frl.zucker

I discovered Maren, or frl.zucker, when I was looking for a banner for this blog. Freshly inspired by a friend, who in a moment of crisis told me to do as Kathleen Hannah does, I looked for something that embodies the fierce spirit of the riot grrl brand of militant, but positive feminism. I wanted something that would also motivate the shit out of me. And I found frl.zucker's drawings! I can't remember what phrase I googled, and I don't want to guess, but I can assure you it was somewhere between embarrassing and awesome. frl.zucker is totally not afraid to be embarrassing though. Her blog is very personal, it sometimes reads like a story. And though she never spells it out, you get a feeling she, too, is looking for motivation and inspiration, trying to overcome something that's preventing her from feeling 100% every day. I can really relate to that, and probably so can very many girls and women. It's nice to find inspiration to act in one another. Maren told me that the banner illustration is of her and her best friend Hannah reassuring her she could do anything, which is really sweet, and also really important. If you have a best friend, it's definitely a thing you should tell her once in a while.

Apart from sharing her story and A LOT of awesome, awesome links + posting nice photos, frl.zucker uses a lot of text in her drawings. That's what interested me in her work a lot - exploring the intersections of images and words. It's a really common medium, if you think about it (comic strips, graphic novels, graffiti, prints, even traditional illustration to an extent, and most of graphic design), but one that I feel is left out from a lot of investigation. We think of type as a separate art form, and images as works on its own, or as ones as additions to others, but rarely as a whole. But as Maren put it, it 'lets [one] think about stuff in a more complex way', and it's impossible to choose which one describes the other - they are both equally important, integral elements of a whole.

frl.zucker recently contributed to a scrapbook released as part of Kate Nash's new album, and also designed some tour t-shirts for her. She also made a fabulous press kit for a band called Desperate Teenage Girls, whom I know nothing more about, as they apparently "refuse to put anything about themselves online..."

Maren kindly answered some questions just for Women, Fire and Dangerous Things, and in an awesome handwriting way. My questions are sometimes a bit vague, but it's a really interesting contribution - thank you!

If you wanted to ask frl.zucker anything else, she has a question form thingy of her own, and often replies to questions on her blog. She also has a Flickr, Etsy, and last.fm. And as I hope you can tell from this post, she's pretty awesome.

Women, Fire and Dangerous Things in Exklusiv #88 (05.2010)

The wonderful woman Karolina Sulej, music and fashion journalist, scholar, dj, co-organiser of such awesome events as Photomonth Krakow, contributor to Wysokie Obcasy, music editor and vice-editor of Exklusiv Magazine, is inspired by Women, Fire and Dangerous Things in her May music editorial. I could not be more honoured!

"Your Kid Sister


I recently found some tapes from my childhood years. Apart from 2Unlimited and Guns'n'Roses, there were tapes with my own songs. I was ashamed to find out I have over 5 hours of my lyrical and vocal performances of dubious quality on tape.


Karolina Sulej - vice-editor, music editor
illustration: Magdalena Łapińska

The American documentary Girls Rock is a story about how important it is for girls to "sing to the tape recorder". That is, about how they shouldn't be afraid to express their feelings and be who they are. Specifically, about a summer camp. A rock camp. Young girls, from the age of five or six to teenagers, learn to play, compose, write lyrics, form bands, and at the end, give a concert together. The camp is visited by female rock stars. When Beth Ditto came over, even the tiniest babies pogoed to Standing in the Way of Control. Rock and roll is supposed to work as a way of releasing anger, fear and frustration, as well as of learning to communicate with others, making friends with those similar to you. The girls who came to the camp include: a daughter of drug addicts, sent from one orphanage to another, a chubby Asian girl bullied at school for being a "freak", a girl with ADHD, another with anxiety neurosis. The campsite, in the middle of a forest, was a meeting ground for young girls of all races and classes - a real ersatz America. They say they're afraid of school. That nobody likes them. That they're fat. That they're ugly. That they don't fit in. That they can't believe they can succeed in anything. The teachers want to explain to them that MTV and a few popular girls at school can't dictate their self-worth. And music, again, becomes a mainspring of evolution - in this case a small one, restricted to a few people, but big enough to heal some traumatic experiences of growing up. The little Palace, who at first couldn't cope with other girls, bit, hit, and argued about everything, is smiling widely at the closing concert, fondly looking at her equally little guitarist and singing lyrics she wrote herself: "San Francisco can be so boring, I don't want to go on this trip with mum, because she only thinks of herself, I'm gonna watch this city burn, burn, burn". She drops the piece of paper with song lyrics. We get a close-up: "I wanna be a SOUPer star". I'd like to be a star like that too.

