Gauntlet

lacontessa: Carole Lombard

Sun, 22 Nov 2009 21:36:27 +0000

Carole Lombard

"The journalist wanted to know if perhaps menstruation was kept hidden just because it’s private,..."

Sun, 22 Nov 2009 20:52:56 +0000

“The journalist wanted to know if perhaps menstruation was kept hidden just because it’s private, rather than shameful. I asked her to think about the ways our society structures work that compel us to keep it private and secret. For instance, how easily can you find menstrual products in your school or workplace when you need them? (There’s a tampon dispenser in the women’s room in my campus building, but the sign has read EMTY for the all the years I’ve worked there.) I also spoke with her about a terrific study by Tomi-Ann Roberts and her colleagues about attitudes toward menstruation, in which a research confederate dropped a hair clip in one scenario and a tampon in another. Dropping the tampon led the research participants to offer lower evaluations of the confederate’s competence and decreased liking for her; they even displayed a mild tendency to avoid sitting close to her. This suggests that women conceal menstruation for good reason – to avoid appearing disabled.”

- Is Menstruation a Disability? | Society for Menstrual Cycle Research (via notemily)

lacontessa: via

Sun, 22 Nov 2009 17:23:37 +0000

lacontessa:

via

Liz Phair - H.W.C.

Sun, 22 Nov 2009 14:24:00 +0000

Liz Phair - H.W.C.

7 popular chick flicks that secretly hate women

Sun, 22 Nov 2009 12:26:40 +0000

rachelhills:

He’s Just Not That Into You seems like a glaring omission here, but other than that, a fun article.

"In the 21st century, thin equals success: posh clothes shops don’t make big sizes; rich footballers..."

Sun, 22 Nov 2009 11:54:03 +0000

“In the 21st century, thin equals success: posh clothes shops don’t make big sizes; rich footballers marry skinny birds. And fat is no longer just a feminine issue. These days men, worried about the moobs, are every bit as likely to refuse the bread at lunch as their wives. The days of the porky chief executive with his “chauffeur chub” and long lunches are gone; these days moguls are lean, mean and up at 6am to work out with their personal trainers. It is the poor, with their takeaway buckets of fried chicken and cheap processed stodge, who are fat.”

- Eleanor Mills

"Now that Belle has outed herself, I wonder why it remains so difficult for people — or indeed the..."

Sun, 22 Nov 2009 11:12:32 +0000

“

Now that Belle has outed herself, I wonder why it remains so difficult for people — or indeed the law — to understand that not all prostitutes conform to the stereotype of the abused, trafficked, addicted victim. Of course such women exist in vast, shaming and regrettable numbers. But to claim, as so many commentators did last week, that this is the only version of prostitution that exists seems to me extraordinarily naive.

The fact that I don’t wear a grubby mac or a trilby with a press card in it and don’t spend my evenings going through your bins doesn’t mean I’m not a journalist — only that I’m not one kind of journalist. The fact that Susan Boyle isn’t Beyoncé doesn’t mean she isn’t a singer. Nice estate agents must exist; you do (not often, admittedly) come across a human-seeming traffic warden or member of parliament. So why maintain that there categorically cannot exist a single former prostitute who a) doesn’t think she did anything morally heinous and b) never got assaulted?

”

- India Knight

"Cohabitation is gradually gaining more recognition in English law and without much debate. Recently,..."

Sun, 22 Nov 2009 11:05:00 +0000

“Cohabitation is gradually gaining more recognition in English law and without much debate. Recently, special laws for cohabitants, which would treat them like married couples on separation or death, have been proposed by the Law Commission and, in a private bill, by the Liberal Democrat peer Lord Lester. This is dangerous. Despite the no doubt good intentions, cohabitation law retards the emancipation of women, degrades relationships, takes away choice and would extend an already unsatisfactory maintenance law for married couples to another group. Women do not need and ought not to require to be kept by men (and vice versa) after their relationship has come to an end. Instead, we should all have the right to live together without having a legal structure imposed without our consent or contract to that effect.”

- Ruth Deech - professor of law at Gresham College, London, and a crossbench peer, writes in The Observer today.

