a fine pair
(also on my myspace page)
We’re finally getting a Hooters.
I feel like what puts a city on the map as a part of the civilized world is a Target store. My husband feels the same way about Hooters. Yes, he only goes there for the wings.
I don’t know how I feel about Hooters.
In principle I think any business which hires only women to be service staff and asks them to wear some sort of cutesy clothing is exploitative and perpetuates stereotypes and perceptions our society doesn’t need.
In reality though… people can do what they want. Maybe the waitresses are making tons of money that will help them get through college. Maybe they’re having a fantastic time and lots of wonderful high quality socializing and bonding is going on there.
I don’t have boobie insecurity either… As a married matron and a mother, I think I can reasonably get away with saying that I have a fine pair, at least I think I do anyway, at least when they are hiked up in proper foundation garments.
Most guys look. Why shouldn’t we be honest about that? It’s not the same as actually being disloyal to the woman they truly love. It’s sort of like how women slaver over adorable and overpriced clothes at the baby store or the designer boutique, with no intention of purchasing. We look, it looks nice, we move on.
Wait a minute… wait a minute. No, it’s not.
You know what?
Women’s bodies are their property. Our bodies, regardless of gender, are our property. The opposite sex has no business judging.
I have become very sick of how judgmental our society is of bodies, especially when real bodies are nothing like that standard (unless it’s via lipo, plastic surgery, and implants, or just a very very rare genetic combination).
I don’t know why we can’t glorify breasts that have breastfed, or tummies that have birthed babies, or bodies that are healthy rather than just adding up to some kind of arbitrary measurement.
You know that automatic, reflex thought I think guys, okay all of us, have, due to evolution, whenever we meet someone for the first time? In a barely perceptible flash we decide whether that new person is either worthy of procreation or he or she is not. I believe it roughly translates to, I’d do her. Or, he would probably make great babies (no we do not actually think it in those words!! most of the time, anyway) or no dang way.
In reality, this is how we are. We’re human, with the entire spectrum of civilization and reptile brain that comes with it. We need to be honest about it, not be too hard on ourselves about it, realize that it’s one in an entire minefield of factors we use to choose mates, and move on.
But in principle and also in reality, when we look at someone’s body and, whether intentionally or not, judge it for its suitedness for procreative activity (with or without procreation), whether we find it beautiful or not, we are completely out of bounds. Completely. It’s that sort of willingness to define someone else that is part and parcel of abusive thoughtways (I love me some Patricia Evans).
And furthermore, guy who is putting down some woman for having a body you wouldn’t sleep with, who fucking asked you? Whether that body, or that pair, pleases you or not, do you think you’re on, or could ever get on, the list of procreatory invitees? Please.
You might… you might not… but keep your judgement to yourself, until you have grown to know someone as a person. One’s body belongs to oneself, and oneself only.
Signed, your postfeminist friend, who has slightly procreatory pictures on her myspace page, so sue me,
shaky
what do you buy a girl turning four? and how I worked that out, with some goodies for me and parenting philosophy on the side
I know what I want to give my child, when she turns four in March.
But what for the little girls in her classroom who are turning four and giving parties this week?
The ridiculous and ugly stuff marketed to little girls these days reinforces so many things I don’t want to encourage– traditional female roles, consumer culture, ugly plastic aesthetic, low to fleeting imagination or creativity value… but I can’t impose my snobberies on others’ children. And I can’t afford Magic Cabin for everyone. I can’t even afford it for her. And plus it’s too late to order Magic Cabin.
I know if I called these parents they would say please don’t bring anything, just come. I know that’s what I would say. And I would mean it, too. But I have a feeling it would be a serious violation of Expensive Montessori School Social Code not to bring something. You play, you pay. One little girl is my child’s especial playmate, and I would really like to get to know the other’s mom…
[The next day]
I enlisted the help of my mom’s group friends, who had wonderful helpful ideas… and then wouldn’t you know, I had a Barnes and Noble gift card to spend on myself and my husband, so I walked into the book store and did the librarian birthday gift after all.
I purchased a Moongirl DVD/Book set for each girl. Ah, now it is done! But of course I don’t have any wrapping paper except Christmas. Too bad. I guess I better hit the Dollar General. Anyhoo, this is a wonderful story, with wonderful edgy art and a fabulous soundtrack for the DVD featuring the ever versatile and hardworking They Might Be Giants.
At first I wanted to give Robert Sabuda’s popup Alice in Wonderland, which is a truly complex and beautiful work of art. But there were two copies of Moongirl, and only one copy of the Sabuda… so guess who gets the Sabuda? That’s right. Moi.
