Today I fly back to London after 5 weeks travelling the US and Canada doing interviews for my book (click the link for more info). In that time I’ve hit up Washington DC, Baltimore, the Raleigh/Durham/Chapel Hill research triangle, Asheville, NYC, Boston, various parts of Maine, Toronto, Winsdor, Detroit, a frat house in rural Ohio, Maui, LA, the Bay Area, Portland, Seattle and finally Houston, from which I am writing this missive.

Now, I’m looking to do the same in Western Europe, and I need your help. I’m looking for people of all genders, classes, ethnicities, religions and political persuasions to share their thoughts and experiences on all matters sex related. The book mostly focuses on people aged 16-30, but I’m interested in older and younger interviewees as well.

The book is a one-fifth pop culture, one-third academic and one-half personal story driven look at the hidden assumptions that shape our beliefs about sex and relationships - and how those assumptions impact us as individuals and as a society. It will be published by Simon & Schuster and Penguin in the second half of 2013.

I’m especially interested in speaking to people DON’T usually put up their hands for conversations about gender and sexuality (I’m looking at you: men, conservatives and people who haven’t been to university).

All interviewees featured in the book will be given pseudonyms, and other identifying details will be changed upon request.

If you’re interested in helping out, drop me an email at rachel.hills@gmail.com with your age, location and a bit of information about yourself/why you’re contacting me, and we can work towards setting up a time to speak.  

Andrea writes for a newspaper. ‘This is for the Living section,’ she says. I know what that means, it used to be the Women’s Pages. It’s funny that they now call it Living, as if only women are alive and other things, such as the Sports, are for the dead. ‘Living, eh?’ I say. ‘I’m the mother of two. I bake cookies.’ All true. Andrea gives me a dirty look and flicks on her machine.

So writes Margaret Atwood in Cat’s Eye. And my thought upon reading it? “Shit, that’s what I do.”

I write for the “women’s pages”. Sure, I write for other venues too – political rags and literary rags among them. But the bulk of my work comes from publications (whether online, in newspapers, of women’s lifestyle magazines) that are explicitly targeted at women.

Mostly, this is because I write a lot about gender and sociology (“social affairs” if you will), and as I’ve written about here before, women’s lifestyle magazines especially are explicitly “about” gender. I think this is a good thing. I wish we had similar ongoing, analytical* dialogues on race, class, and disability.

But I will concede that it does coincide with – if not cause – a certain marginalising of those issues. We’ll put the stuff for the ladies over here, and the important stuff somewhere else.

Today the Fairfax newspapers in Australia launched Daily Life, a new opinion website targeted at women, to which I will be a contributor. It made a lot of the Twittersphere pretty angry – see the hashtag #dailywife for a sample of the commentary.

Criticisms included: “Why do women need their own website? Why can’t we just read the regular news?” “Why is the ‘news’ on this website all about fashion and celebrities?” “If you really appreciate the work these writers do, why don‘t you just put them on the main website?”

Jessica Valenti and Hannah Mudge have both written articulately on these issues before. I’ve also thought about them plenty myself.

Like Mudge, I’ve wondered why everything pertaining to women is classified under “Life and Style”, and I’ve wondered why “lifestyle journalism” is so often boiled down to advertorial for fashion and beauty products (answer: probably because the associated advertising is what pays for writers like me). I’ve wondered if the fact that writing related to gender politics is usually published in “Life and Style” or colour magazine supplements contributes to the perception that, as one commenter recently wrote on one of Laurie Penny’s articles, female journalists write pointless “pap”.

But I also think that the visceral negative response such content receives is grounded in sexism in itself. Why are discussions of political horse races, war and even sport (all of which I enjoy - the discussions of, that is, not the practices) considered more “worthy” than discussions of why we think and feel the way we do, or the more subtle (and I think, interesting) political machinations shaping human life that don’t take place in parliament or congress? It’s not just newspaper websites that lump in discussions of feminism or sociology with beauty tips and celebrity gossip: our collective cultural psyche does too.

Over the weekend, I wrote an article for a teen magazine in which I suggested (in teen-friendly language) that rather than focusing our often well-justified anger on individual micro-political actors – that is to say, you and me – we would be better off focusing our criticisms on the systems that create those actions.

