About
this is my champagne and candy, the pieces of me that don't fit anywhere else, and the clips of things that I want to remember for later. my stream of consciousness, my loves and inspirations.
"you always know what she thinks, but she does all her feeling alone." -zelda fitzgerald
art by Ryan Kelly
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"When a deeply moving song gets sold for an ad, it’s like finding out that the cute girl you’ve been having long, philosophical conversations with at the coffeehouse spends her weekends turning tricks."
—
um, fuck you, slate! though i can’t decide exactly how i feel about this analogy, because on the one hand, it’s fucking gross to be like “ew i don’t want to have philosophical conversations with a whore” with the added implication that who would expect a sex worker to be smart enough to converse with such a genius a writer for SLATE? on the other hand, i ALSO think that the issue of selling out is kind of bullshit because hey, guess what: your favorite bands don’t owe you shit! so i guess the analogy does fit, for me personally. but still. EW.
ETA: also, jumping on the black-eyed peas for selling out? 1) THEY ARE POP NOW, GET OVER IT 2) SNL already did this, like 4 years ago, except way funnier (“let’s get bar mitzvah’d in ha! let’s get bar mitzvah’d in here!”)
(via isabelthespy)
yeah. A. sex workers are quite often smarter and tougher than you, douchebag journalist and B. this society doesn’t support art and artists and so we’ve created a situation in which they MUST sell their art to the highest bidder in order to survive, and then we bitch at them for selling out? shit.
I need to write a music-as-labor addendum to my art-as-labor to talk about this whole fucking phenomenon in which we shame artists for trying to make a fucking living. but first: sports.
"Mass education was designed to turn independent farmers into docile, passive tools of production. That was its primary purpose. And don’t think people didn’t know it. They knew it and they fought against it. There was a lot of resistance to mass education for exactly that reason. It was also understood by the elites. Emerson once said something about how we’re educating them to keep them from our throats. If you don’t educate them, what we call “education,” they’re going to take control — “they” being what Alexander Hamilton called the “great beast,” namely the people. The anti-democratic thrust of opinion in what are called democratic societies is really ferocious. And for good reason. Because the freer the society gets, the more dangerous the great beast becomes and the more you have to be careful to cage it somehow."
—
Noam Chomsky (via pcquotes)
yes yes yes yes. which is why we need lots of different, diverse, brilliant teachers and schools and and and.
perfect.
KEIRA. The collarbones. The eye makeup. The unbelievable pretty. (And for bonus points, the more-feminist-than-not oeuvre.)
Yep, I’m Team Keira.
Bang Bang! you’re dead. Greg Williams, photog.
i love you, robert downey junior.
Reblogged for Jack Scoresby.
Reblogged for HOT.
"Of course, the political blogosphere is pugnacious. It’s ugly, and it’s relentless, and it’s full of spiteful misogynists, rampant rape-apologists, slut-shamers, and bitter men in lonely bedrooms across the world whose idea of a great night in is to shame, decry and otherwise tear apart the very personhood of remote, virtual women who they’re never likely to meet. Nearly every female blogger I know has at some point spoken to me, half-amused, about her ‘stalkers’, and the strange and cruel things they’ve emailed to say they want to do to them. There is a reason that women bloggers moderate their comments, a reason why the majority of female World of Warcraft players choose male avatars, a a reason why we often feel unsafe in spaces where, as liberals or as conservatives or music fans or uploaders of inane vlogs about our cats, we should not have to expect hostility. But when that hostility occurs, as it has for women since the internet began, most of us are big enough and tough enough to handle it, and handle it we do, quietly, exhaustively, relentlessly, fending off the misogynist attacks that any woman with ambitions to raise her voice above a whisper learns to handle. I have been called a cunt, a cow, a whore, a stupid little girl, I’ve been told that I deserve to be raped and beaten, I’ve been told I need to be taken in hand by a man who will fill me up with the babies that are the only thing my body and brain are good for, and I’m still here, I’m still writing, arguing and debating, and they haven’t managed to shut me up yet."