I am a Tenniel Snob. Two brown ‘leather’ bound volumes, dated 1974 inside the front cover in my father’s handwriting, containing the entire unabridged stories and the original Tenniel illustrations, still sit on my shelf. They may be the two most important works to my inner and imaginative landscape, as well as my literary aesthetic, of my entire childhood. I remember being about four and having a pair of brown wing tipped mary janes (oh to have those shoes again, some for me and some for my girls!) that I called my Alice in Wonderland shoes.
I have raised my little girl to be sort of a rough-and-tumble consumer of all media, pedestrian and ugly as well as beautiful and original. Our home is a far cry from the dark, quiet, rarefied, nearly tv free space that characterized my childhood. Sometimes I wish I’d been more careful with her, but… ever since she walked at nine months I have sort of thrown my hands up regarding forcing her to conform to my expectations and decided to pick my battles and let her make (the less harmful of) her own choices. I scour my friends’ libraries for truly beautiful and rich works of art for kids– M and W have put me on to the awesome Miyazaki anime films, for example, although I am disappointed that I get them dubbed in English rather than in the original Japanese– and hope that I am giving her a balanced smorgasbord of choices of theme, culture, and artistic style.
But I digress.
Every once in a while I run across a work of children’s literature that restores my faith in the children’s publishing industry and in the media world’s power in general to produce something truly beautiful and worthwhile.
The Sabuda is sort of the Tenniel work on acid (as if the original Tenniel illustrations weren’t acidic enough!!). [And let me clarify that I have never done acid. Never. I did chew up a tiny shroom one time but it did nothing for me and it was too nasty to attempt to eat any more. But I think I know it, or what our society characterizes as it, when I see it.] The 3-dimensional popups are huge, intricately detailed, beautifully colored, and give delightful views for the story from many angles– look down the accordion-pleated rabbit hole, or through cellophane windows into the house where the giant Alice is trapped! I haven’t read it through, so I’ll weigh in on how well the abridgment of the story works soon. But since it makes me so happy artistically, I’ll love it no matter what. I’m such a hoarder I believe I may purchase another copy or two today off of Amazon…
along with a copy of Skinny Bitch. The title and cover illustration are a clever marketing trick which, I am ashamed to say, worked on me, but I cracked it and read a few pages in the store, and just now read the customer reviews on Amazon. You know I just quit eating meat (except last night I had a few bites of delectable lasagne that I made myself, with meat, because we forgot to make me a little meat free one on the side), and I gather this book gives a lot of information about nutrition and the food industry that everyone needs to make informed choices about what we eat. If it’s in a no holds barred, listen here girlfriend while I tell you straight so you can take responsibility and live a happier healthier life format, so much the better.
We just lost power here for several minutes. Our infrastructure in this community is such that the slightest variation in weather– today, heavy but not exactly monsoon rain– throws our power grid into a tizzy. Anyway, I adore wordpress.com because it saves posts constantly. I lost very little work.
So. It’s New Year’s Eve.
I have lots to do including all my housecleaning so that I don’t have to wash my good luck away tomorrow, soaking black eyed peas and cooking sweet potatoes for sweet potato pie, taking shaky baby to that party at about 12.30 which involves getting us both showered and dressed, and taking a fearless and searching inventory (to quote Lindsay Lohan) of last year’s accomplishments and my hopes for next year. I’d better run along.
my worst (literary) fears realized
My brother and sister in law sent me a wonderful book of fairy tales in their original, dark and depressing forms, with wonderful dark (mostly) illustrations by some awesome artists. I am a huge fan of dark and depressing fairy tales and dark and moody artwork.
I sat down to read Sleeping Beauty to shaky baby. She said, ‘I want to read about the REAL princess!’
I knew I’d live to regret that Disneyland trip.
from The Onion
I loves the Onion…
December 5, 2006 : Holiday Advertisers Seek Coveted Dicktard Demographic
NextGens, The Long Tail, and…
This week at work I have been putting together a presentation on customer service at public libraries, to be delivered at a public library up north the day after tomorrow.
Because I am me, and because I had limited time to present, I decided to touch on the policy and philosophy aspects of customer service rather than on specific situations. I’m touching very briefly on about 100 things, from creating a customer service team whose findings inform policy, to how management must set staff up for customer service success, to defusing an angry patron (what can I do to make this right?) to what not to ever, ever say to a patron (never comment on their choice of reading material, tell them what they can and cannot check out regardless of their age, or mention medical, ethnic, family, weight, age, gender, sexual, criminal, educational, or any other issues, in fact never mention any issues at all, EVER, yours or theirs, other than how you’re glad to see them, appreciate their business, and are there to help), blah blah blah.
