season of the bitch

hawt.

This is a thought-provoking and heartwrenching article on Genesis P-Orridge (of Throbbing Gristle and Psychic TV). Some ideas on gender roles and identity, and meditations on love and art.

Check it out.

Latoya inspired me to think about the hip-hop and R&B girl groups that were around when I was younger. Then I went out to have a couple of drinks and ended up in a karaoke bar with friends watching people revive classic songs from that era–the late 80s and early 90s. I’d already had one song in my head–one I mentioned in Latoya’s thread over there, and a little YouTubing brought me to all the gems I’m sharing below.

Somewhere in the 90s popular music died. I haven’t heard a decent song on a major radio station in ages. We traded TLC and Salt N Pepa for Britney and Christina (though Christina, bless her, does try), and Pearl Jam and Nirvana for the Backstreet Boys.

But these women, these smart, sexy, sassy women, taught me some of the best lessons I could ever need. Read below–with video.

» Read the rest of this entry «

I have some fun and some serious for you this morning.

1. Publius on Obama’s economic policy and reasons to be excited.

2. Ren’s posts on Feministe. All of them. Because she lays it all out there: treat sex workers as people, please. It ain’t friggin’ hard. Or shouldn’t be.

3. Prof BW has a call to arms: Blog Action Day on Poverty. I’ll be trying to do this. You should too.

4. And some fun, as promised: BFP has Lita Ford, Joan Jett, and Joan and Bruce Springsteen duetting. Yay!

I haven’t really been out dancing in ages.

Sure, I’ve gone places where there was dancing–a wedding, the Bust party–but I haven’t gone with the strict intentions of just drinking and letting go to whatever the DJ was spinning.

I’d never been to either place my friend suggested, so I was game. I put on my war paint–hot pink lipstick, black eyeliner smudged with a glitter pencil, and super glam silver shoes–and went.

First bar turned into a sausage fest of the kind of awkward straight white guy you know isn’t there to dance. The ones who stand around in a nervous clutch and look around for girls who aren’t talking to a guy. The DJ looked like a guy who got into it to meet girls, spinning boring 90s ‘dance hits’ and Britney remixes. Meh.

So we left, and walked down the street to another place that looked like a normal bar downstairs and like somebody’s house upstairs. Literally. The DJ’s stand was built on top of a bathtub, there was still a toilet next to it with his records sitting on it, and that corner was tiled black-and-white. The bar was small and awkwardly built against the wall, and the bottled beer selections lined the windowsills. A mismatched clutch of velvet thrift-shop couches and chairs were filled with casually dressed hip kids–not uberhipsters, just funky northern liberties twentysomethings.

Bel Biv DeVoe’s ‘Poison’ got me onto the dance floor after two vanilla vodka Cokes and a Red Stripe, and then the DJ blended in New Order and I was hooked. My thighs ached from swaying and dipping in four-inch platforms, but it was worth it.

Dancing for real uses your whole body, not just your legs or hips. Arms, shoulders, back, hips, thighs, feet…all moving. It’s the best kind of exercise there is because it doesn’t feel like exercise. It feels like celebration.

So many people don’t like to dance in public because they feel like everyone’s looking at them, but when  you really let go and do it you both don’t care, and you invite their looks. Yeah, I’m not trying to look sexy, I’m trying to feel sexy and that makes all the difference. One is for others, the other is for me.

I woke up early this morning to take care of my dog and my sister’s dog and kitten that I’m petsitting. My body aches a bit, but it’s the kind of ache that makes me want to cause more. Think I’ll lace up my sneakers and go for a run with the dog.

Kim wrote about horses, and how nothing bad can catch you there. She’s right. Horses were my safe space when I was younger.

Now it’s the dance floor.

I have to remember that.

Courtney Love is probably the most hated woman in pop culture, but I adore her–her too-big mouth, her weight fluctuations, her mama-lion protectiveness of her daughter. Everyone who looks down on Courtney should look in the mirror first and ask themselves if they’d have the courage to go where she’s gone and come back for more.

Courtney understood the strategic power of red lipstick and girly dressed and her performances, even at her most glam, always had a sense of subversion. Courtney glamorous was saying to us, “Look, I can play this game as well as any of you if I want to, and you will have to call me beautiful for it–me, who tore these things to bits in front of you and will go back to doing so again. Because when it comes down to it, I don’t need them–I am under your skin.”

She is. She’s that piece of all of us that can and will go there.

Go all the way down.

While today’s celebutantes seem lost and questioning, Courtney found what she was looking for a long time ago and wasn’t afraid to keep fighting for it.

‘Crazy’ they say, and leaving behing the implications there–who are we to judge? When men fall apart in public it doesn’t inspire anyone to shame them or pity them. Hell, we romanticize them. We love them (Pop Feminist tells you all about it) We worship Kurt, but Courtney dances in front of us, tormenting us with the words of another contemporary–”I’m still alive.”

Bad mother, bad role  model, blah blah blah–give me a thousand Courtneys over one Paris Hilton any day.

She’s the anti-Madonna, the one who instead of crossing boundaries, scribbles all over them in red lipstick and smears them all over. She’s the Joker. She laughs at us.

I grew up defined by Madonna and Courtney and Tori Amos–the triple pop-culture goddesses of my youth. The rock star, the pop idol, the faerie godmother. Each of them had her excesses and their lack of respect for boundaries, but only Courtney is a monster–to say you like her is akin to saying you eat babies for breakfast in some quarters. Particularly male quarters. She’s our generation’s Yoko.

I wore my Hole T-shirt to high school once and someone made fun of me for it. I didn’t wear it again, didn’t admit I liked Courtney until college and even then I skipped out on going to see her play when my friends did. And then one day in my 20s I went on a binge and ordered all her CDs, and admitted yes, I love her, need her, blonde goddess, the other side of Marilyn.

In one video on YouTube you see her in jeans and it’s so strange–it’s the first time I’ve ever seen her in them. Courtney wears dresses, skirts, even underwear, but never something so casual, so American-rebel-chic-turned-mainstream as jeans. Courtney never changes her hair color except for movies–it’s always blonde and always obviously fake–because after all, who knows better than she does that it’s all a performance?

After all, she’s the one who wrote the lyric, “I fake it so real I am beyond fake.”

Yes, Courtney. And you’re beyond most of our grasp, those of us on the safe side of the lines, and we like to torture you for it.

In the “Mono” video Courtney returns to her shredded-lingerie-princess style, but here she has a flock of younger princesses to protect—they come out of her skirt, yet she shields them protectively even when they produce weapons to scare the boys off with.

And at the beginning she climbs out of a glass coffin with her head resting on a bag of sugar—she rejects the girl box, but she doesn’t reject the trappings of girlhood. She simply rips them and shreds them and makes them her own.

As we all can.

So I recently wrote an article on the 20th anniversary of the Sandman for Comic Foundry magazine. It will be in the next issue, so pick it up.

I made an excellent playlist to listen to while I was re-reading and staring at interview transcripts and writing, and though I can’t share my actual music with you, I thought I’d share my list, anyway. Isn’t there an option on iTunes somewhere that you can make a playlist and people can download things if they want them? Or is that just wishful thinking on my part?

Anyway, list below the fold. Because it’s really long. But I put in some pictures, too. » Read the rest of this entry «

I have decided that glitter eye makeup will save the world.

I said in an email conversation:

And to think about whether or not the world would be a happier place if EVERYONE wore glitter eye makeup (or was free to without any sort of gender policing.)

Picture the construction worker on the corner with glitter eye makeup. Picture your fourth grade teacher. Picture John McCain. Come on, isn’t that a happy thought?

And I’m sticking to it.

Could you declare war in glitter eye makeup? Could you punch someone in the face? Think about how much happier the world would be if everyone spent just a few minutes in the morning playing around with pretty things for themselves.

Look at Siouxsie. Isn’t she fabulous? How could you not smile and laugh things off if you had this much sparkle and shine going on

Makeup like this isn’t some patriarchy-pleasing dollops of blush and red lip gloss just bright enough to make you look postcoital but not bright enough to rub off on the man who might kiss you.

And glitter drawings on your forehead combined with eye-lengthening liquid liner and lipstick–on a man? Oh, Bowie, you blur those lines so deliciously.

Makeup and clothing can be so much more than just means of attraction. They can be means of subversion, but most importantly, a means of celebration.

I used to draw exaggerated eyes on myself back in my goth days. Now I buy mineral shadows in every color of the rainbow (dollar samples from this site, BTW. love them!) and paint my eyelids with streaks of shimmer and shine.

I put on makeup for myself. Clothing gets noticed by others, but sparkle makeup is something I do for me, my time in the bathroom in the morning before I see the rest of the world, where I dip into my palette like the artist I’ll never be and paint myself a face.

