While there’s some humor in this witty PSA by David Cross and Amber Tamblyn about ‘Gynoticians,’ it’s actually no laughing matter and somewhat scary to think about, actually.

Tamblyn writes:

Can you imagine if this actually happened to you? If you’re one of millions of American women, it has. It is happening not in an exam room, but in a room with marbled floors, expensive pens and numerous symbols of “freedom,” populated by men and women in crisp suits whose ideas about “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” are rooted in illogical double-standards and hypocrisies that boggle the mind. These people are making decisions about you, for you, but not by you. They are passing wildly unpopular laws everyday that dictate the choices you can or cannot make, the health care you may or may not be afforded, the rights you can or cannot enjoy in regards to your very own body. Tell Gynoticians like Rick Perry, Trent Franks, Pat McCrory and the Pat McCrorys of women like representative Jodie Laubenberg and Marsha Blackburn that enough is enough: We aren’t just coming for their laws, we’re coming for their JOBS

.

 
Via Huffington Post

 
Of course, most Sonic Youth fans are aware that the 1990 song, “Tunic (Song for Karen),” is a not exactly transparent reference to Karen Carpenter, the honey-voiced chanteuse and easy-listening icon. Kim Gordon’s trademark disaffected delivery feels almost sardonic, as she pleas, “I feel like I’m disappearing - getting smaller every day, but I look in the mirror - I’m bigger in every way”  a reference to Carpenter’s tragic 1983 death from complications related to anorexia nervosa.

In fact, Gordon was a giant Carpenters fan, and the song is completely earnest. Explaining the lyrics 20 years later, Gordon professed,

I was trying to put myself into Karen’s body. It was like she had so little control over her life, like a teenager – they have so little control over what’s happening to them that one way they can get it is through what they eat or don’t. Also I think she lost her identity, it got smaller and smaller. And there have been times when I feel I’ve lost mine. When people come and ask me about being famous or whatever and I don’t feel that, it’s not me. But it makes me think about it. The music is definitely about the darker side. But I also wanted to liberate Karen into heaven

Below is an open letter written by Gordon to Karen (date unknown), reprinted from the Sonic Youth biography, Sonic Youth: Sensational Fix:

Dear Karen,

Thru the years of The Carpenters TV specials I saw you change from the Innocent Oreo-cookie-and-milk-eyed girl next door to hollowed eyes and a lank body adrift on a candy-colored stage set. You and Richard, by the end, looked drugged—there’s so little energy. The words come out of yr mouth but yr eyes say other things, “Help me, please, I’m lost in my own passive resistance, something went wrong. I wanted to make myself disappear from their control. My parents, Richard, the writers who call me ‘hippie, fat.’ Since I was, like most girls, brought up to be polite and considerate, I figured no one would notice anything wrong—as long as, outwardly, I continued to do what was expected of me. Maybe they could control all the outward aspects of my life, but my body is all in my control. I can make myself smaller. I can disappear. I can starve myself to death and they won’t know it. My voice will never give me away. They’re not my words. No one will guess my pain. But I will make the words my own because I have to express myself somehow. Pain is not perfect so there is no place in Richard’s life for it. I have to be perfect too. I must be thin so I’m perfect. Was I a teenager once?... I forget. Now I look middle-aged, with a bad perm and country-western clothes.”

I must ask you, Karen, who were your role models? Was it yr mother? What kind of books did you like to read? Did anyone ever ask you that question—what’s it like being a girl in music? What were yr dreams? Did you have any female friends or was it just you and Richard, mom and dad, A&M? Did you ever go running along the sand, feeling the ocean rush up between yr legs? Who is Karen Carpenter, really, besides the sad girl with the extraordinarily beautiful, soulful voice?

your fan – love,
kim

 
Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Just how beautiful was Karen Carpenter’s voice? Listen to her isolated vocal tracks and find out

Unedited interview with Kim Gordon from 1988

Via Letters of Note

 
From 1976 to the mid-1980’s, Linder Sterling (born Linda Mulvey) was the matriarch and muse of the Manchester, England punk and post-punk music and art scenes. She was part of the mortar that held these scenes together, based somewhat at her home in the Whalley Range area of Manchester. She knew everyone, and apparently inspired nearly everyone she knew. She was the inspiration for The Buzzcocks’ “What Do I Get?” and her long-time BFF Morrissey’s “Cemetery Gates.” She met Morrissey at the soundcheck at The Sex Pistols’ 1976 show in Manchester that Morrissey later described in disappointing terms. He interviewed her for a fanzine in 1979 and she has been a steadfast influence in his life since his pre-Smiths days.

