Quitting Sex Was The Best Thing I Ever Did For Myself by Laura Bogart.

Article by Laura Bogart, Quitting Sex Was The Best Thing I Ever Did For Myself - hit the nail on the head when it comes to being a fat heterosexual woman. 

It's terrifying and exhausting even thinking about joining a dating scene that hates fat people, especially women. And with social media, it's so easy to just get pummeled ("UR FAT KILL URSELF").

On Being a Woman in America While Trying to Avoid Being Assaulted

“Sometimes, I’ll read a novel written by a man in which a woman walks home alone, late at night, in America, without having a single thought about her physical safety, and it’s so implausible that I’ll put the book down.”

From On Being a Woman in America While Trying to Avoid Being Assaulted by R. O. Kwon.

Watch Big Little Lies.

Illustration by Keith Negley

I very much enjoyed Big Little Lies. As the series unfolded I had my suspicions and theories, and eventually grew worried it would let me down, but it did not.

It represented friendships and women in a very honest way and did not fall into any misogynist tropes about whether or not women can be truly supportive of one another.



Spoiler alert on these linked articles!

In Its Final Moments, Big Little Lies Transcends Its White Feminism

From THE SURPRISING GENEROSITY OF “BIG LITTLE LIES”:

In one lovely scene, Jane tells her new friends how detached she feels, as if she were peering at them from far away rather than sitting with the two of them. As Madeline chatters, Celeste stays quiet, locking eyes with Jane. The camera holds on the two of them, capturing the early alchemy of a friendship—and the suggestion that, even in mean-girl world, women might choose to be allies instead of enemies.

That's my main takeaway. I was adamant that the ending feature a show of solidarity, which seemed imminent. These women were able to talk to each other properly after really intense confrontations. Smart, empathetic women can see when they've been wrong and can see what's going on. Even if I disliked someone, I wouldn't stand for them being assaulted in my presence. Women stand up for one another much more than is represented in media and film. 

The praise Nicole Kidman is getting is deserved. And there are times Reese Witherspoon stopped me in my tracks. I wish they could each get an Emmy. They both deserve it. The entire cast was exquisite.

Highly recommended. If you can, watch it in tandem with a friend so you can talk about it.

UPDATE (April 6th), adding this:

Big Little Lies’ most riveting moments are the silent ones between womenThe HBO drama is a stunning study in the unspoken language women use to survive.

YES YES. This this this:

In seconds, and with the threatening man in question standing mere feet away, these women trust each other completely. It’s an unflinching instant of wordless recognition, an understanding so deep that speaking its underlying fear aloud is unnecessary. It’s a feeling of awful, vital solidarity — one that I, and countless other women, know all too well.

Yes yes yes yes yes yes yes.

Lady Gaga on living with mental illness.

Lady Gaga discussed living with mental illness, PTSD and her struggles as a rape survivor when she recently visited a LGBTQ youth shelter.

I love Gaga, and I especially love her for being so open and honest about her own struggles. I really love her new album, there are definite threads of song-writing about kindness and care and that are hyper-emotive, throughout the album.

There's also a piece in The Guardian, that's a little more fleshed out.

She spoke about it again in November 2015 in a panel about the campus rape film The Hunting Ground, saying the rape “changed who I was completely. It changed my body, it changed my thoughts.” 

“When you go through a trauma like that, it doesn’t just have the immediate physical ramifications. For many people it is almost like trauma, where you re-experience it through the years after it.”

Gaga has always been open and honest. The song she did for The Hunting Ground was devastating. Find the live version from the Oscars if you can.



She seems very strong lately, her tone is clear and open and her work is emotional and confident in its vulnerability. It's also sweet, and loving. And that tone is comforting right now, since things are so shitty.

Check out Grigio Girls and Come to Mama from Joanne - I mean, even Diamond Heart and Joanne and Hey Girl . . . .

♥

2016-12-07 - update - She published an open letter on the subject of her PTSD, read it.

Lidia Yuknavitch's The Small Backs of Children.

Where are the borders of art? 

Where are the borders of a woman's body?
How unimaginable is one without the other?
When we think of violence, are we not aware, as women, of our place within the world of men?
The borders of our body, of our safe spaces, of hostile spaces?

I just finished reading The Small Backs of Children by Lidia Yuknavitch and I am re-committed to my impression of her as a fluid, visceral representation of what it is to write of art, trauma, violence and living a woman's experience.

I was floored when I read her memoir, The Chronology of Water. It's lead me here, to her novel, which kept me as enamored.

It's a novel, yes, but I feel as though the narrative of people and places is secondary to the passages that describe life so astutely. This book features a group of friends, all artists and creators, juxtaposed to a young girl in eastern Europe, orphaned by war and surviving through art, grit, and the persistence of young blood.

