Dirty Nails, Dirty Wheels

lillezzie:

Emer O’Toole on women, body hair and why she’s stopped shaving

Great to hear this from a femme perspective. This might be the motivation I need to go all in this year!

Well put, Emer O’Toole.

(via ladydanger7)

WHOA.

I don’t speak anywhere near enough Japanese to begin to understand the lyrics, but this song just totally blew me away. It’s fucking great.

Also, here’s a thing: I am generally ultra-stoked on women* kicking traditional gender norms in the teeth, particularly when it’s in one of the often male-dominated things that I do/make/like, like skateboarding, hip hop, or metal. It blitzes my mind with happiness. But in watching this video, I tripped over the edge of my successful internal work against socialization. When the first verse kicked in, the first vocalist’s delivery was so brutal that I was actually uncomfortable. Not simply because of the sonic brutality—that’s something I’m well accustomed to—but because I was watching a woman, someone I’ve been pressured to conceptualize as delicate, as not strong or ferocious, as supposed-to-be-“pretty,” deliver something so rough and heavy. I’m generally pretty successful at resisting that pressure—like I said, I get actively hyped when I see people defying it—but the song’s distance from the patriarchal party line was so great that it reached a place in me where cultural norms had done their nasty fucking work. It was a troubling moment, and I tried to intentionally open up my mind and heart as I watched the rest, knowing that some powerful and important shit was going down. Interestingly (and uncomfortably), I found there was less discomfort when I listened to the song while it played in another tab—that is, when I couldn’t see who was performing it, and my brain could be like “Could be a dude.” Ugh. I’ve been listening to and watching it over and over, and the cultural bullshit is getting pulverized, listen by listen. Hopefully with some more times through, some more thinking about all this, and a few good nights’ sleeps, the utter stoke that I get off this track—and this band generally, ‘cause their other stuff is awesome too, and I’ve liked it for years—will be unpolluted by sexism.

ROCK ON.

Missile Girl Scoot, Big Mouth.

*And anybody else, too, but this post is specifically about women.

Fierce Women’s Judo Competitors Offend One Man’s Delicate Sensibilities (via sassyroslin)

Thank you. The idea that any action—or mindset, methodology, attitude, style of dress, pastime, passion, whatever—is inherently tied to any gender or sex is a fuckin’ pestilence.

(Source: fuckyeahhardfemme, via moobleu)

I was just watching a video of Meytal Cohen doing a drum cover of a metal song, and a highly “liked” comment on the video, courtesy of “6789smosh,” was “That’s a weird kitchen.”

For a moment I thought it was an absurdist joke—like if someone commented on a skate video “Strange bike, but I like it.”

Then I realized what they meant.

Metal at its strongest is a musical form of struggle and liberation. But like punk, like hip hop, like rock, like fucking every goddamn kind of music I love, it’s polluted with this bullshit. Even the song she was playing was Down With The Sickness by Disturbed, a track that quickly and stomach-turningly segues from a brutal critique of child abuse into an apparent endorsement of violence against women.

Now, reading further into the comments, they’re almost all comments about people being attracted to Cohen, sometimes in extremely objectifying sexual language. Jesus Christ.

Fellow musicians and lovers of music: get your shit together. It’s the twenty-first fucking century. Let’s hold ourselves—and each other—to a higher standard than this. Don’t post those abysmal goddamn comments, and when some piece of shit does, don’t fucking upvote that. If somebody plays a song where they trot out this garbage in their lyrics, walk out or stand with your back turned.

What kind of world do you think you’re creating? Come on.

At the supermarket tonight, as we were fetching bread and ice cream, Jim noticed this line of products. Airbrush Legs. Makeup for legs. To make them look as fake in real life as they do in magazines. We were taken aback by the fact that the company (Sally Hansen) isn’t even a little bit trying to hide the fact that their marketing scheme is to capitalize on the fact that people are widely aware that the people we see in print advertisements are not the same as the people who were photographed for them—and to hold up that inhuman appearance as an ideal of beauty. As if insisting that women shave off their body hair (a marketing-driven trend that only began in 1915, through coercive advertisements, by the way) wasn’t messed-up enough, now they’re supposed to straightup pretend they’ve been airbrushed?

Shit is fucked.

I just read a piece on Al Jazeera about Paraskevi Papachristou, a Greek triple jumper, being barred from the Olympics over a racist post she made on Twitter. Most of the article is perfectly acceptable journalism, but then Papachristou is described as “a blonde-haired athlete who sports a navel piercing,” information totally irrelevant to the story, so far as I can tell. Once again, a woman is described physically in a news article where her physical appearance is immaterial to the content of the piece. Bullshit. And a sort of bullshit I’ve not previously noticed on Al Jazeera, where usually the worst problems are bad copyediting. I hope this doesn’t happen again.