I know [because] that was the case with me.

Well then case closed, I guess.

Not to have a ‘Mac Attack, but like Lindsay was saying, “What Makes You Think You’re the One?” Maybe it’s the legacy of “the personal is political,” but it’s silly to pin this endemic human failure, a deep stupidity that was never born and will never die, on the moment it was finally turned into a war cry. That wasn’t really what had been meant anyway, that’s just what it would eventually unfold itself to be. It makes everything boring. It is soooooo boring. It is a void of curiosity. It is so fucking boring.

At least I am not that. That is what I am thinking. “Love is the ultimate narcissism,” eh? At least it is when you love like that.

If your happiness is hinged on another person, you will always be disappointed. If your solitude is consumed by longing for another, just a body, just anybody, you can’t face yourself. If you refuse the possibility that someone may exist or be whole without somebody else to hold their hand, you need to take a vacation. To the ends of the earth.

All by your self.

Coming from Afghanistan: “In a massive blow for women’s rights, the new Shia Family Law negates the need for sexual consent between married couples, tacitly approves child marriage and restricts a woman’s right to leave the home.“

How much easier would it be to maintain the illusion of control over your life/wife if you could explain to her exactly why you’ve been raping her minimum four times a week?  “I really wish I didn’t make your pussy dry as a field of poppies,” you could tell her.  “And I totally want to devote the time to honoring your human dignity and all, but you’ve got to understand, I’ve got all these fucking quotas to meet around here!  Literally! (hey-o!)  So I’m sorry baby, but I can’t do nothing ’bout it!  Your hands are tied!”  This way, when she’s sponging off the son you have sired in the bathtub, she will not drown him in a moment of traumatized psychosis, having just recognized the face of her constant terror in his chubby blushing baby cheeks.  Bureaucracy ain’t got no face, so cha-ching!  Now you’ll definitely live on forever, at least in name, which is what counts, right?  Right?

Right.  I’m being glib.  But if there’s one single thing I have learned in my time on this earth, it is that men who hate women, who need to exert force and control over them, are really only scared to (of) death.  Conveniently, anyone who cherishes the ephemeral eternal over the unglamorous humane is the same.  They are not unrelated.  Maybe now is the time to extend my apologies to all of you very nice and empathic God-fearing folk.

I will not even bother to address any argument in the vein of, “LIKE, WHAT GIVES US THE RIGHT TO DECIDE THAT LEGALIZING CHILD BRIDES AND MARITAL RAPE IN ONE FELL SWOOP IS ACTUALLY A BAD THING?”, but I will tell you I have a really difficult time believing that anybody truly, deeply, madly believes.  Faith is theatre, a mask for fear, even in the context of radical Islamo-fundamentalism, where some are willing to die for these beliefs; they will die so long as it means they will not die, they will die so long as it means they will have never had to live.  By that I mean of course that living, if you are to ask me, means facing the enormity of possibility, pain and danger included.

Zizek had a memorable op-ed in the NYT a few years ago called, “How China Got Religion.“  It illuminates something about why Karzai et al. would help “rush the bill through parliament in a bid to appease Islamic fundamentalists ahead of elections” when it isn’t something he believes in himself.  The op-ed (in true Slavoj form) deliberately provokes defensiveness from its audience by not bothering with a decisive conclusion, but instead issuing a challenge.  He asks,

Perhaps we find [this all] so outrageous not because they are alien to our sensibility, but because they spill the secret of what we have done for so long: respectfully tolerating what we don’t take quite seriously, and trying to contain its political consequences through the law.

The truth is, none of this has ever been about God.  Not the Crusades nor the Trade Center.  The playing field has always been strictly relegated to the middle kingdom: religion is culture, and culture isn’t sacred.  But maybe that is an answer to the argument I wouldn’t bother with; the audacity to declare “the truth” is in fact easily balanced with the understanding that empirically, no such singular thing exists.  You only have to withstand the possibility of being wrong, and be willing to accept the consequences should that be the case (let’s save wrong against whom? for another time).

