Every now and then my sister comes in and says, essentially, “I’m going to a birthday party, I need you to draw me a card, I have to leave in two minutes”. So, I do it, because why not? It is a challenge.
All her buddies are turning eighteen this year, so, here we go on the one this time:
I don’t know why I am so RUDE
Well, yes I do, I just like drawing nude dudes. Non srs powermuscles ones, I mean. I find it cheerful.
These ain’t my clothes, y’all!
I’m Dinner Ladying the rest of this week and all week and I’m in TROUBLE, because this morning when I got dressed to go to work I had to wear my sister’s clothes.
I’ve gone over in some detail the personal troubles I have with summer clothes, but now I have met the professional perils and they buffeted me onto my rear. See how:
My job entails squeezing around tiny tables and chairs making sure kids eating their lunches are behaving, seeing if they need their food cut or their yoghurts opened, pouring drink, etc. Then I have to make sure they’re safe and happy running and climbing around outside. Skirts and shorts are a bad idea; I don’t trust 4/5 year olds to be fully cognizant of physical boundaries, f’rex. Low-cut or loose tops are a bad idea because I do a lot of leaning over, ditto hipster trousers (no child needs to see the crack of authority). Button-up tops are a bad idea because they gape. The few graphic t-shirts that I own are either intricate - interesting and distracting (they ask me my name often enough - “what’s that about?” is a question I’d like to avoid answering seven thousand times), or scary (when I was small I wouldn’t have wanted to stare at the Crimson Ghost whilst eating, that’s all). Sweaters or roll-necks are WAY too hot right now- really anything long-sleeved is. Showing my belly is inappropriate. And so on. And so on. And so on!
O___O’
This, in my wardrobe, leaves nothing!
!!!
It also does not help that both my pairs of trousers are in the wash right now. Oh, bravo, bravo, I know.
Sister was in the shower so I grabbed and contorted my way into a shirt I haven’t seen her wear for ages and the first pair of skinnies on her floor.
I safety-pinned the back of the shirt of the seat of the trousers because when they say they are low rise they really
are not bluffing, and thank goodness I had a badge of comparable size when I noticed this at the last minute -
..What the heck am I going to wear tomorrow?
When I get paid, I might be looking in to some skinny “jeans” in an interesting colour - I really like the way they just fitted right into my boots. Any recommendations on where to get good quality examples?
It feels like I’m complaining a lot recently. Sorry about that! I will try to do better.
Yesterday my sister was watching a movie where someone went “It’s– it’s so beautiful!” and she said, “haha did you hear that? She was talking about..” And I said, “a peen?”
That was wrong, but I decided that actually, it was right.
So I drew it.
I live in England, specifically in Warwickshire. I have done since I was eight, and I love it here. It’s beautiful. Until recently, I hadn’t heard about the ‘controversy’ going on in another part of my county: Meriden. The ‘exact center of England’. Oh, and also the birthplace of Napalm Death! Nice. What’s happening there right now is that a great many of the villagers have “banded together” to protest a local-living man’s use of the land that he owns; he wants to build a permanent travelers’ camp. The land is green belt land.
You can read more about this here, here and here if you would like. There is also a very good report on the Travelers’ Times here.
Full disclosure: Every now and then, I think about movies I have seen that feature people credited as or referred to as “gypsies” and I think, wow, they were dressed in a way I found really cool. I’d like to dress that way. The fashion industry backs me up; ‘gypsy style’ is a periodical summer staple. And then I feel guilty and callous, for culturally objectifying and potentially appropriating the modes of a classification of people who are treated extremely poorly by people I know (please never say “gyppo” to or near me) and by my country (and just about EVERY country, it seems). Then I go online, and try to find out about the factual histories and present times of travelers.
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This time, I went through here, here, here and here as well as here which sent me to the Travelers’ Times Online, linked above.
In case you didn’t follow the TTO link before to the article about the situation in Meriden, here’s the video report:
Noah’s Ark from Travellers Times on Vimeo.
Natural beauty being bulldozed and planning permission laws being flouted are bad, or at least not good. That’s true. But do you know what is worse? RACISM. YOU FUCKS.
People can say “I’m not a racist” all they like. That doesn’t make it true. Even if, as a white person, having an asian dentist were proof that one had no prejudice at all against any kind of asians, that still wouldn’t be the final word on whether or not one was any kind of racist. I’m pretty sure that there are people who are totally great with, say, ethnic Jews and black Caribbeans but make foul remarks based upon their beliefs about, for example, Pakistanis or the Japanese. “Coloured people” (ouch) are not one monolith of unwhiteenglishness. And ‘being able to pass for white’ does not mean that a person is white, in the sense of being ‘not of another race’.
There’s also the arguable difference between racism and xenophobia and cultural prejudice and ethnic-religious prejudice. Personally I am not sure that there’s much use in differentiating, but as a white person raised atheist-Christian in Church of England schools, I may be missing something important in the distinctions. Is there sense in calling a white English geographically settled person racist for being against, say, white Irish travelers? I would say yes; I think that there’s enough of a similarity in the dismissal of a lifestyle and heritage someone is born to to make racism and ethnocentrism effectively synonymous.