—
Women, political blogging and the future of the left (via azspot)
i agree that this happens. i disagree that it is reasonable to expect that any women with even a modicum of ambition should be “big enough and tough enough to handle” the misogynist attacks that will be directed at them. handling this takes a toll - a slow and gradual erosion of faith in the goodness of humanity, in belief in the ability of people to engage in deliberate and thoughtful debate, in willingness to display any vulnerability or hesitation. this takes unimaginable mental effort and energy to withstand. and i say this as someone who received my first mailed package from a stalker who managed to hunt down my physical address over 15 years ago (to deliver me a teddy bear and a copy of the fountainhead, natch).
i’m still here. they haven’t managed to shut me up yet. but lord, i am so tired.
(via abbyjean)
this is a good point, one I didn’t really think about when I first saw this to reblog: please do NOT tell any of us how much shit we should take, right? or that we’re not “tough enough” if we sometimes want to break down and cry or scream because our opinion-that-is-the-same-as-our-male-coblogger gets picked at and poked at in ways that his never does, or when everyone cites some dude’s fucking brilliance for saying shit you said months ago.
Because honestly? that shit hurts me more than getting called a cunt. Whatever dude, I can say foulmouthed shit too, and I call politicians and other people pretty rotten things every day, multiple times.
But when you’re treated like the only thing you’re allowed to have an opinion about is ladybusiness*, and that ladybusiness will never be acknowledged, commented upon, or linked to, THAT shit is what gets me quite tired.
And makes me call more people cocksuckers.
*thanks, Sady.
anecdote time! so once someone knocked on my door instead of my next door neighbor’s and i went to the peephole to see who it was and it was a tall black guy and he had on a black leather jacket and diesel jeans and black biker boots and a black helmet and they hugged him just the right places and i think i either told him he had the wrong door or just passed out i honestly can’t remember
wow hi hello hot nice motorcycle I mean boots I mean…
"
So, what the fuck, Hollywood? Women watch movies too — and not all of us are excited for the next Sex and the City movie. Some of us actually vomited on our friends or spouses when we saw there was a second Bridget Jones movie. Not only do women deserve to be acknowledged by the Movie Industrial Complex, but we deserve to have characters we can relate to. Maybe the gals from Sex and the City are really super great, but the characters in that show/movie represent the only type of female character in movies. Period. The slut. The purity slut. The bitchy one. And Carrie.
Women come in more flavors than upper-middle-class, fashion-and-sex-obsessed, skinny white women! DUH! It should be portrayed that way in movies as well. For god’s sake, some of us aren’t even skinny!
Then again, Hollywood has always been behind the times in terms of diversity. Blackface? Mexicans and Asians playing “Indians”? Indians playing Iraqis (sorry, I know, I love Naveen Andrews too)? Mainstream films essentially ignoring that there are other ethnicities than “white”; other sexualities than straight; other relationship statuses than married? Woody Allen movies?
This has got to stop. We need more diversity in so-called liberal Hollywood. Actors may be women, gay, non-white, intelligent people who read, but they certainly aren’t allowed to act like it. And it’s pretty frakking annoying.
"
“India may confront one of its longest held taboos this year, as the film “Dunno Y … Na Jaane Kyun” threatens to present Bollywood with its first gay kiss.
Due to the film’s focus on a gay relationship, many have begun to compare the film to “Brokeback Mountain,” and are hoping that the film will challenge prejudice in a similar manner. Despite its size, Bollywood has long been unusually conservative - until recently even heterosexual kissing was considered shocking.
“Dunno Y … Na Jaane Kyun”, which translates as ‘Don’t Know Why,” was made last year after a High Court overturned a law outlawing homosexuality. The full legalization of homosexuality is expected but still must pass India’s Supreme Court.
With the film due for release in May, posters for the film showing two naked men embracing have begun to be shown around Indian cities. While bound to cause controversy, the film’s director, Sanjay Sharma, says he’s confident that censors will approve the film for release. As Sharma recently told the BBC.”At the moment I’m not thinking about any political or censor problems.”