It’s not a gamble for a coward.  But when you know something, when you know!  it!   Know it with your own two hands!  Know it like you know the contours of your own face!  Know it like you know continuing to allow government-endorsed violence against women is one of our deepest, most hideous shames!  Those moments of impassioned belief do not come from a book.  They come from the pit of your chest, and they should never be ignored or tampered down.  They come from making God human, accountable, fragile.  It is not the erasure of belief, because baby I believe.  We’re only giving the holy ghost a little flesh.

One last pearl from Zizek:  “the authentic Christian legacy is much too precious to be left to the fundamentalist freaks.”

Case in point, headline published March 28th, 2009: The Beth Ditto effect: are fat girls finally trendy?

Knee-slapping premise for an article, but it’s actually not bad.

For the record, I could not look any less like Beth Ditto. What people were responding to was that I probably “should” have been tenting myself in caftans, but I, like Beth Ditto one might imagine, am pretty over giving a shit if there’s a soft crease of thigh fat hanging out from my hot pants. I’ve noticed this sort of thing happening any time two or more girls who don’t loathe every cubic inch of their flesh are gathered in one place. Inevitably, “Are you guys sisters!?”

And I guess we are, in a way. Uncle Karl, you are not invited into our sorority. I’m sure you’re super bummed.

Mutants reportedly a genetic throwback to a DNA strain descending from Job and his 2nd wife, a species once widely believed to have gone extinct around the time of the Enlightenment.  While physiologically indistinguishable from homo sapiens through observation, internally mutants said to enjoy significantly smaller brains which are synaptically defective, making subjects prone to spasmodic episodes and aphasia.  Scientific community unclear how the fuck this even happened, gridlocked over the ethical implications of retroactive abortion or other suggested expedients that will not weigh this country down like a 150 lb tumor.

Typically, a wife who would secretly neuter the kitty was basically married to cro-magnon man, or some evolutionary throwback effecting similarly charming mannerisms.  Cro-mag was unable to divorce his own testicles from the ones hanging off his stallion of a tomcat, but it usually didn’t seem like Cro-mag was able to divorce his testicles from much of anything.  Fake balls have a sort of flawless comedic sheen, lit and fig, but it’s a real collar puller when you have to watch some lady get all worked up worrying that her husband will no longer love the treasured family pet if he returns to the hut only half a man.

That’s a good anecdote to drop at a party, but actually it’s a clever little segue into how we experience control, the biology of pleasure, and the sexual imagination.

It never seems to occur to the Cro-mag, nor it seems the ball at the end of his chain, that in the sack, a pussy (cat) is more pragmatic than philosophical. Even the most devout Cro-Mag Catholic fucks first in the name of orgasm, and then to spill the gametes; the relationship of the two mechanisms becomes less clear as the cognitive physiology between species gets less complex.  To say it plain, most animals are not boning for pleasure, and when you’re not having sex for pleasure, it doesn’t seem to merit a high five any more than all the other unglamorous biological realities.  A dog will hump to communicate social dominance whether his sack is empty, all natural, surgically augmented, or had never existed at all—without all the imagined psychophysiological theatre humans hitch onto the Almighty Phallus, the actual appendage is more or less decorative to any animal treated in a small animal clinic.  If anything, you’re vaccinating him against the horror of blue balls every time he catches a whiff of some hott bitch through the screen door.

I was reminded of rubber dog balls when I read the passage a friend pulled from the mission statement for an exhibition at the Museo de Arte Moderno in Mexico City, Animal Roto (Broken Animal).

Symptomatically, the the physical and spiritual ailments now fracturing contemporary society are related to the degradation of the intuitive and powerfully interconnected animal we all carry within us.

He seemed to like it.  I do too; the reason I’m preoccupied with sex in the way that I am is because it is base, primeval, hideously uncivilized—amphibious, even.  There are only two truths which have remained unchanged since bacteria stopped having to knock itself up and finally grew some sea legs to drag its ass up from the sludge: death and sex.  In light of how all human civilization ever for all time has essentially organized itself around denying exactly these two conditions, it seems a generally impossible hand to overplay.

