BRBcoffee

Archive for the ‘Issues’ Category

This is the second post in two days written by me. Why? Because I am supposed to be writing a paper on not being born a woman and another on linguistics, and read two Raymond Chandler-novels. And as you may know by know: I am the queen of procrastination.

Right now I’m in the library with a friend, and I must say: I love Tromsø! This is the best library I’ve ever been in, and the view is amazing. But do you know what isn’t amazing? Writing essays.

I wish I could write this paper in a more humoristic way. Seeing as it is a paper on philosophy, and I am supposed to show my own opinions and views in the writing of it, I guess I could write it like that, but it is supposed to be in preparation for my exam, and I most certainly can’t do that when writing my exam, so I guess I should just get used to it right away.

My last post did actually get comments, so I guess I should write about radical faminism more often. So now I will write about it some more.

The Simone de Beauvoir quote that I ended last blog-post with is the quote I am writing an essay on. And it is found in her most famous book: The Second Sex. This is actually two books, published as one, with many parts and chapter. It’s huge!

I haven’t read all of it yet, and maybe I never will, but I am reading the chapters on gender vs. sex, and how girls are treated differently than boys, this resulting in the different qualities that are associated with the different genders. It is an evil circle of girls being made submissive by the society, and therefore the society continues to expect girls to be submissive.

I was never brought up to be like that. My mother, being the strong and wonderful woman that she is, thought me to stand up for what I believe in, and she allowed me to dress in the way I wanted to and play with the toys I liked. There was no question of forcing me to wear dresses and pink, I got Legos and toy-cars when that was what I wanted, and I climbed trees and had playfights without anyone telling me that it wasn’t “suitable for a girl”. For this I am thankfull.

This doesn’t seem like a very radical up-bringing, I am sure, but I am also sure that my mother and fathers liberal gender-views were important for me to become the woman I have become. No-one ever told me I couldn’t do something just because of my sex, and so I never believed it to be impossible for me to do anything. And yet many girls and women react to my way of being, and even become biased towards me because of it. Do I view myself as any less of a woman for it? No. I know that I’m a woman, I even want to be a mother someday, I just don’t believe that women are naturally more “soft and fuzzy” than what men are. Men are just as capable of love, wimsiness and care-giving as women, and women are just as capable of entrepeneurship, intelligence and sexuality as men. And yet these qualities are still by many linked to one gender alone.

I say to hell with genders, we are all humans. The only thing different between women and men are reproductive organs, hormone-levels and muscle strength. Doesn’t seem quite as important as the human qualities of feelings, intelligence and sexuality, does it?

-Frida

There are two significant causes leading to me writing this particular entry on this particular evening:
1) In less then two weeks it will be the 8th of March, also known as the International [Working] Women’s Day.
2) I am currently writing my first essay in Feminist Philosophy.

The past years I have been active in the planning and celebration of the International Women’s Day in Bodø, so it felt natural for me to be active in the group planning the celebration “Ladyfest” in Tromsø. (That’s right: Tromsø have enough people to actually have an entire festival… In Bodø we had a march for women’s rights and hardly anything else…) I’m glad that I joined the group to plan it, especially because the other women in the group are incredibly nice and supportive.

So, why do we demonstrate for women’s rights? A lot of people ask me about it, and especially in Norway where women are supposedly equal to men. And yet they make lower wages, work more part-time, are the victims of nearly all sexual assaults, have higher rates of eating disorders, and the list goes on. These are some of the reasons why I feel it’s important to keep working for women’s rights, and what’s more: It isn’t all about the norwegian women. It’s called the International Women’s Day.

Let’s face it: This is a man’s world. The dictators in Egypt, Libya and the rest of the world are men. The people who will get the power when these dictators are gone are also men. And they will decide the faith of women in their countries.
In South-American lands such as Nicaragua and Venezuela women are denied abortions. Even if they were raped, or victims of incest. In U.S.America Justin Bieber says to Rolling Stones-magazine that abortion is murder, while rape happens for a reason. Chavez [Venezuela] and Ortega [Nicaragua] are men. Justin Bieber is supposedly male. And they still get the right to speak about and rule over women’s bodies, rights and reproduction, when the women themselves aren’t granted the same chance.

Simone de Beauvoir, one of the best known feminist philosophers, critiqued psychoanalytics (such as Freud), scientists and biologists for using the male as the rule and the women as the exception. Freud even went as far as to say that all women at some point in their life feels like a mutilated man, and that something is missing about them. This is the well-known theory of “penis envy”. [Oh my god, she said penis, right?]

One would think that more than 50 years later this will be better. That the woman is an equal, and not just seen as a secondary creature with a secondary nature, but no. Today, if a woman chooses not to give birth (like Simone de Beauvoir did herself) she is often spoken down to for it. And if a woman, or a girl, chooses to speak up for her beliefs she is automatically labeled a tomboy or a problem child.

The problem I see with the world, and that Simone de Beauvoir also saw, is that women are confined to a certain way of life and thought that people try explaining with science, but that really is nothing more than a social construct. And men uses this social construct to keep their power. This is gender, not sex, and women who don’t fit in are pushed out and away. No wonder it’s hard being a teen-age girl, right?

-“One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.”
-Simone de Beauvoir
And now I’ll return to my writing.

