the ch!cktionary

    5 Nov 2011

    Anonymous asked: In your October 22, 2011 "Ask Lena" post, you mentioned you use youtube yoga videos on the days where you aren't able to make it out to a studio. There are so many yoga videos on youtube so I hope it's not terribly rude of me to ask for some of your favorite "go-to" power yoga videos. It'd be tremendously helpful! Thanks so much in advance :)

    So, YouTube is somewhat hit-or-miss, because there are indeed many options. I LOVE Yoga Journal’s video content and find it pretty solid in terms of production quality. They’re also my go-to source for workout tips. I personally prefer to do vinyasa-style power yoga when I go to a class; at home, I do a more chill version of my regular practice. My favorite videos include:

    Energizing Yoga
    Balancing Poses
    Standing Poses
    Summer Break

    Yoga Journal also has “master classes” that prepare your body for particularly difficult poses and demonstrate how you can get into them. (I’m currently working toward Eka Pada Rajakapotasana and Visvamitrasana. I’ll definitely post a picture if I ever manage to get myself into either pose.)

    Those are just a few links, but take a look around elsewhere online, and if you find something cool, let me know! I’ve come across the weirdest stuff in my quest for free yoga. Hulu, for example, has a whole season’s worth of this semi-cheesy show called Yoga Zone, which includes episodes dedicated to more chill/beginner stuff. (Though, because it’s Hulu, there’s annoying advertising in between — not very, um, zen.) I’ve also found a 90-minute Anusara Yoga class AND this truly amazing dude named Peter Hurley who does the entire Ashtanga Yoga primary series, alongside awesome captioning with breathing instructions.

    Hope all this helps!

    More burning questions? Ask Lena.

    11 Oct 2011

    Hi folks, I’m currently up for the Best Blogger Awards at SHAPE Magazine — and the grand prize winner gets their own web show sponsored by the magazine! If you want to see a mainstream women’s website host a video series promoting positive body image and sexuality, please take a few seconds to click over and vote for The Chicktionary.

    To promote my blog’s nomination, I’ll be hosting interviews with guest experts and doing giveaways of books, sex toys, and more! Get the first scoop on my social media-specific contests by following me on Twitter, liking my page on Facebook, and signing up for my new monthly newsletter. (I’ll be announcing a giveaway for the first 100 subscribers this week.)

    For a peek at some of The Chicktionary’s greatest hits, check out the following posts on fitness, sexual health, mental health, and body image:

    On Harvard and (Un)Happiness
    Why I Won’t Shut Up About Having HPV
    What Sex Blogging & The Freshman 15 Taught Me
    The Gym-A-Phobe’s Guide To Having Your Cupcake & Eating It Too
    How I Dumped The Pill And Met The IUD
    Bad Feminist Confessions: I Just Wish I Were Thin
    The Blueprint Myth

    Voting ends October 28th and I’m currently at #3. Help me get to the top spot by sharing the link with your friends :)

    10 Oct 2011

    Anonymous asked: Let's hear about your exercise routine! Sometimes you tweet/blog about going to the gym... what type of exercises do you do? Cardio? Weights? Any tips for fellow "small Asian women" who hate exercising?

    I’m going to be honest and just admit that I feel pretty awkward about sharing my own workout regime. I don’t want to come off as prescriptive! And I also don’t believe that other people’s exercise habits are necessarily a good guide for your own. This is just what I do, not what I believe everyone else should do. I don’t think other people should take what works for me and apply it wholesale to their life. My routine might not fit your schedule, budget, or ability. Trying to make it fit anyway will not lead to a long-lasting habit, and it could just turn you off from exercise altogether.

    To illustrate, here’s an example from my own life: back in 2008, I tried to emulate Patrick’s running routine and for several months, I trained with him for a marathon I never completed. (I think my longest run was 11 miles and I gave up soon thereafter.) Part of the reason I quit was because it was super cold and I was tired of donning spandex-y long underwear day after day to run in the dead of winter against frigid New England winds. Another reason is that I’m not a very good runner, though my training definitely increased my confidence in this area. But probably the biggest reason I quit? I’ve never liked running, ESPECIALLY not long-distance running. It may be good for endurance and my cardiovascular health and etc. but even after MONTHS of daily running, it only ever became something tolerable, rather than enjoyable. If you’re asking yourself now why I ever thought I should train for a marathon … well, that’s a very good question, and I don’t really have an answer beyond, “I thought it’d be a good way to lose weight and learn how to exercise, until I realized that toes lost from frostbite don’t count as weight loss.”

