I posted this as a comment to someone else's blog post, but I liked it enough to flesh it out and post it here. It may be "duh" to those that are gender theory aficionados, but it's just me thinking stuff out and wanting to share it with the approx. negative zero people that read my blog.

 I think that people cling to gender roles because we depend on binaries. They make everything ostensibly less complicated (although they very obviously don't), because people can place everything into its little black-or-white appointed box, and boom - easy. Gray areas are messy and people don't like messy, because it throws everything we thought we knew about how the world works.


People tend to react to gender variance with this overblown panicky fear, as if the world as we know it is going to end because Angelina Jolie dresses her daughter in boy's clothes or Cher's son got a sex change. I mean, it's a valid fear, but I don't think that we should fear the end of the world as we know it. Because, honestly, the world as we know it is pretty shitty sometimes, and could use a real overhaul in the way things are done. 


But as always, that fear symbolizes a much larger, more existential fear. I think people unconsciously think, "What do you mean, girls don't have to wear pink dresses and play with dolls, cook, clean, be second class citizens, etc.? Then what IS a girl, really? and by proxy, If gender isn't something concrete we can depend on, than what in the hell is?" 

It's the same damn reason that people tell queer people all the time that they can't be bisexual or whatever because they have to be "one or the other" or tell biracial people that they have to pick "one or the other" identity. People have to be "black or white," "boys or girls," "straight or gay," "republicans or democrats"... Hyperbole, but I make my point. 

I really don't think gender necessarily has to be a damaging concept. I think it's unrealistic to say "Just get rid of gender entirely!" because I don't think we have the capacity to just purge gender from our society altogether. Neither would it be productive, because because we're all gonna live our lives in our own gendered capacities and that's totally fine. It's just how to get people's minds out of that linear binary gutter, where it's two endpoints and a scary unknown in between that they fear and despise and use that fear to limit others. 

I guess the problem is how to get it from being a linear spectrum to being more like a circle. If that makes any sense. To me, the gender spectrum is a circle, in that it's infinite. A circle can be defined as the curve traced out by a point that moves so that its distance from a given point is constant. At the risk of sounding cheesy, that center point represents being a human, and each individual point on the curve represents that we're all at exactly the same distance from that core. Yes, "Cis" male and "Cis" female are definitely on that circle, but there are infinite points and therefore infinite ways of being a human. It's not a perfect simile (metaphor? Simile? I never could quite get a grasp on those), but it works. 

I could also dive deeper into the poststructuralist analysis of gender but that's for another time because it's laaaaate. 

Sho confused, sho many questions.  Sometimes I have no idea who I even am anymore - have I become more real or have I become more of a farce? Am I more likable when I have lower self-esteem? Or do I never stop having low self-esteem? Am I an artist now? Am I more grown-up than I was when I was 18? Or will I forever be the person standing over the stove eating spaghetti straight out of the pot? will I be a big 15-year old forever? fuck.

I realize this may make me sound like a weirdo/stoner but sometimes when I get stressed to the point of no return, I have to stop and look around and remind myself that we're all nothing but simple organisms who have convinced ourselves that we're complex and important or that our lives mean anything. Humans invented God because they're scared that their lives mean nothing and that they will someday be alone in the world. Nothing is forever, everything we think is forever is only temporary, we hold our noses, sink underwater and tunnel our vision to make it through each day, we rarely ever come up for air. Everything we believe in and act upon was made up by other simple organisms and we just play into it because it's all we ever knew and we're just mindless rule-followers.  Most speech is meaningless chatter and most thoughts are even more meaningless chatter, because thoughts don't exist to other people unless they're written down or spoken.

ugh.

Maybe i should just sleep more, then I won't keep having existential crises.

found this from my old xanga profile:

Hey. I'm Mollie. I like green day (duh) and i like system of a down (duh) and i like.. Nutella. I a bunch of other stuff, too.. i just can't remember it all because it's... 1:30 AM. ever forget? it happened to me.




ahahahaaaa. 15-year-old me was sooo dumbbbb and sad. I was reading those letters from celebrities to their 16-year-old selves, and I was thinking about what I would write if i had to do that. (even though probably not enough distance has passed since then-only 5 years - but a world of difference, I hope?) I think it would go something like this: 


Seriously, chill the fuck out. Your mom loves you and wants you to be safe. People like you. The girls you've been obsessing over for too long proooobably don't like you that way because they're straight, but that's not the end of the world. People don't give a shit that you're gay, so stop angsting about it. Really, they don't. Stop being intimidated by those other girls who you think are so much cooler than you - they're really not. You have a lifetime to drink and have sex - It's not as exciting as you build it up to be, and you have a whole lifetime to drink and have sex. Plus, once you reach the legal drinking age, you won't think it's fun anymore. And you'll try pot, and realize that you hate it and that it's not exciting either, just kind of scary. 


And please, please, for the love of god, stop being so emo. 


love, 


21 year old self, with a whole NEW bundle of issues to deal with. 

Found this in my freshman year files, and couldn't resist sharing it because it's so precious and funny to me: 

I like to draw pretty pictures. Or rather I don’t – all my art turns out creepy, sexual or violent , because I’m secretly a sociopath apparently

And people probably think I’m a big narcissist because three big projects this year have consisted of pictures or drawings of my in my bra. And I showed everyone who walked by the glass case in main my titties practically. I also did this really shitty drawing /painting of wigs that is the dumbest thing I have ever done but Barry thinks It’s the shit.

I made a banana out of a plastic tablecloth. Which was cool. And I made a stupid cardboard thing. And braided chives for a day and accomplished nothing but a shitty installation and an apartment that smells like chives.

