Still grading. Almost there.

Don’t you just LOVE my new header? Actually, it’s kinda big for my taste, but it definitely gets the point across: HEY, THIS IS THE BLOG OF A WOMYN’S ECDYSIS. Just in case you forgot your spectacles or you think this is some site where Asian womyn will be taking off their clothes. OHHHHH NOOOO, you are sorely mistaken. You can see clearly at the celestial top. Even my mama would be able to read it.

I feel it’s time to shed a bit of my personal stuff, this being MY ecdysis and all, and answer some basic questions that have surfaced.

So, what exactly is an “ecdysis?”
Ah yes, the ever popular question of origin. In college I was a retreat guru (and still am) and I ended up in a long conversation with a mentor. He listened deeply to my questions, my restless, and my impatience for NEWness. Back then, I felt emotionally brittle and in constant need for open ears. Anyway, this priest leaned back in his chair after listening to me drone on about my identity and he said, “I have an image that you are trying to shed something, like how a snake sheds its skin and in its place is a new identity, more vibrant, more alive than before.” I thought about that. I liked that even if I didn’t really understand it. Yet.

I began wondering if there was a term for someone who constantly shed their skin into newness.

A few months later I moved to the pacific northwest. I was playing my first game of Scrabble with friends (yes, the first time ever). Due to my ultra-competitive nature and lust for words, I pulled a dictionary rather violently to check the validity of someone’s word. I can’t remember if I dropped it or if the page settled and my eyes saw an unique-spelled word with a picture of a snake and other animals. Attracted to the ‘y’ in the middle (there just aren’t many words spelled as such) and the hard consanents. I stopped to read it. I found an explanation of the cycle of shedding. I read the words but saw symbolism: cycle, rebirth, life, and skin. And it continues, there is never one identity, you keep shedding into more brilliance and more life. The word was and will always be ECDYSIS.

So, why do you spell wom/y/a/e/n with a ‘y’?
In case you haven’t realized, our world can be a cruel place to exist. In addition to cruelty, we love to stuff people into boxes and torture them if they don’t conform to what “norms” indicate is acceptable. This happens everday in every part of the world in large scale bombing war ways and in small snide comment in elevator ways. Spelling Womyn with a ‘y’ is one of my more passive avenues of activism. It represents my knowledge that gender is one of the most socialized and ridiculously important facets of behavior. If a womyn or man acts different, smells different, speaks in bizarre ways, we distance ourselves from what is unfamiliar. Spelling with a ‘y’ is one form of my dissent, one more way to express that I am different; and see the world in color, not gray, and certainly not black and white. I see spectrum, variations, interpretation, metaphor, and wideness. If you back away because of a ‘y,’ that’s fine with me. We probably would not get along anyway.

Link to original post

The new skinny, sex-crazed you!

Now, here’s some news: Scientists are trying to craft a pill that would reduce women’s appetite for food, but increase their hunger for sex. But it isn’t quite time to protest — or celebrate, whatever — the rise of malnourished, medicated nymphomaniacs: This theoretical pill wouldn’t hit the market for roughly 10 years.

The Medical Research Council’s Human Reproduction Unit, which is developing this diet/sex pill in Edinburgh, Scotland, has given a trial pill to female monkeys and shrews. As a result, the animals ate roughly a third less than usual and engaged in exaggerated mating displays. The monkeys exhibited “tongue-flicking and eyebrow-raising to the males, while female shrews displayed their feelings via ‘rump presentation and tail wagging,'” reports the BBC. But the shocking similarities between the mating practices of human females and our furry female friends — c’mon, tongue wagging and rump shaking! — are also obviously limited.

Thankfully, the BBC article gives a psychologist the last word on the pharmaceutical approach to increasing women’s sex drive: “Some women have problems specific to libido,” said Lesley Perman-Kerr. “But often if they go off sex, it’s more to do with their relationship than their level of libido.”

But who’s to say bad relationships won’t become medicalized, too?
— Tracy Clark-Flory

GRADING

To blog, one must have thick skin. Or so I’ve heard. After all, a blogger must put herself out there for the world to read or see. This can be especially difficult if you reveal your true identity. A blogger is open to all the benefits and consequences of real life, translated into online communication. You take the good with the not-so-good.

