"If we give gay people civil rights, everyone will want them": Heterosexual Privilege

With Maryland being so painfully close to allowing same-sex marriages, I figured I'd get down Peggy MacIntosh style and write about all the privileges I have as a heterosexual today. With all my ranting about how the man has done me wrong on my race, religion, and gender, it's about time I recognize how he completely respects who I chose to have sex with. Here goes:

• I can get married to the man of my choosing in my state and have our marriage be recognized in other states.
• I can adopt a child without dealing with any hassle for having a partner of the opposite sex.
• If I get married, I can receive my husband's benefits and file for taxes as "married".
• On Valentine's day, I can count on having a card, balloon or other ridiculous paraphernalia to have a man and woman on it.
• I can go to any popular bar or club and have people to flirt and dance with.
• I never have to come out of a closet, or deal with the painful realization that my friends and family may disown based on the gender of who I have sex with.
• I can go on a date, and abide by the social norms of who's going to pay, who should be making the first move, etc.
• I can go out in public and be affectionate and hold hands with my significant other without fear of the hostility or anger that it might stir up.
• I can sit comfortably while others in the room degrade other people and even refer to inanimate objects as "gay" or "faggish" without feeling the underlying hate that's stabbing at my sexuality.
• I know my job (when I get one) will not fire me based on my sexual orientation.
• I can dress however I want and not worry about looking flamboyant or attracting the wrong attention.
• Who I can marry will not be dictated by a religion I don't believe in, in a country that was founded on religious freedom.
• Who I can marry, is not re-enforced by ridiculous arguments that my being married will lead to marriages between people and animals, adults and children, and apparently even people and robots.
• I can count on seeing heterosexual couples on movies, t.v. and magazines, and know that my society is perfectly okay with the way I choose to live my life.
• I can refer to myself as "straight" and not think twice about the connotation that everything else must be deviant.
• There are no laws banning the way I choose to have intercourse. Although, either way, the 14th amendment has my back now.
• I can experience true love, the most powerful and all encompassing emotion of the human spirit, and not be told that I am doing something wrong or sinning at the same time.

I know there is so so much more than what I have up here. Feel free to contribute via comments. At the end of the day, it's about time we start loving and accepting each other and bring it back to the real truth: All people are created equal. Our government and society should not be telling us otherwise. This fight for equality is about ALL of us. No one is free when others are oppressed.

Men are from Earth and so are Women

It always amazes me, how hard we all try to figure each other out from the other's perspective. We stereotype each other, we treat race, class, and gender as if they truly define us as individuals. But I think in the end, we're all pretty much the same. We're all equals. We all need comfort and love.

I just spent the last three days driving in the car with my older brother from his former home in Salt Lake City back to our mom's house in Baltimore. At some point we were talking about relationships, and he brought up that he's come to find through his recent experiences that men and women are just very different. I told him that I came to find the exact opposite and realized that men and women are the exact same and that people are just different. Oddly enough, I actually didn't have to make much more of an argument after that for him to agree with me. Still, it got me thinking about the classic gender vs. sex argument.

The very basic distinctions between men and women are mostly biological, aka your sex. But for most of us our gender is planned out before we are even out of the womb. Why else are so eager to find out the sex of the baby? We are socialized to death about who we should be and what we should act like as young boys and girls before we can even slightly comprehend it. I guess that's why we ended up just narrowing down to the opposite sex having cooties when we were little.

Going through the toy aisles in Target make me so uneasy as an adult, because I can see these awful projections of gender on to children screaming out. You can spot aisles intended for little girls because it's covered enough bright pink products to make you nauseous from one walk through. It's mostly dolls or some other kind of crap that place an unnecessary amount of importance on our looks. There seems to be this idea that girls need to ridiculously skinny with long flowing hair, preferably white with blond hair and blue eyes, but these days the token minority is acceptable so long as our only distinguishing features are skin, hair and eye color. Meanwhile boys toys are completely the opposite. Most of them aren't even based on human male "action figures"-clearly not dolls as you can't change their clothes.