Or one like Your Kid Sister, or Maia Vidal. The frisky Spaniard pulled a right stunt at old hardcore punks. She recorded the hit Poison in a version which easily floors the old hands. Time out, boys. From Maia's MySpace: "The character that was created is a (duh) younger sister who, having found your Rancid records, dragged them into her room and learned to sing along. As you can tell, she never understood that Punk was a movement, a state of mind, or that she was doing it all wrong". You can listen to her "singing along" record on the internet, and also see the video to Poison - a little masterpiece comparable to Bat For Lashes' What's a Girl to Do. Unfortunately, from my childhood adventure with the tape recorder and playing "the keys" I'm only left with the ability to play Kumbaya my lord, Kumbaya and singing Whitney Houston songs correctly on karaoke. And of course, because I couldn't become a musician, I became a music journalist. A female music journalist, actually. Oops.

I recently found an interesting zine online. It's called "Veto" and is about the situation of women in the media. "In 2007 the Fawcett Society collated data from nine leading daily British newspapers: they document two female to seventeen male editors, one female to seventeen male deputy editors and one female to seventeen male comment and review editors. The International Federation of Journalists notes that in 2001 in Canada and North America only 28% of all newspaper journalists and 37% of television journalists were female. The Canadian Newspaper Association records that in 2002 women represented only 8% of all editors-in-chief and publishers for nationally recognised broadsheets." That's a part of the opening manifesto. Are female journalists really still at a risk of bumping their heads against the glass ceiling? I don't think so - the glass ceilings are breaking one after another, even if we get our pretty faces scarred in the process. And for those who wish us hell, we can only sing: Some people are poison, Under my skin like opium, And I'll stare in their eye to annoy them, Yeah they're poison.

I found out about Your Kid Sister and the "Veto" zine from Women, Fire and Dangerous Things - www.womenfiredangerousthings.blogspot.com - a blog ran by female journalist Marta Owczarek. We're publishing her interview with the Spanish band Tu Madre next month."



Nothing makes me happier than to think that this blog actually inspired someone and spread the word about women and their various activities. The blog gets a mention, but the editorial really is about Your Kid Sister and "Veto", and I'm infinitely glad I could support both like this. Maïa Vidal is really French-American and not Spanish, and the blog address is www.womenfiredangerousthings.blogspot.com, but those are minor details that I hope don't spoil the sheer pleasure of seeing this editorial in print for anyone. They certainly don't spoil it for me, I'm giddy like a five year old on stage, Girls Rock-like. Thank you so much, Karolina!

Magazines: nostalgia/actual degeneration

Jezebel did a story on comparing two May issues of Elle magazine: one from 1986, one from 2010. Conclusions:

1) freckles vs Photoshopped poreless mannequins on the cover

2) interview + photos of people who look directly into the camera vs celebrities as substitute models

3) actually doable fashion trends relevant to everyone

4) 'playfulness and spark' + diversity vs clinically beautiful, thinner, 'somber'

5) shoots look like actual fun, models show less body and are still sexy vs vamping it up big time

6) obligatory desert shoot

7) women appear stronger, sassier, 'aggressive, energetic, fierce, forces to be reckoned with' vs just not the same "oopmh."

