“we’ll see each other someday” is the map of my journey
a 15-year-old dream that my heart has been chasing
finally coming true in a week-long love story
 
the deafening nights of silence filled with utmost longing
are gone, replaced with heartbreaking excitement
that lonely hour I wave goodbye and whisper
“we’ll finally see each other, my koi no koyan”
 
you welcome me with your warm sunlight
I am engulf by the sincere embracing sounds
I breathe in the sweet sounds of thank yous
 
little India, little Italy, little mermaid made their appearances
walking through the vibrant street corners
the staggering little cat statues fascinate me
armed with a camera, a direction, a love
 
my tiny feet are entwined with the white lights
making my way through the four lanes
everyone is synchronized, surrounded by their presence
in the middle of this crossing, you made realize me
how small I am yet I can feel every fibre in my body
hearing the sounds of the cars, the footsteps of the people
I am nothing but alive in this moment
 
stretching my fingers to the sky, as far as they can reach
ashes coming out of the mountains
you take my breathe away
the water is as clear as the reflection I paint of my smile
my non-stop laughter is from your gentle touch
I am climbing the stairway of your vertebrate
 
my breath is ragged, my body is swimming
the food is being tickled in my mouth
fresh takoyaki never taste this good
through the vibrant lights, the towering figures
the unreadable text on books
I spot the red tower, mighty and free
 
as I wave my goodbye
the natsukashi feelings are overflowing
I let my kiss fly, soar to spread its wings
and I whisper, “we’ll see each other again Tokyo”
truly, my koi no yokan has become a real story

​- Jianne Soriano

     When was your first love? Who was she or he? Perhaps, thinking about her or him brings back so much memories that you’re possibly smiling (hopefully, not crying) right now just by remembering the bitter and sweet thing called first love. We’ve probably all have our first loves, if not, you will get there.

     For many, it’s a person. It happened during their later years of elementary or their early years of high school. But for mine, it happened exactly fifteen years ago. I was five years old. And I fell in love, my first love in fact, was (or still is) anime.

      I remember the moments so clearly when I was ​growing up in the Philippines. Watching Sailor Moon in tagalog dub every morning, that was also the time when I told my grandma that I wanted to meet the Sailor squad but she right-out rejected me and said they’re only in Japan. That began my promise of “One day, I’m going to go there!”, a fifteen-year-old dream to set foot in the land of the rising sun that  finally came true last May.

First off, a bit of context:

     Dalagang Pilipina, my mom called it – the ‘do I’d been sporting for most of my life, and soon I’d only see it again in pictures. I wanted the shortest bob they had on record – at least, the shortest they could manage without making me look like a victim of dress code politics from an all-boys Catholic elementary school. I wanted it dyed light brown, with gold and blonde highlights.

      They told me it was going to be drastic, but that was the whole point. Drastic was good. Drastic was great. Drastic was a big fuck you to all the paralyzing thoughts that plagued me for most of my years and left me lingering at the fringes of life and all its wonders. Did you know people from Japan cut their hair short to symbolize a changed life? Either way, I thought it was poetic. And my hands were clammy. But that was okay. For the first time, I wanted to do something for myself.

      My hairdresser smiled as he combed through my hair, a practiced smile, the kind surgeon’s used on you before they gut you open. A question: “Okay lang ba sa boyfriend mo?”

     I didn’t have a boyfriend. Or a girlfriend. And if I did, why would they need to be “okay” with it? It was my hair, and it was my choice. I was confused and a little bit miffed, but alas, manners don’t simply dissipate into thin air. Years of social and cultural integration did that to a person. No, I told him politely, and he gave me this sly, knowing look, like he’d just thumbed through my old diary and suddenly knew all my dirty little secrets. “Weh, di nga. Shouldn’t a pretty girl like you have a cute boyfriend?”

      I didn’t know how to answer that. I still don’t, to be honest. At least, not an answer involving any form of sassing that would potentially have merited me a horrible haircut and a thousand pesos, all gone to waste.

     Point is: it stuck with me, that conversation. I think about it a lot, along with many other cookie-cutter scenarios that all end with me progressively feeling angrier and more disappointed with humanity. Another development: the day I came to class donning anything but my trademark T-shirt + jeans combo, my lipstick devastatingly red (me! lipstick!) and my winged eyeliner so sharp it could kill a man, a friend came up to meal astonished and whispered happily, “There’s finally a man in your life!”

     Something about the way she said it made me want to punch something. “Or,” I replied, trying to salvage something, anything. “Maybe I just like make-up.” She snorted. Her eyes were laughing: oh, you’re so funny, they seemed to say.