But the lovely Linder is more than a muse. She is a musician, pioneering visual artist, and performance artist in her own right.

As early as her art school days at Manchester Polytechnic Linder created some of the most recognizable posters, flyers, 45 sleeves, and LP covers in the U.K. music scene. She also created her own art, music (with her band Ludus) and her own much imitated collage style. 

Ludus was formed by Linder and guitarist Arthur Kadmon, later joined by drummer Toby Tomanov and bassist Willie Trotter in 1978. They played the same Manchester venues as the burgeoning Smiths, such as Factory and The Haçienda. The Haçienda was the location of another of her art installations in conjunction with a Ludus show in November 1982, where a stained tampon and a stubbed out cigarette were placed on a paper plate on each of the tables at the venue. This piece, as well as her “menstrual jewelry,” is reminiscent of American artist Judy Chicago’s Womanhouse “Menstruation Bathroom” exhibit at the California Institute of the Arts in 1972, which managed to freak viewers out simply by including a trash can full of sanitary napkins painted red.

Also at this show, over twenty years before Lady Gaga, Linder was the first woman to wear a dress made out of meat. She wore a net dress with offal from a nearby Chinese restaurant sewn in. Members of The Crones distributed additional chunks of offal wrapped in pages from pornographic magazines to audience members. During the song “Too Hot To Handle” (video available here with no sound) Linder pulled up her skirt to reveal an enormous black dildo (an actual buzzcock!).

Her juxtaposition of men’s and women’s magazines, segregated by cars/DIYhome improvement/fitness/porn and beauty/fashion/homemaking/crafts, was used on the Buzzcocks’ “Orgasm Addict” 45 sleeve featuring a naked woman with her head replaced by a clothes iron and mouths in place of her nipples as well as Magazine’s debut LP Real Life. With the exception of a few upscale lifestyle magazines (most of which could easily be retitled Affluent Asshole Monthly), any media merchandiser with a corporate plan-o-gram can tell you that not much has changed since then as far as gender segregation. In fact, now we have the fitness magazines aimed at women (fitness always = weight loss) and more hot rod and hunting publications aimed at men than we did in the late 1970’s.
 

 

 

 
This ironic presentation of gender-specific media, particularly ubiquitous vintage images from the 1940’s to the early 1960’s, has been copied the world over in zines, flyers, and record sleeves. In fact, Linder and writer Jon Savage can be credited with literally inventing the now quite tired cut-and-paste zine aesthetic in their glossy fanzine, The Secret Public.

Curiously, Linder’s self-portraits using found media images (“I have always treated myself as a found object.”) almost always hide her mouth. When Morrissey asked her about this in an interview for Interview in 2010, she explained:

The mouth can betray in two ways—by what goes in and what comes out. I am not one of nature’s chatterboxes—but neither do I mumble. As time goes by, I have less and less desire to speak. And the number of people to whom I might address my select and diminishing group of words is likewise dwindling. My internal monologue keeps me busy enough. You once said that you felt as though you had read everything; I sometimes feel as though I have said and heard enough. I cheer the blank page. And central to my own work has always been the fact that women have more than one pair of lips.