It's really quite shocking to notice most of these things really are true. You can argue about the powerful images of women, picking different shoots of different clothes, and that's manipulatable to a large extent, but with some stuff, like the excessive Photoshopping, thinner models, and surprisingly, even the lack of diversity today (I would have never guessed there would be more black models and redheads in a 1986 shoot) - you kinda just have to acknowledge there is some disturbing degeneration going on. Obviously, this comparison is a random sample, but it got me thinking - were we really closer to something more real and "better" 25 years ago? If so, what the fuck?

Looking at these scans, I get an obvious wackier vibe from the older ones, and sleazier vibe from the new ones. Like all the on-the-verge-of-embarrassing clothes and attitudes were polished to some slick and shiny outcome. There is so much talk about an 80s revival, and it's been around for so long, so it's natural we see these blasts from the past and go 'aww, so cute!', but thinking about it from Jezebel's perspective, we're more like '80s - you're doing it wrong'. There is something very natural with looking at contemporary stuff and it feeling quite normal, while older things instantly seeming dated and a bit funny, if not downright ridiculous. But the fact that magazines used to print women pulling silly faces, and not the kind of faux-sexy post-myspace faces, but actual ones, wacky or smiling or serious faces - that's kind of a bomb filled with nostalgia for something that seems to have actually happened.

Still, it sounds a bit too good to be true. Everything that suggests something of the past was better than its contemporary equivalent (or lack thereof) inspires my instant suspicion. It's not even a thing of memory, because memory is selective and mutable (as I learned from the film Waltz with Bashir, people would recognize themselves on fake childhood photos and recall the day/place/their feelings). Nostalgia is what contemporary culture depends on, as we go through series and series of reworkings and revivals. On the one hand, there is this gigantic push towards the new, undiscovered, and constantly updated, but on the other, the reliance on things past is so enormous it never fails to blow my mind (at a young age, the first time I saw Pink Floyd: The Wall, I could not get my head around the fact it was still about World War 2. Since then, I've been ever so vigilant of anything modern really being about distant past). There's a disturbing certainty in many people that any piece of shit coming from the 50s/60s/70s/80s/90s is astronomically better than anything produced in the last 10 years. Of course, very often these assertions are based on more than just age, but it only makes it harder to catch yourself falling for one bogus argumentation or the other. There's something extremely annoying about always looking back and digesting for the millionth time what trash or treasure was spewed out before you were born. But then again, like with this 1986/2010 Elle comparison, sometimes it's hard not to believe we used to have it better, and somewhere along they way totally fucked up.


Vintage magazine nostalgia is rife on the internet, with all manners of sites putting up aged Vogue scans or whatever. Most of it is a question of aesthetics (or the annoying retroer-than-thou contest), but another place where actual debate is signalled is some recent posts on Style Rookie about a 90s teen magazine, Sassy. A commenter describes the magazine as one that 'treat[ed] teenage girls like intelligent, capable, interesting people.' It wrote about serious stuff and playful stuff, feminist issues and teen problems, clothes and makeup as well as sex and prom. For crying out loud, it had a Thurston Moore advice column, which must be the best thing ever. It printed reader's comments, made fun of stuff, including itself, but it was not sickeningly meta-self-ironic like some idiotic magazines today that also pretend to cover serious issues while being playful and sexy at the same time. Needless to say, I'm much more attracted to Sassy than I am to Vice, despite never reading a full issue of either.

All scans from Style Rookie.

Sassy is also a subject of a full-length publication, How Sassy Changed My Life, by Marisa Meltzer, who is also an expert on Girl Power.



Is it nostalgia for something impossible that I never had? Partly, maybe. But mostly, I can't help but agree with Style Rookie's Tavi that 'popular culture has gotten to a point where you have both the Disney superstar and the ~quirky~ outsider rooting for, trying to be, and promoting the nerdy underdog. And when everyone is the nerdy underdog, no one is the nerdy underdog.' And I believe women suffer from this cretinous double-standard loads. Not out of nostalgia, but out of real feeling, I wish today's magazines were more like the 1986s Elle or Generation X Sassy: fun, relevant magazines for girls and women that don't patronize and Photoshop them into skinny shiny contorted "independent" standardized fit-ins, but celebrate as diverse, intelligent and interesting people, with a range of attitudes, hobbies and problems, who are brave and honest and not afraid to be a bit out there and risk being mocked by people for being "overly politically correct", "too serious", "too childish", "too New Age", "too feminist", or whatever bullshit. A magazine to identify with and relate to!

