Some guy on facebook just discovered the whole Balpreet Kaur thing and now all these dudes are talking about how she should still shave her facial hair because that’s their opinion.

It looks like Sofia is finally controlling her talent instead of letting her talent control her. I’ll reserve judgement until I see it, but Mary Antoinette had such an interesting angle on the story but moved way too slow. It looks like having more than one character to focus on helps avoid that and this very special kind of female sense of irreverence gets to flicker and crackle through the story. 

So looking forward to it.

Holy fucking shit. Is there any way of, like, reporting people on OKC? Or at least flagging them as dangerous? ‘Cause YEAH, this guy is rather explicit about his implicit threat…

The thing that freaks me out the most is the sudden dissociation when getting into the rape threat part. I reported it.

I’m wearing a blazer in the picture he is talking about by the way. Not that it matters.

I’m trying to decide if I want to watch the current series. The Bells of Saint John just left such a bad taste in my mouth I stopped watching. But I’m bored and sleepy and the sharks are attacking. Maybe I’ll just skip to the finale? What other episodes are worth watching?

britticisms:

Inspired by a recent post from Alesia and my own recent experiences out at Primary, Smart Bar, and Beauty Bar, I wrote the below essay for WBEZ on nightlife culture and sexual assault in public places. 

(via wbez)

(Flickr/Randy Kennedy)

“All Night Long”

by Britt Julious

“I feel so stupid,” a friend began a couple of weeks ago. “This is not as bad as what you’ve gone through.”

Something happened and so we were discussing nightclubs, their safety (or lack thereof) and whether or not our reactions are justified. Her comment was not the first I heard of its kind. I had said a variation of it myself a few times. I began to rationalize the experience. Not only could the situation be worse, but the situation was not a situation at all. The situation was nothing. The situation was everything as it had always been.

I remember a conversation I had with my roommate from my sophomore year of college and a then-close friend.

“Well,” my roommate began, “Girls are kind of putting themselves in those situations by going out anyway.” I was confused how a woman of all people could say something like this. She was not joking. “What’s the issue?” she asked. Our friendship never recovered.

Last December, the music blog Little White Earbuds wrote a post titled “How Not to Treat Women in Nightclubs.” I read it after a night out at Primary for Sovereign, an eclectic monthly event featuring future bass, post-dubstep, and progressive techno. During the evening, I was cornered on the dance floor, forced to dance with a man I did not know. Earlier that year, rather than say “Hello,” a man came up to me and grabbed my bottom, hard. It was so pronounced a gesture, so aggressive, so callous, that I could not let it go. I yelled to make my presence known not just to him but to the other people in the room.

I thought about this in relation to a post by Alesia, a Tumblr user. She mentioned the disparity between female performers and the experiences of women in hyper-aggressive electronic shows. If you are a fan of this genre of music, eventually you experience this aggression, this sense of not belonging for to belong is to not notice the aggression at all. It is just a symptom of place and not, as I’ve come to understand it now, the perpetuation of exclusivity, violence, and misogyny that runs through various other facets of contemporary culture.

The dance floor is a place where you can be alone in public. It is anonymous as most anonymous experiences fuel a freedom of disappearance. There is a freedom to the dance floor, but that freedom comes and goes. It is not permanence, especially if you are a woman. Eventually, something will pull you out of the reverie and joy.

Music is our most relatable art form because it translates so easily to our everyday lives. Music is rhythm. It is the heartbeat, the breathing in and out, the movements of life over death. That there are so many genres of music only speaks to its importance. We find in it a voice. The dance floor then is the amalgamation of our tastes and secret desires. It is anonymity, freedom, and music. What we lose in these physical violations – what I have lost in these physical violations – is this perfect storm of place and aural pleasure and circumstance.

What does it mean to be safe, to feel safe? I ask myself this again and again. I am not used to this question. I’ve spent years out and about. Nightlife culture is not new to me. These sort of interactions are not new. There is a break in a young woman’s adolescence. Eventually, she learns that her arms and breasts and legs are not her own, but rather the world’s to digest and manipulate and touch and criticize.

Who gets to own themselves? Not women, not even on the dance floor. Assault on the dance floor says that certain spaces are for certain people. To insert yourself into this world is to seek out whatever might come of it for not truly belonging. We normalize aggressiveness. Our eyes are unseeing receptacles of the dance floor. With age comes understanding and with understanding comes dominance. I have better connected with myself. What I seek now is to take back what is rightfully mine, my body. What I seek is to dominate a world that has dominated me.

femminista:

Lauren Conrad answering mystery sack questions on SiriusXM (video)

Q: What’s your favorite position?

A: CEO

I’m sure she stole that from someone so I feel no guilt it taking it for myself.

(via theodore-lawrence)

girlwithalessonplan:

thankyoueducators:

#1 teacher rule.