Inside the mind of a female suicide bomber

Sun, 22 Nov 2009 10:54:24 +0000

Inside the mind of a female suicide bomber:

For Baida, as for many Iraqi suicide bombers, violent insurgency was the family business. It was shortly after the American invasion that her brothers began to manufacture IEDs. One was killed when his handiwork exploded as he was concealing it. She had cousins who were also insurgents. While they were paid for their work, she said, she was herself motivated mainly by revenge. Later it would be revenge for the deaths of her father and four brothers in what she said was a joint American-Iraqi raid on their home, but at first it was more general. She told me she watched the Americans shoot a neighbour in 2005, and she replayed the image over and over in her mind: “I saw him running toward them, and then they shot him in the neck. I still see him. I still remember how he fell when the Americans shot him, and I saw him clawing on the ground in the dust before his soul left his body. After that I began to help with making the improvised explosive devices.”

suckmyleftone: L7: “Shove”

Sun, 22 Nov 2009 09:38:52 +0000

suckmyleftone:

L7: “Shove”

Kate Moss has been criticised this week for telling an interviewer that one of her mottoes is...

Sat, 21 Nov 2009 21:04:00 +0000

Kate Moss has been criticised this week for telling an interviewer that one of her mottoes is ‘Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels’. The Guardian reports today that the motto is popular on pro-anorexia websites.
While I agree that the motto itself is appalling, I think the focus placed on the effect Moss’s comment could have on young girls is little more than hypocritical media outrage. Our entire culture is saturated with fat hate and an obsession with dieting, calorie counting and weight loss. The idea that food is the enemy, rather than a source of nourishment and pleasure, is repeatedly pushed on women by the same media publications that are now attacking Kate Moss. Her struggles with food and body image mirror those of thousands of women, and whether or not teenage girls paid any attention to her comment, they will not be able to avoid the government’s anti-fat TV campaigns, or the adult women in their lives discussing how guilty they feel for eating a piece of chocolate cake, or the calorie labels on every damn food item, or the beautiful, healthy woman in the Special K ad studiously avoiding the biscuit jar so she can earn the right to have fun in a swimsuit, or Cosmo’s latest miracle diet, or Gok bloody Wan, or 10 Years Younger, or any other shitty piece of media production based on the almost universally accepted idea that women’s bodies exist to be looked at, to be disguised, diminished and displayed, rather than lived in and enjoyed as the tools that can allow us to experience so much.

Kate Moss is herself a victim of this fiercely misogynistic culture - even if she has learnt to play it to her own financial advantage - and when it comes to making girls feel so hopeless and worthless that they want to starve themselves into oblivion, her comment is but a drop in the ocean.

From The F Word (Emphasis mine)

oldhollywood: Jeanne Moreau as Catherine in Jules & Jim...

Sat, 21 Nov 2009 18:35:49 +0000

oldhollywood:

Jeanne Moreau as Catherine in Jules & Jim (1962, dir. Francois Truffaut)

Although the film is named for the men, its animating force is Catherine, a creature both utterly timeless (Jules and Jim first see her visage in a photo of a Greek statue) and forever changing: at different points, she plays the roles of Charlie Chaplin and street tough, vamp, and doting mother. Passionate and iconoclastic, she is, in fact, the only true free spirit among them. Just as the men put their talent into their art, so she puts her genius into living.

On paper, the mercurial Catherine seems an implausibly grandiose conception, a woman both giddy and tragic, protofeminist and male-dominated, driven by Eros and Thanatos, love and death. But as played by Jeanne Moreau, a pop-eyed siren with the ferocity of Bette Davis and the kitty-cat wiles of Tuesday Weld, Catherine becomes one of the modern movies’ triumphant characterizations—the anima as autocrat. Whether playing with vitriol or jumping into the Seine, she elevates capriciousness to an existential principle. When Jim says he understands her, she replies, “I don’t want to be understood.” And this is absolutely true.

-John Powers, On Jules & Jim

Girl, 10, tasered by police with mother's permission

Sat, 21 Nov 2009 18:30:26 +0000

Girl, 10, tasered by police with mother's permission

"A bad novel is both an aesthetic and ethical affront to its readers, because it traduces reality,..."

