Au revoir

I leave next week for Israel, and I’ll be away for a month until the end of May. During this time, I’ll have intermittent internet access and little spare time, so there probably won’t be much blogging happening here. Apologies in advance if comment moderation will be slow over the next few weeks as I will only be able to moderate and publish comments in those instances when I have access to my email and internet. I will also be quite busy travelling, visiting my family, doing research and going to a huge family wedding. I expect my blog will be the last thing on my mind.

So, au revoir everyone!

Image credit: Paris, Février 1999 by Édouard Boubat.

Uses for Boys

[Content note: discussion of rape and sexual assault. Plus general plot spoilers.]

It’s been a long time since I read a book where I sobbed really hard at the end (and throughout, really). Or one that left me feeling so gut-wrenched. Erica Lorraine Scheidt’s Uses for Boys is one such book. I was going to save it for my flight, along with some other books. But yesterday, I started reading the first few pages, and I couldn’t stop. I finished it in one sitting. I can’t recommend it highly enough. It’s one of those books that if I had a daughter or a niece, I would give it to her. I will give copies to my younger cousins instead.

Uses for Boys is Anna’s story: a lonely teenage girl who is let down by just about every adult in her life, particularly her mother. As her mum pursues man after man, marriage after marriage, searching for someone to fill the void of loneliness, Anna is left increasingly on her own. When the story begins, Anna is a little girl. We jump straight into the confusion of her mother’s abandonment, new stepbrothers, new stepfathers. Anna doesn’t really know what a family is, she doesn’t know what love is; not the kind that holds you together, that provides something to cling to as you grow up. And so Anna begins to learn the uses for boys instead, and through them, the uses for sex.

This is not a didactic morality tale. Anna doesn’t simply turn to boys and to sex for comfort, love and a family. But it’s certainly one of the main reasons. Anna has sex to feel wanted, for pleasure, because of pain, because of nameless wanting and needing, because she has no mother and she has no father, because she wants a family, because she wants to be wanted, because it’s sex and she likes it, because it’s sex and she doesn’t like it, because she’s easy to manipulate when no one is there to guide and protect her and tell her all about her own worth, because she’s not easy to manipulate and strong, because she likes the way it feels, because she doesn’t like the way it feels. Anna is raped, and assaulted, and used. She is also loved by a boy named Sam. She is loved by his family too. And she is loved by a friend named Toy, and in her own inadequate way, by her absent mother.

This is not an easy book with easy answers. But it’s written in such a way that flows so beautifully, it makes you lose yourself to the rhythm and logic of Anna’s mind. Anna mentions numerous times how she’d like to climb into other people’s bodies and minds and simply be them. And I felt reading this story that I did just that: that through Scheidt’s writing, I had entered Anna’s body, I understood her logic, and I never judged her. I actually loved her, and admired her, and I had some choice words for the people who wrote those superficial victim-blaming reviews that didn’t get this book, and didn’t get her. It’s hard to explain, but I view Anna as a real person now, and so I feel protective of her. I think this makes sense though, and it isn’t that fanciful, since in some way or another, many teenage girls have been a version of Anna.

The thing about Uses for Boys is that it makes you realise what it means to be a teenage girl and a woman in the world:

I’m a slut before I even touch a penis. Before I even have sex. The space between Desmond Dreyfus with his damp palm over my breast while Carl Drier and Michael Cox watch to my mouth around Joey Sugimoto’s penis is very short. The girl I am now, at sixteen, was always present. She haunted the twelve-year-old me.

Haven’t we all been either sluts or virgins in high school? Haven’t we all been reduced to what’s between our legs, and how we use or don’t use it? Haven’t we all heard stories about girls like Anna, those easy girls, those easy lays, those girls you gossip about and the guys laugh about? And then you grow up, and you realise that girl, that easy fuck, had her own story. She wasn’t a disembodied hole to be screwed. Sometimes she had reasons for having sex, just as others had reasons not to have sex. Sometimes, no one had any reason to have sex and not to have sex, and everyone was simply playing a game of semantics: sluts and prudes, whores and virgins. Shit, I’m so tired of it all. As Anna says, “sex is the easy part”.

