no more damsel in distress

you're special
I believed those words and I was so happy...

i heard that if you give up things too easily
to a man, he will get bored with you...

a girl says that she will never be fooled again
but she will fall in love again...

don't take advantage of a girl's willingness
to do anything for love and her caring instinct...

i didn't know that to be born as a girl and
to be loved was so hard...

*lines taken from KISS' Because I'm A Girl*

coming from an all-girls school, our advocacy for "women empowerment" grew on me... i remember telling my friend about the message of the song i have just posted above... and i remember how she cringed as i was telling her how the song goes... it didn't surprised me that i've gotten that kind of reaction from my friend... after all, the message is simple, that women are easily fooled by men... or to be harsh, women are weak... at that time, i agreed with that interpretation but now, as i took a closer look at the lyrics, i realized that there's more to it than simply women being helpless...

you're special... i believe those words and i was so happy... they say we, women, are always conscious and we need compliments to assure us... whether it be with the way we look... our actions... our everything... they say we are conscious because we want to make sure that we are able to impress... i say we're not always conscious... sometimes we want to be complimented because we want to feel appreciated... that there's someone who sees something good in us... that there's someone who notices the good things that are happening in our lives... no, we don't desperately need assurance all the time... what we want is AFFIRMATION...

i heard that if you give up things too easily to a man, he will get bored with you... maybe it's true... maybe it's not always true... though i heard from a lot of people that this line is true, i don't think i can go ahead and say "yeah"... men still hold the key to this mystery, for they are the ones who know what's going on inside them... we can merely speculate... and my speculation is regardless of whether men will easily get bored once we've given things too easily or not, it will not change the fact that we've made the decision to give it to them... and most of the time, that was made because we preferred that decision over the other ... because, naive as it may sound, in the back of our minds we feel that love should not be treated as a game... that love should be genuine...


don't take advantage of a girl's willingness to do anything for love and her caring instinct... sometimes, when we are in love, we tend to be "high"... we feel as if we can do anything... overcome anything... and sometimes, we really do... i think we can blame it on the countless stories of sleeping beauties... of snow whites... of cinderellas... and of all the others who had, at one point or another in our lives, made us believe in the myth of happy ending... that if we patiently wait and care for our prince charming... and if we just nurture him and devote ourselves to him, he will sweep us off our feet and carry us to his castle where we will live happily ever after with him... such utopian perception of love but i feel that this idealistic type of perception is what makes us believe that love is pure... that it is designed to truly bring us genuine happiness...

i didn't know that to be born as a girl and to be loved was so hard... is it really hard to be loved if you're born a girl? i remembered what our professor in rspt once told us... women and men switch places during valentine's day in japan... women give chocolates and the men receive it... in parts of the world, women's clit are circumcised... some people see this action as a foreboding that women are entirely slaves to men... that women should not impart on the pleasure that men experience... but why do these things happen? because we let them determine our lives for us? i will say this... it will only be hard for us to be loved if we let it be...

a girl says that she will never be fooled again but she will fall in love again... we hate getting hurt but we love falling in love... we love feeling that somehow, we are living and breathing for someone... that we are caring and treating someone special... that we are sharing our lives with someone special... we love getting mushy and cheesy (although there are times that we hate to admit it... ;> ) and cuddly and seeing our significant other doing the same thing... that even if our past experiences were not good, we live by the belief that there is something better for us... we live by the belief that true love happens to those who believe... and that true happiness can only be felt once we've exprienced great pain... maybe some perceive it as masochism... but in truth, we only just want to love... and be loved...