Toulouse, Frisbee, and More Mixed Feelings about Leaving

This weekend I went to the Ultimate Frisbee Championship of France in Toulouse. It was amazing and I wrote a 3 page email about it to my parents but hadn't planned to post anything on my blog simply because most people aren't interested in frisbee. But my father thought I should post it anyway, so since I am fond of him here it is. Feel free to ignore if this doesn't interest you, or just scroll to the bottom where I talk about France and leaving and feelings and things.

It takes 5 hours to drive to Toulouse, and we left at 8pm. I was the only one who showed up at our coach's house at the appointed time, 7:15, so I played with his enormous fat cat for 45 minutes while we waited for everyone else. Which meant that we finally got to sleep at around 3am, what with stopping for dinner (even though we brought sandwiches, we took our time) and checking into the hotel and all that.

In the morning I left the company of my usual team, the Jets, and got introduced to my team for the weekend, the Miss Sunshines. This competition is considered the women's Open of France, which doesn't really exist because Open in Frisbee means that there's no age or gender divisions and is consequently the highest level that exists. It is actually the women's Coupe, but it is colloquially called the women's Open anyway because it's the highest level. However, the real national Open competition was happening right next to us, and that's what my usual team was participating in, but since I am the only girl and not big and fast and skilled enough to play in Open Division 1, they found me a girl's team from Paris, the Miss Sunshines. I hadn't realized that it was the women's Open and had thought that I was playing in an age bracket (20 and under, like usual), but the girls were mostly between 25 and 35 years old, and I was the youngest by 3 years at least.

They were really nice, and we had a good mix of handlers and middles. Our first match against LiliPUC was badly played. We could have won but we didn't. We didn't have good timing, we had people cutting at the same time or not cutting at all and a lot of drops. Saturday it rained cats and dogs at Toulouse and was freezing, which certainly didn't help our game. The second match was against Yaka, who are the French champions every single year. Surprisingly we lost by a smaller amount to Yaka than to LiliPUC because they had a bad game and we started to mesh well. The whole weekend we had an amazing defense going on, it was just our offense that was less intense than necessary (and too many drops). This is the first time I've done an all-women tournament, and the major difference I noticed is that you have to have a lot more stamina because since women are not as fast, we have a smaller margin of error, and since we aren't necessarily more accurate with the disk, there are more drops. So we have an hour long match that often ends in scores like 6 to 8, while the guys have an hour and a half with a 15 minute break at halftime that ends in scores like 15 to 17. It's more frustrating because we end up with way too many turnovers per point and it's less fun than the short victorious points you often get with big fast guys. Nonetheless, Yaka was great fun to play against. After losing to them we played the Sesquidistus from Strasbourg and beat them soundly in a good clean match. I had 2 or 3 horrible throws that my coach would've yelled at me for had he been there, but I'll blame it on the rain.

That night we actually didn't go to a hotel -- we went one of the girl's grandparents' house just outside of Toulouse in Merville. It was very large (fortunately, since there were 14 of us) and we put in a team effort for shopping, making an enormous quantity of pasta bolognaise, doing dishes, making the beds, etc. They had redone the attic fairly recently and turned the entire thing into bedrooms, so there were enough beds for everyone, all 14 of us. We had to get up at 6 am the next day to clean the house and pack everything up, since the grandparents weren't actually there and so we had to close it back up. At the end we took a picture in their backyard next to their cherry tree to send to the grandparents and thank them for their hospitality, so this is my only picture of a team I will remember fondly:

Our first match we lost just barely against the Monkeys -- you'll see in table below of our scores that we beat them overall in the competition because we beat some teams that they lost to, or our total number of points added up was greater, or something. I'm never quite sure how the scoring works, but it does seem logical to me that in the overall score we came out ahead. Then we played the F'airs and lost as well, although it was also close. The Jets came and cheered me on for that one, which generally does make me play a lot better, although I think it's less a question of being cheered on and more a question of being watched by people I respect very much and not wanting to mess up.

Our last match was against the BTR team that hosted us at Toulouse, and was by far my favorite. We had really gelled as a team and were playing at our top. The younger players and I got to play more 3 or 4 points out of 5 instead of the every other point we'd started out with, because 2 handlers had knee and ankle injuries and the older players were starting to wear out. I always appreciate that, and was really in top form. The weather was nice -- Saturday had been rainy and so cold it was almost hail, but Sunday there wasn't a cloud in the sky, it was hot, and I got sunburned. There was much less wind so we pulled off a lot of longs. Just about every single point worked the same way: I started in the back of the stack, cut to the front and then took off for the long, while another girl started in the front, feinted for the long, and cut to the front. She caught the disk, returned it to the handler, and the handler whipped off a long that I caught in the endzone. We pulled this off several times, and I caught 6 out of our 12 points from that match. It was pretty exhilarating. I also did a beautiful dive, not my first dive but the first that was both impressive and successful, catching a curved forehand that was a little too strong and a little too low in the far corner of the zone. I caught it in the zone and rolled out and surprised myself by not dropping it. But I was bummed out that no one from the Jets was around to see that point, because it is the crowning moment of my Ultimate career so far. And I am really proud of my skinned knee I earned while doing it.