Even the absolute duds of every age and empire have recognized the perverse grooming we try to foist on all that is spiritual and sensual, but there is something ultra-pasturized about the modern age, something grotesquely sanitary and increasingly hermetic about the directions we are all heading in our cultural understandings about sex.  Among any population for whom resources and technology afford sufficient leisure to, we see the most extreme inversions of our animal nature, erasure of instinct and the will to survive, a waning hold on our humanity; women with every material freedom willingly starve themselves to death, men sincerely feel most fulfilled and at ease romantically involved with a Real Doll.

In this context, Cro-magnon Man might be a thing of beauty.  Even the possibility of “fathering” a castrated animal is an abstract threat of death to him!  Though there is little behavioral difference between a neutered dog or cat, in the narcissistic mirror-image we project onto who and what we admire, he sees himself made a eunuch.  His balls, even his kitty’s balls, are the source of his power!  Despite the miles between himself and any rational understanding of the matter, Cro-Mag’s anticipated response to his pet being neutered is severe enough to seek out two smooth, evasive silicone measures.  He may be crude and beastly, but unlike the glossed, deflated milquetoast who prefers the touch of silicone to skin, he’s at least invested in the carnal.  Also just like a dog or cat, I don’t imagine he’s usually overly burdened with his wife’s orgasm.  But remember, he is Cro-Magnon man.  You don’t want to chain yourself to him, you’d only like to appreciate.  From afar.  Like an animal in a zoo.  You avert your eyes and move onto the next exhibit when he starts behaving too rudely.

So what’s to keep and what’s to leave behind of our animal natures?  How do we decide?  I want nothing of mediocrity (passionlessness, sterility), but I also aspire to all that’s compassionate—and nature, in the raw, is not easily said to be compassionate.  Pleasure, sex for pleasure, is a province of nature we mostly have to ourselves.  What’s amazing about the orgasm is that it’s like this spectral cherry garnishing the mechanical fact of ejaculation.  Nobody really understands the adaptive purpose of it (fuck what ya’ heard), least of all for women.  Even in human males, orgasm and ejaculation are not necessarily coincidental, while in other species obviously unable to articulate the erotic experience for empirical value, there’s little to support an adaptive relationship of pleasure to ejaculation at all resembling the psychosexual storm at work in our brains.  All lady mammals are born with a clitoris, but only the most physiologically developed species have seemed to make use of it (primates, dolphins, elephants).  Of that pool, it is humans alone who deliberately communicate pleasure through clitoral stimulation; any sensation achieved at the hand of a partner among other species is incidental.  The sexual imagination is ours alone, and we may do what we please with it.

The opacity of female pleasure has long been used to rationalize its suppression or purported irrelevance, and a fixation on the evolutionary why of the female orgasm has forever wished to explain a woman’s physiological capacity for pleasure as a Darwinian contingency of the male orgasm/ejaculation response; a clitoris exists to encourage pair-bonding between two partners, so that the female may secure her partner’s support and protection over vulnerable offspring (that bitch tricked him and now he’s got 18 years of alimony checks!).  A clitoris is a sexually selective trait to weed out the deadbeat coozehounds (she needs a man with a slow hand).  My favorite: a clitoris is a miniature failed penis in terms of purpose, and the orgasm is a little biological consolation prize, a by-product of the physiological necessity for jizz.  Feminist biologists have challenged these androcentric histories and the sociopolitical contexts they came from, but even these accounts offered by Lloyd or Hrdy take only the slightest empirical edge because they sound a bit prettier.  Lloyd’s theories are too a product of context; she was hoping to erect a biological model that didn’t allow for women’s sexuality to be secondary, and so yet again reinforce sociopolitical injustice through what is celebrated as the “natural order.”

And that is the problem, that is exactly where the overarching feminist narrative continues to betray not just women, but all of us: it is always trying to erase danger from pleasure, in fact death from pleasure.  In narrowing our attention to the mechanics of the whole ordeal, hoping to find an existential purpose we can read from the physical body, we become as stupidly hysterical as our Cro-Mag who couldn’t separate a culturally manufactured metaphor from the groins of not just himself, but his cat.  I imagine the hope of discovering the orgasm’s origins is to prove conclusively that women have an inherent dignity equal to every man’s; rape, slavery, exploitation, tyranny of all kinds will eventually evaporate under the light of this perfect consciousness.  It’s a wish that’s not just hopeless but harmful.  The recognition of another’s dignity is a choice to be made, not a fate to lie passive under.