     Why wouldn’t anyone believe me? For her, there was no doubt about it, no other plausible reason to explain my sudden affair with self-expression. For her, all of it was a show.The amount of bravery I had to teach myself to have, the self-love I was painstakingly remembering day-by-day, my body and my choices, all of it – casually torn from my own hands only to be slapped with a label of someone else’s name. Just like that.

     There was an answer she wanted, accepted as it was expected – that  universally acknowledged truth that rationalizes women’s choices with a need to please.

     Because apparently every normal, self-respecting teenage girl must be in want of a boyfriend. It’s something in a state of perpetual normalization and glamorization. We tell girls they must doll themselves up, because God forbid anyone sees them without any make-up. A bare, unmade female face – I shudder to even think about it. What would the boys think? We tell girls they have something to lose. We tell girls they are in need of saving. That they are only half of who they are until they find this hero, this strange entity to complete and rescue them from their miserable loneliness – The One, the faceless, profound being that lives out its ghostly existence in every love song, every shampoo commercial.

     You must find him, the oracle says. The first commandment. You must find him, even if you don’t find yourself. Girls have been branded this prophecy even before they were taught to speak.

     No wonder women like to view each other as competition. We size each other up as we cross paths in hallways, screenshot each other’s Instagram photos and send them to our friends in jest. We shun unconventionally beautiful girls for the way they wear their confidence, in a strange sort of way we cannot understand, because it stems from a place we do not know. And that’s the sad thing, really. We don’t know. Nobody taught us it was okay to celebrate ourselves. Nobody really sat us down and said, “It’s okay to love yourself, just as you are.Your body is intrinsically beautiful and pure and it is okay to be proud of it. You do not need a medal or a million likes or a boy to validate that.”

     One last picture: My father liked to tell me I was beautiful, constantly. I would smile, kiss him on the cheek. “You’re beautiful,” he told me again, one day. I smiled cheekily and replied: “I know.”

     “Don’t say that,” he reprimanded, because it was “inappropriate”. He meant it as a joke, obviously, but it stung because I knew where it was coming from.

     Don’t say that. Don’t claim it for yourself. Your beauty is only valid when it is acknowledged by someone else.

     I love my father, I really do. But I think this is just a testament to how we raise our daughters. It’s time to teach girls that they are their own before they decide to be part of anyone else. It’s time to teach girls that they have always been whole, after all this time.

- Andrea Lopez
cover photo source

With this month’s theme all about GRRRL Power, I think we all need to make some space on our iTunes for some amazing female artists.

SUNSHOWERS
M.I.A.
     M.I.A. has infiltrated pop culture and has been one of the most influential artists of this generation. She’s been using her music to communicate the experience of a refugee, an immigrant kid, and an outlier. Her other hits, Bad Girls and Paper Planes, have also displayed her political statements while being incredibly subversive yet fiery to the mainstream.

- Steph Alsay

     When I was a little girl, I was taught how to be lady-like. I have never even grasped and understood the depth of the term until I was in high school. I have always been a little different. I dislike wearing doll shoes; I love wearing heavy combat boots and dirty Converse sneakers. I abstain from listening to pop music; most of my favorite bands are categorized in the punk and hardcore genres. For that, I am proud. I am proud of being myself. I am proud of being female, and being able to like whatever I want to. Many question my preferences with queries like “You’re a teenage girl, aren’t you supposed to wear lipgloss and jam out to Katy Perry?”

     Men are expected to be hard, strong, and incapable of vulnerability. They are shamed when they show emotion, because, as Robert Smith of The Cure sings, “boys don’t cry.” Men are expected to be strong and capable human beings, but not human enough to be able to feel emotion. They are honed to become leaders, builders, and sculptors of our modern world, and as society puts it, they are boxed away from their emotions so they would not hinder themselves from their imminent domination. Women, on the other hand, are taught to rely on whoever we are going to marry. We are taught to make ourselves look good so that we would cater to the needs of men.

     Gender inequality has been a major issue ever since. In the Stone Age, physical ability was everything. If you are not strong, you would not survive. Men are most likely to rule in that era. In the 1800s, women did not have the right to vote. It was a long and tumultuous journey for the suffragists. Only in the 1920s was when women were finally allowed their right to vote. During the 1950s, professional jobs were closed from women, and were only getting paid sixty percent of what men did. The time when the feminist movement truly started to rise was in the 1960s. At present, women are stereotyped to be clueless, dependent, and too weak. The battle for equality continues to this day.

