Ladies *wink*

Butts. They sure are nice. But is there more to life?

Ladies. What are they even?

This seems to be a question on a lot of people’s minds at the moment. From female volleyballers being treated as butts with athletic ability, to our Prime Minister being likened to a bovine, people have been wondering whether ladies are real, and if they are, whether they are the same as normal humans.

See now, feminism is a nasty and dangerous thing, isn’t it? It’s all screaming and bra burning and making men feel bad for having a penis. Feminazis, I think is the official term here. Because of course, fighting for equality is definitely the same as brutally interning millions of people and then working and gassing them all to death. It’s just like that.

No wait, no it’s not. That’s right. Sorry, I’m always getting confused between equality and genocide.

Every single person should be a feminist. Whether you’ve got a vagina or a penis, or both, or neither or WHATEVER. Because if you say you’re not a feminist, you’re saying you don’t think everyone should be treated equally.  Men should feel they are allowed to be feminists. Women should feel they are allowed to be feminists. It’s not something any one group of people owns. It’s not a dirty word. It’s something we’re all responsible for. I don’t say I’m not into the abolishment of slavery because I’m not black.

And if I did, you’d call me racist.

Take the example of the volleyballers. It’s not that they don’t have nice butts, or that men should feel bad for looking at those butts. Butts are nice, ok? Everyone likes a good butt. If you happen to get distracted during a game of beach volleyball by the butts of some of the players, well, that’s a pretty normal thing. But those players are very excellent sports people. They have trained for an exceedingly long time to get to where they are, and are very good at their sport of choice. Most importantly, they are humans, and they should be treated with respect. And it is all of our responsibilities to criticise photographers who publish photos of their bodies with no faces, and don’t even identify the players in the photos. And when they say, “it’s what the people want!” we should all say, “no it isn’t!” And refuse to buy magazines or frequent websites that display photos like that to prove it.

Sometimes people say that equality has been reached, that we need to stop whingeing about this stuff and move on to more important things. And to that I say,

1.     no it hasn’t

2.     multitask

It’s the same with marriage equality. “Why are we bothering about gay marriage? Shouldn’t we be worrying about homelessness or the economy?”

1.     because equality

2.     when was the last time you cared about the economy?

3.     multitask 

So anyway, I live in quite a conservative town, and sometimes people say things about ladies that make me want to stab them. And it’s difficult sometimes to call them out or challenge them, because, well because it’s a small town and unless you’ve lived in one it’s pretty hard for me to explain what it feels like. But I try to lead by example, and I try to tell stories from my own life, about electric drills and driving and how my partner cooks food and how you know, we both do stuff that interests us whether it’s video games or theatre or whatever. Why?

1.     because equality

The Feel-lympics

I feel feelings

I feel them all the time

I feel them with my heart and I feel them with my mind

Hey!

- A poem by Lizzyish

Sometimes blogging can be a bit of a walk down Special Snowflake Lane. It’s like, ‘here are the ways in which I am special and different to you, they are so special, I put them on the Internet’. I know other people feel feelings; I’m not trying to imply I feel more or bigger feelings than you. But I know, from observable evidence, that most people don’t get weepy while watching the Olympic Opening Ceremony. 

I am a sucker for spectacle. It’s probably much cooler to watch big events like the Opening Ceremony or the Doctor Who Symphonic Spectacular or… you know… my little sister’s choir performance at the fete and not get all teary. But I’m not cool. I think we can all agree that my coolness exists only in the minds of my own imaginary childhood friends.

We watched the Olympic Opening Ceremony last night. We don’t get Channel 9 because our aerial is a pile of poo, so we watched it on my laptop many hours after the event. I already knew that the Queen was going to parachute in, that there were going to be smoke stacks that looked like Mordor, that sadly the 10^th Doctor did not get to light the flame and that motherflippin VOLDERMORT was going to be there.  Some of it was cheesy, lots of it was slow and boring, and there was a real emphasis on bad things (a whole segment on DEATH has got to be the foremost one here) but I still welled up. I welled up right at the start, when that small child mimed Jerusalem, and it just got worse from there. Every time I tried to regain my composure, something else dramatic would happen, and I’d be trying to hide my face from Boyfriend again.

I think it’s the music that does it, really. I don’t really give a shit about the importance of the industrial revolution. Not more than anybody else who really loves electricity and their laptop does. I’m not British. I’m descended from British people (I’ve got everything except Scottish in me I think) and I’ve been to England once, but I don’t have any particular fondness in my heart for the British Isles. And yet still, the music swells and the drums go bang and I care. Oh yes I care. And my heart seems to fill up with emotion and feels and pour out of my eyes.

I cry in movies too. Pretty much all the movies. Anything with a remotely sad moment and I’m gone. For those people who say, “I never cry in movies”, let me just tell you, it’s a really strange sensation. Because the emotions aren’t yours. You aren’t weeping for the death of a loved one, you’re weeping for the death of a fictional character you’ve spent less than 2 hours getting to know. And yet, for that fleeting moment, you are completely wrapped up in that emotion. And it feels great, but also awful.

I think my absolutely most ridiculous weeping over spectacle moment has to be the aforementioned Doctor Who Symphonic Spectacular in Melbourne. I’d gone with a largeish group of people. We walked across half of Melbourne to get to the convention centre. And the whole walk, my excitement was mounting, but also a growing doubt. I own the DVD with the “Doctor Who at the Proms” special feature, and I’d watched it twice, and I suspected this was going to be almost the exact same thing minus the most famous actors. As we walked I kept thinking, “it’s going to be good, but not that great, don’t get too excited all you’ll be disappointed.”

And then we got there. And the foyers were completely full of Doctors and Roses and Marthas and Amys. There were TARDISes and sonics, masks and camera flashes. The excitement was palpable, but the foyers were giant, so by the time we got to our door there were only a couple of minutes to spare before the start time. The lights went down just as we sat in our seats. A Judoon told us over the PA to turn our mobiles off, and then suddenly a woman started singing Amy’s theme and I burst into tears. Just like that. Or it was less “bursting into tears” and more “letting out a constricted sob”. I just wasn’t ready, not prepared for it, and it was so beautiful. I think I proceeded to sob or get weepy 7 or 8 more times during the performance.

So anyway, it’s probably for the best that I can’t get the Olympics on my TV, because otherwise I’d be sobbing every day over every amazing Olympian who wins a race or gets a goal. Especially because Channel 9 will undoubtedly replay the good bits to dramatic music every hour.