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so i recently dragged t-bone and my lovely friend L. to revolutionary road (*spoiler alert*) which stars my amazing and wonderific girlfriend kate winslet. hubba hubba. my life, it appears, seems to be at the crossroads of some kind of feminist revolution. i know. heavy dude.
it is a little like teaching my students about feminism. it is a pretty eye-opening experience. the stuff about feminism is familiar – it is theory i have been immersed in since i began my post-secondary schooling. rather, the eye-opening bit is about young women’s (and men’s) reactions to feminism. i have been grappling with why feminism is such a difficult topic since i began teaching and feel as though i might have gotten a smidge of insight after watching revolutionary road.
you have to understand that i was completely and utterly vibratingly excited about revolutionary road. after seeing kate winslet win for best actress on the golden globes, i vowed to see it as.soon.as.possible. and i did. but i didn’t have the reaction to it that i expected. it left me a little cold. even though it was a beautifully written and acted film, i was untouched. perhaps because it was familiar tale. suburban couple. hate lives. disaffected from social roles. gendered complications. the end. i simplify, but this is ultimately the jist. kate was powerful as april. leo was beautifully weak in his role as frank. but their lives and their constraints seemed so far away. another lifetime when divorce was unthinkable and choice had yet to be fully fought for. don’t get me wrong. t-bone and L. thought there were resonances to he present day – questions like: what is truth and what is the truth of your life? are you living your truth? is your (gendered) role your truth? and it fundamentally asks you to question beliefs about the past. who was strong and who was weak. what weakness can turn people into. what the social constraints on lives can lead people to do. to be.
but resonate? not for me. at first i was angry. i really wanted the film to speak to me. to bring a larger truth to bear on the realities of the everyday. and then i wondered, isn’t this the problem that students have with feminism? aren’t they waiting for the punchline, the relate-ability, the way in to what once was? i mean yes, it is hard to understand our lives in terms of the past, but it isn’t impossible. nor should we think it is self-evident. we need to dig into the past to find answers to our present. and if we think those answers – or questions – will be easy to formulate then we’ll be left a little cold. a little distanced. perhaps it is the nature of our society. our individualism. that makes us want without giving. take without asking. and maybe, just maybe, revolutions don’t start with having all the answers. or having readily available all the ways something relates exactly to our individual experiences. sometimes we need to dig a little deeper. and not demand that the surface deliver our truths.
so thanks to work i used to do on public nudity i still know folks in the nudy petudy business. and that has meant, strangely, that my new year has been filled with well…boobies. and lots of ’em. lemmie ‘splain.
a sage and mentor of the naturist movement whom i know, and once had a clothed interview audience with, is a defiant advocate for the right to breastfeed in public. in particular, his most recent cause is for facebook to stop removing breastfeeding photos arbitrarily that someone in the faceless realm of facebook censorship – is it you mark zuckerburg? – considers “vaguely pornographic.” apparently facebook has a problem with nipples. who knew? well. maybe some of you did. you dirty beasts.
anyhoo.
so this leads me to the question – which is not what you are thinking and sorry P. that i might not be going in the intended direction – but when is a child too old to breastfeed? or wait. is that the question? the boob fire has been lit under me and now it just needs to be discussed dammit. call it jacks’ war on nipples. or nipplepalooza. or nipplefest. just make sure there are nipples.
i just watched a “newsmagazine” about this topic and they took this issue to heart showing four-year-olds and eight-year-olds nursing. of course this causes uproar. disgust. outrage. but why? why can’t women catch a break? which brings us to the gendered nature of tits (doesn’t it?). my next research project. (just kidding. well. maybe). but really, the women interviewed make the helpful and important distinction – which is the direction i believe P. is going in – which is a legitimate, feminist point about the right of women to bare their breasts in the “service” of feeding their children the “natural” way. but as always, this fight turns into something else. the right for women to connect with their bodies and their children in “natural” ways. which essentializes. and we don’t like that, do we dear bloggy friends?
