tone it down

For the moment, let's turn our focus on the notion of a person being "attention-seeking."  This is the concept we draw on when we sigh "he just wants attention, ignore him", or sneer "shut up, you attention whore."  We might describe Lady Gaga this way, or Louis Spence, or a small child--anyone shrill or grating.  It's a catch-all term of abuse for anyone whose behaviour is outré in a way that people consider otherwise unjustifiable.  This is a term of discipline, meant to evoke shame.

This first started niggling at me when I was seventeen.  My high school's yearbook committee had planned a page devoted to photos of couples kissing (which was dumb), and administrators had excised a photo of a pair of my lesbian classmates from the final product while preserving the rest of the page (which was dumber).

The message was clear: the school didn't see our relationships as valuable or meaningful in the same way as our heterosexual classmates, but rather as obscene. The administrators advanced two arguments in their defense: first, that the young ladies involved would benefit from not having a permanent record of a relationship they might later characterize as a youthful indiscretion (a courtesy not advanced to a straight couple who had vowed on the page that they would be "still together ten years from now" but who had broken up between the taking of the photo and the yearbook printing); and second, that any further debate over the fairness of this decision would distract other students from their important studies.

Naturally, we organized a kiss-in.  That is to say, we called up the local newspaper and tv news and told them that all the high school students would be kissing each other in a variety of gender permutations out on the school lawn one afternoon.  The form of this protest was considered.  It held up as ludicrous the idea that being photographed kissing your girlfriend might be shameful, and demonstrated that failing to value us queers as students was going to be more distracting than just treating us like everybody else.  It referenced the golden era of American protest, and it had a hook to draw in the media (hot teen sex lawn).  We did get a good amount of coverage, and although we had to add our own lesbians to the yearbook that spring, they made damn sure to acknowledge the existence of queer students in the following years.  It was also, incidentally, the first time I ever kissed someone.  A successful protest all around, I would say.

So it was with some dismay that I read a letter in the paper (an early form of online commenting!) the next day, admonishing the editors for deigning to attend the protest, grousing about all the "giggling bisexuals" on the local news, and generally complaining that it was clear that all the protestors wanted was attention.  Well, yeah.

The more I considered it, the more of a mystery it became to me.  Attention seems like such a Maslovian need--would we sigh "ugh, what a food whore" when we see a starving man?  "She's only doing that because she's looking for a sense of security and belonging in a group."  Attention is how we understand ourselves to have a reciprocal social connection with others.  Not being attended to frequently by people in your life fucks with your sense of self.  Ask a homeless man, charged with the task of soliciting permission to survive from every passerby, how dehumanizing a lack of attention can be. 

Then I started looking at whom the epithet was directed--first, children and reality show subjects.  Second, trolls and bullies.  And thirdly, women in the public eye, queers of all stripes, and people of color who complained of institutionalized racism.  People it's not applied to include parents, reality-show creators, the owners of sports franchises, and straight men in general (hard to be attention-seeking when your gaze is constantly subjectified). 

So.  The framework that's being encoded in the pejorative use of "attention-seeking" is that some people have an excessive desire for our finite attention, like small children, and that ignoring them will serve both to punish them for their bad behaviour and to help them grow up into strong, capable straight white men who dress conservatively.  This is untenably paternalistic, and I reject it.

There is, however, one instance in which I support the diabolization of attention-seeking, and, spoiler warning, it's when corporations do it.  I am profoundly annoyed whenever I see a corporate blog post end with an exhortation to "join the conversation!" or "tell us what you think!"  It's a lazy and useless attempt at online community-building, one which attempts to shunt all the work of fostering a discussion space onto commenters.  Moreover, it's one part of a creeping systemization of creatives working for free (not, as I wrote initially, "pro bono") to make profits for corporate stockholders--regard the ads you see regularly nowadays which ask you to produce content for more advertising campaigns, presenting this as a fabulous creative opportunity rather than a pure scam.

It's really getting to the point where capital is in such a strong negotiating position that it can demand years of free service from a worker before paying him, that he may prove a faithful and uncomplaining employee.  We can fight this, but we need one thing.  Workers of the world: get attention.

Meat Foods I Have Missed

I thought I'd keep a running tally of foods that I enjoyed a lot as a meat-eater, pined for as a vegetarian, then used my newfound cooking skills to recreate.  After some consideration, I've excluded recipes where the flavour comes from heavy spicing and the meat is sort of a blank center point, e.g. curries, buffalo wings, that sort of thing.  I never want for those.  Also burgers.  The state of veggie burgers is fine. 

French Dip sandwich
My favorite thing made from a cow.  Easily recreated with sliced portabello mushrooms and tons of garlic.
Satisfaction: High

Tuna Salad Sandwich
Very successfully recreated with cold crumbled tofu and vinegar.  My partner enjoyed this moist sandwich not one bit.
Satisfaction: Mixed

Unagi
The buttery, tender flesh of eels is one of the last things I gave up on my course from pescetarian to proper vegetarian.  Hit on the solution to this one after frying tofu marinated in alcohol a few days ago.  Made some kabayaki sauce to put on it and I was in non-hog heaven.
Satisfaction: High

Ham
It's a struggle.  The grocery store won't sell me any liquid smoke.  I use some quorn lunchmeat right now. 
Satisfaction: Low

Bacon
Lots of work has been done on this by eminent bacon scholars.  There's baco-bits for your baked potato, veggie rashers for your bacon sandwich, and smoked cheddar for anything that takes bacon and cheese.  As to streaky bacon, I haven't really attempted a remake due to the aforementioned liquid smoke issue. 
Satisfaction: Moderate

Sausage
I've posted about this before.  Morningstar sausages also provide that greasy wrongness you want in a full breakfast sometimes.  
Satisfaction: Perfect

Braunschweiger
I like how it tastes of liver.  Haven't really tried recreating it, but Marmite has a nice kind of metallic organ-meat quality.
Satisfaction: Untested