So at the end we finished 6th out of 9, which is pretty darn respectable considering it was the championship of France, which still just blows my mind every time I realize I actually participated in it. I am happy to have put up a wicked defense against Yaka, the best women's team in France. Here's the results:

I finished by watching the last 2 matches of the real Open, which were pretty stunning. I have never seen players that good, ever. Probably because I haven't watched a lot of high-level Frisbee, but still. There was one woman who played with the team from Bordeaux, and she looked like a tall skinny guy with a ponytail -- very fast and very lacking in female figure. I guess that's why there are so few women who can play in Open tournaments, if you need to have the physique of a guy to keep up. The best match was the grand finale between Tchac and Friselis. Tchac won 15 to 11, but it was a magnificent match. I don't like watching sports too much, but that was art. I guess when you like the sport you're watching, and you're watching a higher quality of game than you yourself can play, you can appreciate it.
The Jets were happy just to not have finished last, because they expected to finish last and the coach promised to pay a round of drinks if they didn't finish last. Even though they didn't do as badly as was expected, they still came home with slightly long (or at least tired) faces because it's tough on a morale level to lose so many games in a row even if you knew what you were getting into. At least they didn't get resorted into Divison 2, which means they can still play in the highest level tournaments.

I was sad to say goodbye to the Miss Sunshines, because I had a really great time with them. They were fun and into their game and talented and really really nice (as frisbee players usually are, but I appreciate it even though it is the norm).

So that was my last tournament in France. And probably my favorite, even though I didn't play with the Jets, or even spend very much time with them. We just played really well and I dig it. There are pluses and minuses about playing on a women's team. Like I said, it takes more stamina and can be frustrating with the number of turnovers per point. And the game is generally less exciting because there are fewer longs and much more tight-knit, laborious passing that takes forever to work its patient way up to the endzone. But on the plus side, it's nice to be faster than average and to be a valued middle/long, instead of someone who does middle/long because I'm not good enough to be a handler. And it was really nice to see some incredible lady players, when I previously have not met very many in a sport that is almost always co-ed, but is still dominated by men. Next year I hope I can play on a women's team and on a co-ed team, because they are actually fairly different styles of gameplay.

I have also decided I will go to the Netherlands at some point. There are a lot of international people who play frisbee, especially the LiliPUC that practices right next to an international university in Paris and so collects all the international students. I talked with a lady from Vancouver and a girl from the Netherlands. Apparently pretty much everyone in the Netherlands speaks excellent English and they seem chill and interesting. Not that I can judge by one girl I met at a frisbee tournament of course, but if they're all like her I would have a great time.
I was astonished at the number of Americans I heard just walking around the frisbee fields. Several teams had one or two or three Americans! Frisbee is certainly a sport that would attract international students, but I didn't realize it was so normal to have an American as a team mascot (as the Jets affectionately call me).

This Tuesday was great too, as I spent it goofing off with the guys from my team. We are all in good spirits at the moment, exhilarated by the approaching end of school and the tournament and the fact that I can count the number of frisbee practices I have left on one hand and therefore have to make the most out of every moment with these people I've come to love. After practice I was eating a yogurt and paused with my spoon halfway to my mouth, a sinking, sick feeling in my stomach. I suddenly realized just how much I'm going to miss my friends and my team and my host family and frisbee tournaments and the roots I've painstakingly grown here in the Vendée.

I still remember the first time I felt sad about the prospect of leaving instead of excited: a few months ago my coach started talking about organizing frisbee trips to the beach in summer, and even having tournaments on the sand. And I regretted the fact that I wouldn't be there. But this was different. This was a sucker-punch to the gut, a realization that not only will I have some fond memories of France and not only painful ones, but I might actually... miss it? Wow. I experienced the same feeling today in the car coming home from school with my three little cousins, a sick knot of apprehension in the pit of my stomach. I don't want to leave my cousins and have them grow up without me. When the littlest one is my age, he won't remember me anymore, and that kills me, considering how he's been an important part of my life this year and vice versa.

The other piece of news that factors into this rumination is that I got my end of the year practice tests back. At the end of the year, French students pass the Bac, a difficult test that determines if they get their diploma or not. This year the kids in the science track will take exams in French and History/Geography, the two subjects that they don't need to take next year to concentrate on science and math, their more important subjects. In French the average was an extremely low 8/20 (normally it should be between 10 and 12 out of 20) and I got a 5, which was no surprise – sure, my teacher grades me nicely because she knows I'm American, but I don't expect a grader who doesn't know me to successfully guess that I'm an exchange student and thus give me a break when I use inaccurate terms or vague sentences or go off-topic. But in history I got a 13, which is pretty good, especially the 9/10 points I earned for the Cold War essay topic. What this means to me is that I could, if I wanted to, stay. I could stay and take the Bac and this year I'd get a low score because of French, but I'd more than make up for it next year with math and physics, and possibly even get honors or high honors if I could pull off a perfect score in math. (The French math program is not very difficult.) I could go to the University in Nantes and live in an apartment in the city, and have a lot of the things that I missed living in the countryside. I could have a bachelor's degree in 3 years, which is a year or even two years faster than I'll have it in the US. I could actually do that; I'd just have to fill out some paperwork and make it happen. Obviously this possibility is not one I'd follow through on. I miss my family and friends and country and language, and I'm excited to study at Madison next year. But my results on an anonymous test compared to French people made me realize that I could stay, and realizing that this possibility even crossed my mind makes me feel like I did okay for myself here. It was hard, but there were some moments so rewarding that I'll actually be sad to leave.

I'm not going to lie. My feelings are really, really mixed. My first months here I associate with the stomach pain and insomnia of homesickness, with anxiety and loneliness and the fear that I'd made a terrible mistake. And even now life is not perfect. Life has simply attained a level of normality that I had at home: some moments are bad. High school is boring. Sometimes I'm sick of everything. Some moments are good, even euphoric. But I actually have a life here, and dammit I'm glad I'm going to miss this. I'm so glad I'm not leaving with a bad taste in my mouth.

10 days until I see my parents. 17 days until I leave my second home.

