Orlando Shootings

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Hearing about the death of Christina Grimmie due to a shooting pained me late last week, but little did I know of the additional pain I would feel thereafter.

When I found out about the Orlando Shooting I could not compute what my eyes and ears collaboratively were exposed to. I sat there absolutely dumbfounded on the sofa, planning minutes earlier to change out of my bedroom attire and leave the house for some headspace. But I could not perform either task. I was watching a live news coverage of the shootings that had been broadcasted for two hours and counting, right after having watched Interstellar again. That movie had altered my mindset in terms of the hyperreal, however reality caught up with me and smacked me in the head. I left the sofa, and curled up in bed.

Beneath my bedsheets I found somewhat of a solace. I fell into a deep sleep that lasted for about five hours. I woke up just as the sun began to set. I came to the conclusion that I no longer think it is a matter of gun control. I think it is a matter of self control. I think of it like this: I have my driver's license, as do most of the people in the world. I have never, however, driven above the speed limit. I have never 'hooned' or driven dangerously so as to harm myself or other road users. That is a choice I have consciously made. When I hear of other road users who have succumbed to death or injury due to their conscious decisions to drive menacingly, I do not pity them. I only pity those who they have harmed. That is the same dynamic of pity that I bring to this terrible massacre. 

And thus the same thing goes with gun control. I have been an admirer of guns ever since I have played my first video game. Do not take that out of context, though. I simply love their form and structure and love the thrill of shooting - having said that, I have only shot one gun and that was in a legal gun shooting range in Queensland, Australia. The gun was wired down to the surrounding metal structures and could only be aimed at the target. If the case were where no structure was holding the gun, that is how I would have gone about shooting the gun too, precisely at an inanimate target. And I am sure of that, despite what feelings I would have felt on any given day where I would hold hypothetical gun. That is because I am consciously aware that I do not wish harm upon other beings, whether they were human or otherwise. I have a strong moral compass and that ensures that I retain my sense of humanity.

I think the problem is that some people do not have this. Some people do not have some sort of mental blocking capability wherein they will kick a dog, trip a toddler over, throw someone's ball onto the traintracks with no hesitation whatsoever. There will exist those people who have no ability to control their moralities. And that is what I fear. It is these people who do not see their wrongdoings, because they have no sense of wrongdoings in the first place, or their sense of wrongdoings do not align with the status quo's sense of wrongdoings. I cannot, thus, attest the fault of guns to this situation. Yes, certain guns should not be made readily available in said amount of time, however I would have purchased the gun he had used just to possess it as the aesthetically pleasing object that I see. Omar Mateen, however, had other motives.

We should thus focus our energies on what it is that causes certain people to think and act in this way. Perhaps this focusing would prove preventative of future violent outbursts. Perhaps we can save lives. I know for a fact that bullying can be damaging to an individual. I have been through things in my childhood that I refuse to talk about because they are still with me to this day. I remember every detail and no matter how old I get I am quite certain that they will remain vivid in my mind. And that is detrimental. Some days I cannot face anyone, I isolate myself and hide away. It is how I cope. Unfortunately, others do not cope in the same way I do. Our coping mechanisms are dynamic. They are ever changing, and unpredictable. Something cathartic for someone may not be cathartic to society, but it is nonetheless cathartic. We are then faced with two problems: the former being the fact that bullying is still prominent and sticks to one for a lifetime, and the latter being the mental aftermath of the bullying and the seeking of catharsis. 

The issue of 'the other' is brought up thus. Calling people 'weird' or seeing them as 'the other' is an early form of this problem. You are different. You do not belong, they taunt at a young age. And so the misfits rise and are shot down just enough for them to shoot others down - literally. Take the Columbine shooters, or Elliot Rodger. Perhaps Mateen had the same underlying motive: to bring himself some sort of catharsis. I have read news reports that allege that Mateen was gay, and that he was on multiple gay dating sites,and had actually hung out at Pulse nightclub several times, so perhaps he indeed was and could not accept the fact that he was. He thus saw it as viable to shoot people who were out and proud; yes, society sees this as unacceptable but a troubled mind may see it as the only option. Perhaps he felt emasculated in his being gay as opposed to what his religion preferred, which was the case (mildly) with Rodger. But nobody will know this because this is information that probably will never want to leave the subconscious. What if we could access this information? What if we actually had areas in our society where people felt safe enough to relieve themselves of their innermost burdens?

