no boys allowed in the room!!!!

It's good to know that even wearing baggy jeans and sneakers and a big messenger bag over my back that makes me look like something that never leaves the confines of Notre Dame Cathedral doesn't take away from my sheer sexiness to men in cars.

I'm on the third read-through of the Sady Doyle piece because different parts of it are hitting all different typewriter keys in my brain, and Rube Goldberg-type things are happening up there.

That feeling is scary but I love it.

Well the thing is I am already kinda out there about my "pet" (another dismissive word but not specifically gendered...maybe) issues, because obv people who are gonna transgress them find any objection "strident", amirite? But there are deffo groups of people I do stuff with that I would have to become like a facing-in-all-directions-at-once tornado of rebuttals if I didn't just give them death glares and move away toward someone else.

I'm thinking about needing to re-set my settings. My baselines for objecting to criticisms of myself, or patronizing talk from men OR women, or whatever, are set way way too high, in the sense that red lights on the control panel do NOT go off when someone tells me how I should change, or talks to me like I'm 5, or devalues my ideas or feelings or my body or my self. I would like to know how that happened and then change THAT about myself, for sure.

jenny, this is too late for your friday interview, but have you looked into tailor-made suits? i have no idea on the cost of something like that (i have never worn a suit, having come even remotely close to working in a corporate environment).

There's a bit in Alan Partridge where he tries to get invited to an influential businesswoman's "Ladies' evening" or something and when he's not allowed he's all "ohhh what, loads of women talking blabbering crap?!" So if I hear anyone talk about blathering women then they instantly turn into Alan Partridge to me.

yammer
blather
blither
dither
blabber

fendi
prada

Sheep blether, it's a livestock word. Well actually apparently it's a Scots dialect word from Old Norse or something, that means to "talk nonsense" and applies to anyone. So it's not the word's fault how it gets used. But after this, I'm going to have a more noticing ear for anti-woman applications.

hm, dither is more like not being able to decide what to do?

the tiger beatdown post Jenny linked reminds me of a favorite blogpost of mine.

Smirks, smarms, provokes, and blathers until you go crazy, then calls you crazy.

^^^phrase that has haunted me since i read it

I liked the tiger beatdown post a lot, but not the girlbomb one so much. Where Sady Doyle's article takes a recent experience and explores the way in which it relates to and reinforces social patterns, the girlbomb one seems to be much more of an antagonistic generalisation. I think it's just written more glibly and dismissively, and a tiny "but I'm not really saying they're all like this" doesn't actually provide a workaround for generalisations (and to be honest I read it as a petulant tit-for-tat sarcasm anyway).

yeah she definitely got a lot of criticism along those lines for it. it is definitely more glib and less careful than the tiger beatdown post. i think i have just known too many dudes of the type erlbaum describes.

Poking around through the links posted today led me to YA Lit Bitch and this interview with Laurie Halse Anderson and it's really good.

I didn't know any of those guys because TA DAAH I don't think we had any kind of feminist organization at my college. Or...maybe we did and no one went? I didn't go, but now that I think of it, I think it might have been run by dudes.

Oh, they definitely exist, and I did boggle at the idea of a college feminist group being run solely by dudes (as mentioned in the comments) - if that isn't co-opting your space I don't know what is. But yeah, I just didn't connect with the writing and felt like the issue could have been dealt with better.

fendi
prada

irl lol

xp No, I agree, it felt flippant and unserious, but I know that stuff has more resonance for people with those experiences. The Sady piece is obv on another level but I think the lighter/smaller one was prob only intended to be a hasty jokey stab at its topic.

xp to Jenny - if you've got a J. Jill around, I like their Simple 120 line tailored wool jacket. Not boxy in plus sizes. They have a skirt in that line, but it's really long (I'm a trouser person myself).

my prob is that the hasty joke stab belittles the everyday experiences without the splash factor of "weirdo poster blabbing about natural breasts"

Well yes. I was trying to be less condemning because horseshoe liked it. But yes!

i didn't mean to condemn :(

No, I mean! Oh boy. I think it's fine if you do it because you are not condemny. I was just trying to be uncharacteristically sensitive. Needs work.

hs knows i love her

luv u boo

kind of off topic but this feels like the right place to 'brag' about this:

i am friends with this woman who i admire a great deal bc she is v talented, smart, funny, has had a really tough but also interesting life and a bunch of other stuff. it is kind of a long story how i met her, but she lives in LA so i don't see her all that often. anyways, she has had a terribly rough year and recently one of her dogs died on top of all the other stuff. so i made her a care package that was just some home-made cookies, some mix CDs and a funny book.

she sent me this email thanking me and basically asking me to be her BFF (lol - so adorable) and telling me how she has a hard time making friends with other women but liked me right away.

anyway, it made me feel good bc lately i've been feeling not v charming or witty or smart or friendly or interesting or anything.

aw you just made me re-thank my bff that I never see for sending me a handbag she made for me plus Britishers snack food last year.

care packages and home-made gifts are the best - so awesome to come home and find a cute surprise in your letterbox.

It feeds the inner person to be liked for the right reasons.

that is lovely, just1n3

nobody needs to hold back in their distaste for that feminist men post on my account! i can see what's offputting about it; sorry if it made anyone's day a little more irritating.

Someone in a car told me I have a nice ass, yesterday, while I was biking home in the dark.

