But the love that they were after is still at large

here
via

I don’t always

agree with the general public. In fact, most of the time, we like different things. For example, I don’t understand what people like about reality TV. Or most cars. Or candy. I really don’t like candy. Here’s a big one: I don’t understand why people drink as much as they do. I have never liked the taste of alcohol, and never felt at all interested in getting tipsy or drunk. In college, everyone else was very interested in both of those things. That’s the College Experience. Everyone expected me to get drunk. When I came back on breaks, adults who knew me would make little “so—getting drunk a lot?” jokes constantly. I laughed along and had no idea why I was supposed to be throwing up all over myself in the basement of a frat house. So yeah. I don’t get it. I don’t get so many of the things the majority likes. Why should beauty be any different?

here
via

Please note only

here
via

Toad Lillie

via

I can't fight it anymore

via

Quickly whisper in my ear

via

"If she's a

virgin, she doesn't have any way of comparing [her husband to other men]. If she's been with other men, then she has experience. Having experience makes women stronger."
here

"Meanwhile, the actual

physical product goes beyond the garden-variety magazine memorial: Each issue comes in a case designed by the McQueen studio and wrapped in a metallic brocade from the spring 2010 collection. And the stock is special loose leaf embedded with wild flowers (poppies, snap dragons and such) that bloom when planted and watered, for those who want to give their limited edition back to the Earth."
via

What, exactly does

it take for Nike to dump a jock? Dog-fighting will do it. After Atlanta Falcons quarterback Michael Vick pleaded guilty to running a felony dog-fighting ring, Nike took action. “We consider any cruelty to animals inhumane and unacceptable,” the company said at the time.

But cruelty to women is O.K.

here
via

Oh course, I

was an idiot. I was raised Irish/German Catholic in the United States of America. How could I not have been some weird sexist and/or possible rapist? And talking to you here, bro, I am not making some claim to ultimate, enlightened gender-issue purity of thought. I still have weird feelings sometimes. It's ingrained. But the thing I had to do was admit it to myself. After that, all you can do is recognize when you are not thinking correctly (because you are not!) and work on it. Every day, you have to work on it.
here

This Is Good

You are a

huge pussy, CTOAC—excuse me, sorry. Pussies are powerful; they can take pummeling and spit out a brand-new human being.
here

Grey Oceans

When I was

in my first year of university, and living in residence, my roommate (who was also my girlfriend) and I were complete shut-ins, and hated everyone. We were considered to be “strange” because we didn’t leave our door open and our music blasting and maybe one time some people on our floor thought they would include us in floor activities and when they knocked, we may have been in the middle of cutting up 20 or so Playboys, Hustlers, and Penthouses. They called that “strange,” we called it “a Friday night.”
here

Happiness

If you want happiness for an hour – take a nap.
If you want happiness for a day – go fishing.
If you want happiness for a month – get married.
If you want happiness for a year – inherit a fortune.
If you want happiness for a lifetime – help someone else.

There is, perhaps,

no more perfect example of the fucked-up ways in which women, womanhood, and female bodies are viewed than at the intersection of the realities of breast cancer and the tone of breast cancer awareness marketing. I mean, forget the pinkification of everything breast cancer, which was annoying enough; now nearly everything about breast cancer has to be cute and/or sexy. Save the Boobs! Save the TaTas! The Beauty of Breast Cancer Research. It annoys me to no end because I almost can't imagine something more woman-hating than refusing to give women a furlough from the expectations of being Cute and Sexy At All Times even when they're fighting cancer.
via

If having sex

was considered passé but exercise was taboo imagine imagine people hurrying in and out of unmarked buildings with plain paper bags full of unbelievably-poorly-made running shoes or phthalates- and even PCB-contaminated exercise balls. And imagine zoning ordinances and community outrage meant to prevent (mafia-run!) “gyms” or “workout clubs” from proliferating.
here
via

Sock Theory

here
via

Think of a better reason

via

Zana Bayne

via

Kate Lanphear

via

Amazing!