There are segments of her book that discuss art and experience, art as expression, as language, as reference point, as both anchor and catalyst. These sections created in me more questions. An infinite amount. Sometimes they fuse with and of the body, and gender and sexuality pour into her writing. Violence as commonplace, as a masculine language and threat. She has a similar juncture in violence, trauma, and women's bodies. One intrinsically stomped onto the other.

Our blood is all over this world.

Our greatest threat is so linked to us.

And of trauma, of death and loss and surviving the horrific, does our tongue split, now able to speak two languages? As if at different frequencies, two languages in parallel.

Yes I understand your desire for me to print this document, to do this grocery shopping, to celebrate this holiday, but do you understand that feeling, the deep rumble that comes from prolonged, wretched pain, where you become diluted by the incessancy of it, and become convinced your threshold makes you the undead, untouchable. Have you known that pain? No? Then we do not speak the same language. But yes, I do enjoy coffee. And yes, the weather has improved.

From page 69:

Who are we in moments of crisis or despair? Do we become deeper, truer selves, or life up and away from self, untethered from regular meanings like moths suddenly drawn toward heat or light? Are we better people when someone might  be dying, and if so, why? Are we weaker, or stronger? Are we beautiful, or abject? Serious, or cartoon? Do we secretly long for death to remind us we are alive?

This actually heavily links to the conversations I've been having with my best friend S regarding HBO's Westworld. There is an awful lot to unpack regarding the nature of trauma. If you have not watched Westworld - do not read anything about it! I went in blind and was able to discover and discuss things as I went and it's been very interesting!

Are our trauma's our cornerstones? 

I'd read something recently about the way in which trauma can root certain pathways in the brain, making it more difficult to adapt or change habits. Isn't this a scientific explanation for what we already know? How our wounds remind us, how old habits die hard? Aren't we creatures of narrative, of story? Isn't the story we hear most often our own?

Yuknavitch also has these really bodied moments, that represent those abstract experiences of being alive and sentient but not fully present in our culture and context. Detached. From page 93:

Then he thinks: love is an abstract word coming from a face hole.

I guess the only alienating bit to Lidia's novel is how it's populated by successful artists. Confident in their art. Monied. That's my alien experience. My unknown. Where art is a work, a calling, and not a form of communication and a way of being, of purging that is necessary.

Bad Feminist, Roxane Gay.

Just finished reading Bad Feminist by Roxane Gay. I already follow her on twitter, she's a great cultural critic. I've read pieces of hers here and there, but this is the first of her books I've read. I've already pre-ordered Hunger as well. She has a novel called Difficult Women scheduled for release in January 2017.

It's a nice collection of current-culture feminist critiques.

From Blurred lines, Indeed:

It’s hard not to feel humourless, as a woman and a feminist, to recognize misogyny in so many forms, some great and some small, and know you’re not imagining things. It’s hard to be told to lighten up because if you lighten up any more, you’re going to float the fuck away. The problem is not that one of these things is happening: it’s that they are all happening, concurrently and constantly. (Page 189)

Here she's discussing the pervasive misogyny we see daily in popular culture, but she's also projecting past that, it's everywhere, all the time. She's also referencing her feeling like a nag/debbie downer by her pointing out this sexism all the time, how it makes her seem humourless. This is something that's often on my mind, since stand-up and humour are very dear to me, but so is the resistance to bigotry.

From The Illusion of Safety/The Safety of Illusion

I don’t believe in safety. I wish I did. I am not brave. I simply know what to be scared of; I know to be scared of everything. There is freedom in that fear. That freedom makes it easier to appear fearless-to say and do what I want. I have been broken, so I am prepared should that happen again. I have, at times, put myself in dangerous situations. I have thought, You have no idea what I can take. This idea of unknown depths of endurance is a refrain in most of my writing. Human endurance fascinates me, probably too much because more often than not, I think of life in terms of enduring instead of living. (Page 152)

Gay comes to this passage through a critique of the concept of "safe spaces" and trigger warnings. I understand what she's saying, but I see no harm in using a trigger warning when creating something you know to be a representation of traumatic space.

If I'm down, and having a hard time, and I see a movie has trigger warnings regarding a lot of sexual violence I might choose to opt out of seeing the film, and keeping it for a day when it won't kick me while I'm down. A trigger warning is the option to say no, and to walk away. I absolutely understand that the world does not adhere to this type of nicety, but that doesn't mean it doesn't have it's value, or what it isn't at least an attempt at recognising the trauma of experience.

I relate to Gay's passage immensely. I also think there are parts of me that lean towards masochism. There is a way that trauma can dull certain synapses, in equal measure. Sure, maybe I have a high pain tolerance, expanded empathy, and deep emotional intelligence, but I also have a low understanding of romantic love and low level trust in men.