I brought this conversation up earlier at the dinner table. I said, "we can get guns here too" when my parents claimed that this was different. "No!" my father exclaimed. "not those guns. We can't get guns that fire that fast."  Whatever guns one can or cannot acquire is regardless of what I am trying to say; it is self control that is above all. This, I suppose, aligns with the argument revolving around pitbulls, that they are a dangerous breed: it is not the breed, but the owner. 

Be not prejudiced. Let the media do that because it's what it does best.

Instead, be human. Be understanding. Be welcoming. Help one another. You never know who is mentally hurting, and for what reason. Seek that misfit. Give them a feeling of belonging. Who knows, maybe you can be a preventative substance in this concoction of terror.

I will end this post with a poem I wrote when I was angered by the news of the shooting:

When man turneth his eyes to a gun we weep

When man turneth his eyes through a gun we weep

When man turneth his gun to an animal we weep

When man turneth his gun to his own species we weep

When man turneth his gun to himself we weep

Do not turneth with the gun but with humanity

Feminism is Dying, Thanks to Humour

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Virginia Woolf spent most of her literary life writing about feminism and the importance of the writings of women and had even gone so far as writing essays wherein she fought for female literary equality and advocated for the importance of female figures in academia. Thanks to Woolf and other literary feminists, female authors have some sense of empowerment in today's society.

But that sense of empowerment is slowly dying away. The leading cause for this is humour - "go back to the kitchen and make me a sandwich", "what do you call the useless skin around a v*gina? A woman", and "sexism is wrong and being wrong is for women" are among the few things said to women by not just men, but other women too, usually in a joking manner. This frightens me because though they are best taken jokingly, they have some sexist undertones that still resonate through the minds of most of society today.

A month ago I finished from a class at university called 'Reading Contemporary Fiction'. We had to read some 'feminist texts', Tar Baby and The Summer Without Men, and having assumed the entire class had read those two books in the span of around two weeks, my tutor handled a class debate: "what do you think about feminism?" and "are you a feminist?" were two of the questions asked. The results shocked me. Most of the females in the class did not label themselves as feminists, in fact I did not come across one.

The word 'feminist' has a negative connotation that comes along with it, and I think that is why nobody owned up to being one. When you think of a feminist, your mind conjures up an old woman living with her female partner of fifty years on a farm and shooting laser beams from her eyes at any man that dares to come near her fifty or so acres of land - alternatively, she has a shotgun. Or you may imagine those wrinkled little old women Sacha Baron Cohen angered in his flick Borat. And that is what contemporary society labels as a 'feminist'. A woman who loves other women and deems every man she comes across a misogynist. But that is not the case.

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Feminism is, put plainly, 'the advocacy of women's rights on the ground of the equality of the sexes'. It is the want to be included in society rather than excluded, the want to be paid equally, the want to be treated as a fellow human rather than having to relive the experiences felt by housewives in the fifties, who, if you look at the picture below, even were brainwashed by the media to feel inferior to the superior 'breadwinner'. 

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Without feminism, we would not allow pregnant women paid leave - in fact, they would not be able to have a job. We would not allow women to vote because prior to 1893 and the Suffrage movement, politics were not considered to be a woman's business. We would still be brought up to believe that we are housewives and an education is only for men. We would still be brought up to believe that all we will amount to in life is what The Good Wife's Guide tells us. That we should live in a society where gender constraints are the social norm.

A group of Year 10 boys in Sydney Boys High School participated in a project titled Gender Equality Project wherein they selected spokespersons within their peers to present to the cohort of the students at their school a powerpoint presentation equipped with confronting statistics to ultimately raise awareness about gender inequality. "I think that young men need to stand up and change this", one of these boys said in the video below. The fact that these boys have bravely taken a stand for equal rights, and I say 'bravely' because it was also noted in the video that the cohort of students they presented to laughed through the first part of the presentation and it is rather courageous of them to stand up against media and the social norm to present their viewpoints, shows that everyone has the ability to welcome social equality. And that is what feminism is, and in doing this these young boys are feminists. This is the face of feminism. And it is a positive one at that.