The structural criticisms of Daily Life and websites like it are perfectly valid. But that doesn’t mean that the sites themselves don’t have any redeeming features – Daily Life’s rotation of contributors includes many of my favourite Australian writers, and those women don’t write stupid, inane fluff. The fact that the site is heavily populated with those contributors shows that “stupid, inane fluff” isn’t what they’re going for.

And for me as a contributor, there’s a clear appeal in a regular gig writing about the issues that interest me, for an editor who has never asked me (directly or otherwise) to dumb myself down.

* Okay, this may be a bit utopian as a holistic analysis of some of these magazines, but it’s what I’m going for when I write for them.

Related: Ask Rachel: Why do you write for women’s magazines?
Mentoring week: Mentoring and the media industry
Are women’s magazines really that bad?

Elsewhere: Where are all the women? In Life and Style, apparently. (We Mixed Our Drinks)
Why Washington Post’s new ladyblog is wrong for women (Jessica Valenti)
The Daily Wife (The News With Nipples)
Criticism of the “women’s pages” (Women’s Page History)
Daily Life

It feels vaguely blasphemous to be writing about how great it is to be single on my first Valentine’s Day as a married person. But given that some quick fraction work reveals that I’ve spent just over 85% of my life so far as a single person (by which I don’t mean “unmarried”, but not in any kind of romantic relationship at all), I feel it is a subject that I know something about. Sure, a lot of those years were when I was a child, but my point still stands.

I wasn’t a great single person. In fact, I was probably about the worst kind of single person there is. I wasn’t that Sex & The City style woman with her expensive shoes and cocktails, confidently eating up every man who crossed her path. I was that girl who would whine incessantly about being single, who would burst into tears and lie in bed listening to angsty Liz Phair songs whenever a fledging relationship fizzled out. 

Intellectually, of course, I knew that all this was ridiculous. (I was well versed in my feminist literature.) But intellect wasn’t enough to override the emotional impacts of a lifetime diet of Dolly, Girlfriend and Dawson’s Creek. In which dating was just what people did, whether you were 12 and going to your first middle school dance (The Babysitter’s Club), 16 and hanging with your beau at the local milk bar (Sweet Valley High), or 17 and hooking up with your lab partner because you don’t want to go to college a virgin (Britney Spears’s Crossroads). 

Plenty of people I went to high school with didn’t date: I went to a girls’ school, and the boys my friends and I met were few and far between. But that didn’t mean that we did internalise the messages that we received from the popular culture that engulfed us. We “knew” that teenagers were “supposed” to date, party and be plagued by sexual temptation. And we “knew” that girls who had boyfriends were superior to the ones who didn’t. I still recall the instant boost in popularity one of the girls in my Year 7 class experienced when she was asked out by a guy on the train. 

So when I grew up and my life looked nothing like Sweet Valley High, I took it to mean there was something wrong with me. That I was somehow defective, unattractive, abnormal. I never felt so defective that I was willing to enter into a relationship with someone I didn’t actually like, but I spent much of my youth with the niggling sense that there was something lacking in me. 

Sometimes I wonder if, maybe if I’d spent only 70 or 80 percent of my life single (as opposed to my current 85 percent), I would have felt differently. If I would have then been one of those single people who loved being single; who actively chose it instead of feeling like it was chosen for them.  

Because the truth is, in retrospect, being single actually was kind of fantastic. And while I didn’t always enjoy it at the time, I can see now that it actually shaped my life in all sorts of beneficial ways.  

Being single gave me the time and space to cultivate all manner of amazing friendships – the kind of friendships people write stories about. It meant that when Mr Musings (someone with a similar ratio of single to not single time as myself) and I got married a few months ago, we were able to do so in the room filled with friends. Not just people we had passed the time with, but people with whom we had shared our lives and true intimacies, in a manner that is frankly difficult to do when you’re investing all your intimacy into one person. 

Being single meant I had the freedom (and again, the time – this one is so important, I think) to throw myself into my interests, enmesh myself in my community(s), to try new things out and, yes, to ultimately discard them if I found they didn’t work for me. It meant I could hold down a job, freelance, do a PhD and still have time to go out three or four nights a week. In temporarily forgoing one facet of the richness of life, I was able to experience more of so many others.

Having spent so much of my life single means that I will never (I hope, at least), be one of “those” coupled people who organises exclusive “couples weekends”, feels awkward about inviting single friends to dinner, or tells their single friends, “you know, maybe you’re just too picky”.

