Small Town Wren

I didn’t watch the Super Bowl. Is anyone surprised? And while the internet is all abuzz about how misogynistic the Super Bowl Ads were this year…I’m not going to discuss that either. Yes, shocking! How could I possibly resist the intersection of media and gender?

Because Riese over at Autostraddle wrote the most amazing takedown of Taylor Swift and the Grammys. That’s how. And oh boy, it touches on virgin/whore complexes, and copycat songwriting, and the perpetually perceived purity of childhood. And she’s got awesome charts and awesome comparison pictures between Taylor Swift and Lady Gaga, and has quotes like this:

Let’s bring it back around to the lady that obvs should’ve won: Lady Fucking Gaga. Lady Gaga is viscous hungry sex in hellfire. She’s more theatrical than Broadway and every night she sings in romantic open fists. Lady Gaga opens her dress, extracts her gut, assembles it in shapes splashed in sinister glitter and then shatters her dangerous violent diamonds onto the piano and screams FIRE and it sounds like bad romance. She wants your ugly, she wants your disease, and she’s everything Taylor Swift will never be. Punks don’t win awards, they eat awards.

Yeah. I don’t need to talk about the Super Bowl. Or anything else. Just go read it.

The Batavia Public School’s Twitterfeed often sends alerts about things from the school time capsule. These unknown ladies were the 1907 Girl’s Basketball Champions of some unknown championship, either the last or second to last ever achieve this mysterious title before Illinois banned girls competitive sports in 1908. Which is incredibly sad, especially considering the Batavia Boy’s basketball team didn’t win a title until 1912. I also find it somewhat offensive that the 1912 banner still hangs in the Batavia High School gymnasium, but there is nothing to honor these girls for their 1907 accomplishment.

These ladies look capable, determined, healthy, and fun to me. It’s a shame that some organization of men decided their delicate lady bodies had to be protected from the horrors of athletics. While I’m not a big sports participant, I can only imagine how these women felt when they were told they could no longer play.

I first picked up The Beauty Myth three years ago. I was writing a paper for a class, for The Anthropology of Gender & Sexuality taught by Nia Parson. It was a great class, and the first time where I was inspired enough to engorge myself on outside sources for a final paper.  I ended up writing a treatise on intersection, third wave feminism, and abortion rights. It was a great paper. I shared it with the group of shamans I was observing later in the year when they started getting grumpy about the right to choose.

The only problem is I never finished it.

Some books have that problem with me: I just can’t get them read. American Gods is a book I’ve started at least a dozen times and as much as I love reading the first 100 pages, something always comes up and I can’t finish it.  With The Beauty Myth, life happened. A series of catastrophic events in early 2008 left me unable to do much else but cry and feel sorry for myself.  I had read what I needed for the paper with the intention to finish it at my leisure during the following semester. It has languished on my shelf ever since.

No more. While generally I would say I have never bought into the monolithic beauty myth, I think I am at a point in my life where I need to read it again (and actually finish it). It’s an important text and it will be good for me and the goals I am working toward right now. The whole strong woman thing.  And, in general, I need some non-textbook reading to happen in my life.

I love my friend David. So much so that I’m the only person who actually calls him David. He’s one of those friends who always knows spot-on exactly what you need. This is what he gave me tonight: