“Girlism” makes about as much sense as “funism”

July 17, 2003 at 11:07 pm | In yulelogStories | 7 Comments

For more background, see Burning Bird and Halley’s Comment. Halley doesn’t have a comment box, Shelley (Burning Bird) Powers’s box is overflowing. My thoughts here: Do we really need another “ism,” robed in the language of marketing, and peddling a conventional adherence to conformity, flogged our way? A queen of lethal “girlism,” the Patsy Stone character on the British comedy Absolutely Fabulous illustrates just how manipulative you have to be to buy into this ideology. Admittedly, her version has no pretensions to the sweet or romantic, but might reveal more of its true nature. Yet even she calls thongs “dental floss wedged up your chocolate starfish.” In so many words, fuck fashion fascism, including “girlism.” Remember that song by Cyndi Lauper, Girls just want to have fun? That had a subversive moment, at least it did when seen together with the video: Cyndi, in a get-up that a “real” man would have found ugly (but which since has been manufactured to be bought off the rack, such is the way of co-optation), has liberatory fun, including getting her big-guy hairy dad to loosen up. It was a great “moment”: girl has fun throwing off shackles of oppression & authority (job & dad). And it was immediately frozen, merchandised, and sold. That Lauper was singing about working girls looking for release, and that her Fun Girl had a revolutionary core, was lost as soon as it was marketed. Today, the flamboyant anti-fashion that Lauper’s music video wage-slave character wore is peddled to 8-year-olds who shouldn’t have to wear a bloody uniform to HAVE FUN because they shouldn’t yet be working, either. But that’s the reality of conformism, and “girlism” smells suspiciously like another marketing ploy to conform conform conform to the powers that be. Hey, any girl could imagine being Cyndi Lauper in a goofball outfit for the nanosecond that her video lasted, and find it freeing. But imagining being a Charlie’s Angel or a Legally Blonde or whatever it is the Culture Industry is spewing out these days? That sounds like work galore. It’s regimental, it’s oppressive, it’s authoritarian: the diets, the workouts, the hair, the skin, ugh! So much for having fun. Feminism enabled women to make demands for personal & collective liberation in an organized way. Its limit might well be that fun is a kind of antipode to any “ism.” Fun is anarchy, it’s revolutionary, and it’s not on the rack of some store: it’s not an “ism.” “Girlism” is just another form of drudgery where, maybe, you get the guy. At least with feminism, maybe you get the well-deserved raise, too.

Medical benefits of DIY

July 17, 2003 at 8:58 pm | In yulelogStories | Comments Off

Who can say if this does middle-aged guys any good, but their sons might be interested.

Carol Shields

July 17, 2003 at 4:34 pm | In yulelogStories | Comments Off

Carol Shields died on Wednesday night in Victoria after a five-year battle against breast cancer. “She took up writing largely out of frustration as a reader, saying she couldn’t find enough interesting books about women’s lives.” About her latest book, Unless, Constance Rooke said in the Ottawa Citizen’s obituary that “‘It’s a book that has a great deal of feminist anger. [...] Carol was aware that women generally suffer from diminution and invisibility in certain kinds of situations.’ Rooke said that because of the gentleness and tenderness in Shields’ books ‘there was the risk of her work being seen as just celebrating the quiet domestic life.’ But Shields needs to be understood as a feminist writer, she said, one who ’suffered from the condescension that Jane Austen did.’” Amid the many international obituaries (including this excellent one in the NY Times), BBC published a brief excerpt from Unless.

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