mozart era

Were there chances, I would recommend every female to watch the movie Gone Girl, no matter she is a teenage girl troubled by her own image, a housewife whose entire life focus is husband and children, or a successful professional enjoying complete financial independence. It is not the normal type of inspirational movie or the “chicken soup for the soul”; it is on the other end of the spectrum—dark, cynical, even psychopathic—even though bright light aesthetically infiltrates every scene. This stark contrast gives you goosebumps; It serves well the theme that a female is pretending to be someone she is not and enslaved by the obligation to maintain what she is not—just as the movie is in no way bright and cheerful though the colorful settings may have suggested otherwise.

Gone Girl is a femme fatale movie to a certain extent. But it is more on the side of Thelma and Louisa than Basic Instinct. Amy is perfect and amazing. She and her husband Nick appear to be the happiest couple made for each other, except—they are not. After she disappeared and made her husband a suspect murderer, she was unrecognizably changed into the real Amy—tomboyish, cruel, decisive, and she symbolically destroyed every piece of femininity in her. She’s gone, no longer worrying about pleasing her husband, or restraining herself such that people would like her based on the worldly definition of success and beauty. She revenges, ruthlessly torturing and punishing anyone coercing her into being the person she is not, including her husband.

The monologue appears in the middle of the movie when she stepped onto the road of desperado points out the embedded disgruntle and depression she was having all the time being a perfect Amy in the worldly eye. Her voice was in the background while she was driving on the American Highway, recklessly, smoking cigs and throwing garbage outside the car window, despising girls in other cars who acts what they are not, and devouring hamburgers and pies. The monologue goes,

“Nick and Amy will be gone. But then we never really existed. Nick loved a girl I was pretending to be. “Cool girl.” Men always use that, don’t they? As their defining compliment. “She’s a cool girl.” Cool girl is hot. Cool girl is game. Cool girl is fun. Cool girl never gets angry at her man. She only smiles in a chagrined, loving manner and then presents her mouth for fucking. She likes what he likes. If he loves girl gone wild, she’s a mall babe, who talks football and endures Buffalo wings at Hooters….

When I met Nick Dunne, I knew he wanted cool girl. And for him, I’ll admit, I was willing to try. I wax-stripped my pussy raw. I drank canned beer watching Adam Sandler movies. I ate cold pizza and remained a size two. I blew him semi-regularly. I lived in the moment. I was fucking game. I can’t say I didn’t enjoy some of it. Nick teased out of me things I didn’t know existed. A lightness, a humor, an ease. But I made him smarter, sharper. I inspired him to rise to my level. I forged the man of my dreams. We were happy pretending to be other people. We were the happiest couple we knew.”

She was taught to be someone she is not when she was very young. Her parents forged her into an “amazing Amy”, a perfect prototype of her. She will lose the pride and love from her parents if she deviates from this expectation. Same thing with Nick. She probably will lose his love if she stopped to be perfect. So she chose to disappear. In orde to remind her numb self of who she really is, she made a do-over of her life in a most subversive and dramatic manner. She seemed to win at last—she controlled her husband and inflicted on him untold psychological pain. Ironically, she did all these because she loved him—she even killed for him. She is a sad character because after all these pain, she did not set herself free like Thelma and Louisa did; she simply caged herself and broke out once she found the cage was becoming suffocating.

She is the reflection of a majority of women in the society. They want to break free but only to find themselves transferring from one prison to another. Or more accurately, the entire world is a prison for women, and there is no place to hide—there is no way that a woman can disappear and totally be herself. Call it cynical you want, but the world is getting harsher on and asking more from its daughters than sons—it asks from them to accomplish things impossible. It asks them to be successful in career and to be good mothers and wives; it only allows them to be free from exploitation if they have independent income, but then, they may have to endure the worldly accusation or judgment of being a “bitch” that no wonder no man loves. Simply put, there is no way that a woman can do a thing right. There will always be voices against her, judgment sabotaging her, prejudices diminishing her and strong forces cornering her to give up what she has. The world asks too much from women, too much.

