Underneath my yellow skin

Tag Archives: gender rigidity

Gender-defending, also known as gender shit (part five)

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Let’s talk more about gender. I want to lay it all on the table so we can finally figure it out together. By the time I’m done, I will have figured out, definitively, what gender is. Once and for all! Obviously, that is said very tongue-in-cheek. If I did not have to think about gender ever again (and people would be chill about it), that wouldbe my happy place. Here is my post from yesterday that about the difference between Asian sexism and Western sexism.

Alas, that is not to be. I still can’t get over the fact that one of the things the people on the right were obsessed with as a reason to hate Bad Bunny was the fact that he liked to wear dresses and skirts. I didn’t even realize it until it was pointed out. Then, I went back and looked at several pictures, and, yes, he does enjoy him a nice dress and/or skirt.

Better him than me! I don’t like dresses. Some skirts are fine (flowy, very loose, and thin), but in general, I am a pants kind of person. Or rather, I am a naked kind of person, but you have to wear clothing in public if you don’t want to get arrested.

In general, I don’t like tight clothing. It’s a sensory thing (another trait of autistic people I have found. Having sensory issues, I mean). I can’t stand anything touching my skin, really, so the less the better. That’s why I don’t wear underwear or a bra, either. I stopped wearing both completely during the pandemic. I was wearing them rarely before that–only when I went out–and then I went feral during the pandemic. And realized that I really preferred going free.

Oh, and I also talked about having anorexia and bulimia while I was in my twenties. That was also as a result of very harmful sexism, both Western and Eastern. Both demanded that girls/women be practically nonexistent, but for different reasons.

Side note: With my recent Kpop Demon Hunters obsession, I’m starting to notice how that sexism plays out. One big way is how painfully thin the female characters are in the movie. Hell, most of the guys are as well. But the women more so. Yesterday, I included the video clip from their song Golden. Today, I have included a video of them singing it live below. You w ill note  that EJAE (Rumi) and Rei Ami (Zoey) are both really skinny whereas Audrey Nuna (Mira) is heavier. She’s not heavy by any stretch of the imagination, but she’s not painfully thin, either.

Side note to the side note: Mira is my favorite character in the movie from the clips I’ve seen. She’s sarcastic, moody, an oddball, and defiant. Audrey Nuna is wise-cracking in a deadpan kind of way and calls herself emotionally constipated. And I love her striking hairstyles. Very non-traditional.

Why couldn’t Mira be heavier in the movie? Again. I’m not asking the impossible. I’m not asking that she be *gasp* plump. Just that she didn’t look like she could be blown over by a sharp wind. The funny thing is that the three women are constantly eating ridiculous amounts of food. It’s true that many Asian women are tiny and can eat a great deal, but still. Let one of them be more than a shadow.


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More musing on gender rigidity

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I have more to say about gender, imagine that. I am almost resigned at this point to have this be an outsized issue because of the way the world is.

Side note (and this may be the soonest I have included a side note in a post) : The Super Bowl happened last night. There was a big cacaphony on the right because the halftime performer was Bad Bunny. Man, did they let their racist freak flags fly high, proudly, and very loudly.

One of the things that they did was rush to have an alternative half-time show starring Kid Rock. There were other country singers, but some of them dropped out (most likely because of all the outrage they received, and rightly so), but there was one country guy who was still in it. Don’t know who he was because I only saw it through the outraged lens of Jon Stewart.

He was singing about how hard it was to be country in this country these days, which Jon Stewart immediately ripped into. The singer goes on to say that he wants to drive his truck, feed his dog, wear his boots–here, Jon played innocent and said that all seemed easy to do. I was waiting for the other shoe to drop, which it of course did. The singer went on to say that in this (he called it earlier cancel-culture country, which, ugh. I have done that rant before, and I will probably do it again, but not right now) country, he can’t have a birthday party for his daughter and tell her that boys aren’t girls–or something close to that.

I knew it was coming (or something like it), and yet, I still winced. Jon was right when he said that for a gorup of people who spent so much time complaining about how the left were such snowflakes who were triggered by everything and needed safe spaces, they were just projecting. I mean, we all knew it, but wow did they make it so obvious with their Bad Bunny outrage.

Back to gender rigidity. I was writing yesterday about reading The Rules and how horrifying the book was. It did tickle my funny bone that the version I read noted that one of the authors divorced her husband between the first print of the book and that one. I left off the last post by saying that the last line of the book was something like, “And it doesn’t stop once you’re married”, which caused me to groan, roll my eyes, and toss the book in the trash. Well, probably not literally*, but I wanted to.

Ever since I was a  little child, I never got gender. I mean, I well understood how society viewed it (binary and restrictive, not to mention reductive), but I never understood it for myself. I just knew I was wrong and bad, and I needed to change my entire being. do you know how daunting that is? To change everything about yourself? And how dismaying?

Side note: I think this is why tradwives lose their shit at some point. You can’t suppress your entire personality all the time without completely losing it. You just cannot as I can attest. At some point, you’re going to let it out. That can be in a positive way or in a not-so-positive way. I’ve done both, and believe me, the former is better than the latter.


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Mother-shaped, but not an actual mother

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I was talking to my mother last night and she asked me how I was doing. I don’t tell my mother anything of real importance. I have been having a really hard time sleeping in the last few weeks because of a personal tragedy and Daylight Saving. I told my mother I was having trouble sleeping because while it seemed personal, it really wasn’t. In other words, it was safe to share with her. Or so I thought.

Later in the conversation (this was around 10:30 p.m. my time), I said I was really tired. She said somewhat derisively, “It’s only 10:30 p.m.” I’m known for being a night owl who rarely goes to bed before 2 a.m., so she probably was saying it because of that. But. As I said, earlier in the conversation, I had spent five talking about how I was having such a hard time with sleep (which I pointed out again). It was clear to me that while she asked me how I was doing, she didn’t actually care. It was just the script she had to follow before she could dump her problems on me (again). She has parentified me since I was eleven. It hasn’t changed. When I am at my most emotionally stable, I can deal with it by viewing her as a sad old woman and not as my mother. I realize that’s a lot of qualifiers, but it’s what I need to do to get around the fact that my mother doesn’t love me as a person.

I came to that realization in my thirties or forties (so later than I would have preferred).Up to that point, I assumed my mother loved me because she was my mother. That’s what she was supposed to do, right?

Side tangent: It’s sad/funny/ironic that I never thought my father loved me, whichwas easier to deal with. It’s like any kind of ism in that I’d rather someone hated me to my face than be nice to my face and nasty behind my back. It’s better to know where you stand with someone than to labor under the impression that were anything but a bigot.

It’s the same with my parents. My father never professed to love me nor showed it–until my mid-twenties/early thirties. My relationship with my parents was horrible during that time for many reasons. My father was here after traveling to a conference somewhere in Canada, I believe.

I was taking him to the airport, and we got into a fight (as usual). I don’t remember exactly what it was about, but I think it had something to do with my mother. Or I may be mixing up our arguments. He did tell me once that the thing that caused my mother the most pain was that I was no longer a Christian.

I looked at him and said if that was her biggest problem, she was living a pretty easy life. I was offended and affronted, to be honest, in part because my father was not a true Christian. He converted because of my mother and only cared when he was in trouble and wanted God to get him out of it. He actually told me that’s what he liked best about being a Christian–telling God his problems and then being able to forget about them. In other words, he has a very childlike view of religion (which is not surprising).


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