elitismi

Under lucky stars: how are the stars lucky?

| Henna Timanttimetsä

How do you define luck? It is a very subjective matter, what we consider as good things to have and happen in life, to grow from, maybe, a pleasant place to dwell and form as a person. It is like when you won something, a competition, situation of being conceived and further developed, when partly randomly you become a human infant. When you are born if you are lucky you grow to be more you, bigger and bigger, more aware hopefully or maybe a human infant in an adult’s body, or something which is decided is you. This is you, hopefully you’ll like it. This is what you should be is still a very common thought which comes from outside of you. We are defined by other people constantly. There is not a moment we would not be monitored when there is more people than you there. Some people are monitored more than others I have noticed, wonder why… Many believe whole-heartedly that norms made are what we should play by, that we are here to be filled with joy and the norms make this filling happen and if that is not happening we feel miserable and blame the feminists for ruining such a good thing. What brings us joy then, living fulfilling lives in comparison to others without need to change, just to match up? Crises are there to wake us up, loss of luck, out of luck situation. To keep on winning and how to is a trick because it is difficult, demands strength and effort. How do we measure the winning, the jack pot, what is it worth and what is the jack pot in the first place, what do we value? How to win in being and becoming you? Or what is your impact within the bigger picture, you feel lucky to be able to live for yourself without concern over others?

Welfare state is a result of decades of hard work. People having build a welfare state and thinking despite where the child is born he or she can have an education, free meal, healthcare, sense of security and support. It does not remove the fact that there are people who would like to see such situation gone, that there are people who think we are bound to luck, circumstances and that is a good thing, the roughness is now lacking. Something which makes us value more what we have got. We don’t have to struggle as humans as much as we should. It has made us lazy especially in thinking. People have become spoiled, naive and arrogant. This much I can agree with. It has come across many times that I should feel lucky I am born in a country where I can realise my goals and dreams just as anybody, sure I can as long as my dreams and goals stay within the given frame. Frame is kind of too small. Don’t be fooled I feel very fortunate and welfare state has been proven effective in my life. To be an artist with my background is an oddity which I find funny as hell.

Here too there is a price to pay for a woman who does as she pleases, as she chooses. My decisions have always been out of the ordinary. Freedom and luck are about being able to choose aren’t they. How about responsibility, how about originality, how about something to say? As it has occurred women are not allowed to break gender norms that easily or at all without it being a scandal, wrong and an outrage of some sort, art being a very fine example. It has also been shown that gender norms are very much violent and intact, changing slowly in slowmo and to repeat why feminism is important must be done individually like drawing a map. You do not hate men or do you? Ok, let’s get this hate thing sorted..

Freedoms men have manifest the problematical within the gender roles. Being able to choose because of physicality, being bigger and traditionally seen as more of this and that, as idiotic as it sounds, is there, it is ’easy’ and society is letting them freely exercise their maleness and the role of a leader. To let girls be bossy is one way to get the thing solved. Me being male is a horrifying alternative but I must try it out. I have a process of wiping feminine role of a subject. Maleness is aggression which women can’t exercise without being labelled crazy and hateful, having lost femininity. For men there is more authority in what they say, stature and credibility in what they do, isn’t there. This is like self-evident. There is black and white, small and big, bad and good, men and women. Whereas woman can prove to be very able many times over and still not be given credit for what she does, quite the opposite. What does she think she is. For her to be grand is to play like a man. Fortune and luck are somewhat different for the sexes. They are very material, the more and bigger you are in the right way the better and the bigger you will become and the more things you can make and have the more you are. Respectability and fulfilment by gender and possessions is a very male outlook on things and gender but yet again women play the same game. To impress via size and amount, measurements and possessions and we all should have that to feel good about ourselves?

For some it is impossible to understand and see the luck they have had and share. It is taken for granted or seen a possession which must be earned. Maybe luck is the wrong kind or there is no such thing. Woman is the filling and the only luck she can have is her looks, oh the blessings of appearance and visuals. They run the world but are cheap. It is confusing. If she is difficult meaning she thinks for herself it could it be seen lucky, she is capable of thinking?

