From germanheit, a handy Tumblr teaching German:
Pain. Sucks. And yep, sometimes it’s so bad you cannot shut up. Here’s what you’d say when you get hurt:
1. Au!
2. Aua!
3. Autsch! (pronounced just like the English “ouch”)
Of course you can curse, too ;)
To English ears, it sounds like “Owwa!” Now imagine a grown man saying that. Adorable, right?
And this concludes Embarrassing My Boyfriend Day. We will now return to our regularly schedule program (of feminist stuff, yayyy).
Convincing my German boyfriend (who speaks perfect English) to say in an accent “I am a nihilist. I believe in nothing.”
playoninfiniterepeat asked: It's only now that I read your Valentine's Grinch post and I'd just felt the need to tell you how much I loved that entry. As far as I can remember, I never liked Valentine's day as well... I find it just as pointless as celebrating your first month of being a couple (a year I understand but a month?). I don't like the idea of people putting so much effort into this day when basically it was just Hallmark who made up this holiday, then there's the traffic, overpriced flowers, gifts and overcrowded malls but most importantly because of what you just said. You articulated it brilliantly. :)
Keep it up, Lena! I've been reading your entries since Sex and the Ivy and I just love how you continue to grow relationship wise and as a person. Gooad luck on your upcoming event. :)
I’m glad you liked the entry I posted on Valentine’s Day. To be honest, when I wrote it, I was sort of concerned that people would take it the wrong way. Because our society does place an enormous amount of emphasis on romantic success and to say “Actually, you’re not such a special little snowflake for having found the One” can totally be construed as a slap to the face of those who are coupled. I know firsthand that it’s awesome to have someone in your life who gets you, supports you, and hangs out with you for hours on end even though you haven’t showered in days and probably smell bad. But I don’t think that my identity hinges on having a boyfriend or having this particular boyfriend, and I don’t think my life is inherently better because I’m in a relationship. That really depends on whether I’m in a good, compatible relationship, but more importantly, it depends on whether I even want to be in a relationship in the first place. That’s why I think it’s the completely wrong idea to encourage this narrow-minded, find-a-mate-at-all-costs view toward romance.
I’ve been told that I take this whole issue wayyyy too seriously. Don’t we live in an age where it’s perfectly acceptable to not marry, after all? Well, yes and no. On one hand, you’re not going to get ostracized by your community if you don’t couple up. On the other, we still live in a world where your parents get concerned for you when you’re “getting to that age” and not yet married. And I do find the institution of marriage problematic because we elevate romantic love above all other forms of relationship — to the point where this is the one relationship that we feel the need to validate via legal and social recognition. When you legally bind yourself to another individual, your friends buy you gifts. They congratulate and celebrate you for finding a life partner, and if they don’t, it’s perceived as a huge faux pas. We don’t treat any other interpersonal relationships that way. I didn’t start a registry when I met my best friends! (There’s an entire social movement built around “marriage equality”, which is something else I take issue with, but I’ve written about that extensively before.)
Love, in other words, is constructed to be “special”, and one of the primary reasons for this is that your significant other is supposed to complete you. We hear this all the time with the “other half” analogy. You’re not just domestic partners, but soulmates who are complementary in a made-for-each-other kind of way. And not only is that an unhealthy way of looking at love (because really, can any single person make or break your entire existence?), but it also suggests that those opt out of coupledom are somehow missing out. And really, I’m pretty ambivalent about anniversaries too. Because what does mine say? That we’re amazing for having been together three years? Sure, it’s great to have spent that much time with Patrick, but that’s only because our relationship has continued to be fulfilling for the both of us. The compulsion to celebrate anniversaries (which I’m admittedly susceptible to) suggest that you’ve accomplished something by reaching another month or year or decade, that relationships should aim for the goal of lasting forever. It makes people afraid to end relationships that are no longer healthy for them, and it makes those who are single feel as if they’re inadequate because they haven’t accomplished this seemingly crucial part of life.
In reality, some people are in relationships that aren’t satisfying, and a lot of folks (my now-divorced parents, for example) can’t get out of unhappy relationships for financial reasons. Or they don’t even try to fall in love at all because it’s simply not a priority for them in the same way as food and shelter. The fact that I can even choose my partner or end my relationship at will is itself a luxury. Love is, perhaps, one of the biggest luxuries of living as an educated person in developed country, but in our endless pursuit of it, we often forget the fact that love is just the icing on a heaping wedding cake of privilege. In the end, an anniversary is not a milestone or a badge or proof of eternal love. It’s a fun excuse to get dressed up or to go out or in my case, to book a last-minute dinner reservation at 10pm and come home to a Lady Gaga music video marathon. (There are a lot of things my cold-hearted German won’t do for me. Lady Gaga is one of my unsavory habits that he tolerates.) I try to be realistic about my relationship and what I expect of my partner, and as unromantic as it might sound to say that nothing lasts forever (nor should it), I think that my lack of insistence on a forever is why we’re still together and still happy after all this time.