T-3 weeks

Another obligatory post for my CIEE blogger internship, ruminating about nothing in particular except the passage of time and whether or not this year was worth it:

8 and a half months down. 3 weeks to go before I see my parents and my brother. 4 weeks left in France. 6 weeks before I come home and see my friends and my cat and everything else.

I'm starting to be really glad that I didn't come for only a semester. In October, November, and December I wanted to go home. I didn't, because going home would be giving up, because it would've been complicated to come back to Homestead in the middle of the year, and because I didn't want to make a big deal (to my host family and to my organization) out of a situation that wasn't horrible, but was simply less good than my life at home would've been. Here is something I wrote for an October 26, 2012 blog post “Angst”:

“Because I've settled in now, which is a good thing, I can evaluate my new life and how happy I am in it. And it's just a little depressing because while I appreciate the idea of having an adventure, I just like the Silicon Valley better than the Vendée in most respects (not all, but most). And I came here looking for an adventure -- it is an adventure to live abroad, but it doesn't feel like one. My life is actually pretty boring. It's not terrible by any means, and it's not like I'll be suffering until I come home next summer. But it is depressing because that means I'm sort of waiting to come home, instead of reveling in every moment.”

I just plain felt like I'd be better off at home. And with all the expectations I had before coming here that my year in France would be amazing and adventurous and fulfilling, I felt let-down. My friend Julia thought I should follow through on this feeling. If you'd be better off at home, go home, she said. There's no reason you should stay if you aren't happy.

But I didn't. September, my first month, had been hard and really long, but I had an expectation that things would get better as I got settled in. I broke down once at the end of September, set off by feeling overwhelmed by my French homework but really just homesick and lonely. October was bad because I started to realize that maybe I wouldn't settle in after all, or at least I would be worse off than at home. November was horrible, except for my trip to Paris. In December things started to look up. On the 28^th of November (“Ultimate”) I wrote:

'Maybe it's too soon to say so, but I feel like this weekend was a turning point. I have a purpose now. Just as marching band was my heart and soul at home, so too can Ultimate be my passion here. These past few months have been aimless and boring, but now I finally have something to get me out of the house, something to work for, and something that's really my own... I don't know if this'll turn out to be an unrealistic expectation, but I can picture in seven months looking back and saying, “Yeah, that first Ultimate tournament at La Rochelle – that was when I really started to have fun here. That was when I first found a reason to stay in France.”'

At least I was right about that. It was my Ultimate team that pulled me out of my funk. For awhile I stayed only for that. School was boring, I didn't have real close friends like back home, and I didn't enjoy going out with my host siblings to their friends' parties. But I had Ultimate twice a week, tournaments on weekends, and it was something different from what I had at home. This is important – having things that are too similar means you're too likely to compare them. High school in France is quite different, but it's still just high school, and it's easy enough to say that it is worse than Homestead. Many other elements are the same – I am more compatible with my high school friends at home than with the people I've met here.

Obligatory picture to break up the text: this is a frisbee team (not mine, actually) that I ended up playing with at last weekend's tournament because I am too old to play in the under-17 category with my usual team.

 

So it's the things that I don't have at home that I'm going to miss. I'll miss my host sister. I've never had a sister or lived with another girl my age before, and my relationship with her is special and way different than what I have with my brother. I don't have anyone like her in the US and I'll miss her a lot. I'll miss my Ultimate team, because I was much closer with them than I was with my pickup team at home, and we went to tournaments together, went camping together, and bonded as a team. I'll miss my frisbee coach. He's my neighbor and drives me to every frisbee practice, so we've spent a lot of time talking in the car. We discuss politics, people, cultures, frisbee, life, and everything else that comes to mind. We are quite different but have a lot of mutual understanding between us; we understand each other and I just plain really like talking with him, and yet I would hesitate to call him a friend because of our large age difference and how much I respect him. I have come to realize that I will miss him a lot because he is something to me that I didn't have at home either: a mentor. An adult who isn't a parent who gives me advice, whom I respect enormously and like so much that it hurts inside. I don't think I'll miss France, because there's not much to miss about a country. I'll miss baguettes and Kinder and maybe certain traditions like saying hi to people on the street instead of just walking past them, or the way French people are blunt and honest, less subtle and confusing than Americans. But that isn't much; I don't think I'll go into withdrawal over baguettes. I'll really miss the people I've met though, because they are the reason I've laughed and learned and grown here. Humans are social animals; life would be nothing without other people. Essentially what I've done here is I've left one life to build another, so now I have two families, two high school groups of friends, etc. And since my life here is pretty complete, it's going to be weird to leave it.

So in December things were looking up, because I had frisbee and was becoming more and more close with my host family. On February 2^nd, I wrote:

“The halfway point was January 22^nd. I feel like I should have passed the halfway point a long time ago, like I should be almost done. It might well end up feeling like that – I rather hope these next four months and one week pass much more quickly than the first half did. After all, I have never lived a longer week than the first week I was here, and never a longer month than the first month. It took until November for time to speed back up to its normal steady tumble.”

And I wrote about how, in a way, I wished I could go home because I'd already fulfilled the reasons I came to France: speaking the language and learning about the culture. But going home would feel incomplete. And truth be told, time really did pass exactly like I said it would. September was the longest month of my life with October just behind, and recently the months have been passing without me even noticing that they went by. (Admittedly, May has been going slower than April because I've been thinking a lot about seeing my parents in 3 weeks.)

In February a lot of other things changed as well. I went to England with my class and I turned 18. The combination of these two things seemed to work some change on how I view myself in a group situation. I feel more confident, more like I belong, more like I have the right to be there, to do what I want, say what I want, be who I want and if anyone questions me, they'll be the weird one, not me. The trip was certainly a bonding experience, but it was also the realization that I'm an adult that helped.

