Dissatisfaction with the culture of male hysteria

I'll be attending a Pussy Riot fundraiser on Sunday April 22nd at Shacklewell Arms in East London, to give a small talk on punk, feminism, politics and protest. The line-up is still in progress, but bands confirmed so far include Viv Albertine, Zoetrope, Female Band, New Noveta and Wars. Come watch me blush my way through, in the name of solidarity and grrrl activism. I'll be on stage at 4.30 pm.

"When I look at my daughter’s face, I know I flew in the face of tradition and culture. She’s an extension of my radical progressive politics. Her birth was outside the norm"

The May edition of DIVA Magazine is out today, and features my investigative article on lezsploitation in UK TV. It also contains my interview with poet and activist Staceyann Chin, on the politics of sex, feminism, the journey towards pregnancy and single-parenting for lesbians. Aging and motherhood are big topics for me at the moment, and as I navigate those things, I find myself reaching out for older, wiser dykes who have traveled/are traveling those roads and can report back with compass and maps. Talking with Chin was important and rewarding in that respect; she makes aging and motherhood look sexy, rewarding and radical.

"And god help you if you are an ugly girl/'course too pretty is also your doom/'cause everyone harbors a secret hatred for the prettiest girl in the room"

I can understand why any real discussion on the politics of beauty raised in Samantha Brick's Daily Mail article is being undermined under a tide of ridicule; women openly admitting confidence of this magnitude is considered an ugly thing, an exercise in vanity rather than an observation on women's internalized misogyny, and the Mail is renowned for baiting readers with terrible writers and right-wing rhetoric. But whether we like it or not, Brick is right: women can be the worst haterz.

Girls are trained to be deeply judgmental, of themselves and each other. Society teaches us to internalize rules about body and beauty and behaviour, and to enforce these ideas in competitive, violent and self-destructive ways. Women are rarely encouraged to truly support each other, and being bold enough to claim yr a victim of prettiness is massively taboo because it destabilizes the idea that women are  rewarded (in any true, meaningful or lasting way) for being pretty. We are socialized to strive for beauty, to pluck, starve, bleach and surgically modify our way to beauty, but never own it. Confronting the ways women punish each other - for being too pretty or not pretty enough - is uncomfortable, because it means acknowledging our part in propping up patriarchy, but the issue of the Mean Girls/Dawn Wiener syndrome is a conversational we need to have, preferably in more radical and progressive spheres than the pages of the Daily Mail.

I stopped talking an hour ago

Deborah M Withers' 'Women's liberation, relationships and the 'vicinity of trauma' is essential reading for anyone who organizes, participates in or is connected to feminist activism. I'd really like to see this conversation expanded to a point where the issues she addresses - the dis/function of trauma in feminist spaces, silencing in group activities, inchoate personal/collective voices and invisible/inarticulated languages of inter-personal oppression - can be properly confronted, and strategies for evolving the WLM out of these traps can be considered and implemented.

Withers takes the 70s women's lib movement (specifically Bristol-based groups) as a jump-off point, but I was struck by how the verbal accounts of those women who felt marginalized and silenced in supposedly safe spaces could just as easily be women of today, me even, speaking about their experiences in feminist and homosocial spheres.

Take a minute to sign up (if yr not already an Academia.edu member), and grab the paper, for free, here.

I ate the meklah fruit, I fell in love with blues

My Q+A with Cat and Stas of rad Sub Pop duo THEEsatisfaction is out now, in the April edition of Diva magazine. We talked about recreating samples, the (unspoken) power of instrumentals (and slang), hip hop rebellion, and making music "travel". THEE are crazy talented, and also the first out black queer female outfit to be signed to Sub Pop. I've been hyping/hearting them for some time (here and here).

 

Long, supine upon the bank, his gaze is fixed on his own eyes, twin stars

I got sick of seeing all those 'ROCK IS DEAD aka where have all the men gone?' articles in January, so I wrote about how awesome rock in 2011 sounded to me.

Take a lathe, and scrape all the glitter off

I saw this in Liberty, just before Christmas. How do girls know what they really want when we grow up in a world that force feeds them aspirations before they've hit puberty? It made me think about the wild yearning power of Courtney Love's early journals, and about how we use diaries to write our futures, how they are spell books, a place where we pour out our secrets and desires.  I couldn't see a target age group sticker on this creepy little life-planner, but the bold, bright font colours look like crack for the pre-school crowd. I wanna go back and slip queer-feminist zines inside each copy.

