Parker Hulick – Drag Artist.
DragStar Cabaret.
Hollywood, 2010
Ginger Liu Photography
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“”You’re Practically A Man” is a personal essay about identity. The scars are from Abdominal Myomectomy, Uterine Fibroid Embolization (unseen) and Partial Hysterectomy, and represent the efforts I went through to try and keep my womb. I lost that fight to a fibroid the size of a six-month pregnancy. The fibroid weighed down on my bladder and I was lucky to get one hour of unbroken sleep at a time. I couldn’t go out anywhere because I constantly needed the bathroom. And once a month, during my period, I would bleed non-stop for two days and lose so much blood that I was too weak to stand. Hysterectomy was the final option.
The title of the essay refers to a woman’s comment made to me after I told her about my operations and represents the consequential view from some people that women are not whole unless they have children. A male friend of mine also commented that my hysterectomy was no big deal because I am a gay woman and gay women don’t have children.”
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THE EXPAT GUIDE TO LOS ANGELES
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Ginger Liu is a British expat who has lived in Los Angeles for more than two years. Her family, on her father’s side, comes from a long line of expatriates. Her Chinese grandfather was an expatriate in the UK and later in the USA at the turn of the 20th century. Her grandmother was a British expat living in the USA and later in China. Ginger Liu’s father and aunt left China after 1946 and they too became expatriates living in the UK and USA respectively. In the 1960’s Ginger’s family became expatriates after moving to the USA for a few years. Encouraged by her father’s internationalism and her mother’s tenacity, she studied media at University in London, backpacking across the USA in her summer holidays. After her father passed away, she traveled the world and throughout China, and decided to relocate to the USA. Ginger is a freelance writer in LA. Her articles on film, TV, music, art, travel, lifestyle, and food have appeared in numerous LA based web magazines. She is an entertainment columnist for Regent Media and a blogger for Pocket Change LA. Ginger Liu is also a LA event photographer and occasionally covers Hollywood red carpet events. Her blog, LA From The Apartment the Size of My Ass, is packed with entertainment news and interviews.
I get tired of reading paternal journalism coining films about feminine stories; with women, about women, by women, as “chick flicks.” They are always dismissed as “chick flicks” as if there was anything wrong with this genre. You’d think this media despised genre was about some small section of society instead of the 51% of the population it aims to attracts.
The term “chick flick” is so ingrained in movie journalism that female journalists, including, yours truly, have coined the term whenever a particularly bad film that just happens to be about women, hits the multiplexes. Yes, I despise the genre that insists that women must find a male mate in order to be happy, or that women must go about their lives within groups of clucking women hens where each female and generation offers some sort of feminine advice to living as a straight woman in modern times. But three out of ten of these movies (if only Hollywood made this many) offer something unique about the feminine condition. As for the other seven, well, these are as bad as the testosterone and gun toting male centered movies that are made in droves. These “dick flicks,” as I like to call them, are violent stories of male egos, hot girls, guns, and explosions. These “dick flicks” start with a gun and end with a gun. As usual, these tedious “dick flicks” are never derided by male journalists and the male centric media, so women have to put up with incredibly awful “dick flicks” and the continued put downs and insults for every intelligent and real story that addresses the female condition.
“Dick flicks.” Despise them.