But as - I just checked, I missed it the first time whilst chopping onions - it says in the video, the travelers in question are Roma. They are an ethnic minority here. They are an ethnic inority everywhere. They are members of a race that is not in power. So all quibbles here become moot.
Did you note the sentence structure and inflection in the woman’s interview section, in the video? The “them” and “us”? They should have to follow the same laws as we all have to. That’s some hardcore sub-radar othering, lady.
The first man interviewed really stresses the word “pretty”! He’s implicitly saying, with that and the rest of his speech, that these people will bring ugliness. Necessarily.
The old guy straight-up says that if it were he who had an identical planning permission overstep, there would not be this outrage. One of the news articles I linked noted that the villagers themselves were breaking laws with the placement of their protest - so it can’t be simple illegality which has got their goat about this settlement.
A year or so ago, I had discovered Yahoo! answers, and was going crazy with finding questions I could answer. Then I ran across a boy who was dating an Italian girl, and who wanted to meet her parents I think. Or, no, maybe he had met her mother and experienced a poor reception. His question was, he wanted to know, was it because he was Roma - did Italy have bad history with Roma people? Now I cannot resist the opportunity to help along a romance. So I googled, and I found this, where “Italy’s highest appeal court has ruled that it is acceptable to discriminate against Roma on the grounds that they are thieves”. And I found this; “Gypsies in Italy protest prejudice”. And I found out about the fire that was set to Roma settlements in Naples in 2008.
Later in the year I somehow ended up on ONTD reading through this thread. The subject of the original post is Madonna being booed for preaching equality and acceptance at a concert with Gogol Bordello in Bucharest. The subject of a lot, and I mean a lot of the comment threads are more detailed looks at how and why gypsies face prejudice in various parts of the world; a lot of these threads start or build with someone saying “but no you guys THEY LITERALLY ARE ALL THIEVES, so it is OK!”. Then these people get schooled by wiser members of their community, but often? They just keep on keepin’ on, ignoring the fact that blind prejudice makes you a dick, rather than your opponent a(n un)worthy victim. It’s an interesting thread. Horrifying, but interesting.
The point is, that all this information isn’t hard to find. Roma people (if I’m saying this wrong, please forgive me and if you’re willing teach me better) are subjected to widespread racism. They suffered pretty darn badly in the Holocaust too, did you know that?
Irish travelers are recognised as an ethnic group here and don’t fare well, either.
I have never, as far as I know, met anybody who lives either partially or completely nomadically or anyone with immediate Roma heritage - as I mentioned earlier the only reason I started thinking about their (your?) lives at all was because when I was maybe six I saw a movie where the romantic lead was ‘a gypsy’ I’m sorry - I really cannot tell if this is an acceptable word for me to use or not. I’m trying to use it only when referencing where it’s been used already and he, his sisters and ex-girlfriend all wore outfits that I wanted– and because Gogol Bordello seem like the coolest people in maybe the entire world. Nothing rests on my doing this research. I am not in the dilemma of “should I go and protest against people (who want to have somewhere to live) being allowed to have somewhere to live, or not?”. And yet - I found this information. In one afternoon, using one search engine, I found all of these news items about the victimisation of a race and of a lifestyle throughout the whole of Britain and mainland Europe. It was not hard; a non-computer literate person could go to the library and say “I need to find some information” and the librarian could point them towards google.
There is no excuse for these protesters.
You can’t gather a posse, saying “I don’t want these people here”, ignoring the persecution they and their brothers and sisters face in multiple countries (right up to government level!), and then fall back and say - “But I’m not racist. I’ve got nothing against them personally”.
You know what? I’m just going to go there and say it. If you can’t manage to not express this kind of wholesale rejection at adults? Think of the children. Please.
Do you care more about planning rules and a single field and, I don’t know, a slight potential fluctuation in property value (are you planning on moving? To a new home? Oh, lucky you), than in the right of a child to be brought up in a place that doesn’t treat her like an eyesore, a criminal and an unwelcome nuisance before they see her as a person? If you do, reader: I judge you.
“I don’t choose to live like this. I was born to live like this.” Said the man who owns the land in dispute.
This makes me feel like bursting.
I hope you win Meriden, travelers. I really really do.
On the subject of the word “bitch”:
I am one of those who tries to convince those around her that “bitch” is not an acceptable word to use when not speaking of literal female dogs (or, I guess, in a clear ironical sense). As a derogative, it’s a sexist term that exists to belittle people based on [either: femininity or membership of ‘the female gender’].
I find it hard to deny that it isn’t a word with its own special, nuanced meaning though. I mean, I do deny it, I encourage people to say “spiteful” or “vindictive” instead, since that’s the closest I can get to how I’ve encountered the word used viciously. But like I say - it’s the closest I can get. It isn’t the exact same. “Bitch” has its own definition/s because if it didn’t, we wouldn’t have used it so widely.
I’m thinking about this because the other week I was considering my favourite character from one of my favourite book series. I was thinking about her in terms of blog post, because that’s a useful thought exercise, and I was letting my mind run ahead of me loosely and lightly describing her character at the start of the trilogy as opposed to at the ending; I caught myself running out bitch. Descriptive.
