I am in New York! Irrelevant to this, enjoy reading about women who free dive. It sounds like one of the top 10 most scary things that you can do.
This started when I read a poem about the women of Jeju who dive for abalone. You can read the poem first if you like, but might also enjoy getting the context first if it is something you don’t know about already (as it was for me). Some horrible metaphors here:
The women work long hours in icy water as deep as 40 feet. Old haenyeo ballads speak of “diving with a coffin on the head” or “toiling in the netherworld so our family can live in this one.”
A free diver who did this for fun, Natalia Molchanova, died recently. She started doing this at 40 and got really, terrifyingly (have I conveyed with enough emphasis my horror/fascination with this practise/sport) good at it.
In this extraordinary sport, free diving, she had 41 world records. She could hold her breath, when floating motionless with her head under water in a pool, for nine minutes and two seconds. Swimming horizontally underwater with a fin, she could cover 237 metres. Diving with the fin alone (as she preferred), rather than aided by a metal weight, she could reach 101 metres. […] After she turned 50 she liked to break diving records on her birthday, to show other middle-aged women what they could do.
This marks a year of Feminist Friday! I hope you have enjoyed it as much as I have. #femfriday started as something that I would send round to my office friends, before it was a tinyletter. I can thoroughly recommend this as a thing to do to jolly your Fridays up at work. Here is what I sent round a year or so ago, and it’s still a good one:
In the Middle Ages the word “spinster” was a compliment. A spinster was someone, usually a woman, who could spin well: a woman who could spin well was financially self-sufficient — it was one of the very few ways that mediaeval women could achieve economic independence. The word was generously applied to all women at the point of marriage as a way of saying they came into the relationship freely, from personal choice, not financial desperation.
Great article on how stereotypes affect academic performance. Its message is a little too strongly anti-eggs for my taste but there’s nothing to say you can’t knock back a couple omelettes whiles thinking about what a complex, intelligent, talented human being you are. Try this today! You are great and so are eggs.
we know that highlighting identities associated with impaired performance will cause impaired performance, but as a counter to this, research also confirms that thinking about our complex, intelligent, talented, individual human selves before the given tests will partially or completely dissolve this impairment. So theoretically we can sort of “engineer” out any test impairments with a combination of these techniques and perform with a lot more cognitive clarity than an extra scrambled egg for breakfast could give us.
Speaking of stereotypes, here’s an piece on the “cult of domesticity”. If you would like to read more on this topic, I got a lot out of Emily Matchar’s Homeward Boundand you might as well.
Women’s magazines and religious literature were two of the primary ways the cult of domesticity was promulgated; kitsch aimed at wives was a third way the message got across. (The female-centric kitsch we see today—coffee mugs and T-shirts and magnets proclaiming that it’s “wine o’clock!” and “don’t talk to me until I’ve had my coffee!” are descendants of this way of thinking: Women are still in charge of the home, only now it stresses them out.) Magazines like Ladies’ Companion and Godey’s Lady’s Book established in the public conscience the idea that women ought to care primarily about the care of their homes for the sake of their families.
Have you read Elena Ferrante yet! I read My Brilliant Friend and one other last month and had the same reaction as the approx. 6 billion other people who have read one or more of her books, i.e., they are wonderful. I did wonder why the cover looked so 1980s, and found the answer here:
I intentionally searched for a photo that was “kitsch.” This design choice continued in the subsequent books, because vulgarity is an important aspect of the books, of all that Elena wants to distance herself from.
One of the many great things about My Brilliant Friend is the way it talks about friendship as a part of life that is serious and joyous and upsetting in its own right. I, like the author of the below, would love to see more media that treats friendships as the “real” relationships that they are, in the same way that we have a reasonable body of culture, at this stage, on romantic relationships. In conclusion, if you have a significant friendship in your life, please consider writing a novel about it.
“You know how busy she is,” my husband said.
“I do,” I replied, “but I also know something is wrong.”
This is an interesting article on how “pink viagra” medicalises a totally normal aspect of sexual desire. And then “treats” it in a way that has high blood pressure and vomiting as side effects! Obviously the pullquote is part of an extended metaphor, but it stands alone as well.
If you're having fun at the party, you're doing it right.
I’m back! I’m back! Thank you Cecily for your lovely Fem Fridays while I was away.
