31 de gener 2018

me too

Often, when I am asked if I am a feminist, I don't quite know how to take it, I am a woman. Being a feminist comes as a default.


However, I don't like being expected to consider myself one as an external characteristic, not only because in my view it seems to accentuate the gap, but also, because from a linguistic point of view and in contraposition to chauvinism, it unconsciously designates the other extreme, which is not the case. 

I am a woman, I am aware of the differences between the two sexes, but I am also aware, that it is a men's world in general and we lack some privileges men don't need to fight for. 
I am a woman, hence, a feminist, as, with my existence I will do all I can possibly do to shorten the gap within the obvious differences.



Generational unawareness...

I found myself the other day watching this video in my parents' company. I mentioned the last statement made in the video hit me very hard and had me crying of anger for over a week. While trying to control my sobbing, my mum missed out that last bit I asked her to pay attention to, because in her attention span, she had moved to playing Candy Crush. I saw myself explaining to them that he was making a methaphore to "la manada", the Whatsapp name of 5 young men who went to the Sanfermines and who clearly stated on their whatsapp conversations that they wanted to get loaded, buy rape pills and with zero shame but proud proclaimed: rape someone. They succeeded and raped an 18 year old within the 5 of them. Brutally and mercilessly. I won't get into the court case details, but they are now free.

I did got to the Sanfermines once, too, when I was 22, with my older 27 year old friend. Two girls. I was more the party and drinking type, and she was more a seducer. None of us had booked any accommodation trusting we could pass out somewhere on the public spaces, common practice that day of the year.

Turned out we met some young men very late, when the sun was coming up, and with my seducer's friend help we were invited to crash with them. Them and some other very drunken guys in mattresses spread in a living room.
My friend did get laid on some mattress spread in the living room with the guy she had been exchanging looks with. I didn't. I don't see any added bonus to a one-night-trophy-shag. I slept. Her actions were consensual at every point. Had she felt uncomfortable we would have left the place. At no point I made a move to any of the guys there, but we were all laughs and giggles for sure. It was summer and we were wearing short sleeves. She might have had a skirt on. I am sure I didn't because I never wore skirts in my 20s. The bottom point was, that we could have been that girl, maybe even with more aggravating factors. We felt at ease with our hosts, and I am sure neither of us would have ever imagined any of the guys to have done something inappropriate. I have traveled alone for years and that is how I have always felt. And it's the way it should be, but it unfortunately isn't. I am sure our experience still is the rule, but there shouldn't be an exception. And in that case, it should be punished hard. There is nothing more sacred than your body.

SOLAS


https://www.elpais.cr/2016/03/08/noticias-del-asesinato-de-turistas-argentinas-exponen-costado-machista/

"Las dos chicas argentinas violadas que viajaban solas Marina Mengazzo, de 21 años y María José Coni, de 22, circulando por las redes sociales".

If you don't see the blatant chauvinism, let me ask how many women/girls does it take not to travel alone?

This case took place while I was travelling South America. Of all the places I have traveled to, it was the one where I felt more objectified, where I unfortunately, more often than not, felt men as predators. Like that time I interrupted a stay with an otherwise nice host, because he would suggest to f*ck per direct or in every other remark. It was very unpleasant and it spoiled nice moments, as I felt I had to go on defensive, on victim mode. 


María and Marina were invited to stay the night by two guys. They accepted since they were quite low on budget. They got raped and murdered, one of the guys said he accidentally killed them because they were too loud. It almost implies he has done something of the like befo
re. 

These things still happen. They shouldn't happen. Men should be educated in consent. Kids in empathy.
The press discriminates us more when, in the headlines, they mention they travel alone. I doubt that would have been formulated this way if it was two men. I doubt, leave rape aside, the press would have said two young men travelling alone were robbed and murdered.

Let's see: 
El juicio a La Manada —el grupo de cinco hombres que formaban parte de un chat de Whatsapp con esa denominación— por la supuesta violación a una joven de 18 años en los Sanfermines de 2016 entra en su recta final. 

Supuesta violación, see what happens to a man:



Violado= when they went on to have kids and have a family- A happy end?... Glorification of the use of rape?