The character is Malta Vestrit, of Robin Hobb’s Liveship Trilogy. Which is fantastic, you should read it. If you’ve read this series, you’ll know what I meant when I stumbled it out - she’s horrible and petty and spiteful and vindictive and spoilt and mean and selfish and thoroughly invested in traditional gender roles and sparky and hateful. She debuts at age twelve, I think.
“Bitch” as I know it, and I’m talking non-reclaimed, perfectly describes her. Which is fascinating!
Wikipedia says:
The Liveship trilogy is gorgeously, wonderfuly written, and the best kind of high fantasy in that it uses differently built, magically infused societies to put the spotlight on aspects of real life. Malta was raised in a port township that is isolated, and where though day to day life is matriarchal due to the main masculine profession being seamanship, the laws and relationships are still strongly patriarchal. Girls don’t go to sea or own ships, women take their husbands’ names, girls are to be married off, the most admired celebrity women are the Satrap’s concubines. She was also raised in a household where her father, who is from an even more radically patriarchal, class-based society and whom she adores, cows (so horribly apt, this word here) her mother and wields a lot of practical, decision-making power.
Malta is clever. She’s bright, and romantic, and passionate, and has a lot of diplomatic aptitude, and she fits easily within her society’s beauty standards. She’s good at being flirtatious and coquettish, she’s dramatic. She’s this great wellspring of potential person, and she was raised in these oppressive, ignorant circumstances which had absolutely no expectations of her.
When I started the first book I hated Malta. I could barely read her pages; I wanted to rush ahead because she caused such an outraged pressure in my head. Much like reading Umbridge, in HP&OOTP. By the end? I adore her (this does not go for Umbridge). Gosh, she’s a wonderful character! You see, the world changes in such ways that an awful, awful lot becomes actually required of her - and she rises to it! It’s not quick, or easy, and she’s still kind of judgmental by the end, but the blossoming of her character arc is a wonder to behold. It’s inspiring reading! Ahhh I heart these books. Come to think of it, comparing the way I felt about Malta at the beginning and at the end probably turned a few major cogs in my “actually, I don’t and shouldn’t resent all females at all, even though I am unhappy at my all-girls school, that’s interesting. Maybe I should investigate this non-hatred of all of my gender further” journey.
By the series’ end, she’s saved three-four entire ways of life, fallen in adult-style love, talked her way out of numerous situations in which she was technically powerless and definitely vulnerable, resurrected a dragon, kept people she despised alive, learnt the value of female community and community in general, negotiated with royalty, managed to find an emotional/ideological truce with the members of her family who she naturally clashes with, and impressed her native high society with her wit and societal balancing ability. The only way I can imagine her being called a bitch by then, is in the watered down, general anti-woman “I don’t like you” way (which as far as I’m concerned has no legitimate uses).
The interesting thing is how clear to me my reflections on Malta made the fact that “bitch” really is a misogynistic word, because it describes female products of misogyny - and puts them down, unconcernedly, for the failings that their culture and unique circumstances have forced into them.
I think that that’s a pretty good reason for saying spiteful or vindictive instead of bitchy; it covers the same reactive bases, but it doesn’t punish or belittle a person for the fact that they live in a historically screwed up society.
Fiction is so cool.
I don’t credit bloggers and street style photo culture with my current level of inner confidence and self-pleasure. I do credit them, large-partly, with my confidence about where I stand in the public, every-day world. Bloggers, online alt-fashion communities and street style photo culture are why I could not keep up my teenage idea of the whole world is against me and nobody wants me to look how I want.
Seeing people dressed outside of the highstreet (and even outside of the known sub-culture) norm(s), happily, at various ages, all over the world, being themselves, made it impossible for me not to know that no matter where I am, there is someone who understands a bit, who doesn’t resent my self-expression and personal visual comfort, who is pleased by my constructed image and who, if we met directly, would give the metaphorical fist-bump of solidarity.
This is all I wish to provide here.
My main memory of highschool peer wardrobe approval was when my friend said to me “Why did you buy that?” about a skirt.. that I was wearing. Whilst we were out. Gee that made me feel comfortable!
I’m sure that I was as much of an ass as anyone.
I feel it like a duty, frankly (pompously?), to honestly present my thoughts and some e-semblance of my philosophy/personality so that people who are similar to me and who haven’t yet found any or many allies don’t have to feel alone in the world.
I’m not asking anyone to make a connection, or cruising for buddies - I just want to be visible as a subject of comparison. Just in case.
It’s not that I don’t do it for the plain satisfaction of self-expression, “activism”, to show off, for mental exercise, to keep me busy, etc etc as well. I like writing this blog! But I probably wouldn’t, because I am lazy, if I didn’t have the blog-related life experience that I do.
I am not sure if this counts as a manifesto, because I find the concept of “a manifesto” hard to grasp. Do you have to use particular language conventions? But it’s a “why I do this”, which I think is basically the same? Right?
Oh and I am not asking for gratitude, obviously!
GOSH IT’S SUNNY!
When it is warm enough for shorts and my mum getting sunburned in April, something feels off. But something also feels that it is necessary to spend weekend days in the garden on one’s belly.
