“it is this quality of ‘never knowing’ that is the body’s defining feature.”
—jane blocker, what the body cost: desire, history, and performance
April 2012
189 posts
March 2012
165 posts
“emo-agressive elfa males are the new passive-aggressive alpha males.”
—
“emo-aggressive” is important.
the other day one of the people with whom i share an ex was telling me how he would talk about his past substance abuse issues and i was like, oh, yeah, he totally used to use that to get girls and, also, to take over every conversation. another person, with whom i share a different ex, was like, “all the crying.” all the crying. and that time he was tweeting at people he thought i didn’t like and when i showed up at his apartment a few minutes later he immediately said, “i feel like you’ve been distant lately.”
manipulative. emotional bullying by playing the victim.
so here is the book: you can go back to the 50s and talk about men not sharing their emotions with anyone except for their wives, blah blah, then talk about the 60s with, like, the esalen and t-group dudes sharing, sharing, sharing, and the new left men who tried to distance themselves from those dudes all the while following c. stuart mills’s “the personal is political” and thinking black culture was more authentic because it was more feeling even as they criticized feminist groups that did CR. then you can trace the 80s and 90s and, i don’t know, donahue and alan alda and the rise of indie bands or something. then you can get to now and men patting themselves on the back for being so in touch with their emotions while actually (as always) using them in a really patriarchal and oppressive way to drown out women’s feelings or insist on taking up more space or add to women’s affective labor or as a trick to actually avoid doing things or to insist that women aren’t being vulnerable enough without any sense of the different stakes.
insidious sexism works better. plundering resources.
find a few recent movies and novels and interview some couples therapists and at least you’ve got a nyt styles story. you’re welcome.
things people have said to me in the last few days when i asked if i could tumblr what they said:
- hahaha it is perfect!
- yes tumbl at will! i like secrets.
- ya go for it!
- INTO IT.
“i believe the secret in writing is that fiction never exceeds the reach of the writer’s courage. the best fiction comes from the place where the terror hides, the edge of our worst stuff. i believe, absolutely, that if you do not break out in that sweat of fear when you write, then you have not gone far enough.”
—dorothy allison (via feministquotes). one more time: follow the terror. it’s the upgrade of discomfort.
"follow the terror" for everything, always, it's our job, ps. post pictures
Using makeup to make my face hideous to cis straight white men
using makeup to look like a girlmonster
#1 rule of feminist makeupping club
what is natural beauty made of even
“natural” is not a thing natural is not real only makeup is real only glamour is real only terror is real
“Natural” is a tool of the patriarchy
“only terror is real” is my new philosophy for makeup, thank you
obvs. many pictures.
“we need to attend to the historical processes that, through discourse, position subjects and produce their experiences. it is not individuals who have experience, but subjects who are constituted through experience. experience in this definition becomes not the origin of our explanation, not the authoritative (because seen or felt) evidence that grounds what is known, but rather that which we seek to explain, that about which knowledge is produced. to think about experience in this way is to historicize it as well as to historicize the identities it produces…experience is at once always already an interpretation and something that needs to be interpreted. what counts as experience is neither self-evident nor straightforward; it is always contested, and always therefore political.”
—joan scott, “the evidence of experience”
“the testimony will thereby be understood…not as a statement of, but rather as a mode of access to, that truth.”
—shoshana felman, testimony: crises of witnessing in literature, psychoanalysis, and history
“lying is done with words, and also with silence.”
—adrienne rich, “women and honor: some notes on lying,” on lies, secrets, and silence
"he, like, explicitly asked for my discretion when we started fucking...but i am getting ready to marie calloway his ass"
wait. wait. wait wait wait wait. um. first of all, everyone knows if you don’t want to be written about, don’t date a writer. (and who isn’t a writer? we all have the internet.) this goes double for dating feminist writers, who are probably committed to telling the truth about their relationships. “you’re hurting me” and “ethics” and “discretion” are such obvious coverups—by self-identified feminist men—for behavior both atrocious and foolish that they don’t want exposed or theorized. it is also what jennifer doyle calls, in sex objects, “the stubborn ignorance (and optimism) of male privilege.” good luck with this one, guys. really. we were dumb, but you were dumber, and you should read the audre lorde prominently displayed on your bookshelves. we certainly have.
when another tumblr friend you just met IRL sends you a message to say...
- [another redacted: ] UMM (opening with 'um' as a rhetorical strategy how about it) I also slept with [redacted], around the same time [redacted] was first making out with him...but only the once, and clearly I got off easy (in the figurative sense) (OHHHH) what I'm trying to say is can I be invited to the real talk too? the internet is out of control.
- kj: omg. YES YES this is the best party! do we need to invite anyone else?
radicalfeministvulnerability.tumblr.com
swmpmnstr replied to your post:swmpmnstr replied to your post: So This…
“radicalfeministvulnerability.tumblr.com”
that one’s all for (and may in fact already be the exclusive intellectual property of) my tumblr-crush karaj— http://karaj.tumblr.com/
but i love you, too, Alex :)
BTW COMING TO GUILFORD MONDAY FO SHO.
BE READY.
(unfortunately I will almost definitely be crying or at least emotionally fragile; I’m coming straight from the therapist.)
today i was supposed to see the professor for whom i wrote my early, pre-tumblr musings on radical vulnerability, and then i was going to try to set aside my entire academic community’s discomfort with origin stories to get to the bottom of just who started using the phrase, because it wasn’t me. (and it might have been her. or adam phillips?) alas, i had to cancel. but when i saw her a few weeks ago and told her that radical vulnerability was all over tumblr, including in relation to a jay-z post, she smiled and said “it’s gone viral!” and i laughed. i’m just the messenger or maybe translator. (xx, cityandsoul.)
