no boys allowed in the room!!!!

Yoni Bitchell is my personal fave
Yoni Basil also a decent option

<3

can't believe you're not going with the ilx classic, and twat

joni luvs chachi was my fave tv show as a little kid so this feels right

that post made no contextual sense, for which i apologize

I loled
There's enough for us all to have one

I didn't mention this before because I feel like it's the biggest can of worms in the universe but that article io posted was otm about "creepy", a word that is so vague that it can refer to anything from annoying behavior to harassment to actual stalking (not lite-stalking as the term is used more generally. I'm not sure she's otm about why, as I think it varies as wildly as the meanings of the word "creepy" but I'm glad she opened the discussion of a very nebulous concept that's always hanging in the air like a fart.

I had to get that off my chest because I've been thinking about the general concept of creepiness for many years.

a podcast i enjoy that discusses old-timey high school books discussed Forever by Judy Blume but neither the host or the guest had read it before

they both liked it reading it as newcomers, which is good & cool to hear

but oh man it bummed me out! i was looking forward to hearing from someone who was a legit teen whose life was changed when that contraband was passed to them (like me!) and who owes JB a debt of womanly gratitude for telling me all the stuff that mum and other women kept to themselves (like me!)

plus this guest was a teen in the 00's (side-eye)
who had only read the Fudge series (double side eye) (COME ON! Deenie? Tiger Eyes? Are You There God?)

Sorry, just venting

What podcast is this? It sounds interesting. I mean, in general, maybe not this specific episode.

It's called Sophomore Lit. The idea is they cover your 10th grade reading list, but they cast the net pretty wide and cover stuff like Longfellow that used to be assigned decades ago but isn't now, as well as standards like Romeo & Juliet, Animal Farm, whatnot. I kinda like it. They stay on topic pretty well, and the host is the brother of Dan McCoy of the Flophouse podcast so I'm kinda fond of it by default.

And it's kinda cool to rediscover stuff that you read in school that you thought was lame but maybe isn't now. Or vice versa.

- I don't think there's a word I hate more than yoni.

- "bought a bomber jacket with sequin sleeves" this sounds amazing.

- Can't really contribute to the prettiness body image stuff because it's something I'm tackling hard irl and it's a little too real/raw for me to talk about here.

- PSA if you guys didn't see 20th C Women when it was out please try to catch it when it's streaming or whatever because it was really great.

- Hi!

Full disclosure I've never read Judy Blume either and I was a teenager throughout the 90s.

Well, '89-'96 at least.

I didn't mention this before because I feel like it's the biggest can of worms in the universe but that article io posted was otm about "creepy", a word that is so vague that it can refer to anything from annoying behavior to harassment to actual stalking (not lite-stalking as the term is used more generally. I'm not sure she's otm about why, as I think it varies as wildly as the meanings of the word "creepy" but I'm glad she opened the discussion of a very nebulous concept that's always hanging in the air like a fart.

I had to get that off my chest because I've been thinking about the general concept of creepiness for many years.

― weird woman in a bar (La Lechera), Monday, March 6, 2017 11:55 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Is the designation "creepy" more about the speaker than the subject? Or is there any basic, central, enduring kind of creepiness that remains the same?

I believe the answer is a) -- but there are surely elements we can all agree on. At its essence, afaict, it's barely concealed desire and/or unwelcome/inappropriate objectification.

I could co-sign that. I might also say that there's an element of threat? Of a power disparity in favor of the creep and against the object of desire. If someone is less powerful and lower status than you, their unwanted desire is...comic? or awkward, or...? something laughable, not threatening. Creepiness feels like it also contains the knowledge that the person could act on their desire and in some way harm you.

Do guys routinely categorize women as creepy bc of their affection or attention? I can't see it being the comparable to the reverse.

a podcast i enjoy that discusses old-timey high school books discussed Forever by Judy Blume but neither the host or the guest had read it before

I had the same reaction to that sentence as you VG before realising that was your point! Even as a kid in rural England I read Are you there God, Forever, a bunch of others, and Sally J Freedman over and over for some reason. I didn't know what so many things were in the book (stucco, bobby pins, lots of Jewish stuff and yeah bordellos).