She also described her self-image while she was growing up in Liverpool:

My mother was a cleaner in a hospital for nearly all of her working life. She used to have nightmares that she couldn’t get her windows clean, and so she couldn’t see through them. I grew up in that psychic force field. I can relate to the chill in Alan Bennett’s comment about a certain kind of Lancashire widow, who “tidied her husband into the grave.” But how might cleanliness look? Genteel? Pretty? Like art? As a child I begged for piano lessons, but pianos were dismissed as “dust harborers.” I wanted ballet lessons, too, but there weren’t any teachers in our part of Liverpool. Culture called—and Billy Fury answered via the radio. I grew up with pop, and pop will die as you and I die—if not before. When I was young, everything was neat and tidy, except for me. I have never felt clean inside, and I never felt beautiful.

Linder’s photography book, Morrissey Shot, was published in 1992. Her artwork has been displayed and/or performed all over Europe, including Paris’ Musee D’Art Moderne, the Cleveland Gallery in London, Sorcha Dallas gallery in Glasgow, the Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art, and the Tate St. Ives in southwest England. 
 

The radical feminist street-theater protest group Femen has come under fire from all political sides, including some unexpected voices from the Left.

Femen is famous for its topless protests in Europe against sex trafficking, homophobia, right-wing politicians, Roman Catholic teachings about sexuality, and the Muslim laws and customs dictating women’s behavior and clothing.

Femen member Inna Shevchenko fled Ukraine last year after cutting down a wooden cross in central Kiev, which commemorated the victims of the Famine-Genocide in Ukraine of 1932-33, with a chainsaw to protest the conviction of three members of the Russian punk band Pussy Riot for “hooliganism motivated by religious hatred.” She has recently been given political asylum in France.

Femen protests, which began in 2008 (the topless part began in 2009 on Ukrainian independence day) are announced ahead of time to the media and attract a substantial amount of attention, probably more for their bare breasts than the slogans (reminiscent of early 1990’s Riot Grrrls) written on them or the Amazonian flower garlands on their heads. Their in-your-face tactics are in the tradition of surrealism, punk, and the Guerrilla Girls.

Femen’s performance-like protests have gone way beyond the old cliché about feminist bra burning. For example, in 2010 they protested the egregious sexual harassment of women on the street and on public transportation (“the rush hour perverts that like to trespass up our skirts and undo their pants”) by protesting in the Kiev metro, holding signs that said, “I Will Rip Your Balls Off.”  In December 2012 Egyptian blogger Aliaa Magda Elmahdy stood outside the Egyptian embassy in Stockholm naked except for black stockings and red shoes – in the snow – with the slogan “Sharia is not a constitution” written on her torso. This year they protested at the Grand Mosque of Paris, chanting “Our Boobs Are Stronger Than Their Stones” and got away before security guards could restrain them. Vladimir Putin, however, liked what he saw when a group of Femen protesters rushed him and Angela Merkel in Germany this April and regretted that his security guards hadn’t been gentler with the women when they tackled them. International Topless Jihad Day began this year in support of a young Tunisian woman, Amina Tyler, who posted two topless photos of herself (Smoking! Wearing lipstick!) on the Internet with the words “Fuck your morals” and “My body is mine, not somebody’s honor!” written across her chest.

A group of young conservative French women have started their own group in response to Femen, Les Antigones. (Doesn’t Antigone die at the end of the Sophocles’ play of the same name?) Based on their officially released video statement and their publicity photos, the Antigones are comprised entirely of young white women who are dressed in modest white dresses, looking as demure as Big Ten college sorority girls at their freshman initiation ceremony. They don’t identify as feminists and object to the shock tactics of Femen as much as their message.

The Antigones describe themselves as, “Daughters of our fathers, wives of our husbands, mothers of our sons, we do not reject men. Instead, we are persuaded that it is with them, in complementarity, that we will build our future.”

After failing to engage the Femen leaders in a dialogue at a protest in Paris this year, the Antigones united to film an official message challenging Femen’s values. One of the Antigones apparently infiltrated Femen as a potential member for seven weeks. At the end of their message to Femen she calls for the arrest and deportation of leaders Oksana Shachko and Inna Shevchenko back to Ukraine.

Traditionalist men are breathing a very loud sigh of relief at the Antigones and celebrating their beauty, femininity, traditional values, classiness, and are hailing them as “real” French women.