Short ribs
Heartbreaker.  There's lots of good barbeque options for the veggie, but nothing is quite like using your low incisors to scrape the smooth muscle off a jerk-glazed pig bone.  I'm just saying. 
Satisfaction: Low 

Crispy Duck
Of all the ghoulish things I miss about meat, it's eating that layer of crispy, fatty waterfowl skin that I miss most.  There's apparently a couple of Asian solutions to this: Buddha Duck, which is made of stacked tofu skins, and mock duck, which is made of wheat gluten.  I've managed to find neither in Boulder or Scotland as yet. 
Satisfaction: Pending

Chicken wings
The good thing about these was eating all the flesh, then chewing the cartilage, then cracking the bones with my teeth and sucking out the marrow like it was crab meat.  But I also just like dark meat on a chicken.  I'm not going to bake any false bones and then fill them with marmite or something.  It's not worth it. 
Satisfaction: Not to be had

Crab
Is crab delicious, or is it just something vaguely saline that you can dip into lemon butter?  Think about it.  It's more the activity I miss here, the cracking and picking.  Replaced that by buying walnuts in the shell. 
Satisfaction: w/e

Beef Jerky
Again, it's less that I like the actual food, which is just beef, and more that I love taking something very tough and fibrous to pieces with my teeth.  There's plenty of vegetarian options for something tough and fibrous, believe you me.
Satisfaction: At peace 


When I started this list, the intention was to demonstrate that anything you miss as a meat eater, you can substitute as a vegetarian.  As I went through the things I liked eating when I ate meat, however, I found that many of my pleasures were bound inextricably to the consumption of animal parts.  It wasn't a question of taste or texture, but rather my enjoyment at using my hands and teeth and tongue to render those things that had made an animal able to live--its connective tissues, bones, and organs--into energy for myself. 

The capacity to enjoy meat is hardwired in me, and it would certainly be easy enough to pursue its pleasures.  But enjoyment isn't a moral imperative.  We can weigh our pleasures against the harm they cause and make decisions that both minimize harm and make us happy.  Frankly, I think if more people would accept this premise, I'd hear fewer of them assert that a monogamous bisexual is a contradiction in terms.

You're Doing Gender Wrong

I enjoy watching pop videos, I guess.  I'll certainly watch them for hours until I've had my fill.  Sometimes I even like the songs.  But mainly I enjoy watching brief linguistic and visual spectacles on the Semiotics Channel.  Take Mike Posner--if you listen to his lyrics, he just sounds like a classically-trained date rapist.  Classically-trained in date rape, I mean, not music.  But the videos for his odious songs are great!  "Cooler Than Me" has him stealing sunglasses off hipsters and looking into different film universes through them, and in "Please Don't Go" the emotional pain of a breakup causes the world to fragment and artifact around Posner like a badly-streamed video.  And every week produces a new guilded turd of similar caliber. 

Generally these days UK pop videos are fashion shows whose central themes alternate between a kind of Babestation Lite and personal affirmations that you are, in fact, okay to just be yourself, even if maybe you don't look and/or fuck like the video people.  So basically music television has become women's magazines, with all the conflicting messages about women's roles that that implies.  I'm open to the idea that young women may be in need of someone to tell them that becoming the world's most lifelike Realdoll is only one of the many things they can aspire to, of course.  I'm just not sure that message is best delivered by a writhing professional dancer with no skirt or trousers.

One style of video I have come to find especially grating is the specific claim, made over and over again, that women are in fact just as good as men and can achieve anything they want.  This was a brave sentiment in 1961; the fact that it's still in heavy rotation in 2011 would seem to imply that it hasn't really soaked in, despite the very different material conditions of first-world women these days.  These songs--Jessie J's "Do It Like A Dude" is the one in current rotation, but previously we had Alexandra Burke's "Broken Heels", a couple entries in the genre from Beyonce, and basically Pink's entire oeuvre--they appear to stem from a sense of inadequacy at not being male, a kind of "penis envy", if I may coin a phrase.  And the answer in the videoverse is to do what men do, but sexier. 

This approach misses out one of the major conceptual gains of the feminist movement, aside from how it got pretty much everyone to agree that there was some historical point at which women were getting a raw deal (currently debates tend to rage about whether we should be locating this point in the past or the present).  The gain I'm referring to is the capacity to question the gender binary.  Rather than attempting to slavishly duplicate men's lives, only with killer heels and bouncing a baby on the hip, we could use feminist intellectual tools to stand back and ask whether the mass of men have it so good today that women ought to expend their energy on catching up. 

Also of note: I am apparently so straight these days, or Jessie J's hoodie-playsuit and wacky gurning antics are so terrible, that I didn't notice that the backing dancers for her number are largely delicious-looking Afro-Carribbean butches.  J, much like Lady Gaga or myself, identifies as bisexual, so I guess I'm meant to feel some kind of solidarity.  I don't.  Also they keep mentioning that she has a heart condition.  The phrase "save your breath" springs to mind.

Letting The Side Down

Increasingly I've come to regard my decision to call myself a feminist as being similar to my earlier decision to call myself a lesbian when I knew I was strongly attracted to men as well as women.  Calling myself a lesbian was a personal, political choice: an attempt to manage other people's impressions of me and a prescription for myself as a sexual radical.  But it was essentially dishonest, and so it was not only problematic for me personally but harmful to the sexual identity I was trying to establish solidarity with--what was the lesson of my love life but that dykes just need the right man to come around? 

I think feminism is super important of course, and the legal, social, and political equality between genders it aspires to are fundamental human justice issues that are far from resolved in even the most progressive circles of even the most privileged areas.  I'm incredibly grateful to my feminist forebears, who ensured that I wouldn't be compelled to whelp live young if I didn't want to and could go to university and all that.  And it gives me pause to even consider dissociating myself from an important social justice movement that has fallen on hard times. 