my frustration is focused on the dichotomy which is inevitably created between the “naturalness” of the naked human body, especially women’s bodies (we are closer to nature, dontcha know? all godless-like and such. borf) and the seemingly un-naturalness of sexuality. or the apparent division between the two. i mean i get it. i studied naturists for long enough to know that the only way you make yourself legitimate as a naked person in public is by saying that it’s “natural” and not “sexual,” thus creating the bind that these women find themselves in. the argument goes something like this: i should be able to post my booby my pics on facebook because i am doing a natural motherly thing feeding them (the age thing is still the wildcard here) and its not sexual because i am naturally made to feed kids. so it’s not sexual to show pics of my breasts when it is in the service of feeding my kids. k, all good. ‘cept for the fact that this argument requires you not only to make the relevant distinction between boobs for milk and boobs for sex (see above pic), but also requires women to turn themselves effectively into the “natural” baby-milking machine called mother. it requires a reliance on stereotypes of nurturing women and their proper role as caregiver. maybe this is just the eggnog talking, but it is a double-edged sword. not the nursing per se. but the lengths women go to legitimate the naturalness of boob-showing as a function of motherhood.
now, i don’t want anyone to get me wrong. i am an absolute, no question, fervent advocate of breastfeeding. in public. in private. in those cute little rooms in the mall that are made for moms that i wish i could go into without seeming creepy. but we women have enough to deal with without being the goddesses of milk. let’s advocate showing our tits for tits sake. let’s nipple it up. and someone pass the bottle.
epilogue: while i introduced the notion of older-age breastfeeding, i didn’t really address it. peruse the official petition to facebook about breastfeeding not being obscene and P.’s site for the banned facebook photos. tell me what you think about boobs. and eight-year-olds. cause this is important to the earth’s planetary rotation.
swears.
for those of you who don’t watch a&e like it is their lifeblood, bill kurtis is a guy (with a silky-smooth voice btw) who hosts and narrates a variety of crime-related shows on the friggin’ fantastic channel that rocks my world. i am currently obsessed with investigative reports (and have been since roughly 1995), where kurtis leads viewers through tales of intrigue and murder, often featuring the criminals and victim-families involved, that lend themselves to infuriating questions such as “should teens face the death penalty in murder cases?” i say infuriating because they take me back to high school when i would argue against the death penalty in opposition to all my classmates whose arguments were premised on seemingly biological categorizations of “goodness” and “badness.” in any case, i digress. in case you are not an avid watcher of all that is disturbing on television, a&e also has a program called intervention. intervention is a “reality show” that documents actual surprise interventions (the person who is being intervened upon agrees to participate in a documentary and then basically gets hijacked by their family with the help of an interventionist – for a synopsis look here) and, usually, the resultant recovery of the addicted person.
yesterday i was watching intervention when something in my stomach told me to stop. i didn’t. and then paid the price. the intervention was for allison – a young woman with a huffing dependency on computer duster (that she actually ingested – that is, blew directly into her mouth and lungs from.the.can) and who also was an anorexic cutter. in her both her sisters’ paraphrased words, allison is trying to kill herself as loudly as possible by inflicting physical pain on herself to demonstrate to her family and the world just how much pain she herself is in. usually, i get through an episode of intervention, having gone through the emotion of it, but satisfied with the recovery process and the epilogue that states the number of months the intervened has since been sober. allison has haunted me since and i think it has to do with a number of factors.
first, her youth. both her and her sister were young women, and very young when they were sexually abused (a reality that later resulted in all of allison’s addictions and problems). they were just regular girls, both hurt, and one hurt beyond recognition. second, her multiple addictions. i am not an expert in the field of anorexia, but i was recently reading about the advent of so-called “drunkorexics” who drink their calories instead of eat them. while this is a tenuous title, and one that many health experts might be wary of, it indicates the integrated nature of addiction – that anorexics often have substance abuse issues, and perhaps vice versa. and third, it makes me think about vancouver’s downtown eastside (dtes) and how all these issue coincide there: abuse and victimization, skeletally-thin addicted women (who i am not implying are anorexic, but are starving nonetheless), and just how easy it is – or would be for people like allison – to end up on the streets without caring people like her family, who of course, have to be in a position to be able to help. this post was originally intended to be about how the bodies of women in the dtes, those skeletal, emaciated bodies, ravaged with years of drug use and misuse by others, are actually held up as a beauty ideal in magazines (to make an obvious, if not disturbing, point). but instead, allison’s story, and damaged body, continues to haunt me, because it could have been me. it could have been any of us who someone decided to mistreat, in ways that are difficult to recover from.
