mask of jokes
stock image provided by Gettyimages.comI am an administrator of a fairly large art community by the name of Shadowness. http://shadowness.com
During my time there, I have met a series of interesting individuals from all over the world.
One of these individuals is a girl from Thailand by the name of Ying. She specializes in self-portraits of herself. Being especially cute, and extremely active (she must post more pieces at a much more frequent rate than any other member of the community), there isn’t a person on the community who doesn’t know what she looks like.
Yet, for a time, she insisted on trading pictures with her at the time boyfriend Jan, and having her member’s picture be that of a Caucasian male, rather than the Asian female everyone knew her to be.
Most people passed it off as a cute joke she and Jan were playing on the community, but I wondered sometimes.
I knew that Ying was bisexual, and often felt a deep resentment towards males. She hated being treated differently for her gender, and had characteristics I identified as being on the verge of lesbian seperatist.
Unfortunately, on online communities, it is often the case that the number of needy desperate guys will far outnumber the number of girls, and girls will receive unwanted, flirtatious behavior from the males. This is mainly caused by the pure outnubering of males to females on online communities (since males tend to be more computer orriented) and, while I hate to stereotype, just the nature of the males who spend time on online communities. (Generally, they don't have a very active social life outside the virtual world.)
Sometimes, I thought she really did want to be a male, and if certain actions like being with a girl were allowed by society, she would do so willingly.
She has told girls before that “if you were a boy, I would want to be with you.”
Instead, because it wasn’t acceptable, she would joke she was gay on April Fool’s Day, and be heart broken when a girl told her that she didn’t like her but liked a boy instead. One girl’s boyfriend even told me that his girlfriend was with Ying during the same time she was with him, for a period of time.
image copyright Ying
Ying would post art of her kissing a girl and pass it off as symbolic, while telling me she has feelings for the girl in the picture. Art was an excuse to get her to pose for Ying-- with Ying-- an excuse to get her to kiss Ying.
To everyone else, her self-representation was a joke. I wondered if to her, that representation of herself was an undeniable desire she wanted to express, but express without feeling consequences of how society would treat her afterwards. I wondered if they were cries from a part within her which wanted attention and recognition.
It reminded me a bit of Mishima’s Confessions of a Mask. Because of society, Ying was denying something inside herself. Her mask was her jokes. She would be confessing a part of her self, and during that whole time, the audience was left wondering “is she being serious, or is this a joke?” as the readers wonder “is Mishima being honest, or is this also a lie?” while reading Mishima’s text.