So, I did. More on that, and the shorts situation, later. I had.. let me see.. four books and two newspaper supplements to read Garth Nix’s Lord Sunday (thank you, beloved!), Grant Morrison & Frank Quitely’s New X-Men “ultimate collection v.1″ (because I only have spotty issues here and there from the Morrison run due to not always being able to get my hands on Essential X-Men, but what I have is SO GOOD), Hammer Films: The Bray Studio Years (birthday present! Excellent!), Homicidal Psycho Jungle Cat: Calvin & Hobbes Collection (because my sister’s school was THROWING AWAY TWO HUGE COLLECTED C&H VOLUMES, CAN YOU BELIEVE, ARE THEY CRAZY), supplements from the Independent so I figured I would be doing not-much on the outwardly creative front. I figured wrongly, though.
I mentioned on twitter that I drew a princess doing carpentry earlier, and that I liked it a lot. I can’t show you the one I meant then, because it’s on a birthday card for my cousin (I don’t think she reads here.. D:), but I can show you the ones I did afterwards. It’s so pleasing! Fancy calm dresses and destructive physicality. Yeuhhhh.
I gotta look up non-euro-fairytale style princesses. I would like to make the Princess’ Woodcutting and Carpentry School open to international students, very much.
Third princess referenced from a shot of Mohammed Ali Chopping wood; the two-princess saw’s from a picture you get if you google image “two-man saw”.
Sometimes, you notice patterns.
And even if you don’t mind - or even like - the individual examples..
The trend (inclusivity and exclusivity) can really get your goat.
When this happens to me, I foight tha powahhh by setting up the H.M. Armed Forces: Enemy Fighter I gave my sister for christmas and doin’ this.
All I’m asking for is a little equality, world. I realise I shouldn’t have drawn him white.
—
Doodlebugs! Idle pen-movements whilst watching the StarTV Transformers dub and my X-Men VHS tapes.
For some reason I can only draw moomins if I make them really old and sinister!
“Life drawing” hahaha NOT EASY FROM VIDEO
So what happens if you’re drawing someone whilst gaming..
And then they start to be DEFIED by the controls and endess credits in place of story?
They like you to stop drawing, that’s what. :]
“Naughty schoolgirl” is a concept that has been so porned out that it barely exists anymore. “Naughty schoolgirl”, someone will say to you, and your mind will reply “augmented woman in her late twenties wearing a bandeau “skirt”, fake tan, and white shirt tied so tightly I fear she may suffocate (on the shirt OR the cock you’re implicitly permitted to stick in her, come to think)”.
You know what? That sucks. Schoolgirls deserve to own their own sub-genres.
When I was a school-going girl and a Guide, in my early teens, my troupe picked the theme “St Trinians” for the parade we were in. We all wore rolled-up skirts, and tied up shirts, and ties tied around our heads or inappropriately loose. We wore knee-socks and fishnets and carried hockey sticks, and most of us had never heard of St Trinians before. This was the movie-verse St Trinians. Not nu-movies. The 50s-60s-1980 movies. I wore bunches.
It felt powerful and silly and fun, and I didn’t feel like I was giving anyone the right to touch me or fantasize about me or show me their genitals. I didn’t feel fake, I felt permitted to try out ‘loose’, in a socially permissive and/or “so in control of the situation that I don’t have to be in constant overwhelming control of myself” way rather than the hurrhurrvagina way.
Ronald Searle’s original St Trinians cartoons or comic strips, by the way, are really really good. You should read them.
Actually at the end of said parade, at the fair, a grown-up man I sort of knew (I think he was someone’s dad? maybe someone who knew someone I knew?) said to me, “Oh, I didn’t recognise you with your clothes on”. I don’t know if he meant “those dress-up clothes” or if he was purposefully implying he had seen me naked, but either way I felt like I wanted to punch him in the fucking face. Because whichever he meant, his words suggested that he might have seen me undressed, and I thought: how dare you do that to me. I did not want to hear about sex, in any way, from any guy. Especially an adult. Especially in such a brusque way. Especially when I was wearing an outfit I knew, vaguely, was sometimes used to mean “slutty!”.
If you don’t get this, or if you feel inclined to say I was asking for it, maybe imagine that you’re wearing an outfit you really like and often air, and then you get a CC’d-to-all-your-friends email showing someone who looks kind of like you, wearing that exact outfit, having something done to them that you’d never want done to you. Or imagine that you move to a new place, where you discover that your name is the same word as the locals use to mean “worthless” or “fucking disgusting” or “fart” or “incest”.
I didn’t punch him, I looked hard at the nearest non-human object very hard and pretended I hadn’t heard. I had no power there.
That was probably about ten years ago, and “naughty schoolgirl” has really gained momentum as a thing since then. What are real school girls going to do, when their forays into rule-breaking and cheekiness and physicality and their own relationship to their own sexuality* are already telegraphed, loud and clear, in town centers and internet side-bar ads and on tv and in magazines (I hate you, Nuts and Cosmo and your ilk) and in the general consciousness, as being a message of “yes, you may fuck”?
*No. Just because someone is exploring themselves and the power or effect they may or may not potentially have (and if they like or are comfortable with it or not), it does not give you permission to be a leering douche. If someone is dressed “sexy”, it does not mean you get to say HAY BABY, I SEE YOU HAVE SEXUAL CAPACITIES!!. Act as normally as you can towards them, and that will tell them what they want to know. Be respectful. Don’t assume that they want anything from you. Especially? Especially if they are or might be underaged. Gee whiz.