In painting class, I did nothing because I am a 5 year old and didn’t like the teacher so didn’t feel like doing work was important because hey, I didn’t have to work in high school, why would I have to now?  Spoiled brat. I did one of my paintings at 3am-5am because I decided once that getting laid was more important than doing my homework.  The rest of them were shitty still lives that had absolutely no relevance to my life in any way – I just had to hammer them out. There were two assignments that I actually enjoyed doing – and those were the FIRST and the LAST. And because of it I got purple oil paint all over my nice white jacket.  And Finklestein didn’t even care, because hey, he was only here for one semester why would he give a fuck?

I’m not even going to talk about elements.

Illustration was fun. I drew thirty pictures of “addiction/overindulgence” and I was proud of them but my teacher shuffled through them like they were a fucking deck of cards. It was time-consuming. Then I drew ten more big ones that were awesome.  

In graphic design I did basically nothing because apparently it comes easy to me. Great. I don’t want to have anything to do with graphic design!

lol. Freshman Aaaaaangst.

fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu.

I am the very worst.

a self-proclaimed feminist makes two very un-feminist declarations:

1. I hate armpit hair. No gender is excepted from this. Armpit hair on any person just makes me squirm.

2. I hate body odor. Well, I like mine well enough. But, no matter how hard I try to not be bothered by it, I still find others' strong body odor annoying and offensive.

does that make me not a feminist? I don't think so.... we all have little idiosyncrasies, I guess.

peaceful to rage in under 60 seconds.

It terrifies me that, to a large chunk of our country, intelligence and competence is seen as a bad thing.

That said, politics these days have the uncanny capability of making me go from peaceful to boiling rage in under 10 seconds. I'm sure anyone who's talked politics with me in the last few days can verify this.

I just. can't. even.

When did 'conservative' go from meaning 'conserve the government's cash flow so we can have a healthy economy' to 'conserve my own big heap of money which NO ONE ELSE CAN HAVE NAH NAH NAH POOR PEOPLE SCREW ALL YOU GUYS GO GET A JOB YOU LAZY BUMS (also I would like a christian nation where no one is educated so they will believe whatever I tell them and I can also hate on whomever I want without any repercussions)'???????

huh?? When?? These are the times when I curse the two-party system and its ability to cause semi-sane politicians to vote against their own beliefs and interests just to court a certain fringe population. (ahem Mitt Romney, Michele Bachmann, and countless others ahem)

There are just endless things I could name that can send me into a spiral of rage - but nothing makes me steam out the ears more than the current political clusterfuck over TAXES.

I'm a democrat, for the most part, so I'm a little biased when I speak about this. But I'm trying to come from a logical standpoint, here.

This is how I see it: Capitalism is a system that in order to be fair and/or functional depends on people not being greedy and -at least marginally- sharing their wealth with others or redistributing it back into the economy some way. However, as of now it is seen merely as a tool to manipulate to one's advantage so one can accumulate mass amounts of individual wealth. The whole "individualism" thing is basically an out for people so they have an excuse not to have to worry about or have any regard for others (if you don't have any money, you just must not be motivated enough, right?). The whole 'sharing' or 'redistributing' thing is kind of cast aside as unimportant because it doesn't concern or benefit the "individual"(except in emotional ways but of course, those do not count as 'important' in the capitalist system). And it has been proven time and time again that people ARE greedy and will always BE greedy. It's also been proven that stimulus funding doesn't 100 percent work, either, for this very same reason. Therefore, the system has a major flaw and needs to be reworked. Right?

so apparently, according to 'conservative' republicans, that means we should keep taxing the poor people and giving huge tax cuts to the wealthy people and businesses, in hope that they will feel generous and flow that money back into the economy with jobs. However, presented with the evidence I think we can safely say that doesn't work, because those wealthy individuals and businesses hoard the wealth rather than redistribute it in the economy. So, our rich get richer and our poor get poorer until there's such a massive class divide that the economy just falls apart completely.

The problem is that taxes are getting higher and higher and incomes are getting lower and lower. Why is there less income? Because there are no jobs. Why are there no jobs? Because businesses and people are so much poorer that they cannot afford to pay more than the bare minimum of workers. Why are taxes getting higher? Because the government is piss-poor. Why is everyone so poor? because the top 1% or something of the population is literally hoarding all the money in this country.



Try to tell me that sounds like a well-oiled, functional economic system.

And why in the world do people ferociously defend a system that, while sometimes has them riding high, mostly just ends up kicking them into the proverbial shitter? (sub-prime loan scams, inflation, great depression of the 30s, great depression of the 2000s, housing and stock market crashes, foreclosures, all other depressions in between, massive widespread poverty)

Here's why: the people making the rules aren't the ones really being affected by all this. They're all about 'limiting government spending' and whatnot, but the hidden fine print on that statement is 'limiting government spending...... on things we don't need personally.' If limiting government spending meant investigating and limiting the salaries and personal spending of government officials and corporate C.E.O.s instead of cutting important things like medicare and healthcare, I'll bet my ass they wouldn't be railing so hard for it. It just makes my logic hurt to think that the ones calling the shots in this country about social and financial issues are not the ones who would face the consequences of those decisions (abortion, gay marriage, medicare, etc.) In addition to that, we are taught from the earliest age possible that capitalism is the ONLY system and everything else is bad bad bad bad. We're taught to rely on it and become completely immersed in it - it's kind of similar to an abusive relationship. The system mistreats us but we rely on it and can't see past it.

It just makes me so sad that the system we try to function in will never work because it's based solely on self-interest and greed. I watched a video recently where republican lobbyist Edwina Rogers literally buys sheets of uncut money from the treasury to use as wrapping paper for gifts (ahem, bribes) for senators. It made me want to vomit and cry at the same time.

I shall continue this rant later.