Memories of smuggling home Forever from my local library in semi-rural England and hiding it so my mother couldn't read it (NB I did a p. half-assed job of this and it mysteriously disappeared from its hiding place so she must have read it). It had been talked about in hushed terms in the playground for the past year or so, a cult literary rite of passage.

I was maybe 12 (just), super naive for my age, many years off any kind of relationship, and I'm p sure most of it was entirely over my head. Not sure I'm quite in the right mental place to re-read it but I'll give the podcast a go.

I remember reading lots of other Blume books whose titles mostly escape me right now. Also Paula Danziger, who I was v into aged 12-13 and who is grouped together with Blume in my British head for being American tween-to-teen lit, poss an association that will make no sense to American readers who had no need to group them by nationality.

Strangely the YA library book I got in trouble with my mother for was not the obviously discovered Forever but a short Gene Kemp book where the male protagonist says on page 1 something like "I love women, me. I love everything about them", which seemed a bit tame at the time to get in trouble for, but there were very possibly further entendres and contextual nuances which were lost on me.

The book goes on to be about Greenham Common and adult in the less parent-outraging sense of being p bleak iirc.

RIP Gene Kemp; as with my most beloved of your protagonists, I did not discover your gender until the end, even though by then I'd met two female Genes. <3

I read a few Judy Blume books and they didn't change my life at all. They were okay, I guess. I liked horror books more. Maybe this is why I have always felt like a deficient girl.

I read a few Judy Blume books and they didn't change my life at all. They were okay, I guess

that's pretty much how I felt as well. Also, by the time I read them, I had boobs and my period, neither of which I found particularly desirable. I think when my peers were reading Judy Blume, I was reading a lot of sci-fi and your standard J.D. Salinger, George Orwell, short books that appealed to disaffected precocious teens.

I feel like I posted this same thing 8 years ago -- thread has come full circle

Do guys routinely categorize women as creepy bc of their affection or attention? I can't see it being the comparable to the reverse.
idk because i am not a guy but i do believe they experience this as well, even if they don't talk about it as freely. "routinely" and "comparable" being the only thing preventing from me answering "of course".

If someone is less powerful and lower status than you, their unwanted desire is...comic? or awkward, or...? something laughable, not threatening.
also i don't agree that this is necessarily true -- a teacher can find a student creepy (and I think the power in that case is in the hand of the teacher, the person "in charge") At least I don't find it comic or merely awkward when a student behaves toward me in a creepy way.

this is a very thorny topic! (save your (t)horny jokes pls) :)

oops i really screwed up that second to last post but i think my point is more or less clear

Do guys routinely categorize women as creepy bc of their affection or attention? I can't see it being the comparable to the reverse.

I've been accused of being creepy before, unfortunately :(

Never read Judy Blume but on a long train journey to Scotland when I was about 10, I finished my book and my mum lent me hers. It was Roald Dahl's collected stories. She hadn't started it yet and I don't think she realised they were for adults. Let me tell you, his take on women's sexuality is not an ideal starting point.

I asked my mother what a bordello was after reading it in Sally J. Freedman. Yeah, didn't do that again!

Re-read Then Again, Maybe I Won't in college and boy I missed a lot when I first read it as a kid! I knew nothing about boys.

I never read any Judy Blume, or much YA stuff at all really: my father was a single parent, and I mostly read his books. He had a few Steven Kings, which I remember liking (especially The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, which I think inspired my lifelong hatred of nature). Thankfully I never read Carrie during puberty.

I read Carrie before puberty! I don't think it affected me much though tbh.

was suddenly v sweaty after lunch at work & came home. felt ok soon after though

it suddenly occurred to me that this might have been a hot flash? idk. i still get my period like clockwork. bleh. ladybusiness is weird

I gave up even looking at ILX for Lent (somehow looking but not posting is even worse than posting and getting shat on all the time?) but today is Sunday and I came on to look if there were any suggestions about how to pitch for a 33 1/3 book*, only to find out that the search is borken.