I get that in this grand free country of ours, the easiest way of keeping women oppressed and consumer driven is by feeding us an virtually unattainable standard of beauty. This way, we keep ourselves fixated enough on attracting men and tearing each other apart, so we never really fulfill our true purposes and passions. But now that times have changed and we legally be oppressed anymore, isn't time for gender socialization to change too?

Wouldn't it be easier, not to sound cliche but, if we all just got along? Little boys and girls could play with the same toys or toys that they're actually interested in without being outcasted. We could learn and discover what we really want from life at a younger age without worrying about what's expected from us. We could learn to interact with the opposite sex so that we're actually comfortable enough when we reach those awkward teen years to just be ourselves. Relationships and marriages would probably last a lot longer too if we were more comfortable with ourselves and less concerned with attracting others.

I guess what I'm trying to say is, I wish our consumer driven society would give us a chance as people not as men and women. We should all know from day one that it's not about appearances, without our toys and the media screaming the contrary. We should all be given a fair at doing what we loved to do without being told we're weird, or even worse, to add to the still widespread acceptability of homophobia, gay.

Getting sucked in...

So I am officially weeks away from completing my first year of law school. I think it's safe to say that this lifestyle has completely sucked me in. For someone who considers herself to be the epitome of the slacker law student, even I spend an annoying amount of time studying. When I'm not studying, I feel guilty because I probably should be studying (for instance, right now I should really be studying for my Crim Law midterm and not writing this blog). Any free time I get, I want to spend it with other people drinking or smoking hookah or chasing any sort of high that will just make me feel like a normal person again and not some sort of law school zombie.

Before I came to law school, I was told time and time again that the first year is the worst of your life. On the contrary, this year has been one of my best. I feel like I am on the cusp of realizing who I am and what I really want to do with my life. I have made some of the best friends I have ever had, and I have come to many important realizations about life in general. But the further I get wrapped into this new law school version of myself, the more I fear losing touch with the activist in me.

While I am trying to follow the path I lead in undergrad by getting involved with student organizations, I still don't think I can regain what I had. There isn't much time for activism. There is always that lurking feeling that I need to be studying. Unfortunately, studying or the urge to study leaves my brain dead and crying out for activities that don't involve thought. And we all know, there is no activism without thought.

It's funny that the very reason I came to law school is being destroyed by law school itself. It's like having had your cake, and while you can't eat it too, you have to sit there and watch other people eat it. I've seen so many of my peers that I met through the movement flourish and become further involved after college and continue on the path of promoting social justice. And while I am so proud and happy for them, I can't help but envious in the sense that I am yearning to be out there with them. I feel like we were all running on the same course, and somehow I lost my way.

I had finally found that thing, that thing you are so truly and utterly passion about, that nothing else comes close. The love that is so much bigger than you, that it automatically connects the dots between yourself and like-minded people, so that together you can turn that love into something more. While I can throw out these spiffy terms like social or equal justice, civil rights, community organizing, coalition building, activism, etc., it all comes down to that love that is ingrained in all these things.

I am positive that I will find my way back. But right now, sitting on the side lines is both tormenting and satisfying. The fear of losing my way has been creeping up on me a lot recently. I'm afraid of losing touch, forgetting that feeling or worse coming back to it only to find that the fire has died down. But, I think deep down I know, I could never let this be "the one that got away". It's all just a matter of getting back on course and finding the means in my life right now to do so.

"She must be a member of the Taliban"

Oh post 9-11 racism, must you always rear your ugly head after a drunken night out. While I don't remember exactly what happened (just a bit too much tequila), I do remember sitting in the late night carry out by my house with my friends while yet another pretentious highly unattractive man sat down and tried to talk to us. Nothing pisses me off more than this. Do men really think that if girls are hanging out without male company, they are just begging for guys to come over? Why is it everytime I'm out with my female friends, guys think it's perfectly fine to impose themselves on us and continue talking to us even when we show no amount of interest? And the worst thing is, God forbid, if a woman offend the male ego, we could be subject to harassment, violence, or worse. So in fear of being followed home or raped in alley way, we have to be nice to these people.