It would be interesting to see what happened in magazines at those times in Poland, where I grew up - I know for a fact that both aesthetically and content-wise, the publications that were available in '86 or '92 were distinctly different from what this post cites. With both my mother and I being avid fans of the printed press, and rarely throwing our pages away - summer excavation project ahead!

VETO zine

I posted about Tiffany Daniels and her music zine Drunken Werewolf a while ago. I also posted the call for submissions to a one-off fanzine on women in the music industry. I have failed entirely to contribute to it, which fills me with embarrassment and grief, but the final project is ready and available. I quote the original post by Tiffany below:



DOWNLOAD PDF OF ZINE

During the past few months myself, Caitlin Wittlif (I'm Wide Awake, It's Caitlin), Lucy V Hay (Write Here, Write Now), Marisa Gunzenhauser (Filthy Little Angels and a prolific producer) and Clare Potts (I Like Tweet) have been putting together VETO, a fanzine dedicated to women in the media and music industry. It includes an informative manifesto, four detailed articles on the state of the sector, the sexism that lies within and our personal experiences, and an illustration explaining the glass ceiling effect.


Please send it around and spread the word - we're not doing it for personal gain, we're doing it to get the message out there. And let me know your thoughts - we've got a voice and we're not afraid to defend ourselves!


Related links:

VETO on Tumblr

What It Feels Like For A Girl

A brilliant, though not unproblematic, talk by Eve Ensler,  playwright, performer, feminist and activist, author of The Vagina Monologues and founder of V-Day, a global movement to stop violence against women and girls. Available is a transcript and subtitles in 8 languages (good learning aid).

Eve Ensler: Embrace your inner girl

Ensler talks about the girl cell in every person, male or female, and how we are taught to suppress that cell. It is essentially a powerful centre of emotions, dangerous to the patriarchal structures of the world which perceives vulnerability as weakness, compassion a waste of time, and tears and pain as unnecessary reminders of its brutality. The girl cell is repressed, instead taught to please. Ensler proposes that instead, girls should use their emotional power to "educate" or "activate" or "engage" or "confront" or "defy" or "create." As examples of such empowerment, she cites girls wanting to swim around the world, get stars tattooed on their face, living in a tree, protesting to the point of being ran over by tanks, loving a rapist's baby they bore, or assaulting their kidnapper. All are acts of courage, all show how you can accept powerful emotions and follow them. She talks about the extraordinary ability to overcome situations. It's incredibly motivational, saying powerful emotions make you stronger, that it makes you present to be intense, that releasing stuff instead of calming it down is the right thing to do. It is also, however, one-sided: powerful emotions don't automatically channel into acts of activism and self-preservation. It seems that Ensler believes in this inner instinct that validates everything going on in our girl cell, and trusts that it will direct us to do what is good for ourselves. Perhaps she's right, it just seems there is a whole side of this she is omitting, a side of emotions that run against ourselves, against our loved ones, that are destructive and weakening. Not all fear motivates courage, and not all hate turns into love in the end. The stories Ensler tells are beautiful, and moving, but they sometimes sound like fairytales, stories that happen to the chosen lucky ones. It's great that she's spreading them, it's great we can believe that we, too, can make our vulnerabilities our strengths in the face of the forces who want to see the girl cell annihilated. But then - do you have to be a hero to be a girl?