The irony is that in hoping to discover some natural set-point of the mind that will be explained by the body, we only further alienate ourselves from what is most human.  We have the gift of consciousness and from that, a sexual imagination unlike any other species.  How grossly alien sex becomes when articulated as if it were “science.”  The beginning of Kundera’s novel Slowness opens by recounting a woman who spoke of sex like a 1930’s anthropologist in the “heart of the jungle”:

A curious alliance: the cold impersonality of technology with the flames of ecstasy. I recall an American woman from thirty years ago, with her stern, committed style, a kind of apparatchik of eroticism, who gave me a lecture (chillingly theoretical) on sexual liberation; the word that came up most often was “orgasm”; I counted: forty-three times. The religion of orgasm: utilitarian puritanism projected into sex life; efficiency versus indolence; coition reduced to an obstacle to be got past as quickly as possible in order to reach an ecstatic explosion, the only true goal of love-making and the universe.

Some things are meant to be kept in the dark.  Some things (all things fun, anyway) will whither if described like a bureaucratic press release.  Animals fuck quickly, thoughtlessly, robotically.  Their pleasure only knows utilitarian bounds.  Human joy is darker, more complicated, hideously selfish and yet implicitly reliant on the other (real or not) in a way that other species do not appear to know.  Are we trying to be other animals?  Are we hoping to ignore the power of our imaginations, shove it way down low into our panties?  It’s just too much power in the pussy.  This is not the Epcot Center of your value or destiny.  When you believe the world revolves around your crotch, what happens if it’s suddenly wounded?  When you come back from the vet’s office snipped and tied?  When you come back from a date having just been raped?

Nature is not imitation.  Our physical and spiritual ailments come from the terror of facing our own somatic animalism.  But our capacity for empathy means that embracing this nature is an even greater responsibility, not an invitation to regress back into (or remain essentially stuck inside) any sort of anarchic nihilism.  That’s not an appeal to holiness, but to kindness.

After class, one of the women sidles on up to me while I’m filling out my modeling slip. She asks me my name.  I tell her.  Then she takes both of my hands in hers, rubbing her thumbs on the backs of my knuckles, and looks deeply in to my eyes.  She says, “Lilah, you are so beautiful. You would be so much happier if you lost fifty pounds.”

I  resist jerking my hands from hers. After a moment, I tell her thank you.  I tell her that I am really very happy, I tell her that I like my body just fine. She asks me with great pity, “Do you have a boyfriend?” Before I can answer, her lips are taut and she is shaking her head from side to side in anticipation.  She thinks she knows what I’m going to say.

“I do, actually,” I answer, which is a little less complicated than the truth, but that point was moot in the moment. I make my exit then, tearing away from her and out of the building.  I sit in my car in silence, watching my breath curl in the cold, imagining the small congratulatory pats she gave herself as she watched me running in the opposite direction. Why had I lied?

Is that all there is to happiness? A boyfriend? So far it hasn’t worked for me, but maybe that’s because I’m fat and can only scrape the bottom of the barrel. I wonder how many people I repulse on any given day as I walk around clueless, believing that I am not a monster.  And all that time, I am making others cringe with this failed potential I waste at beauty. I wonder how many more men I could attract if I were 102 pounds, as she suggested, instead of all 152 pounds I actually am. I wonder if the people that I do sleep with would find me more desirable if I were thin. Would they love me more? Would they fuck me harder? Could they keep their hands off of me? Would they treat me kinder, touch me with more tenderness? Would they stay longer?

Who’s truth is more valuable, mine or theirs? How much is my own self perception worth? I still think I am beautiful; is that a lie I have told myself so I do not buckle in the face of my own ugliness?

I remember lying on my back in the kitchen.  My then-boyfriend (by the way darling, you’re mid-barrel at least) was leaning a carved hip against the stove, looking down at me.  He seemed confused by how deeply and easily she had uprooted me and frustrated that he didn’t have the words to make it just dissolve.  Was there anybody in my life anymore who could remember me younger, less sure, ashamed of everything I touched?  I didn’t know how to explain myself.  I felt like I had lived constantly at war with the eyes of others.  How do you sum these sorts of ghosts up?

