Saturday 27 September 2014

The Angry Feminist.

Once again the word 'feminist' has been hitting the headlines in a positive light due to another talented celebrity using her power of influence to normalise the name of the movement. Emma Watson formally invited all men to join in the fight for equality as UN ambassador for women. After pointing out 'feminism' had collected a number of very negative connotations in the past decades she then continued to eloquently disparage all of this negativity around the word. The world sighed with relief again as somebody else successfully spread the word of equality and took the movement up a notch. Maybe, we all thought, this really will happen someday.

But why has a belief in feminism, which seems beneficial to everyone involved, become such a scornful phrase? There are many interweaving factors to this degradation of the word, yet one aspect we probably should take time to review would be the self-destructive quality that feminism can sometimes create. The 'angry feminist' stereotype is most likely quite a discouraging feature of feminism, and one that should be discussed and then discredited. You could argue that the angry feminist is just a belittling term used by men who still call women 'hysterical' when they display any emotion that isn't blissful ignorance. Women have spent years being silenced (and still are) so it's probably about time they screamed out to the world to tell it to go to its room until it understands what it's done. Also when you identify yourself as a feminist it's very difficult to understand how people can think differently to wanting equality so jumping at any poor sod who doesn't quite comprehend the word and demanding to know their reasons for not being feminist is easy to do. It is a bit like banging your head against a brick wall constantly when suddenly informed about the many injustices of the world and so not getting hysterically angry is really, really, really hard.

However, when we want people to be on our side responding rapidly to 'anti-feminists' with pitchforks and fires is possibly not the best move. Perhaps women who aren't certain about feminism are often intimidated by those of us who can quickly heat up when faced with yet another obstacle. It is not a question of not ever getting angry because not only would that be impossible but also completely pointless, it is more a way of responding to the little things with patience and agreeableness.

By all means get really irate and mad and furious at the inequality in the world to inspire the change it needs. But when someone smirks if you say you are a feminist because they fail to understand the meaning outside of its almost comical stereotype then whatever you do stay calm. It's arduous to be faced with this ignorance daily, but no one ever helps themselves by indulging a cliché.


If you haven't already, give Emma a watch because she really is spectacular:



Saturday 20 September 2014

The ultimate 'me'.

I spend a ludicrous amount of time trying to plan out and understand who I am. I set goals for myself, make routines and plan activities that I think will make me the best version of myself. If I spend this amount of time reading and not watching back to back episodes of Orange is the New Black then I will be a much better person. I will probably be closer to discovering my ultimate being. The definition of my personal existence will make itself clear and I will continue being my true self for the rest of my life. I will be glorious. Forget all the other instances where I went against what I was supposed to be doing and spent hours being completely unsure with what to do with myself. From now on I will always know what to do, I will always be productive, I will finally be me.

I am aware that this entire thought process and the hours spent imagining the entirely idealised version of myself is a complete waste of time. It has suddenly come to my notice that every time I disappoint myself or every time I am not really being me will not only be buried under folds of time but are in actual fact just tiny threads of myself in the vast fabric of my being. I can never be anything other than myself and I have been doing just that for the whole of my existence. Instead of quickly trying to cover up versions of myself that I'm not quite satisfied with I will celebrate them. I will celebrate who I was yesterday, I will enjoy who I am today and I will look forward to who I am tomorrow. Each experience I have is experienced through the eyes of someone I have no control over. Every person I have ever been and ever will be is not totally decided by my own imagination but by my growth and development as a human.

I will never be who I am being today again and that is so brilliantly exciting. I will reinvent myself by accident every single moment I'm alive but each of these versions of myself make up for a whole person. I will never know who I will be based on my past and my present because my past and my present vary so infinitely. But I do understand that when I am disappointed in myself it is not something to be ashamed of, it is simply another me that will add only a tiny ripple to my life. I will change tomorrow. I will stay the same and alter myself simultaneously.

I am not sure exactly what I am saying, but I do know that it is just life. Being me is just life and I can either accept myself and enjoy it or spend all of it agitating over not being who I'm 'supposed' to be.

Thursday 18 September 2014

Gettin' down with the kids.

For those of us living in the dark ages a new discovery has been made that will make some blogging lives much easier. I say new discovery because for some reason I had not heard of this fabulous website Bloglovin. I have now. The world is at last at peace.

So, go on, follow The Fully Intended on Bloglovin on the link below!

"http://www.bloglovin.com/blog/12890729/?claim=h8e8strneg6"

Thursday 11 September 2014

Watching people die.

So there's this footage of the Russian Civil War after 1917 that demonstrates an example of the Bolshevik's ruthless reactions and these two guys' heads are just blown off on camera and you see them die. Oh and if you look it up there's this photo of two black men hanging in the wind at a lynch mob whilst the white people cheer for the death of these men. They're both kind of gross, I guess, but it was a long time ago and I need to look at it for my history GCSE. Also did you know that in the video game Grand Theft Auto 5 you can just beat up a prostitute to death if you don't feel like paying her. How HILARIOUS is that?

It's not hilarious. It's not hilarious at all. Nor is it 'kind of gross' to watch or see real men die in front of your eyes. But teachers at school will show you this without warning you. It's historical evidence therefore no one thinks about how inappropriate it is to use and reuse a visual medium of a civilian's violent death to the point where it begins to mean nothing. It is simply a source of information. The person dying in the image or video does not even become a martyr of any movement or revolution, they are simply a bit of information. People die every day, history is just a huge collection of stories from the dead, but you wouldn't watch a youtube video of your great grandpa being blown up on No Man's Land in WW1 to understand how he died, would you?

However, that prostitute in Grand Theft Auto 5 is just a fictional character made up of code. It's not even real, you never actually violently murder someone. You just initiate it within the game and watch it happen. It probably entertains you.

We have started to completely desensitise ourselves to these extreme images of brutality. They mean nothing to us now, not even a twinge of empathy can be felt for those who have died in an often undignified manner. It is just an image, just a video and just a game. But I don't need to see a beheading to know how it happens. In any reasonable situation I would not be entertained by an act of ferocity.

Fundamentally I find it disrespectful. It is disrespectful for a class of bored, young people to look at an image of totally unjustifiable murder and barely feel angry that it happened. The lack of emphasis on the reality of these images is the result of thousands of films and games like Grand Theft Auto 5 that make us feel indifferent to genuine violence and death. There is no benefit of being desensitised to violence. You gain nothing but a deficiency of human empathy. And whilst it is statistically very unlikely for young boys to be inspired to gun everyone down one day, or to justify violence towards women, the normalisation of severe and immoderate violence is essentially quite terrifying. It does mean that lines between the unacceptable and the 'ordinary' will blur and people's judgement will change.

Violence unfortunately occurs with or without watching films or playing video games with abusive themes, but at what point does it really become unfitting to regard it from the safety of our own homes for our own voyeuristic enjoyment?