The situation can be she does not understand the good man brings, the good man thinks is the good. When you have every material thing but you feel alone, you still do not feel lucky, you need to feel wanted. Loneliness is the defining thing even though you have got all man could possibly want and you like to talk about this all. Bragging about luck but failing to appreciate it is the disease. The infantile need to feel wanted and loved is there even though you have got what is called success by the terms of material modern man. To be born male is a stroke of luck but he feels partial unless he does not have what is expected of man to have. Tragedy of being male are also the expectations. To feel successful, loved and lucky, basis is on the feeling. It is an irrational state, an out of control loop where you think you have the control because of what you have, have been able to accomplish, own and maybe feel unlucky because of what you do not have. This eats you up. Isn’t this what TV and social media is full of nowadays.

We are lured to think happy is what we should be feeling and we think we know what things bring us happiness, which feeling is tightly connected to being lucky, having luck. Whether you like to dwell in feeling unlucky in some ways or are able to feel lucky for what you have got is a matter of maturity and looking at things as they are. Do we see people as they are or via made lenses?
When your chances living your life fully (whatever that means) as a creation of your own is not only a narcissist daydream but something we can all pursue without exploiting others and without hurting anyone in the process, that is fortunate. Idea of luck is what I make of is kind of interesting as we seem to think it is something where we are born into, or with, and are granted like a gift, partly yes and partly no.
To be born under lucky stars is a moment, like a wish for the baby that she or he will be lucky in her/his life. Lucky is of course to be born in the first place. Lucky to be on this earth. To be born screaming, to be born a boy with all your toes. You will be treated differently from early on as you are defined by your sex. How is that lucky? Maybe luck vanishes in that moment of defining and knowing which sex the child is. The situation of being born a girl and how that effects your life. You can be mistreated, killed, abandoned, rejected only for this reason. We know this. Girl is a burden, also for the girl herself her sex is a burden.
So what is the lucky part? When we are loved as we are, since we are not able to impact on how we get to be born. It is out of our hands. Therefore it is huge wrongdoing to place the blame on the child, isn’t it.

Must be a bad apple.

| Henna Timanttimetsä

 

To play according to rules, rules make value: What are the rules then? Made for what and by whom? Like woman is smaller and therefore can be used for the ends of the bigger? Strangely enough, big does not equal strength necessarily.

| Henna Timanttimetsä

Logic is the smaller and more fragile must be abused because you must not strike as civil but powerful. How a young woman is a threat makes one vomit. I have been imposed a huge amount of rules to follow to fulfil what is expected of a woman and girl. Rules are not ambitious, they are to make understandable femininity. The sickening automaton which happens without much thought. Does not require intellect,  though the obedient think so. It is just the thing of my dangerousness and power of the small: the logics is that woman is the one who causes hurt and is flawed. It does not matter what she feels or what happens to her. She is a servant not the boss. Her power is not understood. Her hurt is irrelevant because she is dangerous with what she has got and what can happen by her. She can disturb and turn something stagnant upside down and therefore must be punished before hand.

Gazing is one punishment. The other is the place where one must stand, bend over and do what women do. What happens to her is deserved. Watching, looking, gazing, monitoring always have meaning, one can think what are the results (authority) and gained prizes (power). It is a train of ugly thoughts which show on you without you knowing it. Immediate, a thing of imagination or lack thereof, a cultural loop which happens without thinking what happens there and what you are doing. The justification is something which belongs to traditions and thinking where sexes are valued very differently and this is seen justified just because. What is the intelligent part? The powerful do not have to question themselves. Why such laziness is allowed? When you have reached a point in hierarchy you can stop evaluating yourself?

What is there to protect when she is not the one who needs protection? This objectification happens in an instant. She appears and what she represents is sex. It can’t be talked about, addressed in other ways than looking. Gazes go from head to toe and from each other who is looking with you, and she is the intruder although she is being invaded and intruded. There is no logic obviously when she is the uncivil and a kind of empty. The only meaning she has within is her gender, sex and meanings of those are finished and set, settled and reasoned.