More thoughts or feedback? Submit them here or leave a comment!
I’m so down on the holiday. I know, I know — I’m such a party pooper. And I even have a boyfriend. God, what’s wrong with me, right? To be honest, I, like many others, have always wanted to rope someone into loving me, but now that I have succeeded in doing so, I don’t particularly feel the need to be smug about it. Plus, I remember what it was like when I was single and it was 1) admittedly awesomely fun sometimes, and 2) occasionally soul-crushing. If you’re single with experiences falling into either of those categories, you don’t need some coupled-up blogger to tell you that her partnered existence is sooooo superior to yours. And if you, too, possess a dudefriend of your very own, well, you probably like him for a host of reasons unrelated to flowers, candy, or greeting cards. (Patrick, incidentally, has never bought flowers for me or the apartment! The floral arrangements are one of my domestic duties.)
I’m also guessing that right about now, there are thousands of straight chicks across America holding their breaths because tonight might be the night that he finally says he loves you or *gasp* might even pop the question. Ladies, all I have to say is that if there is uncertainty surrounding these two possibilities, it says a whoooole lot about communication (or the lack thereof) in your relationship. And also, gender roles! The fact that Valentine’s Day is considered a “women’s holiday” says it all. Because all women enjoy gratuitous displays of affection, uh-huh, and no woman in history ever had issues with expressing her emotions. That’s a male-specific problem, didn’t ya know?
Does this seem like a totally unprovoked rant? Let me explain. You’d be surprised at the number of people I’ve encountered in my personal life who truly think that the only folks worthy of their time and acknowledgment are those who have also discovered the Holy Grail of Eternal Couplehood. (And P.S. cohabitation, like in my case, does not qualify as Serious Enough.) The past year has made me dislike the marriage institution and the romance industry more than ever, because there’s so much pressure for folks to find love that they’re systematically excluded when they don’t opt in. I’ve also come to realize that even those professing to be socially liberal and tolerant are nonetheless susceptible to extremely close-minded ideas about love. Reality check: you’re not better because you’re coupled/married/sofuckinginloveomg. And single people don’t need you to pity them for not being able to land a man. Maybe they don’t want a man! Maybe they prefer solitude … or women … or cats. I’m guessing that your “sad, lonely catlady” friend doesn’t get into screaming matches with her feline companions, but you probably do with your human one. So who has the better life now, bitch?!
Okay, whew, I’m calm. I just can’t deal with how easily people are indoctrinated into believing that there’s only one straight and narrow way to live and love, and days like Valentine’s really provoke my seldom-expressed rage. For the most part, I like it when two (or three or four or whatever number of) people make each other happy. What I loathe is how romantic relationships are prioritized above all other forms of interpersonal relationships in our society and how there are all these rules for how you’re supposed to express your love. And these beliefs are so prevalent that if a person (especially a woman) has accomplished all kinds of things but has failed to find a mate for life (because relationships are for life, no matter how incompatible you are!), then they have not yet reached their potential as a human being. If this all sounds nonsensical to you, then GOOD! Maybe you’ve escaped the brain-washing. But if you find yourself feeling defensive after reading the above, I would ask myself some hard questions about why.
SO. Go forth and feast, fuck, and frolic. Just try to not be a smug little brat about it.
A brief update on one of my 2011 career goals: I resolved to publish one personal essay each month and to break into new publications. Here’s a piece about my trials and tribulations in love and blogging, published in the February 2011 issue of Underwired, a women’s magazine based in Louisville, Kentucky . I’ve written before about my disillusionment with dating in the aftermath of multiple romantic catastrophes, which I attributed to the scrutiny I received because of my blog. And then I met Patrick, who’s stood by me through some of the worst harassment I’d dealt with to date. In Underwired, I explore the mindset I was in when we met (along with my decision to not write about our relationship). You can read the piece in full by clicking below for the hi-res image:
Hopefully, I’ll soon have more positive updates on the resolution front! (Since I wrote this a few weeks ago, can we count the piece toward my January quota? I’ll have another one coming for February but it won’t be in print until mid-month.)
Cover Artist: Vana Chupp
Special to Underwired Magazine February 2011
Anonymous asked: Hey Lena,
I wanted to leave you a comment on your post "Enough, now. Here's the truth" but didn't want to put my e-mail address, so...here it is:
Lena...this is one of the most powerful posts I've ever read. Keep on fighting - as many trolls as there are out there, there are far more people who appreciate you and what you write every single day. Your blogs are definitely worth it to so many people, academically, emotionally, and otherwise. I think I speak for a lot of us when I say that I'm glad you continue to write what you think, as horrible as human beings can be...thanks, and please keep writing.
