season of the bitch

thoughts on Hurricane Gustav up at GlobalComment. (thanks again, Natalia)

In the grand tradition of Pop Feminist, I have to love on Buffy the Vampire Slayer for a minute.

I picked up my sister’s box set of the first season DVDs to stick on in the background while I was working on various things, and got sucked in. I’ve never been one for regularly-scheduled TV viewing (except for a stretch of Pokemon and Batman Beyond addiction in college, but that was strangely social–my entire floor in the dorms would gather to watch) so I never got into Buffy back in the day like most teen goth chicks did. Plus, I was a little older–Buffy started in 1997, when I was a senior in high school.

I am absolutely not embarrassed to admit that I loved Sarah Michelle Gellar on All My Children, the soap that my mother’s watched since she was in high school. I grew up with AMC and the other ABC soaps, and Sarah Michelle Gellar was a super-sweet villainess back in the day. (It is completely criminal that she doesn’t have the acting career she should–TV success so often does that, doesn’t it?)

Anyway, I’m digressing. The best part of Buffy for me so far–I’m now way into the second season– is watching the Angel-Buffy romance unfold. The meta humor, snappy dialogue:

“A normal teenage girl and her cradle-robbing creature of the night boyfriend,”

“How did you know that?”

“I lurk.”

Yeah, it’s unrealistic, but who needs realistic? Real teenagers are boring. But there was enough real teen drama sprinkled throughout Buffy, coupled with winning characters and, yes, man-pretty in the form of David Boreanaz. (Yes, I like him because he reminds me of a certain ex–that’s my issue, and none of your bizness.)

Of course, the Buffy-Angel romance turns into the ultimate “girl has sex and the world ends” story, which is definitely an antifeminist plot structure. But Buffy doesn’t wilt away or feel guilty. She goes on and continues to kick ass, and though she can’t kill him right away, she certainly works on it.

And the boyfriend losing his soul after having sex with her? What better metaphor for the post-sex freakout that might be a stereotype, but is so because it happens quite frequently? (C’mon, what straight girl hasn’t had a boy freak on her after she’s slept with him? Oh, I’ve got stories…books full of stories.)

Also, I think the success of Buffy opened the doors for the wave of female action heroes we’ve seen in recent years (see entire film career of Milla Jovovich, Keira Knightley (minus costume drama) and Lara Croft).

There are mountains of academic work on Buffy, and I’m not even going there right now. Suffice it to say that talk of the Twilight books, which I am now tempted to read for the laughs and the feminist analysis, got me thinking about why teenage girls have this attraction to vampires. The blood metaphor sprang to mind.

Blood is something teenage girls are just learning to deal with, and the sexy vampire is a way to make blood powerful, while still allowing that it’s scary. And the otherworldly boyfriend, the bad boy who watches over her and shows up to help, but is still ultimately a monster? Yeah, that isn’t wish fulfillment coupled with teen fears writ large.

And while I dislike the plot device of the girl’s losing her virginity spawning evil, I do like that eventually Buffy had to take care of herself, without Angel.

Buffy herself is a perfect example of what I’m always discussing on this thread–the pretty blonde girl who gets written off as stupid. Buffy is a nerd at heart, though, and she’s smart, sassy, and witty. She’s what every girl wants to be–and yet she’s rejected by the cool kids and has to deal with things on her own.

This isn’t in any way coherent, and maybe someday if I have spare time (who am I kidding?) I’ll write an actual paper or two about Buffy. But for now, I’m just going to enjoy watching.

Marie Antoinette, as Sofia Coppola imagined it, is all about beauty, ‘sparkle’ and femininity as the only pleasures available to a woman in a society where she is just a bargaining chip to be bought and sold—even by her mother, a political force in her own right.

Coppola gives us Kirsten Dunst, a star we are familiar with precisely for her lack of uber-glamness, her waifish build and glowing skin with little makeup, and transforms her before our eyes into the Queen, powdered white and perfect, hair not just styled but turned into a living sculpture on her head, seizing her pleasures where she can.

Marie Antoinette is, after all, denied even the freedom to dress herself in the mornings, and her husband is incapable of sexual performance, so she is denied not only pleasure in sex, but her very identity. It must be her fault, after all, that he cannot perform.

Beauty is both a millstone round her neck and the thing that saves her, at least for a time. She is dressed in the clothing of her new country—the forcible public removal of her clothing happens more than once in this film—and presented to her new husband as a cake upon a platter. The same as the cakes she so gleefully crams into her mouth later, and like the one she is mistakenly accused of telling the people to eat when they have no bread.