To be under monitoring and constant observing as if I was a specimen, an oddity, scary known/unknown especially in the manner of someone disturbing a ’peaceful’ unchangeable and solid something, something good, valuable and worthy, almost holy. To look at holding power of a group is to ridicule and make feel small. To be something to watch out for is a delicious position nevertheless if there is room for choice: choosing how to use this position. The thought is that one should be careful for the exact reason that one is talked about in all possible ways but mostly in negative sense. The negative is interesting and what does it do. Who creates it, why and what does it mean? I will have a reputation which affects my life in different kinds of ways. I have been made feel inadequate and my worth is in how I look like physically, mainly, and how I maintain that appealing look, but also inadequacy is in the eyes of those who use judgement as a power tool. They consider themselves as big and the one who is under microscope is small. What do they see is very biased, a cultural ill.

Could it be said that within conservative communities, people and scenes change very slowly because they think they have found the perfect form of existing and thinking and it is called civilised. They are more than. They are unable to change because they are so high and deserving of this place. They can talk about progress, equality, Marxism and kindness behind which they can hide. To change actually takes such effort it seems too radical and a loss. To live up to good ideals may not truly be exactly that.

Civilised is a curious idea. It follows a codebook and makes us do things in similar ways, realise our lives according to something which is to give impressions. Acceptance within community is mark of civilised. To bend the rules of civilised is allowed for members who are the most respected, wealthy, high in hierarchy. Men are allowed to bend the rules of civil more than women to whom such rules apply making prospects narrow and experimenting more dangerous, always out of the ordinary. According to experience and to what is plain in sight: those limits and rules are fairly easy to test. Reactions are violent. Hypocrisy is that sexes are made to act by, differently but in repeat. For women doing what men do is often out of the question. To be damaged, fallen and discarded happen for women just like that.

What is ugly?

| Henna Timanttimetsä
In art it is something to pursue and master but to be beautiful is too much, so beauty can be too much and a flaw, to make beautiful objects to sell, things to seduce, have seductive visuals around is to make value (what is seductive? Is it about vanity?), to match people and their spaces, their ideals of what is good and what they are themselves. Art must equal learned beauty standards, standards of the aesthetic or it is ugly and rejected as unappealing. One is left to wonder aesthetics of ours, how it needs to be cultivated and the value of beauty in our culture, whether it exists at all (what kind of beauty) and especially beauty in females, for females or is it for males. What is seen in an instant is more important than what does the sight say in-depth. If art has any value, value is the aesthetics, in the matching not disagreeing, arguing and making one think something else than fitting in. To think why something strikes as beautiful and something as ugly and why we think art should follow basic visual tender spots to be liked. Same goes with people. We have strong views on what we like to see in women and in men on the outside.
This strangely stuck thought follows idea many have about what art should be and also how people are perceived, what beauty is in people and in art, meaning of beauty for us, cost of beauty and effort we see to be beautiful by standards we are set to follow. How beautiful all of this is should be argued by those who are lured by beauty. It is agreeable, standardised, manufactured and known instantly, admired, imitated and wondered, but still to beauty one can do whatever. It is fragile and a threat. It is something to exploit, banish and be destroyed out of a whim and just because it shuns and shadows beauty in you maybe. Beauty is under someone else’s power though it is a possession and to be fucked. It is not power but it is seen powerful. It appeals to our need to feel good, be liked and surrounded by attention beauty must give. Beauty has a way of making instant feeling of good.

 

Can you say you are a professional without other people’s approval? Of course, in art.

| Henna Timanttimetsä

What is disapproved professionalism? I highly recommend a kind of disapproval which goes strongly against the establishment and status quo, against those who repeat old truths, truths of theirs. Something out of the ordinary is scary and fear is instant, out of the cult of professionalism, out of the book of solid truths, something to believe in strongly must be put under scrutiny. I strongly disapprove professionalism which sees through corruption, misconduct, sloppiness, carelessness, ignorance, arrogance, unwillingness to make progress, unwillingness to see oneself as student forever such outrage and lack of humility should be disapproved in larger scale there where power to make professionals is and people who can’t take criticism and learn from it. Pedestals oh pedestals, too much respected and feared, way too much.