The hard part is wanting, needing, comfort, love, family, friends; it’s not how we use our bodies, how we punish our bodies, and how we have our sense of self defined for us purely through our bodies. In Anna’s own words again, it’s “being touched by a boy who knows what loves looks like”. It’s learning that slut and virgin, whore and prude, mean nothing; should mean nothing.

I’ve read some reviews of Uses for Boys. I mainly read the negative ones that simply didn’t get it. Apart from all the victim-blaming bullshit, I realised I was also fighting against the easy categorisation of ‘dark’. I’ve seen Uses for Boys described as a ‘dark’ book. To me, it couldn’t be further from that. There is nothing dark about this book. It is difficult and heart-wrenching and intelligently written and requires you to face the reality of teenage girls having sex (something that apparently a lot of people have a hard time trying to comprehend). It is also beautiful and thoughtful and presents an unforgettable character in Anna. I love her like a sister, friend, like myself, and not like myself. She is everything that we’ve been taught about ourselves as women and girls, and she is everything within us that fights against that, wishing for more. This is not dark, this is light. Anna fights for a story of herself that she wants, she doesn’t settle for the story she’s inherited from her mother, and the one her mother inherited from her own.

Uses for Boys, more than anything, made me want to go hug my own mother and father, and thank them for showing me what love looks like. Because of that, I know who I am, what I’m worth. And I wish every girl who is struggling to figure that out would receive a copy of this book from someone who cares for her. The empathy, the compassion, the sense of overwhelming belief in girls is evident in every page of this book. And girls need to be believed in, in a world that calls them sluts and virgins at the same time – in a world that teaches them all the wrong things about themselves. So until the world changes, I hope for more books like this one.

A Tonic

An unashamedly indulgent post filled with artwork that makes me feel good, because it’s been a long and tough week. I’ve been reading the Gardener’s Nightcap by Muriel Stuart each night this week. It’s acted like a drowsy tonic: I read it for five minutes, and start to feel sleepy. Not because it’s boring, but because it calms me down. A few passages I’ve ear-marked are little gems:

Many of these small things which show to the world the merest tuft of cobweb green, or a rosette of silver, have legs ten times as long, which must be allowed to stretch down, down in cool moist soil. It is a crime to possess oneself of plants without knowing how to rear them. We rarely make any other purchase in so casual a way. (p. 27)

There are flowers which resent disturbance. They have builded great beauty, compact, fragile, complicated; taking months, perhaps years of secret labour to produce their finished work of art. Why should they not resent being torn limb from limb between the prongs of forks, or being wrenched out like a drawn tooth? Butchered to make a gardener’s holiday? They resent disturbance. I do. (p. 197)

What could be more heavenly than to walk in such an orchard, to sit by the pool and watch in it the reflection of the still branches, to see the petals dropping on the quiet coloured stone, and on the moonlit night behold the trees in their ghostly bridal white? (p. 38)

What indeed. Have a good weekend everyone.

Image credits (top to bottom): Afternoon in the Cluny Garden, Paris, by Charles Courtney Curran; A Garden by Gaines Ruger Donoho; The Edge of the Woods by Charles Courtney Curran; Greenwich Garden by John Twachtman; Backyard with a Cat by Abbott Fuller Graves; In Vorhee’s Garden by Matilda Browne; Sleeping Cat by Pierre Auguste Renoir.

News from Nowhere 2

: : I’ve been following the news in horror regarding the Boston Marathon tragedy. I have no words. It feels strange to say and hear: ‘my thoughts are with you’ when such tragedies occur. It reminds me of what people say in funerals, at a loss for words. I think: what does that even mean? I guess it’s a gesture of common humanity in the face of inhumanity. If so, then yes, my thoughts are with everyone in Boston. It still feels inadequate.

