GOOD MORNING MIDNIGHT

Hi internet!

Disclaimers first: For the past, like, eight years I have been paid to be good at the internet for various & sundry companies you’ve definitely heard of, and for the past, like, five or six years I have been writing a lot about why it sucks that life sucks more if you’re some kind of lady, and have received more than my fair share of letters from unhappy young fellows who would like me to be dead/raped/etc.   I AM ONE OF YOU, O INTERNET FEMINISTS. I totally get it.

That said, I’m still facepalming really, really hard about #FBRape.

It appears that the general public doesn’t understand that Facebook ads target you as a person, regardless of the content of the page.  Facebook ads are unrelated to the content they show up next to, and are never an endorsement of any content anywhere else on Facebook.  When one buys Facebook ads, one targets users by “interest” and category - so, say, 18-24 year olds who have “liked” a page from another fashion retailer, or people over 21 who have expressed an interest in feminism and volunteering. (Yes, social justice buys ads too - I’ve run the campaigns.) There is no section where you pick where your ad displays, or associate it with any given content.  And nobody, no matter how nefarious their product, would ever pick to advertise on pages related to “sexual assault” or “pedophilia,” for legal reasons alone.  The ads in the right hand column appear independent of content and are as associated with the offensive page you’re viewing as your friends’ icons in chat, which also show up in the right hand column. 

None of these advertisers — which run the gamut from corporate giants to tiny non-profits that work to educate women in developing nations — want their pages associated with racist, misogynist, homophobic, anti-Semitic, violent, or otherwise offensive content.  None of them.  Besides being horrific, that would generally be really shitty for business. But they have as much control over their ads displaying on offensive pages as they would over someone spray-painting a dick or racial slur on the side of a train in which they also advertise.

Also, keep in mind that the folks you’re actually harassing on these pages aren’t in fact some evil corporate octopus figure who wants to endorse misogyny, but probably some other 23 year old internet kid (possibly even a lady and a survivor of sexual assault) who’s their entry-level community manager or digital customer service rep — and they’re probably literally crying in the bathroom right now because all day they’ve had to watch “rape” “you condone rape” “how do you sleep at night” “rape” “you’re terrible” “how dare you” “rape” pop up in their HootSuite feed every seven seconds.  You know who isn’t seeing that or feeling harassed and panicky or triggered by having to see “rape” 3,000 times today? Whatever lowlife losers are creating rape-joke Facebook pages.

Advertisers and corporations should have social responsibility, yes, absofuckinglutely.  But they aren’t responsible, related to, or probably even aware of content created elsewhere on Facebook by terrible people who think sexual assault is something to joke about. #FBRape is not actually reaching the source of the problem. It is not reasonable to expect every advertiser on Facebook (which, again, includes orgs which you are probably passionately devoted to) to pull all their money out, or to assume that depriving Facebook of ad funding is somehow going to enable them to develop better moderation and responsibility. 

If you have a problem with advertising and a specific company or want to dismantle capitalism, deal with that specifically. If you are horrified by content created independently by the masses, deal with that - or create better, more positive content instead. If you are offended by a Facebook page, flag the page. Flag all those pages.  Spend 15 minutes a day hunting down offensive pages and reporting them, if you want. Click the little gear icon and click “report.”  There are literally humans there whose job is to look at what was flagged and assess and delete it - let them know. And remember that those people are actual humans just trying to get through their day, too.

Hi friends! I have gotten mad a lot lately about people being assholes on the internet and I want to talk about being an asshole on the internet.

I am not talking about people who are deliberately assholes on the internet. If you are deliberately an asshole on the internet, it’s okay. Troll is a feeling. I know. I forgive you. I am talking about Accidentally Being An Asshole On The Internet, especially when it relates to that dreaded P-word. 

So let’s all take a second to look at what’s in our individual privilege cocktails (‘cause sometimes we get good stuff and sometimes we get bad stuff, and sometimes it’s an entirely different thing depending on where we’re drinking, much like cheap white wine, which is horrifying 351 days of the year but occasionally just what you wanted.)  In one context one might have been arbitrarily given the social upper hand (things like “being white” or “being able-bodied” fit here) and in one we might find ourselves royally screwed over by society (things like “being queer” and even just “being born with a vagina” fit here.) Sometimes the same thing will work in our favor in some situations, and against us in others. Some issues we hear about often and some we don’t. Some issues we value more for our personal identity than others. Intersectionality. We all has it.  