One would expect to hear criticism of Femen from, say, Rush Limbaugh, even though the body types and BMI’s of the Femen protesters murder his credo that “feminazis” are ugly, hideous monsters: (“Truth of Life Number 24: Feminism was established so that unattractive women could have easier access to the mainstream.”) But on the other end of the political spectrum are leftist critics of Femen, 1960’s and 1970’s feminist icon Germaine Greer among them. She wrote “Is this feminism?” for Australia’s News:

As a revolutionary movement, Femen is fledgling. Its manifestations, though photogenic, are tiny.

If it could drive out sex tourism and the mail-order bride business, and protect women at risk of honour killing and infanticide, it will have accomplished much, but its attack is aimed as much at religion of any kind.

It belongs to the old order of radical feminism that sought to abolish marriage and patriarchy.

Its leaders tell us classical feminism is dead, but what’s happened is deeply conservative equality feminism has usurped its position. Daring as the young women in the flower garlands are, they don’t need to reinvent the wheel.

Though Femen claims 150,000 members, most are virtual. If ever a mass demonstration were needed, most of them wouldn’t show. Virtual isn’t real; breasts aren’t bombs…

For nudity to be a guerilla tactic, it has to go further. The women of Femen are, first of all, young; but they’re also slim.

They may be all colours of the rainbow but they’re not fat, or even plump, or even well-covered.

The breasts they make so much of tend to be small and neat. Not a stretch mark to be seen. Femen offers a very marketable version of contemporary femaleness.

Meghan Murphy wrote on Rabble:

Contrary to popular belief, I am not opposed to boobs. Rather, I am opposed to women’s bodies constantly being objectified and sexualized. I am also opposed to the fact that nobody gives a shit about women or feminism unless women and feminism look like a beer commercial or a burlesque show.

Though Shevchenko claimed that Femen’s topless protests are about taking back power over their own bodies, she contradicts her point by saying that which is true — when it comes to women the focus is almost always on the body.

Many progressive Muslim women are offended by the fact that non-Muslim Femen members are insulting their religion and condescendingly offering to save them. When Femen members wore burqas at a protest in Paris (urging Muslim women to “get naked with me!”) and also burned a salafist flag (containing Muslim professions of faith), they succeeded in alienating many of the Muslim women they want to help. These Femen critics – Muslim Women Against Femen and Muslimah Pride – photographed themselves in their headscarves holding their own signs: “I am already free,” “Freedom of choice,” “Nudity DOES NOT liberate me and I DO NOT need saving,” and “There is more than one way to be free.”

Sara M. Salem wrote in Al-Akhbar: 

Feminism has the potential to be greatly emancipatory by adopting an anti-racist, anti-homophobic, anti-transphobic and anti-Islamophobic rhetoric, instead of often actively being racist, homophobic, transphobic and Islamophobic. By clearly delineating the boundaries of what is “good” and “bad” feminism, Femen is using colonial feminist rhetoric that defines Arab women as oppressed by culture and religion, while no mention is made of capitalism, racism, or global imperialism. It is actively promoting the idea that Muslim women are suffering from “false consciousness” because they cannot see (while Femen can see) that the veil and religion are intrinsically harmful to all women.

Yasmin AmatUllah (@YasminBSikdar) posted an open letter to Femen on Twitter on April 6th:

Accusing women of being oppressed is not only patronising and belittling but a form of control also. Funny how my so called feelings are forever being dictated to me, funny how I’m told that I’m oppressed when I’ve never uttered this, funny how I’m harassed for the way I dress – yet in this clothing I feel free from social pressures and most liberated.

Women in Islam don’t need western ‘freedom’ where you force her to strip away her dignity, limit her to flesh, undermine her ability to use her mind – in order to exploit her and then call it (her) freedom of choice, when you’ve dictated this to her. This is real oppression.

It isn’t likely that Femena is going to drop its nudity or its hostile attitude toward Islam any time soon. In fact, Shevchenko’s response to criticism from Muslim women in The Huffington Post UK was dismissive:

And you can put as many scarves as you want if you are free tomorrow to take it off and to put it back the next day but don’t deny millions of your sisters who have fear behind their scarves, don’t deny that there are million of your sisters who have been raped and killed because they are not following the wish of Allah! We are here to scream about that.

The Antigones’ message to Femen, below:

 
An exceptional interview with Simone de Beauvoir, from the French TV program Questionnaire, in which the great writer discussed her views on Feminism with Jean-Louis Servan-Schreiber.

Beginning with a quote from her book The Second Sex, de Beauvoir explained the meaning of her oft-quoted line, “One is not born a woman, one becomes one,”

“...being a woman is not a natural fact. It’s the result of a certain history. There is no biological or psychological destiny that defines a woman as such. She’s a product of a history of civilization, first of all, which has resulted in her current status, and secondly for each individual woman, of her personal history, in particular, that of her childhood. This determines her as a woman, creates in her something which is not at all innate, or an essence, something which has been called the ‘eternal feminine,’ or femininity. The more we study the psychology of children, the deeper we delve, the more evident it becomes that baby girls are manufactured to become women.”

Recorded in 1975, this interview is in French with English subtitles.
 

 
Although I grew up in the punk era, it was really the post-punk stuff that turned my crank, and still does. During that time there were countless odd ephemeral little bands (including one I was in for 15 minutes) that not only stood no chance of widespread popularity, it never even occurred to them that they could be popular or that they should try to make some real money out of their music. It was almost more about doing something that other creative people in bands would take notice of. Why things were like that for a brief and shining moment I really can’t say, though part of it was the way economics worked then: If you didn’t need a lot of stuff, you could sorta get by with very little bread and spend a lot of your time hangin’ out and, occasionally, working out your musical ideas. Those days, of course, were forcibly crash-landed by Reagan & Thatcher, but for a narrow window of time there was some really incredible musical creativity made by folks who wanted to do something interesting.

One of the obscure little bands I was into was called The Raincoats, and I never saw a review of any of their albums, never saw a video and never saw a photo of them (all the albums I or anyone I knew had only had paintings on the covers). Although they seemed to be a mostly female band, I don’t think that thought really explicitly occurred to me back then: They just made this jangly, repetitive-but-catchy music with weird, often miserable lyrics sung for the most part “unprofessionally” (and as a punk that “unprofessional” bit really made it sound authentic to me). But something about it rung true to my ears and to my small circle of friends as well. We’d sit in dark rooms smoking hashish, listening to The Raincoats and just…abide, though not Cali-style: This was New York City style, complete with cold crummy weather and/or pouring rain.

Little did I know, then, that others were also huddled in dark places around the country, and around the world, listening to The Raincoats as if their music was a tiny little fire with which we’d warm our hands. Never having been a Nirvana fan (though I do appreciate their unique sound), I didn’t know that Kurt Cobain had helped to get their albums reissued on CD and had written this about them:

“..I don’t really know anything about The Raincoats except that they recorded some music that has affected me so much that, whenever I hear it I’m reminded of a particular time in my life when I was (shall we say) extremely unhappy, lonely, and bored. If it weren’t for the luxury of putting that scratchy copy of The Raincoats’ first record, I would have had very few moments of peace. I suppose I could have researched a bit of history about the band but I feel it’s more important to delineated the way I feel and how they sound. When I listen to The Raincoats I feel as if I’m a stowaway in an attic, violating and in the dark. Rather than listening to them I feel like I’m listening in on them. We’re together in the same old house and I have to be completely still or they will hear me spying from above and, if I get caught - everything will be ruined because it’s their thing.”

Meanwhile, Kim Gordon had this to say about The Raincoats:

It was The Raincoats I related to most. They seemed like ordinary people playing extraordinary music. Music that was natural that made room for cohesion of personalities. They had enough confidence to be vulnerable and to be themselves without having to take on the mantle of male rock/punk rock aggression…or the typical female as sex symbol avec irony or sensationalism.

