictly using the language of Integral Theory (fucking trademark).

Lastly, in response to an audience member's question-comment on how men have been stunted because of a lack of clarity around changing gender relations, Nina first spoke out and said "Yes, these are some of the ways that patriarchy has crippled men."

And I responded to the question-comment by recalling this incident:

In Wynyard (the 'yuppie central' financial district of Sydney), last year, there was a photographic exhibition featuring the works of a female photographer who had travelled to different parts of the world taking pictures of different people. The exhibition was held in a public space, and also featured some inspirational quotes and captions under some of the photographs.

One of the photographs featured full frontal nudity of smiling black children. This was obviously considered unproblematic enough by the City of Sydney that the exhibition would go ahead without reprieve.

What I expressed to the audience about my experience with this exhibition was that:

1. What if the photographer had been a man?
2. What if the children had been white?

A great blog post by Ray Harris explores just this very issue:
The Naked Child in Art : Ethnographic Photography


Conclusive Reflections?

All in all, it was a really fantastic evening, with some really interesting and stimulating conversation, and I was very much honoured and grateful to have been invited to speak. As often, we never get to share all that we would have liked, and it is sometimes really challenging to cater a set of really complex perceptions and queries to a mixed audience... I personally would have appreciated an Acknowledgement of Country (of the traditional Aboriginal owners of the land upon which our gathering was held), but I think I lacked the political tact to know how to bring it up after the fact of the event's formal commencement.

It does feel incredibly good to be able to share some of my thoughts on feminism, gender and manhood. I feel especially good that I did not speak from a place of ultra Reactionariness (in terms of aggressive ranting about white privilege, heteronormativity, etc.).

It has been precisely 6 years since I graduated from university with a degree in Gender Studies, and I really cherish these opportunities to be able to speak on, educate and learn more about these issues, especially since I have had WAY more life experience since university!

Muchos Gracias to the University of Sydney Women's Collective!

Skyy vodka: get drunk instead of objectifying women

An affirming message for alcoholic feminists. Market st. San francisco.


Sunday, August 14, 2011

Testing

I posted this using my smartphone. How pomo is that?

Friday, August 12, 2011

Awakening in Urbanity

The current question on my mind is:

How can we design spaces that are more conducive to Awakening?
And by Awakening I mean: psycho-spiritual growth, critical thinking, positive health behaviours, mindful engagement with community and polity, etc.

I want to investigate this.