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[Welcome To Riot Grrrl Online] Herstory This part of the site is dedicated to all of the riot grrrls and riot boys out there. This is the part of the site where you can send me your rants, stories, poetry, etc. & they will be posted on this part of the site. Please try to keep it about riot grrrl/riot boy/feminism ONLY. To send something in go to the submit page. Krome Sun's Herstory My parents raised me genderless. They gave me a sense of honor, a passion for justice, and a dissident spirit, and as such I grew up in a household where my appearance and my girlness were never an issue. I have a vagina. So? This treatment heavily fortified my adolescence, but it had it’s consequences as well. When I inevitably joined up with the activist community and had a look around, I found the feminists annoying. I thought they were splitting the community down the center, branding my mostly male friends with the big S, ranting and accusing at inappropriate times. I thought they wanted attention. I thought – forgive me – I thought they were making it up. Don’t get me wrong, I still dealt with all the shit that most women deal with. I didn’t understand why I couldn’t walk three blocks without being yelled at, honked at, or hit on. I didn’t understand it when my male friends, once I’d turned down their advances, disappeared. Most of all, I didn’t get why attempts to retaliate, argue, or defend myself were met with such indignation. “We’re free to consume you,” was a message I didn’t appreciate. Fast-forward five years, and I’m leaving the United States to study martial arts in China and SE Asia for a while. The Northern China Shaolin Martial Arts Academy is located in the rural countryside of Jilin Province, is run by a sort of Chinese Mafioso, and has a student population that is roughly 95% male. If ever you need a reminder, another kick in the ass, a little inspiration to fight the good fight, live in a building with 60 men that don’t even pretend to be enlightened. If you’ve never been to Asia, there are some things you should understand. Feminism, as we know it, is a joke there. As in, Ha Ha Ha, where’s my beer? The women are uniformly tiny and unbelievably oppressed, and as a 5’10” kickboxer, I tower over, and am louder than, every one of them. I’m tall and athletic at home. I’m a sasquatch in the Orient. You haven’t lived until you’ve been laughed out of a clothing store, the hairless pocket-sized shop girls giggling, “You’re too big to buy anything here.” But that was the easiest bit of it. Back at the academy, like usual, I was one of the guys. I goaded them on in their sexual misadventures, fucking and leaving local girls, chasing tail for the sake of possessing a warm body, rating and judging and mentally undressing the other 3 women at the school. After a while, though, I became uncharacteristically uncomfortable with some of the things I was noticing. I was being subjected to and overhearing comments that sent me into fits of fury. The bawdiness, for the first time ever, was pissing me off. It was beginning to sound like… like… well, like sexism. When a new girl showed up, the boys would bet on who would fuck her first. They talked about them, about the brilliant women who gave me the support I needed to stay there as long as I did, like they were merchandise. Produce. Too plump here, too red there, too flat. My ‘friends’, drunk on cheap Chinese beer, derisively informed me that my tits had gotten smaller since I’d arrived. Not that I’d gotten better at fighting. Not that I’d accomplished anything, or that they respected my dedication. No, my tits had gotten smaller, and consequently so had their regard for me. My master included my gender on a list of debilitating physical injuries that impared some of our group members from training. “You’ve been training hard despite your setbacks,” he said. “Simon has a broken toe. James has pain in his knees. And Krome is a woman.” “You’d be pretty if you were smaller,” told me another instructor during class one day. I think the kicker was when, sitting out on the balcony one day, Danny sat down for a chat. He asked why I’d stopped shaving my legs. “What’s the point?” I said. He sat back in his chair and said something I realized in retrospect I should have smacked him for, and something that I won’t soon forget: “I prefer Asian women. They just… how can I put this without pissing you off?... they don’t try to be something they’re not. The girls in the west, they yell ‘girl power’, but they still need men. They’re not as independent as they think they are. The Asian girls don’t pretend. The Asian girls know their place.” “There’s no way you can put that without pissing me off,” I conceded, and talking to Danny after that became a waste of my time. A lot of things after that became a waste of my time. So here I am. I’ve been out of the country so long, I haven’t yet found any feminists to talk to and commiserate with, but I will. And when I do, we’re going to light fires and beacons everywhere we set down. Thank you all for being there, for listening, and for being courageous. This site is gearing up to be cool. I want in!