The aunts are jealous of her beauty, and they turn her against the one woman who might have helped her gain any freedom and happiness, Madame Du Barry, the old king’s mistress, played lushly by Asia Argento, all blacks and reds to Marie’s pastels and blonde. Du Barry is of course the ‘whore,’ yet she wants nothing more than to be friends with Marie, and is only angered when she is spurned. The simple pleasure on her face when Marie speaks to her is telling—and leads directly into a scene contrasting her lively sex life with the aging King and Marie and Louis’s bedtime conversation.

Later, of course, Marie takes up with another woman of questionable virtue, and it is then when she starts to have her own life.
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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.

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.)

Working still. So, Tori for you. Bizarre video, but, um, Adrien Brody?

Lyrics below jump.

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I posted this video the other day when I had too much going on to really explain the thoughts going through my head. It was a synthesis of my teenage dream-come-true interview with Neil Gaiman (yes, Neil fucking Gaiman, buy the next issue of Comic Foundry to read all about it) and talk about Iggy Pop, and my beloved Pop Feminist’s question Can Women Be Part of Counterculture? and Octo’s post on Feministe about “Sparkle.”

And so before I went out I posted Siouxsie. With her short-cropped hair and Egyptian-queen makeup, her shorts and vest and skinny boyish body are genderfuck supreme here, especially singing an Iggy Pop song where she takes on the male power-role—she isn’t the passenger, someone else is. She’s going to take him for a ride.

She’s got both masculine and feminine aspects here, of course. She’s glittery and glam and made-up but in skinny boyclothes, taking on the male role. When she dances, she does high kicks with the boys from her band, she covers Budgie’s eyes, and mostly you have to stare her in the face—each time she moves, she keeps her eyes on you.

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One of my favorite ladies in all of bloglandia has been getting far more than her fair share of shit these days. So here’s something to cheer her up: pretty boys and talk of porn! (below jump, because there are a lot of pictures) » Read the rest of this entry «

The absolutely fabulous Caroline at Uncool gave me a blog award. Seriously, I heart that girl. She’s not only got one of the first blogs I check on a daily basis, but she’s a good friend, too. Love.

So here are the rules:

1. Put the logo on your blog.
2. Add a link to the person who awarded it to you.
3. Nominate at least 7 other blogs.
4. Add links to these blogs on your blog.
5. Leave a message for your nominee on their blog.

In no particular order -

1. Pop Feminist. This lady is smart as hell and uses her powers for evil–if one’s inclined to think pictures of the Rolling Stones and tributes to unlikely-yet-fabulous feminist icons (right now, The Spice Girls!) sprinkled with some heavy theory are evil. I think she’s brilliant.

2. Flight Papers. I’ve mentioned this before, but this blog is truly one of the best-written out there. I wish she updated more.

3. FeministGal. Just…love. Love love love. Plus, we may secretly be sort of the same person. She’s got an excellent post up currently on Beauty Privilege. Because yes, you can examine it without making other women feel like shit!

4. A Secret Chord. She has the Carnival of Progressive Christians up right now, but she’s much, much more than that. Plus, we both like to objectify hockey boys.

5. My Private Casbah has been on a roll lately, and I love it.

6. Galling Galla because I think I’m still allowed to link to her, and because she’s fierce, and fabulous.

7. Letters from Gehenna. Her most recent post would be enough for me, but it’s definitely not the only reason.

8. Natalia Antonova. Do I have to explain why I love Natalia? Really? Zombies? Colossal squid? Cockroach songs?

So picking up Comic Book Tattoo has me on a Tori kick again. Downloaded a few songs that were in the book that I hadn’t heard before. Tori and I have a long history. She’s been there for me when shit went bad, like a good girlfriend. And I like this song, so here it is for you.

I’m off in the morning to work and then to Maine for one of my best friend’s wedding. She’s an amazing person, and the man she’s marrying, well, I’d be jealous if I wasn’t so incredibly happy for them. They make me believe in love. They are best friends and lovers and everything that you want in a relationship.

I’ve adjusted comment modding so that if you’ve commented before it’ll go right through, so you guys can keep talking on these threads. I hope that you do. And I can mod from my BlackBerry if I get a minute, so I’ll try to check in at least once a day. I’m really happy with the discussion that’s come out of me getting pissed and running my mouth.

I’ll leave you with one more quote, from an awesome article that Queen Emily sent me. Oh, and tell her happy birthday, too.

“Like drag, they [burlesque performers] require the audience both to reflect on the ways in which femininity is performatively constructed within the constraints of a normative, gendered culture, but also do justice to the extent to which feminine identity may be experienced as a source of pleasure.”  -Debra Ferreday