But I get exasperated with the unfalsifiable doctrine that wherever there are men and women, women must be getting the worst of it.  I get mad whenever "men" is used as a synonym for "patriarchy".  I get offended when media representations of white women are treated with greater seriousness than the actual lives of black and brown ones.  I get irritated whenever I see the implication that the advancement of women consists of getting them to catch up to men, and that men's lives are a fixed measure by which everyone ought to be judged.  I can't subscribe to the idea of a zero-sum game between one half of humanity and the other, and I don't feel that I'm different enough from penis-havers to automatically side with my sisters against my brothers.  And, lordy loo, I'm tired of having that one argument about rape.  

It's not just that my knee-jerk reaction in any situation is to also consider a male perspective before coming to a snap judgment.  I have selfish reasons as well.  I'm tired of how I react emotionally to mischaracterizations of feminism, feelings which seem distressingly near to patriotism or sports fanaticism.  I'm tired of dealing with the fallout from a 60-year disinformation campaign anytime I want to convey to someone what I believe generally.

What I want is a word that doesn't imply that I hate sex and jokes and men and domesticity, but which ideally implies that I hate God.  I want to go back to what I knew was the right term for myself the first time I read it as a child: humanist.  Secular humanist if you're nasty.  I want to define myself as pro-human and resolve to be in solidarity with humans. I know it's very white-privilege of me, but I just want my affiliations and opinions to be by choice rather than by default.

Mannequins with Kill Appeal

"It only got a 30?!  You're shitting me."

There's nothing for it: I've got to stump for the redemption of the film version of Silent Hill.  This is a movie, and I can't stress enough how unusual this is for me, where I had put it on in the background while I gazed into the internet but then found myself more and more drawn to the film and actually put the internet to one side altogether so I could watch it closely.  After it finished, I returned online again to look up the reviews, which I vaguely recalled being bad.  I was wrong: the reviews of this movie eviscerated it.  They are literally worse than Gothika.

I don't know if it had been a disappointing summer and all the critics were hot and angry or what, but there are far more deserving targets that received an indulgent pass while Silent Hill was getting its neck stomped.  I daresay there was an aspect of revenge in it: TriStar refused advance screenings, to mitigate an expected poor response, and critics clearly jumped at the chance to punish this behavior.  Horror is not the genre to work in if you're hung up on critical acclaim in any case, but when 28 Weeks Later, Shadow of the Vampire, and THX 1138 get scores in the 70s on Metacritic while Ravenous, Final Destination, and Saw have scores in the 40s, some metric other than quality of filmmaking is clearly being drawn on to evaluate them. 

I must say, first, that I have never played through a Silent Hill game, because they are scary and I get scared.  I can't, therefore, relate to some people's experience of the film as a betrayal of the franchise, comparing it against the film that should be there.  I have the luxury of only being able to evaluate what is there.

I NEED AN ADULT

I don't mean to argue that Silent Hill is a very good film, heavens no.  I'm quite comfortable losing that argument.  It just has much to recommend it and is, though this is faint praise indeed, a standout among video game adaptations.  The critical perspective I draw on which rewards me richly when I watch Silent Hill is a feminist critique, something that's still fairly thin on the ground in movie review circles.  It's very much a women's picture, if such a thing still exists: all of the characters save those inserted at the behest of execs are women; the horror is that classically feminist style, body horror; it doesn't use women's suffering primarily to titillate a presumed male gazer, as Gothika does; and, as in Aliens, it's not so much big dumb guns as motherhood that saves the day.  As far as I'm aware, no marketing to a specifically female demo was attempted: the trailers just about reproduce Sean Bean's role in full, the way the marketing for Scream was cut to suggest that Drew Barrymore survived the credits. 

The storyline is a regular ghost one, revenge/justice for a female victim of patriarchal violence and social ostracism, here with heavyhanded religious overtones that do little besides absolve the viewer of responsibility for the mistreatment of women unless they're a member of a Christosatanic cult.  The town and its horrors are explicitly manifestations of the psyche of this ur-victim.  Frankly, I'd rather have it that way than how supernatural elements are manifest in most horror films, where characters devised specifically to treat a protagonist's experiences of non-materialistic phenomena with skepticism are then punished for their disbelief with grisly death.  Here the grisly death is distributed much more impartially, which is always refreshing. 

The main thing going for Silent Hill outside of its feminism is its atmosphere.  All the exteriors are dampened in a gray-white mist where black ash falls from the sky like snow, and all the interiors have the perfect quality of urbex in a dying steeltown.  The town itself is based on the story of Centralia, Pennsylvania, but I can't help but think Roger Avery missed a trick (one of, you know, many) not writing it as a more explicit portal to hell.  The monsters have been designed from the principle of the uncanny valley, and I can't think of an instance where it's been used more pitch-perfectly, except maybe Gore Verbinksi's version of The Ring, another female-focused atmospheric horror. 

Generally the film is about mothers and daughters, which may explain the low level of sexualization experienced by the cherubic Radha Mitchell as main/final girl Rose.  Her companion for most of the film, Laurie Holden's Officer Cybil, has a cop-appropriate blatant lesbian image.  She's sexualized, but as a sleek muscular object along the lines of Robert Patrick halfway through unmelting himself in T2.  The rest of the film's sex is tied up in Pyramid Head, here a straightforward avatar of rape, and the mannequinesque nurses, whose forest of bared cleavage Rose has to cautiously pick her way through lest she be torn to ribbons.

"I would have liked more time with the cleavage nurses
and less with the religious fanatics."

Now, I think Tycho's a hundred percent correct when he says that the style of the film evokes the style of video games.  I've seen just about all the video game movies, and I've played a fair amount of survival horror, and I've seen a fuckton of cutscenes.  And the quality of cutscenes is this: they contain a lot of bad, clunky exposition, and they contain a lot of visual spectacle.  Their function is to provide a break in the action which briefly suspends the player's control in the interest of advancing the plot.  Silent Hill retains the cutsceneness closely enough that I kept feeling like I ought to be pressing X.