Listening to The Raincoats I didn’t get the sense that I was listening in to a message from women to other women. They were just singing bluntly and honestly about their lives (which had patches of light but plenty of patches of rain too), and we listeners scattered in our dark places related to that. Though probably their best-known song is “Shouting Out Loud,” my favorite tune of theirs was always “I Saw a Hill” from Moving. Listen through to the finale and tell me this doesn’t kick your ass and point straight and unwaveringly at that hidden woman that you keep (be ye male or female) deep down inside and that until this moment you were absolutely sure no one could possibly identify:
 

 
The Raincoats’ stellar cover of “Lola” by The Kinks:
 

 
Below, seldom-seen footage of The Raincoats performing “Go Away” and “No Side to Fall In” in 1982.
 

 
I first noticed a backlash against the Beats when it was announced a few years ago that Walter Salles was making a film of Jack Kerouac’s novel On The Road, with Kristen Stewart cast as Marylou, Sam Riley as Sal Paradise, Garrett Hudlund as Dean Moriarty, and Viggo Mortensen as Old Bull Lee.

You expect to hear negative comments from aging conservative academics in English departments or that weird PhD candidate from the East Coast who supposedly had an “influential” zine once but hated every writer who didn’t sound exactly like William Faulkner.

But this round of anti-Beat Generation comments was coming from much younger people posting on non-academic literary forums, and not just 4Chan’s /lit/ board.

I visited Kerouac’s entire On The Road scroll, purchased by Indianapolis Colts owner Jim Irsay for $2.5 million in 2001, displayed in its entirety, on a day when a fourth grade public school class was on a field trip to the same museum. I had seen the scroll previously when it had been laid out in thirds elsewhere, necessitating multiple visits. This time it took up an entire corridor. I didn’t get to meet the delightful hippie who travels with the scroll simply to set it up and take it down wherever it is being shown. I was peering at the typewritten text peppered with handwritten notes and corrections, ignoring the stares of the security guards who apparently thought I was going to stuff the scroll in my purse and bolt. I was also trying not to snicker at the conversation of a group of nine-year-olds looking at the nearby vintage Playboy cover featuring Marilyn Monroe (also part of Irsay’s collection) displayed on the wall above the scroll’s case.

“Who’s that?”

“It’s Madonna.”

“No, that’s not Madonna. It’s Ke$ha.”

“No, it’s Gaga!”

Their teacher asked me a question about the scroll, obviously assuming that I was a museum employee. When I explained that I was just a visitor, she apologized and said, “But I didn’t think women read Kerouac.”

That was news to me.

The backlash against the Beats in general, and Kerouac in particular, is becoming more evident and is mostly coming from Feminists.

In 2010 blogger Alexa Offenhauer imagined the domestic circumstances around Kerouac’s creation of the scroll in her post “It’ll All Be Worth It If I Get Published, or: Why I Hate Jack Kerouac”:

I can just imagine the scene, can’t you? There he is, playing with his tracing paper, painstakingly cutting it and taping it back together like the world’s first scrapbooker, all while taking himself very seriously and refusing to take any pleasure from his crafty pursuit. Then, just when his poor wife thinks that maybe he is done with the insanity and they can go for a nice walk in the park, he sits himself in the corner at his typewriter, cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth, and starts a typing frenzy that, as far as she is concerned, may never end.

Imagine the smell that emanated from that corner of the apartment by the end of those three weeks. The ungodly mess of cigarette ash, butts, apple cores, coffee mugs, chicken bones, and dead skin cells that must have littered the floor around him. At least, that is what it would have looked like at the end of those three weeks if I had been his wife. Minus the chicken bones, of course, because I would not have cooked for him and I doubt seriously he would have managed it for himself.

But maybe Joan Haverty not only cooked but also cleaned for him. Maybe she reminded him go to the bathroom and maybe, if she was very skillful, managed to get him in and out of the shower once or twice during that time.

I like to think that she had an affair with the grocer or the mailman while he was lost in his self-imposed, self-consumed insanity, but then I’ve always been optimistic.

