by | February 9, 2015 · 10:57 am

Feminist or Alone: A Valentine’s Day Drinking Game

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From the ages of 11 through 23 I was sick every year on Valentine’s Day. “Allergic to love” was a common theme in the emo anthems that hugged my cassette player on the 7-minute drive from home to school, and it is also a phrase that I believed accurately described me. I was glad to miss out on mandatory classroom Valentine’s Day cards and pink shit. I was glad to miss out on everyone else’s flower deliveries. Last week someone asked me if I had ever been in love, and I just laughed and laughed and they were quiet. “Invented by Hallmark,” “sexist capitalist bullshit,” “just another day whatever,” “I mean how are we defining love anyway.” I celebrated the last few Valentine’s Days on a “self-love” tip, which consisted of overcooking steak and watching Beyoncé videos with a whole bottle of Pinot Noir. Valentine’s Day makes me sick, and not just because I’m a feminist, and not just because I’m alone.

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Bey don’t know about this life.

Drink when you check the “single” box. Drink when that makes you feel a way. Drink when Beyoncé says you and means you. Drink when you’re not the girl in the Kay Jewelers commercial. Continue reading →

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by | February 7, 2015 · 9:00 am

Rah! Rah! Roundup

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Finally, a Google Chrome app that “changes the word ‘man’ to something more appropriate”! And it’s called, you guessed it, Not All Men.

As you probably heard, since for some reason this news story turned everyone on social media into a total snark, Harper Lee will be publishing a second novel. Go Set a Watchman is a sequel to To Kill a Mockingbird, although Lee wrote Watchman first. And okay, okay, some of those posts were pretty funny, like this one that riffs on that Kanye-and-Paul-McCartney joke from a few weeks ago:

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by | February 6, 2015 · 11:51 am

Valentine’s Day Is for Everybody

I think Valentine’s Day is a shitty holiday for lovers. I think it’s an even shittier holiday for people who are in between lovers, or don’t want lovers, or aren’t getting along with their lovers. I mean, it’s not that I’ve never had a really romantic Valentine’s Day. One year my husband and I lit some candles and listened to some accordion music and ate some pastries and wondered, “Could this evening get any more romantic?” And then this happened:

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Obviously the answer was “yes.”

But that incredibly romantic evening (there were FOUR weddings, you guys) was the exception that proves the rule. I’m in love, but I know that love is 1) a brutal trick played on us by our selfish genes to get us to reproduce and 2) destined to end in tears (don’t forget the funeral.) If you’re in love and happy, don’t go to a goddamn restaurant and let everyone watch you share a single noodle. Keep your head down and hope the evil spirits haven’t noticed you yet. At the same time I really love Valentine’s Day. I really love holidays in general, and also Valentine’s Day has the #1 best holiday color scheme. Red and pink and white! Overlaid by doilies! Dipped in chocolate! Coated with sugar! Drenched in glue! Brittle with glitter! Trapped on the sidewalk under an inch of ice and a dusting of snow! So sugary. So bloody. So tacky. So superfemme. Continue reading →

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by | February 5, 2015 · 1:07 pm

The Feminist Bachelor Recap, Episode 5: Shit-Talking & Storytelling

This week’s Bach brought Farmer Chris and his clan of ever-more-uniformly blonde ladiesssssttttthhh to Santa Fe, New Mexico. Chris talks up this wonderful city while wearing a chic leather jacket, and one nondescript blonde thinks she is going to actual Mexico, ’cause, you know, girls are dumb.

Welcome to Mexico

The first date is a one-on-one with Cruise Ship Singer Carly, and the date card reads, “Let’s come together.” I know what you’re thinking—simultaneous orgasms with Farmer Chris = every womyn’s dream date! But Carly puts the accent on “let’s” and pretends all ladylike like she doesn’t know what orgasms are… but not for long. Cue “spiritual music” and Farmer Chris and Carly walking into a room where a woman who identifies as a “love and intimacy mentor,” or “love guru” as Farmer Chris prefers to call her, waits for them on a pile of sensual Southwestern blankets. She burns sage and leads the pair in a chant, and it’s all really vaguely racist and cultural appropriation-nation and gross. She encourages them to like, hold their gross open mouths near one another without kissing, and then they sort of start dry-humping, ewwies all around. And also a totally insane first date, since the “love guru”’s goal is clearly to help couples reconnect. Oh yeah and love guru tells Farmer Chris and Carly to take each other’s clothes off (because clothing is different masks we hide behind you guys) but they’re too nervous and can’t do it (thanks a lot, Eve!). At dinner, Carly tells Chris that her last boyfriend didn’t want to touch her and it made her feel like she isn’t beautiful while I ran downstairs to get my sushi delivery. When I got back, Carly was still crying. (I hear her, because I had the same ex-boyfriend, basically.) Chris says he’s scared his farmer lifestyle isn’t good enough to make someone happy, and Carly assures him he’s wrong. Carly is confident and nice and normal when she’s around Farmer Chris. Which makes me almost like her, except that I have to remember her talking shit about/gender-policing Jillian last week. And then I’m like, oh right I live in the real world and Carly is horrible. Continue reading →

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by | · 9:00 am

In the Shadow of the Father: The Power of the Patriarch in Ginger & Rosa

Based on her previous contribution to feminist cinema, it comes as no surprise that Sally Potter’s latest film delivers a female coming-of-age tale that is deeply personal and deeply political. Ginger & Rosa, which was released in 2012, failed to achieve the kind of attention a film of its caliber deserves. A striking indictment of masculinity, male entitlement, and a treatise on the varying motivations behind political action, Ginger & Rosa tells much more than the story of its two teen protagonists’ ascension to adulthood. The two father figures in the film, one present, one not, frame the story, embodying the Western notion of the “patriarch.” Potter invites us to examine the power of the father figure, the complex relationship women have with the men in their lives, that the power of the father figure is not always evil, but it is always present.