I don't put much stock in the idea of faithfulness as a measure of the quality of an adaptation--who wants to hear a cover of a song identical to the original, anyway?--but I have love for films that have love for their source.  Christopher Gans spent years trying to obtain the rights to Silent Hill, going so far as to create his own fan-film scored with the Silent Hill soundtrack and send it to the game's creators.  Aided by this purity of feeling, he's produced something that expresses the spirit of, if not the games themselves (for how can I judge that), the medium and the genre they spring from.  The whole idea of survival horror is that you are resource-poor and nearly powerless in a landscape designed to do you harm, and from themes to sets to characters, the movie carries this idea through wonderfully. 

I can't say I don't feel a little hurt that Silent Hill was panned so especially badly, because the symbolic language it used was so close to my own experience of feminine terror, and so keenly expressed.  When I read through mainstream reviews, I can see that none of that has come through for most reviewers, and as usual with an adaptation (especially from a devalued medium), a number of them have felt free to just make shit up to pretend familiarity with the source, like when Roger Ebert wrote that the brilliant colors of From Hell closely evoked the graphic novel.*  Fans of the game are also very angry at the ways in which it differed from the movie that happened in their minds, but that kind of bitching has been easier to write off since Watchmen.  When I look at amateur reviews, such as this one from the Bechdel Test site, though, I get the feeling that I'm not the only one who sees the value in it. 

"30, though!  What the fuck."

*Maybe I am conflating him with a different critic, but I swear that someone said this, and Ebert is a critic I have no real issue with slandering in a post that touches on gaming. 

Instructive Failures

 I am something of an academic by nature, and it is to this I attribute my (apparently unusual) high tolerance for didactic cinema.  I'm not saying I could sit through Crash without yelling at the screen or anything, but I stuck with Studio 60 long after the show had dropped all pretense of being anything other than Aaron Sorkin's Chew On That Hour.  Sorkin is that entertainer who pulls a rabbit out of a hat in a novel and entertaining way, and then when the audience clamors "Amazing!  More tricks!" just pulls the same rabbit out of some slightly different hats over and over again until everyone has left.  It's not an uncommon mode for artists, and the first rabbit you see can be really something.

I never watched Sorkin's most beloved creation, The West Wing, but I feel like I understand the kind of catharsis it provided to progressives rendered catatonic by the actions of the Bush administration to have a shadow cabinet play out their Al Gore fantasies.  I'd seen Sports Night and enjoyed as much of it as I understood when it was first on, years before my partner told me he was really getting into Studio 60.   We watched almost all of the doomed first season together.  It's probably telling that I've seen the show up to the big nineleveny cliffhanger in which a main character's life hung in the balance, and have not yet felt a need to see whether she lives or dies.

What finally killed my willingness to indulge Studio 60's oratory, that I might learn something about how American topical sketch comedy shows are formed, was a dawning awareness of a certain tendency it had in common with a lot of modern screenwriting.  It was what instantly put me off Fringe and of course Heroes: a compulsive need to subvert audience expectations that turns pathological.  The fall of Heroes between its first and fourth season is...well, already this post is of extreme length, and I could go on essentially indefinitely about what went wrong there, breaking it down fractally, shot by shot.  But basically what killed Heroes was trying to surprise the fan community by refuting their expectations, especially when they expected a sensical, meaningful plot. 

For Fringe, the expectations it was subverting were those created by The X-Files, which in 1993 was itself subverting an audience expectation by creating a skeptical and science-minded female character (who was still always wrong) and an intuitive and credulous man who seemed to assemble his near-unfailingly correct interpretations of weird events by the same word-association method the Bat-Man uses to solve the Riddler's clues.  Fringe, then, seemed to be based on the assumption that audiences would find it daring to see a credulous and intuitive female investigator paired with a skeptical and science-minded man, and would not correctly identify their subverted subversion as a tired stereotype.

The subversion I remember best from Studio 60 is when Evangelical funnywoman Harriet is misquoted in an interview in a way that suggests she believes that homosexuality is uniquely sinful, after which she is violently attacked by some large angry gays.  You may recall this particular story--in which god-fearing men and women innocently expressing a nuanced version of their beliefs are physically threatened by the same depraved sex perverts who control the media and twist around their words to suggest that not wanting gays to marry is somehow an expression of hate or fear--from the recent Supreme Court case on whether petition signatures from Washington state's Referendum 71 would remain public record or become secret, in the interest of protecting people who feared that their public expression of bigotry might cost them something.  (The court ruled 8-1 that the plaintiffs' wish to keep their terrible opinions between themselves and their legislature did not override well-established laws promoting civic transparency. The plaintiffs continued plainting after this, wishing the court to note how unfair it was that they had no chance of proving how fellow co-signers of this, their attempt to protect the solemn gravity of marriage by keeping it safe from people who really really want to get married while reserving it for people who have been cooling on the whole idea for 40 years, might be targeted with a similar level of harassment to two men who want to hold hands.)  So I found that to be a somewhat irresponsible bit of writing, in that, like most of Harriet's character on the show, it felt intended to pander to and soothe the ruffled feathers of a moderate Christian audience I'm pretty sure was never watching.

The second notable subversion attempt I wanted to talk about is one I misremembered, which came up during a discussion with my partner of blogospheric rumblings on whether Olivia Munn's disastrous Daily Show appearances were yet another manifestation of The Daily Show's "woman problem".  The female problem in question is one that should be familiar to students of television: shows, but especially comedies, have trouble attracting and keeping female writers even when they are actively seeking them out, let alone when they aren't.  My partner mentioned that Studio 60 had had a subplot involving a lawsuit by a former writer, Karen, alleging that the writers' room on the show-within-a-show was no more than a boys' club and that she had been fired for being insufficiently like the chick in the men's mags who just, you know, likes totally normal, pudgy guys and wants to wear push-up bras and Daisy Dukes and get beaten at video games.  I recalled that the episode contained a sequence in which Karen's lawyer asks around the show to find out why people believe she was fired, and to a man, they answer "Because she wasn't funny."