The Good
Well, I’ve been on the blogosphere since July of 2006. I’m a little shy of a year and it, truly, has changed my life. I mean, “changed my life” in a sense that my life is deeper. I understand information, am able to interpret opinion and fact much more quickly and efficiently than I have in the past. Most importantly, I have access to other writers (HOORAY FOR FEMINIST WRITERS OF COLOR) in the world who are utilizing their pocket of the internet to fill it with perspective, insight, and creativity.

The Bad
There’s a lot of trash out there.

One of my Sheros, BFP, put up this picture from this link.

In Hebrew: ‘I have sex with Palestinian women.’

And then she got this message:
Palestinean Torreist | i_will_fuck_you@if_u_will_not_rempve_it.com | IP: 87.101.244.7
remove fucker mother
Apr 25, 4:53 PM — [ Edit | Delete | Unapprove | Approve | Spam | View Post ]
#
Palestinean Torreist | i_will_fuck_you@if_u_will_not_rempve_it.com | IP: 87.101.244.7
Fuck you all
this not a palestinain women this is a fcker jewish in palestinain clothes cuz our relgion push us to the a good things
remove this picture or i will send a pump for all of you fucker mother

To which, my Shero replies:

I do believe these are what’s called THREATS.

And in light of the fact that I do not support THREATS of any kind, I have decided to not “remove this picture”. I have chosen to embrace my “fucker mother” label and even reciprocate with a friendly fuck you. Oh, and how about a kiss my fat Mexican ass just to make things interesting. And may the day come when you, PT, rot in hell.

smooches,
your friendly fat assed mexican,
bfp.

I believe in the bravery of solidarity and not in the shrinking cowardice in the form of threats, be it verbal, facial, physical, or written; with or without serious intent and plan.

One should know better than to try and intimidate those who spend their lives fighting threats, oppression, and empty anger – anger that does nothing but attempt to suppress others, anger that feeds on fear, anger that follows footsteps and trails of strength.

In solidarity with the women in this picture, in solidarity with BFP and all bloggers who take SHIT on a daily basis for attempting to fill their internet pockets with Hope, in solidarity with all women who live in terror of violence, harassment, stalking and fear.

I say to all those who spread violence and fear, no matter how big or small:
You can kiss my Filipino ass as well.

From Postsecret.

Think this has anything to do with VT? Do you really believe there is not relationship between the race-driven media and fear?

Here were other comments made after this postcard was sent to Postsecret.

—-Email Message—–
Sent: Sunday, April 22, 2007 3:33 PM
Subject: Asians Scare Me

Don’t worry, after VT, we have more reasons to be scared than you do.
—–End Message—–

—–Email Message—–
Sent: Monday, April 23, 2007 8:02 AM
Subject: PostSecret

I grew up being in fear that I was asian. Now after VT I too am more scared then ever. It’s good to see that someone else feels the same way I do . . . That email message made me feel better about the situation we are in now.

For more postcard-ed secrets, click here.

I am on a listserve for people involved and work for women’s issues. One of the emails I received this week was concerning whether or not any violence against a woman would/should be considered a hate crime. If someone is targeted, just because she is s woman, similar to if an individual was targeted just because s/he is of a certain religious background, race, ethnicity, or sexual orientation, why shouldn’t it be considered at hate crime?

The email author went on to say that she was at a seminar with the FBI concerning hate crimes and someone posed the question and the FBI, under unusual candor said something along the lines of, “If every act of violence toward women was considered a hate crime, the FBI wouldn’t have enough officers to handle all the cases.”

Thanks to BFP who got it from Priscilla.

What May Come: Asian Americans and the Virginia Tech Shootings

Tamara K. Nopper
April 17, 2007

Like many, I was glued to the television news yesterday, keeping updated about the horrific shootings at Virginia Tech University. I was trying to deal with my own disgust and sadness, especially since my professional life as a graduate student and college instructor is tied to universities. And then the other shoe dropped. I found out from a friend that the news channel she was watching had reported the shooter as Asian. It has now been reported, after much confusion, that the shooter is Cho Seung-Hui, a South Korean immigrant and Virginia Tech student.

As an Asian American woman, I am keenly aware that Asians are about to become a popular media topic if not the victims of physical backlash. Rarely have we gotten as much attention in the past ten years, except, perhaps, during the 1992 Los Angeles Riots. Since then Asians are seldom seen in the media except when one of us wins a golfing match, Woody Allen has sex, or Angelina Jolie adopts a kid.

I am not looking forward to the onslaught of media attention. If history truly does have clues about what will come, there may be several different ways we as Asian Americans will be talked about.