: : I watched an interview on ABC news this morning with author Carrie Tiffany, the winner of the inaugural Stella Prize. It warmed my heart that she donated a large portion of her prize money to fellow authors. As she said in the interview, when you give authors money, you give them time. The luxury of time to write is one that most authors have to scrounge for in between other full-time work. If you’d like to read her book, it’s called Mateship with Birds.

Another thing that stood out for me in the interview is when Tiffany mentioned her annoyance at once reading an article where an editor or a publisher (I can’t remember which) mentioned how they don’t want to read such and such from authors anymore. Tiffany’s response was to do precisely what was suggested as a bad move in this article. She said that it’s not the place of marketing people or publishers to tell writers what to write, but rather, that writers have to discover on their own what they want to write about. I agree. There are too many rules and guidelines out there for writers, streamlining all our work into some marketable end product. Is that really the writing and reading culture we want?

: : I wrote an article for Overland Journal on Downton Abbey and the Heritage Industry. It’s an expanded and reworked version of the blog post I wrote on Downton Abbey here on my blog.

: : I also wrote this post on English ballerina, Mona Inglesby, who helped democratise ballet in England. I think her story is wonderful and should be more well-known.

: : There have been many articles on the proposed university cuts here in Australia, these are just two: Fear of death by 1000 cuts and University sector to be hit in Gonski reforms. This stood out from the first one:

“Professor Richard Teese, from the University of Melbourne, believes the cuts to universities are particularly cynical because Labor can bank on the fact there will be minimum electoral backlash. He says university funding has traditionally been something few voters have cared about.”

Yep. This country doesn’t give a shit about university funding, or universities full stop. Our university funding ranks 25 out of 29 advanced economies and is well below the OECD average. It seems incomprehensible to me in an environment where universities are already severely strapped for funding, that they are being hit with even more cuts. I really don’t know why I did a PhD anymore, there is very little future or a sustainable career path in academia. There are also no jobs, and most people work in short term contracts or casual tutoring. And they have to fight for that as well. It’s kind of pathetic to see a group of smart, enthusiastic and highly educated people compete for casual work, like dirt beneath someone’s shoes.

There is currently a petition against these cuts as well as a letter that can be sent directly to Prime Minister Julia Gillard and Craig Emerson, Minister for Tertiary Education. You can also take part in the national protests, with all the details here.

: : This was probably the most powerful article I’ve read on Thatcher, and we should all remember Clause 28.

: : Thanks Gwyneth, bunnies make everything better.

Image credit: Mona Inglesby and her dog Copper.

Rage

[Content note: discussion of rape and sexual assault]

I was actually going to force myself this weekend not to read articles online. Too late. This post comes from a place of rage, so if you’d prefer to read something more suited to the nature of weekends, read Vic’s excellent guest post instead. And sorry Vic, for publishing this so soon after your post, but the rage has taken over.

I read this article today about yet another teenage girl who has killed herself after photos from her sexual assault were shared online by her so-called ‘friends’. It’s similar to this story, and of course, Steubenville. It’s similar to probably tons of stories like this that occur every day but are not reported on the news. I mentioned on twitter that it’s hard to read story after story of this happening to young girls and women and not think that our societies just really hate women. And we do: we fundamentally hate women. A teenage girl is raped, and she is the one who is bullied. How is this anything other than misogyny? And this is not a culturally specific hatred, it occurs everywhere. I found it telling how certain people from Australia, UK and the US who commented on the various articles on the Indian gang rape victim who was so brutally raped and killed sought to make it a cultural or Indian problem. Sure, misogyny and rape are subject to particular cultural practices and beliefs, but they do not belong to one culture alone. All we have to do is look in our own backyards to know that’s true.

I just can’t even begin to express the sense of rage I feel when I read these stories. And it feels like indulgent rage sometimes because I’m not one of these women who have been raped, and I’m not a member of their families dealing with the aftermath of their death. But this rage nevertheless exists. It’s a rage that comes from a feeling of complete uselessness and hopelessness, and it’s also a rage to do with the fact that I recognise how little I’m worth as a woman in the world as it is. You know what reading these stories says to every woman and girl? It says this:

You are a piece of shit. You are not a person, you are a thing. You are worthless.

