As it seems to me questioning and jeopardizing status quo make those who dare unfriendly and unwanted, meaning that there are things somehow perfect that are offered to the students on a platter to kindly eat and be grateful. There will be hurt feelings when those offerings are strongly objected and quality of teaching is critiqued. Please do understand if you are a teacher: it is your job to make people think for themselves. Students’ intellect and abilities are continuously underestimated. People are treated as if they were youngsters who were born yesterday. Quality feedback is difficult to get, which would mean actually being interested in students’ work, thoughts and progress. But as it goes research is more important that teaching, this is what we get and it should be praised. What is there to praise in a system that does not want to evolve because it thinks it is perfect? What kind of education do we get in a system that has such high opinion of itself hiring airheads instead of intellect?
women
Terve!
Where do we go from here?
Plastic world is a threat. The fact that we are already in trouble what comes to the amount of waste still seems somehow too far away to deal with for too many. We enjoy the massive production of goods far away cheaply with materials that are often reasons for bloody conflicts and shady business, but we like not knowing about such atrocities, less to let them affect our behavior. Consuming habits are unsustainable even though there is plenty of information and research provided all the time for us to change what we do, which would be reasonable. Such reasoning is beyond every day. It is easier not to bother. Waking up happens when things already are on the wrong so badly there is nothing to do but to change our ways of doing, thinking and making. ’Treehuggers’ have been doing the waking up for decades. Childish term for people who are concerned for a reason. Markets guide our behavior and we are the market, strangely enough. Thinking we deserve our standard of living, our goods manufactured cheaply, new gadgets every year discarding those that don’t please any more, holiday trips abroad, meat and dairy products daily because we are used to such diet and to question any of these habits brings out outrage and instant denying.
Where am I getting at with the same old critique against our way of life, we are doing what we can, aren’t we? Um yeah, kind of, up to a point and there is clear division between people: there are those who are interested and then there are those who do not know and do not care that much for various reasons. It hit me at Aalto-university, a place where they educate people who design goods, packages and visuals in the future. If at a university the critique against unsustainable production, against consumerism and exploitation is nonexistent what hope is there? If university is that unpolitical and quiet about flaws in our system then I am truly concerned. If critique is being offended by not seen as appropriate and vital for system to evolve it also an intellectual crisis we are having.
http://www.globalresearch.ca/new-world-re-ordering-and-neoliberal-transnationalization/5453352 ”Left-wing ‘foreign policy’ should not be limited to security; rather it must also include social, economic and environmental aspects. How should we assess the current geo-economic changes? Which issues are currently gaining in strategic importance? Moreover, what might constitute an appropriate left-wing response?”
http://www.vox.com/2015/6/3/8706323/college-professor-afraid”As Northwestern University professor Laura Kipniswrites, ”Emotional discomfort is [now] regarded as equivalent to material injury, and all injuries have to be remediated.” Hurting a student’s feelings, even in the course of instruction that is absolutely appropriate and respectful, can now get a teacher into serious trouble.”
Quest for presentable.
How culture pushes us to mold our appearance into admired package to be wanted? We want to be wanted. What are those forces that do not give us permission to be accepted as such, as we desire to look like, but make us follow given patterns and imitate images that show who are wanted? Is it due to beauty norms which all the time change as does fashion, what is hip and what to have, what to be, where to be? Isn’t it weakness to follow beauty norms of others, to let one’s mind be dictated by machinery that only cares about profit? It is the weakness of modernism, modern man, and also as such a contradiction as modern man is supposed to be individual and original maker of one’s fate.
The most I have faced the norms is by men who have very strict norms for women in mind meaning that a woman is a continuation to a man to stand by a man and is seen with a man as his. Everything is measured from head to toe. Woman is to be with a man to complement him to bring him something extra. She is his choice either good or bad. Idea is to manipulate environment believe how good this man is. The thought of a man who is seen with this and this kind of woman and what of it. To accept and value woman as equal person is extremely difficult to implement in a world where woman is an object without capabilities other than what are believed to be hers. It is a sad reality of how life for us to live is for eyes of others to show off, continue a wreck culture. Basic thoughts of women as for someone to mold in order to serve and please.
Self-portrait 2002
Beauty of female
Beauty of being female is to experience femininity, to learn to know it as your own. Is it undisturbed and protected? Hardly. Even the most strict attempts to preserve femininity unharmed is harmful. What would there be to protect, what is the harm and against who? For some reason femininity is the disturbed, harassed, mistreated, undervalued, feared and therefore powerful. How to experience femininity can be a challenge for it is under pressure to imitate male existence to hold and obtain power to equal male authority. Subtle and fragile nature of female is what is expected of the other sex, the receiver waiting to be loved, taken as bride, accepted and wanted as obedient and kind, loving and caring. Strength of female is to question her status, to be able to either blend in denying herself and wishes of hers or be complete as a woman and stand against, say against the norms. Her strength is that she can choose. She is allowed to choose. Complete woman is a complete person who does what she expects her to do not what others expect of her. Religion, politics, people, society, only what she expects of her to be and want. That as such can be also her weakness. The all that there is to want.
To experience femininity is to be prepared to be looked at, stared at, talked about, where is the exact place of femininity, calculated, is a strange thought because it is everywhere, on level of hormones and cells, biology, undeniable there to be faced and looked at. Why does femininity have a place of particular and a set like theater, like something ready and determined from above without this plan to have a chance to be altered and turned over? Why is gender something stiff, to be scared of, panicked over screaming in need of help, childlike, unaware, difficult and therefore controlled?
To wish to be average and normal is the worst kind of idiocy there is.
I have sometimes wished it because it has been so difficult to be me. It has been difficult to notice how above average is not hoped for, wanted, because it is seen as below the average, as something bad and wrong. To find excellent and to know it yourself, to be excellent is what one should work for always. Demand it for yourself. To know what is excellent and good one has to understand it and believe it. In search for excellence and unique people settle for what they get thinking that is the best there is for them or that other has the best and we should want the same or beat that other when one there is to beat is themselves. Logic is often lost and people wish to seek the comfort of a crowd to blend in, still and want what other people have. No wonder it is demanding to be an artist, a feminist and a dissident, all those things scare people because of the radical nature of those, of those labels, stigmas, ways to see life, forces of nature, because nature is scary and to be under control. It is scary when we don’t know it, when we don’t respect it and protect it and it is in us for us to find. It. The best you can be.
Personal confession, personal experience as a woman. Bias and suspicion, the most average shit there is.
Sweet love
How to respect, what is respect?
Does the word respect have a clang of old-school and stiffness about it in a way that there is something that needs to be changed how we see what it is to respect someone? There is respect in manners and paying attention to how we treat each other, take others into consideration, but that is not all what comes to respect. When I often call out for respect for women it is not a call for manners and opening doors or bowing your heads towards me, taking your hat off when passing by. Respect is entirely something else, which many times seems to be absent in the meaning I am after. Is respect something we earn and is given when we deserve it? Is respect presence, present when we are, not to think there is something better elsewhere, but something interesting is here where you are at? To me respect is exactly the acknowledging the importance of something and someone in that place. Acknowledging is not a trophy or a prize, it is noticing and wanting to know. It is paying attention instead of seeking something that is a higher far away goal. The better than attitude is so common I have become to loath it and places where such attitude for some reason is winning.
Respect is finding the same level and enjoying that level, exploring and getting to know it. Yes one can be ambitious and aim high. There are wrong ways and right ways to get there. Wrong way is the way of deceit and thinking about the prize.
Majakollektiivi Timanttimetsä 