Set in 1962, in the flurry following the bombing of Hiroshima, the film features Ginger (Elle Fanning), a young woman who’s swept up in the Ban the Bomb movement, dragging her best friend Rosa (Alice Englert) along with her. The two, who were born on the same day in the same hospital, embark on what begins as a sweet and intimate friendship. They share baths, cigarettes, dating tips, and straightening irons. The gulf between them is slowly revealed as Ginger becomes more enmeshed in protest movements and Rosa shows herself to be more preoccupied with boys. Continue reading →

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by | February 3, 2015 · 11:39 am

The Gender Politics of Kristy and Mr. Mom: What We Currently Know

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OBJECTIVE: To obtain enough knowledge about the gender politics of the 1995 novel Kristy and Mr. Mom to eliminate major critical lacunae in the fields of a) feminist theory; b) queer theory; c) sociology; d) Baby-Sitters Club studies; e) Michael Keaton studies; f) Mr. Mom studies. This study is particularly timely because of the current prominence of the Oscar-nominated film Birdman, which stars Michael Keaton as a disgruntled actor who can’t live down his success in the 1983 film Mr. Mom.

PROCEDURE: I will review the facts now available to scholars of Mr. Mom studies, and articulate a series of questions and conceptual problems provoked by those facts. I will then attempt to retrieve my copy of Kristy and Mr. Mom, which I may have left in a coffee shop, and use it to answer these questions. If further funding is available, I will procure and screen a copy of the 1983 Michael Keaton film Mr. Mom.

REVIEW OF LITERATURE (WHAT WE CURRENTLY KNOW):

1. Kristy and Mr. Mom was book #81 in Ann M. Martin’s popular Baby-Sitters Club series, published in 1995 by Scholastic Books. Although Martin is listed as the author, the book was ghostwritten by Jahnna Beecham and Malcolm Hillgartner. Continue reading →

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by | February 2, 2015 · 9:00 am

1999

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by | February 1, 2015 · 4:15 pm

Feminist Bookstore Super Bowl Tweets from Portlandia

Great news for feminists headed to Super Bowl bashes tonight: Now you will have something besides booze and puppy chow to keep you company. In Other Words, the real-life feminist bookstore in Portland, Oregon, will be taking over the Portlandia Twitter account and live-tweeting the game (and, I hope, the commercials). Here’s one from last year to give you an idea:

What, exactly, is getting made fun of here?! It might be football; it might be me. All I know is I like being in on the joke.

I’ll be posting some of my favorites below, and you can play along with hashtag #FeministBookstoreSaysWhat. In the meantime, check out this deep-cut Feminist Bookstore video from 2009, back when Portlandia was in its incubation stage as Thunder Ant:

 

*UPDATE* Check out these feminist lolz:

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by | January 31, 2015 · 12:46 pm

Rah! Rah! Roundup

rahrahroundup“…to write poetry and be a poet is to get bombarded with stupidity like you’re invited to be on panels with titles like does poetry matter. […] And of course as a poet you have to react. It’s like being female and listening forever to people say dumb things about who women are and you wonder if you will ever get to simply be.” – Eileen Myles on Dorothea Lasky for Rookie’s Hero Status feature.

“The consistently old Cartesian dichotomy that “some” writers are engaged with the process of ideas (and therefore abstraction and therefore elevated) while “others” are fixated to the realm of the earthly crass and contingently precise: these are clearly marked racialized and gendered divisions” – The Mongrel Coalition Against Gringpo critiques “White Conceptualism” over at Montevidayo.

10600373_10100519813900600_9049692733626719654_nJennifer Tamayo is planning a public cry-in for Ana Mendieta on the last day of Carl Andre’s Dia Beacon retrospective. Continue reading →

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by | January 30, 2015 · 9:00 am

Real-Time Review of Björk’s Vulnicura Upon Initial Listening

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Björk’s new album Vulnicura (co-produced by Arca—who I think is pretty awesome as a solo artist) just came out and I was thinking of doing a review for it, but I didn’t want to do a typical review in the “this album sounds just like so-and-so or that album blah blah blah hear me name-drop galore-athon” way. So I got the idea for the following post from doing something similar for (the now sadly defunct) Kitchen Sink.

Basically, I decided to write whatever came to me as I listened to the album for the first time ever. In doing this, I think I may have written something closer to the actual experience of listening to something vs. thinking about listening to something… or it’s all a fun momentary gimmick. Or both. Whatever, here:
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