i think it ultimately speaks to the correlation between treatment of our bodies and understandings of ourselves. and if one is too young to have autonomy over themselves and are mistreated, they will often mistreat themselves. a long time ago i was in a car accident and i was hospitalized for almost two months. at fourteen years old, my roommates fell into one of only three categories: anorexics and bulimics, cancer and accident patients, and suicides. i had one of each, although i got to know my roommate C., the best. she had survived not only rape, but her attempt to kill herself after that rape. i decided then, and was reminded now, that there is something wrong in a world where young women’s bodies are mistreated, by others, and themselves as a result of pain. pain over hurt, pain over not being perfect, pain over not being enough. it is often said that young girls live in a scary world, and they should be protected. but i am going to suggest that young women are the real survivors. they are the ones who have to contend with a world that denies them autonomy, and then asks them to apologize.
as you can see, i need my own intervention. an intervention to not watch intervention.
oh. and i’d like bill kurtis to host it.
i have been thinking a lot about babies lately. and kids. and not in the way one might imagine. these thoughts are giving me icky feelings. and pee-inducing nightmares.
it all started when i had a dream about t-bone being preggers. i mean, sweet, right? turns out, not so sweet. i think he was just a vehicle for my own messed up ideas about what pregnancy would be like. read: f*ckin’ scary as shit. all he did was whine. and he wasn’t sexy pregnant either. sorry, dude. but pregnancy doesn’t become you. next it was the proliferance (is that even a word? methinks, no) of babies in my life. i mean babies are cute. darling even. but i can’t EVER imagine being responsible for one. like. EVER. and then there is the fact that they never go away. as my mother always tells me (and something that i have internalized as a threat): “once a mother, always a mother.”
this also could have something to do with two other factors. 1) someone recently called me “unconventional” and after i almost punched them i realized that it was meant as a compliment; and 2) i am going on the job market. the “unconventional” nature of my life means that not only have i been living like an undergrad since 1997 but i have possibly also been thinking, acting, and being generally irresponsible like one since around then too. also, how is it possible to work and have children? i know women do it. but i am convinced that they are magical. like unicorns. and leprechauns. or magical the way matthew mcconaughey having a career is magical. and we all know how i feel about him.
i had a recent debate with a friend about whether or not it is “okay” for employers to punish their female employees based on non-performance at work due to family commitments. i mean, obviously, it is not but it seemed to me like we we speaking within the confines of popular discourse that still, let me stress: STILL encourages women to think of working as a choice. as though we would all be happier – oh, and have better adjusted children – if we just stayed home. as though that “choice” doesn’t also exist in a land of fairy tales and privilege that not only doesn’t exist but doesn’t take into account women’s RIGHT to work, be ambitious, successful, f*cking fabulous, and the like. choice is a tricky word when it comes to women. and everybody seems to be all about “giving” women the choice between this and that. between attractive options like double shifts of work meaning work, then kids and home, and triple shifts, such as work, kids, home, and care of extended family and/or child-like spouse. i mean come on people! choice is a fantasy created by those who don’t have to choose. who can live in the comfort and safety of knowing that their “role” doesn’t involve housework, child-rearing, and caring for elderly relatives. whew. jacks is on ranty roll kids. watch out.
i guess this sums up my perspective on children. i guess i think that being unconventional can’t work with little ones. because then you are mother. and with an academic career looming, that is a scary prospect.
however, if one can have an unconventional egalitarian marriage, perhaps there is hope for procreation. cause we could all use little jacks’s running around, no?
i love to teach. as exhausting and challenging as it is – i can’t friggin’ help myself. i find it lovely and delicious. splendorific even. i am just wrapping up an intensive three-week course where i get to teach my passion – i get to teach students about gender. there is something beautiful about teaching people something different about something so intimate. something that is seemingly so “natural.” eyes widen. hearts and experiences open. teaching is transformative. and that’s why i can’t get enough.
i have long joked that the children of teachers cannot escape the call of educating. it is akin to being called by god, called up from the minor leagues, possessed by that which you cannot help yourself from doing. and i have been thinking lately about why teaching is my calling. i think it has something to do with the fact that it combines all of my interrelated spastic properties. teaching is a performance – which i love. teaching is (can be) transgressive. and ultimately, teaching can transform the lives of individuals by generally making the world more livable. i don’t know if my particular brand of teaching does any/all of these things. but teaching is beautiful and the effects of its affects may never be measured.
think of that teacher that you had that you loved. you love them because they did something to you. viscerally. they changed the way you think. they gave you information that could never, ever be taken from you. they gave you a sense of self that was real. tangible. they called on and accepted your very being. some might have changed your worldview, others might have crushed it. but all this transforms one’s very being. it alters opportunities. knowledge engages the soul. that is why the harbingers of said knowledge are so intimate a memory. so decidedly important.