March was a good month as well. I wrote some advice for future exchange students, and went to Méribel a second time. And started being really inseparably close with my host sister. In April I decided where I'm going to college, I started forgetting to be embarrassed about my accent, and the sun started to come out after a long, rainy winter. (Unfortunately, in May it's raining again.)

So in the end, was it worth it? If I had been at home, I wouldn't have been perfectly happy either. I would've still been itchy with wanderlust if I hadn't taken the opportunity to travel. I would've been reasonably content with school, classes, and friends, though occasionally lonely and grumpy because that is life. Here school was undoubtedly worse, although I gained cultural perspective and language skills. I changed a lot, and feel like coming home might be weird because I'm a different person than I was when I left. Change is not intrinsically good, but it's hard to regret the person you are now, because even if you've lived through bad experiences that you wish didn't happen, you are a stronger/more cautious/more confident/more experienced person for it. There are people I never would have met if I hadn't come who I'm very glad I've met, although there are also people I've missed a lot by being here. I do feel like I'm more ready for college now, because now I know that the Silicon Valley gives one a skewed view of what is normal, and I've seen a lot more of how different people and cultures function.

In the end, regret is impossible, and it's hard to say if I would have been better off at home or in France. I've had some hard moments and some amazing experiences as well. It's the choice between safety and risk that you're taking, if you're trying to decide whether to go abroad. It will certainly change you. You will certainly enjoy some moments. You will certainly break down at least once. But it's an experience to have.

5 Things About Feminism I Agree With

I've been blogging a lot about the things that feminism does wrong. But I don't want to give the impression that I'm an anti-feminist, either, because that would be pretty far from the truth. So here are some reasons we need feminism:

1. Birth control and abortion rights. These are the two most legitimate issues on the feminist agenda in my mind, because they are two issues that must have showed up in a time machine from the 19^th century because who the heck thinks that women shouldn't have a right to decide what to do with their own bodies? Granted, I could write a much more coherent political post specifically about these issues, especially since I know not all of my readers agree with me, but it's been done many times before far better than I could do. There are many reasons for which I consider these issues no-brainers, but the biggest one is that women are sentient human beings and can decide what to do with their own bodies without the rest of the world chiming in. If you are a woman and are against abortion, great. Don't get one. (Similarly if you are against gay marriage, great, don't get one. Ditto for contraception.) But leave the rest of us alone to make our own decisions. My body belongs to me and me alone.
   
   
2. Read this article: How ‘Slut Shaming’ Has Been Written Into School Dress Codes Across The Country. This is a weird issue because it combines sexism and ageism, a concept I'm going to write about... soon. Whenever I get the time. (Note that my list of topics to write about is getting longer faster than I can cross them off the list.) I am aware that this does happen in adult work environments, but is much less common and much more shocking. We consider it perfectly normal if a kid says “At my school, we aren't allowed to wear spaghetti straps because it shows too much skin.” But if an adult says the same thing it sounds really weird. “Isn't that a little sexist and overly controlling?” you might respond. Perhaps the worst is the reason given, that it's “distracting.” To whom is it distracting? Example #4 from the article is: 'A kindergarten student in Georgia was forced to change her “short” skirt because it was a “distraction to other students.”' In kindergarten I really don't think the boys are going to be distracted by a little girl's ballet outfit. In kindergarten I'm pretty sure my brother still wanted to wear dresses to school so the two of us could be matching. (And my mom let him, because she's awesome.) Kindergarteners don't give a rat's! So really what this is about is trying to teach girls from a very young age to cover themselves up because their bodies are sinful. In an exercise in charitable thinking, it's trying to teach girls that there is a respectable way to dress that follows certain societal rules and expectations. It's for their own good so that they don't dress like sluts later on in their professional life. It's just when you think about what the gesture actually means that you realize we're installing the belief in girls' heads that their bodies are shameful, they have to cover up or other people will be distracted, and eventually that if they get raped or sexually assaulted, it will be their fault for dressing provocatively. It is fortunate that these sorts of rules are much less common after high school, but the damage has been done.
   
   
   
3. Read this Cracked article: 5 Ways Modern Men are Trained to Hate Women. I don't agree with all of these points, especially not the end that makes it sound like men think only with their dicks. I don't know, I'm not a guy, but I was not under the impression that that's how it works. Anyway, points 5 and 4 I especially agree with. It's not anyone's fault, but it's true that all the romance stories we've ever seen since we were born tell us that the average-looking main character guy deserves a hot girl in the end when he deals with his problems, defeats his childhood bullies, and becomes successful. And since everyone sees themselves as the protagonist of their own Hollywood film, they often feel like the world (or the girl) has been unjust when their advances are refused. Again, I don't think this was an intentional move by the misogynistic media or the patriarchy or something like that. It was just sort of an unintentional thing that happened from our historically sexist society. So blame is dumb and that's where I think a lot of feminists are getting it wrong, but we should realize the message here. In general heroines don't vanquish their enemies to be awarded with the muscled man-toy of their choice.
   4) The other point I liked the best was “We're trained from birth to see you as decoration.” Truth. And it's not just the men who are trained this way. Read this article on How to Talk to Little Girls. Even very young girls are told every day that they're pretty or well-dressed, while young boys are told that they're getting big and strong. The problem with this is that we're socializing these kids to believe that looks are very important, especially girls being pretty.
   
