jennIRL

note: i do believe — although i could be wrong so don’t hold me to it — that G+ is open to most, if not all, pre-existing Google users. if you are a Yahoo fan, though, i don’t think you can get an account yet. but i could be wrong. it’s hard to tell.

my enthusiastic foray into Google+, rather than producing the burnout that a lot of folks are talking about (ZOMG TOO MANY SOCIAL MEDIAZ WHICH ONE(S) TO KEEEEEP), has actually revived my interest in my other social networks. Tumblr has never lacked for my love (I LOVE YOU TUMBLR, TUMBLR I LOVE YOU, LET’S NEVER FIGHT OK) but i’ve had some epic frustrations with Twitter (see here here here and here) and Facebook.

but as i groom my Circles and poke at the workings of +, i find myself jumping over to TwitBook more often than i have in months. it should be the opposite, right? what’s wrong with my brain!

i think it might be that Google+ is still new and shiny. people are fiddling with it and figuring things out, and in the meantime the artists and creative folks i’m following are, in particular, taking full advantage of the fancy sharing features. and it reminds me that people are doing, and talking about, interesting things ALL THE TIME. the trick is to filter out the extra (and of course what is extra changes from day to day, or minute to minute. sometimes you want a funny cat video and sometimes you want to rant about politics, sometimes you want both; that’s the beauty of the internet). maybe a particular network is going to do it for you, and maybe it’s not, but in any case i now remember why i got on here in the first place.

about a week ago, i received an inappropriate email at my work address from someone i have never met in person, and in all likelihood never will. it was in response to this sound-byte of text:

“alina’s book-excitement also coaxed me to greenpoint, brooklyn, where me, her and wesley stace (aka john wesley harding) played in a basement of WORD bookstore, which is a rad independent joint run by very hot-looking brooklyn chicks.”

i’m sure you can figure out which part of that quote was in question. it was not hugely inappropriate, but it was also not innocent. at the time, i just hit Archive — better, i thought, not to reward it with a reaction. better to just ignore it. i figured the sender would get the message.

and maybe they did, but it’s been bugging me ever since. i can’t seem to let it lie. two things today brought it bubbling back up to the surface, enough so that it woke me up in the middle of the night and forced me to write this post. one was a conversation with a friend in which i explained the concept behind the upcoming Slut Walk NYC (august 20th!); the other was seeing a post make the rounds on google+ in which a user thanked others for calling out an inappropriate commenter. (i’d link to it but that’s pointless since it’s still in testing and lots of folks don’t have in yet.) suffice it to say that the user made the point that the digital space can easily become a space in which inappropriate behavior, usually disguised as joking, becomes the norm, and she appreciated that people were being sensitive to it early on in the life of this new social network.

i am telling you guys about this because i feel like it’s important to point out that, whether it’s a sound-byte about how someone is hot-looking or an outfit that is revealing or whatever, there is a difference between inviting attention and inviting harassment. they are not the same thing. it’d be nice if people would err on the side of caution, rather than the side of “well what did you think would happen, i mean really!”

that’s all, i guess.

note: credit for the title goes to ali the wonder room-mate

so yeah, i read romance novels. YOU KNOW THAT ALREADY. and the more i read, the more this one particular trope makes me nervous. i’m not a finger pointer by nature, so i’m just going to paraphrase/reinterpret for you. the trope i am referring to comes in several guises, such as:

• punishing kisses (which gave rise to this short-lived project)
• he would pleasure her ruthlessly
• he loomed over her, trapping her between his powerful thighs

and you guys, THOSE ARE REAL WORDS FROM REAL NOVELS, but the point is that there’s this weird unacknowledged dominance/violence trope. unacknowledged being the operative word — it’s never actually addressed, and we are otherwise to believe that this is a potentially loving and entirely consensual relationship. and yes, these are current novels! not some crazy written in the ’80s women-can-only-be-submissive bodice-rippers! sure, some of them are set in historical time periods, but now that i’m looking for it i’m finding it across the board — paranormal, contemporary, regency, you name it.

