October | 2011 | The Fear Girls

October 23, 2011

Kickin’ It with the Kardashians

By Sophia Rowland
A wise boy of 21 once told me there are three stages to Reality TV:

Stage 1 – Denial. “I’m not going to watch Millionaire Matchmaker! That show is stupid. Watch something intelligent damnit!”

Stage 2 – Resentment. “I’m watching it, but I don’t like it and will now proceed to point out how awful this is.”

Stage 3 – Acceptance. “…hahaha.”

I grew up watching documentaries – so you can imagine me and reality TV don’t get along. Except that I’m starting to enter stage 3 where I find myself watching some of these detestable programs. The one that gets my attention most is ‘Keeping Up with the Kardashians’ – which, in my better days, I was accidentally calling ‘Kickin’ it with the Kardashians’ (that’s when I didn’t know the difference between Kim, Khloe and Kourtney).

It is a totally watchable show, let me tell you. But just like watching the news at 11pm before you’re about to go to bed, it’s pretty upsetting. Sure I can laugh at them, but god…so many people are watching them. And who fucking cares? They’re awful, awful human beings. I mean, the mom is basically pimping out her daughters! Didn’t Kim get famous because of a sex tape? Ugh! ………But I still watch the show.

I’m not a religious Kardashian watcher, but I have noticed a theme – materialism.

Kourtney’s line at the end btw is “Kim, there are people dying” which makes me crack up every single time.

But seriously, what an awful, awful trio of girls to be seen as ‘role models’ for girls. I say ‘role models’ in quotes, because I know moms aren’t going “Now sweetie, stay in school and do your pilates so you can be smart like Kourtney, but look like Kim!” – Yet girls do look up to them, and grown women see their lifestyle as desirable. And to risk sounding like my mother, it’s sick. It makes me want to throw up. It makes me want to cry like the sad animal shelter commercial with Sarah McLachlan does.

No one knows who Jean Kilbourne is, but we ALL know who Kim Kardashian is. Being a ‘feminist’ is considered a fightin’ word – and it really shouldn’t be.

When I tell guys about TheFearGirls, there are mixed reactions – usually defensive ones. And I can totally understand why – we talk about some pretty personal stuff. And I may not be the prettyyy one, but I am certainly the opinionated one. However, sometimes, a guy will say, “I dig, I’m a feminist too!” Which is awesome to hear, because that’s what feminism is!!! A respect for both genders and seeing everyone as equals. I don’t like excuses like “Well, I’m a guy, so my opinion is XYZ” – You’re a human, and we’re really not that different.

I’m not sure why I watch some of these shows. I can say that I am 100% ashamed and feel like a huge hypocrite. The shows, if broken down and analyzed, usually consist of women calling each other ‘bitch,’ ‘fat,’ and ‘ugly’ and an emphasis on materialism. They also tend to gender stereotype, with people justifying ignorance with their own sex, i.e. “I’m a guy, so it’s okay that I want my women hot and stupid.” With that said, I feel like when I watch these shows, I learn more about the battle like-minded women and I are fighting daily.

And on a personal note – I watch how these women judge each other so that I won’t do it in my day-to-day life. It’s easy to make an off-handed, mean comment about someone, but it’s harder to stop yourself from doing it.

Angela

Sophia, I’m so glad you wrote about this. I, too, am guilty of watching these shows–not the Kardashians particularly, but Gossip Girls pretty much fits the bill, I think. Watching two best friends snipe and fight! But I’ve ALSO been on many the receiving end of a mean “feminist” comment. Men and women both seem to take issue, probably because of the anger and “men-hating” aspects of some feminists, particularly second wave. AND people seem to think women no longer need feminists. The whole idea of “post-feminism” is that sexism has been abolished and thus feminism is irrelevant. Both viewpoints are dangerous. Sexism has not vanished and feminists are still needed. But it’s always been attacked or dismissed.

5 comments

October 18, 2011

The Mysterious Case of Lana Del Rey

By Caitlin Clarkson

One of my favorite songs at the moment is “Video Games” by Lana Del Ray. It’s simultaneously tender and strong, reveling in the day-to-day joys of a relationship while boldly proclaiming, “I tell you all the time, heaven is a place on earth with you.” Del Ray has yet to even officially release her first single, but she’s already garnering quite a bit of attention.

All this attention, however, could possibly undo her before she even ‘makes it big.’

You see, Del Ray has been positioned to become the next empress of the hipsters. And by all means, they should love her, soulful brunette that she is. The cloyingly lo-fi video for “Video Games” features snippets of young, cool people just hanging out, Del Ray singing against a white background (highly reminiscent of American Apparel ads and Terry Richardson’s photography), and, inexplicably, footage of other hipster darling Paz de la Huerta stumbling drunk after a red carpet event. Everything hipsters love.