The other day I overheard two women talking in a dressing room.  I watched myself in the mirror while I listened to the sounds of hands slapping and pulling at flesh, tongues ticking with disappointment, all this breathlessness, hopelessness.  I was glad for the body I had, if only because once I had been so consumed by it that now it bored me.  I thought about the woman at the art museum, how she might lave been the last battle in my war of attrition.  When I gathered myself again, I no longer much cared.  I stopped struggling.  I could will myself into a seahorse with better luck.

Survival is the way your brain bends around the world to shield your most vulnerable parts.  It certainly is something to look on at a person at war, knowing how all they’re fighting for is only a small moment of peace.  Maybe it’s hardest for the ones who can actually envision what victory looks like for them, who can see a finish line.  I never could.  I threw up the white flag.  I don’t miss whatever it was that I lost.

In my mind, I can draw a clear line between my inclination toward self-portraits and the Jenny Craig polaroid from all those years ago. Even the more remedial images that I take, ostensibly just to record the day’s outfit, are all actually stunning reenactments of that Jenny Craig polaroid – standing full length, back to the wall, remembering everything I was wearing, again and again and again. My Jenny Craig portrait was such a sad picture, such a painfully, pitifully sad moment captured and clipped to my file as a constant weekly reminder of why I was there. The picture said, “I don’t know what else to do.” The picture said, “I am taking the action I’m supposed to take, the action the whole damn world has directed me towards.” That choice was not in my heart. I always had other options; I could stop being afraid, hating myself, punishing my body. But I didn’t know these options existed. I didn’t even know.

That is it, right there.  There are always possibilities for ourselves which we have yet to imagine.

I have been doing a lot of note-taking about fashion blogging lately, and its value/reception in overall internet culture.  The ostensible diversity of a street-style aesthetic was a democratic answer to the oligarchy helmed by Anna Wintour et al.  From there, as internet literacy had its boom, we’ve seen in the last two years the rise of the fashion blogger, the evolution of democratic fashion ideals in the age of a participatory spirit in internet culture.

Like all the rest of the internet, there’s a scrabble for control over unconquered wilderness. Fashion ain’t no different.

In the 100 most popular blogs back in August, only 13% of them were written by women, either in group or single-author formats.  Blogs about culture in general make up only 4% of those 100 sites, and fashion remarkably holds down a 1% on its own.  Overwhelmingly, tech blogs dominate at 57%, followed by politics at 18%—neither of those genres very famous for their appeals to female demographics.  What are women doing on the internet?  Of the gender split, the author comments, “I interpret this as supply rather than demand. Blogs catering to women will likely find audiences much more easily than the over saturated male-oriented market.”

Will they?  While change and trends are instant on the internet, I would bet here’s one that will remain somewhat static.  We can see material culture mirrored in the web, where mainstream values are geared for, promoted to, and authored by stereotypically “male” interests.  This is all, of course, been of interest for some time, and the subject of much research.  In a post by an author hoping to understand better the relationships of blogging and gender, the writer innocently captures a larger cultural sentiment at work:

I am starting to believe that the reason my research sample has so few female bloggers in it is not because fewer women are blogging about emerging church stuff, but are doing it in the wrong genre. That is, while I have come aross many religious blogs written by women, their focus has been on discussion about daily religious life, rather than explicit discussions about emerging church issues. Thus they don’t present themselves in the same way as other types of emerging church blogs, as ones written by men, whose intentions to engage people in all things EC are done explicitly in their style of blogging, be it [blogs which link to other sites] or [blogs which collect new information]. I must confess I have considered including some blogs in my sample but late changed my mind for their lack of discussion about events, theories, opinions about others’ opinions etc., in favour of talking about personal experiences, emotional respones, private reflections on general theological suppositions.

