Candice Raquel Lee's Blog

Maybe it’s because I grew up on the mean streets of Brooklyn or that I have been dodging molesters since I could walk, but I just don't understand the reaction of many women to sexual harassment. The shock and surprise surprises me.
For me, when I meet a guy I think "potential rapist," and he has to work from there to convince me that he is a human worth talking to (unfortunately, many don't). With statistics telling us that one out of six women has been raped, how can any sane women who wants to stay that way trust a man they do not know? 
Why are we shocked when a woman says a guy did something inappropriate? Yes, many men do not-- hopefully they are our family members and our friends--but strange men are strange men, and we should not give them the respect of believing they are decent human beings these days until they prove they are.
Believing a man is guilty before being innocent might save us some grief. A suit, money and power on a man may be attractive, but they do not mean he is a gentleman and may mean he feels comfortable enough with his wealth and power to do anything he would like to a woman. 
How is this a face to trust?We live in a time when men call women "hos," "bitches," and "cunts." Women's bodies are draped in ads everywhere in sexual positions to reinforce the idea that we are walking vaginas there for men's usage, not people with feelings and needs and brains. We are hardly depicted as sisters, daughters or friends.

Our whole culture tells men to be aggressive, never to take no for an answer, to go after what they want with both hands. This is the opposite of what women need to feel safe. We need men with self-control, but our culture is telling them "more, more, more," "don't stop," "'no' doesn't really mean 'no', it means you haven't tried hard enough yet."  This doesn’t just apply to women but to things like pursuing success or a promotion.
This how we imagine the beginnings of  male/female relationsMy solution? I don't know (maybe... always have a recording device on you?). My only piece of advice is never let a strange man surprise you. For me, when a man does something inappropriate I am not surprised. When I was a girl, I used to be surprised. I used to freeze. So much self-doubt crap went through my head. Can I take him? Will anyone believe me if I scream? What if he blames me? What if he says I wanted it? What if he tells people and I lose my job? Maybe I'm overeacting... Blah Blah Blah. By the time I could react he'd already groped me and left. Now, I'm not surprised. I know now that my self-respect is more important than anything because I have to sleep with me after him, and I am not going to have regrets, not going to have nightmares about him for the rest of my life, or change my hair, or gain weight, or live in fear.  That is why I always respond. I try never to get stuck like a deer in the headlights. I always move. I act in whatever way I feel is appropriate. I have an escape plan. I laugh it off, I move his hand, I say 'no'! and speak up, I scream, I lie, I punch or kick. Recently I only look him in the eye and let him know he has messed with the wrong woman. Then I rise, like Maya Angelou said we should, and leave. I suggest we all learn how to rise.
If you think this is about blaming the victim, that's in your brain and has nothing to do with what I wrote. I know we all get victimized. That is life. It’s naive to believe that we’re getting out of this world without some scars. To fall down is not avoidable, to not learn from falling down is. 

Share and help arm another woman if you agree.

Thanks again to all who voted! #Read my #interview in the #Penmenreview and the other winners too!
https://www.snhu.edu/about-us/news-an... …

Thanks to all of you who voted for my short story "The Buffalo," which won the first place prize in the Penmen Review's Fall Fiction Competition. #Read about it here http://penmenreview.com/

Hi, I'm a finalist in the Penmen Review. Please read my short story, about love and loss, "The Buffalo" and vote for it here: http://penmenreview.com/vote-snhus-20...

My story is a finalist in the Penmen Review. Please read The Buffalo and vote for it here.

Is He a little tiny infant made of butter?















Will he disappear like Tinkerbell if we don't believe in Him?







Shouldn't an all-powerful deity be that: "an all-powerful deity" able to defend Himself if He feels a need? If He doesn't punish anyone then shouldn't that be a statement that He does not care, not a message to people to kill on His behalf? The world would be a lot saner and peaceful if we trusted God to take care of Himself and protect His own ego, instead of doing what we "think" He wants us to do. If God really cared about the stuff we care about wouldn't people be dropping dead or exploding all over the streets? Instead, God lets people live even though we think they are sinning.