On this particular night, I was not having it. Maybe it was the tequila, or maybe it was the shear disregard for personal space that this fat, trashy, 30-something was forcing on us that set me off. I mean could you imagine the reaction from a group of 20-something boys, if I was 15 years older and a hundred pounds heavier, and I just sat down at their table and tried to strike up a conversation? Needless to say, they wouldn't have to be so polite. He started getting mad at me because unlike my friends, I wasn't trying to be nice to him out of fear of pissing him off. I kept saying things along the lines of calling him an ugly, fat white guy and trying to get him to go bother another uninterested group. I realize that I may have instigated a racially charged retaliation from him, but for him to say "I don't know what's wrong with this girl, all her friends are cool, she must be a member of the Taliban", is just plain ignorant. Why yes, ignorant sir, anyone with brown skin must be a member of terrorist organization, you clever little man, you.

Why does racism have to surface every time we really want to piss each other off? It's not helping anyone, and it's definitely not progressing our society, yet we all know it is the ultimate low blow to the person of color. While it may be said more out of spite intertwined with humor than actual racially ingrained malice, we know what we are saying and that chances are this statement will set the targeted person off like crazy. There is something about being attached to whatever it is that our skin color conveys to other people, that takes away our individuality, our struggles, and stabs at whatever pride we have built in ourselves. There is something about being attached to the oppression and hatred that our brothers and sisters before us faced, that makes me wonder, just how American are we?

I realize my fourteen letter last name and multiple deity religion doesn't make me seem like the all-american girl next-door type, but this is all I know. All I have ever known really, is Maryland and this country that I love so much. My parents focused on their careers and their hatred for one another, instead of teaching my brother and I about Hinduism and Sri Lankan culture. I really know little to nothing of the land, language, and culture that they grew up in. Why does this event, 9/11, something that happened within my lifetime, need to be attached to me simply because the color of my skin? Joking or not, it absolutely sucks to be associated with terrorist groups. This is the only home I have ever known, and to be tied to organizations and pointed out as an enemy to my home, is one of the most demoralizing, heart breaking thing you can do to someone. I am an American-born citizen, and I will continue to fight for the rest of my life for social justice in this country because I love it.

With that said, I realize it has been a long time since I wrote in this blog. I started at a point where I felt so deeply connected to the Asian Pacific American activist community. At that point, this connection was my strength, my passion, and my power. Now, over a year later, in law school at the University of Baltimore, I am not connected to that community everyday. I no longer sit in Asian American Studies classes or attend weekly Asian American Student Union e-board meetings. The people, who brought me to my passion, helped me foster it, and taught me the importance of this fight are now miles away and scattered around. I find myself reading blog after blog trying to keep up, trying to keep my passion aflame, but I feel somewhat lost without these people. I look to broader civil rights movements, but with all the work I have to do for school, it's been harder and harder to keep connected. I realize now, that regardless of the circumstances, I need to keep up with my activism. It is my true love and the driving power behind my pursuit of my J.D. This incident may have been irritating and I'm sure I'll face plenty more racism, here in Federal Hill (one of the "nicer" areas in Baltimore), but it's good to know that I can still lay the brown smackdown.

This one's for you...

This is for every male that's ever grabbed me(or part of me) in a club/bar, "grinded" up on me, followed me home or roofied my drink against my own will and thus left me feeling powerless...

this is for every guy that's ever verbally/physically/sexually abused a girl, tore down herself esteem, and made her feel as if she was completely worthless without him...

this for every magazine, movie, television show, and advertisement that tricks girls into thinking that the standard of beauty is white, young, straight, able-bodied, deathly skinny, completely free of body hair, and otherwise unachievable and therefore that we are nothing if we don't fit into this mold...

this is for the society that let's "boys be boys", but socializes girls to believe that their purpose in life is to stand still and look pretty, without ever questioning the status quo or expressing any sort of anger, hostility or sexual desire...

this is for every member of my family, that needs to make some comment about my weight, usually in the form a back handed compliment, every time they see me, but doesn't say a thing to male relatives about their appearances...

this is for every brother of color who "only dates white girls" or considers white girls more attractive/"better" than us sisters of color, and make us seem like hideous monsters unless we straighten and/or dye our hair, bleach our skin and double fold our eyelids to be just like them...

this is for everyone who holds true to the double standards and passes judgement on any girl that expresses her sexuality, but encourages guys to go "spread their seed"...