This did indeed happen, but it's worth noting that none of the characters expressing this opinion were actually contemporaries of the fired writress.  Also, when I went to look at more detailed summaries of the episode, I noticed that the final word on the matter came from one of the executive producers reading out the actual text of the complaint, which begins to make Karen look like she might not be talking completely out of her ass.  The content of the scene is based on a sexual harassment lawsuit filed against the producers of Friends by shitcanned stenographer Amaani Lyle, where besides discussion of David Schwimmer's orientation and Courtney Cox's fuckability, she alleges that the writers had collaboratively constructed a parallel Friends in which Joey was a serial rapist.  Regrettably, this is not the plot of Joey.  The complaint in Studio 60 relates an extensive public discussion of various ways the male writers would fain fuck Harriet--on an altar, with a crucifix, in Pat Robertson's mouth, etc.--which would itself constitute excellent grounds for a religious discrimination lawsuit.  The executive producer is of course deeply troubled by this, because Harriet is his woman.  So let's call Sorkin's opinion on the frivolity of high-profile sexual harassment lawsuits--because I think it is pretty safe to say that the words coming out of his characters' mouths are intended primarily to advance his opinion--ambiguous.

It sounds like I'm saying I disliked the show for not toeing my particular party line, and maybe that's the case, though I wouldn't be watching much TV if I couldn't put my politics to one side in the interest of entertaining myself.  I think it's more that I don't really believe Sorkin thinks that scary gays will bash Christians or that bitches be trippin', but that he is condescending to the imagined prejudices of his audience in order to feel he has leeway to make his point.  I'm not exactly bucking the conventional wisdom here: all reviews I've read of Studio 60 involve some variation on calling it condescending.  But, you know, it's not awful to be condescended to if you're genuinely ignorant on a subject and are interested in getting a quick grounding.  What Sorkin managed by talking down to me on subjects I know something about, and by not seeming to mind if he was getting them all wrong, is just to make me doubt his credibility on anything I thought I might be learning from him.  The only times I've ever minded a lecture are when I know I have a hell of a lot better handle on something than the guy who's trying to explain it to me in very small words.

On Hedonism

My favorite thing about Jennifer's Body--in which Karyn Kusama and Diablo Cody attempt to remake Mean Girls as Buffy the Vampire Slayer and end up with an affected, irritating Ginger Snaps--is the opening scene in which Megan Fox scratches a scab and chews on her hair.  Fox is, in the film as in life, an exqusitely crafted product machine-tooled to the sexual specifications of an aggregated audience of women-fanciers, and despite my knowledge of this, I can't help but enjoy seeing her walk around and even occasionally talk in films where she has not been tinted orange in post-production.  There's something going on with Jennifer's sexual power and demonic energy and physical perfection all waxing and waning together month by month, but I'll be damned if I can tease it out of the web of pointless homoeroticism and immediately dated cultural references.  Anyway, some part of the film's point, whatever that may be, is about the physicality of bodies, and the relative frailty and impermanence of even the most perfect ones.  Moon, too. 

I think I love my body just about as much as is humanly possible for a young woman of this era who doesn't exercise (hence my project of extensively documenting it), but I still get Kafka-esque heebie jeebies from many of the realities of being a consciousness in a big gestalt of semi-autonomous cells, not all of whom share my genetic material.  Sometimes my teeth just hurt for no reason, and I'm always biting the inside of my mouth.  My toenails--are they getting ingrown?  Was there always this much hair?  Does my nose look bigger when I wake up than it did when I went to bed?  Is sitting causing my ass to atrophy?  Why is all this body fat distributed as cellulite instead of smooth curvilinear forms, anyway?  Must my breasts be asymmetrical?  What happened to all the coins and paper and hair and peach pits I ate?  And my skin!  What the fuck!  I'm not even going to go into what goes on in my perineal area, suffice to say that popcorn is a sometimes food.  And as if that wasn't enough to worry about, I'm freaking mortal as well!

Keeping this in mind, it is often difficult not to eat all the cheese I want.

On Women in the Sciences

Years ago, I attended a panel on Women in Science for which the prompt was the shitstorm stirred up by Harvard president Lawrence Summers remarking that tenure appointments of female science and mathematics professors at Harvard had probably declined steadily throughout his tenure because of a) babbys, and b) innate differences in the sciencey parts of women's brains. The panel was made up of three female scientists and one male scientist; the audience was...well, I went to a panel later in the same conference titled A Woman's Right To Jimmy Choos and the demographic composition was roughly the same.

The male scientist was the first speaker, and looking distinctly uncomfortable, he explained that while he in no wise agreed with Summers' assessment, he felt it would be a disservice to the panel format to have only panelists who were in total agreement, and so he would advance what he felt was the best defense of the innate differences theory he could muster. Basically, that defense was: it was utterly ridiculous to dismiss discrimination and socialization as factors in women's low representation in science jobs in the manner Summers had been presented as doing, but to treat the idea of innate differences between men and women as an already-settled question was unscientific, and more research should always be conducted.

The female speakers all declined to touch directly on the subject of Summers' remarks, and I had the distinct impression of them scooting their chairs ever so slightly away from the first speaker.  Instead the female scientists focused on their personal narratives as girls and then women interested in science. All noted that they had been routinely mistaken for secretaries by male colleagues of all ages, and all bemoaned the difficulty of finding mentors who people would decline to spread rumors they were fucking. The second speaker, who seemed most interested in talking about female scientists in the aggregate and least interested in talking about her journey, mentioned the case of Ben A. Barres. Barres, an M.I.T.-educated neuroscientist, transitioned from female to male in his thirties, and recalled, for example, overhearing colleagues discussing his work commenting "He's such a better researcher than his sister Barbara!"