    When I stopped training for the marathon, I didn’t run regularly again for over a year. I was totally sick of running, in fact, and my memories of it were not the most positive — wheezing, huffing, side aches, wind chill. It took me a while before I began to rebuild positive association with the activity. Nowadays, I’m starting to pick up a running habit again. I’ll go on weekly runs with Patrick, but I’ll peace out after five miles tops, while he goes on to do his “usual” eight-mile loop. I’ll probably never run as fast or long as he does or complete a marathon, but hey, that’s fine by me. I’d rather do semi-regular slow, short runs and enjoy them, especially if the alternative is being completely turned off by the activity because I’ve forced myself to do it despite my disinterest.

    My point is: I could tell you all about how I exercise but if you hate what I do, you’re never going to incorporate it in your own life. Maybe like me, you dislike running so you need to find something else that works. Perhaps that’s swimming or biking or dancing or a recreational sport. I know folks who participate in dodgeball or kickball leagues, not only for the exercise but also for the opportunity to meet new people (i.e. potential sexual partners). One friend of mine recently purchased a discounted voucher for an acrobatics course. Is she ever going to be able to join the circus? Not in a million years, but the unlikely skills she’s acquired in the process are enough to motivate her to keep going to class. Think about your interests and what motivates you, and focus less on the goal of losing weight and more on the goal of creating a habit that you can sustain physically, mentally, and financially for the long-run.

    ANYWAY. I know this is not an answer to your question, but I promise I *will* be answering your inquiry — as in, giving an actual rundown of my routine — as soon as I’ve got a minute tomorrow. There are a lot of fitness, sexual health, and body image-related questions in my Questions queue right now. If you’ve got others, submit them here because I’ll be blogging these subjects to death in the upcoming week!

    In the meantime, if you’ve found my writing on any of the above topics to be helpful, please head over to SHAPE Magazine to vote for TheChicktionary.com in the Best Blogger Awards. The winning blogger gets their own web series on SHAPE.com and I’m in the top 3! Polls close October 28th.

    6 Sep 2011

    So, y’all should get on this: right now, you can get a one-week pass to free classes at 1,600+ yoga studios across the country for National Yoga Month (September). Just a quick form and you get an email for a redeemable voucher :) I’ve done yoga on and off throughout the years. I tried Bikram for the first time earlier this summer, and that sort of got me addicted to the mat. Not to get all new agey on you, but my body — particularly my back and posture — has definitely changed as a result.

    Anyway, I just started on a three-month membership to Karma Yoga Studio’s South End location, where I’m doing heated Power Yoga on Tuesdays, Thursdays, & Saturdays, so I’m not sure if I’ll have time to take advantage of the one-week promo. That said, I’ve heard some AWESOME things about Back Bay Yoga, which is closer to my apartment and comes with a trusted yogi pal’s recommendation, so maybe I’ll take this as an opportunity to check them out for free!

    (And as I’ve mentioned before, yoga is not scary at all for beginners and you don’t have to be super spiritual to enjoy it. For example, I primarily see it as a workout that leaves my back feeling WAY better after a day hovering over my laptop. I’m forcing my friend Jason to come with me for his very first yoga class next week. I’ll have him report back.)

    2 May 2011

    I’m going to start off by saying that I find the so-called “founder” of Bikram yoga pretty appalling as a human being*. Back in the 70s, Bikram Choudhury invented a 90-minute series of 26 hatha yoga postures (done in a hot room), gained a celebrity cult following, and became something of a, uh, “guru”. And as this Mother Jones article indicates, he’s also an arrogant racist and bully. He says lovely things such as, “I didn’t come here without a visa, like everyone from China and Vietnam and Cuba. I came here by special plane…received by the ambassador, by the president of the United States. I should be the most honored man in your country.” Also, he once told Business 2.0, “I have balls like atom bombs, two of them, 100 megatons each. Nobody fucks with me.” Which would be kind of hilarious and awesome except “nobody fucks with me” translates to suing yoga studios for copyright violations when they refuse to register as franchises with him (and pay the requisite fees) or don’t want to follow a rigid set of postures registered as the “official” Bikram sequence.

