diabola in musica

because perfection isn't easy

President Obama spoke at the Asian Pacific American Institute for Congressional Studies Annual last Tuesday and explicitly mentioned how important it is to recognize the diversity within Asia America to honor its peoples and to better target policy for each demographic.

And I know it can be tempting — given the success that’s on display here tonight — for people to buy into the myth of the “model minority” and glance over the challenges that this community still faces.  But we have to remember there’s still educational disparities like higher dropout rates in certain groups, lower college enrollment rates in others.  There’s still economic disparities like higher rates of poverty and obstacles to employment.  There are health disparities like higher rates of diabetes and cancer and Hepatitis B.  Those who are new to America — many still face language barriers.

I am still processing the speech. I was in tears when I heard him understand that Asia America is diverse and that each experience is valid. I can’t explain how much it means to me that there is someone not Asian American who understands this, that there is one person for whom no explanation is needed.

I also can’t explain how much it means to me to have that person be the President of the United States of America.

Nigerian Author And Artist Teju Cole Comments on #firstworldproblems »

At The Dish, a reader reflects on the first gay first kiss:

Dan Savage wrote: “The growing civil equality of gays and lesbians—from marriage equality in Canada and New York to the end of DADT in the USA—is revealing a lot of things.” Among them, just how non-existent a threat it all was, he says. And I think in retrospect that THIS is what the right was most afraid of.  Not that society as they knew if would crumble, or that God would damn everyone. But that things wouldn’t change at all. That their story about hellfire and damnation would be revealed for what it was: pure fiction.  And that in large measure, their authority (moral or otherwise) would be diminished.

And it is.

Exploratory Study Finds Over Half Of Self-Reported Multi-Person Sex Experiences Among Adolescent Women To Be Coerced »
While doing my daily roaming on Tumblr, I came across this picture. My first thought about this picture was that it looked amazing. While scrolling through the notes, the first few comments I read were about this picture was about how “make up does this to people” or “this is basically how every girl looks like”. Seriously? Has the society and the culture blinded you so much that you’d make a bias comment make up differences? I don’t understand how people can be so shallow that they can’t see the beauty from both sides of the face. Supposedly, because she wears make up, she’s ugly. Or because she doesn’t wear make up, she’s ugly. This world views such things in a black and white perspective. I say both sides of the face is gorgeous. Focusing on the left side, her make up radiates her beauty. In other words, it’s complimenting her facial features. Her skin gives off a warm glowing tone, her brows and lips are full, and her eye make up brings out her blue grey eyes. Focusing on the right side, everything is natural. There is no shame in the uneven skin tone. There is no shame in the bags and lines under her eyes. There is no shame in in her unfilled brows and her natural lip color. The beauty about this is that they are not flaws. We are brainwashed by the media and the culture about how to define beauty that we overlook what beauty really is. If you compared the two sides and said one side looked better than the other side, then I feel sorry for you. You truly don’t understand what makes both sides beautiful. NB: Both photo and commentary have been circulating around the Internet without obvious accreditation, which saddens me because I want to know the person who wrote such a brilliant piece and it is a pain to sieve through notes to find an original post. I’m sure that ze isn’t the first to comment on this aspect of beauty norms nor would ze be the last, but when a thought generates over 47,000 responses, its author deserves, at least, an easily found link, especially when people are asking who it is. So who is it? Everyone, meet Allison. Zoom

While doing my daily roaming on Tumblr, I came across this picture. My first thought about this picture was that it looked amazing. While scrolling through the notes, the first few comments I read were about this picture was about how “make up does this to people” or “this is basically how every girl looks like”. Seriously? Has the society and the culture blinded you so much that you’d make a bias comment make up differences? I don’t understand how people can be so shallow that they can’t see the beauty from both sides of the face. Supposedly, because she wears make up, she’s ugly. Or because she doesn’t wear make up, she’s ugly. This world views such things in a black and white perspective. I say both sides of the face is gorgeous. Focusing on the left side, her make up radiates her beauty. In other words, it’s complimenting her facial features. Her skin gives off a warm glowing tone, her brows and lips are full, and her eye make up brings out her blue grey eyes. Focusing on the right side, everything is natural. There is no shame in the uneven skin tone. There is no shame in the bags and lines under her eyes. There is no shame in in her unfilled brows and her natural lip color. The beauty about this is that they are not flaws. We are brainwashed by the media and the culture about how to define beauty that we overlook what beauty really is. If you compared the two sides and said one side looked better than the other side, then I feel sorry for you. You truly don’t understand what makes both sides beautiful.

NB: Both photo and commentary have been circulating around the Internet without obvious accreditation, which saddens me because I want to know the person who wrote such a brilliant piece and it is a pain to sieve through notes to find an original post. I’m sure that ze isn’t the first to comment on this aspect of beauty norms nor would ze be the last, but when a thought generates over 47,000 responses, its author deserves, at least, an easily found link, especially when people are asking who it is.

So who is it? Everyone, meet Allison.

There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own — nobody.

You built a factory out there? Good for you. But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police-forces and fire-forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn’t have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory — and hire someone to protect against this — because of the work the rest of us did.

Now look, you built a factory and it turned into something terrific, or a great idea. God bless — keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.

As much as we would like to believe that the [BDSM] scene is a problem-free sexual utopia, it still suffers from many of the problems that mainstream society does. Straight male sexuality is prioritized, and thus straight male doms are the prevailing players in the scene. Straight male doms have no use for male subs, yet they still like female doms—they like us because we bring a certain energy to the scene and are fun to talk to and be around and because they hope that maybe we’ll co-top their girls with them and that they might be able to get into our pants.

So my sexuality is something that people in the scene can appreciate and sort of see the value in from afar. But the object of that sexuality is not accepted in the scene. While male subs are not seen as potential objects of desire, female doms are seen only as objects of desire.

[…]

These het-male-doms who make up the mainstream of the subculture that we inhabit? I think they like me and respect me and think I’m hot, but I don’t know if they think my sexuality is valid.

[…]

There is a lot of male submissive-shaming in the public scene. You’ll hear it all the time. “Male subs are creepy,” “male subs spoil the atmosphere, so we don’t want to encourage them.” And while I have indeed encountered many male submissives who have acted in inappropriate ways, I have one question to ask: why do you suppose that male subs like maymay who do respect boundaries don’t feel welcome in the scene? It’s not because they are making male submission look bad, it’s because you are equating male submission with badness.