#metoo

In May of 1998 I gave myself a trip to Prag, on my own. Alone. I booked a hostel behind the central station. I had been told the station was an unsafe area at night. It really looked like a dodgy area I avoided. 
Turns out after going out for beers and jazz with some newly acquaintances (silver lining: I met my bestest Luxemburger friend for years to come), I had to leave the metro before reaching my station, on the central station exchange, because of curfew. 
Turns out I had to walk to the hostel from that station. It was hard to talk to people, I tried to get help from the police but they were only interested in controlling my passport. I had no money left. The only way to my hostel was through the station. I found a coat on the street I put on, because it was getting cold. The coat was 2 sizes bigger and made me look like a dark mass of fabric. I did manage to cross the very dodgy park at the station unnoticed. There were mainly drunks and some drug dealing and prostitution from the other side of the steel curtain. 

I reached a street. I only had to cross and walk up the hill. Relieved I didn't get in any trouble, nobody cared about me. And then I heard this voice. A male. He was calling me, but as we women do when guys cat calls us, I ignored him. But he ran after me. There I was face to face with this man. All I remember was his very dirty nails, he didn't give me a nice first impression and there was nowhere to go. 
He kept me on conversation for nearly 30 minutes, trying to invite me to the casino. Me, pretending I was late to meet my friends and telling him I was going towards the opposite direction, so he wouldn't know where I was staying, in case he'd follow me there (all of these techniques are applied after real experiences, I wonder if men would ever had to). 

I politely rejected all his offers to accompany me, to join him in the Casino, to have a drink and so forth. I nicely said bye and walked to my pretend direction. 
I didn't refuse to shake hands as a good-bye. He grabbed my hand hard, pulled me towards him aggressively, grabbed my face and licked it from bottom to top. I turned around, slowly, mute and started walking, my back to him. He started to shout: run! run now! and came after me, so I ran. I followed a street and saw a small alley where I could cut back and reverse direction,  to get closer to the hostel again. When I did reach the main street, like in the movies, I saw a cab and took it. 
I don't know what he had in mind, but he had already managed to place himself in a spot to run directly from the other side (a very sick game of hide and seek).
My cabby didn't speak German, or English or Spanish or French and I didn't speak Czeck. But he could feel what was going on, he could see me pointing, shouting, making gestures to that man. He empathised.

He dropped me at the hostel and refused to charge me the fare.

That night it could have been me. Travelling alone version.


And as I was still working on this writing I found out about Diana Quer, new sick rape case in Spain. It makes me feel so responsible to work toward a change. 
As usual education is key, but can we reach out to all those abused/neglected kids? 
Is justice going to modify the condemns, in order to address the magnitude of the issue?
So don't call me a feminist. It's common sense.

16 de gener 2018

do normal


Doe normaal!

a Dutch expression that parents typically tell their kids when they are behaving obnoxiously. 

In my circle of friends in Amsterdam we overuse it in irony mode, mocking the undescribable concept of "normal". Because maybe you can try to do normal, but being normal is a more complex thing.

I think am doing normal these last weeks. It is interesting, here some normal doings:

I wake up in the morning Monday to Friday. I commute in public transport. I overuse senseless sentences that have morning, weather, Mondays, Fridays or weekends as a subject. On the weekends I feel I have to go out and drink (something I haven't craved since last time I did normal back in 2015). I do hang out at parks with kids at times. We do sand castles. Life is normal.

The most normal thing I am doing is spectacular: I have incorporated an activity I have refused to undertake in my 20 years of very active lifestyle:
I go to the gym.
Well, I found a discount on a site to join the barrio's gym, because of its swimming pool (a place I like to go in winter).
Since I was going to do normal for a while, I thought I would blend in beautifully if I also did the dreaded indoor exercises.
It was a very interesting experience and I am sure it will still providea lot of anthropologic material.
I was late to one of these group classes and I had a 40 minute gap to fill, sporty dressed and all. I thought I'd go to the fitness room and see what goes on in there.
I am no stranger to weight exercises, but I am to machine-filled rooms.

 I do regularly follow very primitive exercises on vintage videos in my laptop and they help me start the day. I split the screen between a muted 80's exercise video, with John Oliver or Late Motiv volume on. The habbit has gotten to a point that I can't see Buenafuente, Broncano or Berto Romero without lifting dumbells or doing donkey kicks. Pavlov's bitch big time! 

But that was before doing normal. It was when I didn't know the day of the week, when I woke up when my body felt like it, where I could take 20 minutes to have a coffee, and a smoothie, hang around and wait for the first bowel moves and then set myself in the living room to watch videos of the School of Life while wearing ankle weights in my pajamas.

I knew doing normal would help me appreciate my life much more. Thank you, normalcy.

Today the experience is called: "normal things that happen in a gym".