     Undoubtedly, a lot of people are greatly misinformed about what feminism really stands for. Most of these people see feminism as a movement that promotes hatred for men. A poll conducted in America in 2013 reveals that only 39% of Americans claim that they are feminists. Interestingly, the poll also revealed that 82% of the same population believe in the statement “men and women should be social, political, and economic equals.” It is a brief and factual translation of feminism, but the advocacy has been perceived as man-hating, negatively radical, and liberal, among other incorrect perceptions of the advocacy.

     Feminism has made numerous headlines in the last decade. Last year, Robin Thicke’s song “Blurred Lines” was the number one single on every music chart on our planet. The listening public devoured the song; it was being played on radio stations for weeks at a time. Although there is no doubt that the song boasts a catchy rhythm and an addicting hook, its lyrics held a controversial story about Thicke trying to woo a woman at a nightclub who may or may not want him sexually. The song, coupled with a racy video which involved three male performers playfully dancing around with topless women, awakened a mass of angry feminists on social media. Some thought it was just harmless pop music; some thought it was a form of mistreatment and disrespect to the female gender. We do live in a patriarchy, so our society is the way it is. What is possible, though, is that men should be taught firsthand that women are not just sex toys. Men should not objectify women and glorify themselves for being able to snag a hesitant woman at a nightclub.

     The media is a primary promoter of the fine line of different treatment between the two genders. An example is one that involves Miley Cyrus, who is well-known for her rather distasteful way of executing her art. She is always under fire for her actions, just like that instance when she swung on top of a wrecking ball, wearing nothing but boots on her feet. After the controversy the video garnered, headlines on the internet read “Miley Cyrus Sex-crazed and Pleasuring Sledgehammer in New Video.” On the opposite side, the media praises Nick Jonas for posing almost nude in a photo shoot with headlines like “Nick Jonas Has Blessed Us With a Mostly Nude Photo Shoot.” How come when women display their bodies to the world, it is widely judged and criticized? When men do so, it is seen as something so extremely acceptable that we call it a “blessing.” It is sickening how fazed we are by the bias we are faced with and that people see women’s bodies as incredibly offensive as compared to men’s.

     Free The Nipple is an equality movement with a mission to empower women across the world. It claims that acts of violence and killing are glorified by the media, but women’s bodies are censored and considered too obscene to be displayed in public or in various media platforms. It is a campaign that promotes equal rights for men and women, a balanced system of censorship, and legal rights for all women to breastfeed in public. Founded by a female American activist, its main stand is; “What is more obscene: Violence or a nipple?”

     When you stop and think about it, it is true. All around us are different kinds of violence and inhumanity. There are numerous crimes to solve, political anomalies to analyze, and systems to shake, yet what society dwells on is the apparent unnatural display of women’s bodies. Humanity has allowed itself to evolve into a monstrous and vicious species, but women and their bodies are still believed to be the enemy. However, women’s bodies could also be the culprits of crime.

     Rape is one of the most overlooked atrocities in our current culture. The story of rapist and victim is tremendously contrasting. A rape victim after the crime will have to suffer the interrogations of many, such as “What were you even doing out that late?” “What were you wearing?” or “Why didn’t you have anybody with you?” People make it seem like it is a woman’s fault that she was born a woman and therefore it will be her fault that she was raped because she went out at night wearing clothing she was comfortable in. Why not teach men respect and teach them not to treat a woman as a thing that could just be played with anyway they want? Why not teach men to see the opposite sex as plain human beings?

     Fifty-four percent of the cases of sexual harassment remain unreported, thus giving anti-rape activists a difficult time bringing the urgent problem of rape culture into the spotlight of our society. In recent times wherein photographs and videos of sexual assaults frequently surface on social media, the argument that rape is worthy to be the subject of public attention is becoming harder to defend. We have all become spectators of the morbid situation in our society that is rape.

     Each one of us has become witnesses to the diseases in our society, but at the same time, there are obstructions which make us unable to see our current situation. Our culture has bred us to just accept the plague of misogyny that gravely fogs our society. Women nowadays cannot even take a compliment from a man without growing paranoid. This example reflects that the various cultural aspects and norms that we all grew up with have promoted the notion of the inferiority of women to men.

     Women as little girls were taught to be feminine and delicate. We were taught how to cook, clean, and read. We played with plastic dolls dressed in frilly dresses. We aspired to be just like these dolls, but as everything became clearer to us, we grew aware of reality. We grew up to live up to the pressures of being skinny, pretty, and perfect, appearance-wise. We fall for boys who want nothing from us but the objects in between our thighs. To us, it meant everything to be wanted by that certain boy, whether if it was for the best reasons or not.

