If it were now to die, ‘Twere now to be most happy, for I fear My soul hath her content so absolute That not another comfort like to this Succeeds in unknown fate…
Dylan is coming on a tour of Australia!! *insert sighs, screams and fainting spells*
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Archive for the 'pop-culture' Category
Again not official Wo! business (my justification Anna- is that subversive ideas need to be accompanied by/is good art and music)…
So need to share this gorgeous song i’ve already played a thousand times on Dylan’s bootleg series. This stuff is glorious. Dylan sings it with former lover-singer-collaborator Joan Baez (who substitutes Mama for Daddy). It works either way (and let’s not get into a whole Freudian thing about this…)
(”If you gotta go, go now” on the Bootleg series is also pretty hot. It’s up there with “All i want do (is baby be friends with you) in terms of my favourites.)
A diplomatic incident has nearly broken out over allegations of racist abuse on British reality show ”Celebrity” Big Brother.
We all know the show is hardly a conduit for good taste- as can be attested by the “turkey slapping incident” last year on Australian Big Brother which created a huge debate in Sydney newspapers about sexual harassment, even prompting calls from the Prime Minister to ban the show.
But what Big Brother does reveal with its massive ratings and its potential to create public controversy is a rare insight into the lives and minds of ordinary and ‘public’ figures at their most uninhibited.
The dynamics of the house are revealing about a whole spectrum of issues- including attitudes to gender relations, racism, culture and sexuality in modern life.Â
In this way the show has an ability to uncover a little of the nation’s psyche- mirrored in all its ugliness.Â
The victimised housemate- Bollywood actress Shilpa Shetty, was apparently ganged up upon by four of the housemates, one whose claim to fame was being a member of the defunct band “Steps”, and singling her out to bullying.
Shetty was apparently referred to as “the Indian”, a “cunt”, made fun of her for her accent, with suggestions made that Indians were so thin because they ate “undercooked” food.
The B-grade starlet has now become a heroine in India and Britain with thousands sending emails complaining to the show’s producers in support of the embattled actress.
The situation has created a firestorm in the UK highlighting simmering racial tensions. Shetty’s experience has obviously struck a huge chord with the British public.
The controversy has touched upon the raging debates that have characterished modern British society- on issues of race, culture, religion, multiculturalism and integration. To the extent that politicians have come to the fore to address the issues in the House of Commons.Â
In these debates it has always been the minority groups which have been castigated for their inability to “integrate”. The deluge of complaints reveal the deep chord the Shetty debacle has struck with the immigrant experience.
If “integration” is called for- than this is also a two way street. “Integration” is only possible when people feel welcomed as equals in their society to be their very best. These efforts are severely undermined when you’re being called a dirty “Paki”.
The ”Empire” obviously needs to straighten things out. It’s “subjects” are in revolt. Â
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I walk out the house one night looking fly, and 19-yr- old Model girl stares with interest, “You hot slut!” she shrieks grinning madly.
I freeze for a second. Then break out in an involuntary smile- there is so much love in these words i can’t describe it.
“Filthy slut,” “skanky ho”, even “hot bitch” have morphed into common terms of endearment between young women.
In the absence of external objectification are we just objectifying each other? Or has “slut” been redefined to denote female sexual empowerment?
Is this camraderie of boorishness especially among the “educated student set” - where getting “smashed” and “high”, having multiple boyfriends and being the most materialistic is the ultimate symbol of status- a regression or a progression?
Are we proving women can go just as hard and fast as the guys? Or is it just a shallow form of self-absorbed competition and conformity?
Ariel Levy, author of “Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the rise of raunch culture” writes that “Girls gone Wild” is a phenomenon that seems to suggest liberation but really just panders to a banal form of consumerism and titillation that masquerades as empowerment.
In a world where Jenna Jameson not Jane Eyre is the cultural icon, even Punk Rocker Pink wonders , “What happened to the dreams of a girl President? She’s dancing in the video next to 50 cent…”
First we have prostituted up Bratz Babyz dolls, and padded bralettes for four year-olds,
the US sells g-strings and lingerie for toddlers and now retailer, Tesco, has just been forced to remove a “sexy” pole-dancing kit from the toys and games section of their website. Marketing pole-dancing to kids? WTF?! My head is going to explode.
A “sexy” pole-dancing kit has been pulled from the toys and games section of a website run by Britain’s biggest retailer after protests from outraged parents.
The Peekaboo pole-dancing kit, which has a “sexy garter” to help “unleash the sex kitten inside” was sold in Tesco Direct’s toys and games section, The Daily Mail reported.
“Soon you’ll be flaunting it to the world and earning a fortune in Peekaboo Dance Dollars,” its blurb reads.
“Unleash the sex kitten inside … simply extend the Peekaboo pole inside the tube, slip on the sexy tunes and away you go!”
The £50 ($125) kit includes a 2.6-metre chrome pole, a “sexy dance garter” and a DVD demonstrating suggestive dance moves, the report said.
I need to go lie down.