Do you remember the article on women taking wives in Igbo culture? Here’s something similar, about girls dressed up as boys (for a variety of reasons) in Afghanistan. The only possible reason I’ve not featured this already is that I bought the book and thought I’d write about it after I’d read it. That could be ages. Read it today!
There are no statistics about how many Afghan girls masquerade as boys. But when asked, Afghans of several generations can often tell a story of a female relative, friend, neighbor or co-worker who grew up disguised as a boy. To those who know, these children are often referred to as neither “daughter” nor “son” in conversation, but as “bacha posh,” which literally means “dressed up as a boy” in Dari.
I read George Sand for the first time on holiday. When her first book came out, there was lots of controversy about whether she was male or female – with the argument running that no woman could write so well, but also, men don’t understand women, so what sort of a person could have written a book like this? In the below excerpt, we see Ms Sand nailing a common female fantasy, a man realising that a woman does not want to listen to him talk any more:
She was also the inspiration for George Eliot calling herself George Eliot! Really a remarkable woman, and also – in a callback to the first link – one who would wear men’s clothing for fun and practicality.
Her literary production is vast. Honoré de Balzac was deemed phenomenally productive: Sand was mocked for her output. There was an implication that such a stream of works was unfeminine in its proportions. She wrote a huge number of novels and plays, a massive two-volume autobiography, stories, essays, and articles. And her letter writing was quite as prolific as that of other writers of the time: her published correspondence comprises twenty-five volumes
I was at a conference, earlier this year, on "The Changing Politics of UK Music-writing 1968-85". In fact I was helping to organise the conference, so I spent quite a lot of time outside the room, running about, talking to interesting people. I made sure to be in the room for a couple of essential things, like Val Wilmer talking about her life in music writing and photography (Wilmer was also, incidentally, the collector who made available a great number of the historical photos shown at Rivington Place's Black Chronicles II exhibition last year). And I was there when Hazel Robinson, a friend of mine who was moderating a panel on the future of music writing, talked about the kind of music writing that's being done on the internet, right now, by fans. Writing that feels like music criticism, writing that absolutely doesn't. The ways that fan fiction and fan art can be media criticism, music criticism, political criticism.
We live in a different media landscape from the 1968-85 that the conference conjured up, and a lot of the music writing we encounter rushes past, part of the endless millstream of #internet #content. Huge hype of each tiny new thing released, gossip items, will-this-do pr-fluff rewrites... It was ever thus, even though it feels more thus than it ever was. And it was always the case that fans would invest the time and emotional energy in long-form, in-depth, quirky, personal writing about the things that they love. I've got, somewhere, a great Elvis fanclub annual from the late 1960s, with fan letters and long pieces that can't quite stomach making that year's output of mediocre films sound good. Writing by fans and other fan creations have plenty of opportunity to be critical, to investigate, to identify not only what's worth loving but what gets in the way of it. Music writing has always been about the experience of being into music, even when it thinks it's about the music alone. The fan writing that sets itself free from the pressure of "being objective" can reveal so many interesting, alternative aspects of living in a world with a soundtrack.
So here's some bits of music writing in the form of fan creativity, by fans, about fans.
One Week One Band, being a tumblr where a person writes for one week about one band, has a tendency towards showcasing fan writing that's overtly personal. So you get, for example, some great writing about Taylor Swift that's also about being a person in the world, and how you react to the music and the artists that have been around you all your life. You get, also, The Jenny Lewis Dream Hair Tutorial, probably my favourite piece of music criticism of that year (also excellent from that week: the piece on Rilo Kiley's "Breaking Up").
Possibly my favourite OWOB - and I say this as shouldn't, as it's written by a friend of mine - is the one on The Libertines, a band I have never particularly liked, never really wanted to know more about. I'd always considered them with a kind of lazy misandry as just one of those bands whose songs made dance-shy boys flood the floor at indie discos -- but in the OWOB I learnt so much about the female fanbase, how the band and its fans and its friends (and the music press!) together created a mythology.
It's great when writing makes you excited about something you didn't know you could be excited about. There's a games-maker called Porpentine, most famous for her games created using Twine (predominantly text-based, sometimes described as "hypertext fiction" - Porp's just been interviewed for a piece on how twine, as a format, works particularly well for making horror games). A little while back she made a Twine game called Crystal Warrior Ke$ha. It's great! I would probably have ended up liking Ke$ha anyway, but this game gave me a whole new set of possibilities for imagining how I could like her.
And that's me done here! Hope you're having a good Friday and looking forward, as I am, to having Alex back.