Sat, 21 Nov 2009 17:42:46 +0000

“A bad novel is both an aesthetic and ethical affront to its readers, because it traduces reality, and does indeed make you hunger for a kind of writing that seems to speak truth directly. But I also feel, as someone who just finished a book of more or less lyrical essays, that underneath some of these high-minded objections, and complementary to them, there is another, deeper, psychological motivation, about which it is more difficult to be honest. In “The Modern Essay” Virginia Woolf is more astute on the subject, and far more frank. “There is no room for the impurities of literature in an essay,” she writes. “The essay must be pure – pure like water or pure like wine, but pure from dullness, deadness, and deposits of extraneous matter.” Well, yes, that’s just it. An essay, she writes, “can be polished till every atom of its surface shines” – yes, that’s it, again. There is a certain kind of writer – quite often male but by no means exclusively so – who has a fundamental hunger for purity, and for perfection, and this type will always hold the essay form in high esteem. Because essays hold out the possibility of something like perfection.”

- Zadie Smith on the rise of the essay.

"Even for him [I assume she means Chris Brown], like, he knows now that he’s never going to do..."

Sat, 21 Nov 2009 17:39:39 +0000

“Even for him [I assume she means Chris Brown], like, he knows now that he’s never going to do that again. And now, young girls also, they learn from it, and I really hope young men can learn from it. Even more than the girls, the men really need to learn from it. Because everyone’s focusing on the women, but the problem isn’t the women.”

- Rihanna

"Why is sex work necessarily more degrading than working at McDonalds, or a Dunkin Donuts for that..."

Sat, 21 Nov 2009 16:58:53 +0000

“

Why is sex work necessarily more degrading than working at McDonalds, or a Dunkin Donuts for that matter? Both involve the sale of ones body, and labour power to a certain degree. Both involve not being adequately compensated vis a vis profits versus wage, yet pornography is deemed horribly degrading. I submit that this because womens sexuality is only culturally acceptable when it is virginal in nature. Good girls, or authentic women don’t actually enjoy performing sex acts, or participating in any form of voyeurism. Certainly there are women working in the porn industry that are not happy about that choice but not all women feel that way. If you ask Walmart workers, I some will tell you that they are not happy working there either.

For us to accept this as completely degrading to women, we must ignore those in the sex trade industry who unequivocally state that they perform this labour because they enjoy it, and therefore if we truly feel that it is necessary to respect women, we should validate their experiences and accept their explanations about their labour. Is it still demeaning if the one performing does not feel demeaned? By telling sex trade workers that they are uniquely oppressed are we not guilty of seeking to discipline their bodies in the same manner that we accuse others of doing? Are we not creating them as other?

”

- via Womanist Musings (via ihatethismess) (via igather)

I think there is also an element of classism: if mid-to-upper-class women were to admit that Mickey D’s and maid service are just as degrading, they have to admit that it’s something they’re a part of. If McD’s is just as degrading, it’s degrading because the pay is such shit and the working conditions are so bad. If it’s degrading in that way, it’s because higher-class people don’t care enough to make it any better (because they are the ones with the power to do so). Therefore, if McD’s is just as degrading as sex work, it’s because of them.

So, of course, sex work is just a super special kind of degrading low-pay use-of-body work. Because class privileged women don’t typically hire female prostitutes. But they do hire maid service or buy something at Starbucks or stay in a hotel or use a public bathroom or use their electricity and indoor plumbing systems or stay in a man-built structure period … and so on …

(via amandaw)

(via thecurvature)

lacontessa: photo by Nina Leen via

Sat, 21 Nov 2009 16:19:48 +0000

lacontessa:

photo by Nina Leen

via

(via lacontessa)

Sat, 21 Nov 2009 16:05:37 +0000

(via lacontessa)

IMPORTANT MEMORY:

Sat, 21 Nov 2009 15:42:45 +0000

katiecoyle:

Alice Yorke, age 15, in a history class debate about abortion being dominated by the insufferable young man who would later be our valedictorian, with only a few seconds left on the clock, whips out a coat hanger as a shock tactic, making everyone in the room (except for her friends, who knew this was coming and in some cases [mine] skipped lunch to watch) extremely uncomfortable.

lacontessa: Robert Maguire, The Damned Lovely

Sat, 21 Nov 2009 14:03:24 +0000

lacontessa:

Robert Maguire, The Damned Lovely