Recent Bollywood movies such as “Dostana” and “September 11” have begun to challenge stereotypes. In “Dostana”, a heterosexual couple have to act as a gay couple in order to convince their landlord to let his attractive daughter live with them. “September 11”, a film based upon the 9/11 attacks, was the first Bollywood film to show male buttocks.
Dunno Y, however, goes further than that, telling the story of a male model who goes to Mumbai to make his fortune, and the sexual relationship with another man that awaits him.”
(via ONTD)
very cool, but also—THAT PICTURE IS SO HOT.
Super Bowl ads
Look, I don’t want to be all “if you only watch one major sporting event per year, perhaps your opinions on the ads running during them are inevitably going to be shallow and trite,” but here’s the deal: the only TV programs men watch (in any great number) are sports. That is not a stereotype: that is a Nielson-certified factoid. What that means is that, if you want to reach a male demographic with a TV ad, the only choice you have is to reach to all of it at once. And that necessarily means that you have to shoot for the lowest common denom-nom-nom-inator. With women, advertisers have the luxury of both assuming they are going to be exposed to multiple media streams (so they can spread out a bunch of subtler ads over disparate programming and go for a cumulative effect) and being able to target women by their rough taste group. And so you can run ads that “make sense” more, in that an ad run during Oprah makes sense for that audience and an ad run during The Rachel Zoe Project makes sense for that audience, which somehow seems less insulting? But with men, you have no such luxuries. Advertisers have to run extremely blatant ads that sacrifice any hope of getting niche demographics by pandering as hard as possible to the largest demographic. Which means basically Dane Cook jokes in ad form.
But let’s talk about what those ads are portraying. People call them sexist, which they are, but that’s not the point. Images of women being treated like objects and masculinity being defined in stereotypical ways don’t validate a vision of themselves men already have. Instead, it makes their current lives seem inadequate, or tries to, anyway. It takes their relationship with their wives and children, a relationship that is precious and meaningful and more important than anything else they probably have, and makes it seem emasculating because you have to drive a lame car. It takes fleeting anxieties and tries to turn them into a full-blown syndrome. It takes the reality of men’s real and human relationships with the opposite sex and makes that seem like you are pussy-whipped. And since you can’t actually change those things—why would you want to change being a father and a decent human being?—you will need to compensate by buying the proffered product.
This is not to say that this appeal works consciously or directly. But it is to say that the ads are intended to work on men in almost exactly the same way that ads targeting women are intended to work on women. All of this is cloaked in humor or empowerment, but it’s really communicating inadequacy. The men’s ads just have the additional unfortunate side effect of being demeaning to their female viewers. My point here is that we shouldn’t take the appeals made by male-targeted ads and assume they reflect a genuine feeling in men. Rather, it reflects a feeling advertisers would like to induce in men. To blithely assume they have been successful is like watching daytime TV and assuming all women are overprotective mothers with undiagnosed OCD. Or like, say, assuming the attitudes of 20-something artsy urban men reflect the feelings of men in general. Just saying!
also, these ads aren’t just during the Super Bowl. I used to spend a LOT more time watching sports than I do now—I had the NHL package at one point and lived in South Carolina with few friends around—and on a daily basis I used to curse the sexist commercials that inevitably aired during sports.
Last week I interviewed a lovely woman who works for Marvel Comics, and one of the things she said was that to get women to read comics, all you have to do is NOT ACTIVELY ALIENATE THEM. And that was how I felt every time I watched a hockey game or a football game: that those ads were saying “You stupid girl, this isn’t for you.”
“But I want you to know first, that this is what it was like. You would head down to the courthouse to register to vote, if you dared. In order to register, you‘d face an exam. It was sometimes called a literacy test, but it wasn‘t testing to determine necessarily if you could read or write. If you were black, the test was designed purely to afford a legalistic veneer of justification for denying you your constitutional right to vote.
The questions weren‘t about ABCs. They were—they were questions like this one, from Alabama‘s literacy test in 1965. If a person charged with treason denies his guilt, how many persons must testify against him before he can be convicted? Do you consider yourself qualified to vote in this country? Can you answer that question?