Unfortunately for Del Ray, it’s come to the attention of the hipsters that she is not uneffortlessly cool like they all are. Del Ray has a dark secret that has recently been brought to light- a dark secret named Lizzy Grant.

When she first began promoting herself, Grant looked like an all-American girl; she had bleached hair and fresh-looking skin, and frequently wore t-shirts and jeans. Unfortunately for her, listeners weren’t biting. While we don’t know yet if it was her idea or that of a music exec, Lizzy Grant built a cocoon, injected some collagen into her lips, dyed her hair brown and put it up in a retro bouffant, and emerged as the butterfly Lana Del Ray.

When they realized they had been ‘deceived’ by Lizzy Grant, the hipsters were furious. “In a world where Best Coast is celebrated for being ‘pro-women’ and ‘empowering,’ Lana Del Ray is a massive step back for the anti-cyberbullying feminist movement within indie rock,” says Carles of Hipster Runoff. “Her career works against the indie ideals that if you are ‘talented enough’, u can make it.”

While I wasn’t aware that there was a “anti-cyberbullying feminist movement within indie rock,” (can someone give me an example of this actually happening?) I do know what the members of Best Coast look like. They look like they’d be friends with Lana Del Ray. And not Lizzy Grant. A quick Google search reveals that Lizzy was making lo-fi videos back in 2008, long before she became Lana. And her music hasn’t dramatically changed. So why do the hipsters insist that they’ve been tricked, and that it’s a reason to be outraged? Li Lykke Timotej Zachrisson was not born as the fully formed Lykke Li; I highly doubt Natasha Kahn’s parents intended to name her Bat For Lashes and that she came out of the womb with her bangs in her face. Why, in the age of Stefani Joanne Angelina “Lady Gaga” Germanotta, are any of us surprised by something as insignificant as dyed hair and a new name? Does her career really go against “the indie ideals that if you are ‘talented enough’, u can make it,” if she had to look like everyone else to actually, you know, make it?

The hipsters need to lay off and remember that they were not the first to pick up a pair of Ray Bans at a flea market- someone told them the glasses were cool first. The same as how now, they’re being told Lana Del Ray is cool. They don’t have to like her music, but calling her ‘manufactured’ is a serious case of the skinny tie calling the skinny jeans “narrow.”

Hipster Runoff article: http://hipsterrunoff.com/altreport/2011/09/lana-del-rey-exposed-b4-she-was-alt-she-was-failed-mnstrm-artist-without-fake-lips.html

October 14, 2011

Covergirl 390 + Job Interview = Success?

By Angela Lashbrook

I haven’t been interested in wearing makeup since middle school, when I put turquoise dots on my eyelids with liquid eyeliner. A few years later I got my makeup done for prom. I stressed to the cosmetician to make it natural—but when I looked at myself in the mirror, I felt like a total phony. That was not my face. My freckles were gone and my eyelids looked and felt leaden.
In high school my grandmother got me a little box set of eyeshadows, blushes, etc. “You might try wearing it!” she said. Some girls may have been thrilled. I was hugely insulted. Was I ugly? Did I need makeup?
That was pretty much the end of makeup for me. I have one tube of lipstick, which I chose carefully and which I wear only on occasion, and with particular things. It does not make me feel prettier than I ordinarily do; I wear it to complement my outfit.
On that note, I’ve gotten every job I’ve ever applied for and really wanted. For interviews, I dressed neatly. I don’t think I was wearing any makeup. I couldn’t have been—I only recently bought that tube of red Benefit (funny name for a makeup brand!). They all hired me anyway, obviously acknowledging I brought something significant to the table, regardless of whether or not I’d painted my face.
I bring all this up in response to a study conducted at Harvard University, with researchers from Boston University and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, and funded by Procter and Gamble (a gigantic corporation which owns Covergirl, among other things). The researchers investigated the impacts of makeup on a group of women, who were photographed with varying amounts of makeup. These photos (which are awful, by the way) were then shown to another group composed of both men and women. Conclusion? “It [makeup] increases people’s perceptions of a woman’s likability, her competence… [and] her trustworthiness,” reports Catherine St. Louis for The New York Times.

