Monthly Archives: November 2011

I Wear Sweats ‘Cause They’re Comfy

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In my post-turkey laziness, I was idly poking around the internet.  And then I started to notice some similarities between certain headlines.  Here’s a sampling of what I saw in 20 minutes of screen-time:

“Christina Aguilera Gets Slammed For Skin-Tight, Cleavage-Baring AMA Outfit” – US Weekly

“Hot! Kristen Wiig Sizzles in Black Lingerie for GQ Photo Shoot” – US Weekly

“Can Parents Be Convinced To Want Baby Girls?” -Jezebel

“CURVY Kate Winslet doesn’t miss a trick as she clads her curves in another optical illusion frock.” – The Sun

“’She doesn’t look like a princess. Where’s her dress?’: What primary school children thought of Duchess Kate when she paid them a surprise visit in jeans” – Daily Mail Online

“Man Posts Evidence of Bride’s Lost Virginity To Facebook, World Retches” -Jezebel

“Newly single? Jennifer Love Hewitt looks heartbroken as she picks up comfort food in sweats and no make-up” -Daily Mail

“Bitch Stole My Look: Jennifer Lopez vs. Britney Spears”-Eonline (“bitch stole my look” is a running feature on this site)

Now. It’s not news that women are objectified in popular culture. But it’s truly shocking (to me, at least) that for the entire length of time there has been print media in the United States, there has been visual and linguistic objectification of women. It’s bad enough when we’re subjected to these images in advertisements, but when the arbitrary concepts of “hotness” or “thinness” are actual headlines in and of themselves – when all we know about a princess is that she’s supposed to wear a dress – when all we care about when we see an accomplished actress is whether or not she’s wearing sweatpants (and by the way, do you know why women wear sweats and leave the house without makeup? Because sweats are comfy, duh) – and when we constantly set successful women up as each others’ foils – well, sometimes, I just feel like things are getting worse, not better.  It’s obscenely pervasive.  It pisses me off.  And I feel like we’ve all kind of just laid down and accepted that this is the way things have got to be.

I see a lot of equality movements getting traction these days, and I am a part of many of them, and I say RIGHT ON to them all.  I’m concerned, however, that feminism – the reasoned, theoretical and practical, and yes, dogmatic set of beliefs that hold that women are of equal value to our society and in our culture – isn’t a part of conversations of equality anymore, except as something of a footnote.  I’m concerned that at a time when young progressives are riding a swelling tide of progressive thought, none of it is focused specifically on the role of women in society.  I can’t fathom how women’s lack of equality in the financial sector isn’t a huge topic of conversation within the Occupy Wall Street movement.  Or why we don’t talk about the (almost nonexistent) number of single women who exist within the 1%. Why we’re not talking more about the extreme marginalization of women of color and women who are immigrants.

I don’t understand how we can allow female legislators to be called “socialist bitches” without causing a hue and cry.  I don’t understand how in just 20 minutes on the internet, I can find – as I just randomly surf – eight examples of abject objectification of high profile women, as well as just some straight out misogyny. I feel like women are somehow getting lost in the new struggle for a new order, and I’m not sure how to prevent this from happening, or how to bring about a new consciousness around the issues that women still face in society today.  I’m all out of answers on this one.  Any ideas?

The Skein

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Blog Description:

skein
[skeyn]
-noun

1. a length of yarn or thread wound on a reel.
2. anything wound in or resembling such a coil.
3. a flock of geese, ducks, or the like, in flight.
4. a succession or series of similar or interrelated things.

The Skein was created in early 2011 as a way to give a written form to my never ending commentary on the political and social constructs inherent in American culture. Since that initial inception, and after a four month hiatus, The Skein has been re-imagined as a place to more fully explore the world as “a succession or series of similar or interrelated things,” not just through the complementary lenses of political and sociological study, but from a more humanistic and holistic perspective.  The primary “goal” – if something like this project has a goal, and is actually anything more than a wind-lofted seed driven by the order of chaos – is to incorporate more personal and emotional content.  I want to move closer toward an accurate reflection of who I am and what I think as a woman, a liberal, a feminist, and a writer, without the filters of assumed and arbitrary propriety behind which I have spent a long, long time…well, if not hiding, certainly poking around in some pretty dark corners.

The original version of The Skein was set at a remove I deemed necessary for appropriate interaction with the subject material (political, liberal, humanist, etc.), a distance that managed to convey very distinctly about one-third of what I wanted to say about given subject at any given time and managed to obscure far more than just the remaining sixty-six percent.  The blog worked to the extent that it provided a forum for analytical discourse, but failed in its desire – my desire – to get to the source: to jump in, to delve deeper, to wind and unwind that braided tree-root of interrelated things that creates both our individual perspectives and shared commonalities.

The entries posted from January to July comprise a reasoned, reasonable discourse about issues facing my corner of society today, and it functions fine for what it is, and serves as a useful historical record of this developing project.  The idea going forward is to compose a less reasoned, less reasonable set of narratives about how I perceive the world not just through filtered words but through the lens of my actual self.

I hope to continue publishing analytical essays, but also to publish non-narrative ones, to share fictional works in progress, to explore not just social constructs but writing and literature from both creative and critical perspectives, to sometimes wax long and to other times write short, to shed some of the buttoned-up baggage of analysis and stray more into the realms of imagination and interaction vs. observation and commentary.  It will work best when you, the reader, participate and comment in whatever way you want: with words, with thoughts, with pictures, with songs, with poems, with joy, with anger, with heart. The Skein aims to have less holding back, more holding forth; less prevarication, more bald honesty; to be more bold, to be bigger than itself.

The writing ends up better that way anyhow, and fuck all if that wasn’t the point in the first place.

Welcome.