So here I am, girl thread, how are you? This is the only thread I ever find myself missing.

I read that article IO posted on twitter ages ago, and had ~THOTS~ on it but have forgotten what they were. As someone who has dated men and women and people inbetween, my only conclusions are that dating women and dating men both suck, but that they suck in different ways, qualitatively and quantitatively. It's not that dating women and people who aren't cis-dudes is totally free of all the patriarchal and looks-based bullshit; but it's a thousand times more crushing with cis-men. It's easier just not to do dating, so I'll stick my oar out of that one. Feeling at home in a body is a constant battle.

I don't know. With things like 'creepy', the scale and the power imbalance is just completely non-comparable. Yeah, I've totally been called creepy by dudes, and it's because Asperger's and lack of boundaries and sure. But then you compare that to the scale of the current breaking scandal of sexual harassment in universities which has been breaking in Britain over the past few months (and exploding across academia in the US, too) and it's like... You are comparing one or two individuals to a massive, systemic, endemic thing. It's like comparing blue moons and Mondays. One is a rare, exceptional, notable, random chance, once every few years thing; the other thing happens routinely, regularly and deliberately 52 times each year. Don't pretend like it's the same. It's not.

*I did a OWOB last year, and it was the weirdest experience. As much as possible, I deliberately left my name, and any links to my online presence out of it. (Partly because I didn't want to be self-promotey - why? Like, dudes never care if they come across as self-promotey and CHECK OUT MY BLOG Y'ALL. Probably because they don't get incessantly called attention-whores by dudes doing exactly the same thing, if they do. Partly because... y'know, stalkers.) And I had a total GitHub** of an experience over it: seeing it linked and promoted and RT-d by loads and loads of people, many of them men. Many of them men, formerly of ILX; some of them even actual men who had bullied me, dismissed me, rubbished me and my contributions to ILM. And yet when my writing is divorced from my name and my history, they're totally into it? And sharing it for feminist brownie points? That was such a head-fuck.

**Have we discussed that on this thread? Study came out this year, about public ratings for female programmers. The actual work of female programmers is consistently rated higher than average, but only when their identities as female is hidden. When coders use female names, their work is consistently rejected or rated lower. I mean, people have proved this stuff 100x over with CVs identical but for the names at the top. But this is ~SCIENCE!~ and it's hard to ignore that.

I mean, yeah, social media is such a weird echo-chamber, and you can't actually assume that they've even read the piece they're RT-ing. IS2G half the time people just share stuff because it's like a high-five to their bros, rather than they actually read it and agreed with it. But it's something that Roxy and I talked about ages ago, on here. Like, how to react, when someone is tossing around ideas they refused to hear from you. Should you be glad that the ideas have now become common currency? Or are you 'allowed' to have a gut-reaction of "you? YOU? Who spent two solid years harassing me on an internet forum, but now you're tossing around my feminist, genderqueered readings of electronic music? Really?"

Argh. Sorry. This is such a "stomp in, spew, stomp out" non-contribution to the thread. It just strengthened my resolve that I should write more. And try to get published more. And instead of stomping around going "Why is no one writing about X?!?!?" be the person who actually goes out and writes the piece about X. Because the piece that got all the RTs was actually something I was ranting about up earlier on this thread last year that no one had written about.

But ugh, pitching is like dating, but a hundred times worse. Because when they reject you... when you're dating, it's only your body they're rejecting, and my body isn't me. It's just a lump of flesh I use to walk around. But when someone rejects your writing, it's like... OH NO my writing really *is* me. I'll get completely broken and discouraged and not publish anything for a year again. But I look at the jerkwads who do get to do it, and feel the white-hot heat of fury, and that anger is the only reason driving me to publish anything, really. (Except I won't. My nerve will fail, and I'll screw it up like I screw up everything.)

