feral women

So yay! Here I am. Post #100. I think I thought I ‘d get here sooner, but since I pretty much disappeared for October and November… (something about a day job? about teaching the children?) Alas, I am and shall always be a s l o w poster

Celebrating 100 posts puts a lot of pressure on the post. I keep feeling like I should write about something VERY important. Obama and Huckabee are ahead in the polls; Iran is getting harder to invade; Chavez lost his vote; fucking Don Imus is back on the air. And so it goes.

But then, suddenly, I came across a link to this story over at Sex Like Men: “Is Hello Kitty Turning Feral?”

I’m saved!

After all, why go important when you can go VERY important? Umm, in an inverse sort of way. And though I surely bear a stronger resemblance to my beloved Chococat, this article about about the unexpectedly risque Hello Kitty “shoulder” massager combines two favorites: Hello Kitty and feral women, both of which I’m prone to writing about.

You know, between the close readings of moments critical to transforming ideas about race, class, and gender and the occasional sputtering of rage against random machines. And the occasional statement on world-making. And shilling for Obamas.

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Dan DeLuca has a great article in the Philadephia Inquirer, on the dominance of the revenge narrative in pop music by women.

The cultural predominance of the female revenge narrative came up continually in my class on women and pop last semester, and it seems to be a trend that emerges every few years or so– enough that it might be time to think about when the theme makes it big comebacks, over and beyond its status as a trend.

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Let’s go old-skool: If I were blogging in the 1920’s, I would say of the image after the jump, Kudos to Lysol, for recognizing that bridging the chasm between traditional womanhood’s heavy labors and the ideals of femininity requires an industrial-strength douche.

Actually, I guess that is not what I would say. I would more likely be wondering if I want a pussy pocket reminiscent of a pine grove ER, and worried that, if I didn’t use it, that my children’s friends would daily steel themselves against my big, stinky fangorn forest. Hot or not? Well, not, I guess, since carbolic acid was also found a good remedy against female masturbation. Yikes!

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So, I was thinking about how, by the end of my recent post on feral supermodels, I had become interested in how ‘heroin chic’ or ‘poverty chic’ had become, well, just chic. That is the first thing.

The second thing I was thinking about is why I am obsessed with chicness as feral. To be ‘feral,’ as you probably already know, is be wild. But not quite wild like “girls gone wild,” (although…) but more like raised in the wild, like raised by wolves.

According to feralchildren.com, feral children “are children who’ve grown up with minimal human contact, or even none at all. They may have been raised by animals (often wolves) or somehow survived on their own. In some cases, children are confined and denied normal social interaction with other people.”

Hmm. Today’s celebrities: survivors? — check (Kate Moss has been in the news for almost 20 years!) Denied normal interaction? — check. Raised by animals? — well at least there’s a good metaphor there. Read the rest of this entry »

Happy Mother’s Day!

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Yesterday I was reminded of how hyperlinking might happen in all kinds of places. I was at the Montague Bookmill, grading papers while jd and mhpd played alongside the river. If you’ve ever been to the Bookmill, you know that the bathroom walls (now there are two bathrooms, upgraded, but they haven’t fully lost their randomness) are covered with letters and newspaper clippings. The bathrooms always remind me of the independent journalist Mae Brussell, who used mountains of news clippings and cross-filings to develop theories and keep tabs on all kinds of government activities. She was down with the “internet” before there was an internet!

Anyway, on my way out, I just happened to catch sight of a Natalie Angier article from 1993–”Fashion’s Waif Look Makes Strong Women Weep” (If you don’t get TimesSelect, you can click here to read it). It shot me back to college, to when waifs–and their attendant “poverty chic” and “heroin chic“–were new and news.

Angier, a New York Times science writer, sets it up like this: Read the rest of this entry »