Mansplained

"Mansplaining is such a fantastically accurate term for an all-too-common phenomenon. However, it is often controversial. This is mostly because it calls out men for a behavior they often don’t know they’re doing, and this in turn raises the defensive hackles. Mansplaining is generally defined as any instance in which a man explains a subject to a woman despite that woman’s personal experience with said subject or proven expertise in that subject."

via http://www.lawsonry.com/891-look-kitten-i-am-too-a-feminist-fauxminism-and-men/

Don't forget to douche!

Taken from a 1971 edition of a well-known, mainstream women's magazine that was still in print up until this year. Suspect chick lit, pro-domestic violence editorials, tragi-comic slimming ads, vagina deodorant and procreation propaganda. Thank fuck for the second wave, eh?

"I love you, Lisa, I love you," Richard said. "No," she whispered, but without conviction.

"I've talked to a friend who is experienced with girls and he says that she isn't the only one and that some girls are brought up by silly mothers who didn't fancy sex themselves and influence their daughters to be afraid of it, too"

Bubble boobs.

Pauline Black interview

The parallels between Thatcher's Britain and the violent unrest that David Cameron's government have inspired are not lost on Black. “2Tone got together was to address social pressures and inequality and I see no reason to stop doing that now we're older”.

The legendary Pauline Black, lead vocalist of The Selector and first lady of 2Tone, on Black By Design, her just-released autobiography, conscious reggae, losing Amy Winehouse and Poly Styrene, the origins of ska and its women, and the London riots. Read through to the end for her articulate David Starkey smack-down. Rude gyals fi life.

http://www.tourdates.co.uk/londontourdates/issue-076/2011/09/01/2620-pauline-black-black-is-back

She can't feel, she's no queen

I was invited to write a little something for the Evening Standard this week on PJH's Mercury win. Here's the original draft, which they tweaked a little:

Let England Shake is an utterly worthy record, and recognizing Harvey’s continuing ability to break ground is important, but its difficult not to feel a twinge of regret for some of the younger, equally deserving debuts who were eclipsed, perhaps unfairly, by PJ’s established legend. Her undeniably innovative repertoire has had the downside of creating a unwitting, token female icon, the kind of one-in one-out role the male-dominated, white indie music world reserves for a handful of talented women in each rock generation (Janis, Patti, Chrissie). She’s been elevated by the music press as the ultimate measure and go-to comparison for many a fledgling female artist with a guitar - an incredibly reductive situation that also serves to undermine some of her own success as feminist role model - and this rather complex privilege makes Harvey’s win a complicated one, even more so given the serious and ongoing lack of female Mercury Prize winners and nominees (4 out of 12 this year), an issue we’re addressing at Wears The Trousers with our all-female Venus Prize.

***

I'm a huge fan of PJH, despite her shaky non/feminist stance (repetoire rich with feminist discourse whilst publicly distancing herself from the F word - whether as an ultimately failed attempt at preserving  herself from pigeonholing/stigma in the boyindierockworld or through what she once described as a genuine ignorance about the radical *sigh* notion of gender equality) but I know a bunch of successful female artists - women I've interviewed in some cases - who had to fight off PJ comparisons early on in their careers. Harvey's contributions to music and feminism are redoubtable, but the fact remains that boy rockers are regularly cast as gifted son-and-heirs of their hallowed male predecessors (Dylan, Page, Cobain et al), whilst a whole generation of women who have arrived after Harvey's archetype, even ones who sounds NOTHING LIKE HER, are held up to her legend and denounced as wanting.

This kind of strategy maintains the hegemony; it supports the fallacy that talented males outnumber talented females in indie rock's sphere of influence, and further. Its not about PJ's ineffectiveness as an artist and/or role model (plenty of girls picked up Fenders after Dry) - its about how the old boy network position her as a do-not-pass-go measure, a bad-girl Eve who ate the apple and did something that no other rocker girl to come will ever surpass.

Womanthology - all-female comix anthology

Play like a girl

"I grew up in a small, all-white Midwestern town and the “United States of America” that I was being taught about in school – the one in which we all believed in equality, freedom and justice for all, the one where Americans were the good guys and everybody in the world  loved us – was essentially reflected back to me except for some seemingly small inconsistencies.  Learning that black people had somehow been excluded from the equation did not make sense to me, and I couldn’t make that fit in to who I thought ‘we’ were. Also, when I was twelve, a teacher gave me John Hersey’s book Hiroshima to read for extra credit. Learning that our country had used such a horrible weapon on civilians also seemed incomprehensible to me. I really did believe in the ideal version of America that was presented to me in school. At the time I concluded that something had gone wrong somewhere, and because the school system was the thing right in front of me I decided the problem lay there. I could see that we did not educate according to democratic principles and I thought that if we did do that we would create a truly democratic country, the place where everyone really did have equal opportunity for participation and growth. That was before I understood that the school system was simply supporting the economic system, which is in no way democratic"


http://www.wearsthetrousers.com/2011/08/wii-11-ann-hackler/

Mad inspiring interview with Ann Hackler, co-founder of The Institute For The Musical Arts in Massachusetts, a teaching, performing and recording facility dedicated to supporting girls and women in music and music-related business. 25 years of alternative education and successful DIY music feminism. RAD. 