this is for the slang and language that we use daily, such as "hit like a girl", which make women seem weak or less than men and "bitch/slut/whore" which still lack in equally demeaning male counterparts...

this is for the government that says we are all equal, but gives women paychecks that are drastically less than their male counterparts for doing the same work...

this is for the parents that let their sons do whatever they please and place no restrictions on them but dictate every detail of their daughters lives...

this is for any guy that thinks that girls have it so much easier, when really we are holding our tongues, "letting it slide" and putting others before ourselves because that's what "good girls" are supposed to do...

this is for every person who will read this blog, get offended, and write it off as nothing more than a "femi-nazi" "man-hating" rant, and completely miss the point I am trying to make...

FUCK YOU

You will never recognize your privilege, but the minute it is even slightly threatened you get riled up. You criticize activists for fighting something that isn't there or you think they already have, and never consider the possibility that you just don't see it because things are working in your favor.

I am writing this blog after considering many different instances that have came up in the past month that have to do with male privilege. We have a society that is progressed so much in such a short amount of time and I am really grateful for that, but that doesn't not mean that we have to stop fighting. Feminism may have came along way but we have so much more to go. I feel like people forget to recognize just how much impact gender has on our lives still. We also forget that it really doesn't have to be this way. I know it is much easier to say that "it's just the way things are", but that's just blind reinforcement of the double standard. Both men and women are guilty of this reinforcement, but by recognizing either privlege or inequality, we are getting just a small step closer.

I'm tired of walking around with an 800 lb Gorilla on my back

I'm angry. What else is new? My new source of anger is that over 2 weeks ago I wrote a guest column for the Diamondback, in the OPINION section mind you, and I am still getting heat for it. I have responded to now two reporters who are doing a follow-up article to my article and the many responses it got online. If you don't know what I'm talking about here it is:

http://media.www.diamondbackonline.com/media/storage/paper873/news/2008/10/27/Opinion/Guest.Column.The.800Pound.Gorilla-3506761.shtml


I'll be the first to admit, I am awful at taking criticism. I'm getting better but it's taking time, and I still get upset when I look at the comments on my article. Mostly over the blatantly racist ones. What sucks the most is that these dickless sons of bitches can write whatever the hell the want to and not hold themselves accountable to it. Believe me, I did get good responses on the article, but they were via e-mail from strangers thanking me for writing it. Of course they did'nt mind holding themselves accountable. This is my response to those people, in which I don't have to hold myself accountable, because I know they won't read it.

I know that my opinions are bit extreme, and throwing out terms like the Model Minority Myth to people who would never in their wildest dreams refer to me as Asian(Asian American wouldn't even be in their vocabulary) was an overall disaster waiting to happen.Another one of my fellow AASU wrote a very similar column to the Public Asian, our school's APA newspaper, and got no heat for it at all. But I have freedom of speech just like the people who commented did, and I felt the need to address the newspaper that was publishing these articles.

Some of the comments hinted at the fact Asian Americans isolate or alienate ourselves. Really?? really??? We do this to ourselves? We wrote the Chinese Exclusion Act? The Japanese decided to head off to internment camps all on their own?? After 9/11, South Asians happily went back to their home countries without so much as a phone call to their families, who they willing left behind???? Sorry buddy, but I'm pretty sure we don't isolate ourselves, yeah I'm pretty sure American society does that for us. What I can't seem to understand is why people even question that racism doesn't exist. Do they think its some kind of jolly coincidence that minorities make up most of the people living below the poverty line and most of the people in prison in this country???? No, believe it or not, it's not because we are "too lazy" to pursue the American Dream, but rather institutionalized racism in play.

The blatantly racism ones don't deserve my time but I feel the need to share my favorite: People who eat dogs are beneath contempt. How many dogs have you eaten?


Oh I've eaten about 5 or 6 today, thanks for asking. What the FUCK? I cannot believe I go to a university that is one of the best public colleges in the nation, has AMAZING ethnic study classes, and prides itself on diversity, and yet I still have to put up with this moronic bullshit. Everything I've learned about racism in our society I have learned from this classes at this University, and now I'm having thrown back in my face by one of my fellow students. BEYOND RIDICULOUS. Actually, beneath contempt.