Thanks for listening. I'll pop back in when Lent is over but this thread goes in such fits and bursts it's really blink and you miss it. Hope you are all doing well, girl thread denizens!

Sorry I wanted to add some links. The thing that got me thinking about this was this essay, about harassment and abuse in academia and the ~literary world~ and how it expands out to who gets to be gatekeepers for things. And how that affects who even approaches, let alone who gets through.

http://www.tinhouse.com/blog/45377/experts-in-the-field.html

And this response to it:

http://lithub.com/roxane-gay-aimee-bender-and-more-on-assault-and-harassment-in-the-literary-world/

In which someone raised the ugly points that these same men who do these things to young women, they are the ones who teach *how* to write, who teach even *what subjects* are considered worthy of writing about, and by whom. They are the ones who edit journals, and hold control over what gets published and what doesn't. So it's this double abuse: they abuse individuals, physically. And they abuse entire classes of people by literally (through literature) shaping What Writing Can Contain.

this thread is as good a thread as any to talk about women's hair and politics and this:

http://adage.com/article/cmo-strategy/shea-moisture/308785/

and

http://www.complex.com/style/2017/04/shea-moisture-nixes-ad-after-backlash

I think I have a summer crush!

Relatedly, I went to a local gallery/community space, and exchanged info with one of the women running it. She seems cool & I want more friends my age. I just feel like being blunt and emailing "let's be friends!!!"

dunno if we've discussed this before, but, I have a question --

I have a close friend who has a (pretty obvious, but unacknowledged) eating disorder. How do I best respond in the context of social media -- she posts a lot of selfies?

Idk if I understand the question -- are you unsure of how to react to her (possibly) alarming selfies?

do you need to respond?

yeah, I'm not sure how to react. Also, it'll be something like facebook memories will bring up a picture of us from a few years ago (before she lost a lot of weight), and I avoid posting them.

privately, maaaaybe a dm? but you would have to broach it delicately. And you would have to know her pretty well.

publicly: don't.

Yeah this is fraught. Could she be ill for example and not told anyone?

i'd avoid communicating via text about this-- if it were me, and i were very concerned for the person's life, a private safe face to face convo or nothing imo. (if the person is a close friend but doesn't live close enough to hang with, phone convo)

disordered eating is everywhere so i would only intervene if i were seriously concerned about her wellbeing.

In college when I cut my hair off and wore men's clothes my mother told someone bitterly that I was "trying to be ugly." How strangely right she was. I really felt like this article was speaking for me. #wheniwaspythia

https://catapult.co/stories/role-monsters-gorgons-medusa-women-beauty-ugliness#

Medusa lost her beauty—or rather, it was taken from her. Beauty is always something you can lose. Women’s beauty is seen as something separate from us, something we owe but never own: We are its stewards, not its beneficiaries. We tend it like a garden where we do not live.

Oh, but ugliness—ugliness is always yours.

yeah i feel that
i don't have a lot to say about it, but it strikes a familiar chord

i think it also applies to age
how much of the beauty routine is intended to stave off AGING
how much do you hate your neck? google "i hate my neck" and see the algae bloom of results

Oh, I like that article. Though I feel like it frames the issue a bit too much as if it is *easy* to take ownership of your own ugliness, when it really is not.

On a related note, this is probably my favourite Comet Gain song:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mJ13rgmBjtQ

Particularly irate today at having to watch 5+ minutes of coworker's daughter's wedding video in which every single word, frame, vow, dress, etc, is lock-step gender norms & a certain kind of conventional. "You're my puzzle piece, and I will love you for forever and beyond." <-- I'm not sure you know what words actually mean but okay.

And it was at the Brooklyn Botanical Garden so it had to have been tens of thousands of dollars. What does a reception at BBG even cost? idk

The sound track for the wedding highlights is a song that goes "A diamond ring and a dozen roses, everything she ever wanted."