I started thinking about this because of this picture in the paper:
It’s Hit-Girl, from the film Kick Ass,which I do not think I would enjoy. I don’t like the comic and I can’t get behind eleven year old murderers played for awsums. I do have a soft spot for Nic Cage though. THEY’RE IN MY EYES!. She’s played by Chloe Moretz, who was born in 1997 (and who’s gonna be in the (actually really positive-sounding) re-make of Let the Right One In. Go Chloe!). So she’s twelve or thirteen in this picture. Do you see the differences, between Hit-Girl here and the average current “naughty schoolgirl”? Yes. Yes, you do.
This picture reminded me of another comicbook (as you wish, Stan Lee!) depiction of a schoolgirl gone wrong. Here’s Jenny, 15, from Grant Morisson’s excellent (excellent!) book The Invisibles. She appears on two pages as far as I can tell (does she return? I haven’t read every volume), and she’s pretty darn enjoyable, as a character.
Okay so I said above that I can’t get behind killer kids, true - but forgive me my over-generalising. Hit-Girl’s essentially a real-world fictional kid, albeit a highly skilled one, and she’s gonna have to live with being a people-chopper for the rest of her real-world fictional life. Jenny’s metafictionally one of the last survivors in a post-apocolyptic Enemies Exist world, born of a psychically well-protected mind being tortured. That changes things up. Am I a hypocrite? Bollocks.
The thing here, is that these are two internally enormous, badass, power-reaching characters who know how to do what they’re doing and who don’t do just what they’re told (or what we as viewers know they’re societally told), who are nevertheless currently encapsulated by the school uniform. They don’t fit, level-one semiotically; it’s still understood that school uniform means “be good”. That’s why school uniform, and the “schoolgirl” part of “naughty schoolgirl” matter: the goodness is there to be subverted. Whether you’re talking sex-play, or violence, or anything else.
>>Other objections aside, it is SO LAZY and missing-of-the-point to turn the school uniform into full-on erotic decoration. If you make it into a straight-up string-stripper outfit, you lose the reason you were interested in the first place! You lose the character, you lose the realness, you lose the honesty. All you’re left with is “isn’t screwing hot?”, which, wow. Fascinating.< <
Jenny and Hit-Girl’s skirts are short, and we can see Jenny’s knickers, and knee-socks have enough cultural-sexual baggage already that they can mean ’saucy’ by themselves - these outfits aren’t completely unsexualised or unsensualised. Like I mentioned, we tied up our school shirts and rolled up our skirts in the Guides parade (we rolled up our skirts in school - that’s a pretty culture-wide experience). I’m not arguing for the sterilisation of teens, image-wise or biologically!
I think that the photo of Hit-Girl is a good one, and I can dig those two pages of Jenny in Invisibles. Not in any way because I want to exploit them sexually, but because I can sympathise and empathise with these pictures. That’s a lot of what fiction is for, I think - more than just entertainment and escape. It’s not quite identification - it’s understanding what characters, as constructs before/as well as people, mean; Hit-Girl here and Jenny are about bursting out of your chrysalis - saying YEAH FUCK THAT, WHATEVER! and going really, really fast at your own discretion. Being aware of the body that you’re in, what it can do and what it means to you. Feeling that anybody who wants to appropriate any of that can go blow away to nowhere. They’re about moments of realisation that you’re god of your own damn universe, and you make the rules for you.
It’s easy to see how those sorts of thoughts can segue (for teens or between consenting adults interacting with this sort of imagery) into “let’s do it”. They don’t have to, but they can, and that’s fine! That’s nice, even! Know yourself, enjoy yourself, use symbols that you like or that speak to you (I’m not assuming I need to give permission here, I’m just hopefully making it clear that I’m not trying to somehow deny you permission to do what you want in private. I don’t want to know about what you do in private (or public, if it’s shaggin’)).
But these feelings, grown organically, are too necessary and vital to have them publicly and almost overwhelmingly equated with misogynistic, performative, no-strings intercourse.
‘Sex’, a lot of people seem to forget to remember, is not about what platonic-I can do for platonic-you. It’s not simply about places to put penises or things in vaginas. First of all, it is about what platonic-I can do for platonic-me, and basically, the rest of the world has no rights to that.
It just thinks it does.
No, Jerkface, she can’t. But you can empathise, or sympathise, or just allow her to enjoy it without trying to make it all about you. EMPATHY AND SYMPATHY. Do you speak them?
I kind of like Lady Gaga, maybe. Her costumes are often sexually coded, and then she outright says to her fans “it’s okay not to have sex if you don’t feel like it, no matter how you feel like dressing”. Anti-rape culture. That kind of stuff needs to be said.
So that’s what I think about “naughty schoolgirls”. That people should leave them alone, for goodness’ sake, and let the real ones be able to think that they (re-)invented the trope. Because you know what? If they did, they did.
My sister, and my foot again. I’m just unable to colour things without using yellow. Why, I wonder? I barely ever use white for highlights, even when I’ve built up enough pigment to block out the paper or canvas. Or if I do use it, I start to hate it and feel put-upon.
Don’t worry, I’m not gonna be posting these every day!
Plus: I’ve been twittering my discontent with Ian Holt and Dacre Stoker’s “official” sequel to Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula; Dracula: The Un-Dead. I drew this in the night, after reading a particularly enraging, faith-breaking passage. Please excuse my vendetta.. Dracula is just too darn GOOD.
Warning: Possible rape triggers
I am “an illustrator” and my beloved is “a writer”. We do a lot of creating, but have nothing ready for public show. Which sucks quite a lot, because it makes us look like big lazy sub-par arses. But for tiny, everyday practice, we decided to start a story game. And now, we share! I drew a picture I had no story for (and honestly, no like for; the anatomy is terrible. I have been so lazy with my lifedrawing studies recently AND IT SHOWS), he made a scenario out of it. I drew a picture inspired by that, he wrote a little bit. And so on, and so on. I was baking, he was hoovering, during..
Him: It seems like the Coalition for Nuclear Disarmament are training an airstrike unit for their next protest… But inkeeping with their liberal leanings, they aren’t against letting under-18s apply for the job!
Him: “You see the figure on the chimeny?”
“Yeah…”
“She’s demonstrating the correct launching-off point for our airstrike. Now–”
“Isn’t that a nuclear chimney?”
“…What was that about the chimeny?”
“Chimney. Isn’t a nuclear power station?”
“Well… There’s ‘nuclear’, and NUCLEAR nuclear. This plant is just nuclear.”
“Isn’t there a fundamental ideological flaw in launching an anti-nuclear airstrike from a–”
“SO THE NEXT SLIDE IS………”
Me:
Him: “WAIT WAIT! That chimney’s–”
“Chimeny.”
“–DEFINITELY nucular, ‘cos I used the shower at that facility this morning… What? My dad works there. So I used the shower, and now I have to wear this coat ALL the time or my blood falls out and I have to drink other peope’s!!”
“…Huh. Alright, MAYBE we should choose a different chimeny. Does anyone know of any?”
“You don’t need a take-off point if you outfit the wings with a VTOL system.”
“…Genius! But how can we fuel such a thing without sacrificing our anti-nuclear morals?!”
“Nucular….”
Me:
Him: Ok, mental block. But they’re in disguise to find a new source of power or… SOMETHING.
Me: What I was imagining was, they were pretending to have been RUINED AND MUTANTISED by nucular power, so that they had an excuse for using it for their advantage. Did you notice chubby frankie muniz?
Hope it gave you a pleasant enough pause!
To Be Continued..???
I don’t always illustrate my face subject to the thoughts I had when I dressed for the day. Sometimes I do, but sometimes I just add what I think would look fitting based on the taken photograph, or to add a balancing agent to the mix (for example, if I look bodaciously Disney-buxom, I’ll probably add a manface). Sometimes I add a completely new element, to see how it changes the story of the clothing and my body language.
Today my creative process went like this:
“Haha, this outfit looks way sixties! A thinking socialite, like the ones from the movies, who took the Sound of Music straight to heart. Such things were nowhere near my mind when I put this stuff on! How interesting! I think I shall add a snooty model head, to complete the ensemble.”
“Hmmm. A lot of my thighs are visible here. How can I make a thigh look interesting? Well, much as I dislike him, Batman has made forearms look interesting.. how can I improve on that.. fins.. fins.. mermaids?.. fishpeople.. Gillman!”
“I can’t be doing with drawing ANOTHER set of thigh scales. The Creature’s only my second favourite type of classic movie-monster, anyway; I’ll show that Kate Beckinsdale what for. What a twit.”
I don’t actually know if there is/is going to be a softcover of this book.
Jennifer’s Body, first-off, was a horror movie out last year. Written by Diablo Cody, starring Megan Fox (jennifer) and Amanda Seyfried (Needy); about a pair of teenaged, highschool friends who give up pretending that they don’t feel like enemies once Megan’s character, titular Jennifer (and no, I’m not taking that pun out - it was accidental and I don’t feel like redacting it to avoid rubbish jokes), becomes some sort of demon. I hated it when I saw the posters, I resented it when I saw Megan Fox being used for sexyface yet again, I rolled my eyes and sneered at it when I heard the “HELL IS A TEENAGE GIRL!” tagline. But when I read the coverage it got on Jezebel - 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 (’6 reasons to love Jennifer’s Body’)) I started to think it might actually be really fantastic.
I still haven’t watched it, though. I’m a rubbish cinema-goer (I still haven’t seen Where the Wild Things Are, for goodness’ sake!).
I was and am super-keen on the idea of a horror movie about teenage friendships full of resentment and stangancy (not a real word?), about how objectification and patriarchy turn people against themselves and each other, and a deeper examination of high school/teenage problems than “my parents don’t understand or listen to me” or gender-divided court hierarchy. Not that those things aren’t interesting and true and painful, but that isn’t all that sucks so hard about growing up. I was-am also super-keen on examination (& debunking) of sexism within horror movies. And how that comes from, reflects and focusses sexism and gender-based assumptions in ‘real life’.
But like I said, I haven’t seen the movie yet! So I should shut up about it, and talk about the comic which I HAVE read!
They were still shooting when I was writing so I haven’t seen the film but I got to read the screenplay. It was kinda crazy writing characters that were being changed on set and in the editing process. - Rick Spears, author of the compilation, to Atomic Comics
I mentioned that I bought my copy in a regular book shop rather than a specialist comic shop - this meant that I got the Cho-drawn cover:
Now, I twitter’d this before, but the fact that this comic came wrapped in cellophane makes me go HAH and then EWW.
When I started writing this today I decided I should check good ole wikipedia to see if it had any interesting facts I had missed. it didn’t, but it did provide me with this paragraph synopsis of the book:
The novel features less of Jennifer than the film, but does capture her “going in for the kill” several times. It focuses heavily on following her soon-to-be victims and provides information on their personalities not elaborated on in the film so that readers can better conclude whether the boys deserved to be murdered. The novel consists of four chapters, with a prologue and an epilogue, with art provided for each by different artists. Each one follows a different boy and what is happening in his life just before Jennifer kills him.
I’ll just day that “conclude whether the boys deserved to be murdered” is not what I did when I was reading. Why? Oh! That’s right! Teenage boys DON’T deserve to be murdered! You nutter, anonymous wiki editor.
I don’t actually think that that was what the author intended me to do either though - I got much more of an impression that this was a book written out of a funny sort of sensitivity. Boys don’t deserve to be murdered, but horror movies need victims.. but victims mean nothing if they weren’t people first. I leave the room when Luke’s rebel friends are being burst like fireworks as they’re all assaulting the Deathstar, because it’s sad. Phelous often mention that the films he reviews miss the mark because the characters who get skewered (or whatever) are so irritating or vapid that the viewer doesn’t care or is glad when they pop their clogs - the more a victim matters, the more of a reaction will be gleaned from their demise. Or from any trouble they meet, really.
Just like in Nation X there are four stories, and just like in Nation X the first one is the best.
Chapter One: JONAS follows a jock who vaguely wants to bone Jennifer despite his girlfriend’s presence, and who’s feeling the strain of staying the sports hero he’s always naturally been whilst living the life of sofa-riding and snack-scoffing that he’s also inclined towards. It’s drawn by Jim Mahfood, who is great.
Second-page in and Jonas is getting a Strickland-esque dressing down from the headteacher - Jonas is never going to go anywhere, his life’s peaked already, he’ll end up hating his whole life and his whole life caving in on him. Jonas shrugs it off, but he can’t.. quite.. ignore it..
He gives it a good try though.
Spears keeps adding little extra bits of pending doom onto Jonas - ones that are unrelated to Jennifer.
Then he figures out his girl isn’t quite all his, then classmates are lost to a mysterious fire, then Jonas can’t keep it all in any more when the school’s grief councillor schedules a visit.. Jonas knows his life’s not what he wants. He knows his story is supposed to be better than this. And then, beautiful powerful popular Jennifer appears, and Jonas knows she can make the right things happen.
Jennifer’s not so into making out or hooking up any more though, so she whacks his head off.
Jonas’s story is over, and Jennifer was really only the end of it.
Chapter two: COLIN is about a kid who wears a shirt with an anarchy symbol on it, who has been “in love” with Jennifer since childhood, and who cannot bring himself to buy music from a mainstream record shop in a mall.
He can’t even speak in front of Jennifer, even after they become lab partners (is this really such a romantic appointment as the movies suggest?). Until..
So he can talk to her, but when he decides to overcome the dismissals of his sub-culture peers and ask Jennifer out, DISASTER STRIKES.
Don’t worry! Jennifer isn’t going to let him get away so easily. Romance may blossom after all! In an building site. Nice, Jennifer. But Colin’s not so impressed.
Jennifer looks like she’s hoping for some naked time, and Colin’s thinking of backing out because he’s a kid with emotions, you know? I’m not making fun Colin, I think that’s nice.
Sorry, Colin. Jennifer wants your body.
Chapter three: Ahmet from India made me ask “What the fuck is this?”. Is this dialogue straight-up racist, or is it just me?
What’s up with the sentence construction?
Also, is circumcision that common? Really? Uncommon enough that a team of baseball players will taunt their new expert bowler off the team based upon his present foreskin?
Really??
I don’t know if there was a Bollywood scene in the movie, but either way its inclusion here makes me feel uncomfortable. Ahmet is at the club everyone goes to, a band plays, the music is SUPER AWESOME and Ahmet gets Bollywood vision, rainbows and bare-chest-waistcoat and all. Dance routine time.
???
I liked the character that came through from Ahmet. He seemed like a decent kid. It’s interesting to get a view of a character whose international schooling year goes terribly, what culture shock feels like, and it’s true that food from ‘back home’ can be immensely comforting to someone in a place that feels hostile. For example, I started eating courgettes having hated them previously because I was glum in my uni town, and our crop at home had just ripened. It’s good to be reminded how extremely unkindness can effect people - you really never know how much other stuff someone’s dealing with as well. I am just completely baffled by the way that this section is written. The art’s pretty good - it’s just not used entirely for good, I think!
I considered that the odd dialogue might have been an author’s technique to bring home how culturally out of place Ahmet is or seems to the other kids at school. But if it is it is SO badly applied.
This last couple of panels was smart though, I think; Ahmet starts his story by talking about grasping his own American Dream, and ends (doubly) by quoting an American film classic.. about his ‘foreign’ home.
The last story is Chip’s. Chip is the boyfriend in the movie, Needy’s boyfriend. He wants to have sex with her, a lot, she’s intimidated by her body (Chip’s words) and doesn’t want to do it much. He fantasises about Needy, and sometimes about Jennifer too. Eventually Jennifer kills him and it is sad. I thought this was the most straightforward of all the shorts, which is why I didn’t include any pictures.
The four short stories are bookended by Jennifer, at (I assume) the beginning of her rampage and at the end of the film. The caption boxes show her inner monologue.
Start:
End:
And they say it all, really - there’s zero insight into Jennifer in this book. No more than I got from the trailers, anyway, or the exchange between her and Needy:
Needy: You’re killing people!
Jennifer: No, I’m killing boys.
She knows boys want her, and partly because of that she disdains boys. She knows she’s hot, and partly because of that she disdains her body. This book was about the boys, and it causes me slight to middling pause that they went ahead and called it “Jennifer’s Body” on the cover.
Jennifer’s body wasn’t what killed them, and the stories show that. What killed them was Jennifer’s actions. What led up to Jennifer’s actions were the pressures upon her, and upon the boys. and their reactions to these pressures. Oh, and of course, what caused Jennifer to start “killing boys” was the demonic entity which possessed her, after she was murdered in a misogynist ’sacrifice to Satan”. Thanks wikipedia.
It’s true that each of the boys in these stories are sexually attracted to Jennifer and her body, but in no story does the kid in question simply want to fuck her. They think she’s ‘hot’, but they also want what she (with personality, standing, artifice) represents. Jonas wants the comfort and potential of a partnership with her. Colin wants to spend time with her doing things he likes that it turns out she might enjoy too. Ahmet wants someone to be his friend - a bond, maybe even someone he can share love with. Chip is the only one interested in Jennifer’s body, and even he rejects her because he doesn’t want her body. He just responds with boners to the sexual interaction that she flaunts as a possibility. Maybe all this is why they kept the title, I don’t know.
It’s all over pretty fast, anyway. I was left with that feeling oh “oh.. huh” that I also got from the Buffy season six/seven tie-in comics I read years ago. It does feel like a tie-in, I think is the problem, and I think the psychology of the various attractions to Jennifer (and her reactions to them) are set out a bit simplistically. Or maybe I mean straightforwardly? In Colin’s story, particularly, I felt like I was reading the bad sort of soap opera webcomic, where relationship dramas are settled by enormous speech bubbles of self-help book join-the-dots. This was a really bad comparison to draw, because I can;t link to a comic that I think does this sort of thing because that would be terribly rude. I think what I’m saying is that I felt that some of this book were too neatly drawn. And when I say ‘drawn’, I mean ‘written’.
Apart from the baffling aspects of Ahmet’s chapter, I think I recommend this book. It is, at the very least, an interesting artifact: the “but what about us?” response to a feminist slam of internalised misogyny’s effect on teenage sexuality. What about you, boys? You matter too, of course! And that’s why you should be on our side.
Oh, pee ess, the reason that I actually did turn out to write a review with no mention of the character design or wardrobe choices? Because it was apparently no-one’s priority here at all, and I barely noticed what anyone was wearing ever. Bah.
Sorry this got so long.
Ugh ugh ugh, sorry for the multiple edits! >_<
I had a sort of a job interview thing, today. Does it count if it is for a volunteer position? One day a week YES I SAY THAT IT DOES. So I wore my “I’m not asking you to look at me but I am still myself” fallback combo; sweater, wool skirt, dark lace tights. I might still fit in at a WW2 french resistance reenactment, but I don’t look like someone one might be nervous of working with. Hopefully. Well even apparently, because I am now an Assistant Appreciator! Hurrah! I cannot get over that title.
When I bought it this jacket was clearly a fixer-upper. I’ve mentioned I think that it was a third off because two seams had already given - I decided it was worth it, because trading a heck of a lot of patching for the awful, awful, hair-ripping experience that I KNOW sewing this fabric from scratch would be.
But! There are already three more holes to plug! One in the left sleeve in the crook of my elbow, two on the left-back seam. I appreciate the opportunity to finally place the beautiful silky patches I traded with my Japanese peers when I was eleven (Arden ‘98 International Guide Campers, represent!) and like I said I was wearing no rosy lenses when I bought it but honestly, Topshop? Bad form.
Bonus images!!!! Me tipping organic kitchen waste onto our compost heap! Dropping two boxes all over my feet! Pretending a cat did it! Don’t read this, Dad!
P.S. detail from yesterday: I take a joy in buying expensive clothes at discount prices and then wearing them until they get crunky and bobbled and holey like REAL CLOTHES.
We were playing Dynasty Warriors. Hence eyebeam of CONCENTRATION!
Once I went to a fancy dress party as Velma, and two different people asked if my hair was a wig. It was just my hair! I felt pretty proud, about that.
I am not paid - in money or in gifts or favours - to endorse anything here. If I was, I would be bad at it, because lying is ugly.
If you've commented here and it isn't showing up, it's not because I hate you! It's because either wordpress or 1and1 hate me. Give me a shout on claire [at] illustratorclaire.co.uk, or claire [at] britishstylebloggers.org.uk!
Oh, and by the way - I do tend to post on Sundays, so if you find that day a little net-empty.. check back? Great idea!
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