Thank you for the note! I really appreciate the support. You know, so many shitty things have happened as a result of this blog that I figure at some point, there will be nothing that any Internet stalker can try anymore short of coming into my house and stabbing me. (In which case, I have much bigger problems than just a website they don’t like.) To some of those who have contacted me about being harassed, I seem remarkably level-headed about the situation. Truth is, I’ve just had a lot of practice at managing crises. After the fact, I try to forget that the said crisis ever happened. Which is why, though I do mention it as a cautionary tale, I have little to no interest in revisiting the witchhunt that ensued when Patrick was outed. I haven’t actually reread that entry in over a year, until I recently linked to it, and when I did read it again, I was surprised by how optimistic and not bitter and together I seemed. In reality, the stuff I was dealing with at the time was too much for any 20-year-old to handle. I’m not surprised that I didn’t finish school that semester or that I never moved back into Harvard housing.
Recently, when I was rereading my old blog over New Year’s, I wrote about forgetting trauma as a defense mechanism:
The strange truth is that after I met Patrick, left school, and moved to Boston, I forgot a lot of what happened. Quite literally. I have worked on enough book proposals in the time since to realize that there are some serious gaps in my memory for which there are no explanations.
The entry the above poster mentions is a perfect illustration. Until I read it, I couldn’t recall most of the events it referenced. It’d be one thing if I could isolate and shut out a particular memory, but in practice, I end up discarding an entire chunk of time, during which some good things happened too. When I was dealing with the scandal surrounding my relationship, I was constantly stressed about Patrick’s reputation and whether people would believe the rumors, but at the same time, I was also completely falling head over heels and doing fun, new things with this great guy. It’s sad that the latter had to be polluted by the former. That’s why I didn’t fully let myself feel happy or secure with Patrick for a long time. I’ve always considered it unfair that instead of a honeymoon period, I had to deal with all these obstacles other couples didn’t have. But really, who cares? Other people have other problems, and we’re still together, which is what counts. When I forget the good along with the bad, I risk losing touch with the stuff that makes my writing worth it, the stuff that reminds me how resilient my relationship is.
So, that was a huge preamble, when all I wanted to share was this sappy, forgotten anecdote from that tumultuous period:
Two weeks ago, Bluehost shut down Sex and the Ivy because my scripts were running inefficiently (whatever that means). Patrick twiddled on my control panel, upgraded my Wordpress, called customer service for me, and convinced them to put it back up again. The guy whose reputation I’m ruining helped me fix the website that’s made him infamous by association. Think about that for a second…
I told him in the very beginning that I didn’t want to make his life complicated. I tried to explain about my blog, about the drama that had already ensued. He didn’t believe that it could get so bad. “What are you,” he teased. “Like E-list celebrity?” I laughed. I agreed it was ludicrous. But I’d been in the game long enough to know that people fixate on the most asinine things. I prepared him for the worst case scenario, but no amount of preparation could ready someone for the type of fallout that occurred here. If he left, it would be easy for me to be sad or bitter and to blame my blog for ruining my life. But he hasn’t left and if he does, it won’t be because of this. And so I find myself with an odd kind of burden. I can’t simply be sad or bitter. I have to do everything I can to make things as right as possible. Because caring about me is far harder than it should be, and yet still, he makes me soy lattes in the morning.
Even if we break up down the line, I hope I always remember that there are people who are willing to stand by you no matter how bad it gets — for you or for them. I used to think that this was a storm I had to weather by myself, but friends and romantic partners and yes, even readers, aren’t just there for the good times, they’re there for the total shitstorms that you can’t even predict. I used to think, because of my laughably disastrous love life, that guys couldn’t be counted on the same way you could count on my freshman year roommates. Nowadays, Patrick is a big part of the reason why I get up every morning unafraid to write something disruptive. And that doesn’t mean I can’t do it on my own or that I’m dependent on some dude’s affirmation. After all, I started blogging way before we met, and I handled more than one harassment campaign on my own. But since we’ve been together, I feel stronger, because I know I have his support, and I don’t think there’s any shameful or anything anti-feminist about admitting that. People ask me if we don’t believe in marriage or “I love you’s” how it is that I know Patrick cares. He’s still here, isn’t he? After all this. That’s how I know.
(FYI, if you do want to comment on this blog, you can still do so with a guest account and fake email address. Again, there’s a risk of being identified if you don’t use a pseudonym, so I wouldn’t recommend using your real name.)
Have a thought or question to share? Submit it to Lena here.