Being single gave me a foundation: of friends, of genuine intimacies, of what I was passionate about. It meant that when I did end up in a relationship with someone I wanted to stay with, I knew what I wanted from life, and to choose someone who wanted basically the same things. 

That’s not to say that serial monogamists can’t have these things, too – I know plenty who have – but I do think that having that wealth of time to myself in the earlier part of my 20s helped me to achieve them.

A few weeks ago, a good friend of mine – a friend whose ratio of single time to coupled time is even higher than mine is – wrote an emailed wondering if, as a “perpetual bachelorette”, she was destined for a future of boredom and loneliness. The irony is that this particular friend leads one of the most vital, inspiring lives of anyone I know, filled with tight knit friendships, passions and projects.  

The point isn’t that the grass is greener on the other side. The point is that both sides of the proverbial meadow are green… even if we don’t always appreciate that.

Related: Welcome to the Institute for Sweet Valley High-related cultural studies
Wanting to be with someone you LIKE means you’ll be alone FOREVER
The Musings of an Inappropriate Woman Guide to Feminist Wedding Planning: Part 5: The Opposite of War Isn’t Peace, It’s Creation.

Elsewhere: Why I broke up with my Girlfriend (and Dolly too) (Girls are Made From Pepsi)
Occupy Valentine’s Day

There are some people in this world who make us irrationally angry. For me, Melinda Tankard Reist used to be one of them. Maybe it was her stance on abortion, or maybe it was the way her name always seemed to pop up in newspapers articles about primary school children getting bikini waxes and exchanging sexual favours in the playground.

Whatever it was, I didn’t like her. And it wasn’t just her ideas I didn’t like. I thought she was a fake and phony; someone who used the language of feminism to push her socially conservative agenda. That women I knew and respected heard what she had to say and thought she was a gutsy new vanguard for feminism? That bothered me.

I still don’t agree with much of what Melinda has to say, but she doesn’t bother me in the same way anymore. In fact, as a human being I quite like her. Miraculously enough, I am able to sustain two contradictory ideas about a person at the same time (think she’s a nice human being, don’t like her politics) without my head spontaneously combusting.

So I should probably tell you why I wrote that profile piece about her in Sunday Life this weekend. It’s pretty simple, really: I thought it would be interesting. Like many journalists, I spend too much time thinking about what goes on in other people’s heads, and Melinda was a public figure I found particularly perplexing. I’d moderated my “phoney feminist” stance by this point, but I still didn’t “get” her. And I wanted to.

I wanted to know what drove her, and how her various ideas fit together. I wanted to know why some people I liked and respected were drawn to her work, and why she made others so damn angry. What did it say about the state of the movement that she got more airtime than pretty much any other commentator on women’s issues in Australia? And what did all that airtime mean for the way the general public understood feminism?

I knew from the outset that I wasn’t going to write a hatchet job. Allowing yourself to be written up by another person is scary, especially when the person doing the writing has been vocally critical of your work. Melinda had never done a profile piece before, I respected that she was willing to hand herself over to my keyboard – if I were in her position, I would have been seriously tempted to say no. I wanted to write something critical (in the sense of making analytic judgments) but still human.

I was warned before this story was published that in writing it, I would only be granting her ideas credibility. They would have it that the only acceptable story to tell about Melinda Tankard Reist was one in which she was “outed” as a villain, one in which her brand of feminism was explicitly declared “not real”. But I don’t think Tankard Reist is a villain. And while I don’t subscribe to her world view, I also think she genuinely believes her work is, as she put it when we spoke, ”pro-woman and pro-girl”.

While the Sun Herald went the other way in their attempt to get people to buy the paper and open the magazine, I’d like to give people – or at least the people I was writing the article for – more credit than Tankard Reist’s detractors do. I didn’t want to explicitly say if Melinda was “good” or “bad”. I wanted to let people make up their own minds.

So, if you are “anti-raunch, anti-porn and pro-life”, you’ll probably think she’s pretty awesome. If you’re not (like me), you’ll probably think that’s not the kind of feminism you want to be involved in.

But hopefully you’ll also decide that the way to win that battle is to come up with better, more accurate and “stickier” ideas. As Eva Cox says: “Those who don’t want feminism to be co-opted … need to do some thinking about what direction they want to take it in instead.”

You can read the whole thing here.

Related: How to be a feminist intellectual (or a public thinker of any kind
The problem with pop feminism: why Emily Gould is right
My feminist agenda: what’s yours?