Disapproved professionalism is something which has moved away from something known, corrupt and repetitious, away from something which sees itself as perfection that can’t be overshadowed, critiqued, put under microscope and be revealed as it is. Unprofessional is to behave badly against other professionals, without a good reason other than those feelings. To look down on and think you are so much better than is highly normal. You want to feel empowered and demonstrate this power position of yours with violence. Maturing is tough, admitting falsehood, doing wrong and failure is difficult, almost impossible. We all have met these kinds of people. They are the menace and sign of ruin of the power structure and themselves. Such thinking costs you, you narrow-minded fools. So never fall into the trap of arrogance and false pride. There is always someone better and other ways of doing. To find out which one’s are the best is a competition where there almost never are winners. To win is what professional competition is all about unfortunately.

To be proud of one’s work is what we should feel, be unashamed, whatever the work. For artist it is a battle especially when the most often thing to come by is rejection, contempt and hate. Art community should by default understand that artists face a lot of discrimination and negative positioning like the artist was the ultimate loser and threat. All you need is family which does not approve what you do. This can’t be too much emphasised. Be empowered and privileged is something many aren’t entitled to. Quality of work is another thing and what is it is the contents not how much your camera cost you and where you are BASED. Those who have reached position which gives them right to look down on do more harm than good. No wonder they are easily hurt, professional emotions are so vulnerable. Most damage they do is at schools. Which I have wondered why assholes and idiots get to teach.

Something which does different from the approved form of status professional? A connoisseur of practise, of thought, ideas and craft, how much does this have to do with feelings? We must feel satisfaction of doing something well and be rewarded for this. We need collective acceptance to be uplifted, respected and valued. This image and game, play or how should I call it, rivalry, fight for right to be a professional, is of course passionate and exclusionary, shutting out those who do not match credentials of the profession. Which is understandable. Sometimes, especially in art, such game of who can and who can’t get interesting proportions and this has got to do with gender a lot and where you come from.

Let’s dig deeper into professionalism, shall we. The credentials for professional vary and the idea is understood in different ways.

| Henna Timanttimetsä

Is there something such as professional pride? Pride of doing one’s job as well as possible, as well as one is able and knowing what it means to do job at hand well, any job? I have come to learn that such pride is not what it used to be, when work was your signature, pride and measure of worthiness in the eyes of those who enjoy fruits of one’s labor. Are we so spoiled already that work is not who we are in the meaning that it only makes it possible for us to live and express ourselves outside work? Is that what being spoiled is, to have free time to express oneself and feel free? I think it is. How does this effect the way we work and do our work and most importantly appreciate as work? Work must make a decent living, be valued as craft and expertise, worker be valued as someone whose effort is noticed and appreciated. Someone who just has a job is not enough, we want more than that because we are fully what we do for work. Job must be something which can be valued as modern and an achievement, an extension to one’s personality, fulfilling ambition, one being able to show talent, capability, proof of all this existing in this one person.

Fair enough, we are entitled to this luxury, aren’t we. Be appreciated and be paid for what we are worth, what our work is worth, our labor input. What other things follow hopefully are plusses. We are entitled to search for fulfilment via work and be tormented when this does not happen. It is unfortunate when work does not involve exchange of money, it is possibly not considered work but something else, a service. Naming is important, exchange is too, interaction. Is what you feel important in this matter? Money is there in one form or the other, work as money possibly. To work and make can be seen as means of exchange, value is in what was made and done and how the exchange happened. Our values are largely bound to money as is our way of living, making money is valuable as such, having money, looking like you have money. How is that the biggest one value there is and why there does not seem to be enough ever? Money gives value to people and money only? Is how much the most used question and basis for understanding value? Value of work done where does it lie? Important seems to be who does the work: gender has an important role in creating value.