So most people I come in contact with might find me unlikeable and untrustworthy. Oh, and incompetent. Or at least less competent than the done-up girl a few feet away.
I have a lot of issues with the study. I find it invalid to compare a series of responses to some photographs to how people feel when they interact, which pretty much anyone would say makes more of an impact. Are you a jerk? Are you really loud, are you very shy, do you stink? Or do you speak intelligently, smell clean, and appear all-around confident? These are the real issues, and to publish a report telling women if they don’t wear makeup they will be less liked is misdirected, although maybe I should say it’s a perpetuation of the same b.s. American women have had to deal with for at least a couple hundred years.
Makeup should not be viewed as a crutch or a necessity. We do not need to maintain the idea that a woman has to look a certain way in order to be worthy. Wear makeup because it’s fun. Because you like experimenting with different colors, because you’re passionate about fashion—not because you feel like you have something to hide, and not because you feel like if you don’t, you’ll be less liked. If you feel good about yourself, I can pretty much guarantee it won’t make a difference.

You can see the original study here: http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0025656#s2
And the New York Times article here: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/13/fashion/makeup-makes-women-appear-more-competent-study.html

Angela is currently a senior at California College of the Arts in San Francisco. Her occupations have up to this point been poet, barista and coffee snob, expensive chocolate hawker, and iTunes organizer. She hopes someday to be an editor and writer at Esquire. She loves food, urban landscapes, and a clean apartment.

Her fear is that she will end up in a career not dedicated in some way to the written word.

October 13, 2011

Porn! Not Just a Man’s Game Anymore?

By Siena Aguayo

The other day, I happened across some advice column where a woman mentioned that she had tried watching porn with her boyfriend as a way to spice up their sex life, amongst other things. The columnist’s response? “How open-minded of you!” And I said to myself, “Oh, right, people still think that women don’t watch porn, or shouldn’t watch porn, or some other antiquated bullshit like that.”

This, I think, goes hand-in-hand with women and masturbation. There are a lot of things to discuss here. The biggest question is, why do women masturbate less than men? And let’s not pretend like that isn’t true anymore. Women are still not as in touch with their bodies, sexually, as men are. At the very least, there are two sides to this problem. The first is that well, it’s a little harder to figure out what to do with a vagina, given no experience, than it is to figure out what to do with a penis. There’s only so many ways you can touch a penis, and hey, you simulate penetrating something, and bam, orgasm. Women are a little more subtle. You can stick things in it, sure, but unless you really know what you’re doing, you’re not going to achieve an orgasm just like that. No, it takes a deeper curiosity to discover the clitoris. It’s just like in the South Park movie. The search for the famed clitoris. (Is this directly related to how sex is portrayed in the media? All penetration and no love for the ladies? Yes. How else do impressionable youths learn about what sex is supposed to be like anyway?)

The second big reason women masturbate less is shame and guilt. Masturbation is pegged as dirty, unnatural, a sin. Girls who touch themselves are sluts. Sex is a man’s game, women have no place feeling sexual without a man present (see: all those age-old questions about how can lesbians have sex if neither of them has a penis?). Because of these stigmas, girls still don’t try. And you know what that translates into? Girls who do not know how to pleasure themselves cannot tell a partner what they like best in bed, and that will create frustration for both parties. If you don’t know how to get yourself off, how can you expect someone else to figure it out for you?

Right, but we were supposed to be talking about porn. Porn. Should we, as women, not watch porn because most of it is degrading to women? This is a question I have struggled with myself, and save for the really bad rape-like porn (I’m looking at you, Japan), I don’t find most porn to be demeaning to women. What I get out of porn is identifying with those women. She feels good, I feel good. She has the same parts I do, and I know how those parts work. If the woman doesn’t look like she’s having a good time, then of course that’s a turnoff. I also don’t get anything out of watching just blowjobs. I don’t know what getting a blowjob feels like, so it’s hard for me to relate. I don’t actually need a man to be present in my porn at all, and really, sometimes the videos I like the best don’t feature men, but rather one or more woman experiencing her own pleasure.

What with the Internet and speedy connections and more and more high school kids getting their own laptops, current and future generations have access to tons of porn, right at their fingertips. It’s an important time to figure out your sexual preferences, because like I said before, how can somebody do what makes you feel good if you don’t know what that is?

Granted, this is just all my personal opinion, and I’m sure there are plenty of women out there who have plenty of their own reasons for not liking porn. I just wish people would stop acting so damn surprised that women do consume pornography, and that more women would realize that there might be something out there that they like, too. And just for the heck of it, I will say that more porn that caters to a woman’s pleasure would be a good idea, too.

Further reading: There is a surprisingly detailed Wikipedia article about the divide amongst feminists over porn.