And there it is: the division of public and private spheres, and privileging one as “right” and the other as “wrong.”  The blogger, of course, doesn’t intend to reinforce that dichotomy, in fact it’s important to understand he’s hoping for just the opposite.  Yet still, we see a familiar theme under the implicit suggestion that women wedge themselves into blog culture by communicating in and of masculine modes of speech; the issues women are writing about and the ways women are talking of them are “wrong.”  Women, by extension, are therefore “wrong” (in an irony that beats all ironies, we see this criticism of an inverse of this sometimes legitimately leveled at feminism still).

The Victorian era was actually an incredible moment of dialogue in Western culture (comically, psychologists en masse have apparently just decided it made us “better people”).  Arguably at its center was “the woman question,” Without going into a full-scale reading of  of 18th century literature, the rhetoric of the time was highly concerned with women’s place and ‘natural abilities’ in the public (ie commercial) sphere, as well as arguing or denigrating the value of traditionally domestic interests.  One of the largest issues to spur debate was the legitimacy of career female writers, and a developing a market accessible to women that would find some ladies financially independent of men, and therefore significantly less at their mercy.

The upshot of this, especially in more economically privileged circled, was increasingly lax conditions of social mobility.  But the “will to power” never seems to die easy; where one way of exercising control fails, another typically crops up in its place, by nature less visible than its predecessor.  It was also in the Victorian era in which we saw the rise of consumer culture as we still know it today.  Funny enough, the central commodity Victorians loved to consume was fashion.

Understood by Victorian men as a largely frivolous yet enjoyable province of the lady of his house, fashion was controlled by and marketed to almost entirely women.  Men would be expected to participate, but to be overly concerned with such trivial interests would be seen as quite “fey” (queer eye for the straight guy, as we know).  Social control was thus exercised in new ways:

Women have a profound sense of the constant surveillance of their public selves, and this extends to their surveillance of other women too. Female narcissism was encouraged in the Victorian plates and in fashion illustrations generally which tended to feature a large number of mirrors.

Victorian feminists grew more agitated as the obsession raged on.  From an issue of The Rational Dress Society’s Gazette (1888):

She extends her authority to the minutest details of our lives; tells us when we must eat and when we must strive to amuse ourselves. She turns day into night, ignores our comforts, disposes of our money and our time, and engages in successful war even with Nature itself.

So much of feminism’s shortcomings, and its disconnect from mainstream women, lies in the tendancy of discourse to be destructive and largely reactionary.  In some ways, we are constantly trying to undo the havok wrecked by a culture thriving on latent misogyny, but this also means we’re always one step behind.  We’re truly on the cusp of new media and where that will reach, and we can see here how consumer culture seeks to reinforce its own power through invasion of our freest spaces.

Like the writer of the Jezebel post, I also find it hilariously myopic to describe a girl who takes pictures of herself in her bedroom in expensive clothing as “a beautiful stylista actively pursuing her passion via Chictopia and creative expression on her own blog.”   I mean, that is the sort of shit which ensures one will never be taken seriously.  And yet I think it’s relevant to reconsider how a fashion blogger might be re-appropriating the gaze for herself in new ways—ways that hadn’t exactly been ravaged by capitalist exploitation any more than fashion itself—and the incredible power in that.

That sounds suspiciously like the sort of dumb arguments given by “Playboy-style Feminism,” where women find empowerment in serving up their own exploitative media.  But consider how street-style is neither of interest to nor intended for the consumption of the male sexual imagination.  Tricia Royal, who started the flickr pool Wardrobe Remix, is very much of the DIY ethos and writes often and with great enthusiasm about the non-frivaloty of fashion, at times in explicitly political ways.  Wardrobe Remix still feels very much like a women-centered space of creativity and expression, and clicking through the pages of contributors is a fascinating look into the lives of an almost indefinable range of lives.

That energy was then extended to an even more politically charged agenda with a communal flickr pool geared specifically for plus-sized posters, affiliated with the website Fatshionista, who’s byline is “fat, fashion, & intersectional politics.”  The fascinating part of Fatshionista’s flickr pool is that we see in no uncertain terms fat people, whom we are socialized in various degrees to identify with lazy, unmotivated, stupid, slovenly etc, exercising a great deal of care for their appearance.  We see, in a forum which by nature is an invitation to be looked at, the myriad faces (in all senses of this word) attached to the fat bodies typically encouraged to be ashamed of themselves.  And I wonder, were I not a fat girl who takes great pleasure in fashion myself, if I was to stumble upon these pictures of fat people dressing so deliberately and smartly, how would I read it?  Would I be surprised by the beauty I might have thought was impossible on a fat body?  Would I be able to recognize it at all?  Would it change how I saw others, change how I saw myself?

