June 1, 2009
God, I can’t even think about what to say. How did we get here? This man had a wife. He had four children. He was murdered by a movement that calls itself “pro-life.” I am done with that word. These people are terrorists.
RIP Dr. Tiller
More thoughts on Dr Tiller’s death here
May 11, 2009
Hi all! Written on the Body is going through some renovations- apologies in advance if this page looks wacky. Unless it seems postmodern and innovative, then it was totally intentional.
May 5, 2009
It’s always so tough to hear about the passing of another feminist, like you’ve lost someone you’re connected to as comrades and fellow soldiers. Like you always kind of thought you’d meet up some day and have so much to talk about. 
Marilyn French was one of those women, a person I always wanted to hear more from and know more about. A real survivor of the second wave battleground. It would have been nice to share battle scars, and have her laugh at how superficial mine were.
I think French is one of those feminists who have been deemed “unsafe”, aka “man haters”. Like Andrea Dworkin her writing had a strident tone and caused people to wring their hands and worry about hurting men’s feelings. And maybe her writing did, I don’t know. But I do know reading The Woman’s Room in university was like stepping through a looking glass. It was like entering a world that was both familiar and strange. It was off-putting and terrifying at times but it was something I needed to read. No woman wants to see the phrase “all men are rapists” or read about someone else’s repressed life, but I think for women particularly of my generation, we need the reminder. We need to remember that it once was-and in many places still is- permissible for a man to rape his wife. We need to remember that only a few decades ago we were held back from pursuing careers and having intellectual lives. We need to see where we’ve been to figure out where we’re going.
The world will miss you, Marilyn.
April 22, 2009
evil aunt, evil cousins, school w/lots of death, sexy boss! oh no other wife! creepy missionary, Rochester blind now, married ♥, the end
Ok, I’m totally going back to work now. Seriously.
April 8, 2009
The jury’s out on whether this is going to be really good or just really… Stephen Kingish. I mean, if anyone can pull off an epic 1000+ word novel about a town being trapped under a dome it’s him. What worries me is the 
Stand comparison. Do we really need another lengthy battle between good and evil/random weirdness in which (spoiler alert!) good wins? And the leader of the good team is a well-meaning middle-aged guy who is totally not Stephen King because sometimes he doesn’t wear glasses?
I actually really liked the Stand, I remember going to school the day after I finished it continually thinking I was in the middle of an apocalyptic viral war and flinching every time someone coughed. As somewhat predictable as his main characters often are, I always remember an interesting female character I can identify with (remember when Dayna throws herself out the window to keep Flagg from reading her mind? OMG!)
But King can also take us different places- he’s at his best when he lets his creative plots loose and writes a world somewhere beyond the black and white of good guys vs bad guys. Really, as long as there’s some kind of supernatural vortex or rips in the fabric of time I’m good.
April 1, 2009
So the time has come to voice my comfortably anonymous and unpopular opinion: I have a huge problem with strippercise classes. I’m know a lot of women enjoy them, but having done research in the field of sex work and knowing a bit about the sex trade in North America I find the idea of paying someone to teach me to strip for fun uncomfortable. I’m told it’s great exercise, but so is kick-boxing and yoga. Why do we need to play at being sex objects to get a good work-out? I know it’s also got the “sexually empowering” thing going for it which causes me much worry, because as far as I can tell there’s nothing all that sexual happening for the stripper- unless that pole vibrates it’s pretty much just contorting your self into positions that someone else will find sexy. It seems stripercise is “empowering” only if someone else validates your sexuality. And that is the oldest trick in the patriarchy handbook.
What do you folks think? Am I over-reacting or should we put Carmen Electra out of business?
March 10, 2009
Today is the National Day of Appreciation for Abortion Providers in the States, and I would just like to take a minute to thank all the Canadian men and women who have made reproductive choices like abortion available. These people risk their safety and often the safety of their families to protect our right to choose. Thank you.
I strongly encourage anyone who can to make a donation to the Morgentaler Clinic.
March 8, 2009
I’ve been following Mad Men for the last few seasons and find its portrayal of women working as secretaries during the 1960’s fascinating. While most of these women have professional training and clearly do more actual work than most of the male execs they work for, they were vastly underpaid and had almost zero career mobility. It was 
expected they were there to find a husband were not permanent employees. My first reaction was to think “thank god these days women can be more than secretaries!” reflecting on the female senior editor I work for and Sigourney Weaver in Working Girl.
After I finished my MA I returned to the real world and realized I had a lot of gaps in my resume, and needed some non-academic work experience. I signed up with a staffing agency, saying I was looking for a job where I could expand my computer skills. The jobs they called me for? Receptionist. Consistently. My boyfriend, who was also looking for a temporary job to support his arts career, had signed up with the same agency and though we had basically the same skill set he was never called for a receptionist position. I think you can see where I’m going with this.
After working several short-term receptionist positions there’s no doubt in my mind the pink collar ghetto hasn’t gone anywhere. I got to know lots of other receptionists who were all in the same boat- while being a receptionist isn’t a horrible job and often pays pretty well, it keeps you in your place. What the companies and (almost always male) executives I worked for wanted was someone to smile and be helpful. Someone to take their phone 
messages, make their coffee, and put postage on their mail. Someone who could have walked out of an Emily Post guide to etiquette. I learned quickly you weren’t supposed to take interest in the inner workings of the company and never even attempted to find out about other positions in the company.
Why is this hold-over from the corporatization of North America in the 1950’s still with us? Why do we have strict laws against sexual harassment and hiring policies about equal opportunities and yet don’t question the demand for a perky, young girl to sit at the front desk? Is there any escape from the pink ghetto?
February 20, 2009
American Apparel is now trying to sell us the same ugly neon scrunchies we wore while coordinating dance moves to the NKOTB and wearing jewelry made of plastic:
I’m off to stock up on bottled water and canned soup. I totally knew Dov Charney was a bringer of the apocolypse right from the start. Fucker.
Hat tip to Jezebel
January 28, 2009
So because this blog is anonymous I can admit this without being flogged: I don’t really like postmodernism. I don’t like the theory; I don’t like the work that results from it. I think it can be fun and experimental but at this point it’s doing more harm than good to the literary world. It seems like nothing new has come of out it since the 60’s, though we’re not supposed to admit this because every time a writer does something weird we call it inventive. But it’s not. It’s been done. I’ve been trying to be less of a bitch about the whole thing by looking into what poets are actu
ally doing right now and I have come to a hopeful conclusion: I think the internet might be saving postmodernism.
I’d like to present Exhibit A, an online piece called Status Update by Darren Wershler and Bill Kennedy. The poem takes status updates from a Facebook RRS feed and attaches them to names of famous writers, creating a poem that is ever in flux. Thus we get lines like “John Keats has the Grey Poupon” and “Samuel Taylor Coleridge is going to eat a soft-boiled egg and contemplate really good design.” Not only are the randomness and humour of Facebook status updates brought to light, but it raises questions of how the medium of writing has changed. Can we even compare the works of Robert Frost or Lord Byron with the hoards of autobiographical snippets we see every day on the internet? If Dante Rossetti was on Facebook, would his status updates be just as naval-gazing and silly as the ones compiled in the poem?
The same writers have also compiled another online poem called apostrophe, which googles the net for phrases starting with “you are” and puts them into a block of text. If you click on any line the poem will reboot and rewrite itself. The project makes for a readable and thought-provoking poem. Once again, the use of the internet’s limitless access to text is reflected back and we see the gaping abyss from a different angle.
So cool.