Siena graduated from Oberlin College, majoring in East Asian Studies (Japanese) and English, so, of course now she works for a software company. She loves language, correcting other people’s grammar, and putting commas in all the right places. She hopes one day to live her dream of being a Japanese translator/interpreter, but is content for now living the life in Silicon Valley. A Los Angeles native, she enjoys computers, fashion, delicious food, and video games. She is also Sophia’s cousin.

Her fear is that she will somehow compromise on becoming the woman she has always wanted to be.

3 comments

October 11, 2011

Writing About Love for Little Girls While Being a Terrible Example IRL

By Sophia Rowland

I graduated with a BA in Creative Writing this May. My thesis was to write something, and to write a lot of it. We had had many assignments to write before, but 30 pages had been about the most. This time we needed to write a boatload – aka a book-load. I was up for the challenge early on, but after the first out of two semesters of this ‘thesis’ class, I pretty much had nothing usable, and no idea how I was going to crank out a book’s worth of a rough draft in four weeks.

I cried about it. I was angry about it. I had just broken up with my boyfriend for the 3rd/5th time. I was at home with opinioned parents telling me what I should and shouldn’t write about. I was a mess.

What I came up with, and continue to work on (currently on draft 4), is a young adult fantasy story about a girl…and magic. Sidestepping all the tricky plot details, character descriptions and all that other fun stuff, I shot a big old hole in my foot by introducing a love story early on. Granted, this love story makes the book what it is (or what it’s going to be a million years from now), but it’s a tricky thing to work with, and here’s why…

For one, it’s me, not Stephanie Meyer. And I hate Meyer, because she is selling totally unrealistic/messed up ideas about love and relationships. I didn’t want my story to be anything like that. I wanted something real: I wanted to talk about how I believe the best relationships come out of friendship. Not necessarily saying you go from being friends to lovers, but that you can also BE friends. That a healthy love is one where you feel like you are also friends. Does that make sense? I sure hope it does. My career only totally depends on it.

Writing about love, especially when geared for a 12-16 year-old female audience, is kinda a lot of pressure. Even if the only 12-16 year-old to read my book is my BFF Ellie (just turned 14), it’s still a lot to handle. The goal of my writing is to have some positive influence on this complicated age group. So even if she doesn’t like it as a read, she may absorb something from it, maybe good, maybe not. That’s a lot to think about at night, because at the end of the day, I don’t necessarily know what the fuck I’m really talking about.
Let’s look at Sophia’s experience with love in a nutshell. Three relationships that crashed and burned:

Relationship #1 – He said: “I don’t believe in love. I believe love is a chemical imbalance caused by science.”
Relationship #2 – Broke up with me on Valentines Day/the night before my 20th birthday … oh yeah, AFTER I said ‘I love you’ for the first time.
Relationship #3 – Did you see the part in the entry earlier when I mentioned we broke up 5 times?

I spent a lot of my teens/early college (okay, and late college…) trying to gain experience from guys. I wanted to lose my V-card ASAP. I wanted a solid list of numbers in my back pocket. I wanted to feel like I knew what I was doing. The result? Generally feeling like I have no idea what I’m doing. I’ve been with people who didn’t want to be with me and stayed in relationships too long even when we both knew it was time to call it quits.

But I don’t want to write about that in my teen fantasy story! How hopeless and sad is that? I want to believe that there is a dude out there who will complement me, and me him. I just watched ‘What’s Your Number,’ and I totally believe that the number of people you’ve slept with doesn’t matter, and that love should be something that’s comfortable and easy and friendshippy!

So I guess I may not know exactly what I’m talking about. But after all the crap I’ve dealt with from dudes and from myself – I do know what I want, or at least what I don’t want. And all I can hope for is that there is something to this love and friendship coexistence tune I’m singing.

Caitlin

I’d say that experiencing different relationships, and the good and bad times that come with them, doesn’t mean you are a failure when it comes to love. The only failure would be to never experience love at all, either being loved or loving someone else.

I think you have a deeper understanding of love than you give yourself credit for; falling in love and being with someone should be a learning experience. Love isn’t a “those who can’t do, teach” sort of thing. Maybe the relationship between you and your partner ends, but at least you’ve learned a few things that will come in handy next time, and hopefully give you a deeper appreciation of your next relationship.

Not to mention, being in a few failed relationships will probably make you a much better writer than finding your TRU LUV at 16 and living happily ever after. Because now you know what it feels like, to love someone, be their friend, fight with them, go through rough patches, and you understand it. You’re growing up and becoming an adult, same as your characters.

So cut yourself some slack. Remember: they all end until one doesn’t.

4 comments

The Fear Girls

Month: October, 2011