Regardless of how she got through those three weeks, by the end of it, she must have been breathing an enormous sigh of relief. No matter how bohemian she was, no matter how much she believed in her husband’s literary genius, as he finally sat up, rubbed his eyes, and said, “I’m finished,” I can’t believe that she thought anything other than, “Thank God, now maybe he can sell this damn thing and then we can move to a place with a cross breeze.”

But no. After that three week marathon, which itself came after years and years of planning and working, it took him another nine years to perfect his manuscript and finally sell it.

Last August a conflict erupted first over an article on The Millions about a literary matchmaking service, Between The Covers, at an independent bookstore in Brooklyn, WORD. Kerouac fan and co-author of Burning Furiously Beautiful: The True Story of Jack Kerouac’s ‘On the Road’ Stephanie Nikolopoulos wrote “On The Highway of Love, Jack Kerouac Divides Men And Women”:

Then I encountered a woman who openly disdained Kerouac – and all that he seemed to represent. It occurred to me that women saw him as a misogynist vagabond, the bad boy who had left their broken hearts in a trail of exhaust fumes. He didn’t like being tied down by responsibilities or women. Perhaps those female readers who actually did like his writing feared adding Kerouac to their list of favorite authors for a literary matchmaking board because they didn’t want to end up with someone like him: a penniless drifter, a dreamer, an alcoholic…

In a work written by a man, the female character is usually going to be the subject of the male gaze. If that work happens to be On The Road, you’re going to end up with women like Marylou and Camille, flat characters being two-timed by hyperactive car-thief Dean Moriarty. It’s no wonder then that many women, even when they put his personal lives aside, don’t relate to Kerouac’s story.

Jezebel‘s Katie J.M. Baker wrote in response, “Why Don’t Women Like Jack Kerouac?”, dismissing the Beats as “kind of immature dicks” and asking “Do any non-teenage women actually like Jack Kerouac’s On The Road?” (Her own answer to this question is – inaccurately – no.)

“Whenever anyone tells me they ‘adore’ On The Road – which doesn’t happen often because I don’t hang out with sixteen-year-olds – I can’t help but think she or he isn’t particularly well-read, just eager to come off as adventurous, spontaneous, and/or sexy.”

One of Baker’s commenters likened being a woman who enjoys Kerouac to being a black person who likes Gone With The Wind or a banker who likes The Communist Manifesto. Another interesting take by a reader was that Dean Moriarty was actually Kerouac’s manifestation of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl trope.

On April 8th this year the goddess herself Kim Gordon tweeted: “[Beat] role models are over rated. Set male evolution back to caveman era,” possibly referencing her ex-husband’s new band (Chelsea Light Moving) and their song “Burroughs.”

Is it fair to morally judge an artist’s work based on how he lived his life if all of his work is autobiographical and barely fictionalized?

Personally if I purged my bookshelves, real and virtual, of all the alcoholics and misanthropes – let alone all the manic-depressives, opium addicts, suicides, eccentric asexuals, adulterers and misogynists – I would hardly have any books left. In fact, I would probably have remaining to me some dictionaries, an anonymous booklet on reciting the Divine Mercy chaplet, The Better Homes and Gardens Cookbook (first edition), and my husband’s copy of Henley’s Formulas for Home & Workshop.

So it would be a real bummer if from now on when I read On The Road I have to take Dean Moriarty not as a fictional, folkloric, mythic, modern Western American character but as the actual man (Neal Cassady) on which Moriarty is based, who, to be fair, was rather fucked-up. I don’t want to be a Monday morning armchair shrink and classify Moriarty as a likely bipolar, child molesting, sex addict, kleptomaniac, sociopath with ADHD who abused cannabis, amphetamines, hallucinogenics (later) and every woman who crossed his charismatic path. I don’t research Buddhism to determine whether the kind portrayed in The Dharma Bums is accurate and doctrinally sound either.

Taking Beat literature out of the context of the time and culture in which it was written robs it of too much of its power and importance. It’s unrealistic to examine written works from the late 1940’s and 1950’s and excoriate their views of women based on modern Feminist standards that would have been quite alien to men and women of that time. (Have these anti-Beat critics have ever even met and conversed with real-life old men in their eighties and nineties?)

