Musings of an Inappropriate Woman

Weekend reading on gender, politics, pop culture and more.

A more effective brand of tip jar. (Your Face Here)

Why we find strength in Britney Spears. (The Hairpin)

Sarah Palin’s secret Facebook account. She ‘likes’ her own articles and status updates! (Failbook)

Can’t find clothes to fit your body shape? Meet the fit model:

If you have a body exactly like a fit model, off the rack clothes will fit like they are tailored for you, which they pretty much were, and you will be the envy of everyone. Now, I don’t resent fit models. I do think it’s a good idea to fit and try on clothing using actual human beings at some point during the development process and I understand the desire to use people of similar size and shape, to keep sizing and fitting relatively consistent across a clothing line. You may note, for example, that clothes from some companies fit better than others, and you can thank their fit models for that; their bodies are a tad closer to yours than those of the fit models for that other manufacturer over there. (This Ain’t Living)

Lonely people are drawn to clutter because it makes them feel popular, but how many of the people we admire do just that? (Girl With A Satchel)

Dancing alone vs dancing in public. (Chibird)

Why you aren’t as successful as you want to be. (Chris Brogan)

Joan of Snark: this week’s 30 Rock parodies Jezebel. (Jezebel)

Amanda Marcotte on when all women are “fat”:

[T]his is a reminder that, in a patriarchy, the word “fat” has two meanings.  The most obvious is that it’s a word that’s applied to people who actually are fat, and this is the sense that it’s being reclaimed by fat activists, who insist it should be just a descriptor and not a loaded word.  (I agree with them.)

But then there’s the other way the term is used, and that’s as a free-floating insult that can be applied to any woman at any point in time, regardless of her actual body fat percentage. In a patriarchy, all women are “fat”, i.e. they take up too much space and have physical bodies that are coded as Other and therefore disgusting. (Pandagon)

Check out LA’s new brand of literary bars. I did when I was in town last week. (For Absolute Beginners)

How to make a genuine connection with anyone. (Penelope Trunk)

Many years ago, a friend of mine made a video about female masturbation. I can’t find it online anywhere, but it was basically a collection of euphemistic images – mouses being clicked, kittens being petted, muffins being buttered - all set to a jaunty tune.

I bring this up because this week, Rachel Rabbit White is running a blogosphere-wide project on women and porn (she likes to push our comfort zones like that). She asked me to contribute, and while I thought it was a great idea, my immediate, instinctive response was: “Nuh-uh. Sorry, I can’t write about that.”

Not because I think porn is wrong. I don’t, although conversation on this subject matter over the past couple of weeks suggests that I have a somewhat different definition of “porn” to other people. I didn’t want to write about it because I didn’t want to be slut-shamed.

Much like my friend’s video on masturbation, there’s still a very real stigma surrounding women and porn.

Maybe it’s because there’s such a big media discourse at the moment about how “bad” it is (although my frustration with studies and porn, whether positive or negative, is that they always seem to find the results they set out to find), maybe it’s because most discussion about pornography focuses on men, but there’s a sense that porn is something that “nice girls” just don’t talk about.

The “appropriate” response is to either protest its misogyny or to blush, giggle and politely demure.

Of course, I’m well aware even by talking about why we can’t talk about porn I’m, well, talking about porn. But to me, this is the important question, and one that cuts directly to the purpose of Rachel’s project. As she wrote in her call-out:

[G]irls aren’t encouraged to talk to each other about porn— the same way we aren’t encouraged to talk to each other about masturbation. In girl-world, too often we expect our first orgasm to come from a partner. Then we expect our Sex-and-The-City approved hitachi-orgasms to come from our closed eyes.

So, why can’t women talk about porn? Or masturbation, for that matter? What kinds of conversations have you had on this topic with your friends?

Related: Ask Rachel: How do you deal with people you respect watching porn?
Why do we slut-shame?

Elsewhere: Lady Porn Day (Rachel Rabbit White)

Two or three years ago, I was sitting on a bus in Sydney’s Taylor Square with a friend when the subject turning to trash talk. If people were talking about her behind her back, my friend would want to know about it, she said, so she could expell these disloyal people from her life.

I begged to differ. I would not want to know, I said, in part because I would find it too upsetting, but also because in all of the trash talk I’d observed over the years, little of it was intended as an honest or direct criticism of the person being spoken about. So while it would unsettle me, it would do so unecessarily.

Most of the gossip/bitching/trash talk I’d observed (and, let’s be honest, taken part in) fell into one of three categories:

1. General community gossip, in which the people discussed are treated less as human beings than as symbolic players in some broader ongoing melodrama. I’m thinking celebrity gossip, political gossip, student political gossip and so on. This kind of trash talk is more about humour and the expression of group values than the actual fact of the person being discussed, whom usually no one involved in the discussion knows particularly well. It’s hurtful to find out about, but it’s not really about you, and I don’t think any genuine malice is intended by the people partaking in it. (Well, usually, at least.)