So we see there is a political value to fashion blogging, but it’s still unclear how we negotiate it with the more undesirable parts of fashion at large.  Tricia wonders this:

the last few months or year has seen what seems to me to be to be an explosive proliferation of street style/personal style/fashion blogs… there has also been a launch of a myriad of fashion-sharing sites. many of the fashion/style sharing sites have an element of rating (or rating systems)…i.e., users are encouraged not to simply celebrate, but to criticize

Therein lies the difference between Wardrobe Remix and Chictopia, and why American Apparel would choose them as an appropriate Trojan Horse over the matter-of-fact spirit of Remix.  It’s not that users don’t judge the outfits of personal value to them on Remix, it’s that outside assessments are beside the fact.  This outfit was significant enough for a user to document and then share—this in itself is all the legitimacy it needs.

Chictopia instead sorts itself through popularity, not a consistently changing database.  Unsurprisingly, the popular users share a (if you ask me, and you are) somewhat ubiquitous aesthetic, boring in particular when you understand the bredth of creativity at work on the site—bloggers like Zana of Garbage Dress or Jane of Sea of Shoes both participate in chictopia as well, the latter even as a newly contributing writer.  It almost boggles the mind that people who engage with their own everyday presentation at a level approaching constantly evolving, living works of art are not recognized with the same fanfare, but of course, if users are solicited to vote, the mediocrity of the masses never fails to make itself known. Users immediately approach others critically rather than openly, and a sellable uniform aesthetic will soon emerge.

That’s something feminists might want to learn from; by laughing at fashion bloggers, both the Jezebel writer and I are snidely divorcing ourselves from something of importance to a significant and still growing number of women.  Feminist bloggers are constantly stuck trying to reconcile the private (personal) in the language of the public (political), and we can’t exactly afford to eschew anything of obviously overwhelming interest to young girls especially as “wrong.”  We need to make sure we give support and build upon what is right.  Otherwise we’re doomed to learn the same lesson twice; ultimately, Victorian feminists criticizing fashion were not especially effective:

Whilst the reformers had succeeded in raising and deepening the debate about women’s dress and health, they did not make any permanent or serious impact on the advance of fashion. But for them, the rejection of what they saw as the pernicious and repressive aspects of fashion meant a step towards emancipation, and to be emancipated was what it was to be truly modern. A popular device used by feature writers on fashion, both adherents and reformers, was to connect it to the world of politics. Both fashion and politics shared a connection to change and to progress, and it was towards this particular kind of advancement on which both groups set their sights. Fashion as represented in women’s magazines was always connected to commodity culture and to modernity, whatever the nature of the debate.

Without positive engagements with new media, we leave more and more room for robberbarons like Charney to move in on some very lucrative ground–lucrative to those who care about women’s lives and those who wish to exploit them.  We will see this kind of infiltration in all new media related to the “private” sphere; sex, fashion, home, etc.  Without supporting a number of alternative voices in the mix, whose narrative do you think will win out?

American Apparel’s move into the world of fashion and sex blogging signals something big—that whatever you think is truly open and democratic (like the internet), this too will be commodified.  The aesthetics of street-style were both informed by and dictated AA’s trajectory into the pornography of “everyday women,” and now we see the space created by street-style being further impinged upon by tastemakers looking to be moneymakers.  Anna Winteur’s regime is dead, but there’s nothing egalitarian about what might be coming next: get ready to salute Dov Charney’s notorious erection.  And nobody is going to want to clean up after that mess.

(Unless I guess they give one of us a “modeling” spread?)