Why? you ask.

Maybe because He has a greater plan for them than our tiny, little, short-lived, angry brains can fathom. So, the next time you get so angry or think you hear Him urging you to rage at another human being He has not seen fit to either hurt, kill or make miserable, instead of acting out for Him, maybe realize that the only one who is angry is you.



The next time you start spewing like a rage monster about how this person or that person is offending God by doing or saying this or that and should be punished remember 1 John 4:8: 


"Beloved, let us love one another, because love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love."


And ask yourself (in any moment of hate or anger) do you really "know" God?

Share and like if you agree. 

Recently, I ran an ad for my book. It went pretty well, but I wanted to tweak it so I made a couple of others. They were approved. Finally, I thought I had a pretty good idea of what I was doing, I crafted my ultimate ad and it was rejected because one of the reviewers thought the image was inappropriate.  I looked at what was running in the ads and all I saw was half naked men in sexual positions, but because my ad had a woman who was naked but not showing anything the Indian reviewers rejected it.
Here is my cover:


Here are the covers they accepted:






Here is the example of a cover they will not accept because a breast is showing:


So, because one male Indian reviewer is evidently applying the standards of his culture to my book, it has been  targeted. I am writing this because I cannot seem to get around this guy/girl even when another person allows my ad, he comes back and rejects it again. 

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I have enjoyed reading Shakespeare since I was a child. In high school, I nerdily carried around a notebook covered in his quotes from Macbeth and volunteered to do the "To be or not to be" speech for a class.  Yet, I have never quite forgiven him for writing Othello.  From the first time I saw it, it has made a cold chill run down my spine. When I have thought of it, a nameless terror has seized me. Even when I saw it being acted out on "Cheers,"
 I could not get past the feeling of horror that gripped me even though it was supposed to be funny. I have heard many discussions about the how one is supposed to feel ambiguously about Othello, to be at once empathetic and repulsed, but I have never been captivated by his captivation with Iago or his descent to madness. I have read many scholars discussing the idea that everyone has a jealous killer in them, and it is in facing that part of us that we begin to understand and empathize with Othello.


Jealousy, the green-eyed monsterAs a woman who has suffered abuse, I can only sit with my mouth open at this tragedy.  I understand that for thousands of years men have considered women as chattel and possessions that they could dispose of as they liked. I know that there are still men today who consider their wives as chattel and property and not human beings. I consider that Othello is one of that ilk. His color does not matter to me. To me, he is like most men physically. Most men are capable of overpowering the women they marry. It is understood that most women are physically weaker than their partners. That is where trust comes in and that is what is being betrayed so thoroughly in this story and why it creeps me out so.

Every time anywhere a woman lies down with a man, she is trusting him. It is an implicit thing that is not said and that a lot of men ignore or think a ridiculous old-fashioned idea, but it is the truth.  A female must trust a male to have sex with him; whether she should is another idea all together. But when the big man lies on top of his wife in their bed and strangles her, it is done in a parody of the marriage agreement. Instead of the position giving joy and pleasure, it is mimicked to perpetuate murder. It is used to betray. Perhaps that is the idea of the duality of the bedroom and relationships between men and women. It is that betrayal of that unsaid and implicit trust that is so disturbing and makes a woman feel so vulnerable and a man feel so monstrous when seeing Othello.

I have also never quite bought the idea that Othello killed Desdemona because he was jealous. Yes, jealousy can drive men mad, and people have shot each other for cheating, but Othello had only the word of Iago that his wife was unfaithful. He believed the idea so quickly, yet his wife had hardly been out of his sight, so why believe it so soon? It had to be more than jealousy, so then what? What was the fulcrum that moved Othello. I came across an article, "'Yet That's Not Much': Age Differences in Othello" that besides discussing race and gender says one should look at age in the play too. So let us look. We have a May-December romance here. Othello is as old as his wife's father. By that time, there many comedies about May-December romances. They were seen as unseemly and ridiculous. Shakespeare discussed the idea of a young girl being married to an older suitor in Romeo and Juliet. We all know how foolish Paris was. Now, put twenty more years on him.