My quest is to understand professionalism and how we understand what it is. For most the pay check is proof enough, the title, education, network and being busy, accomplishing and achieving, making progress such as getting more money and more fancy titles, getting ahead on career path. I have been wondering this issue because there seems to be a huge misunderstanding or collective mind-set, one-way path, what it takes to do one’s job well, what is achieving something, having a path, pursuing goals and why this pursuing goals which self-evidently belongs to choosing careers is important to take up and obey, choosing up one’s career. What is a career, who validates it, is it given or taken?

Interestingly rules for professional in business are tightly tangled with art which makes it curious to be an artist when to create something new constantly and being one’s own boss, at least for me, are at risk of becoming something else. Artist should be a brand, a product to sell her art. Ways of becoming a brand and product is very business culture obedient more and more. That is not good news for art. Something goes missing easily which is personality, uniqueness and following path of one’s own despite what happens, doing what I want to do contradicts the business savvy heavily for a reason. What is expected of you is to obey.

When art is an investment what are the expectations and when art pursues not fulfil expectations but move further what happens? When the interest lies in ways of presentation, what and how expensive one’s equipment is, who do you know and where you live, are based, as it is said nowadays, where are we based exactly, where do we base our priorities? What is lost in this kind of interest in showing off and thinking the tools make the art more than you ever can, professional emerges when one possesses the right kind of kit? Yuk. Freedom of making out of scratch, out of nothing without need to impress by things, places and domains, play a role in making something worthy nowadays. Sure to look nice even presentable is what you are looking for go for it, but to expect that be the professional way is corporal setting and harnessing, waste of something good and turning into mass product, likeable and following instructions for professional outlook to impress as professional. Who is the artist in this picture and why the need for grandiose and expensiveness is so important to make an awe, an effect, spectacle and produce value which is bloated ready to explode? Is it business as usual we should have?

Size of one’s studio, sizes of cameras, how does an artist look like, what is the street credible look for an artist, in which city to dwell, where to show one’s art and what kind of art to make? Large prints, monumental paintings, what is the it thing, if it interests anyone? Maybe the contents will tell the value??
I also ask because to come across people who consider themselves professionals due to positions they have been granted, things they deliver and give back do not often strike as well done, having done one’s homework kind of thing at all, quite on the contrary. Professionalism is one issue where trickle down effect goes wrong, something gets in the way, like lack of will to share and contribute. So where is the professionalism when you have to put yourself on the line, your career and what does it mean to do one’s job so that there is pride, ability there in the right way, not in the way that the work serves only you and interests of yours but something larger and as we do not live alone in the world, our work affects others too pretty profoundly.

Cunt is currency, looks is currency, what else is there than having currency and something to buy?

| Henna Timanttimetsä

I can approach this topic by how I have always been viewed by people, commented and stared at. Pushed into a role of female which is highly narrow and limiting, refusing this is irregular and not wanted, to understand power of feminine attraction is awkward, what power, and which one thing one should understand is how to exploit this situation, to see the whole picture over and over again unchanged can be defeating. To me it has been traumatising no less to figure out how trapped we are by visual pleasure instantly and how women do not have power because our thing is to please and via that get attention and be liked, loved, noticed, approved, hired etc. It is sad as hell. By kissing ass and doing as we are told we do not get power, we do not have power, ever.

To be female in a shallow profit driven world and succeed is to accept how one-sided women should be, are desired to be, not try build more dimensions and possibilities. Assumptions and options which repeat the same stay boring and have nothing to do with progress, intellect, human rights and dignity or my line of work when one tries to change the state of things and one’s life, tries to change the expected. My worth as a maker is in the work I do, not on how I look like and what I have under my clothes. To pay attention to my looks when I work is pure sexism and I do not tolerate it, not from women and not from men. I am many times left out because of my gender and looks play an unwanted bizarre role, sexism functions as limiting and exclusionary like picking the fruit to be eaten. I do not play games which sexism is all about and expects to play along. I do not accept my role as all pleaser which is the part of women and rules of this game are set for women. We all are scaled out through and through how attractive we are which tactics is wrong and hurtful in many ways not only for the people but for progress within society.