why does this bother me? because i can’t help but hear “she was asking for it” in the subtext every time i read these kinds of scenes. acknowledged and consensual dominance/violence is one thing (for this done right, see also: Coin Operated and that episode of Buffy where she and Spike have sex for the first time, you know the one i am talking about). but the kind of dominance/violence apparent in the examples above is a vague, “manly”, she-is-so-beatiful-that-she-is-driving-me-to-this impulse that is, i guess, supposed to be sexy but ends up just feeling creepy. if you are punishing a woman with kisses (however laughable that might seem), you are saying that she needs punishing for … being desirable? if you want a woman “helpless with desire, begging for mercy” in your bed, you’re saying that she needs to be … controlled until she submits? are you creeped out yet? because i sure am.

i don’t know. maybe i am unreasonably obsessed with sexual politics of late. what i’m trying to figure out is why an author would use such a loaded, misogynist trope. is it just careless writing? or is it a deliberate choice? and if it is a deliberate choice, why not have your characters acknowledge and/or examine the inherent violence in their feelings? as it is, the second i hit one of these i stop reading the book. because if i’m going to be a smart bitch reading trashy books, to borrow a phrase, then the books sure as shit better be smart too.

nota bene: any romance novel i have reviewed on this site is guaranteed to be “punishing kisses” free, btw. i don’t blurb the ones i throw at walls.

subtitle: the function of literature?

i went to Cara Hoffman‘s reading for SO MUCH PRETTY at Bluestockings tonight (which, btw, if you are in NYC and haven’t been to yet you should go, i will be returning with $$$ for to buy all their ridiculously well-curated books), and probably because it was a feminist bookshop and the author and the book itself are outspokenly deliberately feminist, the Q&A got pretty intense. i haven’t read the book yet, but if you look at it for two seconds (or hear the author read from it for fifteen minutes) you know right away it is about girls who are missing. and i thought to myself, maybe she will have a theory on this Season of Missing Girls we are having (see also: Hannah Pittard’s THE FATES WILL FIND THEIR WAY, Jane Bradley’s YOU BELIEVERS, Emma Donoghue’s ROOM, Timothy Schaffert’s THE COFFINS OF LITTLE HOPE).

Cara is, it should be noted, a big fan of Hannah Pittard, and interviewed her, and actually said something along the lines of “FUCK MY BOOK! GO BUY HERS!” at this point of the reading, which will forever endear her to me. and so there i am, wondering out loud to her about what it is, is it like in Hollywood when there are four blockbuster movies about asteroids hitting the earth in a row, or is it something else, like our social conscience bubbling up, and she said yes (and i am paraphrasing here, obviously) — that it was the latter, and that if you look at the statistics, it is mind-numbingly clear that we should be paying more attention to this. some of the statistics she mentioned (with a little help from NOW):

• an average of 3 women a day are killed by an intimate partner
• more than 600 women are raped or sexually assaulted every day

i couldn’t find any stats on abduction, but i imagine it’s equally horrifying. so after we’d talked about this a little bit (CHEERFUL!), another woman in the audience asked how Cara deals with thinking and writing about this, if it isn’t hugely depressing. Cara said that it makes her angry, which is useful creatively, and then turned the question around. and the woman said, well, i stopped thinking about it.

which i 1,000,million percent relate to. i am an ostrich — get me in too heated of a conversation, and i bury my head in the sand. except for very rare things like Planned Parenthood, for which i will READ YOU THE RIOT ACT, but those things are few and far between. i just don’t like to argue, is all.

but this isn’t really about arguing, is it? i mean, this is about how i carry mace and walk purposefully and hope like hell that it’s enough to keep me mostly safe when i’m out by myself at night (which i try not to do very often anyway). this is about terrible terrible things happening all the time and us as a society not thinking about it until we absolutely have to. and it’s about people like Hoffman and Pittard and Bradley and Schaffert and Donoghue writing queasy-making books about girls going missing, and all the many ways we get it wrong when we have a chance to address the issue. it’s about people like A.S. King writing posts like this. it’s about the many ways we fail to look out for ourselves and each other. and it’s about what good literature does — it makes us think about things we might not (and might rather not) otherwise think about. and for that i am, as ever, thankful.