Two things that I’ve come across in the last couple of weeks gave me a little jangle of awareness. Neither of these ideas are anything new, but when they first hit the airwaves I was at my smalltown library job and a new mother, so I wasn’t in a position to think about their implications.
One is The Long Tail– the idea that our hit driven culture hits the lowest common denominator and that many many small niche markets– made possible pretty much by the internet (unless you count the way librarians have been able to satisfy eclectic information needs and wants for years, no software needed) — are much more powerful and profitable than hits, for many reasons. The concept is very easily tailored to the five laws of library science/service, but someone’s already done that, so I won’t, at least not any more than I’ve already done for this customer service presentation. Here’s an article on it, if you have the time, which you probably don’t. Suffice to say that I and most of the people I know are really getting great benefit from the fact that it’s easier to get more diverse and interesting stuff to consume than it used to be.
The other is an article called Born With the Chip, about the information habits of people born 1982-2002– my children, if I stretch it a bit, and most of my friends’ children, at least their first babies. Now this really did jangle me, almost physically. Librarians spend so much time bemoaning how we can’t get teens into the library, how nobody wants to read books any more, etc. etc. etc. But that’s our problem. Society is moving in a certain direction, and that’s the way it’s moving, and if we stay stuck we’ll be left behind in our little backwaters. [Not that backwater isn't a nice place to be-- I kinda like it, meself, but do I want to be completely stuck there, with no choice?]
Libraries’ function as repository and archive, at least in terms of public libraries, is going away. Public libraries are about access for all, and due to scarce money and shelf space and staff there’s been no way we could afford to provide absolutely everything absolutely everyone wants… until now.
Since we’re not all that friendly a place to be, either, people are voting with their feet and going to much friendlier third spaces like book stores, coffee shops, and dentist offices.
[This thought is also nothing new among the wisest of librarian leadership, and I most recently heard it mentioned most humorously by Karen Hyman of the NJLA, but I thought it was worth mentioning here and in any customer service workshops I do.]
Now don’t get me wrong. I think traditional library service and resources are never going to go away. I always say, I can’t take my laptop or my ebook into the bubble bath, and there are two pretty significant barriers to entry for an oldster (GenXr, that is) like me– the learning curve, and the cost, of learning to use MP3 players, IPods, etc.
But technology is getting cheaper and easier to use all the time, and ‘these kids’ demand, and we must provide, access to all the, er, format agnostic, nomadic information recsources they crave. It is our job for many reasons.
We are supposed to be bridging the digital divide, making sure there are no have-nots in this day and age. Believe it or not, some families still don’t have internet access at home and can’t provide, or could care less about providing it, for their children.
These skills will serve the next generation well as they job hunt, learn, and express themselves.
Downloads are not just loud nasty music and empty or predatory chat. They are also news programs, lectures, social vehicles, and many other types of resources which bring people of different geographic, ethnic, educational and social milieus together– and that bringing together, both digitally and in person within their communities, is another life jacket that libraries need to put on, right now.
They are a way that libraries can finally have something for everyone, without having to go through the laborious, money and space intensive process of purchasing a physical object and putting it on the shelf to be, possibly, never touched again, stolen, or worn to pieces.
Then, as I logged in this morning to blog, I happened upon this, An Open Letter to Those Born After 1982 (Or the One Thing Your Parents Got Right). It really interested me. There are many comments of varying agreement on it, and I could take issue with a few things she says, but for the most part I really like it. It sums up many of my philosophical thoughts about parenting, such as whether our traditional measures of intelligence, success and happiness are all that, in the end, or hoping to skip kindergarten in favor of an extended trip to China or Germany, or the principles of this book or this one. I hate to be an elitist, but I think there’s a difference between being an elitist and making positive, proactive decisions about the kind of education and experiences you want for your child.
So… amongst my visits to scenic and isolated areas of my state and getting my nature on, that’s what I am up to professionally, as well as parentally, these last few weeks.
From an attendee at BlogHer
Scobleizer shares what he learned at BlogHer. I recently learned about BlogHer in a Fast Company blog entry, and jumped right on the site. I look forward to learning more.
This entire post is worth a look– he talks about marketing, Windows Live, and other technology stuff– but as a woman who thinks about woman’s stuff I was interested in this bit:
“Other things I learned from BlogHer?
That the stereotypes about women are true (they talk about things like mothering, cooking, sewing, and soft stuff like feelings, sex, relationships, along with broader things like books and movies far more often than I usually hear among the male dominated groups I usually find myself in after conferences). But, the fact that they are true gives women HUGE economic power and content power that the tech bloggers simply won’t touch.”
More on BlogHer as I learn more.