Attractiveness is subjective and the easy breezy simple way to see and judge people, why on earth is it so? Stereotypes live on as do behavioural patterns, models of thinking. It is far too easy to think and stick on to the view that women who are attractive are stupid, available, weak, deaf, easily led, want certain things, can be manipulated and to overcome this bias they must work harder, look ugly, learn to say no, work harder than those who do not have the burden of looks and sex, burden of sex is the expectation, assumption and the ready-made image which must be met. Yes a burden because whether ugly or beautiful we are judged by it completely and it is waste of time, human resources, energy, unnecessary bullying and repeating of old thinking patterns which do more harm than good. How to be objective and be sure to get accurate results is obviously very difficult task but it is not impossible. It is not enough to be impressed by work done, we must be impressed by character and habitus, to please and like are more important than what has been accomplished. What comes to doing one’s job well, is it a matter of gender and appearance because cock has more valid info and capability than cunt? We live in a corrupt world where to understand laws of corruption pays off. I must grow myself a cock. What do we do to end corruption is not play with it.

In business and in art where you come from, gender and appearance strikingly have big roles still, looks and gender can tell of intelligence and talent usually lacking which correlation to me is pure fascism. That is the most comment sparking thing about me I appear and I am not what you expect me to be, such issues which concern me as a human being are almost solely about my surface from head to toe. Best thing is of course to say so that I can hear that I am fuckable. Oh yes fuckable of course, how else can someone like me be understood and set to one’s place but naked and legs apart. I am trying to be a professional artist but it fails for many to behave as professionals somehow (is there piss in your heads?) who think they are professionals when it comes to gender roles and how women are treated and perceived within the industry. Someone who looks like I do cannot be talented and her looks must be commented because that is the compliment, right. I don’t find it flattering, I know what I look like and I do not push my appearance to be the most important thing in me.

One more thing: when photographing an exhibition, it is more interesting to photograph the artwork than the artist. When I say I don’t like to be photographed, please don’t insist because I mean what I say and I am showing my work not myself. For me this has a huge difference whether you get it or not. I’m not into posing with my art, it is fucking lame.

Come as you are

| Henna Timanttimetsä

Surely you know the lyrics, but what does it mean in real life, come as you are? You are welcome and accepted as you are by those who maybe have invited you or when you just appeared and said hello. Who feel invited in a culture and being complete creations of their own and part of culture? What is the problem and what does it mean to be part of a culture? Is that even a valid question anymore? I think more valid than most. To find the end of the problem often brings the solution. Cultures, people holding culture as their own, tend to resist change when they think they are complete and safe. How can anyone say they have made themselves and their lives, by themselves, and who are those people who are accepted as they are, as they are in any culture? Body and soul, mind and will, knowing oneself is to want something for oneself and be something, be special preferably but not too much. Isn’t it a fantasy and utopia to be accepted and have luxury of finding yourself? Today it seems so that we are to complete ourselves by training (we are guided online through and through) especially our bodies and our mindsets to fit in, what to want, what to be and how. Every part of us tell of us and are parts of us but we mould the image of us by what we see, to match what we have seen and be something more than what we are. So we are influenced all the time and we like to think we are free. We are free to choose, at least in Finland, up to a point. It is still like someone have made decisions for us because the fight one must endure and go through wanting to be you can be terrifying. It is always up to a point you can go astray. When there is that point where you must think it is not enough and correct what you have found or are given, begins going against. Free to be what we want, feel what we want, say what we want, thinking we are masters but underdogs.