I read these articles, and I wonder: why do we even exist, to be treated like this? Because articles like this one show women what the world really thinks of them. And then you have some smart-arse dude wanting to argue with you that rape culture doesn’t exist and that misogyny is a myth. Or read a comment saying that the girl shouldn’t have been drunk if she didn’t want to get raped. Newsflash genius: THAT’S NOT THE FUCKING POINT. You do not get to demean, brutalise, penetrate, or treat another human being as anything other than a human being just because they are unconscious. Funny how my first thought when I see a guy passed-out at a party is not: ‘gee, let me sexually assault him with my mates, because that’s just so fun!’ I don’t know how in the year 2013 we’re still teaching boys that aggressive dehumanisation is an acceptable and endorsed definition of masculinity and girls that they are essentially a piece of shit. And I feel so useless writing this, because I know that tomorrow, or next week, or next month, I’ll read another article that sounds exactly the same. My rage is meaningless.

My Favourite Book: Victoria Hannan

Chances are, you’ve probably already visited Vic’s blog. But if you haven’t, let me introduce you to a treasure where you’ll find no biggies like total babes Bill and Hillary Clinton, Albert Einstein wearing fuzzy slippers, Susan Sontag wearing a bear suit, the couch Freud’s patients used, Johnny Cash’s to-do list and Sylvia Plath’s copy of The Great Gatsby. No biggie too that Vic is a super writer and photographer (and she really is). And no biggie at all that she’s written a wonderfully honest contribution to My Favourite Book, which I love. Read on (but no biggie). Thank you Vic!

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers

This is not my favourite book because it’s the best book I’ve ever read. That might be Lolita or Revolutionary Road, Fitzgerald’s Gatsby or those parts in A Farewell to Arms when Frederic’s floating down the river or when he’s rowing on the lake. This is my favourite book because of the impact it had on my creative life (which, actually, is really just my life life).

In 2006 I was working as a copywriter in an ad agency but I don’t think I could really write. I tried hard to write scripts, to write fiction, to write music reviews, travel articles. All of it. I’d read other people’s writing and I would think - yes! That’s writing! That’s how a writer writes! That’s how I’ll write! And then I’d write sentences in the voice of Franzen, of Salinger, of Plath, I’d adopt an accent or a style of another person or another time. But they weren’t real, they weren’t interesting, they certainly weren’t good because they weren’t mine.

Then I read A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (AHWOSG), Dave Eggers’ surprisingly funny, beautiful, gut wrenching memoir about raising his eight year old brother after the loss of both of his parents to cancer. And I realised something so stupidly, glaringly obvious.

I went back through my work and I re-read all the forced sentences I’d written. Sentences that, while factually accurate, were without a shred of truth. Because I wasn’t writing with the voice in my head. I was writing the way I was taught I should, I was writing the way I thought I should.

Eggers writes what’s in his head. He writes things that other writers don’t in ways other writers can’t. Even in his fiction when he’s writing in the voices of characters, he’s present in his prose. And this is because he writes the way he thinks. He writes the way he thinks! I remember sitting at my desk at a job I hated in a city I hated and saying that over and over. He writes the way he thinks! A revelation.

Now I force myself to remember this:

Don’t write the way you think you should. Write the way you think.

It’s the simplest thing. But only once I adopted it did I really write, did I really understand who I was as a writer, and now, much later, who I am as a photographer, as a creative person. As a person.

If anyone ever asks me for advice (they rarely ask), I tell them we all have a thing that is distinctly ours. It’s what sets us apart from everyone else. It’s what makes us interesting, it makes us us. It’s the way we see the world and it’s the most valuable thing we own.

AHWOSG is my favourite book not because it’s funny, beautiful and masterfully written (and it is all of those things) but because it gave me a sense of myself in my work. It taught me an invaluable lesson that I carry with me every day. So while this book and Eggers and his presence in every sentence won’t be to everyone’s taste, I’ll be an evangelist for them forever.