   The other day I met a 5-year-old French girl who immediately upon meeting me explained her wardrobe choices for the day (I chose the gray pants because the blue pants didn't go with my top and the black leggings are getting too small!) and told me that I had a weird face and told my host sister that she was beautiful. (I was very tempted to answer her question “Why is your face like that?” with a very blunt “Some people are just ugly, but they tend to take it badly so you should learn not to say it. Some day you might even be ugly! You never know.” Fortunately I restrained myself and her mom sat her down and explained the concept of acne.) Anyway, my gut reaction to her thoughts about her wardrobe was that there was something wrong with her, that she had already at such a young age been conditioned by her parents and society to care about things she shouldn't care about. I certainly didn't care about being pretty when I was her age, and adults didn't tell me I was pretty – probably because I made insulted faces at them if they did, cause looking back at my baby pictures I was pretty adorable. But then I was forced to admit that she is probably like many of my friends – actually genuinely interested in fashion. Fashion, after all, is like an art, so why should an interest in fashion not be legitimate? Just because I've never liked fashion and have always felt pressured to try to like it doesn't mean that a large percentage of girls aren't genuinely interested in it. So this topic is difficult for me to write about, because I'm not sure how much we're socializing girls to like fashion, and how much fashion is an art form created by girls that many girls happen to be interested in, just like how math was invented by nerds and nerds continue to like math. (There's nothing oppressive about math, even though nerds are often considered to be the bottom of the high school totem pole.) But even if young girls have a perfectly legitimate interest in fashion, I do think we emphasize the idea that they are decoration too much, since standard adult conversation to little girls consists of little more than “What a lovely dress!” 
   
   
   
   
   5) Girls can't do leader-stuff: Remember the thing in that Cracked article about how we judge Elena Kagan by her looks even though that has nothing to do with the job she's supposed to do? Same goes for Hilary Clinton and Nancy Pelosi, two of my favorite female politicians. (I've never heard anyone insult Elizabeth Warren's looks but that might be because she's less well-known and so the only people who know about her are more sophisticated thinkers.) Criticizing Hilary Clinton's looks is such a non-sequitor, such a breach of logic that I really don't how you ended up there. We weren't talking about her looks, we were talking about her ability to run a country and make rational decisions that represent the will of the people... Speaking of Clinton, the word “bitch” has been used to describe (probably; this is just my best guess) the fact that she's a woman in a position of power. Since this is a minority opinion, I'm not going to address that issue. But what I am going to address is the underlying psychology that spawned it, in my humble, completely uneducated-in-psychology opinion.

Guys who are leaders are often seen as powerful, intelligent, arrogant, horny, charismatic, ambitious, etc. The negative qualities (arrogant, horny) often just contribute to the general picture. They can be excused by the man's greatness. Steve Jobs was allowed to be an asshole because he was inspirational and a Leader. I guess I can't claim that men are allowed to have sex scandals, considering what that did to Bill Clinton's career, but it's not shocking. Many, including myself, just sort of shrug and say “Oh well, I guess all politicians are horny.” I have no idea how we would react to a female politician with a sex scandal. (Update: Apparently, either we don't really care or it doesn't happen to really prominent female politicians because it happens less often in general.

But if female leaders exhibit some of the same qualities – let's go with the ambition/arrogance/confidence cluster because it's easier to deal with and analyze – they tend to be called bitchy. Like Hilary Clinton. In my estimation, Clinton is no more ambitious or confident or arrogant than any other politician during the 2008 elections, but she was the only one to be called names for it. It's sort of our gut response to females trying to take power. We question it, because it doesn't feel right. Personally, I tend to get along very poorly with female coaches or teachers. A female English teacher is the most likely to get on my bad side, because I often disagree with English teacher's comments, provoking sentiments like “Who does she think she is, anyway” and “Who is she to tell me what to do.” I've never had a male teacher in English, but I've always gotten along wonderfully with my male history teachers. I respect them for their history knowledge and let them tell me what to do in my essays because I feel they have the right to. In sports, I have a terrible time accepting orders from females, and tend to doubt their qualifications. If a female senior marching band member told me what to do, I might well have thought to myself “It's not like she knows how to march well anyway! And she should treat her fellow marchers with more respect.” But a male coach can scream at me and humiliate me and I'll generally feel terrible, but accepting of this discipline. I'm assuming that this is not just me. It could be something to do with wolf pack psychology, that as a somewhat dominant female I do not like other alpha females, but am fine with (and even tend to like) alpha males. Or it could be something to do with the fact that all of us have trouble accepting female leaders.

This really sucks. I'm not sure what to do about it, because I really do believe it's a natural phenomenon that has a lot to do with wolf packs and testosterone and having “being a leader” engraved in our brains as “muscle-y and virile and able to fight off enemies” and nothing to do with a conscious and deliberate hatred and oppression of women. So is feminism useful? Who knows. I'm sure there are some things we can do to fight against our brains, but I don't know what they are. But that's one of the biggest reasons I don't like being a woman, because I'm aware that being arrogant and ambitious and self-centered are all things that are more acceptable and attractive on a man than a woman, and it's way harder for us bossy females to look leaderly than it is for men.