The picture that angered me horribly and influenced this post, though, is the very first one located at the beginning of this post. A seemingly innocent pillow, wrapped in a slogan that says 'if a woman is upset, hold her and tell her  how beautiful she is. If she starts to growl, retreat to a safe distance and throw chocolate at her'. First of all, it is portraying the woman as animalistic, as a being that is not satisfied when fed with compliments. Second of all, it makes a link to a woman that is menstruating and how she needs chocolate in order to stop 'growling'. Men are falsely led to believe that menstruation turns women monstrous, and that it is a bad thing altogether because it stops the ability to penetrate, per se. 

Menstruation is what gives women their ability to rejuvenate their bodies. We shed our inner lining to allow for the creation of a new one and to highlight our fertility. The video below shows Dominique Christina performing her poem The Period Poem, inspired by a twitter post that she found wherein a woman was being demeaned by her former boyfriend for having her period - he dumped her, and displayed this action in his Twitter post in a joking manner, the same manner in which the above pillow's slogan was sprawled out into the world.

"There is, for me, a necessary conversation that seeks to undermine the shaming that happens to some girls around menstruation. [...] To my daughter: [...] Just bleed, bleed anyhow. Spill your impossible scripture all over the good furniture, bleed and bleed and bleed on everything he loves. Period."

And I think Dominique captured the essence of today's society quite well, in terms of misinformed citizens about feminism and its many benefits - the escape from tyrannous stereotypes and gender profiling, the escape from gender ideologies and prejudices and inequality and the escape from women like the one in the picture below who still believe feminism is not needed; take a mental trip back to circa 1893 and attempt to thrive in a society where a man is deemed greater than you in every aspect and do not complain when your rights to an education is taken away, do not complain when your rights to being able to read or vote or work or partake in anything other than marriage are abolished, shut up and conform, and then come back to this slowly evolving society and slap it across its face to the point where you burst its blood vessels when it produces pillows which seek to alienate women with natural bodily functions, and when it tries to harness the stereotypes which cause people to believe that equal gender rights are only meant to be fought by wrinkly little women married to other little women. 

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Feminism should not be mistaken with the hatred of men - it is, rather, the hatred of the superiority of men and the inferiority of women. It is the abolishing of hatred and sexism and little humorous undertones in sexist jokes that work to defy our trust in a world where all is seemingly equal; our world is not at all equal until derogatory terms against those who fight for gender equality are diminished. 

Waiting in Beauty Salons

There is a reason as to why I do not particularly like attending beauty salons, in fact there are a multitude of reasons. Today one reason came to life and looked me up and down in the form of two withered old women. 

A young lady, accompanied by her mother and grandmother walked in as I sat in the waiting room. Three generations of Arabic women - I picked up their words immediately and although I loathe stereotypes and their pigeonholing of people, they worked in my favour today because no Arab can pick out that I too am middle-eastern and that I can understand their filthy conversations perfectly. They sat perpendicular to me and I kept staring straight ahead of me at an array of cosmetic products, with them kept purposely in the side of my vision. 

Then, nasty events unfolded that reminded me of one of my grandmothers and her middle-eastern prejudicial staring and judging tendencies. As soon as her granddaughter went in for her appointment, she turned to her daughter and said something about me which I just so conveniently happened to block out of my hearing ability, and her daughter did the classical 'I'm going to look around and pretend to look at the blank wall behind the person I intend to look at and look at it in a way that implies my utter interest when really I will be looking at that person and that person in the meanwhile will not even suspect my gaze even if I am staring directly at her as she is staring at me wondering why I am staring at her in the way that I am'. 

And she held that stare. She and the grandmother. The staring and the talking, the judging. I could feel their words pressing against my skin, against my contours and staining me with hatred. It would not end. It was a recurring event that I did not want to be a part of, that I left the vicinity of my distant Lebanese relatives to avoid. Fortunately my sister joined me after finding a car park space and saved me from the foreign glaring, yet I felt worse because they then aimed it at her then the both of us. It was torture. She sensed it right away before I had the opportunity to point them out. "Can you feel their stares?" And yes. They penetrated my comfort barrier and tore at my insecurity levels. 

I know that I should instead feel empowered. Gone are the days of my severe insecurities, why shall I let the hatred of strangers take me back to the days of darkness? I shall not. I am content with my life, I am content with my achievements and I am content with how I dress and how I act and how I feel and how I make others feel, I will not let two women who carry prejudicial pests have agency over my emotions. Let them stare. Let them talk. I am one with my mind and my mind and I are supreme.