We have an older man with a hot young girl, but they did not have Viagra in those days. So, would Othello be having doubts about satisfying his young, frisky girl? Would he be feeling insecure about his prowess with her?  And speaking of insecure, we know he was not of high status birth that he worked himself up the ranks. He had just settled into a good social position and now has a wife fitting of it. Othello is in a good place unless you consider how humiliating it would be if his young wife cheated on him. Othello is a triple loser if she is unfaithful. He is a foolish old goat cuckold who loses face in public and is his humiliated socially by her betrayal. Maybe a man who was younger, of good family and wealthy could stand that, but someone from the streets like Othello, where one's status is so hard won, could not take this blow. He has gambled his status on this girl, and he thinks he has lost.

Now, everyone says that Iago knows Othello so well he can push all his buttons, but nobody asks how a Venetian guy could understand Othello, a Moor? They are from two totally different cultures or are they? They are both men at the bottom of the social ladder trying to climb up. Only Othello has climbed past Iago and left him in the dirt though he is a foreigner. We all know how some people hate to see anyone that is different doing better than them. They think that what that person accomplished should be theirs. Iago seems no different. Iago knows Othello because they are the same guy, both social climbers with the same ambitions and the same insecurities.

Iago's wife says that she has cheated on her husband but only because he has taught her how. Here is another similarity. Iago knows what it is to be a cuckold, who knows jealousy, and it is that knowledge that he uses against Othello. Everyone has two forces in them, the one that pulls us up and into the light, which would be embodied by Desdemona in this case, and the force that represents the worst in us or our fears that pull us down, our Iago. Othello listens to Iago because he is the personification of his inner Shadow. Othello is a play about the destiny of a man's soul caught between heaven and hell. Desdemona can forgive Othello's unforgivable betrayal because she is not a woman like Iago's wife (who cheats on him ouu of revenge) but an ideal. She is young love, innocent, sweet and unfaltering, made flesh.

It has been because of this that for may years I have found it hard not to hate Othello and to call him unworthy and less of a human being. Desdemona had to defy forces like Iago, social condemnation, her father's displeasure, racist assumptions and cultural constructs and expectations, and she surmounted them. She did into listen when she was told not to marry such an "old black goat." She rose above it all. Othello's love was never tested until Iago came along, and he fails utterly. Is this the difference between young love and old love?  Young love is unfaltering while old love is flawed and cynical and suspicious?

 Life must have taught Othello not to trust love, and this is where I can empathize with him finally. We all have our fears that love is fleeting, that we cannot hold it, that it is not true. When we fight to get something we always wonder was it worth it? Is the price I paid fair or was I cheated? Can my happiness be real? Can I deserve this?  Othello got his happiness, but he could not keep it because he could not trust it. Maybe he had a tragic life, which he implies when he speaks of himself, or perhaps he had many losses that taught him not to trust happiness. Many of us, including me, have out of fear, sabotaged our own happiness with worry and distrust. People who have had hard lives don't trust joy. They know it is fleeting, and sometimes they destroy it only because they believe it will not last. Perhaps there is the idea that if we destroy it, then at least we control its destruction, at least it is not taken from us. We will get rid of our happiness ourselves and  pretend we have control.

Othello is an Icarus who tears apart his own wings because he believes he will fall anyway.  He listens to Iago, because as a mature man he knows that happiness does not always last. Once again we come back to the idea of trust and faith. It is his lack of it that destroys him in the end as it destroys many of us.

I have hated Othello, feared him, seen him as the worst of men, but in reality he is just like all of us: afraid of our own happiness and willing to self-sabotage to make our own sad worldview true. Othello is not a Moor or a black man; he is not an old man or a young man or any man of any type. He is just us all at our darkest and saddest, when we have lost faith in hope, trust and goodness, and that is the real tragedy of the play.