HOWEVER. There are times when context is a little more obvious, and when it’s generally understood that one particular party is getting the short end of the stick thanks to the Evil Overlords of Societal Norms And Stereotypes Et Cetera.  This doesn’t mean that those of us with the long end of the stick are always doing great! We might be feeling shitty because secretly we are dealing with an invisible but debilitating illness or because we are gay or because we stubbed our toe. And then sometimes we feel shitty as a result of the other conversation going on, the one about how the Original Speaker kind of feels crappy due to their lack of privilege in the topic at hand.

Here are some examples of these sorts of feelings:

• “I have a lot of gay friends but I don’t like it when people think I’m gay by default!”
• “Why are you all talking about trans people, it sucks that I am invisible as a femme/bisexual/whatever!”
• “But I don’t think we can talk about race because my depression and lower-middle-class upbringing also prevents me from getting good job opportunities so I don’t think I am winning the privilege olympics so this isn’t fair!”

Sometimes we call these feelings things like “small violins” and sometimes we want to tell the speaker to shove it, and sometimes it turns out that we are the people with these unsavory feelings.

It’s okay if you have these feelings.  Feelings are totally valid. I have crappy feelings all the time where I feel resentful because I wanted to do my favorite thing in the universe, which is to Talk About Myself, and somebody had to rain on my parade.  I also frequently have feelings which make me want to walk up to screaming babies on the train and punch them in the face and scream at their parents to make their despicable little worm SHUT UP BECAUSE I AM TRYING TO READ.  

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This whole Planned Parenthood/Komen thing keeps irritating me again at random points throughout my day, which is pretty crappy because it’s seriously ruined basically the past seventy two hours of my life in a pretty major way.  Right when I think I’ve forgotten it or managed to distract myself, some little part of me flares up in rage again (“But what the FUCK! It’s like they’re TRYING to PROVE that Planned Parenthood is only a baby-killing machine by taking away some of its other super valuable services! And like they only care about curing breast cancer in rich white ladies who will give them more money! What the fuck is humanity COMING TO? This is HORRIBLE!”) I think I physicallycannotstop being pissed off about it, and so instead of writing nine thousand more words on how utterly infuriating this entire situation is, here, instead, are some links!

• Lest we forget, a year ago when that whole defunding debacle happened I wrote a thing about how much and why I love Planned Parenthood, and none of my feelings have changed.

• Salon has a great piece with a good analysis of the Komen Foundation and how it’s actually symptomatic of wider problems with the org:

It’s worth noting that while breast cancer rates are dipping, an October report from the American Cancer Society warned that they are declining more slowly among low-income women, and that “Poor women are now at greater risk for breast cancer death because of less access to screening and better treatments. This continued disparity is impeding real progress against breast cancer.” You know who loses when Komen backs away from Planned Parenthood? Probably not those nice, pink-clad ladies who attend Susan Komen wine-tasting events.

• This post does a great job of explaining the insidious ways in which pro-lifers are not so much anti-abortion as anti women’s freedom and anti-sex in general, which is an excellent point

If pro-life activists really cared about public health and stopping abortion and saving the precious widdle babies, if they were truly pro-life, then they would support policies and scientific advancements that prevent abortion and, you know, actually save lives.  They would promote the use of contraceptives, and fight to make them as cheap and accessible as possible…………. They would support financial assistance for women who cannot afford pre and postnatal care.  They would support organizations like Planned Parenthood.  But they don’t.  They virulently oppose all of these things with a vicious, fiery passion because it’s not about the babies and it’s not about health - it’s about the sex and the women who have it.

• The Planned Parenthood Saved My Life tumblr is full of stories from women who received excellent and often life-saving care at their local PP, which is nothing knew but really serves to drive home the point that, you know, it rules?