Elsewhere: Who’s afraid of Melinda Tankard Reist?

A few weeks ago, the best thing that has ever happened in my life happened to me: I sold my book. To a publisher I joked about to my nearest and dearest towards the end of the proposal process in the same way I might joke about going out on a date with, I don’t know, George Clooney.

That is to say, something that would be totally awesome if it happened, but is so awesome that you don’t ever actually expect it to happen.

Fortunately, I am sufficiently prone to vocalising my anxiety that most people I’m friends with were fully aware of exactly how much work went into getting to that point. But from an outsider’s perspective, I’m conscious that it might have looked like something that happened as if by magic. Like George Clooney (let’s just go with the celebrity analogy here) happened to stumble upon this blog, or heard about the project I was working on, called me up and said, “Rachel Hills, you are amazing. Please may I publish your book?”

But, no. That is not how it happened at all.

I want to point this out because I think that we creative-slash-thinky types are often seduced by the idea that if we’re good enough – sufficiently pithy, sufficiently talented, if our ideas are the “best” – people will pick up on that and reward us accordingly. A record company exec will hear us singing to ourselves at the mall and sign us up. An editor will stumble across our blog and ask us to write a column for them. We’ll write a thesis so groundbreaking that it won’t just enter the academic lexicon; it’ll become part of popular culture to boot.

And sometimes that does happen, I guess. But most of the time, getting what you want – especially if “what you want” is something really juicy – means pulling out all stops. And for most people (for me, at least) pulling out all stops requires being honest about what you want.

It means standing up and acknowledging – at least to yourself, if not to other people – “hey, I really want that juicy thing and I’m not ashamed to admit it.”

I bring this up because – and it’s the whole reason I’m writing this post, really – I feel like it’s somewhat uncool to admit that you want juicy things, or at least that you want them in a way that would see you actively go after them.

I don’t know if it’s a “woman thing”, an “Australian thing”, a belief that if talent is innate then trying is crass, or something else entirely. But what I do know is that if you deny your ambitions; if you hold back or downsize them or just hope that they’ll come true without you having to do anything much, they won’t come true. You’re short changing yourself.

It can be scary to want big things. It puts you at risk of failure, for one: writing a great book, making a great record, creating a product that genuinely serves a need, running that activist campaign that actually succeeds in changing public policy or opinion are hard things to achieve. It also tends to take longer than we’d like - it can feel like chipping away at a mountain with a small hammer.

It can also make you feel like an egotist: who are you to deserve to want something juicy?

I felt kind of preposterous wanting to sell my book not in the country where I was known (Australia), but in a country where I was as good as unknown (the United States) – but where I thought my ideas would have the best chance of travelling. I was well aware that my plans may not work out.

Many people along the way told me as much: that I was fighting an uphill battle, that as a non-American author I would have to work twice as hard to get my book picked up, that it would be a difficult sell. And all along the way, I had to fight my ego and desire for affirmation; that part of me that was tired of training (that is, writing) and wanted to play ball (that is, get the damn thing published), just so I could say that I had and I could.

As it happened, it wasn’t a difficult sell: in part, because I was fortunate enough to land an agent whose hopes for my book were as grand as my own, and who knew editors who felt similarly. But also because I’d put in the ground work to get her - learning the field, perfecting my ideas, filling the holes, rewriting and rewriting, asking people who knew what they were doing for advice.

Maybe all this is moot. I haven’t, after all, written the book of my dream yet. There are still many more parts of the mountain to be chipped away, many more places in which I could go wrong (or just not get it quite right). I have to finish writing the thing, for one. Then there’s the relentless promotion you have to do in order to get people to read it. And even then, I can’t guarantee it will connect with people.

She who tries doesn’t always “win”: chance, timing, privilege and learning the system all play their role - often a big one. But you’ve got a hell of better chance of achieving the things you dream of if you own up to your dreams and go after them, than if you just sit back and hope things will work out for the best.

I’ll leave you with a quote from Steve Jobs, via Sarah Wilson:

Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you. And you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use. Once you learn that, you’ll never be the same again.

Image credit: Sweet on Veg

Related: Why hiring a writing coach was the best $240 I ever spent
Seven enviable lines: advice for freelance writers

Elsewhere: On failure and the contradiction of beauty (The Beheld)
Making your writing a success: advice from John Gray (Time to Write)
Poke life and something will always pop out the other side (Sarah Wilson)