2. Negative talk about someone you actually really like, but who is driving you crazy at this particular moment. Usually in this instance, the talker is actually quite close to the person being talked about, which means that this kind of trash talk is infused with a feeling of betrayal - both for the person doing the talking, and the person being talked about. But this talk is rarely a genuine reflection of the gossiper’s actual feelings towards the person in question; it’s an exaggeration or distortion that happens in moments of frustration. 

3. Negative talk about someone you don’t actually like much, but feel compelled to pretend as if you like them for the sake of smooth social interaction. Work associates, friends of friends, former friends and so on. It’s almost impossible to avoid these people, and it’s rude not to be nice to them, but the real nature of the relationship is - to get a bit women’s maggy on your ass - more frenemy than friend.

These observations are a little close to the Sunday Life/Black Swan article I posted last week, but certain events in my personal life mean that the subject is on my mind again.

I might say that gossip/bitching/trash talk are inevitable and I just don’t want to hear about it, but perhaps what I’d actually rather do is avoid it - or at least, the second two types - altogether. Like I said, I don’t actually think that most negative talk is intended maliciously. It’s just a reflection of the reality that none of us are perfect people, that we all have people who don’t like us, and that we all piss off people who do like us every now and again.

But private trash talk rarely stays private, and when it inevitably trickles back to the person being spoken about it feels like cruelty, feels like betrayal. And the discovery that someone you thought you had a genuine connection with actually, by all reports, hates you, makes you - or makes me, at least - wonder how many other people secretly feel the same way.

One solution is to be more honest in our interactions. If a friend is giving you the shits, talk to your friend about it, instead of letting it boil up inside and spill over onto other people. Or if you do need to unload to other people, keep it about your own feelings, rather than an exaggerated caricature of the other person.

And those people you don’t actually like? Stop investing time in them. Be civil when you do see them, by all means, but don’t actively make friendly overtures for the sake of civility. One of the underlying sources of trash talk, I suspect, is that people feel pressured to like everyone, or to like everyone their friends like, at least. Trash talk is a manifestation of too complicated friendship dynamics, and a desperate little voice that wants to scream, “But I don’t like that person!”

The other part of being more honest in our interactions is to invest more time in the people we do genuinely like and trust, and to treat those people with appropriate respect and kindness. As my Black Swan article explored, our closest friendships can be rocky - even devastating at times - but genuine, deep running affection is a valuable thing.

And if someone is truly vile or malicious? My friend was probably right: drop ‘em.

How have you dealt with trash talk in your life?

Related: Friends and Enemies (Sunday Life)
Yet another way in which Gossip Girl is kind of like real life

Regular readers of Sydney’s Sun-Herald and Melbourne’s Sunday Age may have noticed that I’ve been doing a lot of work for Sunday Life lately. I really love the commissions I’ve been getting from SL - they’re meaty, intellectually challenging, and closely match the kind of writing I enjoy doing and aspire to do in the future.

The below story - on Black Swan and the complexities of female friendship, a difficult subject to tackle without resorting to “women are so bitchy!” stereotypes - is my favourite one I’ve written for them so far. (And yes, I did get to spend 13 minutes in a room with Natalie Portman. She was my favourite celebrity interview to date - like hanging out with one of my friends, except for the whole “famous” thing.)

Published in Sunday Life, 16 January 2011. Copyright Rachel Hills 2011.

But these don’t allow for Black Swan. Set in an elite New York City ballet company, the film tells the story of two ballerinas – Nina (Portman) and Lily, played by Mila Kunis of That ’70s Show fame – competing for the lead role in Swan Lake. At first glance, the two seem to be polar opposites: Nina is passive, a perfectionist and innocent to the point of being childlike, while Lily is relaxed, a little wild and potentially dangerous. Nina is a perfect fit for the role of the White Swan, Lily for the Black Swan. The trouble is, in this performance, they are the same role.

Read More →

If you read one thing this weekend, make it Rachel Rabbit White’s ‘I made out with a pick-up artist and then interviewed him’:

Dylan was a DJ with asymmetrical hair and over-sized glasses. I had the same hair with confetti crosses and rhinestones glued to my face, so it wasn’t so weird that our mouths collided in a club. What was weird was learning that this kid  I’d made out with a few times was on a reality TV show…about the “art” of picking up women. (Rabbit Write)

Shed your weight problem here. What do you think of this advertisement? (Fuck Yeah Advertising!)