i complain. i struggle to do my best in this short span that challenges me as the instructor as well as my students. i worry. i try to engage even those students who looked bored or who don’t invite a change of perspective. i don’t relish marking papers and assigning a value to work that my students have laboured over. i don’t see myself as a specter of future import in the lives of students that share three intense weeks in a hot classroom learning that their bodies, themselves, could be different. and perhaps that through that difference, oppression could be lessened. but i have learned something about myself that is perhaps more profound than what i could hope to teach. i have learned that i am a teacher. no matter how spastic.
teaching is really an extension of who (how) i am. it has meant over the past year that teaching has made me confront myself. my wants. desires. needs. teaching has transformed me through the circulation of knowledges about power, selves, and pasts. being a teacher isn’t what defines me. but it is an integral piece of who i believe i am. and a passion that even the greatest fear cannot eradicate.
[whoa. holy deepness.]
i have just reached a turning point in my life. i have set a personal record. gone to a place of no return. i watched three movies in the theatre in three days. look at me. a personal best. what movies, you ask? well it is a colourful line-up. first there was sex and the city which i didn’t think i was going to see because i didn’t think it would translate to film. it did just fine. second was the strangers which i shouldn’t have seen due to the fact that i like to be scared by supernatural events but not by roving bands of psychopaths with no clear motive. third was indiana jones and something about a crystal skull. all of these movies were entertaining. one made me want to shop. one made me almost pee my pants. and one made me sing “dr. jones” by aqua every time someone called indie dr. jones. all in all – good times.
i struggle with movies at times because it seems like it is hard to turn one’s critical lens off. i like to say that the study of sociology has forever ruined my full enjoyment of film. there are some movies i can’t watch because they actually make me feel stupid. and really, if you think too hard about most films, their strict adherence to formula, their underdeveloped one-dimensional characters, and their incessant “hidden” marketing strategies should make us feel stupid. we morph from citizens to consumers. from collectives to wholes. from humans to currency.
that said, sex and the city infected me with shopping fever. and i don’t think it is going away.
i have always been the feminist in the crowd that is wearing make-up. a dress. polish on my toes. as i get older, and more women define for themselves what being a feminist means, i find more long-haired, paint-faced, skirt wearing feminists. but: the women of sex and the city feminist? this is certainly a puzzle as they have the potential to be but it also makes me want to wear heels. real bad. which is ridiculous. anyhoo. i have decided to use my feminist powers for good and provide you with a brief dissection of the sex and the city women from a quasi-feminist perspective:
carrie: she is successful. cute. funny. smart (we think). fashionable. quirky. kissed a women (alanis no less) for fun once. she has made a name for herself in a tough city. she picks a*sholes to date, but we all make mistakes.
samantha: f*cks everything and encourages others to do the same. the woman should receive a medal, or at the very least, a gilded set of anal beads.
miranda: prolly the one true feminist on the show. highly educated. articulate. balances child and career in a no-nonsense way. consistently reminds women of the battles that have been fought for what they have, and can do, now.
charlotte: um. anyone? bueller? forget it.
so, in sum, despite the fact that the women of sex and the city live in privileged white and largely heterosexual monogamous paradise, there is a silver lining.
and it involves shoes.
so at dinner last night with my fav american couple S. and B., i became aware, once again, that i not only LOVE talking about the differences between canada and the u.s. but that i also have no idea what is going on electorally over there. and for this, sweet baby jesus, i am proud. i mean, maybe it’s the profound and crushing disappointment that i felt when bush was re-elected, or the fact that i feel like if i don’t now what is going on here, then why should i know what is going on there, or maybe, just maybe, it is that i am lazy. nevertheless. i can’t handle any more talk about obama and hillary (please note that people ALWAYS refer to them like this. even though it reflect the sexist use of language as a symbolic representation, that is, calling her “hillary” devalues her authority which is given to men through the use of their surnames). anyhoo. i am having a wtf moment and thought i’d share. i mean, i should care, shouldn’t i? does this make me a bad person? or does this make me similar to (some? most? all?) americans in that i have no idea what the f*ck is going on in the political universe (other than, tangentially, my own). oh, and i know that this is a generalization of americans that is inaccurate, all-encompassing, and ignorant. i will not, however, retract it. so there.
here are a couple of reasons i have compiled about why i don’t give a sh*t about american politics or the players in it. (where is this ranty rage coming from you ask? the rain, okay? and the fact that i recently watched the documentary outfoxed. and i’m all fired up about nothing. it happens. for reals). okay, so back to the list:
1) it kills me a little inside how people have tried to construct the democratic race as if it is about gender (by which they mean sex) or race. i mean, i know that it is going to get spun that way inevitably, but it just points to how ANYONE, other than a middle-aged, white male (and/or any member of the bush family), is not seen as a valid candidate for the highest office in the united states. this is obscene. what is more obscene is that people argue that feminism is dead, or should die a quiet death, because all kinds of equality have been achieved. really? i didn’t get that memo.
