Gotta get up and try try try

I first really really wanted to blog when, back in 2008, I chanced upon Girl With A One Track Mind and just could NOT stop reading it (go through the archives!). It was blocked in my office so had to go through proxies to read it. Hehe. Imagine licking clean the whole blog in your one month notice period, and gulping as you go. Also, stumbled upon Meenakshi Reddy's blog and it's really no surprise that my blog url has been heavily influenced by it.

What really captured my attention was with how much liberation these women were writing - about their careers, their sexual escapades, their families & friends, and as a limited 23 year old, I would vicariously live their lives, hoping some day I would have stories of my own as interesting or exciting.  

"Interesting" came fairly late, but did come nonetheless and maybe I should've just been anonymous to be able to discuss them here. Heehee. But with all the talks of feminism these days, I can't help but wonder if it's a privilege to be able to write that way or a necessity. Why should I be anonymous to be able to write freely? Why the mudslinging and the slut-shaming if one were to talk about their life? Maybe there are more female blogs out there (on such topics) because we feel the need to rebel against the current social structure. Sometimes we go out of our way to claim the rightful spot in this world, even if it means being ridiculed because you know someday your tiny step will lead to a larger change. Do you get me, dear reader?

Through a YouTube discussion on something as trivial as girls moshing to a metal cover of a pop song, I realized there are young, educated men out there who have no sense of the concept of equality. Let me correct myself because Joss Whedon said "Equality is not a concept, it's a necessity" and that makes total frikkin sense. Those men believe women have no right to "mosh" and doing so, they're making the metal fans out there feel ashamed. This is ludicrous! And I refuse to rant more over it. They've probably never heard that Music is Universal. They sound like those 10 year old boys from Hollywood movies who claim to have formed a ClubHouse where girls are not allowed because they're evil. 

Freedom. I figured we don't NEED freedom on a url or on a YouTube video. What we need is freedom in real life. And though my parents have been anal about this and that all my life (majorly because I lived in Delhi), they never made me feel like I can't achieve something because I'm not male or there are designated activities/careers for men and women, never made me feel like my freedom to express myself should be curbed because "what will people say!" or "this is not how girls should behave" and for that I will forever be indebted to them. And, funnily, because of the same thing, I don't understand when my fellow gender sharers are mousy and appreciate (or even ridicule) how "liberated" my mind and actions are, because that's the way I've been brought up. That's inherent in my nature; I genuinely don't understand when people compartmentalize everything into brackets of male and female. That's inherent in my brother's nature; in all my life, I've never heard him discriminate against women, and that makes me so proud of my family.

I once dated a guy who said to me "Don't get me wrong but I'm not sure how to handle a female personality as strong as yours". For a second I felt offended. But then I realized, perhaps he wasn't brought up that way. But he was making the effort to work around it. 

That's all we ask. For you to make an effort. Women and men alike. Me too, in some ways. Please keep an open mind. A mind without filters and prejudices. It's so much more easier than you think. Trust me.