Why should anybody accept me as I am, is the question obviously, to be myself is too outrageous and unacceptable, I don’t know why. To me it seems we do not accept ourselves as we are at all or others as they are whatever they are because whatever is not acceptable. That is key to development and progress: constant dissatisfaction, enduring uncertainty, dealing with no’s, disagreements and refusals and abandonment, not belonging and feeling something is missing can be a blessing. Life would be a lot easier if we were one and content. What would we be then? We need understandable and clear packages to feel safe with, people as objects which is one thing to fight against. Easiness to subjugate and think it is the right way. Everything which is off beat, is not known, is suspicious and must be repressed. Accept yourself as you are and do what you want to do is a human right? Many people want to party and bully and think it is acceptable and that represents freedom to them. It is the most difficult thing to do, be you within the norms, as you are in front of other people without hiding anything, at least for a woman and a girl, and when you are not as all males are supposed to be, a stereotypical male, difficulties are very likely to occur. Difficulties like not desirable enough, not manly enough, not straight enough. You must know what you are, you can label yourself, name yourself, stand your ground and accept yourself but what if no one accepts you? To believe in you and present yourself as you are as this creation of yours but you want to be wanted. So we must know what and who we are and how do we learn to know this? Strangely many know what other people are without knowing what they themselves are truly. To present oneself is like acting a part. We can’t be not as we feel but what we are expected to be and what are the rules for presenting yourself. Be funny even though you are not funny, be fluent even though you are not fluent in presenting yourself by the rules. It is confusing, so the best thing is to abandon the guidebook.

What are you and how do you become what you are? Defined by what you do and who do you know, who knows you, what we know in general and are interested in. How do you define yourself and where does you begin? Is it from desire to be and dreaming? What are the things that come first to your mind when you think about what you are? Is it something someone else has said for you to be and you believe it to be true or can’t shake it off even if you wanted to? Have you found truth of your own about you but can’t say it? Why is it the truth and unsayable? People we are surrounded by, environment, history, country and our biology telling what we are is the truth of some kind, reality I suppose. It is there and we should know it. For other people I am firstly my gender, I am almost completely perceived from that angle, what that gender does for other people. There is always something to gain and women are taken for granted, they provide the pleasure and comfort. It has been difficult for me to comprehend what it is that women are for since they are not nearly enough ever, they are partial but necessary, useful handy. They can’t be granted full rights to existence, full human rights meaning the same as men. That has been how I have been looked at, compared to men I am disabled but I complete the other, the other does not need to complete me. I have learned that this is the primal thought, how useful it is as a strategy and idea to live: resentful, and this other human called man to me is useful when he protects me and bonds with me, wants me, I suppose. Don’t you want to be wanted?

To feel what I am is what I refuse because irrational is the most successful way to go wrong and rules for women are irrational and without factual base. It is clear women are the unknown. There is also the song where a woman says you make me feel like a natural woman. What is that and how natural are we, hippies, trolls, fairies, natural woman, natural man, natural human in natural habitat doing natural things? Natural is something good but we refuse it because it leaves very little room for our contemporary desires and ambitions. Natural is dirty and manipulated is something more, it adds tons on you, artificial and something more to feel connected with and be personalised. Contemporary desires: we can be whatever we want to be and we feel let down when we aren’t having what we want, but we have the right to pursue what we want, I guess. It is a disturbing though to be able to pursue whatever.

To be true to one’s vision of oneself is to be ready to confront all other opinions and definitions about you, and there will be plenty. In crossfire how strong and capable will you be being yourself doing what you think is what you must be doing, being your own woman or man, gender and sex of your own, your creation after you were created by other people and a bundle of other factors like bias, traditions, expectations, sexism, chance, randomness and culture. How our own are we? When we have right to opinions and have a discussion we can find it out, freedom of ours is in the expression. It is about difference not necessarily belonging, if it is never belonging but being an alien because society and other people push us to be something and we want something else. We are pushed and pushed, dragged. To what we must settle and what is it that must not be accepted? To have liberty to be yourself is a curious case of freedom and limitations. What are limitations to desire? To me limitations have been set by other people, legislation and daring. If scared of consequences limitations are pretty strict and often rightfully so. I cannot wear that, I can’t go there, do what I wish for work, I can’t swear, I can’t disagree and question, there is a huge pressure by men and women for men and women, it is still minor issues of proper and major if it is about what is regulated. When I disregard rules for women I become despised very quickly. Lines for odd and the unknown are painted with warning signs. Word goes out, people didn’t like what I said because it contradicted their views, I spoke inappropriately ( uh I hurt your feelings, well I guess that was partly my meaning because you hurt my feelings) what nerve. How are your feelings more precious than mine and how is your life more important than mine? Let me know.

Lessons for learners

| Henna Timanttimetsä