Sunday, July 27, 2014

I will write about abortion until all people stop cringing at the word. #teamgia

Once upon a time there was a girl who had sex when she was just a child. It ended in pregnancy and she felt obligated to share her decision to terminate the pregnancy with the boy who impregnated her. When this bastard decided to run an online smear campaign bringing this brave lil' lady's character into question her life turned upside down. No longer was she Gia the track star who wore fishtail braids before they were a thing and was the only eighth grade girl in advanced physics. Gia's talents, alternative hairstyles, and fiery personality no longer meant a thing. She was reduced down to the "whore" who got an abortion.

Far too much of Gia's story has been dictated by this single jerkoid. So, eleven years later, here's my message to the cowardly little boy who impregnated one hell of a woman.

Stop attacking the morality of a fourteen year old girl who selflessly terminated a pregnancy in order to prevent a child being brought into the world who neither parent had the ability to care for. Gia's decision preserved your youth and stopped a child from being raised in circumstances unfit for any child. So, why then, is it Gia's morality that's in question? What kind of fourteen year old boy has sex with a fourteen year old girl without protection and then starts an online smear campaign demonizing her for making a decision with her own body that best fit the needs of her, her family, and you? How did you plan on raising a child at the age of fourteen? How would you afford to feed it or watch over it? You would not have had the resources. You would dump it on her or your own parents and continue to live like the carefree little shit you are while occasionally playing with your son or daughter whenever it was most convenient. You both had unprotected sex at age fourteen, but it was Gia who was faced with an unforgettable decision. You owe her so much more than what you gave her. Your words suggest that you believe it was Gia's responsibility to give birth and that she somehow owed this fetus something. A pregnant woman does not owe a developing fetus anymore than the fetus owes his or her parent's an apology for being alive. Suck on that.

Gia took a job just eight miles away from her old junior high and next month she'll move back out to California to a town she has avoided for the past nine years (the town she departed before high school to escape misogynist pro-life bullying.) So, a big fuck you to pro-lifers. Looks like you lose. Again. Because Gia is not the girl who got an abortion at age fourteen. She's the super slick physics nerd with a smarty-pants engineering degree who only wears hoop earrings, taught me that frozen grapes will change your life as much as lip liner does, has a secret knowledge of mechanics who hopes to someday adopt foster children. #teamgia


Saturday, July 26, 2014

Go ahead. Judge me for my make-up.

Sans make-up my face exists as a amalgamation of tissue, protein, cartilage, and cells. The arrangement of all that previously mentioned reveals nothing about who I am as a person. I simply crawled out the womb and aged. Conversely, my cosmetic choices did not simply crawl out the womb and age alongside my face. Unlike nature, my gene pool, and my DNA, I exercise control over the products I smear on my face. I chose it. I put it there. Me and my personality carefully select this routine. Thus, make-up (tattoos and piercings included) is the absolute closest humans will get to facial self-expression.

So, when a dude tells you he prefers you without make-up, there's an even more serious issue than the fact that he's taking relationship advice from Drake. He's telling you that he prefers you when you do not make choices that advance your personal identity. Such statements suggest that your body is preferred over your brain. Your brain is the reason you rimmed your eyes with coal black liner. Your brain is the reason you lips are always masked in NYX, Tarte, or Lime Crime (all vegan approved!). Your brain is the reason you think glitter, not concealer, is the best way to camouflage under-eye circles.

Your naked face and body are inane vessels through which you operate and reveal nothing about your ideals, personality, interests, skill set, etc. Does our economic identity and need to physically protect ourselves sometimes deter us from expressing our truest selves? (I totally cannot afford every shade of MAC lipstick or the newest Jeffrey Campbell’s and there are definitely cities I would not feel safe experimenting with my gender identity/expression.)Yes. Of fucking course. But even taking that into account, every time you make a decision to clothe your body or apply cosmetics you are making a decision to reflect yourself through the canvas of your physical being.

Motivated Millennials needed to Spark next Iconoclastic Movement

I belong to a generation sans alternative, but how can a subculture exist alongside a mainstream culture that is nothing more than a synthesis of every subculture that has ever been? 

I find myself pissed off a lot. Scratch that. Not pissed off. Disappointed. Disappointed in the fact that my peers, my fellow Gen-Yers, are not angrier about life - about insurance companies selling us shit deals because it is all we can afford, about pre-packaged food working as population control, about how nine-to-fives pulverize human souls, about how we work those nine-to-fives because someone somewhere proclaimed living for free unfathomable, about how kids do not read for fun anymore, about how vinyl is now on the endangered species list, about the wealthy investing to produce more excess to hoard, about the ever expanding income gap, about all of the social inequalities that divide us and how confidently all too many people declare those inequalities do not exist. I am disappointed with the contentment of my generation. I am disappointed in the fact that we all complain about the ways things are but do little to nothing to change these things. I am disappointed that I am part of the problem.

Yet, there is no noteworthy anti-cultural movement here today. The world remains thirsty for something fresh, something thought-provoking, something to kick us in the ass and yell, "YOUR ENTIRE REALITY COULD BE SO DIFFERENT." I refuse to believe that my generation is too lazy too talentless. Our generation's jazz movement, our flapper movement, our beat movement, our hippie movement, our punk movement, our gangster rap movement is a fire just waiting for fuel.

So, will there be another iconoclastic movement? And if so, will we Millennials be the founders or a distant memory reduced to a chapter in high school textbooks? What's going to make us hear music like we'd never heard music before?  Will we have something to tease our children with and brag that we saw first? Will anything at all change our generation's ideals and value system? Exactly how can our generation have a voice if we don't know what it is we are trying to say?