I guess what would be more accurate to say is that these are 5 reasons it sucks to be born a woman. I do not feel that all of them are causes for feminism. Abortion rights, birth control rights, and the one about school dress codes definitely qualify: Go kill school dress codes, feminists, with my blessing! These are all issues for which I am a fire-breathing feminist. But the others are more deep-rooted psychological issues. It sucks for me that I will never look as leaderly as a tall, imposing man, but it's no one's fault and I don't know what, if anything, we can do to fight against it. I think my primary objection against a lot of things that radical feminists do and say is the hatred and blame that they use. I find the term the “Patriarchy” confusing and blameful. I find they are too negative, seeing sexism and rape culture and other terms I don't really understand when I never would have thought of that, and have to squint my eyes and smoke a little concentrated feminism to even start to see what they're getting at. (See my last week's post on the negativity of radical feminism.) But I am aware that I've been pretty lucky and have never felt discriminated against for my gender in ways that are institutionalized and not psychological. When other feminists go on rants about things that I found perfectly normal, they are probably reacting that way because they have a different history than I do, have been more abused by our sexist society, and have learned to have a trigger response that looks a little crazy to me. Anyway, so I managed to end on yet another negative note, but this was supposed to be my post explaining why I do consider myself a feminist among all the other posts I write criticizing the movement. I'm not trying to be a horrible anti-feminist person! It's just that I actually am a feminist, and I started reading a lot of feminist blogs and feel the urge to pick on all the things in their logic that I don't like! My apologies, feminists. I am on your side. Now let's go convince people that abortion rights and birth control rights would be great things to have.

I have a massive crush on humanity

This is an argument simultaneously in response to republicans, radical liberals, and radical feminists. It is not a very rational argument, but it is one of the principals by which I try to abide that has very little to do with rationality and utility but is really really important to me anyway.

Here are three arguments that I don't like:

1. Welfare is bad because there are a lot of people who take advantage of the system and abuse it. We shouldn't support those lazy people who just don't want to work.
2. (From my crazy leftist US gov teacher at De Anza): Society is falling apart and going to hell because of these evil evil republicans who want to keep women and minorities in a quasi-slavery position and because the socialization of our children today teaches them about violence and drugs and rape and not enough about love and family values.
3. Men (the “patriarchy”) are evil and trying to suppress women and want to rape them and deny them their rights. The media and makeup/clothing companies are evil and want to make women have Lots of Issues by making them insecure about their bodies to sell them products.

What is the common element? Quite simply, that people are evil. This is something we should always avoid thinking, because it mis-portrays our opponents. How do I know this? Tell me this: have you ever met someone who actually thought of themselves as evil? Someone saying to themselves “Mwahahaha, I am now going to oppress women for my own advantage”? No, I didn't think so. The point I'm going to make here is that your model of the world will be much better if you have a sense of charity to your political opponents; that you should remember to be optimistic about people because everyone (with the exception of psychopaths) is well-intentioned.

So first of all, let me destroy these above points one by one.

1. Do you know anyone who wants to live on food stamps? I don't. Standards of living are much better if you aren't on the US's pathetic version of welfare, and working is a fairly good predictor of happiness. As this Cracked.com article points out, misery is sort of humans' default setting, and working is one of the best ways to fix that. People on welfare are therefore probably pretty miserable and don't want to be in that situation. Furthermore, there are actual scientific studies that show the negligible percentage of “people who cheat the system” and how we spend way more money trying to find them than they would've taken away from the system in the first place. [Citation here]
2. ...I actually have nothing to say. This teacher's argument is so incoherent I don't even know where to start, except that it sounds roughly like the good old geezer's complaint “Kids these days! Society is falling apart because of video games!” which a few decades ago must have been “Kids these days! Hippies and pot will destroy society!” and a few decades before would've been “Them flappers and their bobs and pants will destroy society!” and a way long time ago must have been “Kids these days and their new hunting techniques with frigging bows and arrows must be making them lazy!” I have news for you, old geezer: society isn't falling apart. By many measures, it keeps getting awesomer.
3. I just don't think anyone planned for the oppression of women. Sure, the media has some negative effects. But do you really think that the people who design makeup commercials and put unrealistic plastic photoshop women on their ads were thinking “Haha, I will make women feel terrible about themselves!”? Personally, I think it's more likely that they were thinking “We are making a commercial for makeup. Therefore, it would make sense to have a really attractive woman in our commercial.”

I want to elaborate on this one a little bit, because this post was primarily inspired by the radical feminist blogs I've started reading. I just think they're doing it wrong, out of pure negativity. There is a recent internet buzz about Dove's Real Beauty campaign. Watch this video, but if you're too lazy it's a forensic artist who drew women based on their own descriptions of themselves and then on a stranger's description of themselves. I thought it was pretty powerful, and gives all of us hope that what we see in the mirror every day is not an accurate representation of what we look like to others. Our faults are magnified, and we should all break all of our mirrors remember that we're more beautiful than we think. Dove has a history of good feminist campaigns. I liked their last one even better: a time-elapse video showing how the women on makeup billboard ads get so beautiful and ending with “No wonder our perceptions of beauty are so distorted.”

Anyway, people on the internet immediately started making a huge fuss about the Real Beauty campaign because the women involved were primarily young-ish, thin-ish Caucasian women with blue eyes and blond hair. I definitely remember seeing a black woman on the video, but whatever. Details aren't important. I definitely remember seeing a woman who was about 40 on the video, too, but I guess that doesn't count either. The main point is that they're doing it wrong. They aren't giving Dove credit for what is a well-done campaign that is touching and empowering for a lot of women. So maybe if you, radical feminist, were on the design team, you would have included fatter, more diverse, older women. But does this neglect make it a bad campaign? Maybe I'm the only one not shocked by this because I too am a young Caucasian woman with blue eyes and blond hair. But I also don't think I would have noticed if it were all black women, or all Asian women, or all Latinas. I recently watched a different video on Youtube that was a short touching romantic film that had only Asian people and I literally didn't notice until I scrolled down and saw in the comments an exchange that went roughly like this: “Wow, Asians.” “But would anyone have said anything if it were all white people?”