    Some folks will surely say, “Well, didn’t the man — no matter how large an asshole he may be — make up this sequence himself? Shouldn’t he get credit for that?” but intellectual property is a modern concept and the postures used in the Bikram sequence have been communally and collaboratively developed over thousands of years in India. Bikram thought up the sequence, not the postures, and while his particular series may be a sort of innovation on his part, that innovation was only possible based off of the practice’s entire history. It’s just taken as a given in the West that yoga is commercial (like everything else here), when really, no single person can “own” a particular yoga sequence or yoga itself. Copyrighting yoga is as ludicrous as copyrighting the hokey pokey**. Besides that, Bikram yoga is prohibitively expensive as it is (trust me, I’ve been looking for affordable ways to learn it for years). Copyrighting it basically means that a non-licensed teacher  or non-franchised studio can’t teach it (for fear of being sued) and a licensed teacher/studio will likely have to charge very expensive fees (since obtaining the license involves committing thousands of dollars to training). So while the American tendency may be to think of copyrights as a good thing that protects the copyright holder, this is a very good example of how copyrights also function within free market economies to prevent people of a certain class from accessing privileges requiring capital. If Bikram yoga is truly incredible enough to justify spending bajillions to defend it in court, why in the world should people be kept from learning and practicing it cheaply to improve their fitness and health? (There is a lovely group called Open Source Yoga that successfully fought these copyrights.)

    All that said, I did just find an astonishingly cheap deal that will actually allow me to finally learn Bikram***. So while I have many reservations about feeding this douchefuck’s ego, I am also curious to see if this is indeed as “life-changing”, “addictive”, and “body-altering” as I’ve heard it is. I’m hoping that I can fix some of the physical ailments (headaches, neck pain, back discomfort, etc.) that I’ve acquired this calendar year as a result of neglecting exercise and stretching. I’m also hoping that at the end of it, I’ll have mastered the series effectively enough that I can practice it in my living room, without signing up for a membership at a studio and further funding this asshole’s quackery. (If you’re local to Boston, this is my referral link to BuyWithMe, which is where I got a 21-day unlimited class pass to Bikram Yoga Boston for $25. A single class is typically $22, which is just beyond comprehension, but pretty typical for hot yoga in the areas convenient to my neighborhood.)

    * I’ll be first to say that I do not know a ton about yoga in general or Bikram in particular, beyond the linked-to Mother Jones article and knowledge imparted by a good friend who used to work in the “industry”. I used to attend yoga classes in college but stopped after I moved off-campus because the school gym was no longer convenient and studios were way too pricey. I’m not the person to go to if you want to zen out, and if you go Eat Pray Love on me in the comments, I will probably cringe really hard, so just keep that to yourself, kay?

    ** FYI, the Hokey Pokey (song) is copyrighted and owned by Sony. The dance, as far as I know, is not.

    *** My goal is to attend at least one 90-minute session each day for 21 days (to really get my money’s worth and to also achieve maximum results). I’ll be writing and hopefully finishing my book proposal during this same three-week period. It’s all part of my summer life improvement/getting my shit together plan, which I’ll post about later.

    29 Apr 2010

    Anonymous asked: I totally look up to you, Lena. I've followed your blog for really long time and let me tell you that even though I don't know you personally, I really admire and take a lot from you experiences. You are a strong-ass womyn for doing all that you do.

    I've always had this question though. I know that you sometimes do Anatomy of an Outfit and stuff like that. How do you explain your own inclination towards what can be labeled as.. materialism? How do you incorporate your own attraction towards hair salons, brand name clothing, etc with your feminist views on beauty and capitalistic consumption?

    Great question, and not one that I necessarily have an answer to. I’ve actually wanted to address this issue for a while. Perhaps I haven’t because there’s not really a pretty way to say this: I’m not a model feminist and probably won’t ever be in this regard.

    Anonymous is referencing the Anatomy of an Outfit series in which I break down what I’m wearing any given day. I first started doing this wayyy back in the Sex and the Ivy days, and I still do it, despite railing against beauty ideals and privilege and capitalism. There are attachments I have to getting a nice haircut, wearing cute clothes, putting on makeup, etc. which will probably never go away completely. Perhaps these things will become less important over time, but the truth is that I do like looking a certain way and cultivating a personal style (whatever that means) and I’m not sure there’s anything wrong with that in itself.