The movie Thelma and Louisa ends with both of them committed suicide driving a car down to a valley against the rainbow, holding hands, in the most artistic fashion possible. That’s the way out for a women living under the context of permeate exploitation. In this new age, women are facing a worse scenario: there is no way out—not even non-existence—as the prejudices, the judgments, the vilification will not stop simply because of one’s disappearance. Women are forever imprisoned, in family, in relationships, in their career, with the cell labeled “love” and “success”.

 Our gone girl never made it far.

Tim Cook came out of his closet two hours ago. Finally.

His statement has been shared and reshared; his coming-out is lauded as heroic and altruistic. As a celebrity and icon who happens to value personal privacy a lot, he certainly has made a most difficult step forward. What he made is a public statement–entirely different from daily communications, from what you confide in your family and best friends. He came out not for himself–he makes a firm stance by doing this–that he stands by the underprivileged and the marginalized, that he is doing his part in balancing the scale of this majority-minority tilt.

Nonetheless, the reaction from the society and the media probably reveals something, something not entirely positive: we may want to ask why Tim Cook’s coming-out gained so much attention? Is it because he is gay or because he is Tim Cook? Or both? As a celebrity I guess his every major move will be captured by the flashlight, and declaring himself a gay man gonna be the most explosive kind. And yet, we still have to pursue with this question: will such attention add any political capital to the current gay rights movement?

Why being gay is still a thing? Why has such declaration to be put on the headline, along with Ebola and ISIS? Why can’t people just smile at it and forget about it? Because we haven’t come to that stage, gay rights movement hasn’t arrived at that stage–the stage when we are able to treat it as daily trifles and whatnot. It is a huge deal because it concerns identity, and identity is the core of one’s soul. It defines who we are. And homosexuals’ identities happen to fall in the category unwelcome and unrecognized by the majority. Cook mentioned in his statement that “being gay has given me a deeper understanding of what it means to be in the minority and provided a window into the challenges that people in other minority groups deal with every day.” Having identified with a minority means you have to fight the battle all your life–either you fight by yourself in which case you will certainly lose, or, you can enlarge your group until it has equal strength with the now majority.

Except that the identity-based majority/minority demarcation is problematic.

Identities draw boundaries, form exclusive clubs and antagonize those in the middle. Identities label the camps so that they are ready to stand against each other. Identities obliterate common grounds and hide the fact that we are all human. Identities further turn a blind eye to the rationality of people and the tendency of their being drawn by the ideas they champion, not whether they are attracted to a different or the same sexuality. In other words, there are homosexuals who are in the stage of denial and see anti-gay people as their bedfellows; and there are also heterosexuals who join the movement despite of their different identity.

The expansion of the minority group should not and can never be achieved through increasing the number of homosexuals, rather, it should happen due to majority’s taking a side, switch of camp, a change of heart, or even, a change of mind.

Tim Cook did the right thing. But his is, after all, as he said, one of the minority. The real force of balancing the tilted social structure should come from the other group. Being in the majority group doesn’t mean you are privileged; it most possibly means you are mistaken along with bunches of  people who are mistaken in a similar way.

Last night a female classmate knocked at my door and told me she was moving away for other educational opportunities in Canada. I told her to take care; the Chinese pronunciation of “take care” sounds much like “adding on more pounds”, so she chuckled, “I am not going to do that. I am trying to lose weight!”.  Even during this short melancholic farewell, she didn’t forget to mention one of the top issues for women–weight.

It appears hypocritical for a thin girl to say, “I don’t care about weight”; she might be despised since she was already thin enough. It is even troublesome for bigger-sized girls to say so, as it appears she is just making justification for her “bad shape” and excuses for not working out and keeping a figure. Either way, girls just so habitually take issues with comments concerning body.

Two friends of mine, one is a bit overweight, another one at most chubby, hate themselves everyday in front of the mirror. They wish they become smaller, lighter on the scale, and have long, thin and charming legs. In a word, they wish to be those they see on the fashion magazine. I tried to persuade them to give up the idea by saying the glamorous images of stars on the magazine is artificial; it is deliberately designed in a sexy even erotic manner and stars don’t look like that in their daily life. They know all these. But they choose not to side with this opinion. They think I am thin and looking good enough to make comments like that. But this is simply not the solution for them.