(this is not Alex! this is Cecily. I hope you are having a lovely day)
Yesterday morning I found, among the junk and nonsense fallen from the letterbox, a letter from a friend who lives abroad. A real, actual letter. She always uses the cutest stationery. I put it on the desk, went about my day, failed to open it until I came back home hours later. I was delighted to receive it, and I felt guilty. She's always the one that writes me a letter; I can manage about an email in response, sometimes, if I remember to get round to it. Otherwise it all waits until we're briefly in the same place, when we've an afternoon free to spend wandering around, talking about everything. I think about her a lot – I've been thinking of her loads this week in particular, partly because of job stuff she'd be interested in, partly because I'm soon off on holiday to a town she knows well – but how's she going to know that? I'm not putting the same work into maintaining my friendships that she does. I don't even do Christmas cards, other than scrawling my name on the ones my mother sends out to old friends and relations.
It's interesting how quickly the Metafilter thread on Emotional Labour gets onto the issue of whose job it is to send cards, remember birthdays, maintain familial relationships (spoiler alert: it's pretty gendered!!). That's not really the focus of the Jess Zimmerman piece that's the thread's starting point; it's just where the flow of conversation goes. This is the sort of thing I love MetaFilter for: not just the useful and interesting ideas, not just the many delightful examples of patience and kindness and helpfulness between internet strangers, but the way the discussion in a thread evolves as people riff on or react to each others' posts. Sometimes it's like a school of fish, a flock of birds. Everyone arguing in one direction until someone darts out with a sudden original idea that skews the story and the whole group wheel about, staying in motion, a new heading in everyone's mind.
The other thing I love MetaFilter for is, of course, the "human relations" tag on Ask Metafilter. It's so good. I mean, it's useful. There are some suggestions in there that I have found genuinely helpful for navigating life as a human being among human beings. Reading Ask MeFi's "human relations" tag you start to realise that there are so many existential and interpersonal problems that really only require one of five solutions. DTMFA ("dump the mf already"); go into therapy; engage a lawyer; set and assert boundaries; take up couch to 5k. Maybe, while you're at it, you can read one of the canonical self-help texts: the Gift of Fear, Allen Carr's Easy Way To Stop Smoking, Codependent No More, the Emotional Labour thread.
But also I love the Human Relations tag for reasons of what we might call #selfcare. I love it because it reminds me that I am not the worst person in the world. No matter how small and selfish my heart, how low and petty I am being, how wrong-headed and histrionic: the internet is here to remind me that some other person - some perfectly functional and passingly ordinary person - is definitely worse. Not people who are actively evil (though you hear plenty about them, on Ask MeFi as on the rest of the internet). Just people who are… wrong. Maybe it's an advice seeker! Maybe it's the person they're seeking advice about. Maybe it's one of the people giving them advice. They are making some awful decisions, suggesting some really ill-advised solutions, asserting some incredibly incorrect opinions. And yet they still manage to live in the world. There really is hope for all of us.
The Awl's Alex Balk, one of my favourite internet humans, asserts several laws for thinking about the internet, the first two of which are: “Everything you hate about The Internet is actually everything you hate about people” and "The worst thing is knowing what everyone thinks about anything." And, sure, a lot of my internet time is spent choking on the pea soup of other people's boring opinions: the clickbait and the hot takes, the grandstanding, the bragging, the false naivety, people responding to the backlash before the pre-lash has even been written. I'm a firm believer in Never Reading The Comments -- except when it's the comments on, for example, Heather Havrilesky's excellent AskPolly advice columns. People sincerely want to give strangers advice on all kinds of problems: because they sympathise with and want to help others, and because they are bossy, or monomaniacal, or attempting to atone for some personal past sin. All these things at once! Aren't people amazing.
I worry a lot about etiquette, how I come across, what is the right thing to do. Advice columns are useful for working out these sort of questions: less in the definite answers that they give, more in the constant struggle between the answer and the pushback it receives. But also advice columns are the supportive and sassy best friend of a million rom-coms. You have to forgive yourself first, they say; that's a deal-breaker, get out now; I am sorry that things are hard for you; don't change to suit anybody else, but you probably should still change.
The thing that keeps me coming back to advice columns, though, is their greatest and most reassuring reminder: other people on the internet are so awful that, statistically, you cannot be as awful as you feared.