I live in pain-reduction so much, it limits my choices. I have nearly zero ambition these days. I'm always in crisis mode - in limiting my stimulation. I'm tired of enduring, but I have no reference for what living looks like.

Gay's framing of a bad feminist is based on what has traditionally been a white-upper class version of feminism. I'd argue that with millennials, there is more of an understanding of the fluidity of identity, and that like many things, it exists on a spectrum.

Feminism is the fight against patriarchy. More than that, it's the notion that women are people, and as such deserve the same unalienable rights as men. Furthermore, they deserve person-hood and autonomy.

Gay is a great feminist. There is no such thing as a bad feminist. You can be a racist feminist. You can be an elitist feminist. If you're "bad" and believing in equality - you're just not a feminist.

There is no one right way to be feminist. As there's no right way to be Canadian,  American, female, male, or queer.

So Gay might be a bad feminist of her own identifying. I'd argue she's a great one. But identities, especially those that hold on too tightly to a narrative, tend to alienate. And a reading of her work understands how she came to that title.

I recommend her book.

Kesha.

Go read the article Kesha, Interrupted now published by The New York Times Magazine.

Then watch this:



Brutal. She's going through so much, publicly.

Strength and love to her.

♥

Sex Object: A Memoir by Jessica Valenti

Just finished Sex Object: A Memoir by Jessica Valenti. There is definitely some great insight in Valenti's book. I especially liked:

Men’s pain and existential angst are the stuff of myth and legends and narratives that shape everything we do, but women’s pain is a backdrop--a plot development to push the story along for the real protagonists. Disrupting that story means we’re needy or selfish, or worst of all, man-haters--as if after all men have down to women over the ages the mere act of not liking them for it is most offensive. (Page 15)

I think the power of her memoir is in its personal representation. There's a lot about street harassment and lived misogyny that isn't necessarily mind-blowing to another woman, since most of us have lived variations of this. For these sections, I'm sure most men could learn about the daily hostilities women and girls face. For me, it was a little redundant. Not that it isn't powerful and important to address and name, it's just I'm part of the club so I have my own subway stories, my own stranger-dick horrors. In fact, a lot of them are eerily similar. Asking for directions with a dick in his hands... saying gross things to a young teen... etc. My "old hat" mentality towards it speaks to what a pervasive issue it is. Valenti's memoir is important in it being an act of being seen and heard, something still revolutionary (and potentially dangerous) for most women. She's able to call-out a lot of shady shit. And shady shit needs to be called out.

The book didn't shake me awake, as much as it just kind of said to me, hey, you know all that fucked up sexist, rapey stuff you've lived through - yah well, Jessica too. 

Reading her book makes me wish there was an organisation that went into 6th grade classrooms and told girls what they can do in order to protect themselves / how they can report the many kinds of assault. With the prevalence of cell phones, I actually think girls are more likely to have what they need to go to police now. When I was 15-16 and a guy stopped his car to ask for directions / masturbate to my friend and I we went to the cops. The cops told us unless he masturbated in front of a cop, there was nothing they could do. What fun. Now you can easily pull out a cell phone and get the fucking guys licence plate number.

Valenti shares a lot of stories that deal with drugs, sex, self-esteem and shitty relationships. At one point she mentions something her father says something that shakes her...

The things you do in your twenties are just things you do. Bus as you approach thirty what you do starts to become who you are. And there are some things you do not want to be forever. (Page 123)

I recognised myself in this. I've been looking at the lives of my friends, and thinking that the choices they make (who to hang out, what to prioritise) ends up being their choices, period. The same can then be applied to me. It's why I started volunteering. It's why I'm inching closer to vegetarianism one vegan or vegetarian meal at a time. I want to live my values. And to do that, that means actively choosing things that correspond to your values, to what you want.

That might seem so obvious, but when you're so depressed your general choices just focus on getting you through each day, it's hard to feel there's a greater rhyme or reason behind what you're doing.

Being a hot mess might be cute when you're 20 and can get by on being bra-less and naive. It gets less cute by the second. In fact, you realise how those who found that helplessness "cute" were patronising pervs mostly.

Eventually time starts flying by. There's more demanded of your time and your choices are all you have. The leisure of youth meant the privilege of being bored, of trying things. Every choice seems more important now. You see the ripple affect.

My friend E is about to finish her last graduate course. When she's completed it, she'll have obtained her Master's degree. This really makes me want to go back to school. Then I look into it, and I realise not only do I not have the money to go back, but I'm so exhausted that I can't fathom having the energy to go back and be engaged. The energy of youth. The ability to try something. I have to manage my expectations now. I hold back. I ration my energy.

Check out Valenti's work if it seems up your alley.