t-shirts by Zara

On a different side of what it means to be a girl: the movement behind Pink Stinks (UK), or Boycott Pink (Poland). Both oppose the early sexualization of girls, the body image obsession, and "the culture of pink" - kitschy, glitzy, empty celebrity role models. Pink Stinks encourages "real role models", and aims to "inspire, motivate and enthuse girls about the possibilities and opportunities open to them", "improve girls' self esteem and confidence, raise their ambitions and ultimately improve their life chances", and "challenge the 'culture of pink' which is based on beauty over brains and to provide an aternative". Boycott Pink is not half as well-spoken, but according to an article in Wysokie Obcasy, Różowy sposób myślenia [A Pink Way of Thinking], it operates under similar slogans of discouraging girls from brainless copying of plastic popstars and limiting their interests to shopping and iPhones at the age of 10. Both initiatives protest against the dominance of princesses and pink in toy stores as the only available choices for girls. A great and worthy cause. It's absolutely true that girls are encouraged to imagine themselves as 50s pinup housewives/princesses marrying princes/popstars marrying footballers, that brains are always less important in their development and their worth in the eyes of the society than beauty, and that being sexy/cutesy is encouraged a lot more than being natural and intelligent. So.. what about those alternatives? Boycott pink, but do what instead? The stairs begin here.

Pink Stinks has a whole section that "points you in the direction of some of those [inspirational, important, ground-breaking and motivating] women", and "a sister site for kids, www.cooltobe.me, currently in development, [which] will tell the stories of some of these women, using all that the internet has to offer, and exciting story telling techniques." That's pretty cool. There's a bunch of really great women featured on the main website, but so far only one movie for kids: about Isa, a member of the World Cup Winning Women’s England Cricket team, who "has a degree in Science, likes guitar music but best of all she likes playing cricket and playing for her country." I can't help the feeling that it reinforces a very particular alternative to being a pink princess - that of being a tomboy, a girl who does things stereotypically reserved for boys. Of course, it would be wonderful not to have to make binary choices, to be able to exist on a spectrum and do things because we want to do them, and not to fulfill gender roles. It is an incredibly hard thing to do, however, especially at an age when social acceptance is so painfully crucial for self esteem. What Pink Stinks is doing is fantastic, I'm just saying it's not as easy or straightforward as it may seem - boycott is one, but filling the void is another. My sister is 8, so this topic is of crucial personal importance to me. I'm obviously trying to be as good as I can as a role model to her, but it's very tricky to deal with the gendered princess vs warrior struggle. Sometimes it feels the opposite of liberating, like it's trying to promote toughness and asexuality and unbalanced intellectualization, which means the neglect of the emotional girl cell, in this dichotomy closer to the pink side. Navigating these concepts is hard enough for a grown-up, so I'm not surprised many young girls struggle like hell to figure out what it means to be a girl, which ways are good and which bad, which elements they're supposed to surpress, which come from themselves, and which from outside pressures.

"What It Feels Like For A Girl" is also a song by Madonna. It starts with a spoken introduction by Charlotte Gainsbourg taken from the 1993 film version of the Ian McEwan novel, The Cement Garden. It goes:

Girls can wear jeans

And cut their hair short

Wear shirts and boots

Cause it's okay to be a boy

But for a boy to look like a girl is degrading

Cause you think being a girl is degrading

But secretly

You'd love to know what it's like

Wouldn't you?

What it feels like for a girl

It's almost exactly what Eve Ensler is talking about in her speech about the inner girl cell and its surpression. "Strong inside but you don't know it/Good little girls they never show it/When you open up your mouth to speak/Could you be a little weak" is along the same lines as "I'm an emotional creature". Madonna goes into the ambiguity of the pressure to be beautiful, infantilized, domesticated, contained and controlled:

Hair that twirls on finger tips so gently, baby

Hands that rest on jutting hips repenting

Hurt that's not supposed to show and

Tears that fall when no one knows

When you're trying hard to be your best

Could you be a little less

So, what's going on on that single cover? Is it ironic? Is is making you think about it, or is it a sweet pop image promoting a pleasant song noone will listen to enough to note the lyrics? It's not subverting anything, it's exactly fulfilling that stereotype of the pink princess, while the song speaks of the pain and enslavement of the "real" girl. What alternatives does the intro by Gainsbourg suggest to break out of the misery - to wear jeans, shirts, and boots?