    What is wrong is the importance placed on being “beautiful”, which is often a mainstream standard that most people can’t or don’t want to meet. And the consequences of not conforming can be really nasty and are never deserved. When I was 20 pounds heavier, for example, I would not hear the end of it, because 130 pounds is apparently too “fat” for a respectable sex blogger. So instead of engaging with my arguments, commenters would derail discussions by informing me that my (non-existent) cat is more attractive than me. These comments bothered me at one point in time, but I learned to not take them personally. They were just a reflection of people’s unrealistic beauty standards and particularly misogynistic expectation of thinness. Through trial-by-fire, I realized that it’s not impossible to teach yourself to care less about how you look, to unlearn all those things we are taught about self-worth and appearance, and to still try to look good without beating yourself up when you don’t.

    Recently, I found this old but still relevant blog post, where I documented my beauty regimen in 2007 versus my beauty regimen in January 2009. A lot has changed since then, and even more has changed in the past year. About 90 percent of my closet now comes from a consignment store. I no longer wear make-up on a daily basis and only bother the three or four times I go out every month. I just went three weeks without shaving my legs and wore skirts on all the warm days. These are really small changes and incremental in the grand scheme of things, but they’re highly significant to me, since these changed habits signal that I’m less self-conscious than I used to be.

    I don’t have a particular attachment to “Anatomy of an Outfit”, but I was inspired to continue the series on The Chicktionary after I started reading Jessica Schroeder’s blog What I Wore (which has become wildly famous since). Part of the reason why I really like Schroeder’s site is because nothing she puts together is particularly expensive, and she relies on a lot of the same secondhand bargain-hunting that I do to stock my closet. It’s not so much about worshipping at the altar of Dior than it is about making do with what you have. As time has gone on, I’ve used “Anatomy of an Outfit” to document some of my more ridiculous get-ups, including duct-tape pasties (NSFW) and a last-minute Halloween costume as a BDSM submissive. But who am I fooling? I can try to be as fashionably transgressive as possible, but ultimately, when I’m prancing about in size-2 designer clothes — which, even if thrifted, are not available en masse —, I shouldn’t be surprised if people call me out on the hypocrisy.

    I’m open to the possibility of not doing these kinds of posts anymore, since I’ve begun to realize that there’s a kind of responsibility when writing for a large audience that I didn’t used to feel when I was blogging for my friends and peers. Let me know in the comments what you guys think, and I will definitely consider your input when doing future posts.

    More burning questions? Ask them here.

    6 Apr 2010

    Patrick and a few of his friends are doing the Berlin marathon this fall. I’ve watched him run two marathons now, and I’m not entirely up for another round of sitting by the finish line twiddling my thumbs. I feel like I should at least try this once myself!

    In late 2008, I signed up for the Surf City marathon in San Diego but didn’t run it (and only ever got up to eleven miles). The race took place right after the holidays, and I was just generally undisciplined toward the end. I’m kind of concerned that the same thing will happen this time around with summer traveling and visits home to California, which will precede the marathon and possibly interrupt my training (which I’d basically have to begin now to be in shape by September). On the other hand, I may be living in Berlin for the month of July and it would be incredibly cool to train in the city and to replicate routes from Run, Lola, Run.

    No shame in admitting that a movie is the primary reason why I find this whole idea so appealing.

    11 Jan 2010

    Remember That Time I Learned How To Ski?

    It was epic. Language barrier aside (these were Austrian ski instructors), I was terrified of running into a tree or a small child, and fear is not your pal when you’re going full throttle downhill with fiberglass strapped to your feet.

    Thankfully, I am much better this year. I’m currently on my second day in Zermatt, Switzerland and my first day of ski school, that place where the roomie sends me when he’s had enough of my bunny slope nonsense. This time around, I have no concerns about getting stranded on a black piste and being left to die, yet I still don’t entirely understand or appreciate why people go skiing. The Alps are scenic, sure, and skiing is a fantastic work-out, no doubt, but why not go for a nice walk or an ill-fated sled ride instead? You’d get the same benefits while virtually eliminating the risk of being run into by uncoordinated petite Asian women making high-pitched noises.

    2 Sep 2009

    “I feel like I’m comping the Lena Chen Jazzercise Society.”
    — Gracye, in reference to our gym date

    21 Jul 2009

    I grill my roommate for workout tips.

    Today’s question: What’s the most effective way to burn fat if you’ve only got two weeks before you don a bikini?

    Answer: Low-intensity cardio, such as running.

    Good to know, since I usually push it and end up with an astronomical heart rate (not that “pushing it” isn’t good for you in different ways). It’s extremely convenient that my boyfriend is also my personal trainer.

    Tomorrow’s question: How can I recover my awesome ass? Are there ass exercises one should be doing?