[In case it needs to be said: I don't agree with every word of everything I link to. --L.]
- Invisible female labor
- That fashion is pleasurable for many women is why it’s considered “frivolous”, due to the long-standing cultural belief that if a woman is feeling pleasure, something must have gone wrong. So I look to the cultural pressure to look good to explain why women are stuck in this catch-22, where they’re supposed to shop and pull themselves together, but they’re shamed if they enjoy it. If there was nothing but pleasure and shame in it, a lot more women would give it up, I think. That women insist on taking pleasure in clothes shopping while being shamed over it is admirable. It’s not like the world’s greatest act of bravery to continue applying lipstick after a man snits at you that he prefers “natural” beauty, but it does take self-assurance. (Or, if you want to move up a level of bitch, echo Dolly Parton in “Steel Magnolias”: “There is no such thing as natural beauty.") I admire the courage of women who say no to beauty standards, but I also admire the women who decide to take audacious pleasure in femininity. Both are rejections of the restraints of femininity, one of the standards themselves, and one of the taboos against women showing their work or taking too much pleasure in it.
I want to add an observation Marc made when I told him about this survey. He noted that it was weird not to research men’s shopping habits, and he felt like if you did, you’d find that a shocking amount of men’s time is spent shopping—especially since they included window shopping. Men’s shopping, he pointed out, is imagined as interesting and useful and not even really shopping in our culture. Whereas shoe buying is considered frivolous, reading tech blogs all day as they wank off about this new consumer product or that isn’t treated as evidence that someone is a bimbo. On the contrary, you’re considered smart for being able to understand all that shit…
- Bamboo Review: Kick-Ass
- There were two things I knew coming out of the movie “Kick-Ass”: that I loved it, and that it was going to be one of those movies that really divides people. Do not see it if ultra-violence pisses you off. Do not see this movie if little girls with foul mouths piss you off. I’d say don’t see this movie if Nicholas Cage pisses you off, except he usually pisses me off, but he was perfect in this movie.
But if all these things merely make you uncomfortable, but you can see why they’re entertaining, see this movie. It’s perfect for you. It treads the line between entertaining the fuck out of you with the off-the-hook violence, and making you question how fucked up it is to enjoy these things.
- The center and the margins, and butt hurtness
- …there’s two ways to define a phenomenon like “mansplaining” or “Dude Rock”, or anything at all. There’s defining it by the ideal and defining it by its borders. Call the first one the idealistic, like the Platonic ideal, and the latter legalistic. Most people tend to work with both methods, but when butt hurtness erupts, it’s because people start demanding that a idealistic definition be held to legalistic standards. [...]
Defining from the center is a really excellent way for people who’ve had the experience of being marginalized to name the problem. Which is why so many women went nuts for Silvana’s post about sexism in music, and the boringness of what she deemed “Dude Rock”. It was such a relief to have this problem named. [...]
Dude Rock—it’s hard to define by a sound, but you know it when you see it. It crosses genres. But if you define it from the center, you have a good idea of what’s going on—their shows will mostly be male, and female intelligence will not be taken seriously in that space. [...]
The problem is that legalistic margin-trolling is often used not as a fun sport, but as a way to intimidate women out of talking about their experiences with sexism and questioning male privilege. Some kinds of butt hurtness are purely innocent and just nit-picking legalistic internet noise. But a lot of it is sexism repackaged as “objectivity” [...] there’s a real danger in claiming that a definition only counts if you can define it by the margins, where of course subjectivity is so much in play that anyone can say, “Nuh-uh!” It serves as a silencing mechanism.
- Shades of Grey, Colour, and Visual Perception
- As a person with visual impairments, I found this book fascinating and intriguing and it generated all kinds of food for thought as I considered the way I interact with society and the way in which things are definitely tailored in particular ways for the benefits of particular people. For me, it was a jarring reminder that we become trapped in systems which feel perfectly normal until they are viewed from the outside, and then we see how very harmful they really are.
The Link(s): Mon, Apr 19th, 10am by Lee Salazar, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. Terms and conditions beyond the scope of this license may be available at leesalazar.com.