Ashley Mears on the invisible labour of modeling:

Success in any culture industry is a mix of both hard work and the luck of being the “right” contender at the right moment, which is somewhat arbitrarily decided in any given fashion season. Saying that success is “all in the genes” renders the “look” into a natural state of being, when like all culture industries, modeling is a complex social production. (Jezebel)

Find out what happens to London’s old tube stations. (Londonist)

Spoiler alert: Loved Franzen’s Freedom? You’ll probably also love Allegra Goodman’s The Cookbook Collector. So why did one get so much more press than the other? (The Millions)

Do you feel scared to do your creative work sometimes? You’re not alone. (Becky Hunter)

This one is the kind of fascinating which can only be fully demonstrated with an image. Find out the etymological origins of the names of every country (and ocean) in the world. (Mediaite)

Who’s afraid of radical feminism? (The Guardian)

“Skinny Pepsi” and the problem with diet food:

Big Food and its advertisers trot out the usual “Ooh, this is healthy and will make you fit and skinny” cover story, but concern-trolling about a woman’s health is merely part of the marketing. It’s especially ridiculous in light of the fact that those yogurts and chocolatey cereal are created in labs from over-processed grains and lots of added starch, sugars, artificial flavors and sweeteners. They’re not healthy. They’re hardly even food. (The Pursuit of Harpiness)

How to deal when your life is in shambles. (Yes and Yes)

Check out Leah Dieterich’s thank you notes to her favourite authors. (For Absolute Beginners)

Check out Amsterdam’s new fur-free fashion exhibition. (Lost At E Minor)

Is “feminism” a conservative word?:

Afterwards I spoke to Greer to get her thoughts on it all. “Feminism?” she queried. “Oh it’s such an old-fashioned word anyway.” Cox and Summers went one step further, describing the word as both traditionalist and conservative.

“To be honest, I am not - and never have been - hung up on the word ‘feminism’,” says Summers. ”I never used it when I was young because feminism was seen as very conservative and backward-looking then. Today’s young women have a similarly disdainful attitude. They see feminism as old-fashioned - just as we did when we were the same age. To me, what matters is that women (and men) support women’s equality and all that is needed to achieve that. It’s what we think and how we act that really matters.” (Sydney Morning Herald)

No chicks, no excuses: an awesome new Australian speakers bureau for female speakers. (Howling Clementine)

Six fiction writing techniques to improve your blog. (Problogger)

The over-examined life: on life bloggers, life loggers, and famous diarists:

While I like biographies and sometimes enjoy books of correspondence (especially with senders brilliant and troubled like Ingeborg Bachmann and Paul Celan,) diaries never really appeal to me as literature. If the point is unpack, unburden, unforget… how can anyone else quite understand? Usually when a diary is publishable, there seems a layer of artifice to it, a stagecraft to the self-examination. Now, Franz Kafka’s journal is as meandering and strange as you’d hope, but I found Susan Sontag’s diaries somewhat unpleasant to encounter. So composed and self-aware, so clearly never for her eyes only, at times she even alludes to her hope that someone else might sneak a peak. (Tomorrow Museum)

The ballad of the female “self-promoter”. (Jezebel)

Beauty is not a spectrum. (Eat The Damn Cake)

NB: This image (of a busy and stressed woman) is not of me.

I’ve been busy. Like, really really busy. Since the beginning of this year, I’ve been commissioned to write a lot of features (most of them for Fairfax/Sunday Life and Cosmopolitan, if you’re interested in checking them out).

This has been great for my bank balance and for my general financial security – and fingers crossed it continues! - but it also means that writing, thinking and interviewing have so consumed my life that at end of the day, sitting down to write yet more words leaves me exhausted rather than inspired.

The thing is, I feel guilty about it. Because I try to “do good” by you guys, the people reading. Because when I sent out my annual reader survey last year, most of you asked me to post more, and here I am posting only one or two substantive entries each week. Because I really value the fact that, however I might sometimes find it wanting, this blog seems to touch people in a far deeper and more substantive way than the articles I properly research and get paid for.

Because lovely people like Jade Craven and Jessica Klingelfuss and Jessica Furseth write posts about how great I am, and I think to myself that I’m not so great at all, because I haven’t been updating much, have I, and most of what I have been writing is not all that related to my core subject matter, gender and feminism. And I know from the aforementioned survey that that’s why a lot of you visit here.

Anyway, the point is, I’m not going to abandon either you or this blog. But the fact remains that I only have so much energy and so much brain space, and along with the avalanche of freelance work I’ve been processing, I’m also trying to make slow progress on my PhD thesis, and more substantial progress on my book proposal (which, you will be glad to know, does deal with all sorts of interesting stuff relating to gender and sex and sociology and history and philosophy), so I can actually, you know, send it to publishers and agents and stuff.

So my question for you is, how should we proceed? What would you like to me do, in these times when my blog inspiration is, frankly, failing me?