-Frida

Mondays are not at all like fridays… not at all! The weather sucks, I overslept a lot because I was up till 4 watching videos about the holographic universe, and this time I really did leave the headset at home. Oh, and to top it off, my buss is filled with annoying little firstgraders. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t hate kids, it’s just that when they band together, each individual’s annoyingness goes exponential…

Anyway, that’s the intro. It’s a little long, but I’m ready to move on. The only problem is, I really just got on here to whine about how badly my day started, so I’m not entirely sure how I should follow up.

I guess I’ll talk a bit about Israel, it’s been a long time since it’s been mentioned on this here site, which is a bit out of character for us, so someone has to make us predictable again, and it might as well be the chaotic one.

Israel, “the only democracy in the region,” is of course rabidly supporting “President” Mubarak of Egypt, the dictator who has ruled for three decades. This seeming contradiction of a democracy supporting a dictator is very surprising to absolutely no one at all. Why is that? Maybe it’s because Israel is hardly democratic at all. Any country that systematically opresses part of it’s people with a given ethnicity has no right to call itself a democracy!

But Burie, how can you say such horrible things!? There are surely Palestinians in the Knesset! That is true, there are a few, however record shows that they have never had a decisive vote in a single case, in if such a situation has ever been imminent, the vote is not held, and the matter has been decided in back rooms in discussions where the Palestinians have not been present. If that is hard for you to believe, I shall append links at the end of this blog to prove my accusation as soon as I get on a computer.

Furthermore, in order to continue their blockade of the Gaza strip, Israel is completely dependent on Egypt upholding their blockade, as Gaza has a small border to Egypt in the south. If Egypt were to develop into an honest to God democracy, which it will, mark my words, then they might not be so keen on ruthlessly oppressing an entire people any more. So you see, Israel is terrified of democracy spreading in the region. If it can no longer falsely call itself the only democracy, it can’t expect to be the only friend of the west either (although the US did support Mubarak, but that’s a subject for another blog). In Israel’s eyes, no longer having a monopoly on telling us the truth, we, the west might start to hear certain truths that do not agree with the truths that they’ve been feeding us. Most importantly, that Israel isn’t a democracy, and that Palestine is even worse off than even the most liberal media has dared to whisper of to date. For these reasons, the democratic revolutions in the region are extremely exciting.

This is my end station here, see ya!

As I was updating my personal “About”-page to fit more recent events in the location-like department (i.e. bragging about finally leaving Bodø to go live in Tromsø, which is way cooler!) I came to think of a political cause that I care greatly about, that doesn’t get enough focus in todays society, that the politicians deprioritize time and time again, but that is also really important…

Based on the title and this introduction there are two important political causes I could be writing about. Before we continue, would you like to venture a guess as to which one I am going to write about?

[poll id=”38″]

To avoid cheating i will fill some space with a big, old and edited picture of me with crazy hair, so that you can’t see the upcoming text. Do not cheat, capiche?

So… All the reasons why I love trains:

• Trains are old-fashioned, and thus romantic.
• There is no stressing when it comes to train-travel. No security check-points, no boarding and take-off and landing and what not. You get on, you hang out, you get to where you wanna be.
• People are nicer on trains. (Probably because of the romance and lack of stress thing.)
• I always meet the nicest, funniest or most interesting people on trains.
• Trains are better for the environment.
• You’re never as rested after a nap as you are after a nap on a train. (At least I ain’t…)
• Trains are means to traveling that aren’t airplanes. Airplanes suck. Logically: Trains must be amazing.
• Last but not least: How can you NOT love this:

There is only one problem when it comes to my current living situation and my love for trains… Tromsø doesn’t have a railway.

Bodø is the last stop on the norwegian railway. Everything north of Bodø and Fauske  is train-less. (Except for the stretch between the norwegian town Narvik and the swedish town Kiruna, originally used to transport ore, or something…)

Why is the north of Norway without trains? Because the only one ever to actually bother building railway in the north of Norway lost all power before he finished. I am of course talking about Hitler, so it isn’t a bad thing that he lost all his power, but it would have been nice if the norwegian government had continued his work in this general area. Like they promised to do. Time and time again. But never did.

There is a railway-station in Tromsø, actually. And 4 metres or something of actual tracks. They were promised a railway by the government, you see, and celebrated this by building a station. And aquiring 4 metres of track to pass this station. The train never arrived, and the station is now one of the pubs in Tromsø with probably the highest age-average. (Oh, and I’ve been there and will be there again, because I loved it a bit…) As for the 4 metres of train-tracks, they are leant up against some wall. 4 metres of train-tracks aiming for the sky. A true railway to heaven.

Anyways, I’m clearly trailing of, and I’ve lost all track of time, so I think this will be it for today….

Forever yours,
Frida.

(Ps.: None of the facts in this entry have been checked against accurate sources. So it may be 8 metres of railway and not 4… Please don’t choo me! And I don’t think there’s any big mistakes, I’m just covering my tracks…)

Good morning.

As the green goblin said in the spider-man movie, forty thousand years of evolution and we’ve barely even tapped the vastness of human potential. Or in the spirit of Kelso in that 70s show, it’s the 1970s, things should have round edges by now! It’s almost 2011 for crying out loud, and yet stupid sicknesses like the flu still roam the lands, infecting people at willy-nilly. Shouldn’t we have been able to cure that shit by now?

I want my bionic exoskeleton that protects me from diseases and makes me awesome. Why are nobody working on this? Surely we’ve seen enough movies of aliens featuring Will Smith to know that exoskeletons are awesome?

Also, during the night when I was unable to sleep, I thought of a list of things that are more awesome to do because of having a mustache. Sadly, I have forgotten what those things were.

Full of holiday cheer,

Vegard