Songs For Swinging Lovers

Lotus

20% into the season and still pointless :/

But if ya playing this tape

via

Nothing On TV

The lesson, ladies,

is that great cleavage comes with great responsibility. People who shame women for wearing “too-revealing” clothes like to center their objections on women’s clothing “choices,” but make no mistake—this is not about what we choose. This is about the things we don’t choose—having chests or butts or legs or necks or hair or any other part of our human bodies that others decide to project their particular sexual interests—and their slut-shaming—upon. The man who is horrified at a woman’s “overly exposed” breasts will likely never have to worry about wearing one shirt—one shirt out of a lifetime of shirts—that happens to accidentally set off some random person’s slut meter, because of the way his body just is. And because my breasts are smaller, less visible, less imposing than other women’s breasts—because there’s less boob there—I can feel free to wear the more revealing top without attracting claims of public obscenity. It seems that some women’s bodies are just naturally sluttier than other women’s bodies—and all women’s bodies are naturally sluttier than men’s bodies.
here
via

Standing in my own reflection

via

go back to

1994, your junior year of high school. someone will gift you a ticket to see her in concert. you will have heard of tori and listened to her music before, but seeing her live will entrance you. you will be surprised to find yourself crying. you will listen to the albums - little earthquakes and under the pink - often enough that sometimes in the car, your dad will sing along. you will know that ‘girl’ was written for you. and ‘winter.’ oh, and ‘precious things.’

you start talking to other fans on the internet. the first video you watch on the internet - at the fancy computer lab where it’s possible to view video on the web - will be tori performing on david letterman. you will discover an entire community on usenet and this will prove the start of an enduring internet addiction. you will start collecting bootleg recordings and imports and you buy the soundtracks to higher learning and great expectations just to get her tracks. most of all, you will start going to shows, where tori is at her best, pouring so much intensity and emotion into her music that it pours into the audience in thick waves. you become a connoisseur of the different growls she uses for the “tucked inside the heart of every nice girrrrrl” line in ‘precious things.’ you will go early to see her come in for soundcheck. you will learn to recognize her bodyguards.

boys for pele will come out when you most need something in which to find faith, and you will pore over the words and the sounds, hoping they hold the secret to escaping your depression. they don’t, but they help, and by the time from the choirgirl hotel comes out, you and tori are both ready to dance. you are still going to shows, and you are still seeing the same people and talking to them on the internet, and realizing that internet people can be friends.

by the time to venus and back comes out, you’ll just have moved to california. you’ll find a local independent record store and buy it on the release date. but you don’t listen to it as much, and you find yourself spending a lot more time with the fragile, the nin album that came out on the same date. and you still go to shows, you still talk to your friends, but you find yourself drifting away from tori. you buy the next two albums on their release dates but don’t listen to them much. you stop going to shows, having seen her roughly 45 times by now.

but you will still be friends with these people, the same ones you’ve known since 1994. who have gotten married and had kids and gone to school and suffered horrible losses and even died (love you DWC). and most of us hardly listen to tori anymore, but your friendships will endure. she will always be important to you. you will always be able to identify the song within 10 seconds, the lyrics to ‘the waitress’ will often spring to your mind during arguments, you will describe yourself as ‘the sweetest cherry in the apple pie’, and you will never ever be able to listen to ‘me and a gun’ without breaking.

here

Feminism needs to

enlist more men brave enough to admit to having feminist ideas. Like Mitchell, it might be a struggle to get them to actually use the word 'feminist', but 'empowerment' is a good temporary substitute for those still too delicate to handle the f-word. The silent majority of men, particularly younger men, are sympathetic to feminist aims. We need them to be brave enough to speak.
here

International Women’s Day

via

There are ten

Gurus, or teachers, who shaped Sikhism into the religion that is practised today. They all thought women should be equal to men. Guru Nanak, the founder of Sikhism and the first of the ten Gurus said:

“In a woman man is conceived, from a woman he is born … why denounce her, the one from whom even kings are born. From a woman, women are born. None may exist without woman”

here
via

Body Talk Pt. 1

Playing hooky

It seems only women's magazines, not men's, give advice to play hooky from work to improve a relationship. Or maybe it's just Cosmo.

