This Game Had Consumed My Life

Written On The Body Pt.1

I’m sitting here at my desk trying to make sense out of this book and doing a horrible job of it I might add. Not really the book, more the issues in the book that I have to think about for myself. And so I think to myself, perchance if I were to reason it out in writing I could get somewhere. So for now let us begin with the biggest question in my mind after this novel.

Where do my gendered perceptions come from and why the hell is it such a big deal to begin with?

So I guess that I will have to be horrible and cliché about the whole thing and begin with blaming the culture that I was raised in. Not that my other reason is that much less cliché, it’s family, but as I know in my best way of knowing, gender is a learned thing, and those are the main two places you learn any social behavior.

Okay, Society. A great deal of it has to do with power. Gender is one of those things that keeps the social hierarchy in place. Look at it as a pyramid, which it is. On top in that small minority is the white, heteronormative, patriarchal male. The more “masculinized“ you are within this the higher you are. And of course I should qualify this with the fact that I can only speak of my Amerocentric upbringing and society, this apex is socially different across the globe. Without fail though no matter where you look throughout the world, it is the heterosexual hyper-masculine male at the top of society.

So since the idea of gender keeps people in their places, ensuring power for those on top, I begin to see why it is so essential to our society.

And to segue for a moment, I want to clarify that is is a big deal. I don’t care how ”liberal“ or ”open-minded“ you think you are. You are just as caught up in the gender game as I or anyone else is, with perhaps the exception of a very few people on this planet. I’m not going to argue that point. Accept it.

Back to power though, you can see why it is a fairly nice system. A mode of labeling, that feminist and misogynist alike buy into, a system that equally cripples both of them, leaves those on top with a lot of power. After all, if you can disenfranchise most of the population they are a lot easier to dominate.

From before we even get ready to exit the womb we are engendered. We are put into one of two checkboxes M or F. And for those who are not clearly one or the other, well the doctors butcher them into one of the boxes. And that is not a rare occurrence either. It’s more common that red hair. The fact that there is an entire medical process for forcing people into the generally accepted gender binary must mean that it is a construct. If things that common were ”anomalies” there would be a hell of a lot more people dying their ”defects“ away.

I can site examples of the gender binary in society until I’m blue in the face, but I think you get the point.

To be continued in part 2...

This Man Is My Hero

Today I Saw The Jerry Springer Show Live

50's Mentality Pt.1

Why is it that things that you don’t like are somehow considered to be good for you?

It’s like that old 50’s mentality, you know the one: “What doesn’t kill you only makes you stringer.” That one.

Thinking on this I realize that in all practical matters it’s true. For instance the sucker-fish. Those things give me the creeps. They look so horrible and scary, some freakish holdover from the prehistoric ages. Without it though your aquarium is twice as hard to keep up. So, no matter how squeamish they make you, keep them around because in the long run it really is good for you.

Exercise is another thing. I’m at the gym last week and I’m on this machine called the “true Strider” and I tell you it was hell. In thirty minutes I burned away seven hundred calories. The morning after my legs felt a though they had been immersed in flames. The first few steps out of the bed threatened to give from beneath me. In retrospect though, it really does do wonders for the calves. And once again, what seems like the time from hell ends up being great for you after the fact.

Now it’s true, this good old 50’s mentality holds true in a lot of situations. This is why people are so willing to take it as gospel. Ask anyone and they will nine times out of ten say that it is true, no qualifiers. Only every now and then will you get the qualifiers of “usually” or “most of the time“. And if you ask those people why they add that qualifier, they will undoubtedly have had some personal trauma that disproved it. If you were to further interrogate these people, nine out of ten will quote some overbearing parent, teacher, coach, or employer. I’m not really interested in them though.

I want to know about that one tenth of one tenth that sites love as the qualifying experience. And as pretentiously romantic it is to feel that to be wounded by love is to be in a minority, it’s how I feel, if you don’t like it, you can stop reading right now.

So 1% of the 50’s mentality population, is what I want to discuss. And in my very own romantically pretentious way I am going to use myself as the standard for our lot.

We are told that it is better to have loved and lost than to have never loved at all. The theory being that bouncing back from heartbreak is somehow fortifying in character and better off to have the war scar than to stay in hiding. I hope no one ever tried that argument on Anne Frank. Supposing that you survive the heartbreak though it is supposed to be a fortifying experience. Those who do not survive it, well that is another camp all together.

I want to talk about those of us who are broken. I mean that pseudo-rare class of people who are genuinely broken from a great, yet non-lethal, heartbreak.

In short I wish to talk of my own heartbreak, and how though I have survived it, at least physically, I am weakened, even broken, because of it.