Moving on, my favorite thing I've been told through this experience is to just ignore it. One commenter wrote that if you don't like something, don't read it. Aka, her genius ass should have not read my article. Everyone and their mother has already shared with me that they think I'm being oversensitive. I found out recently that a professor looked into my article, the Public Asian article , and the cartoons that we were writing about, and informed us that when we see cartoons like this the best thing to do is just ignore it. Call it oversensitive. Call it whatever the hell you want, but when I see something that doesn't sit write by me, I need to say something. Because if I don't, I am only leaving room for this kind of bullshit to happen all over again. The cartoonist of the cartoon that used to sit next to Professor Gorilla, who goes by the name B.Ray, informed me that if we just ignore it, people will stop picking on us. It's like in elementary school he said. If you fight back, they only pick on you more. Too bad in other communities of color, people know better. I asked him why wasn't it "Shaniqua" instead of "Jung Sung". The Black community has been amazing at responding to racism, and although they still face UNBELIEVABLE amounts of racism, sometimes people know better than to make cheap shot jokes at them. Not B.Ray tho. Too bad for him, apparently he got fired last week because he made a cartoon that was racist against black women. Funny how things work out.

After hearing from some so many people that I was being oversensitive and I should ignore it, I almost started to think that they were right. But then, two things re-affirmed my own beliefs and my position in standing up for what I believe in. The first was the amazing performance of Yellow Rage, at the FUEL conference this past weekend. They did a poem on the word chink. How people use it, but they don't mean anything by it and sometimes even mean it as a compliment. Yellow Rage laid down the law. They affirmed what I had said in my last entry, which was that just because you don't mean it in a hurtful way, doesn't mean that it doesn't still bring back years of oppression. Find new words, people. Find intelligent humor, Diamondback cartoonists, there are plenty of funny things outside of race, gender, and sexual orientation.

The second thing was the election of our 44th President, Barack HUSSEIN Obama. Yes, HUSSEIN, which all too many Islamophobics out there are afraid of, many of whom still think he is Muslim. Many people did not believe they would ever see a black president in their lifetime, but he did it. Many people told him he was too black, too inexperienced, too young, too not fit to be our President, but he will be come January. Do you think this man listened when people told him all this?? He wasn't born with the mass following that he has now, but he earned his supporters and he did so by never backing down. I have to say, that around primaries time, I was on team Hilary(I'm Green, so i couldn't vote). But now, I have this man to thank for a renowned faith in hope, change, democracy, and the country that we live in. He has made me and so many others a better person by utilizing his freedom of speech. So for all of you who said I was being oversensitive and should ignore it, I'm officially ignoring you instead. I'm following the lead of our next President, and I REFUSE to back down. I am entirely too angry, smart, and empowered, to sit and smile while the rest of society takes a cheap shot at me. Sorry if that's oversensitive in your book, but in mine it's standing up for what I believe in.

Say what?: The language of hate

I do it. You do it. We all do it. It's practically a societal norm. That's right people, everyday we use slang words that further oppress the already oppressed groups. What is it about our generation that we love to rally for change, but yet we continually use our mouths to drag ourselves straight back to the gutter of injustice? I've tried to stop. I've tried to stop others. But I'm afraid. It's so ingrained in us that if you try to stop, you're taking things to seriously. You're too sensitive. People will be afraid to make jokes around you. People will walk on egg shells around you. You'll lose all your friends. Still don't have a clue what I'm talking about? Well allow me to elaborate, sir!

Let's start with my pet peeve and the most commonly used. Gay. Fag. Homo. No Homo. Butch. I used to rock the hell out of this language in middle school. I mean it was the cool thing to do. You want to be cool don't you? How is it that the word gay, when I try to substitute it, always translates to "stupid". "That's so gay". "This is the gayest project ever". Really? can a project be attracted to a project of the same sex??? Is there sex in inanimate objects? We use these phrases because other people use them, and other people start using them because we use them. Its an unnecessary domino effect. I doubt that most people who use these phrases are even homophobic in the least, but no matter how casually you say it, or what you mean by it, you are using gay as a synonym for stupid. You are saying being gay is the equivalent to being stupid. You are supporting homophobia, whether you like it or not. I don't think that the LGBTQ community should have to suffer, just so we can be cool and throw around some slang. I mean did Matthew Shepard really deserve to die for being himself? There could be a lot less hate crimes against this community, if we all just supported them and didn't use these words. It's a start to a simple solution to a very dark and complicated problem.

