Awesome Every Day

I’m getting ready for some awesome stuff!

Today and tomorrow I’ll be prepping for a really fun work-related (read: music-related) thing this Friday. I can’t wait to tell you all about it. I will try to remember to take pictures because I always forget. What I am really excited to tell you about is how it all came together!

I am also thinking of starting a3 video-blog specifically for content in my afropunk.com blog. I’ve had this phone which will do video for months and I have done very little with it. I think that’d be cool. What do you think?

Recently I haven’t been writing new songs, just refining what I have finished. Last night I revisited my almost finished tumblr song and started serious work on a song about masturbation.

What can I say? I know my audience.

one more comment on sexism.

melanyouth:

(via the-sky-is-another-ocean):

melanyouth:

I honestly feel that in this society I gain so much more by being white than I lose by being female, so much so that it’s often hard for me take seriously the strain of feminist thought that says I, as a woman, need to constantly focus on ferretting out and addressing every little instance of sexism I encounter.

Frankly, I’m too focused on interrogating my white middle class privilege on an ongoing basis to worry about things like meatheads who call women ‘girls’, old men in the workplace who don’t get it that women are valuable contributors, or construction workers who stare at women walking by. Sure, I wish things were different, but I just can’t spend energy on much of that. It rarely seems productive; my anger and frustration won’t change other people, but by modeling respect for others and a consciousness of my own hand in things-as-they-are, I demonstrate the positive qualities I’d like to see others take up. I change society by changing myself.

I agree that being white is more important in many ways in terms of privilege than male or female, but I’m clearly older than you, because when I was growing up, femiinis  wasn’t about construction workers comments or any crap like that, it was about women earning so much less for the same job than men, about all the jobs that tried to keep women out, about the fact that women in the military were assauted often with little recourse on a frequent basis. Real issues. I had a friend who was the first female firefighter in her town, and she was harassed in physical ways that had nothing to do with stupid comments or snotty attitudes and everything to do with whether she could safely do her job, not be injured by ‘pranks,’ not be fired as a disruptive influence.  If you can dismiss feminism it’s because a lot of people before you couldn’t, and fought against the limitations that society wanted to impose. Just saying.

I just came across this and I can’t remember if I ever responded (and Tumblr search is sadly useless), but my original point was not to dismiss feminism at all, and actually I, too, come from the generation where feminism was about equality and liberation and I think those are absolutely critical precepts that are worth fighting for, defending and enlarging upon.

What I was saying was that I think it’s horseshit that when there are so many deeply troubling instances of normalized racism around us every day, I see so many lengthy blog posts by feminists of the ‘a strange man told me I was attractive and I felt so violated’ and ‘It’s so terrible that I have to consider my personal safety’ varieties. Not only can I not relate, and I think it’s pretty counterproductive to the larger feminist struggle, but my point above was that this aspect of feminist thought is almost exclusively the realm of a very specific, very privileged demographic who seem to think that every interaction revolves solely around their gender, and that the most important thing in the world is their emotional comfort with every single thing that happens to them. How laughable yet sad. And certainly not what early feminists had in mind when they considered what the movement would be focused on in 40 years.

To my other point, if I was to count up the number of instances each day where I encountered sexism, and compared it to the number of times I observed or heard things I consider racist (both IRL and online), the latter would far outdistance the former.

As a woman, the vast majority of daily interactions I have with men - whether they be friends, acquaintances, colleagues, or strangers - do not result in my feeling threatened, demeaned, or made to feel less-than in any way. Is that the case for Black people in America as regards their interactions with White people in their daily lives? That’s what I’m talking about.

You make me proud to be human, Ms Cricketbites. :-)