Anonymous asked: So tell us about your interest in the German language. Did you gain an interest in the German language after being introduced to Karl Marx and his writings, along with writings of other writers of Germany?
To be honest, no amount of curiosity about German philosophy would’ve been enough for me to learn the language if I weren’t dating someone of German descent. Though it would be nice for me to one day tackle the original text of Das Kapital, my primary motivation for learning German (which is an on-going struggle) is to be able to communicate with Patrick’s friends and family. A nice side benefit is that I get to use this knowledge when I travel in German-speaking countries. But don’t get me wrong — I’m nowhere close to fluent! I have a year of intensive college-level German under my belt and some months abroad, but am always looking for ways to make language acquisition a little less painful process.
More burning questions? Ask Lena Chen.
A lot of people assume that a couple consisting of a German and a sex blogger must surely engage in plenty of Kinky Fun Times, right? The truth is much more boring than the perception.
If a debate is started in our apartment, it will be finished, so all the more reason to not start it in the first place when there’s work (in the most liberal sense of the word) to be done. Tonight, we got to discussing Jessica Valenti’s piece on why she’s not participating in tomorrow’s More Magazine panel about young feminism. I’ll be there, as planned, but Jessica is opting out because she does not wish to legitimate a conservative panelist’s claim to “feminism”. The conversation about her blog post somehow devolved (or evolved, depending on the point of view) into a two-hour debate about whether ideological labels serve any purpose or whether there is such a thing as the feminist movement and if one actually exists, whether women constitute a useful analytic category. Also, we conducted an exegesis of Catharine MacKinnon’s Toward A Feminist Theory of the State, which I originally thought was a good summation of all the running arguments we’ve had over the course of the past two years. (FYI, I was wrong and I now think the book is kind of a cop-out, but I can still see the purpose of MacKinnon’s attempt to reconcile Marxism and feminism.) And then we talked about what actually constitutes activism and whether activism — in its current incarnation in the democratic, capitalist system — is an effective political method. Simone de Beauvoir, for example, was not an activist, and yet she is indisputably one of the greatest contributors to feminism, is she not? This point, like many others, was abandoned as a tangent to a bigger debate about whether the feminist movement is one worth fighting for. And that bigger debate, of course, has been unresolved and going on between us for years. Two steps forward, one step back, every time.
While I would not quite characterize the first year of our relationship as a “reeducation” per se, dating, living, and talking with Patrick is certainly responsible for elevating my feminist views from the self-centered personal to the universal political. We didn’t know anything about the other’s political philosophies when we met. I could barely articulate my own. I knew intuitively that my experiences with sexual double standards and slut-shaming were not unique, that they represented a widespread problem confronted by many women and queer people, yet it wasn’t until I started dating Patrick that I really thought about the roots of sexual repression and oppression.
That first year, the German and I argued endlessly about education, marriage, pornography, sex work, welfare, the American Dream, employment, and democracy. He has a few years and a Master’s degree on me, so I scoured the shelves at Strand for classic feminist texts, reread my coursepack from Introduction to Studies Of Women, Gender, & Sexuality Studies, and tried to reconcile the often opaque theory of academia with the imperfect practice of activism. I came to a conclusion — not entirely, independently — that the root cause of the silencing and stifling felt by women like me isn’t a vague and shadowy bogeyman who goes by the name of “Patriarchy”. “Patriarchal” is just a description, nothing more than an adjective; it’s not an explanation in and of itself. I had to concede that gender-based oppression is, in fact, just another expression of the consequences to a market economy that does not recognize sex differences, such as a woman’s biological inability to participate in the labor market when pregnant or after childbirth. Equal treatment, in other words, does not lend itself to equal ends. To me, this dilemma represented the continued need for feminism — perhaps a feminism that is awakened to its anti-capitalistic roots — but to Patrick, this demonstrated the movement’s futility and failure.
Our first year together was the same year I spent on academic leave from Harvard, and I maintain — even after my insane senior year schedule of intensive German classes and thesis writing — that the time I spent falling in love contributed more toward my intellectual and ideological development than all of college up to that point. I don’t know if this says more about my relationship or higher education.
I'm Lena Chen, a writer and media producer who's been called a "skank" (by Bill O'Reilly) and "a small Asian woman" (by The New York Times). My favorite part of my workday is the hate mail.
I got started blogging as an undergrad at Harvard, where I started the infamous Sex and the Ivy blog. My life and my Google results haven't been the same since. Nowadays, you can catch me online talking all things sex-related on Sex Really With Lena Chen, a webcast for Bedsider.org, and Sexy Times, a web series debuting in January 2012 on gURL.com. I have mixed feelings toward the portmanteau "sexpert".