Patti Smith writes an article on reading a book and feeling like she had found a sister. This is a lovely piece about chasing a family you do not have, but think you could get back or make anew. This book has just been republished, too, so when I read it I will let you know.
I learned only that she was born in Algiers, was orphaned, had served time and had written two books in prison and one in freedom, and had recently died, in 1967, just shy of her 30th birthday. Finding and losing a potential sister all in the same moment touched me deeply. I was approaching 22, [and] on my own
If you have not read Alison Bechdel’s beautiful graphic novels, I encourage you to do so at the next time that is convenient to you. Here’s a review of the musical (!!!) of Fun Home, which is the one to start with. If you’ve already read these, why not give them another spin this weekend? It’s probably been a wee while and you will not regret it.
But even if its implications remain unaddressed, Fun Home the graphic novel at least depicts Alison’s attraction to women as unavoidably enmeshed in her desire to be a man, and Bruce’s attraction to men as also a part of his allegiance to femininity. For the two of them, same-sex desire is simply the most irrepressible form of a more complete gender variance, as they try to survive in a heterosexist system that defines manhood as a desire for women and womanhood as the inverse.
Since it’s the summer, here are some reviews of books that you might like to read on holiday or in a sunny park. There’s maybe only one book you’ll want to read here, but all of the links here are really good, so I’d recommend reading them and then settling in with a book of your own choosing.
I bought Spinster last week, and wish I’d read this excellent review before I’d done that (because then I might not have done that):
[M]any magnificent spinsters and their unnamed sisters expand the range of femininity far beyond the familiar territory of the cute, cool, or easily commodified, and ignoring or shunning almost all of this classic spinster pantheon — as Bolick does — has political consequences. Above all, it domesticates the threat that the spinster poses to normative systems of love, sex, and power. There is a reason the word “spinster” has long been a queer-tinged insult with a straight-slicing edge — a reason why Katharine Hepburn, one of cinema’s great spinsters (Summertime! Desk Set! The African Queen!), was devastated in The Philadelphia Story when her ex-husband called her a “married maiden” and her estranged father called her a “perennial spinster.” Historically, spinsterhood has meant a kind of radical unavailability to straight men, implying either rejection of them or rejection by them or both.
Here’s a book by interesting person in her own right and identical twin Caroline Paul. She and her twin also make the Wikipedia page on “twins with differing claims to fame”, featured a couple of weeks ago:
Caroline herself is an exceptional person: a former firefighter who spent many years as one of only fifteen women on San Francisco’s 1,500-person Fire Department, a fearless pilot who flies experimental planes, and a terrifically talented writer, author of the memoir Fighting Fire, the historical novel East Wind, Rain, and the funny and poignant micro-memoir Lost Cat, illustrated by her partner and frequent Brain Pickings collaborator Wendy MacNaughton. Yet under the tyranny of celebrity culture, we idolize not the writer, pilot, and firefighter but the Hollywood actor; we lionize the fictional lifeguard on television while her real-life twin spends her days saving real lives from burning buildings and writing excellent books about it.
This is not a book review but I expect Jess Zimmerman will write a book at some point. She writes about how women erase themselves, how it felt for her to unerase herself, and what we mean when we say “midlife crisis”:
We have the privilege to care about feeling fulfilled, but we don’t always have the freedom to try—and by the time we’re old enough to realize what we might want and believe that we deserve it, it feels too late.
Here is a, please note, possibly distressing article on old Hollywood and the power of words::
In some ways, Young’s situation was impossibly unique. Yet it also recalls the millions of unwanted sexual encounters that entire generations of women did not talk about, in part because they couldn’t: They literally did not have the language to do so.
Obviously late to this party, I read loads of Joan Didion in Seattle and enjoyed it enormously. Here is an essay of hers, not my favourite but interesting for being written to a character limit:
It was once suggested to me that, as an antidote to crying, I put my head in a paper bag. As it happens, there is a sound physiological reason, something to do with oxygen, for doing exactly that, but the psychological effect alone is incalculable: it is difficult in the extreme to continue fancying oneself Cathy in Wuthering Heights with one’s head in a Food Fair bag.
This is so late, because I am in Seattle this week.
Here’s an article about the woman behind the science on Orphan Black – she has had a really interesting life and it’s nice to know that the science in the show has some sorts of underpinnings:
Herter respects science; in some sense she is devoting her life to science. But the “‘yay, science!’ bandwagon” unnerves her. “It doesn’t question the underlying assumptions about the kinds of authority that we endow science with.”