Snow White's stitching up the circuitboard

via

In the meantime

via

Gaga’s world is

one in which “anything goes” – but that means literally anything goes. You can be gay, straight, trans, cis, sexually active, virginal, temporarily celibate… Gaga doesn’t care, so long as it makes you happy. She accepts and embraces you, and she wants you to accept and embrace yourself.
here

As far as

virginity goes, you only have one shot. I want it to be with someone with whom that act will build something. I want it to have emotional meaning, not just a chore to be completed in order to be considered an adult. When I lose my virginity, I want it to be with someone who I love, and I want it to be a good, positive experience for the both of us. It really doesn't matter if she is a virgin. It doesn't matter if we are married. It just matters if it is the right time, it is the right person, and that it is part of a lifetime partnership.
here

But, all that

said, I still find myself getting apprehensive when I see all of the buzz about a riot grrrl revival and how "someone needs to be the next Bikini Kill" and "we need another Sassy magazine." I don't want "another Bikini Kill," I think Bikini Kill already did a pretty decent job of being Bikini Kill -- if they hadn't, people wouldn't still be listening to their albums. The Sassy staff already tried to make another Sassy. It was called Jane. Things didn't work out so hot. What I'm getting at here is that instead of seeking to recreate cultural products that exist in conjunction with a specific subculture and a singular moment in time is that we need to be looking at and working within the now.

...

While I understand the value in drawing both musical and political inspiration by looking backwards, I sometimes worry that by fixating so wholly and fervently on riot grrrl that we erase the women who were doing musical and political work before riot grrrl and who continue to do so in its wake. I feel like we do this even when it comes to original riot grrrls themselves. I mean, members of bands like Bikini Kill, Sleater Kinney, and Bratmobile have not stopped existing -- in fact, many of them are continuing to work on their own creative projects. Yet many people continue to fixate on what they were doing 15 years ago as opposed to what they are doing in the here and now. I also worry about the tacit assumption that all lady punks have a vested interest in the riot grrrl movement -- there are plenty of people out there who explicitly do not want to identify as riot grrrls and when we push their critiques to the margins in the hopes of "keeping it posi," we effectively engage in the same silencing of marginalized populations that some of the original riot grrrls engaged in.
here

Princess

here
via

Sarah Maple

here
via

It may be

40 years since Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch, but look beyond our borders at the lives of women and it’s clear that many have been left untouched by emancipation. The rumour is that as we mature we mellow, but if that’s the case something’s badly wrong with my hard-wiring. I think it was a report from the Congo that finally got to me. A woman who’d been raped at gunpoint then had to watch soldiers doing likewise to her 11-year-old daughter.
here
via

I’ve been thinking

a lot about Amanda Hess’s blog post about how women have to walk through this social political maze when it comes to beauty. She observes something I’ve written about before, about how there’s pressure on women to put forward a lot of effort to be beautiful, but to conceal that effort from men in order to make it seem you were just born that way. Much of the pressure to conceal comes in the form of jokes about how frivolous and stupid girl stuff is. Women are mocked for spending time on their bodies, hair, and faces, for having medicine cabinets teeming with products, for being obsessed with clothes and shoes. But if you decide to react to all these messages about how you’re a bad person for caring about this stuff by not caring about that stuff, you’ll be considered and even worse person, probably a “man-hater”. Choosing to say no to even a little of it gets the attention of the NY Times, for fuck’s sake. So clearly, the ideal is to do all the work but hide it from men. But as Amanda points out, you also need to make the effort not to hide it from other women. If “effortless perfection” looks too effortless to other women, they can start to resent you for it. It’s a fucked up situation.
here
via

Air Swell

Ina-Ich

Cheese People

Nobody's Daughter

Rainbow awaits us

via

Transcontinental Hustle

I'm not gonna teach him how to dance, dance, dance, dance

via

BBQ food is good

via

Masculinity, however, can

come at a high price. Women often think of high-testosterone types as uncooperative, unsympathetic, philandering, aggressive and disinterested in parenting. In fact, there is evidence that they really do have more relationship problems than other men. In a small study led by psychologist James Roney at the University of California, Santa Barbara, 29 women were asked to look at photos of men and rate their masculinity and fondness for infants. (The men had already been tested for child-friendliness and testosterone levels.) The men who were rated as the most masculine generally had higher testosterone levels; the women also were generally accurate in assessing child-friendliness.
here