Then came the Q&A portion of the panel, where people could get up and query the panelists. To a woman, it consisted of people who wanted to unleash a blistering torrent of invective at Larry Summers and were not reluctant to use the unhappy male speaker as a surrogate, whatever his views. After three or four of these the moderator opted to restrict commenters to only caustic screeds which could be phrased in the form of a question, and it was around then that I decided it would be a better use of my time to wander off.

Ally Sheedy Makes Over Molly Ringwald

Okay, I admit it--besides just trying to put hair in my face, this look is an attempt at Noomi Rapace's dyke-punk style from Män Som Hatar Kvinnor.  Rapace is a dead ringer for Gillian Anderson.  The movie...well.  Suffice to say I have mixed feelings.  It's well-styled and well-constructed, and people seem to think it's feminist in some way.  I guess they mean Rapace's haircut, because otherwise I don't see how it's much more feminist than, say, Taken.

Solipsist

Perhaps one of the reasons I am so godawful as a lesbian--why I fell so fast and so hard for cock--is that I can't get the makeup down.  I heard the "lesbian look" described (of pre-outcoming Mary Cheney and Candace Gingrich; perhaps it would be more accurate to call this look "passing spinster"), in something I read in the early 2000s -- maybe a memoir of  Ron Reagan Jr. -- as little to nothing around the eyes or on the cheeks, with plain lipstick, viz.:

Pearls optional, unless you're in politics.  

I kind of have something against lipstick.  While my eyes continue to get flashier and madder, lipstick still codes as Trying Too Hard to the buried high school butch in me who still judges all my outfits.  Also, I have mildly asymmetrical lips, and applying a color to them inflames my OCD something terrible.  Wait, not OCD.  What's the one where you self-diagnose with psychiatric disorders?  Oh yes--hypochondria.  But never wearing something has certainly not stopped me from hoarding it, and so I have many lipsticks, nail polishes, pieces of jewelry, pairs of high-ass heels, belts, purses, bits of string, and the like.  These next pictures represent the portion of that collection I could be arsed to apply and quickly snap two photos of.

My lips with nothing on top.

Glosses:

Clear (maybe slightly red?) apple-flavored lip gloss.  Mmmm.

Some drugstore frosted gloss.  Unimpressive-looking, sticky, overpoweringly vanilla-scented.

These are some of my favorites, from Medusa's Makeup--magenta (Smooch) and red (Talk Talk), both with gold and copper sparks.  The purple somehow manages to match my lip color beautifully, and the red is just right for looking sexy but not overdone.  They smell pretty bad and the wands are difficult to work with. 

This one was a freebie from Everyday Minerals, some kind of tube of orange-hued chapstick.  This is another thing I object to about lipstick: my choice of hues, if I want to maintain some self-respect, is limited to the chunk of the spectrum between orange and purple, and that's dull to me.

Liners:

A frosty pink Barry M pencil I mainly use to highlight around the eyes.  Alarmingly metallic, but good under a translucent colored gloss. 

Another orange tone, this brick-colored drugstore pencil is soft and slightly emollient, making it a terrible choice as a liner. 

This looked to me like it would match my lips, but in fact it is dreadful.

Lipsticks:

This one is sort of a medium brown in the tube, called "Divine Wine."  Dark lipstick supposedly makes you look older.  I still think I would make a pretty good goth.

My best Elena Kagan.

 Another sort of matchy berry bronzey metallic thing. I am falling asleep.

Now, this is my favorite thing to do to my lips.  It's just a crimson stain, applied from the center of the mouth and faded outwards.  It makes me feel totally sex.

Also, incidentally, my skin is looking fantastic here, by the standards of my skin.

That Much Is True

I didn't even realize Susie Bright had updated until, while trying to find an old post about the unintentional comedy of Juno and Waitress' depiction of pregnancy, I finally saw this cracking academic essay from Eithne Johnson analyzing feminist anti-porn consciousness-raising slideshows (memorialized in Dykes To Watch Out For as what turned Lois kinky) with the film theory tools of classic exploitation movies.  Check it out.

 

 ©Alison Bechdel, ~1995.  Go buy the Dykes To Watch Out For collections, with money. 

What the hell is the point of this

Look, just tell me--are most other women straight, or not?

where does this even figure in to their sexuality I don't know

if green pears you like

If I consider it logically, I don't think I'm particularly fashion-forward. I'm the wrong size and shape for a fashionista, runways bore me, I'm afraid of shoes over 3" high, and, most damning of all, I come from an area deep in the irradiated middle of a certain gauche continent.  Nevertheless, it is often my experience that I will fix an object in mind and hunt it fruitlessly for weeks, finally settling on something overpriced and merely similar, only to find a few months later the discount racks flooded with that selfsame object, now a full-on trend.  Interpreting this as some kind of uncanny knack for fashion would be akin to taking my stereo turning on during a thunderstorm as evidence of the existence of ghosts who hate lightning and love Tori Amos.  Still, I'll try my hand at a few predictions. 

