10r3:
it is so upsetting listening to so many males talk about all of the times they have gone on road trips alone and slept in their cars alone or on the side of the road, or travelled overseas alone and slept on the floor of strangers homes or in parks or at hostels, and they appear to have such freedom in that they are able to be alone in ways that females, unfortunately, cannot. and there is an ignorance surrounding this in that these boys never seem to comprehend just how fortunate they are that strange people and unfamiliar places and the dark of night are not their enemies but rather exciting, promising things.
“Yes, my consuming desire is to mingle with road crews, sailors and soldiers, barroom regulars—to be a part of a scene, anonymous, listening, recording—all this is spoiled by the fact that I am a girl, a female always supposedly in danger of assault and battery. My consuming interest in men and their lives is often misconstrued as a desire to seduce them, or as an invitation to intimacy. Yes, God, I want to talk to everybody as deeply as I can. I want to be able to sleep in an open field, to travel west, to walk freely at night…”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
The words of the artist, Lindsay Bottos:
In Girl Work, I attempt to address issues of girlhood and my experience expressing those issues as a woman and as an artist. Each piece speaks to a different aspect of how I have experienced my own femininity.
“And Everything Nice” is an unflinching analysis of the standard for female beauty. The ongoing series consists of women in states of affliction; the body fluid of the models have been replaced with glitter to visualize the concept of girls invariably needing to seem attractive regardless of the actual situation.
Sianne Ngai, in an interview for Cabinet
(I read this about a year and a half ago, and I still think about it; it’s very interesting to me)
Oh I remember our conversation about it! Wasn’t it one of our early ones?
Pastoral romance is a good turn of phrase. Utopia and cuteness seem counter-intuitive to me at this point more so than before. Hmm.
(via arabellesicardi)
Cuteness is a way of aestheticizing powerlessness. It hinges on a sentimental attitude toward the diminutive and/or weak, which is why cute objects—formally simple or noncomplex, and deeply associated with the infantile, the feminine, and the unthreatening—get even cuter when perceived as injured or disabled. So there’s a sadistic side to this tender emotion, as people like Daniel Harris have noted. The prototypically cute object is the child’s toy or stuffed animal.
Cuteness is also a commodity aesthetic, with close ties to the pleasures of domesticity and easy consumption. As Walter Benjamin put it: “If the soul of the commodity which Marx occasionally mentions in jest existed, it would be the most empathetic ever encountered in the realm of souls, for it would have to see in everyone the buyer in whose hand and house it wants to nestle.” Cuteness could also be thought of as a kind of pastoral or romance, in that it indexes the paradoxical complexity of our desire for a simpler relation to our commodities, one that tries in a utopian fashion to recover their qualitative dimension as use.
"‘nicer’ voice about three times more often than were boys (see Table 3). This finding is particularly interesting because boys’ play
was frequently much noisier. However, when boys were noisy, they were also often doing other behaviors the teacher did not allow, and perhaps the teachers focused less on voice because they were more concerned with stopping behaviors like throwing or running.
Additionally, when boys were told to ‘quiet down’ they were told in large groups, rarely as individuals. […] Girls as individuals and in groups were frequently told to lower their voices… The girls learn that their bodies are supposed to be quiet, small, and physically constrained."
Men Stop Threatening To Kill Your Daughters Boyfriends To Prove Your Masculinity and Show That Your Daughter Is Your Property 2k14
I have ruined entertainment 4 myself bc my feminist lens game is 2 strong
Women who have experienced this can recognize that placating these men is a rational choice, a form of self-defense to protect against setting off an aggressor. But to male bystanders, it often looks like a warm welcome, and that helps to shift blame in the public eye from the harasser and onto his target, who’s failed to respond with the type of masculine bravado that men more easily recognize."