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:
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!
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.
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.
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.
womenfire.dangerousthings