INEVITABLE TRENDS
• Steampunk: all the kids who were going to be goth will be this for the next fifteen years, which is a palette-shifted form of goth with brown standing in for black, gold for red, and gears for spiders.  All the kids who were going to be ravers will be werewolves, I guess?
• Head scarves for young muslimahs, but also for non-Islamic punkas protesting the interminable culture wars and girls-gone-wildism. 
• Drag--it will be fashionable for men to dress feminine, and men who refuse will be considered gay. 
• Increasingly obvious factory mistakes in clothing, from "raw edge" hems through "contrast crease details" on prints, right up to the point where workers' fingers are fashionably serged into ruching.  Also look for the return of clothes which are just square, unfinished bolts of cloth, sold as "the universally-flattering sari look".
• A haircut that's, like, a kind of reverse Travis Bickle, with a strip shaved jauntily up the middle and the rest of the hair longer
• Ironic swastikas; ironic yellow stars
• Tooth embellishment; neck tattoos
•All 20th-century decades' retro, always, simultaneously, forever

 GONE FOREVER
• The big platform tennis shoes of the 90s.  I miss them. 
• Anything that takes a great deal of sewing and tailoring to construct 
• Lipstick
• Being "white"
• Ties for men
• Most hats and gloves
• Pubic hair.
• All vintage clothing, eventually, unless it is sealed in lucite
• Clowns; panties
• The concepts of decency and privacy

Look At This Fucking Haul

These are my men's jeans. I bought them in a department store which doesn't need or deserve the publicity. This store is bi-level, with the men's, children's, and housewares sections on the lower floor, and the women's department on the upper floor. In order to avoid using the men's dressing rooms and potentially seeing a penis, I grabbed a few sizes I thought might fit and ascended the escalators to the section of my gender.

A familiar frisson accompanied this action, the same as I felt after using the men's room at the theatre once. (It was an emergency more than a whim: my film was in progress but another well-attended movie had just let out. Both men's and women's restrooms were packed to the gills, but constant maddening experience has demonstrated to me that the men's line moves faster due to anatomy and a desire not to be thought gay. I waited, staring firmly ahead, in a line of men and children, suspecting that each saw me and resented my ability to invade their space without consequence. It smelled terrible.) After assuring a reasonable fit in the ladies' dressing room (though, like all jeans, these gapped at the back), I brought my purchase to a pretty young clerk. As she rang me up with a retail smile, I envisioned her being blown away by my poker-faced daring, and later telling her friends of her envy and admiration for my style. (I probably shouldn't admit this, as it appears conceited beyond belief; in my defense, I am aware it is a fantasy. This is not what I believe actually occurred.)

I rarely buy men's clothes since I went femme, so this purchase was tinged with nostalgia for teenage dykehood. The feelings of danger in crossing a gender line, I find, vary considerably with the circumstances. The two-level design of the store here forced me to cross the border very publicly, but many stores separate men's and women's sections by inches. I've never been accosted, asked to leave, or treated with hostility while browsing for men's clothes, but I suspect the same would not be true if I were male-appearing and looking at skirts. I feel it can be advantageous to roleplay that, perhaps, you are shopping for a gift for a father, brother, or boyfriend. Or just adopt the same demeanor you'd cop if you wanted to shoplift: you belong and your actions are normal and blameless.

I think women should have the experience of shopping for and wearing men's clothing, not because it is transgressive, but because I think women should understand firsthand what it is like to wear something which has been designed primarily to fit and be comfortable on a broad range of bodies. How it looks is something of a tertiary concern for men's clothing, following well after function and comfort. By the same token, I think men should experience buying and wearing women's clothing, due to my deep-seated hatred of men.


These are my jeggings. Jeggings are a recent point of contention in the fashion police state due to their availability to people who have enough body fat to continue menstruating. They combine two previous fashion trends that were giving people the vapors: skinny jeans and leggings. Numerous rules have sprouted up to mediate the wearing of jeggings. We are instructed that to properly wear jeggings, we must avoid being old, "curvy", thick in the thighs, or habitual wearers of panties.

Basically, the rule is that flaws--those aspects of your body that differ from a purely hypothetical and subjective female ideal--must be concealed for the sake of public decency.  Remember, if you're female, the visible parts of your body belong to a sort of civic trust, and as such are subject to continuous urban renewal and beautification efforts.  The process of disguising the unacceptable reality of your horrible body in a decorative way is known as "flattering", from a term meaning an insincere compliment delivered with an ulterior motive.

Skinny jeans, leggings, and jeggings are unflattering because they fail to conceal the shape of the leg, belly, and buttocks (the most awful parts of the woman, after her terrible genitals), forcing people to view the shape of female bodies which are wider or differently proportioned to the ideal. I plan to wear them with boots. Incidentally, the price of jean-colored spandex sewn into the shape of some leggings is slightly greater than the price of men's jeans. Both are about $15 cheaper than inexpensive women's jeans.

So as you can see, I'm a fashion fucking rebel. But already, inadvertently, I negated any transgressiveness of either of these articles of clothing when I bought them in a chain store, with money, and then took them home and put them on my young white pretty body.  Whether I or anyone else wants it that way, that'll always be a fashion "do".

Oh good, another blog

Reading lipstickeater and threadbared on consumerism and femininity (recently synonymous) has got me thinking about the development of my own gender expression.

As a child I was never able to put conformity before comfort--when my long rusty hair got painfully tangled at the base of my skull, I cut it off.* Dresses were too scratchy, and besides, my feminist, atheist folks didn't want to burden me with unnecessary gender coding. It was purple or teal slacks and Calvin-style striped shirts all the way.

Then before I was really prepared for it, puberty arrived and my comfort eating began to pack on the pounds. My jeans size went up--8, 10, 12 for a long time, then relaxed fit 12, finally 14--and I bought a ton of men's XL t-shirts with superhero logos.

Through some cultural osmosis or other, I came to the conclusion that girls who cared about the way they dressed and wore their hair were stupid, and since my greatest fear was of looking stupid, I'd stick completely to jeans, jean shorts, and a single, floor-length denim skirt. I'd play with lipstick and blush when no one could see, but without access to women's magazines (soooo stupid) I had no idea how to proceed. So.

Around about the end of middle school, I began also wanting my clothes to express a burgeoning queer identity, albeit not one my parents would be able to decipher. Overlarge Doc Martens with rainbow laces--who could possibly ferret out my genius code? I would ask for my hair as short as the Great Clips drone would willingly cut it, but I could never buck up the nerve to ask outright for the stranger touching my head to give me a man's haircut. Even though that would have been cheaper.