2) do i really like/trust hillary clinton? i mean, her presidency would mean that in the last 16 or so years, two families, and two families alone, have held the title president of the united states. isn’t that messed up? i mean, how does that happen? huh?
3) i am a little afraid that oprah will in fact be the vice president after something mysteriously befalls whomever his vice president will be. it would be a coincidence in line with point #2. that is to say, not a coincidence. at all.
4) why are all politicians in the united states elevated to the status of celebrity? can’t they just be boring politicians that no one knows anything about as they are in canada? i know that macleans is trying to get people to care about the private lives and goings on of canadian politicans on that kinda “social” mp section but i am quite sure that everyone does as i do and completely. skips. that. page. because, seriously who cares what the mp from some 40-person riding in winnipeg does with her time off? hmmm?
5) everything gets soooooooooo blown out of proportion. like michelle obama saying that she is proud of her country for the first time. or clinton (ya see that?) crying. all has to be dissected. analyzed. spun. and it all detracts from what they are saying. like the fact that they want to exit nafta if they don’t get what they want. i’m not saying nafta is a good thing. alls i’m sayin’ is why don’t we look at what this means. not whose hair is fabulous and whose sweater is frumpy. again, amercians can learn something from the frumpy unfabulousness of canadian politicians. i’m just saying.
6) is it spring yet? i want more flower blossoms and sun. and less american politics.
pleeeze.
last week i saw a new canadian comedy called “young people fucking.” it was low budget and fabulous. as an added bonus, the director, martin gero, was there to introduce the film and then chat with the audience afterward (an unexpected surprise and due to his residency in vancouver). gero was a funny guy. the film was a funny film. largely in an uncomfortable kind of way which happens to be my favourite kind of funny (that and poo humour gets me every time. poo. hehe). and callum blue is in it. need i say more?
i found myself thinking about the film after seeing it more than i expected. i usually think about films if they are particularly dramatic or sad. and then i can’t seem to get them out of my mind even if i desperately. want. to. but the quirky-fantastic-ness of this film made me ponder it over and over. so perhaps this is an attempt to get it out of my mind. and onto yours.
the comedy is essentially set in five bedrooms. with five stories. in six acts that span foreplay to orgasm and beyond. if you haven’t realized from the title already, it’s a good date movie. if, in fact, you want to have sex with said date. it covers threesomes and sex with exs, friends with benefits, and bored marrieds. the only thing it fails to fully probe (hehe, i said probe) is any kind of gay sex, except in a laughable end scene. it was written by gero and his friend (aaron abrams who also appears in the film), apparently largely over msn, and its particular male perspective is obvious. but also funny.
i vacillate between pissing my pants laughing at male-centered comedy – you know what i mean – the superbads, knocked-ups, and every will ferrell movie ever made – and finding myself alienated by the way it attempts to, or fails to, engage women. where women are depicted as the straight-woman. the love interest. the conquest. the unfunny body that propels the story of the man forward. in short, the other. while young people fucking does appear to centre around men, i am going to suggest it could be read differently. but not entirely subversively. it does engage women in ways that we do not often see as it demonstrates how sex is a powerful motivating force for women as well.
there is a successful woman who successfully seduces her ex, a best friend that convinces her long-time pal to f*ck her in amidst the backdrop of some hardcore gangsta rap, and a bored married that suggests a “alternate” route to pleasure (i can’t ruin that one – it is too unexpectedly funny). its quirky and women have a role beyond passivity. saying no. being no. to the man’s constant yes. this is not to suggest that the movie isn’t still male-centric, but rather to say that it has a certain truthful quality to it. in that way that independent small-scale films often do. they surprise you with their true-to-life reflections. and make you laugh your ass of at the sometimes awkward act of sex. this is why its been on my mind. and why you might wanna see it.
here is a review from the pacific cinematheque where i saw it. enjoy.
i should really get paid for this shit.