It is crucial

for men to be a part of feminist agency. If feminism is to attain its goal of liberating women, men must be a part of the struggle. Indeed, men probably bear more of the responsibility for ending oppression of women since patriarchal men have been the main perpetrators of that very oppression. But can men do this by becoming feminists?
here
via

Joan Smalls

via

Maison Martin Margiela

here
via

Forgiveness Rock Record

Tango 3.0

This sort of

organised moral outrage is deeply unhelpful to young people negotiating the complex world of adult sexuality. The imprecation to "let girls be girls" imagines a halcyon age of sexual innocence, where young ladies climbed trees and drank ginger pop instead of rummaging delinquently in each other's pornographic pencil cases. In fact, in countries where children are routinely well fed, a significant minority of seven-year-old girls have already started puberty, and most foster a natural curiosity about bodies and intimacy. Rather than encouraging healthy sexual exploration or promoting education, campaigns to protect girls from "sexualisation" assume that sexuality itself is a corrupting influence on young women.
here
via

Rock'n'Roll Circus

My Best Friend Is You

So what does

this say about us? That we are, perhaps, a touch preoccupied with women who are unafraid to blur the lines between art and sex and their personal lives? That female sexual experiences are still so foreign to us that we can only consider them on an individual level and can only acknowledge female sexual experiences that are made explicitly public? That we are more comfortable with the personal lives of weird dudes who yearn to be Forever Young and Rocking than we are with women who explore fully realized, complicated identities? I don’t know!
here

To do list

via

Me for you and you for me

via

Rob Goodwin

via

Handbasket Productions

Doing it Ourselves is a hot collection of trans women and their partners of all genders engaging in sex the way they want to be represented. Starting with a group of trans women who are tired of the way that they have seen trans women portrayed in porn, this film tells the story of its own creation when the decide to, well, do it themselves.
here
via

You know what?

I really, truly, believed that I sucked because I was a girl, that I must have some weird thing about me that I could just not understand how to write songs or to play guitar or to rock out or to sing angry, because of my vagina. Dudes made me believe it. Because all through college, they refused to listen to women making music, refused to listen to women’s opinions about music, and regarded women who were really into music as “cute.” If one of their girlfriends happened to like one of the dude-approved bands of Dude Music? It was, oh, isn’t that cute, until, oh god, she is copying me GET YOUR OWN MUSIC.The number one thing I learned from being in a band and hanging out with a lot of guys who were Very Serious about music is that basically the worst thing that can happen to the music you love is for too many women to like it, or for one woman that you know to like it real hard. Music that is good is not music that women go crazy for. If women go crazy for it, it must suck, because women have terrible taste and like all that chick shit and like shave their legs and stuff but oh my god it’s disgusting when they don’t.
here

Sigh No More

Let the Light In

Can you lie next to her?

via

Is there any

connection between these two trends - between the rise in the number of young women who self-identify as lesbian or bisexual, and the increasing normalization and acceptance of pornography in the lives of young men? Maybe there is. A young woman told me how her boyfriend several years ago suggested that she shave her pubic hair, so that she might more closely resemble the porn stars who were this young man's most consistent source of sexual arousal. She now identifies herself as bisexual. "It was just such a welcome change, to snuggle under a blanket on the couch with my girlfriend, watch a movie, and talk about God and death and growing old, to be intimate emotionally and spiritually as well as physically. I don't know a guy who could even comprehend the conversations we have."
here

Women of my

generation have acquired all the responsibilities that come with sexual equality (i.e., earn your own paycheck), but few of the equal benefits (again: see paycheck). We’re encouraged to be “empowered” but vilified for being feminists. We have more career opportunities than ever, but somehow we still get the message that a bustier, not a brain, is the real source of “Girl Power.” We’re urged to put on Nike cross-trainers and “Just Do It”—but we’re encouraged to “just do it” while consuming twelve hundred calories a day and weighing no more than 103 pounds. We’re inspired to scale the corporate ladder, but we’re fully aware that it still bumps up against the glass ceiling—and that, more often than not, some guy is still peeking up our skirts as we climb.
here
via