Weight issue has become the main topics among girls whenever they go–when they go shopping, go to school canteen to dine, do sports, work out in the gym, afternoon hangout in the coffeehouse, you name it. It becomes tedious whenever I meet a female friend she will bring up this topic–a topic appears more important than career and relationships. I tried to downplay the importance of body and weight to make them feel better, only to find out later that they hate me talk that way and they have been ready to rebut even before I started. So I instead try to engage in this conversation. I provide the counter opinion that people ought to have more diversified and more tolerant attitudes towards different body size. They will nod, and then make another comment starting with the word “BUT”, indicating a helpless resignation towards the “reality” in their eyes. And normally the conversation will end up with a sigh, followed by continued attempts to lose weight.

What troubling me most is not that girls are trying to lose weight, rather, they are doing it not because they think it is good for them, but it fits the social perception of being beautiful and sexy. You may question, why their motive matters?  And aren’t we all struggling to satisfy the expectation of the society all the time as we strive to be admitted into top-tier institutions, to be recognized at work, to earn as much money as we could and to gain higher social status so as to be perceived as successful in life?

The motive matters because otherwise we are enslaving ourselves and no one could ever be able to set us free.

Girls have to be made to aware that this is a problem to begin with. Sadly, they fail to realize sometimes they must take a step back to see the bigger picture. They have to ask themselves why they are doing this? Why they have to starve themselves for a thinner body when they biologically have a bigger stomach to feed? The problem is they do not feel uncomfortable with the mainstream ideas of body images, instead, they feel this is the RULE to follow–whether they agree with it or not is entirely irrelevant. They take the “rule” as given. The whole idea of “die or be thin” is an institution imposed on all young girls who desire certain kinds of recognition from their male counterparts and the whole society.  This institution is exploiting their health and corrupting their minds softly with them knowing. Its propaganda branch has been doing a great job making the girls believe this is in fact their own idea and their struggling in conformity with the rule is self-initiated. The mechanism works to infiltrate those notions into girls’ minds and soul almost like hypnotization.  This institution just becomes self-perpetuating and the enslavement eternal. When they believe this is their own choice and even advocate for such choices, they are trapped, and throw the keys to unlock the vault imprisoning them.

The idea that the enslavement is a choice is detrimental. It is troubling in another sense that it distorts the advocacy for choices, and has a potential of confusing the contemporary feminist movement. It is a paradox to advocate for choices that is not genuine. But at the same time it begs the question under what situations can a choice be genuine. We are susceptible to opinions of mass media, pundits, research results and people around us. To what extent can the opinions or choices be purely self-initiated? But it is entirely a different thing to advocate something that generates harms so tangible for the welfare of certain group of people. But the advocates may argue even if they concede on the harms to health, this is entirely a lifestyle choice subject to individual preferences in the same way people choose to smoke and drink. I cannot agree. The latter scenario can be perceived as lifestyle choice only because its negative effects to health is so well known that it is almost impossible that people will not be put on notice. On contrast, many girls are ill-informed about how severe rigid diet plans can influence not only their body and health, but also their state of mind and psyche. They probably don’t know when they strictly control their calorie take-in they will become depressed and grumpy,  they probably will not be able to manage good social relationships, their focus will be shifted from career developing to food most of the time, the struggling of “to-eat-or-not-to-eat” is distracting and torturing. What’s worse, it is very easy for them to develop an eating disorder which may accompany a girl for the entire lifetime. Girls may not even know about the above when they enthusiastically and ambitiously start their journey to the “thin land”.

The feminism and feminist movement itself is complicated enough. It is largely diversified, incoherent and full of conflicting notions. If we say girls who struggle for better body shapes are trying to make themselves look good in front of man or satisfied the worldly perception of beauty, we are being intolerant towards the choices those group of girls made, when the very basis of feminism is to embrace all, even conflicting, ideas regarding women issues, so as to establish an environment of equality and freedom desirable for the development of sisterhood among all girls in furtherance of feminism and feminist movement. Feminists who are not fans of body image perfecting cannot castigate such advocates, since they are one part of the entities that we want to bring into the scope of our advocacy,  and they are the very group whose interests we want to better protect. We do not want to alienate them by contradicting the basis of feminism. Alienation and too much rivalry inside the women groups has been proved counterproductive. But how far can tolerance take us along the way of feminist movement?

