International Women (Warriors) Day

All women are warriors, whether they know it or not.

We see more blood in our lifetimes. We are under attack from the moment we wake in the morning, until we go to sleep at night. We walk into battle every day no matter what uniform we are wearing.

And the women who step out of femininity and speak out for their fellow females, they are the cavalry. The women who leave men behind and focus on their love for other women, they are the black ops. The ones who write about oppression and feminism, they're the journalists, the warriors of words.

Yesterday, I read this inspiring article that affirms an important point I have been advocating for the past two years. Women are capable of doing anything that a man can do, and then some.

Arguments in favor of patriarchy almost always return to the same exact point--that males are physically stronger and therefore superior to females. While it might be true in a biological sense, what exactly does it mean to be 'stronger?' What political, social, or economic gain does it give a man to be able to benchpress 430lbs vs 225lbs? How does being physically stronger help this world achieve more peace, more humanity, help fight environmental degradation, which in itself is a reflection of the way women are exploited and ravaged all over the world? What does it matter that men are physically stronger when we use guns and bombs to go to war?

This argument has always frustrated me deeply, because the concept of physical strength is relative. There are female body builders who can lift just as much as any male body builder. And again, just what is so significant about being able to lift? Have women been historically tagged as 'the weaker sex' because they are truly physically weaker, or because they have been groomed for passivity and discouraged from physical activity?

The truth is in the latter of that statement. Men don't want women to be strong, because they don't want women to be able to defend themselves.

As a writer and reader with a feminist mind, media that I can bear to consume is a constant struggle, and I know this is true for many women, lesbian and bisexual, who crave stories about the true physical and emotional strength that exist within and between women. This is why I feel that The 100, despite being written by a man, Jason Rothenberg, is such a massively important television show.

The women characters in this show (which often predominate the male characters--amazing!) are just as likely to get beaten up, scraped up, dirtied, and fight back as the men in the show. They are shown with so much dirt and blood covering their face that you can barely recognize them, which is practically unheard of in modern television. Have you ever noticed how female characters tend to keep their clean face and perfect makeup whether they are running through underground caves or waking up in a mucky, dirty cell? The women of The 100 yell out, speak out, rage out, fight, claw, and bite their way to survival and success.

This is what I want my own characters to do, and these are the female characters I want to read about. This is how I want to see women in stories--battling and scraping by for their life as a metaphor for the battle we do every day just to achieve a little autonomy separate from men.

To every woman out there, happy International Women's Day. I stand with you, as we stand together.

Women need not be afraid to fight, because they are already warriors, whether they know it or not.

(Octavia, one of the main characters of the CW's "The 100.")

Lesbian Warriors and Priestesses.

A few years ago, a writer came to my school to talk to us about her work. At this point in time I had finished the second draft of my first novel, which features two brothers who are at war, Kelson and Avedis, as the main characters.

This author, whose name I shamefully cannot recall, seemed to be a radical-leaning feminist, though she did not name herself as such. I was lucky enough to have a studio session with her, but it was one that left me feeling confused and a little patronized. There wasn't time for her to actually read any of my writing, so I could only give her a quick synopsis of what the book is about. After the conversation with her, I remember feeling rebellious but also a bit disillusioned. 

She asked me why my main characters weren't female. I couldn't give a good answer. Back then, I was so far in the closet I couldn't even coax myself out, and I had this sort of fascination with male characters. I thought they were deeper by nature, more interesting in the contrast that the men I knew in daily life often hid their emotions. Women were too soft, delicate, accessories to characters rather than characters themselves. I liked to write male characters who laid themselves bare on the page, and thought I was getting at something with that.

As it turns out, a character's 'maleness' isn't something that should be glorified, in my opinion. 

The second point that this writer brought up to me was that slavery is little-addressed in modern fiction, despite the fact that slavery is still a global issue which is practically invisible to us living in the "first world." She asked why I didn't address slavery in my writing, and in my head, all I could think was 'oh I'm not interested in that.' Again, I couldn't give a good answer.

Shame on me, twice.

Years later, this conversation lingers in my mind, and I feel a sort of guilty haze about it. The next year, I discovered radical feminism for myself, and came out of the closet. I don't define myself as a radical feminist, but I am radical leaning in that I don't believe our modern systems of patriarchy and capitalism should be rectified, but rather destroyed. New systems need to be built from the ground up, and this is the idea that inspired my most recent series, "Anthology of the Cold Night." 

This series, as it stands, features 5 short stories and a novella which I am still writing. This series has almost exclusively female characters, and addresses the issue of slavery and trafficking, especially that of sex-trafficking. I am aware that authors should not be preachers, and that is not what I am aiming for in this story of lesbian warriors and priestesses. Although both women and men are victims of sex-trafficking, it is statistical fact that women suffer more for their sex/gender than men do. Any strides taken to give women more freedom will inherently benefit men, too. That is what I want to show in my stories. Almost every woman I know has been raped or sexually assaulted/aggravated by a man in their life. That is something that NEEDS to be addressed in current media. 

A lot of writers are afraid to brand themselves as feminist or gay writers. I strive to brand myself as a lesbian feminist writer, because I know how desperate I feel when I pick up a book that seems to have a strong female lead in it, and the heartbreak that comes over me when she loses every sense of autonomy and sleeps with and then bows down to the men in the story. (I would like to iterate here that gay, and trans men and women are not included in this generalization). 

So while I don't want to rewrite my first novel, I have drafted it not only include more female characters, but to expand on the ones who were there already. My future endeavors go forth with feminism and slavery at the forefront of my mind, and I encourage any female/lgbt+ defined writers to embrace these ideas. 

As always, I am open for discussion and thoughts about this. Stay tuned for a small excerpt of the Wolfena novella, and thank you to anyone who has read this. 

Fantasy Indulgence

Writing has always been a form of escapism for me, as it is for so many others. For the three and a half years before I began writing my first novel, the only writing I did was for school. It was a long creative block where I forgot how much I enjoyed storytelling.

When I first ventured into "The Ascent of Avedis," I found a world where I belong. This story and the stories which all center around it have evolved greatly in the nearly 4 years since its inception. I graduated from college, came out as a lesbian, and decided to make writing one of the topmost priorities in my life. Learning that I was gay changed my perspective deeply when it came to storytelling. I began to realize that myself and people like me were abhorrently absent from mainstream media. I searched the depths of Netflix and the internet for every alternative story I could find, and I learned that there is something very particular that people in the LGBT+ community, along with other marginalized groups, are searching for.

We want stories who happen to have gay characters, not necessarily stories about 'coming out.' Those who are already out of the closet live a life just like anyone else. Being gay plays into the day to day of things, but just as often it can be perfectly irrelevant. There's a difference between a 'gay person' and a 'person who is gay.'

The characters in my stories are not 'gay characters'; they are characters who just happen to be gay. Some of them have romance, some don't. I want the people reading my work to feel as if they have a place, like they belong, like they're not alone. As we face both social progression and regression in the USA and throughout the world, sharing stories about alternative communities is more important than ever, and that is my goal.

It is true that I was a different person when I wrote the first manuscript of TAOA, and that piece of writing still reflects that person, but with characters and themes added along the way during my evolution.

I encourage/invite anyone who happens across this little blog post to share their thoughts on this matter. This is an open, reaching out to writers and readers of the LBGT+ community, and a safe space to share.

Welcome to Ismenara.
Read an excerpt from "The Ascent of Avedis."