(warning: this post may or may not be suitable for the following: actual douches, wannabe douches, and anyone who has a problem with vajayjays. you’ve been sufficiently warned).
okay. so i have been feeling some guilt about calling myself a starbucks douche. i mean, i have previously tried to validate my use of the term as a subversive strategy. and because, for reals, there are an exceptional amount of douches in the world. however. the question remains: is it appropriate for a feminist to use the “d” word? hmmm. let’s ponder.
when i think of the word douche, i think of my dutch aunt. stay with me – this isn’t going off the rails. yet. she never fails to use the word douche when i stay with her, as in, “and here is the room for the douche for the morning.” okay, douching is not some kind of bizarre, collective, room-specific dutch morning ritual. she means the shower, but she inevitably uses the french term, la douche. my aunt isn’t pretentiously co-opting the word. it is just how she learned to say it in english, okay?
then there’s the summer’s eve douches of my youth. not of my youth exactly (thank baby jesus that it had gone out style as a cleansing trend by my so-called “coming of age”). but characterized that part of my ’80s youth that was horrified by the very. thought. of. bringing. back. freshness. every(gulp)time. gawd. i still can’t say it without shuddering in my formerly nine-year old skin. bah. (and perhaps this is the very problem. the idea that i had when i was nine, or whatever godforsaken age, that made me cringe at the thought of something specific to women’s “parts”).
and finally there is the discovery of someone’s mother’s douche which you crowd around as if you have found a piece of the lost ark. or porn. or the filthiest secret imaginable. that just happens to have a nozzle.
so, okay. before i lose my audience entirely, i would like to bring us back to the point at hand. does douche in fact call to mind any of these above examples? or does it represent a kind of male humour that pillages and appropriates the very intimacies of the human female body for the sake of laughter? or rather, does it stand as a testament to the douche pictured above? has it successfully morphed meaning? in our hypertextual, unfixed meaning, postmodern world can douche mean douche? seriously. i need to know.
what do you think?
(i just want to apologize personally to matthew mcconaughey for a joke that has gotten out of hand. sorry. i’m an a-hole).
first, i must say that teaching – my convenient excuse for everything these days – has been taking over my life and this is why my productivity level for pumping out posts has, in fact, been pitiful. however, in order to come back with a bang, i am going to write about my fabulous friday night when i experienced a burlesque show for the very first time. needless to say, i now aspire to be a burlesque performer despite the fact that i know this will never happen. still, one can dream.
you might remember my foray into pole-dancing not too long ago. this experience was, at best, conflicted, and fraught with dissonances between what it meant to be “sexy” for the gaze of (an)”other” – that is, a man. burlesque on the other hand, kicks the shit out of this notion of the gaze. mostly, in a intensely sexy juxtaposition, you feel object to the bodies on stage. as if your only function is to enjoy the beautiful sexuality that forcefully, aggressively, and uber-sexually demands your attention. you will not look away. feel squeamish. or objectified. you will, in fact, enjoy yourself. because, it just so happens, that burlesque is best.
before i went, i experienced some anxiety around the idea that this was – allegedly – a female-centric, feminist-inspired, expression of women’s bodies. i was, in fact, afraid it would be mishandled. mistaken. misappropriated. and essentially be akin to stripping with a greater acceptance of the diversity of women’s bodies. but still. a smidge-y ummm…dirty. and not dirty in the puritanical sense. but dirty in the male-defined and focused sexuality way. on the other hand, i was also fearful of it being an expression of our goddesses within. our inner femaleness. our connection to the moon. and excuse me while i puke, but i can’t handle my inner goddess. it reduces me far too simply to my vagina.
shockingly, neither of these two worst-case-scenarios played out. instead burlesque ended up surpassing any expectation of predefined sexualities or (biological) determinants. essentially – and quintessentially – it was sexy. really friggin’ sexy. and the power of the women on stage was palpable. visceral. and intense.
so what can we learn about the importance of pasties and pussies? well perhaps that the performance of different varieties of female sexuality needn’t be predetermined or presumptuous. but that burlesque demonstrates that it is perfect in the power it affords women over their own representation. their (em)power(ment) within their bodies. their clearly defined and articulated agency. and that by wearing the once pariah-producing brand “slut,” these harlots can kick the shit out of what it means to be a “properly” sexual woman.
this post was brought to you by the letter P. which apparently i am in love with.
this post is also tangentially related to something hilarious i stumbled upon in my blog travels – i give you the mostly hilarious sarah silverman in her music video producing debut (with special guest appearance by matt damon) entitled “f*cking matt damon.”
sarah silverman’s f*cking matt matt damon
enjoy.
the thoughtful spaz 
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