I'm Ecofem-tastic
I think I got to work faster by bike than I normally would have by car....
I left around 12:30pm from class, and got here at 1:37pm.
By car I would have had to bike back home, drop my stuff off, change, and then walk to my car. I probably would have eaten something to. Let's see, that would have put me at being in my car at probably 1:00pm... and then a 20 minute drive at that time... but then having to park in China town and walk 20 minutes... that would be around 1:40pm. I beat the hypothethical by 3 minutes! Yes! I would have gone faster but my legs were still tired from yesterday.
Haha. Yesterday. Yesterday was a fun day.
It was yesterday when I biked to work for the first time. At 7pm I was going to cover Bobby's shift until 9pm. At 4:30pm, I was about to leave when he called me to see if I could cover it starting at 5pm. It definitely takes me an hour to get to UCLA from here, and I wasn't able to leave until 4:45pm because somebody in the office saw my bike and started blabbing on about biking somewhere.
So I rushed back. It was definitely easier on the way back. I took a Olympic instead of Pico (which smelled horrible half the time), which turned out to be mostly flat ground and some nice downhills. When I was on Westwood approaching Wilshire, there were these pigeons in the road. I was saying "move pigeons, move!" and they were still just chillin' by the road. At this point I'm going 15 mph and I'm not about to stop for some damn pigeons, and with all the cars around, I can't exactly swerve out of the way.
So I just rode through.
And of course, demonstrating the amazing reactivity of the pigeon species, they didn't move until I was half a foot away. Then, instead of flying AWAY from what was running into them, they flew TOWARDS it... meaning me... meaning my head. Haha. I definitely had to duck.
I got hit in the head by a bird before. Different story. I was just walking around campus and went by a low-branched tree, and apparantly there was a bird on a branch that I didn't notice and that didn't notice me. Yeah. Freaked out in my face.
The rest of the night was pretty good. I was biking around campus going to close Young Research Library when this girl came up to me and asked if I could take note of an incident that just occured to her.
Immediately when she tells me this, I think "*sigh* Masturbator." Really though. That's what YRL is all about. I'd say about 80% (if not higher) of the incidents that occur there are lewd conduct related. The entire library is just big, empty, with lots of cover, and the same weird guys come all the time. And whenever I begin to tell this story to anyone, the immediately think it's going to be about some wanker as soon as I say "YRL."
Anyways, she claimed this guy had broken her computer by knocking it off of the table and she was trying to approach him about taking some responsibility for it, and he was completely ignoring him. Well, at that point I was thinking that it was pretty serious since her computer was broken. Sucks. So I was talking to her, and a guy zips by us. She points out that he's the guy. Really distinguishing appearance. Green long-sleeved shirt, black pant, large brown bear, long hair, and this canvas back-pack. So I kept obs him and updated control of his location. Then he headed downthis ampitheatre by the Fowler Musuem. And shit -- I lost ops for maybe 5 seconds because I had to get on the grass, and there were some bushes blocking my view. I get to the stairs of the ampitheatre, the UC arrives, and the guy is gone. He must have gone inside. He must have had a key. They searched the building and didn't find anyone, but all he needed was a damn key to get into a place where they couldn't search. There was no way he did't enter the building.
So I started doing perimeter checks like crazy. Being on a bike makes you so much more aggressive. Anyways, didn't find anything and went back to the library with one of the UCs to talk to the girl. I felt bad, and then all of the sudden, some truth starts coming into the story. He didn't knock down her computer, he accidently (as far as you could tell, because you can't prove that it was intentional) nudged it on the tape and her charger came loose. And then, the computer itself wasn't broken, he charger was just not charging. You know, people who leave their chargers all dangly off the sides of tables deserve it pulled out.
The funniest part was her subject description of the guy. UC 83's out there prompting her for the description and she has everything all wrong. Wow. The only thing she has right was the he was a male/white. She missed the beard. Thought he had been blonde. Thought he was wearing blue jeans and a blue jean shirt. Labeled him as 130 lbs. Dude. This guy was TALL. At LEAST 6 foot. He was not going to be 130 lbs. I don't even think I weigh 130 lbs. Maybe 135 lbs. I don't know. I don't weigh myself.
Oh, and don't question whether or not I was following the right person. He was the only guy around.
All in all, a pretty fun night. Got home around 10pm maybe, finally ate some dinner, and wrote an essay on ecofemism. Lovely. It's actually really interesting; I hadn't really read anything about it before. Actually, I'd never even heard of it. The times that I've tried to talk to guys about it in an intellectual manner they get really defensive about it, and simply dismiss it as stupid. Kind of interesting. It's not accusatory; it just looks at the facts. I think people are just put off about by the word "feminist" and start to feel like they are being attacked. Sad.