• Here’s a link where you can donate to PP, or if you aren’t able to donate, you can always actually support them by, you know, utilizing their services — go ahead and book yourself a pap smear or whatevz like, right now, since you’ve probably been putting it off anyhow. You can also add your name to the letter declaring that you still stand with PP, or you can check out the PPAction site for more news and updates and calls to action.

Lately I’ve been really into weird concepts of something like failed, desperate, self-conscious deliberate performative femininity? Part of this is evidenced by the fact that I’ve been doing my hair in big curls with my kinda-crappy-blonde-dye-job and wearing a ridiculous faux-leopard coat with ripped tights and messy eyeliner, and part of it comes together more in at least 47 different e-mail conversations about books and movies with “unrepentantly fucked up” lady characters that I’ve been having with at least 5 different people of late.  Some of these ideas have been written very eloquently by other folks already, and some of it is obvious and some of it is still vague, and all of it is definitely not “complete,” so, like, go at it in the comments, y’all, I wanna know what you’re thinking.

It begins, I think, with my ongoing frustration that when we are presented with male characters (or personas, or even real persons) who are basically bad people with one redeeming quality (still sleeps with a teddy bear, is a brilliant filmmaker) we let that one redeeming quality, you know, redeem them, and are collectively charmed by their fucked-up-ness.  But I have a really hard time coming up with similar female examples: all of the ones I can think of we have opted to either lambast or concern-troll instead.  And we always need to redeem them. They always need to learn something or be rescued, which we all know is basically the opposite of how the world really works.  Kids, I am a hot mess, and almost all of the women I admire and love and am fascinated by are also hot fucking messes, and I so rarely see that represented in a real, nuanced, and fascinating way.  To simplify: I am eternally tearing my hair out over the fact that I desperately want more female antiheroes. In books, film, pop culture personas, whatever.  And I’ve been seeing this idea come up again and again lately.

As a brief list of some of what I’m referencing: There’s this Lana Del Rey album review, which is kind of the most astute thing I’ve read on her yet, and which hit the nail on the head of my bizarre, obsessive preoccupation with her and her aesthetic — though it condemned her where I obviously am fascinated instead.  There was that Marie Calloway brouhaha, and the fantastic response to it all from Kate Zambreno, which also lead to The Rejectionist’s interview with her here.  There were a bunch of folks over at Emily Books who managed to somehow misread a lot of lesbian moralism into Eileen Myles’ Inferno, when I thought it was just a book about, like, someone very funny and intelligent and unapologetic, who also lived a life that reminds me an awful lot of my life now. There was Charlize Theron in Young Adult, who would have been way fascinating if not for Diablo Cody’s frustrating insistence on de-nuancing her characters in favor of twee trope-tastic banter.  There’s Cat Marnell at XOJane and the no-nonsense-it’s-okay-to-be-human writing at Rookie.   Sarah’s and my Rayanne Project (which sort of fizzled out probably partially because I am a little bit too much of a whacked-out womanchild to coordinate and motivate folks to write me things like that, but the stuff that’s up there is still amazeballs!)  The Amy-Winehouse-inspired couture collection that Gaultier showed yesterday.  Courtney Love, like, in general.

I am really into this, you guys.

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Russian-born Nina Leen was one of the first female photographers to shoot for LIFE magazine, which, fortunately for us, means there’s a ton of her work available on the Google LIFE photo archives. While mostly known for her work with animals (including a dog named Lucky that she adopted and apparently put hats on), it’s Leen’s photographs of women that I find most fascinating.  Admittedly, to some extent the period of time in which she was working for LIFE — the late 40s through the 1950s — dictated that bizarre style of “it’s totally not posed, I swear, I just stand this awkwardly and grin with a box of kitchen supplies all the time, not to mention we are all white and very happy all the time” photography. (The original “woman laughing alone with salad?”)

But when juxtaposed with her more candid shots (a girl falling down at a skating rink, a woman on the phone in an office, women trying on shoes, cleaning their living rooms, browsing stores) they provide a surprising amount of insight into the expectations versus reality of being a young woman in that era.  Exposé photoessays on the work of housewives or of young working girls (like we know from Mad Men, most of them are either secretaries or models) ran in contrast to Upper East Side socialites walking their dogs or glamorous women in evening gowns posed like mannequins.  Intentionally or otherwise, her work as a whole provides an interesting study on idealized femininity and the public versus private lives of women and the world, separate from that of men, in which they were forced to exist.