The cool thing

about this moment politically is that we don’t ever actually need to debate, as feminists, whether or not sex work is a good thing or bad thing. We can stop that. If we want to keep people from going into sex work (which I don’t, but again, what we feel about sex work is secondary here), or if we want to make sure everyone in sex work is as happy as Ashley Dupre (again, also don’t, and also doesn’t matter), all we have to do is work to improve economic opportunity for young women, queer people, transgender and gender non-conforming people, and people of color. If we redirected the energy we spend questioning whether or not the act of selling sex or sexual fantasy is feminist or not, healthy or not, towards education justice, economic justice, and bringing some justice to the criminal/legal system, folks would have so many more options available to them, that what we all did for a living would feel like that much more of a choice. What we feel about sex work actually really doesn’t have an impact on the folks who sell sex — our opinions are largely academic. But when we start advocating for policy based around those feelings, then we start doing way more harm than good if we don’t listen to sex workers.
here
via

I don’t think

that openly feminist pop culture figures, like Tina Fey for instance, should be above reproach or criticism, but the problem with having so few of them is that we—loosely used “we”—pin all our hopes and dreams on them, which makes it exceedingly easy to tear these women down when they don’t live up to all of our aspirations and projections. We bitch about the fact that every woman has to represent all women all the time, and then we uphold that standard among ourselves. You—loosely used “you”—are not Tina Fey; you are not Liz Lemon. She is not you and she doesn’t have to be. Sorry. Get over it.
here
via

Ironically, she was

also criticised for not removing her niqab in order to appear on TV. She declared that "it doesn't cancel my mind, thoughts or art". She also asked people not to support her for her insistence on wearing the niqab, and that the whole issue "be kept to one side", for people only to pay attention to her poetry. That is a message all preoccupied with female attire should heed. Hissa, whose name poignantly also means "lesson", seems to have succeeded in doing something many men have not been able to do. She has used entertainment to attack the more insidious elements of the religious clergy, inspiring millions to listen to her message, even though they could not see her face.
here
via

We Are The Lost Loves

Solange la Frange

Brady is just

as hard to decipher. Arguably the country's most prominent businesswoman, she will replace Margaret Mountford on The Apprentice later this year. She has been a fixture in the public eye since the age of 23, when she became managing director of Birmingham City FC and brought an immediate end to rumours that her appointment was a gimmick by dragging the club into profit – and later into the Premier League. At the same time, she has always seemed a conundrum. She's an outspoken advocate for women's rights in the workplace, yet went back to the office three days after having her first child. She seems relaxed, yet apparently once went without a holiday for 13 years. And then there is that unbelievable self-control.
here
via

I will experiment with my fear right before her eyes

via

And here I keep looking for sweater guards -_-

We can’t know

whether Abbott’s comments would be the same if he had sons instead of daughters, but it’s a reasonable bet to say his language, if not his central message, would have been different. Boys are rarely told that their virginity is a gift, or indeed that their sexuality is about “giving” something to another person – lightly or not. Boys “get laid”, “get lucky”, “get some”. They “take a girl’s virginity”, “take advantage”; if they’re thoughtful, they “take their time”. Boys are not taught to think of themselves or their virginity as something to be offered up, unwrapped and enjoyed.
here
via

What not to wear

according to that bitchy pair on tv you mustn’t wear a pink and black plaid mini kilt with black fishnet shirt, black studded belt, knee high skull socks and danger pumps
even if you are a beautiful twenty-something dj/designer
who can rock it well

so what would they say of me
in my blush frothy tulle ballerina mini skirt
or my frayed hem jeans?

i have worn hats with veils, eccentric platforms
men’s engineer boots and prom dresses
ripped t-shirts and torn stockings
a piece of orange satin wrapped into a dress
distressed knit “depression wear”
and silk kimono patchwork big enough for clowns
i’ve had bleached hair with black roots
pale powder face without blush
too-big silver hoops
mostly i’ve worn my heart
bleeding all over both my sleeves
it’s not a pretty sight, my dears
and now my fear
like ridiculous armor to keep you out

hey tv bitches, bring it
at least i still
got up this morning
and wrote this thing

WHAT HAVE YOU WORN THAT YOU “SHOULDN’T” HAVE
via

Then I heard your heart beating

via