I think I'll write something up about it in thenewnature. We'll see how it goes. I'll definitely write more about it later SOMEWHERE. It's rather interesting. I never really thought about ecological degradation and woman objectification steming from man's internal bitterness towards one's mortality and reliance upon non-human resources. That's pretty much the jist of it. I've read some stuff that just talked about exploitation and oppression, but that never really delved into exactly why that culture has developed in male communities. It was a very interesting perspective.
Well, back to work. This hippie needs money.
posted by susanimal at 2:34 PM
2 Comments:
Ok, as someone who has had "ecofeminism" "explained" to "him", I can verify that it is, indeed, the most rediculous explanation for human behavior that I have ever heard.
I don't get defensive, women do get treated badly.
I don't freak out at feminism, a lot of fear and anger is out of misunderstanding at what it really means to be a modern femninst.
However, that aside, from how Susanne explained it, ecofeminism is men opressing women because they're closer to nature than men are, and that makes men jealous and angry.
In a modern society, I would say that the majority of males and females have retreated an equal amount from nature, and whatever subconscious anger that a man would have towards women from their "closeness with nature" would probably be negelcted by the diminishing desire to be close with nature that our society is moving towards.
I don't think it's stupid because I'm defensive about it, I think it's stupid because it provides a very bizarre explanation for something very simple; Groups oppress other groups becuase they can. It's as simple as that. If it's possible to increase your own group's power by decreasing that of another, then it makes sense that they would. This doesn't make it right, and it doesn't solve the problems we're facing because of it, but ecofeminism doesn't either.
-Justin
2:03 PM
it's too early in the morning to respond to this via blog, especially because I already had an excellent conversation about. I hate writing down what I talked about just yesterday because yesterday is always so much better.
Anyways, I'll write more about it in the future. It's not like I believe it to the extreme way that ecofeminists do. I do however, think that it is an effective way to gather the masses (of women) towards a cause. Although it's pushing it a little bit (ok, a lot) when it comes to the whole "men oppress women because women are perceived as being closer to nature." Yes, that whole looking at the effect to justify a cause isn't quite the best way to looks at a problem. But really. the movement is more of a spiritual one than a political one, and I'd say that since they aren't doing any creepy/illegal cult things, let them have that spiritual connection with one another.
Ecofeminism gained movement from the fact that 70% of the world's people living below the poverty line are women, and that large majority of those women rely on substinence agriculture to survive. Often times, they are actually the main providers for their families. SInce the tradition of the hunter-gather society, women have predominantly handled agricultural matters (in terms of planting, gathering, and harvesting). However, this does not disregard man's connection with the nature (from more of a hunting perspective). The movement looks through history and notes how man has abused the earth, and looks at it with the idea that it is women who must step up and stop those "evil manly corporate machines of consumption."
It is a bit much. It's true that one shouldn't look at a problem and work off of the theory that one's own group would have done a better job. (However, in the case of Democrats over this administration... i'll make an execption). There are other ways of gather a group of people for a cause. However, ecofeminism has not taken a huge stronghold in let's say... suburban america. Especially for suburban causes. These groups have predominantly made efforts to decimate the oppression of women through agriculatural control/limitations in third world countries. Here, I don't think most women have more than a year of plow experience. (Borat, anyone?).
And in response to the whole "defensiveness to feminsim" thing... it was more in reference to my Geography class, where we all have read and learned about the material. We talked about feminism in general, and I just thought that it was sad that the term had transformed into something negative from a male perspective (and sadly, from a female perspective too). That's all. The term raises high emotions in people, whether it be a strong support, or an agressive or defensive stance. And those feelings are always warrented, because people do go into "attack" mode.
And when it comes to myself -- I'm not heavily educated on the subject,what can I say? In geography classes, I don't think one veer becomes heavily educated in anything specific. So much of the study is a braod global perspective. Specificity is for graduate school.
But really, I don't know a lot about the subject, and I'm not going to pretend that I do. What I learned was merely an introduction to a topic that a myriad of books have been published on. I didn't mean to talk about ina way that made it seem like I was attacking anyone. The truth is, you can't look at any issue from a single perspective. Too me, this one serves merely as one to combine with others. One perspective doesn't solve any problem because it is simply not possible to get people to agree on one thing, especially when it's so skewed to a single demographic.
I just thought it was interesting because it was something that I had never really heard about. And anyways, what I wrote out was unfortunately not formatted in a good way. What can I say? I wrote that while at work in about 15 minutes. I should definetely try to give topics that stear of the course of the mundane daily happenings of my life much more thought.
Well... I guess I ended up responding.
8:29 AM
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