EVERYONE LIKES TEDDIES!

Something that's bugging me recently but has always bugged me somewhat is societal gender roles and gender pigeon-holing. I'm going to try and not offend anyone in this post but if I do it's purely because I have a different understanding to you, I would love for you to talk to me in the comments and explain your perspective if you think I have said anything out of line here or I'm missing something fundamentally important!

So I'll start with asking; what does it mean to identify as male? What does it mean to identify as female? What does it mean to identify as having both genders or even no gender? Is it a sexual thing? Is it a societal thing? To me, identifying as any of these means absolutely nothing. To me the definitions are you are male if you have male anatomy and a female if you have female anatomy and if you're blessed with characteristics of both then you are intersex - but some people would define that as sex and not gender, to me gender does not exist, to me, the words are interchangeable. As far as I'm aware identity has no gender and gender has nothing to do identity.

But then maybe I'm confused on what identity is... What is identity? My identity is who I am. It is my personality, my morality, my ambitions and desires... it is everything that drives me to do what I do. Identity to me is not skin colour, hair colour, eye colour, sex, the shape of your nose or the height of your cheekbones. I'll use an analogy I read in an article about racism the other day, I think it can be applied in the same context here; identifying people based on their outer appearance is like organising books by the colour of their covers. Categorising books by red, blue, green etc. regardless of their content would inarguably be silly, so why is it that we insist on doing it with people?

Let's debunk this a little bit more... What has society taught us about gender?

Some of the characteristics associated with being masculine; physical strength, independence, ambition, dominance, protectiveness, high sexuality, tolerance of physical pain, emotional disconnect and an affinity to the colour blue.

Some of the characteristics associated with being feminine; compassion, humility, sexual elusion, generosity, servitude, physical delicacy, bashfulness and a love of the colour pink.

Now look at these characteristics and ignore the gender label assigned to them. If you only possess qualities from one of these classifications and brush the others off as having nothing to do with you then my personal opinion is that you can not possibly be a healthy or happy individual. I admit these are rather outdated views of gender roles, but to a high degree these are still brutally imposed upon us from a very young age.

I'll get a little more personal here, I have always said I didn't get on with girls as much as I got on with boys and I've never really thought about it, I always just felt like I had more male friends than female friends... But now that I think about it that's not strictly true, I've always had loads of female friends but I just always thought of females as having the above female characteristics and therefore automatically said I didn't have as many friends like that. If I were to count the number of male and female friends I have/I had I think I'd get quite even numbers.

I've never been much of a girly girl (I say as I'm sat here wearing a 'hot pink' bra which I bought because I loved the colour). I have two older brothers who I spent most of my childhood playing with, fighting with and generally getting into trouble with. Naturally their friends were my friends and vice versa, they went to all boys schools until they were 11/12, so all of their friends from school were guys and I went to all girls schools until I was 12/13 so all of my friends from school were girls. I guess I was outnumbered 2 to 1 so maybe I did have more male friends than female friends as a child but I don't remember hanging out with one gender more than the other...

As a kid some of the things I loved to do were climbing things, playing football and netball, wrestling/fighting, collecting bugs, playing with animals, dressing up in silly outfits, doing stupid things with my hair and speaking in funny accents, dancing, singing, shouting, skating, picking flowers, reading, maths, taking things apart, fixing things, making things, putting glitter on things, fluffy things, colouring (or just colour in general), watermelon, strawberries and mashed potato. Some of the things I hated were make-up, dresses, snails/slugs/anything slimey, ballet, small spiders, English, history, sour sweets, bananas, mushrooms and anything slow. (I really tried to rack my brain for stuff I disliked but I can't think of much...).

When I went to a co-ed secondary school I developed new interests and dropped others, some of the things I'd previously hated I'd learned to love, but this is something I think of as a product of growing up, meeting new people and learning new things, not of my male-to-female friend ratio. I continued to make new friends based on common interests, not on our common gender.

I think I'm quite lucky that my parents allowed me to behave like a kid instead of making me behave "as a girl". I hated make-up, as I said before, not because it was girly, but because it felt weird, took too long to apply and meant I had to be careful not to smudge it. I hated dresses because they restricted my freedom, they got caught on bushes and trees and I didn't have any pockets. I chose my clothes because of comfort and practicality, not clothes that were designed to teach me what a woman should look like to attract the opposite gender. Similarly I chose to play with toys that were fun and interesting and not toys that were designed to teach me to like what was considered feminine.

As children we don't have different body shapes, so why are there two sections for boys and girls clothing, children shouldn't be make to feel guilty for wearing what they want to wear, they're children, who are they trying to impress?! How many young boys are put off participating in dance because a leotard is considered a female clothes item?! Even more ridiculous are gender specific toys! Why should children continuously be made to feel guilty for their interests?! Where's the sense in that? EVERYONE LIKES TEDDIES!! It's these societal pressures which feed into the disparity of sexes in certain career paths. On one side of the toy shop you find the toys which encourage looking after babies and animals or hair dressing and beauty. On the other side of the shop are the toys for construction, science kits, the army and space. If we stopped telling kids that certain toys were for certain genders do you not think there would be a shift in these gender dominated roles?