More photos after the jump.

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Okay, kids.  I’ve been putting it off and re-editing and drafting and queueing and un-queueing a post about this for weeks now, but I need to stop waffling about it, since we need to talk about Lana Del Rey and Kreayshawn, and how I don’t hate them, and how I think the intensity and specificity of everyone else’s disdain for them is sort of shitty, and how self-righteous and unquestioning we’ve all been about that hatred.  We’ve talked about both of these ladies to death, but it seems that very few people (in my admittedly over-stocked Googlereader, at least) have even so much as glanced at the intensity of the public reaction to both of them and really questioned why they irritate us so much.

There’s one disclaimer to be made here, first — it’s true that there are a lot of conversations to be had about Kreayshawn and race (and to some extent about Del Rey and nostalgia and class.)   I want to make it clear that I’m not in any way refuting these, as a lot of those conversations are totally valid and necessary and you should read them or write them too and I think they are super important and want you to tell me about them too.  This conversation, if it’s possible to do this, is slightly outside of those dialogues, a concurrent frame through which I think these two singers can be viewed.  This is about ladyhate and the curious extent to which of these pretty lady pop singer internet sensations have become our most reviled cultural icons this year, our favorite objects of hate and disgust. 

This isn’t criticizing thought-provoking conversation about potential social issues in pop culture, or any of the nuanced dialogues about femininity and race and queerness and class that they may have provoked — plenty of those have been super rad, and super necessary.  This is about the personal attacks and the particular brand of lady-directed-snark we’ve been seeing all over with regards to both of these girls, lots of which are lacking in deeper analysis. This is about how despite the fact that Kreayshawn and Lana Del Rey have little in common other than having a YouTube account, we the feminist music-snob internet have reacted to them with the same variety of sneers and upturned noses.

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DEAR INTERNET I AM HAVING SOME FEELINGS AGAIN. Mostly about the fact that I cannot open my Google reader or my Tumblr dashboard or basically anything ever without reading about y’all arguing each other about privilege, and who has it, and who doesn’t, and when it’s valid, and when it’s not, and whether you feel guilty about it, and what kind you have or don’t have, and what you are allowed to talk about given your own very special Internet Approved Privilege Scorecard and also your Arbitrary Internet Approved Vocabulary For Talking About These Things. 

Let’s first make it clear that I am not saying that I don’t think that privilege exists, because it totally does, or that it isn’t important or important to talk about, because it totally is, or that I don’t have it in many ways or lack it in others, because I do (white, middle class, predisposition to giantess heights and ectomorph proportions, etc) and I don’t (gay, lady, etc.)   Instead, I am asking if, given all these things, is our eternal Internet Privilege Witch Hunt really the most productive way to talk about every possible problem?

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So a few weeks ago The Rejectionist and I were having one of our weird long gmail conversations about, like, this thing pissed us off and should we buy these pants and have you seen this cool thing on the internet and OMG the 90s, which naturally progressed into lengthy discussions about My So Called Life, because I mean, what else is there worth talking about?  And we realized that the same thing kept coming up — we get it, Jordan Catalano leans really well and like everyone ever thinks they’re Angela, but what about Rayanne?  While Angela’s the central character and the “most relatable” because of her “most normal” life, why don’t we ever take Rayanne seriously?  Why is it that she’s relegated to the secondary character of “the one with quirky style and attitude but like kind of an unhinged drunk slutty bad girl?”