Another troubling idea is that being thin is the panacea for every misfortune in life. Girls too often blames their failure and under-achievement in relationships, job interviews, etc. to not being thin enough. A popular pep talk usually  is similar to, “If I were thin, I would have definitely…” or “I will be more beautiful/ confident when I become thinner”, or “they don’t like me because I am fat. So I must be thin”, etc. Striving to be thin is the easiest way out: one doesn’t have to evaluate her performance ex poste, or do some serious reflections to learn lessons. She thinks being thin can resolve every problems she is facing now. In fact, she will mostly be disillusioned had she achieved the level of thinness she desires (and yet being thinner has no actual ending point).

The idea of a thinner body image entrenched itself in female minds to the extent that it makes them confuse enslavement with freedom. It is sarcastic that the enslaved girls become advocates for female freedom. Appearing thin and putting oneself in skinny clothes is far from self-emancipation.  To become an advocate, please set yourselves free before everything.

I decided to turn this personal blog into something bigger–talking about something other than myself, and other than ranting and more than a means of emotional release.

I was troubled by many social issues. I read about them through various sources everyday. I keep track on those troubling issues. And yet look around, there are not so many with me.

For a long time I took a view of  pursuing my own path, and I try not to be bothered by the fact that other people don’t care, since what you think is important may not even be an item on the bottom of their list. I am not a paternalistic person and not intellectually and practically experienced to teach others a lesson. I thus resist the temptation of telling people what is important.

But I cannot stay silent any more. Especially when all the efforts to covertly insert one piece of my mind to others’ during some conversation turned out in vain. It is difficult to make a small change, let alone change others’ minds. But this doesn’t mean it is not possible at all.

I am a feminist. And I am not so sure about it until recently.

I had delivered some lecturers on feminism as a debate trainer. I have written a few articles on feminism. I have debated on the topic feminism quite often. And yet I was still not sure.

Until I had a dinner with some classmates and a young lecturer who has decided to devote herself into public interest legal field, and who has been involved with refugee and IDP work for a long time. She and I shared many opinions on feminism, but we apparently adopted different approaches. When we were talking, others were listening. They are all girls, and they listened closely–with rather confusing look. Some of them tried to jump into the conversation or asked questions–but finally chose to just listen. They rarely heard of radical and moderate approaches. They have never encountered the phrase “confidence gap”. They don’t know why the lecturer dressed not like a lesbian but addressed herself  as a feminist. They were afraid of offending the two of us by saying something negative. The biggest problem is–they cannot make sense of what feminism means–their  limited positive understanding of feminism is simply–to do whatever it takes to achieve the equality of women and men.

I have a female friend who thinks her female friend is a feminist. And yet the latter one is no more than a girl appears more professional and knows how to run politics in school. The former one is a housewife-type girl– her ideal life is to have a loving husband and most of her everyday ranting and talk is about relationship and clothes. Neither of them has ever been exposed to or actively seek to get in touch with feminist article or theory.

Clothes, brands, shoes, makeup, handbags, weight, diet. When you put those words juxtapose to each other, the natural response would very likely to be: we are talking about girls.

So I was a cynical person. But I didn’t entirely lose hope in making a change. I sadly and reluctantly admit that the feminist images have been greatly misunderstood, distorted, sabotaged and…detested.

Celebrities are not helpful at all in disseminating right images of feminists.

Theoretical framework is too impenetrable for ordinary persons.

Stereotypes on feminists are too embedded to uproot.

Social perceptions on feminism is too narrowly and negatively constructed.

And worst of all…

People don’t think this is an important agenda.

I talked to some of my male friends about it. They gave me similar responses: why you are so obsessed with feminism? Why you always talk about women’s right? So…feminist, seriously?

I looked at those taunting faces and listened to comments with the sarcastic tones quietly. I didn’t want to appear intolerable against what they say (even if they were intolerable) just to consolidate their stereotypes.

I could have used an F word to express my rage and shut them up.

But I chose to explain the other F word.

The one that is far more powerful.