"When a sexual assault, circulation of documentation of an assault, and vicious victim-blaming for an assault are subsumed into the bullying narrative, it obscures the truth of what happened. If such things are filed away under bullying, we fail to name them as instances of gender-based violence, exploitation, and harassment that are enabled by a culture that minimizes, dismisses, and normalizes violence against women."
— Beth Lyons, On Calling Things By Name: Rape, Exploitation and Victim-Blaming Aren’t Bullying at Shameless Magazine (April 11th, 2013)
"Even though I cannot be sorry that certain dead visionary women have attained in death the adoration they deserved in life — I’ve already mentioned Sylvia Plath, or Anne Frank or Virginia Woolf (Marilyn Monroe? Amy Winehouse?) — there is also something creepily avuncular and overheated about the culture industry “cumming” all over what it either never honestly bothered to nourish or insisted on taking only exactly the way it wanted to. Female commentators, including the brilliant ones, are often beset by the problem of (over)identification when they write about such figures, while male commentators cannot seem to give praise or produce readings, however just, without betraying a kind of respectful arousal (or aroused respect?) rendering themselves the somewhat abashedly horny liberal uncles of the world, free to jizz into history on the figure of the actual woman whose intention it was decidedly not, via her photographs, to merely physically seduce them."
—
Ariana Reines, “An Hourglass Figure: On Photographer Francesca Woodman” (April 4th, 2013)
I’ve read this twice in twenty-four hours. I cannot shake this.
"Nobody pays me to say anything. If anything, they might pay me not to say things, but that doesn’t work either."
—
MARGARET ATWOOD to me for the spring ish of BULLETT.
You better read.
(via snpsnpsnp)
AND THIS IS WHY MARGARET ATWOOD IS BOSS.
"This is about all the bad days in the world. I used to have some little bad days, and I kept them in a little box. And one day, I threw them out into the yard. “Oh, it’s just a couple little innocent bad days.” Well, we had a big rain. I don’t know what it was growing in but I think we used to put eggshells out there and coffee grounds, too. Don’t plant your bad days. They grow into weeks. The weeks grow into months. Before you know it you got yourself a bad year. Take it from me. Choke those little bad days. Choke ‘em down to nothin’. They’re your days. Choke ‘em!"
— Tom Waits (via withnailrules)
(via ourheartsareloudandwillnotrest)
"Not being racist is not some default starting position. You don’t simply get to say you’re not a racist; not being racist — or a sexist or a homophobe — is a constant, arduous process of unlearning, of being uncomfortable, of eating crow and being humbled and re-evaluating. It’s probably hard to start that process if you’ve been told that every thought you have is golden and should be given voice, and that people who are offended by what you say are hypersensitive simpletons."
—
PostBourgie (via thugzmansion)
have repeated this countless times - yet it bears repeating again and again and again…
"Anyone can write, but to write well and often and for pay can be a hard and lonely job, because to do it honestly requires - at least at the beginning - a certain amount of boring self-analysis whereby professional and existential crisis feed exhaustingly off one another. To be an honest political writer or journalist today is constantly to negotiate and re-negotiate the complicated relationship between conviction and orthodoxy, between critical reportage and activism-as-journalism."
— Laurie Penny (April 2012)
(Source: warrenellis.com)