Adult obsession/terror with teenage sexuality is hardly novel, but in retrospect, the emerging “hook-up” culture simmering only five years ago seems maybe even a little modest.  When last month, a 15 year old girl was indicted on felony child porn charges for sending nude photos of herself to her classmates via cell phone, clueless old bags everywhere were swooning and moaning like a southern belle.  Kids today, etc.  I, too, was unsettled thinking about what it is to be sexy in the eyes of young women now, who from my perspective seem increasingly willing to volunteer themselves for all the work of a porn star without any of the pay.

But I’m always reticent to endorse any hand-wringing over “kids these days,” as the myth of spiraling social decline always has a way of generating discussion that’s more defeatist than constructive.  What we know about sex is specific to the climate and circumstances we spent our most formative years inside of, so I’m not entirely sure that just because I managed to lose my virginity before everyone had a sidekick, there’s any great case I’ve been blessed with a more “healthy” sexuality.  Especially when our attitudes about sexuality are changing faster than they ever have, whining about any sort of “moral decay” only seems masturbatory, not to mention irrelevant.

Sex seems to be the favorite site where cultural criticism believes it is always reinventing the wheel, but let’s just pause for a moment to consider how many “sexual revolutions” have actually revolved in only the last hundred years; the Victorian era into the Jazz Age into the Femme Fatale into the “Liberated Woman” into the Girl Gone Wild.  These self-congratulatory “revolutions” are better read as constant revisions and deliberate separations from old sexual mores; you know, all the old people bitch about how all the young people like to fuck in totally ~*crazy*~, immoral, destructive ways.  This is liberalism’s most dopey flaw: chronic ahistoricism.  As new media and technology become increasingly pervasive in our lives, we need to be careful not to approach adolescent sexuality like a bunch of crotchety old luddites.  If there’s one thing young people don’t care about, it’s that in your day you had to press the number 2 three times before you could type the letter F into your “sext messages.”

So instead of coming to the resounding conclusion that feminism has failed and our mothers knew better than we did (a-la Ariel Levy), how can we approach the intersections of new media/social networking and developing sexuality constructively?  What if we reserve judgment on a teenage girl sending 2 megapixel titty shots to her “friend with benefits” for a moment—even if her naive representation of adult sexuality is informed almost entirely by the sex industry, will that degrade her own experience or knowledge of her own potential for pleasure?  Is it possible that what she’s doing isn’t necessarily destructive, but instead just part of a more explicit courting ritual than we’re used to?  Or is that just weak sauce?

Additionally, how do race and class backgrounds factor in here, and how are the ways we are talking about “good” and “bad” sexuality shifting?   Access and engagement with new media has sharply increased among white, upper middle class youth, sorta leaving everyone else in the dust.  What does that increased visibility to a very specific population mean for young women in general?  Stigmatized and dangerous sexuality has historically been inextricably linked to marginalized populations—will that change?  And how?  Will those mechanisms be sublimated elsewhere?

These are important questions to challenge ourselves on, because this is the direction that intimacy is taking, so whichever it is—the “for better” or the “for worse”—is an irrelevant question.  In the last year, texting alone among teens has increased 100%.  And more significantly, while the ‘blogosphere’ may ostensibly where the boys are (because we pay them more mind), it’s actually young girls who are far more proficient and prolific in their use of social networking utilities and creating media content online (see Pew again).  Our private spheres are shrinking, and for the many adolescent girls who are sexually maturing quite literally on a stage for the whole world to see, the repercussions of that socially can be real and traumatic.  Understanding the way to build positive engagements with sex and new media is becoming absolutely crucial, and to move forward here, old moralizing debates might need to be put to bed.

Ok, so we’ve got a pornified culture, unmitigated access, and no way to turn it off—how much does it matter anymore if Dov Charney is being innovative or odious if he’s here to stay?  And how to we make sure nobody grows up to think the perfect girlfriend is as dimensional as an American Apparel billboard?

ETA: As a side note, I see a substantial connection between hitting a girl who photographed herself with felony child porn charges, and last year’s alarmingly aggressive obscenity charges over internet content which have found Max Hardcore with 46 months in prison–specifically by willfully misinterpreting, abusing, and applying written statute for the purpose of regulating human sexuality.  Consent is consent is consent, even if it grosses you the fuck out.  Something to consider.  And be terrified of.