Scrub you clean/now you forget what you mean

Major double take in the 'beauty' aisle at Richmond House of Frasier this morning. Little pink tubs of fat girl hate on sale via Bliss, a spa-turned-product line based in NYC. According to their site, they also peddle fat shame products such as the fatgirlslim treatment kit.

In my fantasy, a gaggle of beautiful rad fatties storm the Bliss offices/spas and wash their little empire away in an orgy of wild, pink bubble soaked destruction.

Kate Harding, debunking the criminal sham that is the BMI index 

Rihanna and the rise of raunch pop

"I hate that my four year old's favourite song is S&M. At home, we've banned the music channels because of what they're putting out at any time of day, but that doesn't stop us hearing the full uncensored version at, to give a few recent examples, an ice skating rink during half term, a holiday park disco - for kids and numerous shops. This stuff is corrosive. The message it sends about what women are and what they are for is deeply harmful."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2011/may/12/rihanna-raunch-pop

Odd Future - "I am a fucking unicorn and you're not gonna tell me that I'm fucking not"

I think comparing Odd Future to Insane Clown Posse is both fitting and reductive. This article by Mehan Jayasuriya makes solid points on how difficult it is to place Tyler et al in a context of lineage (gross out punk? horrorxcore hip hop? not-yet formed self-perpetuated future genre?) and how doing so can be disruptive, and have the potential to reveal strains of cultural bias in music criticism. I think Caroline Ryder of LA Weekly got close to it when she said the crew are operating under "influences they don't even know they have yet", which I think is true for a number of artists/bands/genres these days.

The ICP mention reminded me of Jon Ronson's interview with the evangelist juggalos from last year, which is well worth checking out if you haven't already.

Shad - 'Keep Shining'

Because I blogged about how good the track was when the LP dropped and now there's an equally dope video to accompany it.

Grrrl talk

This Winter = rad coalescing of femalecentric community magic. Helping out at Ladyfest 10 (go get yr tix!), curating Wears The Trousers's first zine (not to be confused with our propa print editions, but cut-n-paste grrreat nonetheless. Links to follow!), working on proposals for 'women in hip hop' book chapter, helping to plan major cool, international  woman-celebrating events for next Spring - it all feels very fun and promising and important, and especially needed in this crazy Coalition era of economic doom and anxiety about the future.

So, here's my critique of Sara Marcus's book on riot grrrl (Be sure to peep the link to Alison Woolfe's piece of mind) and a review of The Dogbones debut for fans of growly grrrl vox and Queen Adreena-styled UK grunge revival.

Internation Women's Day

Today, I'm sparkly eyed aware of all the great, great feminists - in both my own extended circle of family, and the wider global homespace, boy, girl, past, present, still to come - who plant those little seeds of revolution in the turf each day, who cry out proudly or quietly destabilize the patriarchal dynamic with small, covert acts of notebook/sticker action. My heart beat quickens when I see/hear/listen/read/watch/take part in these small&enormous acts of fucking CHANGE and yeah, i do have my Much Finer moments, but mostly I believe we can get this thing Done.

Pertinent UK events for yr body n spirit:

http://www.wrc.org.uk/news/iwd_page.aspx#myLink

I think I feel the flush of super list coming on. Until then, link yourself silly.

www.internationalwomensday.com

http://www.feministing.com/

http://www.thefword.org.uk/

http://www.pinkstinks.co.uk/

http://www.subtextmagazine.co.uk/

http://www.reclaimthenight.org/

http://www.millionwomenrise.com/

http://refuge.org.uk/

http://remember-who-u-are.blogspot.com/

If the feminist revolution had a soundtrack, you'd be reading about it here: www.wearsthetrousers.com

RIP Lucille Clifton

Lucille Clifton passed away on the 13th of this month. If you weren't familiar with her work, start with the gems below and follow on.

Her words rattle my bones like prayer beads wrapped around strong hands.