And then we started thinking about all the other things related to that, like how maybe all of Rayanne’s sex and “slut potential” wasn’t totally consensual and why do we sort of ignore how rich her character is when the show does a pretty good job of it really?  Why do we just want to talk about how COOL she looked even though, you know, shit wasn’t exactly coming up daisies for her and her life was impressively complicated for a show airing at that time, and maybe we should talk about that? Why is every analysis of Rayanne and Angela’s friendship that we can find anywhere way too idealized and, frankly, kind of stupid?  Could we also see Rayanne some kind of accessible whitewashed pathway into talking about those “othered” (through race, class, gender, body, whatever) teen girl experiences that don’t get talked about as much? What about Ricky, what if we relate to Rayanne and Ricky more as well?  Basically — can we make Rayanne more than the quirky, slutty, sassy sidekick drunk with amazing hair? 

And how does that relate to other things we’ve been thinking about, like the devaluing of teen female experiences or how we’re both sort of grossed out by the fetishization and flattening of what could be loosely defined as “punk female identities,” and how a tattooed bisexual asskicking brunette does not a feminist storyline make? Or how it bums us out that nobody ever writes good fiction about what it’s like being sixteen and a girl who dresses funny or maybe was a little nuts but doesn’t need to be saved or married off or isn’t going to die or anything from making some bad decisions? Or how we totally can’t fucking stand that manic pixie dreamgirl trope and aforementioned asskicking bisexual tattooed brunette character?  Can’t we talk about teenage girls without it turning into a Choose Your Own Adventure of Pick One: crazy-pregnant-addict-anorexic-kooky-overemotional-shallow-lonely-doomed-virgin-whore?  And how does all that fun stuff like race and class and gender and sexuality and bodies and ability and everything intersect with those experiences? 

And then we realized that there was a lot to say here, and that it might as well not be said only to our own Gmail archives, and that we had an entire internet of people with Very Smart Opinions who we also wanted to talk about this. So: we want to know what you have to say.  Do you want to blog about this as part of a big ole internetwide Let’s Please Talk About Rayanne or Girls Like Rayanne Seriously kind of thing, our Rayanne Project, as we’re calling it? Do you not have a blog but want to guest-post on one of ours, or interview someone, or be interviewed? Are you overwhelmed with some other related creative impulse that we could also somehow e-share and show off your fabulousness? Awesome, because we want it all.

Ideally, since it was the basis of the conversation (and we basically really want to talk about Rayanne without being like OMG THOSE BRAIDS!! THOSE PATCHWORK PANTS! again, because we have that conversation twice a week) — we’d love for you to use My So Called Life as the basis of whatever you want to contribute.  But if you want to branch off into that multitude of related topics above, or have other really awesome ideas that relate, we certainly aren’t going to stop you, since we pretty much think enough can’t be said about this. 

We’re planning mostly on a blog conversation for starters which we may then later curate into another website — but if this goes as well as we’re hoping it will, there will be a zine coming out of it (!!!!), and some kind of event for those of us based in NYC.   

So!  If you’d be interested in contributing in some way, please email megpclark[at]gmail and rejectionistandyourmom[at]gmail by Thursday, May 12th just to say that you’d be down, and let us know some of your ideas, or how or what you’d like to contribute.  We’ll get back to you soon with more concrete details, posting schedules, and more guidelines later next week — because duh, we can’t wait to hear what you have to say.  

Continuing my apparent ongoing obsession with photographers who call excess attention to just how creepy mandated performativity of the feminine can be (see: Alex Prager, that Kourtney Roy editorial) — some of Anna Gaskell’s photographs, largely from the 90’s.

Similar to Prager (and nodding of course, as always, to Cindy Sherman, who we have to mention again that I can never for the life of me care about as much as I know I ought to, considering her obvious influence on so much that I do like) Gaskell stages elaborate, cinematically lit photographs, but of costumed young girls in inexplicably macabre, somehow sadistic poses.  The Hitchcock light and angles, extreme cropping, and cartoonish saturation of colour creates and re-enforces the discomfort we feel with the girls’ cruel and bizarre actions, the apparent fetishization and sexualization of their isolated legs and feet, and the idealized, stylized doll-like way in which they are presented.  Vague parallels emerge between classic cultural references of young girls (Alice in Wonderland), a forced and limiting uniform (the blue dresses, white tights), and a discomfort regarding feminine agency and sexuality, and the taboo of corrupted innocence; the overall effect is troubling in ways we can’t quite comprehend at first. 

More after the jump!

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