Last Friday I was on a panel at the This is Not Art festival with a few others, notably Rachel Funari, editor of Lip Magazine, Rachel Hills, freelancer specialising in writing articles about women’s issues and Wendy Bacon, second-wave feminist and investigative journalist. It wasn’t a panel in practice however, as we and those who came to participate sat in a circle in a room discussing a range of things.
I was a bit disappointed with the discussion, mainly because I get frustrated if discussions such as this don’t end with any tangible results. What I would have liked to see come out of it is a couple of people commit to starting feminist blogging collectives. I really think that this is the way to go with feminist media in Australia. It’s so doable and probably the easiest form of self-publishing there is.
We didn’t spend much time talking about the avenues that the internet opens up for us though as far as forming virtual communities and an exchange of ideas, information, discussion and dialogue.
The agenda was set around the relevance of feminist media and we discussed a lot why the movement is so disparate nowadays (i.e. why aren’t we all holding hands and singing ‘I am woman’ anymore), Why feminism is a dirty word and if we should distance ourselves from the word (to which I say baloney), How we can reach the younger generation which is so caught up in raunch culture, How feminist media can be sustainable, amongst other things.
The issue of funding and sustainability
I’m going to be on a panel at this years, TINA National Student and Emerging Media Conference in Newcastle this weekend, discussing whether feminist media is still relevant. Details below:
Grrrl Media
Pan Upstairs Front - Friday 1:30pm to 3pm
Is feminist media still relevant? Does it have a place and does it have a future? How is it changing and evolving and how should it change and evolve?
I think I will talk about the importance of the electronic medium in forming virtual communities and the importance of self-publishing and feminist-focussed blogs in communicating ideas, news, dissent etc. I think there’s still a ways to go with that in Australia.
Anyhoo, maybe I’ll see you there ;p
Cultural guru? I’m not so sure. Maybe cultural commentator, if culture is limited to the small sector I engage with, but this is a blog and therefore its contents are defined by its author, namely me.
For post number one I thought I’d introduce you to one of my favourite all time artists, Tom Zé, and his new record, Estudando O Pagode. I’m still in two minds as to whether men can practice feminism, but I’d say in the case of Tom Zé he does a good job of engaging with, commenting on, and participating in developing ideas of feminism in a pop-cultural context.
Here’s the Zé intro: Born in 1936 in the Bahia region of Brazil, Zé has been a part of outsider culture coming out of Brazil since he first started making music. His early work dealt with his impressions of metropolitan Brazil, following his move to the relatively massive Sao Paulo coming from the poor northeast, but as time and ideas progressed he became a crucial part of the Tropicalia movement of the late 60s (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tropicalia for more info). Using music as a platform to experiment with ideas and comment on politics through a more oblique language, the Tropicalistas created a form of political activism that proved effective because of its populist tenets and the way this blended with both creative and political experimentalism. Zé is perhaps most well known for his oft-quoted proclamation, “I don’t make art, I make spoken and sung journalism.â€
I’d go so far as to say that this record is a musical essay, journalism in its most critically engaged form.
Over the last 40 years not much has changed, Zé has been at the forefront of combining cultural observations with an agenda engaged with musical experimentalism, political observation, social commentaries and subversive populism equally. That he has achieved all of these with considerable amounts of success is remarkable.
So what makes his most recent record relevant to this blog? Read on and see, this is a review/ appreciation of sorts.
I was eagerly unwrapping my new Bob Dylan CD and DVD when I unwittingly got into debate with my friend “Boston Cowboy [1]“.
It all started with the Cowboy commenting on Dylan’s appearance in a US Victoria Secret commercial. I knee-jerkily expressed distaste. All I knew of Victoria’s Secret was its well-publicised catwalk shows of lingerie models marketed to a largely male audience, which reeked of justifying soft-porn in the guise of advertising on Prime time TV.
Cowboy stopped me right there arguing I had a very crude and simplistic idea of what “objectification” was and the Dylan commercial was actually very “tasteful”. I conceded I hadn’t watched the commercial and was acting on pre-conceived assumptions.
Surely the man who created “All I Really Want to do”-who celebrated the beauty, mystery, melancholy, and complexity of women and love in all its shades could not be party to such a cheap gimmick.
The Cowboy thought my response was symptomatic of the zealous puritanical strain of feminism that was too quick to scream “objectification” and saw no value in art, in complexity, in layers of meaning, in context.
The Cowboy didn’t believe “objectification” existed. He thought a text was inanimate and it is only we who ascribe meaning to it though our reading. It has no “objective” value in itself. It was my value judgment that was casting aspersions on Victoria’s secret. It was my own perception that was the problem.
(On a side note, Cowboy is also that species of that “straight-white-male”. This would normally exclude him from making any valid comment on the impact of cultural images against “those without power” but I benevolently decided to consider his arguments.)
Continue reading ‘Objectification: In the eye of the Beholder?’
This one’s for the Ani Difranco fans. Here’s footage of Ani’s speech at this year’s NOW conference, including her big announcement that she’s preggas.
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