We have such an ingrained idea of how men/women should be that it affects our judgement of people, and I know I'm not alone in this. I'll use my example earlier where I stated that I've always said I get on with guys more than girls. It's not strictly true, as I said before, I have a lot of friends of both genders and also a few in between, but when I meet a girl for the first time I automatically think I will not get on with her because I associate the above "feminine" characteristics with her. Due to my somewhat negative perception of women any woman I meet has to try harder to gain my trust. It's not something I've consciously done, it's just something that's been ingrained...

So what I'd like to end on goes back to my original remark that gender does not exist. Everyone has the sex organs they are born with and these determine their sex. A person's sex does not and should not be perceived to define anything more than that.

The power and the glory.

It's been a long, LONG time since I posted anything. I started writing a post about an artist called Erik Ravelo - particularly his series Los Intocables (the untouchables) - I was interrupted by my friend, no names mentioned (you arse!) but yeah I won't write about it now, the moment has passed, however I do suggest checking it out.

Today I just wana post some beautiful women. Enjoy.

Introduction post and a soppy romance novel

In the past I have had some blogs, however they've never had any real direction to them... Either that or I eventually got embarrassed by what I'd written and deemed my posts unfit for the public eye. 

The thing is I like sharing my thoughts; I'm highly opinionated and I don't like to let people forget it easily. I also like sharing things I find interesting, in the albeit vain hope that everyone in the world has the same interests as me.

As I've found through living my highly opinionated and overly expressive lifestyle, not too many people appreciate hearing my thoughts all the time... But for those that do enjoy my ramblings I bring you this blog. It's here for the sake of being here, please feel no obligations to read it. It's available on line for whoever wants to read it, and for whoever wants to ignore it too...

So to start off my newest blog I'll first tell you that this is going to entail a random amalgamation of things I enjoy(ed), namely of the arts variety. The title "die kuns met Sofa" translates as "the arts with Sofa" (Afrikaans). And also "Kunst" (from the URL) is the German word for art.

So I've started the blog by including a couple of languages I don't actually speak... Yes it may seem like I'm being pretentious and annoying by using random words from other languages but I like to think of it as borrowing some flair/adding some culture, and hey, now you know a few words from the Afrikaans language and you can compare the similarity to Germanic language. Who knows, you may even want to broaden your understanding of African history by reading about why the two languages are so similar, should you not already know.

Now, before I start;

Disclaimer1: I might post sporadically, I might post rubbish, I might just post a link and hope you follow it. Sadly I have a busy lifestyle and probably won't post enough content for this blog to be terribly exciting or enjoyable, but hopefully it will be, at least in those times when you find yourself looking for a distraction from your own busy lifestyle.

Disclaimer2: Should anything come across as offensive or patronising please forgive me. It's never my intention for things to come across that way, but I'm not the best at expressing myself sometimes so please forgive me, and indeed inform me, if anything does come across that way.

So now that all the palaver is out of the way let's get to my first piece of kuns; Eleanor & Park.

Eleanor & Park is a sweet little novel written by Rainbow Powell. To start it's a soppy romance novel, but don't let that throw you off. Usually I'm not too keen on romance, if you know me you'll know that I'm far too 'armadillo'-ish to enjoy a good romance novel and write about it publicly afterwards. But obviously this book struck a chord, I guess I do have a heart after all...

I don't want to give too much away, I hate reading a book after reading a synopsis, it's a bit like watching the trailer for a film; sometimes they just give too much away... But it can't be a review without saying anything about the book so, to put it plainly, the novel follows two somewhat eccentric teenagers, who, surprise-surprise fall in love... I laughed, I may have shed a tear, and I absolutely loved the way it was written.

The characters are witty and unusual, and the book is from their perspective, meaning you have two narrators with their own distinct narrative styles. In using this perspective Powell manages to create an excellently strong emotional tie between her characters and her audience, and we all know empathy is the key to fictional romance.

The book is also realistic. It may seem trivial but it's a very good trait to fiction, and sometimes it's extremely difficult to pull it off. Hat's off to Powell as she does an excellent job of writing in not one, but two first person narratives of different sex, describing an emotionally difficult stage of their lives, and focusing mainly on the characters' emotions. As a side note to all you budding authors out there - even the best fantasy novels must have a strong element of realism in order to capture the audience's empathy and consequently their interest.

The last thing I wanted to say about this book is that for anyone to really enjoy a book there's got to be something personal about it that you enjoy. There's always something that draws you in and something that keeps you reading, and they're not always the same thing. Eleanor & Park has a number of elements that could work for you, simply the fact that it's a romance novel could be enough to keep you interested. For me though, the thing that I loved the most about this book was the way Powell uses music - the 'soundtrack' for the book is brilliant too! If you're a big fan of music you'll understand what I mean, it's like for Powell music is knowledge, culture, comfort & nostalgia all encompassed into one, which is pretty much completely how I feel about music myself...

But anyway, I won't say any more, I would hate to give anything away, you've got to read it yourselves.

I hope you enjoyed my first post. Á bientôt!