Moving on to the word that makes me cringe. The N word. It's back and back in style. Thanks to the ever growing trend in rap music to use this word. Everyone can name a song with it in there. Fuck, everyone can name 20 songs with it in there. Who wouldn't want to sing along with Kanye, " I ain't saying she a gold digger..."? You know the rest. We all know that its okay for our black brothers and sisters to use it but not us. So why is it that all my non-black friends use it all the time? In the same way though, the joking around way, not the I'm gonna lynch your ass way. They wouldn't dare say it around my black friends though. I mean they're just being cool and trendy like Kanye. WRONG. It's not like I can call up all these artists on the phone, and be like I hope you know you just re-instated hundreds of years of racism. Really, is there a difference between the KKK-I'm gonna lynch you way and the trendy way? It's the same word, people and it is extremely painful to all communities of color, regardless of the context.

Ladies, ladies, ladies. You didn't think I'd forget about us did you? The most commonly used and most commonly overlooked hate language brings us down. Watch out cuz I'm about to go feminazi on this piece. Bitch. Slut. Whore. Ho. Hooker. Skank. Chickenhead.Floozy. I use these words all the time. Once again, jokingly. Can you think of the male equivalents to these words? No putting Man in front of it is not the same thing(Man Whore, Male Slut). It's more like Player or Pimp. But wait, those sound like good things? Can you think of any words that chastise men for being sexually promiscuous? No. There really aren't any. It's fine for them. I don't think I need to explain the ridiculousness of the double standard that our society holds so dear. What I don't understand is why women are constantly told to be stronger both emotionally and physically. "You throw like a girl". "Stop being such a woman." Apparently being born with a vagina and estrogen is an awful thing and ladies, we need to get rid of it immediately. Ask some one about Hilary Clinton, who you know does not like her, and they will tell you she's a bitch. Ask some one who doesn't like our boy George Dubya(shouldn't be too hard to find), and they will tell you he's a dumbass, jackass, etc. Why doesn't bitch come out? A bitch is just an aggressive woman. But than as soon as Hilary starts crying, she isn't strong or aggressive enough and definitely not fit to be president. Although I can almost guarantee that if Obama started to cry, he would be commended for his passion and commitment. Our language would tell us that basically a woman needs to sit still and be pretty. Unfortunately, all too many of us take this advice. This is why we spend more time and money shopping, dieting, buying make-up, shaving, and trying to fix every single "flaw" in our appearances. Oh, but we're just being girls right? This stuff makes us feel good about ourselves, it makes us confident. Why is it that feeling good about ourselves is almost completely dependent on our appearance? This is hate language in its works. Of course the media plays a huge part too, but the two go hand in hand. You wouldn't have hate language without the media.

Growing up in the suburbs among equally well off people, I never realized how I was SWIMMING in privilege. I have privilege flowing out of my ass. I never noticed that the word"ghetto", which I used to describe anything cheap or run-down, was racist and classicist. I mean I thought everyone that lived in the ghetto was there because they were lazy. They were supposed to pull themselves up by the boot straps, just like Will Smith in the Pursuit of Happiness. I thought it happened all the time. Wrong. Institutionalized racism got you again, sucka! When you think of the ghetto, do you picture white families? Didn't think so. So as long as you keep thinking that the American Dream is real, and you can easily make your way out of the ghetto, get an education, and have 2.5 kids, institutionalized racism will still go on.

I'm getting tired, so I'm going to assume you know why saying things like "retard" makes the difficult lives of the disabled even harder. This entry was not meant to be some sort of self-righteous rant about how you need to stop using this language right now. I said it myself, I use some of these words ALL the time, everyday. All I want to express is that our words have consequences. They mean something. You may not be racist, sexist or homophobic but believe me the people who invented these words and phrases were. Think before you speak, do not let the media tell you how the world should be.


*no i did not read through this to check for grammatical errors