― arch midwestern housewife named (Laurel), Tuesday, August 30, 2011 8:39 AM (6 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

That was nice of him, and nice for me, because I was just wondering about my ass.

― arch midwestern housewife named (Laurel), Tuesday, August 30, 2011 8:39 AM (6 hours ago)

this totally made me lol!

this reminded me of when my friend Amber used to walk to her cafe job, and a very nice man hanging out on the corner praised her ass by comparing it to white chocolate. He also was so flattering as to loudly express his desire to partake of it.

Gee, I haven't been catcalled in years. I must be really hideous.

I can't remember who & where I've told this, but have I mentioned I have someone praying for me to find a man?!?

oh geez -- have any of your fb friends posted that "boaz" thing? do you know what i'm talking about?

I just laughed and laughed and tried to take it with the well meaning I know this woman has but oh my.

No!

The woman who is doing this is convinced her prayers helped another friend find her missing ring even though it took TEN YEARS.

To all the single ladies, here's a quick piece of Biblical advice:

Ruth patiently waited for her mate Boaz. While waiting on YOUR Boaz, don't settle for ANY of his relatives: Brokeaz, Poaz, Lyinaz, Cheatinaz, Dumbaz, Cheapaz, Lockedupaz Goodfornothinaz, Lazyaz or Marriedaz and especially his third cousin Beatinyoaz. Please, wait on your Boaz & make sure he respects Yoaz!!

Oh dear.

both friends who posted that are Mormon

but don't know each other, as far as i know

my god

That's not just philosophically offensive, it's linguistically horrifying and racially insensitive, to say the very least. Stay classy, Mormons.

lolaz

I've been reading game of thrones for the past couple of days and have yet to read the original post on tiger beatdown but read the professor feminism post and LOVED IT. but yeah, game of thrones is not a feminist text by any stretch, i know that much and i'm like halfway through the first book - i love how every servant girl has is "young and slender", gah, unnecessary perviness. plus all the refs to rape and a women's place and etc etc. and yet as a book i find it totally entertaining (as well as ridiculous, with repetitive prose and nonsensical metaphors, etc). i will read the TB post soon though and likely agree with it, while still finding GoT entertaining, if only bc it's 'fantasy'. which also brings up the whole geek girl thing, which i was reading about earlier today too. and then, coincidentally, a friend posted this - http://ittybiz.com/death-threats-online/ - on her fb and i'm like o_O and yet not completely surprised - misogyny, alive and well and totally disgusting and sad.

Undoing what we've been taught - to be good, to accommodate, to hold our tongues, to fear - is truly difficult and requires daily practice, i've found, and a supportive community of women and men, which, for many women, can be really hard to find. But i think we know in our bones what our power is, and when we can't express it, that blockage kills our spirits slowly, whether we know it or not. And i'm just like, at this point, fuck that. The unique power of women has been not only overlooked for too long now, but outright quashed, literally put to death. why? because it is some serious stuff. In an ideal world, it works in harmony with men's power, which is also, as we know, some serious stuff (not to mention all other energies/powers between and beyond, but that's another point). In this non-ideal world, it's just seen as a threat, imo. But i think that's changing, slowly slowly and with great effort. And in a way, i'm glad for the internet assholes who out themselves in such public ways as misogynists - at least it's a tangible piece of proof that we can talk about among all the other proof that has been dismissed as mere "feelings", that sickening pit low in the gut that tells us this shit is just plain wrong. It pisses me off to no end, that's for sure, but living my life in a pissed-off fashion doesn't seem to work for me, so that's why i practice undoing the good-girl lessons and just saying what works and what doesn't for me, according to my gut and my heart and my brain. It is work and it is hard! And it's meant i've lost my footing so many times in the past couple of years, but always picked myself up and gotten closer to the good gut feeling because of it. My tolerance for living any other way is extremely low now and my awareness of bs is high, but so is my awareness of all this awesome stuff that women (and some men of course!) are doing to build new (if small) paradigms.

It's kind of funny that I'm reading GoT because there's so much fighting in it, and for me the last thing that's going to solve our problems is fighting, at least not in the warring sense. Maybe in the sense of how people who love each other very much sometimes fight, to get the blarghrrarr energy out of their systems and get back to the core of the matter of being kind to each other. hm.

But i think we know in our bones what our power is, and when we can't express it, that blockage kills our spirits slowly, whether we know it or not.

Holy... wow. This is amazing and so true.

Robyn always dependably amazing on the things unseen.

I solved my suit problem, sort of. After concluding that Lane Bryant is still the Devil's Own Source for Plus Size Clothing, my shopping companion and I decided to hit up Macy's and LO. They had some suits. Unfortunatelyyyyyyyyyy the two suiting lines are not cut well for my figure (which is pretty hour glass) so any jackets that fit in the bust were of David Byrne proportions everywhere else (which is too bad because there was actually a WOOL BLEND SUIT that was on sale 40% off and I was going to buy that fucker and never worry about a suit again, except the fit was off). So but anyway, I ended up buying what is probably a wholly inappropriate black and white kind of zebra print jacket in a very cute, modern cut and heavy knit (so it's got a lot of body and it does not look knit until you get right up to it) fabric and I love it. The End.

PS this is a job interview but like I said, it's a long shot for many reasons so I'm not too worried about sticking to the straight-and-narrow superconservative black suit attorney path. Plus it's internal and they see what I wear to work every day so they aren't going to be like "OMG HOW DARE SHE," but rather more like "Oh, that's kind of conservative."