It became important that my clothing was labeled for men, which felt so appropriately transgressive to buy and wear. This would have been the late 90s, post Spiceworld, so I also owned a couple baby tees and spaghetti straps--that was my cover, you see. I dressed for comfort, and to express my contempt for the idea of dressing for anything else. I wanted out of my body.

Second year of high school I started getting really into dyeing my hair. Since it had dulled from new-penny to old-penny during the hated puberty, I had been lobbying my mother to help me go as red as drugstore brands would allow. She would instead steer me to some extremely subtle auburns, probably out of lessons learned from her own youthful hair experiments. These hair colors did fuck-all.

It wasn't until I began colluding with my pixieish friend Aviv to watch anime and become bisexuals that I broke out the 30-vol bleach and did what I assured my folks would be only a tiny blue stripe in my bangs. The way it made me feel was addictive. I wanted to look at myself and I wanted other people to look at me and be shocked and impressed. This is how punks must have felt back when they actually existed.

From an allusional Miki cosplay to a full green head for school photos, I tried on every color, eventually settling down to a good-sized chunk of the spectrum between orange and purple. I tried to avoid stepping on the toes of any of my group of friends who suddenly all had the same close crop and orange or pink hair, but Manic Panic makes a limited range, after all.

Coloring my hair was a huge relief as a largely degendered outlet for my desire to decorate my person. Makeup would have been a minefield--there were too many girls wearing it well, who would know when I wore it poorly. Becoming a goth was always tempting, but too expensive and too likely to draw unwanted parental attention. Though it dyed my collars, pillows, and walls, my hair situated me within my female peer group while letting me stay androgynous.

I kept it up for a bit early in college, but dyeing in a room you clean yourself quickly became a drag. As far as I can intuit, this is the college experience in fashion: the elaborate looks you've created to code yourself to your high school chums erode rapidly, followed by all decorum and grooming. You'd just roll out of bed and put on whatever was closest to hand and easiest to pull over your head. That's right--those collegiate fuckers were completely biting my high-school look. This could not stand, because if everyone looked like me, no one would comprehend instantly how blindingly superior I was.

I started drawing up plans for my all-new style. It would be based on the tuxedo, all crisp white blouses with black jackets, skirts, and trousers. Basically, I decided that the ideal look would be "waiter". To that end, I started to haunt thrift stores. I started to pay attention.

The other thing that happened was, I started to lose weight. Mainly this was from living on microwave popcorn rather than food, but seeing that it was possible for me to lose weight lit a fire in me. I dieted and exercised religiously, skirting the edge of an eating disorder. I was constantly hungry, angry, paranoid and antisocial, I had a mini nervous breakdown and quit college for a while, and I dropped from 180 lbs to 120. Overall, a classic female success story!

My wardrobe, by contrast, expanded rapidly. A frenemy had opined that I was "unfeminine" and therefore unattractive, and because by this time I was desperate to attract anyone's company, I took it as a challenge. Dresses, skirts, and frilly tops began to attract my coin. I had decided that I would still be queer, but now I would be a femme queer. My logic was, and still occasionally is, that the feminine is degraded and disregarded in a misogynist society, and that I would work on redeeming feminine dress and practices (while reaping the benefits of being viewed as socially compliant).

I wasn't alone, either. All kinds of young women were turning from the androgynous styles of the 90s to "new Romantic" or "retro" or any of a dozen other ways to say a highly femininzed, desperately sexualized fashion turn towards a safe imaginary past. My passage into the feminine had been well-greased by strong cultural forces with an interest in getting me to fit in.

Moving from a socially unacceptable body and dress style to a socially acceptable one did get me positive attention. From guys. In fact, a number (3) of guys stepped up to tell me that they had even liked my socially unacceptable body, but had been wary of asking out an obvious lesbian. The threat to my queer identity boys posed was outweighed by a genuine attraction to men and an o'erpowering desire to fuck someone who was not also a virgin (sorry erstwhile roommate!). I dated a bit, then fell in love with the man of my dreams and, well, put the queer identity on a shelf so as not to be called a bisexual poseur.

Still and all, I hadn't counted on the fact that a decade of studiously ignoring fashion and, well, grooming would leave me without the necessary skills and aesthetic sense to dress myself in the mornings. I wore a bunch of bad shit. Well, they don't call it trial and success, eh?

Despite looking at girls for years, I had no idea how to suddenly become one. The girls of my acquaintance, too, wore jeans and t-shirts, but with a hundred subtle touches that resulted in feminine presentation. But, look, fuck subtlety. If I was going to learn anything about girl drag, I was going to have to try too hard. Instead of looking at the women around me, I looked to caricatures: the sex-nuts Victorians and the 1950s pin-up housewife. An hourglass exaggerated by a full skirt and a cinched waist: that was my jumping-off point into femninity. It felt like a masquerade, a costume you wear until it inhabits you, similar to the enchanted (and sexy!) costumes in Buffy the Vampire Slayer's second-season Halloween episode, "Halloween."

In any case, it's been a few years since then and I'm generally happy with my dress sense and makeup skills, though I still have a ways to go with hair. I'm ambivalent about what my newfound love of adornment means for me. When I began to pour my creative energy (what little energy I possess) into looking pretty, I lost much of my drive in art and writing, which I always thought would redeem me being bad-looking. My ambition to do what I consider valuable has plateaued while I work on this new outlet, which is ephemeral, dubiously rewarding, and arguably unfeminist. I read any kind of cultural studies I can lay hands on to try and understand my fascination with and compulsion to create myself anew on the site of my body. So this is my attempt to make a style blog which is against the idea of style blogs, to become an anti-fashion guru, to create criticism, to redereconstruct. My secondary goal is to not be needlessly cruel to anyone while doing this, so if you see me being, say, racist, please let me know.


*Random bolding strategies in this post owe everything to Slog.