I can’t write you four substantive posts each week at the moment. I just don’t have it in me. What I can offer you is one – maybe two – substantive posts each week, dealing with whatever gender-related, creative or philosophical stuff I’ve been thinking about. If you want more content to keep you satiated, I can supplement it with other interesting material I come across around the net.

This blog is important to me. I want it to be a long term relationship. But I’d really like some feedback from you on how to make it work so that it’s a good relationship for both of us.

Would you be okay with thoughtful, but less frequent posts? If you want more posts, how much does it matter to you if I supplement my own work with that of other people? If I am going to cut back, what do you most want me to keep?

I need your help here.

Rachel

If you read one thing this weekend, make it Tiara Shafiq’s ‘I am from a third world country’:

If you’re going to commit a massive fail by claiming that “if you’re in a third-world country I doubt you’d have internet access and a Tumblr” us third-worldies will come en masse and poke you in the eye. (The Merch Girl)

I rather like these alternative Royal Wedding souvenirs. (Londonist)

Laurie Penny on writing and responsibility:

[D]espite what some people inevitably believe, my writing is not a self-promotion exercise. Far from it. I care passionately about the politics and the movements I am engaged with, and I am having to learn very fast, by trial and error, how I can best behave in order to be useful to those movements. I’m having to anticipate what I might do or say that might damage or cause divisions within the causes with which I am associated. There is, bluntly, a lot more I can do now to fuck stuff up. (Penny Red)

Serendipitously, Sarah Wilson decided to quit sugar two days after I did. Seven days in, I’m feeling uncharacteristically cheerful, calm and energetic (is it possible to feel the last two things at once?), although that could also be the lack of caffeine and alcohol talking. I’m not experiencing any cravings, either, although I am looking forward to my weekly sugary treats once I get out of the cold turkey stage. Read Sarah’s reasons for breaking the habit here. (Sarah Wilson)

Is Australia’s horrendous summer climate change or a coincidence? Matt Granfield asks the experts. (Matt Granfield)

Lori Adelman on fashion and feminism. (Feministing)

Some political “cliques” I could get behind:

Wouldn’t it be interesting if various writers subverted the Team Red versus Team Blue aspect of the blogosphere by founding lots of competing teams? Like the yellow-bandanna-wearing Team Intellectually Honest Consequences Be Damned, or the green scarf-clad Team Averse To Hyperbolic Denunciations. (The Daily Dish)

Tiara again on the problem with progressive language policing:

[I]nstead of looking within yourself to see how you’re perpetuating and practicing discrimination and harm, all you have to do is pick out a word and go “Ableist! Classist! XYZist!” and dismiss the other person altogether, self-satisfied that we’re done our Good Activist Deed Of The Day and so no one can call us out on our rubbish. (The Merch Girl)

What would your last blog post be? (Nubby Twiglet)

What your 16-hour work day says about you. (*char)

Do you find it embarrassing to admit to your ambition?:

We’re not supposed to want to be important. It sounds selfish. I know, because I’m uncomfortable writing about it. I assume that whoever reads this will think that I am too self-involved to be tolerated. Penelope Trunk told me to write about things that make me uncomfortable. Because that’s when I’ll know I really care about what I’m writing. And chances are, if it makes me uncomfortable, it will be something worth talking about. (Eat the Damn Cake)

Blue milk on why introverts hate you. (blue milk)

I’ve said this before. Cultural ideals may change from decade to decade, or even from month to month, but that doesn’t mean you can change your body along with them.

Following Jessica Biel’s workout routine isn’t going to give you Jessica Biel’s body unless you have Jessica Biel’s genes. Following Megan Fox’s diet isn’t going to make you look like Megan Fox. No amount of weight gain or loss is going to give you Christina Hendrick’s curves unless you’re naturally really, really curvy in the exact same way she is.

That’s not to say you can’t change your body: gain or lose weight, increase your strength or fitness, build muscle mass. But doing that isn’t going to turn you into some celebrity clone. It’s just going to give you a thinner, fatter or more muscley version of the body you’ve already got.

This is why I hate articles about what’s fashionable when it comes to body shapes. Not because of the specific body shapes they promote (even though sometimes they’re not achievable unless you’re a naturally tall and skinny person on a lettuce-only diet), but because promoting the “hot new body” suggests that said “hot new body” is something the people reading can just go out and get themselves, like a new handbag or haircut. (And those articles are silly, too.)

“Rihanna’s body is what’s ‘in’ right now? Okay, I’ll just go and buy myself one Rihanna body so I can be fashionable too, then.”

Your body is not a handbag or a haircut. Your body is not a fashion statement.

Related: The new body shape for 2011.

Elsewhere: The ideal shape has changed constantly over the years. So what does it look like now? (Boston Globe)