Tag: women

the vagina post

tinyorc4 Comments
Your vagina is a beautiful flower. But it is also mainly just a vagina.
Your vagina is a beautiful flower. But it is also mainly just a vagina.

It is the one-year anniversary of this post, which originally ran on my old blog and brought me much Tumblr-based fame and fortune.

Fellow vagina-bearers.

Too long have our vaginas been living in the Dark Ages. There is technology. Technology that can make your vagina’s life so much richer and more hopeful. Here is a list of must-have accessories for your vagina.

Content note: Here follows detailed discussions of vaginas, periods, sex and peeing in alleys. If you are not okay with these things, do not read. Please do not come back to me and be all EW MARIANNE TMI ABOUT YOUR LADY PARTS. Also, curious penis-wielders are welcome, but bear in mind that we will be delving deep into the Mines of Moria. You have been warned.

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meet my belly

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Hi, I'm Marianne, and this is my belly.
Hi, I’m Marianne, and this is my belly.

I cannot remember a time when I didn’t have my belly, so I’m going to assume it’s been with me my whole life. I was a pudgy child who grew up into a pudgy pre-teen and then abruptly stopped growing but remained pudgy, even when I gave up chocolate and sweets for Lent and didn’t cheat, even once.

My belly and I have a love-hate relationship. For most of my life, it’s been heavy on the hate.

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street harassment, now with extra sad

tinyorc2 Comments
Stop Telling Women To Smile - the anti-street harassment artwork of Tatyana Fazlalizadeh, photo courtesy of NYU News
Stop Telling Women To Smile – the anti-street harassment artwork of Tatyana Fazlalizadeh, photo courtesy of NYU News

A few weeks ago, my friend Emily of Rosie Says almost broke the internet with her article on Role/Reboot, A Letter To The Guy Who Harassed Me Outside The Bar. It’s a fantastic piece that cogently and calmly articulates why being on the receiving end of “jokes” and “compliments” from strange men is rarely a funny or flattering experience. Response was overwhelming and Emily has been documenting a lot of the feedback, both negative and positive.

Today, she posted A Letter To The Girl I Harassed, a response from a male reader that attempts to flip the perspective once again and give us insight into the mind of a harasser. While the letter writer admits that his attitude is not healthy, he feels that other guys will relate to it. Emily says she finds the letter disturbing and a little scary, but mainly sad, and calls for empathy on all fronts. My reaction was less kind. For me, this letter reads as a steaming pile of entitlement and essentialism and I find the “predator/prey zero sum game” narrative kind of terrifying. But there is one paragraph that really stuck out to me.

“Being in the presence of a woman can be anguish. It’s loneliness (and sometimes horniness), and all that other Freudian bullshit rolled up into mundane moments. Just walking down the street can make me feel helpless when I pass a woman sometimes. I can’t shake it. If I could shake it, I would. Trust me. It’s no fun. But this is the hand I’m dealt, so I roll with it.”

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here is my soft perspective

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"Your new soft pink boardroom decor, courtesy of soft pink lady board members!"
“Your new soft pink boardroom decor, courtesy of soft pink lady board members!”

Last week, I moved to Oxford, which involved a lot of driving in the car with my mother, which in turn meant a lot of listening to the radio. I love Irish radio. We are a nation of excellent talkers.

However, last week on Irish radio, there was a moment of epic genderfail and I said several words that I would never normally say in front of my mother.

Don’t get me wrong, I hear a lot of genderfail from mainstream media outlets on a regular basis. As I have previously discussed, living on Feminist Internet can be an insulated experience and I am frequently startled by the levels of stupidity I encounter outside it. On Feminist Internet, even in the heat of disagreement, people understand the basics; for example, vague stereotypes are not a good starting point for productive debate.

This incident of genderfail was particularly infuriating because it came from a successful businesswoman who was trying to advocate for other businesswomen. To do so, she resorted to ridiculous generalisations about Women: The Monolith that would have been shouted down on any reputable feminist blog or forum within seconds.

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leggings

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Today, I had a mission. That mission was “Go to town, purchase two pairs of black leggings.”

Leggings are my religion, but good jeans are good.
Leggings are my religion, but good jeans are good.

As a teenager, fitting rooms were an intensely stressful experience for me. Things that were not confidence-boosters include: unforgiving bright lights, mirrors angled so you can see your whole butt at once and things that won’t button or zip even though they claim to be in your size. I rarely buy clothes these days, but historically I often gave up around the fitting room stage of the experience, purely because I felt so miserable about my body.

As well as my urgently-needed leggings, I picked up a few tops and also found an incredibly rare pair of jeans – 28-inch leg and 30-inch waist is like the Holy Grail when you have roughly the same proportions as a hobbit – that were 50% off. So I had no real choice but to try that shit on.

And in the fitting room, I stripped down to my underwear and took a good long look at myself.

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I get all the girls

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I'm totally a Hannah.
Totally a Hannah.

I just watched the first two episodes of the new HBO series, Girls.

First off, I acknowledge that any show featuring a main character who is a 24 year-old publishing intern with a major in English Lit, currently writing her memoirs in essay format and having a casual sex thing with an actor is … already hitting scarily close to home.

There’s also been a lot of backlash against this show (which I, obviously, have to work hard not to take as backlash against my life personally.) A lot of it, despite being wrapped up in palatable words like “shallow” and “unnecessary,” still reeks of my favourite flavour: MISOGYNY!

Honestly, I’m not going to even address the RARRR-GIRLS-DOING-THINGS-NO-ONE-WANTS-TO-SEE-THAT bullshit, except to say that it is getting tiresome wading through the same old thinly-veiled “arguments” any time a woman makes something about and/or for women. That said, some of the backlash is totally legitimate, such as the almost total absence of characters of colour except in incidental, stereotyped background roles. I hope this is something Lena Dunham et al take into account when introducing new characters.

Apart from that, I enjoyed my viewing experience immensely and apart from the aforementioned creepy parallels, here are some things I really relate to:

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I don’t think I’m beautiful

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This post was inspired by Lisa Hickey’s powerful article/confessional, Chasing Beauty: An Addict’s Memoir. 

I don’t think I’m beautiful.

And I don’t – in any way, shape or form – mean that as a self-pitying, self-deprecating statement. I am not fishing for compliments. I don’t have low self-esteem.

This is what I look like at No Make-Up o'clock
This is what I look like at No Make-Up o’clock

When I say I don’t think I’m beautiful, I mean it as a matter-of-fact, realistic statement. This does not mean I don’t think I’m attractive. I think I look pretty good most of the time, especially if my hair is sitting right and my skin is behaving and I took the time to moisturise. I’m confident enough to say that I’m attractive, that I like my body and I like my face and I think I scrub up pretty nicely when I make the effort.

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