I'm not trying to get all up on my high horse saying that I am above racism. I recently took a bunch of Implicit Association Tests which I recommend you do as well and it showed exactly what I would have predicted: I have little or no association with Asians as foreign or bad, and a strong automatic preference for whites over African-Americans. No, I wouldn't have predicted this because I'm secretly a horrible racist, but because in our scared little human brains, unknown is bad. Where I grew up in the Silicon Valley, I know just as many Asians and Indians as whites, and therefore I see them as just another brand of Californian, just as “ blond” and “brunette” might be two different brands of Californian. I don't look at Asian people and think “Hey look! An Asian!” because I am used to them and that would be ridiculous, like a New Yorker getting excited every time they see a Jew. However, there are very few black people where I grew up, and I'm pretty sure I've never had a close friend who was African-American. (I say African-American, not black, because I do know a Cameroonian who is one of my favorite people ever.) Just like how I disliked beautiful popular girls until I got to know some of them, I think my brain is normal to be suspicious of a group of people I haven't gotten to know.

However, it also is possible that these tests show nothing at all, because I just took the Gay-Straight test, where I honestly expected to get “slight automatic preference for gays over straights” and they gave me “strong automatic preference for straights over gays.” What? I am aware that my internal stereotype of gays is of kind, creative intellectuals who are awesome and share my political viewpoints, like a certain lit teacher at Homestead, or my history teacher now, or my friends from Campbell UCC, or any of my gay friends from, you know, everyday life. I know the “ I'm not racist, I'm friends with a black person!” claim gets shot down a lot, but let me just say I had no reason whatsoever to expect this result. So who knows what the IAT measures or whether it's accurate or whether it only works if you've drunk enough coffee in the morning and have fast reflexes and it's Tuesday.

The point is, I'm not above racism and I don't think anyone is. People have implicit preferences for people of their own race: “88% of white Americans (and 48% of black Americans!) show an implicit racial preference for whites on this test.” Clearly there is some weirdness going on here where everyone is secretly racist in the traditional sense of the word (against blacks), but it also shows that people just plain like their own people better. I think most people date within their broad racial/cultural spectrum (not sure if this just works on a white/black/Asian/Latino level or on a more specific Polish/American/Brazilian/Jewish sort of level). And this seems normal to me, pretty much like how I'd only date nerds because I'm a nerd and nerds understand each other.

That was a tangent. Sometimes I do tangents for an entire page or two and then realize that I'm not talking about the right topic. The thing I actually decided to write about was that a lot of the time, people make arguments (political or otherwise) that don't make sense simply because their enemies don't actually think that way. This is called strawmanning, and it is bad because it prevents people from rationally discussing issues to compare pros and cons and make decisions. When we aren't familiar with people, it's easy to assume that they're evil. This sort of ties in with racism: if you aren't familiar with a certain ethnic group, you probably don't actively think “Black people are horrible!” but subconsciously you might trust them less. It's very easy for me to assume that pro-lifers are horrible, misogynistic people without remembering that they actually believe that a fetus is as important and valuable as the mother (often more so, because the fetus hasn't sinned yet) and therefore it would be murder to abort. Everyone is the hero of their own story. No one plays the evil villain, except mentally ill people. And whether or not they are wrong, it works much better to treat them like the well-intentioned people they are.

I was inspired to write this post partly by watching youtube videos of this CMU a capella group my best friend sent me. Watching it just gives me the feels, this wonderful feeling that humanity is just awesome and that there are so many beautiful, kind, quirky, special, intelligent, fascinating individuals out there to discover and I can't wait to meet as many of them as I can. This is an odd feeling for me: I am an introvert and meeting people terrifies me. I have a lot less social anxiety than I used to, but it's still stressful to be among people.

Still, I get this feeling fairly often. Theater and music both give me the feels, and even when I've been in the pit orchestra for musicals, I never dare to talk to the actors because I don't want to destroy the perfect image I have of them. I've done HMS Pinafore, Pirates of Penzance, and South Pacific. Every single time we in the pit romanticize the actors and talk about them, without ever daring to talk to them. It is easier to have heroes when you don't know too much about someone. I idolize Gustavo Dudamel, and I know nothing about him other than what orchestras he conducts, and Danzon no 2. Just look at that smile, that fervor! Tumblr is a great example as well: they know quite well what unreasonable infatuations are. They are obsessed with Benedict Cumberbatch/Sherlock Holmes. They are obsessed with David Tennant/Doctor Who. They are obsessed with lots of beautiful and creative people, and you know why? Because people can actually be really cool. Granted, sometimes when we get to know them they aren't as perfect as we hoped they would be, but sometimes they're really really cool anyway and sometimes they're even cooler than we could've imagined. People are fascinating and complex and beautiful and they're what I want to study in college. Everything we do revolves around people, and generally if we feel like we have no one, if we feel alone, we're pretty depressed creatures. People are what makes us laugh, and cry, and love, and everything else that we obsess about and write poems about and live for.

So the flaw in these arguments about welfare and the patriarchy and all that is that these people are forgetting the humanity of their enemies, and they're confusing the issue by misrepresenting their opponents. People aren't trying to be evil, I promise. The patriarchy, if you insist on using the term, is not a club of straight white males who are trying to suppress your liberties. The patriarchy is a system of cultural traditions and norms that need to be overthrown because times are changing. A lot of the enemies of change (those who oppose subsidized birth control and abortions and gay marriage and all that jazz) are exactly that: people who have trouble with the notion of change because they were quite comfortable with the world in its previous state, having never felt disadvantaged by it themselves. They have reasons to oppose it, but a lot of it is just being conservative, which means reluctant to change the system, and with not being gay/female/an immigrant themselves.