Image credit: Untitled by Sofia Ajram (used with permission). The girl’s tattoo in this photo is the final words from A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers.

Q&A: The F Word

On Monday night, I watched the ‘special edition’ of ABC’s Q&A titled “The F Word”. I don’t really know what I was expecting with this show, but I can tell you what my reactions were to the majority of the discussion around feminism, which were basically encapsulated by Helen Razer’s tweets throughout the show. It was a limited discussion. There were a few bright moments and good points raised by panellists, but I couldn’t help feeling uncomfortable and resentful that feminist debate was defined by questions of whether Margaret Thatcher was a ‘feminist’ (seriously, this is the woman who called feminism a “poison”. This is not a hard question to answer: no, she wasn’t), men opening doors and chivalry (such a key and significant problem in our current societies – for fuck’s sake), whether sex workers can be classified as ‘feminists’ (sigh, really?), “is feminism obsolete?” (again, really?), Julia Gillard’s jackets (just kill me now), and so on. The more I listened to this, the more I felt like something sharp was gleefully and repeatedly stabbing my brain.

But let me focus on the interesting parts, and to me those were mainly two comments made by Germaine Greer and by Brooke Magnanti. Magnanti made a number of good points, not least of which was challenging Mia Freedman when Freedman claimed that no little girl wants to grow up to be a sex worker. In an industry where women are heavily exploited, commodified and trafficked, I understand where Freedman is coming from. However Magnanti pointed out that she has met sex workers who do view it as a desired career and if that makes Freedman uncomfortable, then tough. I thought this was a very interesting point. But it was one, like many others, which was lost in the haze of the word ‘choice’ and the statement ‘feminism is about choice’ which cropped up repeatedly throughout the show. I have to admit to rolling my eyes each time I heard both. I would have turned it into a drinking game if it wasn’t so irritating. I’ve written about choice politics on my blog, so I won’t go through my points again. But it’s safe to say that I think reducing feminism to individual choice is a cop-out. It’s a safe tactic that doesn’t address the real problems of economic, ideological and cultural inequalities that affect and disenfranchise women worldwide. You can’t fix these problems with personal choice because your personal choices are defined, dictated and limited by the society and culture in which you live. It seems astounding to me that we are still debating feminism through choice.

On to Greer. The comment that ultimately stuck with me from the show was Greer’s statement that “We’re not even there yet”. Meaning, how the hell can we talk about feminism being “obsolete” when we haven’t even achieved basic equality? But then she went on to discuss the need to also delve beyond equality. Equality is a necessary but very modest goal. Because what women are seeking now is equality with men in institutions and cultural practices that have historically been largely defined by men and that privilege men. Greer pointed out that we haven’t even begun to think about whether we want to shape a different world from the one we have inherited from history, with all its biases. This is part of what she said: “When we talk about equality, we’re actually enunciating a profoundly conservative aim. We just want to have what somebody else has got. We don’t really want to change the whole system. Now, it’s important that we do that stuff ... We’re not even there yet. Until we’ve actually worked out how the world, as we’ve inherited it works ... we cannot even see a way forward.”

I guess here, I agree with Greer: it’s necessary to keep fighting for equality in the world as we know it, flawed as it is. At the same it, it’s necessary to consider that perhaps part of the way forward is to reconsider what “the whole system” means to both women and men. This reminded me of Angela Carter’s words in The Sadeian Woman, where she writes: “Pornographers are the enemies of women only because our contemporary ideology of pornography does not encompass the possibility of change, as if we were the slaves of history and not its makers, as if sexual relations were not necessarily an expression of social relations”. This applies to every other social, cultural and economic practice in our modern world. I’d like to hope that at some stage we won’t simply be aiming for the conservative goal of equality, but actually question the assumption that we’re “the slaves of history” when we are in fact its makers.

Image credit: 28 Daria quotes for any situation; by the end of the show, I re-fashioned this Daria quote in my head along the lines of: ‘Feminism is about CHOICE! I choose coffee, coffee for everyone!!’ This probably only makes sense in my head, but whatever.