I have always said I dislike gyms, a lot. I couldn't provide empirical information, it was just a gut feeling from past experiences. I never quite embraced the idea of groupalry doing exercises going nowhere like hamsters in a mill. In my beloved Sydney, for instance there is 1 fitness trainer every 2 citizens. In a city you can actually run on the beach sand as soft as flour or do outdoors exercises with views of the whales in the horizon. True story Christiansen Park!

Anyway, with the experience fresh in my senses I can  state from a non-empirical point of view why I dislike gyms:

It has a lot of the things hypersensitive beeings find gross combined:

- Smelly people - check!
- annoying music - check!
- excessive vanity - check!
- television screens - check!
- superficial interactions - check!
- scarce intellect - check!
- unnatural bodies - check!

I started feeling a bit visually disturbed by those guys so pumped they can't hang their arms on both sides of their body. I call it the inverted croissant effect.

To me, muscly guys are unsexy, because they use their biceps to lift a lot of weight, but they don't seem to have lifted a book (and/or read it). 
As I came closer to them the initial assumtion confirmed itself when I accidentally eavesdropped the guys on my left: they were talking passionately about the great atmosphere at Pacha and who could get them cheap tickets. They were in their 30's, mind you, I would turn a blind eye on 15 year olds. Don't judge. Dios los cría y ellos entran gratis en Pachá.

I suddenly had the impulse of running out of the room in sheer confusion and convinced that it couldn't be possible I shared DNA with those walking croissants of muscle, product of hamster-like exercise, that tissue-damaging protein powder that reeks of turtle guano and perhaps good old steroids, steroids+testosterone: the rapist-maker.
As my mind wandered to the view of bumpy bodies, I thought, as I always think: "if you saw yourselves in my eyes..." All to the rythm of repetitive boom boom music, that was really fogging my mind. 

And I also though, as I always think, if any female in the world finds that pumped, ballooned, shaved, shiny, smelly, bumpy, veiny body sexually appealing. 
In order to escape the horror in front of me my mind needed to fantasise with chubby guys, not the flubby ones, the naturally "big boned", with arms like my legs, a protubering tummy to lay on, some body hair, those you can fall on to and never hurt yourself, sinking a bit in a feast of warm flesh (hmmm)
I was so horrified by the scenario and my thoughts that I started to fancy the idea of getting out of the building and join the parents outside watching the swimmers for the 30 minutes I had left until the yoga class.

But, oh serendipity made a plot twist, as I put my hand in my pocket and I found I had my mp3 inside. Block my ears, hit play... and suddenly the idea of listening to "Flashback" from Fat Freddy's Drop calmed me down (that intro...) and gave me strength to resist.

I had an atypical rush of courage, of positivity, thinking: "I paid for this, and I will use these machines to get the hardest, roundest, slap-a-best 40-year old-arse in the district of Horta-Guinardó and maybe even Nou Barris."
The music in my player continued to "Over and Over" from Morcheeba and it gave me new energy to look forward to coming back home and practising the picking on the guitar. Awwwww
The idea of coming home to my guitar cheered me up a bit. And then I remembered a dear friend who once confessed she liked working out because she gets micro orgasms when she hangs from a bar and does sit ups.
Slightly panty-moisted by the idea of coming home to the guitar, I remembered that doing butt-exercises does not exactly make me calieeeente, but the moves have a positive effect on my crotch. Maybe if I work on it I can manage to reach a few microorgasms and get something out of the situation other than sore muscles. Challenge accepted, purrr.

I went to talk to the monitor. My first question was, in Catalan: "haig de portar la meva pròpia màrfega?" Em contesta: "l'alfumbrilla? No, no la tens que portar, hi han aquí"
Penso en el Yeral i l'Àfrica. Sona Eurythmics: "there must be an angel (playing with my heart)" I laugh like a mad woman at the randomness of my playlist.

I don't know if I'll follow on. I have thought that I can load the mp3 player with audiobooks while working out and focusing on reaching some sort of a similar climax to my friend's while working on my abductors, glutes, adductors, hamstrings... I can bypass the odd smell by focusing on familiar scents. The perks of looking into the bright side, woohoo!

I'll keep track of changes and maybe get over the idea that uploading pictures is vain and just try to make something out of being a work in progress in the oh-not-so-fresh years and my normal doing stage.
I've never had a gym-butt. 
Say hello to the yummiest gym-butt to be, yeaaaahh, yessss, yessss, YEEEAAAAAAHHH

Ik ga normaal doen, hurra!