I know quite a few people who are homophobic, but they know just one or two gays and insist that these gays are not like the rest of these (sick, perverted, drag queen, whatever their stereotype is) gays. One of them sent me a chain email with a picture of two fat men walking hand in hand in a gay pride parade, wearing pink high heels and thongs and nothing else. The caption was “And we'd let these people adopt children?” And suddenly I understood. He doesn't like gays because he doesn't know enough of them. He knows one or two, thinks they fall outside the norm, and thinks that the norm is the flamboyant cross-dressers in gay pride parades. With so little information, it doesn't seem surprising that he would conclude that gays are just really kinky people who probably shouldn't be trusted with children. (Sorry, trans people who are excluded by LGB media because you're too weird and we're trying to emphasis the normality of many gay couples! But... one step at a time, ok?) So when he says he's against gay marriage, it's not against my gay friends or my awesome history teacher. It's against “those people” because he's taken away their humanity. Just like how I often take away the humanity of pro-lifers before I remember that they, too, are in fact well-intentioned. So whenever you find yourself hating a particular group, try to imagine yourself what their rationales might be. Try to remember that they could be your parents, or your “That's my uncle Bob – he has some weird political opinions so don't get him started on communism, but he's really cool! He taught me how to hunt squirrels!” Try to imagine the little quirks about them that would make you like them. Maybe they hum off-key all the time and it's simultaneously annoying and endearing. Maybe they are gluttons for chocolate. Think about what they ate for breakfast, and whether they are a cat person or a dog person. Think about the things that make them human, the things that make them awesome, and remember that no one is evil. Some people are wrong, but no one is evil.

Noirmoutier, Brétagne, Le Mont St Michel

I just got back from vacation, which I spent at an island called Noirmoutier, in lots of different places in Brittany, and at Le Mont St Michel.

My host family's grandparents own a house on Noirmoutier that we borrowed. My host sister, her boyfriend, three close friends, Sarah the American, and I got to chill out on the beach for four days and goof off together. I got sunburned, of course, because I am very white. Otherwise it was not very eventful, at least not with publishable events, except that we did get to witness part of the filming of the second Le Petit Nicolas movie. It was very relaxing and exactly what we needed after a long winter and lots of school stress.

Sarah and I buried in sand:

This is all we could see of the filming: they were making waves with these boats to make it look stormy. We all wonder why they couldn't have just chosen a beach with more waves, but whatever.

After Noirmoutier, we got home and immediately loaded the RV of my host grandparents to go explore Brittany.

The Viaduc of Morlaix

We stopped and explored a lot of beautiful coastal cities: Morlaix, Perros-Guirec, St-Brieuc, Lamballe, and St Malo. All this adventuring took 3 days. 

Perros-Guirec: a port city with lots of pink granite in large improbable boulders on the shore. It's a little spooky and quite beautiful and striking. 

Look at that boulder, just perched on top like a BAMF. Stop! That isn't how physics works!

At Perros-Guirec we ate at the best restaurant I have yet discovered in France. Brittany is famous for their crepes and galettes, which are properly eaten with a mug of Brittany cider. I had a goat cheese-honey-walnut galette followed by a pear-chocolate-whipped cream crepe, and it was really incredible. If you ever find yourself in Perros-Guirec, give me a call and I'll try to find this restaurant again for you.

We also spent a lot of time in random ports that I don't even remember the names of anymore, so here are some pictures:

 

My host mom and I, being the gorgeous models that we naturally are.

My host mom freaking out because she thinks I'm going to fall over the cliff. It was really windy.

Everyone in Brittany has this bumper sticker

We spent the first night in Morlaix parked under a lamp that dripped on our roof all night. The second night we spent with some friends of my host parents who are also furniture merchants and were very accommodating. Their property is big and beautiful:

The third night we spent with some other friends, entertaining their 5-year-old daughter. They served us Breizh Coke, which is apparently a special kind of Coca Cola in Brittany.

The third day we spent in Saint Malo, the Corsaire City. 

Here's some traditional sea chanties from St Malo for you to listen to while you scroll. This one has pretty pictures, too.

It's a city that you've probably heard of because it's an important port and therefore has been crucial in many wars. It's a walled city, clearly very well defended.

The ramparts

With old architecture

This is the name of a café in St Malo which means: The local coffeeshop down the street at one end of the city opposite the port La Java.

They have interesting deco choices.

 The next day we were at Le Mont St Michel, the second most visited site in France after everything that's in Paris. I have to admit, I tend to be really bothered by touristy things, and le Mont is probably the most touristy thing I've ever visited. Paris is at least a city: there are real people who live there, and it is the political, economic, and cultural capital of France. Even if it's very touristy in certain neighborhoods, you can get away from it if you explore the city alone and on foot like I did. But le Mont only has a few monks who actually live there, and everyone else is a tourist. The whole thing is museums and restaurants and gift shops and it sort of put me in a bad mood. But it was nonetheless beautiful.

The construction going on was not very photogenic.

A real live monk!

 

So that was le Mont St Michel. Beautiful, historical, fascinating, and frustratingly touristy. In general I preferred the roadtrip through Brittany over our final destination because it showed me a lot more of France than I've seen so far and gave me a feel for the different culture they have over there.

For example, their traditional garb involves funny hats:

And bilingual road signs, in French and in.. Breton!

No, I did not actually pass by Brest. I stole this photo off the internet because I forgot to take a picture myself. Here is a map of my actual route:

And then when you consider that I've also seen Le Mans, Angers, Nantes, Blois, La Rochelle, Méribel (Albertville), and I'll soon be off to Toulouse, I've seen a fair chunk of France! Not too shabby.

Coming up soon: a philosophical post that I'm having trouble writing because it's about nothing in particular.