I can’t find any pictures from A Game of You (which used to be one of my least-loved of the Sandman stories, but which I keep quoting lately), but in that story Barbie, who in A Doll’s House was a typical blonde pretty girl, has decided to use makeup in a completely different way. She draws a chessboard or a veil on her face, obscuring her pretty-girl features and making the idea of makeup front and center, the illusion that it is.

And Courtney Love, whose entire existence can be seen as one huge subversion of femininity, used and abused makeup throughout her career, but always pointed out the very obviousness of it as a device.

And that’s what’s so fabulous about it, after all. To quote Ms. Love, “I fake it so real I am beyond fake.” What’s wrong with artificial? Artificial was always set up as the “good” side of the debate when it was man vs. nature and women were nature. (See, oh, eleventymillion feminist theorists.) Why is artificial so bad when it comes to gender?

Perhaps because by making gender artificially exaggerated, we point out that it is, after all, a performance. A game of you.

And so. Glitter makeup will save the world.

Ten points to the first person to post me a photoshopped pic of John McCain in glitter eye makeup.

(This post brought to you by the department of Sarah woke up too early and is caffeinated. Now I’m off to download Hole videos. And have I really not posted that Courtney Love essay I wrote weeks ago? Goodness! Must rectify.)

Because it also occurred to me that as well as being Western-centric, the idea that gender presentation always privileges the male and punishes the female kind of ignores large portions of even Western history.

Or even what’s going on in culture right now, as male fashion magazines spread and male “grooming products” flourish with the rise of the “metrosexual.”

Consider this:

Yes, it’s from the movie.  But it’s also a fairly accurate representation of how men and women of the upper classes dressed at the time. And it’s a photograph of actual people dressed in those outfits.

Yes, Marie Antoinette’s dress is huge and unwieldy. But her husband Louis wears a powdered wig and makeup of his own, a high-collared shirt and (though you can’t see them here) knee-breeches, tights, and high-heeled shoes.

There’s a discussion of privilege that we aren’t even going to have here because simply having the time to worry about whether or not to shave one’s legs implies privilege.

What I want to talk about is the fact that male gender presentation has not been static through the ages. That quite often it too has consisted of very specific clothing, shaving, hairstyling, and behavior requirements. Yes, most of the time the women’s were more restrictive, and I don’t think we’ll ever see women embracing bound feet the way some have re-embraced the corset (full disclosure: I own two steel-boned corsets that can take two inches off my waist, but I’ve never done real corset training like Dita or others).

Sparkle, in other words, wasn’t only for women.

I hope I won’t find any feminists who will argue with me that male gender presentation is if anything more heavily policed these days than female. While a woman can wear pants, no makeup, cut her hair short, and while she may be called butch or told that she’d be prettier if…, she probably will not face the same sanctions that a man who wears makeup and dresses will (unless he’s Eddie Izzard). The sanctions for a man who prettifies, who embellishes his appearance, are generally going to be much greater than those for a woman who de-prettifies, most especially in terms of his personal safety in certain quarters.

(And I’m not even talking about trans people here, because we all know transition is policed. And that there’s the assumption that if one transitions, one automatically adopts all the gender signifiers, is straight, and otherwise does everything possible to enact some repressive gender role.)

One exception to present-day gender restrictions on makeup, high heels, and the like is, of course, the rock star:

Ok, so that’s Bowie in the 70s. So pretty. Bowie caused quite a stir by wearing the things that he wore and acting the way that he did. He certainly wasn’t ‘pleasing’ the patriarchy. Gender-bending has always been a part of the “fuck-you” tradition of the rock star, after all, but it also served to attract the opposite sex. Putting on makeup and dresses didn’t make Bowie less attractive to women, it made him more so.

And of course, the other assumption that all of these things are evil and can have no pleasure for the people who use them makes women even less powerful. We are (slightly more than) half the human race, after all. Is it to be believed that over most of human history, women have been so beaten down that they’ve had no input into any of the choices made for them? That every decision, every choice, every second of their lives was pure misery?

We assume that ‘patriarchy’ (I prefer Kyriarchy, these days) is a vast system of subconscious controls, but if it is this way, rather than something rigidly outwardly enforced like a school dress code, how can you really tell what was a result of it and what was in spite of it?

Anything that is outwardly enforced, coerced, becomes no choice at all, of course. If you face social sanctions for not dressing like the gender you appear to be, for not having children (or for having them), for not having a gender-appropriate job, for being with someone of the ‘wrong’ gender, then it’s not a free choice. If you do those things despite social sanctions the action is seen as subversive, even when you’re just living your life.

Feminism shouldn’t be another system of enforcing social sanctions on its members for their actions, should it? What’s liberatory about that?