     Men as little boys were taught to be strong and independent. They were taught how to restrain their emotions and keep them boxed away. The games boys played involved strength and the acquisition of power. The more strength you had, the more of a man you are. To society, when a woman is stronger than a man, it is emasculating. When a woman is more successful than her male partner, it is emasculating. When a boy’s sister can hold her emotions better than he can, it is emasculating.

     The fact that a word such as emasculate should exist is bothersome. To emasculate means to deprive a man of his male strength, role, etc. What exactly is the true measure of a man? The idea of genuine masculinity is profoundly different for every generation. For this generation, being able to extensively provide for his family of their needs equals masculinity. Men suffer the burden of their assigned gender roles. Women are designated to stay at home and tend to their children, because this is what is expected of them.

     What if we lived in a world where a woman’s femininity was defined by her ability to be independent?  What if we lived in a world where a man’s masculinity was defined by his ability to show and display his true self and his deepest emotions? Or better yet, what if we lived in a world where we plainly saw each other as human beings? If the idea of gender roles were to be stripped away, we would not have to suffer the judgment of others and their caging us in their expectations. “You’re a boy and you like trying on make-up? Okay, cool!” “You’re a girl and you don’t wear bras? Great!” Imagine if every single component of our seven billion population’s mindset was such. Imagine if women and men were free from the borderlines and boundaries which prevent us from being ourselves. Our world would be free of the ideals, bias, and prejudice that give us the cause of wars and chaotic tendencies.

      Not all women are women. Not all men are men. 

     Each one of us falls into a place between the gender scale, because gender is not plainly black and white. The key to a world free from discrimination is to understand that we all bear different ideals of masculine and feminine, of happiness, of love, and of ability. Gender, and all other concepts which separate our humanity, should be subjective and free from the chains of stereotyping and expectation. Equality in all its forms should not only be seen as an idea, but it should be seen as an urgent necessity. A world free from discrimination is a world far-fetched from our current state, but it is not impossible once we start to wake up and realize that the power to change the world’s perception dwells within ourselves.

- Janina Talabis
SOURCES: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7
cover photo

The generation today is a big disappointment and something to be proud of, If I may say so myself.

     Children at the ages of two already know how to operate an iPad better than my mom. Don’t you see? We’re too committed to technology and it’s embarrassing because kids these days just want to vomit at the thought of a book when literature should be loved and adored by many. Not many people know how to understand the beauty of art these days, which just brings more disappointment to me, honestly. The beauty of art is seen by how the artist sees the world, they do not know how to express their feeling into sounds neither words, so they use art as a way to express anything they believe. The internet is a drug and no cure has been found, once they have started, there’s no turning back. They become enslaved by the internet and they get brainwashed into thinking things.

     But you know what; I still have faith in our generation. I still have hope in the people who walk the Earth today.

     Because though it may seem that we people of today may look stupid with using terms such as “selfie” and other slang, there are still people who have the goodness of intention and mind inside of them. Now you’ll see on twitter these poem porn accounts and quote accounts most of those words were written by teenagers living a normal life, who experienced great emotions. Through these little actions, they inspire so many people, and these people express their thoughts because they became inspired and the cycle goes on and on and on. It’s a wonderful sight to see because we can actually revolutionize the world.

     We the generation today have the right mind, though our minds may be cluttered with thoughts that should have never existed in the first place, we understand what this world needs. And what the world needs today is somebody to make a move, to take action. We can lead the nation to the future they always wanted us to have.

     I have the right to call teenagers today heroes in disguise. Without adults even knowing, some of us have already saved lives because of communication through technology and that’s something to be proud of. Many teens suffer depression, self harm, bulimia and many more thanks to society with its double standards which actually do no help at all. These heroes talk them out of doing things that they will regret and it’s such a marvelous sight to see.

     The thing is sometimes people provoke them from taking action because they just want them to be safe but they should learn that they’re willing to sacrifice their lives to save an individual’s.

     Most people do try their best to stand out so that they could be remembered as someone who is not someone average or typical; we really try to be unique but the people of the world brainwash humanity into thinking that uniqueness is a flaw. But we shall prove them wrong. We shall defy their belief. We shall revolutionize society. Now all we need now is your help, because it all starts from you, because you are important, you are valuable, irreplaceable.

     The generation before tried to save the world, little did they know they were destroying it. We can change the world and it can all be because of you, now the choice is in your hands. The fate of the world is left in our hands.


- Samantha
click on the photo for the link