If you’re looking for books about how to write memoir on a site like Amazon, there are so many titles and so many of them have five stars. Which of them do you choose?
writing
My writing
Spot the Misogyny: My ex-friend Wim Soetaerts
“No one is born a bigot. Hate is learned.”
This is a old childhood picture of someone who used to be my friend. This cute little boy, smiling so brightly, surely deserved to be happy and loved.
But W. was viciously bullied. He wasn’t athletic and the other kids constantly made fun of him. Home wasn’t much of a comfort either, because his mother would punish him for trivial things by sending him to his room. He spent much of his childhood immersed in comic books.
He grew up believing that people in general were just cruel to one another. This cruelty affected him to his core: inwardly he aligned himself with the bullies and learned to take pleasure in other people’s suffering, and call it humor. But you wouldn’t see it if you know him only casually, because on the surface he can be very kind, generous with gifts and time. You might think he has a dark, twisted sense of humor, but you’d probably overlook it because he seems so good in other ways and is devoted to his friends.
He seems like a nice guy – as long as you don’t get too close.
Victims
Those who think feminists are all “victims” who are just victimizing and oppressing themselves should read this now. They won’t, because they’re smug, privileged assholes.
BDSM Logic Makes No Sense Applied to Anything Else
Brilliant.
On beauty
We live in a society where beauty is demanded of women. There’s a beauty industry making billions of dollars by convincing women that they’re all ugly and unacceptable unless they buy this or that magical beauty product. A lot of us are sick of it, sick of hating ourselves, but we don’t know what to do about it.
The ugly truth about Survival of the Prettiest
While doing research for another post on beauty, I ran across this old review, written by Karen Lehrman, of a book called Survival of the Prettiest by Nancy Ercoff. The cover features a headless female torso wearing a painful-looking corset.
Lehrman points out that Ercoff has won awards for her research on sex differences and the brain. Which doesn’t mean her book isn’t full of shit.
Solitude as a way of life
Forest Pool by M.K. Hajdin
There are two kinds of people: those who have spent most of their adult lives partnered, and those who have not.
I’m one of the latter, and I feel like we’re a minority among all the happy (or happy-seeming) couples out there. But I have found a number of other people who have spent their adult lives alone, too, and it helped me to feel less weird about it.
I wonder if there are any reading my blog and if they’d like to share their stories. It doesn’t matter if you are willingly or unwillingly without a partner.
More about backlash and silence
When men say, “Shut up about what men have done to you, or else you’re wallowing in victimhood when you should be doing something more positive”.
A few years ago now I was working in an office which had a poster on the wall saying “women are talking”. It was an inspirational message-ey one, like the “Keep Calm and Carry On” mugs. At the time, I loved it. I thought it was true. I thought we’d broken the silence and that was it. Patriarchy had just said “oh fuck, they won that one” and gone home.
More and more these days I get a chill running down my spine as I realise quite how limited the space is where we’re allowed to ‘talk’. (By ‘talk’ here I mean talk about men’s violence against us. There’s another chill there about how that’s obvious before you even specify, most of the time.)
For a start, we can’t ‘talk’ or ‘speak’ any more. We have to ‘disclose’, ‘share’, ‘confess’. Even the act of naming what men do to us…
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On neutrality
Banksy
Leonard Nimoy: The more we share
Such a sad day. RIP.
Exiled Stardust 