Ted Joans’ line “So you want to be hip little girls?” from his poem “The Sermon” is over the top, yes, but try finding literature written by men from the post-war era that didn’t contain some degree of chauvinism and less than perfect female characterization.

Despite Kerouac’s many flaws, Nikolopoulos summed up the influence that On The Road had on her life as a young woman:

It didn’t occur to me that I needed a boyfriend or even a friend to accompany me to art galleries or readings or to make my life full. I wasn’t looking for my Jack Kerouac. I was Jack Kerouac.

Below, Jack Kerouac on ‘The Steve Allen Show,’ 1959:
 

 
Dissidence is frequently intimidated into propriety. Folks come ready to protest their government, full of piss and vinegar, prepared to hand lawmakers their collective ass, but they freeze up amidst the pomp and circumstance of politics (and lots of cops).

It’s especially hard when the politicians you’re addressing are mired in right-wing reactionary culture—coming from a red state that I maintain a love/hate relationship with, I saw this one all the time. So I nearly got choked up when I watched this woman (identified only by her Twitter handle, @VictorianPrude) 28-year-old activist Sarah Slamen say everything she really wanted to say to the Texas Senate, even when they tried to shut her down.

Because you shouldn’t be polite to fascists. You should scare the living shit out of them.
 

To be fair, when you already have hair like a Democratic Senator’s wife, you’ve already started to embrace The Pretty
 
Spanish photographer Jon Uriarte is not gender-bending with his project, “The men under the influence.” In fact, these pictures of men in their girlfriends’ clothes only emphasizes masculinity in a way that belies the girly threads. It’s not even drag—it’s dudes looking completely incongruous to their clothes, despite sometimes looking totally comfortable (and sometimes pretty hot). It’s oddly mesmerizing, especially when the clothes aren’t really far off from “men’s” clothes, betraying the increasing gender neutrality of fashion.

Uriarte describes his project thusly:

“The men under the influence” addresses the recent change in roles in heterosexual relationships from the relationships of our predecessors and how those changes have affected men in particular. the photos attempt to capture men’s sense of loss reference, now that women have taken a step forward and have finally come into their own as equal partners. The project consists of full-length portraits of men wearing the clothes of their girlfriends or wives, taken in the space shared by the couple.

I’m not that familiar with Spain’s gender politics, but I’m sure that anxieties around emasculation are at least as prevalent there as they would be anywhere else. In nearly every developed country you have a current of reactionaries bemoaning the death of traditional gender roles (as if they’ve somehow been completely eradicated). The project is a compelling way of dealing with evolving romantic relations, but avoids the false nostalgia for a time when “men were men.”
 

 

 

 

 

 
Via Feature Shoot

I, for one, am baffled that anyone has sex with women at all.

Just kidding! She’s totally cute!

Artist Nickolay Lamm, who previously created “clean-faced” Barbies intended to look makeup-free, has gotton even more ambitious with his most recent conceptual Barbie project. Using the Center for Disease Control & Prevention’s measurements of an average 19-year-old woman, he has created a Barbie shaped like an actual person. Declaring, “we should at least be open to the possibility that Barbie may negatively influence young girls,” Lamm taps into a can of worms that’s been debated in parenting and feminist circles forever—when children use play to learn, is there really such thing as “just a doll?”

On some level, hyper-realistic dolls are a bit silly anyways, since anyone who’s ever been around kids will admit you can draw a smiley face on a jar of pickles and they’ll play with it like a doll. In many parts of the world, dolls don’t attempt the detail of Barbie, and people don’t have to think about dolls’ “bodies.” On the other hand, when a doll is produced with such an uncanny attention to detail, especially when it’s a hyper-stylized depiction of the sort of bodies ubiquitously heralded as “hot,” (and oh so rarely achieved via nature alone) you have to wonder if kids are internalizing the Barbie “body” as something attainable.

Regardless, it’s an interesting concept, and it says something about how deeply ingrained Barbie has become as an American icon that a realistic body makeover looks jarring and surreal.
 

Barbie’s got back.

 
Via Bust