You want to hear it again? If a person is charged with treason—if a person charged with treason denies his guilt, how many persons must testify against him before he can be convicted?
Or how about this one from the same test: In what year did the Congress gain the right to prohibit the migration of persons to the states? Do you know the answer to that one?
Again, these are from Alabama‘s literacy test in 1965. It was applied selectively, of course, to black voters, to keep them from registering.
If you lived in Georgia in 1958, you would have faced questions like this one: Who is the solicitor general of the state judicial circuit in which you live and who is the judge of such circuit? If such circuit has more than one judge, name them all.
How did you do on that one? Or how about this one: What does the Constitution of Georgia provide regarding the suspension of the writ of habeas corpus?
If you wanted to vote in Georgia in 1958, those are the questions you would have to answer. But, of course, not everyone would face those questions. The board of registrars had the sole authority to determine who got asked which literacy test questions and whose answers to those questions rendered them ineligible to vote.
The idea was that black voters weren‘t being denied the right to vote based on race. That would be illegal. No, those voters just couldn‘t pass this literacy test.
This isn‘t the plot of some Kagzo (ph) Klansman gothic short story. This isn‘t a theoretical for first-year law students. This isn‘t some State Department report on some tin pot dictatorship halfway around the world that we can‘t pronounce.
This is American history. This is really, really recent American history—as in this lifetime for a lot of people American history.
And the opening night speech at the national tea party convention this weekend proposed bringing the literacy test for voting back. And that proposal got a warm round of applause.”
bolding mine.
I miss watching Maddow.
"Of course, the political blogosphere is pugnacious. It’s ugly, and it’s relentless, and it’s full of spiteful misogynists, rampant rape-apologists, slut-shamers, and bitter men in lonely bedrooms across the world whose idea of a great night in is to shame, decry and otherwise tear apart the very personhood of remote, virtual women who they’re never likely to meet. Nearly every female blogger I know has at some point spoken to me, half-amused, about her ‘stalkers’, and the strange and cruel things they’ve emailed to say they want to do to them. There is a reason that women bloggers moderate their comments, a reason why the majority of female World of Warcraft players choose male avatars, a a reason why we often feel unsafe in spaces where, as liberals or as conservatives or music fans or uploaders of inane vlogs about our cats, we should not have to expect hostility. But when that hostility occurs, as it has for women since the internet began, most of us are big enough and tough enough to handle it, and handle it we do, quietly, exhaustively, relentlessly, fending off the misogynist attacks that any woman with ambitions to raise her voice above a whisper learns to handle. I have been called a cunt, a cow, a whore, a stupid little girl, I’ve been told that I deserve to be raped and beaten, I’ve been told I need to be taken in hand by a man who will fill me up with the babies that are the only thing my body and brain are good for, and I’m still here, I’m still writing, arguing and debating, and they haven’t managed to shut me up yet."
—
Women, political blogging and the future of the left (via azspot) (via bmckinney) (via amberlrhea)
emphasis mine, for “fuck yeah”
"
Male privilege may be more obvious in other cultures, but in so-called Western culture it’s still ubiquitous. In fact, it’s so ubiquitous that it’s invisible. It is so pervasive as to be normalized, and so normalized as to be visible only in its absence. The vast, vast, vast majority of institutions, spaces, and subcultures privilege male interests, but because male is the default in this culture, such interests are very often considered ungendered. As a result, we only really notice when something privileges female interests.
This results in, well, lots of things, but two that I want to talk about here. The first is that true gender equality is actually perceived as inequality. A group that is made up of 50% women is perceived as being mostly women. A situation that is perfectly equal between men and women is perceived as being biased in favor of women.
And if you don’t believe me, you’ve never been a married woman who kept her family name. I have had students hold that up as proof of my “sexism.” My own brother told me that he could never marry a woman who kept her name because “everyone would know who ruled that relationship.” Perfect equality - my husband keeps his name and I keep mine – is held as a statement of superiority on my part.
"—
When Worlds Collide: Fandom and Male Privilege (via ihatethismess)
Emphasis mine. Yes yes yes yes yes.
(via katoleary)
(via amberlrhea)
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