The video to the song, a first collaboration between Madonna and then-husband Guy Ritchie, taps into that, showing Madonna as an aggressive, confrontational, destructive bad girl. The album version of the song is a ballad, but a remix by Above & Beyond is used in the clip. "This is an angry song and I wanted a matching visual with an edgy dance mix." Madonna said. "In the video I play a nihilistic pissed off chick acting out a fantasy and doing things girls are not allowed to do." She crashes a car full of men, steals money using a stun gun, shoots cops with a squirt gun, blows up a gas station,... "It's a violent video, not something you want to see before going to sleep" Liz Rosenberg, Madonna's publicist, commented. In the US, MTV and VH1 decided to ban the video after only one airing. Madonna claimed the character she played had been abused, and it was an anti-violence message, even though it portrayed graphic violence. The video ends with a car crash meant to symbolize a suicide.

This is the kind of shit that Eve Ensler is not talking about, because in her speech, it would be an example of bad reaction to mistreatment and abuse. This is what Madonna thinks is a good way of showing that it's painful to be a girl. To be a girl, you should be a bit less of a girl; being a girl you can be a boy as well. Push yourself to prove you are not a passive princess whose verb is to please. Be a hero, or a villain, but don't suppress your emotions. Strong is sexy, which is good, but also bad, so watch out not to become a Lara Croft clone. You should cry, you should love everything around you, but you should also turn your powerful emotions into positive things, but not things like birds and flowers. Then again, kicking things and being rebellious makes for a great pop image, so instead of a pink gown wear something dark and be aggressive, because that's empowerment. Be a girl, but also don't call grown women girls, because that's infantilizing. Be fun, but be serious. Weakness is your greatest strength, so while acknowledging all your feelings, please focus on those that tell you to climb Mount Everest. All these things are trying to say we can be whoever we want, but they say it in a way that makes us feel that whatever we do, we've probably got it wrong. My gut feeling to that is somewhere between fucking the system and giving up.

Carnations and a pair of tights

 

Suffragettes in Cracow (Poland). Women's Day in 1911.

No joke - carnations and a pair of tights were the traditional gift for International Women's Day in the Eastern Bloc. The governments would make a joke out of that day in order to promote socialist values, praising working women of all professions (that is, teachers, nurses, cleaners, etc) and entirely ignoring the amount of inequality, both in economic and social terms, that was safely going on under the proud slogans of an obligatory holiday. The supposed equality of work status in a deeply patriarchal society meant that many women had to work their asses off in factories, and then come home to make food for their husbands and children and clean the house. Today March 8th is often a day for feminist manifestations, but the work vs. housework ethics are still often very similar (outside the former Easter Bloc as well, I'm sure).

To many women the day is still associated with ghastly school academies or work parties, an atmosphere of forced celebration and false praise, and many, like my mother, refuse to acknowledge the day, preferring to ignore it entirely. (My sister, aged 8, is not happy - for her, March 8th carries no baggage other than a possibility of presents, cake, or other festivity, and that can't be bad.)

I have very mixed feelings - not too traumatized by the regime, but without much emancipated guidance behind me either. Of course, there is also an International Men's Day, so in theory we're even and alright. Both days are great occasion for raising awareness of various issues, such as breast/prostate cancer, discrimination issues, social stereotypes. But 'global celebration for the economic, political and social achievements'? A day to sit back and pat ourselves on the back? I can see how that smells of the fake communist celebrations, telling ourselves we, the humanity, both female and male, are so awesome, and our definitions of success and achievement so coherent and linear, we really need a day off to take it all in. Even in good faith, with such premises, it is bound to become an empty show of numbers confirming we are making Progress, each year increasing the quality of lives around the world. It is, of course, really great to be positive, and to notice positive development. It would just be really great not to get lost in it, and still ask what does it mean to develop, and aim higher.

For the slightly lofty mood that should go with an International Day, I'm posting J.K. Rowling's Commencement Address, “The Fringe Benefits of Failure, and the Importance of Imagination,” at the Annual Meeting of the Harvard Alumni Association in June 2008. It's old, but it still speaks volumes - to both women and men, of all ages, I believe. Happy International Women's Day.


J.K. Rowling Speaks at Harvard Commencement from Harvard Magazine on Vimeo.