One, we will watch white media pundits and perhaps even sociologists explain what they understand as an “Asian” way of being. They will talk about how Asian males presumably have fragile “egos” and therefore are culturally prone to engage in kamikaze style violence. These statements will be embedded with racist tropes about Japanese military fighters during WWII or the Viet Cong—the crazy, calculating, and hidden Asian man who will fight to the death over presumably nothing.

In the process, the white media might actually ask Asian Americans our perspectives for a change. We will probably be expected to apologize in some way for the behavior of another Asian—something whites never have to collectively do when one of theirs engages in (mass) violence, which is often. And then some of us might succumb to the Orientalist logic of the media by eagerly promoting Asian Americans as real Americans and therefore unlike Asians overseas who presumably engage in culturally reprehensible behavior. In other words, if we get to talk at all, Asian Americans will be expected to interpret, explain, and distance themselves from other Asians just to get airtime.

Or perhaps the media will take the color-blind approach instead of a strictly eugenic one. The media might try to whitewash the situation and treat Cho as just another alienated middle-class suburban kid. In some ways this is already happening—hence the constant referrals to the proximity of the shootings to the 8th anniversary of the Columbine killings. The media will repeat over and over words from a letter that Cho left behind speaking of “rich kids,” and “deceitful charlatans.” They will ask what’s going on in middle-class communities that encourage this type of violence. In the process they may never talk about the dirty little secret about middle-class assimilation: for non-whites, it does not always prevent racial alienation, rage, or depression. This may be surprising given that we are bombarded with constant images suggesting that racial harmony will exist once we are all middle-class. But for many of us who have achieved middle-class life, even if we may not openly admit it, alienation does not stop if you are not white.

But the white media, being as tricky as it is, may probably talk about Cho in ways that reflect a combination of both traditional eugenic and colorblind approaches. They will emphasize Cho’s ethnicity and economic background by wondering what would set off a hard-working, quiet, South Korean immigrant from a middle-class dry-cleaner-owning family. They will wonder why Cho would commit such acts of violence, which we expect from Middle Easterners and Muslims and those crazy Asians from overseas, but not from hard-working South Korean immigrants. They will promote Cho as “the model minority” who suddenly, for no reason, went crazy. Whereas eugenic approaches depicting Asians as crazy kamikazes or Viet Cong mercenaries emphasize Asian violence, the eugenic aspect of the model minority myth suggests that there is something about Asian Americans that makes them less prone to expressions of anger, rage, violence, or criminality. Indeed, we are not even seen as having legitimate reasons to have anger, let alone rage, hence the need to figure out what made this “quiet” student “snap.”

Given that the model minority myth is a white racist invention that elevates Asians over minority groups, Cho will be dissected as an anomaly among South Koreans who “are not prone” to violence—unlike Blacks who are racistly viewed as inherently violent or South Asians, Middle Easterners and Muslims who are viewed as potential terrorists. He will be talked about as acting “out of character” from the other “good South Koreans” who come here and quietly and dutifully work towards the American dream. Operating behind the scenes of course is a diplomatic relationship between the US and South Korea forged through bombs and military zones during the Korean War and expressed through the new free trade agreement negotiations between the countries. Indeed, even as South Korean diplomats express concern about racial backlash against Asians, they are quick to disown Cho in order to maintain the image of the respectable South Korean.

Whatever happens, Cho will become whoever the white media wants him to be and for whatever political platform it and legislators want to push. In the process, Asian Americans will, like other non-whites, be picked apart, dissected, and theorized by whites. As such, this is no different than any other day for Asian Americans. Only this time an Asian face will be on every television screen, internet search engine, and newspaper.

Tamara K. Nopper is an educator, writer, and activist living in Philadelphia. She can be reached at tnopper@yahoo.com

And one more thing about my disgust with the media today, as if Imus and the circus around that fiasco isn’t enough –

I’m SO, SO glad we know that the gunman is Asian.

(Never mind my vendetta with the umbrella use of that term.)

So often people wonder by “people of color” see race in everything and everything is racialized and in every possible action, something comes up regarding race.

And then in a tragedy like this, one of the first things we need to know about the gunman, not if he acted alone, was a student, or what his agenda was – no, we want to know what race he is.

Have you seen the links on the internet that give listings of Asian killing sprees? Or that the gunman might have been an international student and is not looking to see if he has ties with a terrorist group?

AARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH