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I was watching Skins on SBS just now - for the first time. I suspect I’ve been missing something I’d have liked, and I’m not sure why I never tuned in before. Anyway, Cass and the crew were having a dinner party and someone (I don’t know all the characters’ names) remarked - “just like adults”.
I can remember when I was at uni in the early 90s, and a sudden dinner party craze hit certain circles I moved in. I don’t think it was that anyone was a stellar cook, and the cooking wasn’t necessarily the point of attraction, but more the sort of enactment of an “adult” ritual. If there was any generation that really did the whole postmodern performative irony thing, it was us Gen X kids. We were caught on the cusp of a transition between fairly fixed social patterns - of our parents’ generation - and complete fluidity and the decay of practices and traditions to the extent where they don’t even have sufficient force for (affectionate) parody to have much meaning. When does “adulthood” begin now, and what marks the transition? Are there bourgeois signifiers like joining service clubs, and dressing for dinner? It’s pretty hard to grasp the force of some of Bunuel’s movies from the sixties which parallel a culture which now seems aeons distant in terms of its purchase on living tradition and lived experience.
Anyway, it was all kinda fun, and I have fond memories of some of these nights, including the notorious naked dinner party on Hawken Drive (which I’ll write about one day, maybe, in pursuing my argument that Gen X was more nekkid than Gen Y). One day, we still have to do the Edwardian dinner party, and indeed the Mrs Beeton’s dinner party. They’ll be about wine and dressing up more than food, I think.
As a bit of a segue from my link to Eye on Big Brother’s last post, I was thinking a bit about Bianca and her body image issues, something I’ve discussed before. At one stage during Big Brother 2008, the narrative centred on Bianca’s breasts - her worries about her own body shape, her ambivalence about breast reduction surgery, and her displacement of her own troubled embodiment into criticism of Brigette and Rebecca and the other surgically enhanced FHM wannabes the show loved to cast over the last few years. She also had a bit of an awareness of how the womens’ bodies on the show functioned as signifiers of potential celebrity, and as objects to be scrutinised and traded among the men on the show - and implicitly the male viewers, though she didn’t really thematise this as such. Partly what was going on here was her own self-image and character work as “the smart chick”, but it’s also, when you reflect on it, I think, a classic example of how “society” is conceived in popular culture. I mentioned Rebecca Wilson’s comments on all the boob talk:
I think it was on the very first Big Brother Big Mouth this year that Rebecca Wilson asked whether it was normal for teenage and twenty-something women to talk so much about their breasts. She said that she couldn’t recall such discussions occurring when she was in her twenties.
Continue reading ‘Bianca and Big Brother body politics’
There’s been some (rather entertaining) discussion on a recent thread about alternative names for mainstream media blogs. After all, they really are a different sphere, aren’t they? Coincidentally, and it’s a happy coincidence, a guest Hoyden at Hoyden About Town has posted a very comprehensive guide to how to attain that bloggy success you’ve always hankered after. And the rules aren’t all that complex. One of the important tips - men blog about sport and politics, and women blog about dating. However, some things transcend the gender of the writer:
Now whether a male or female writer, one simply *must* make all sorts of gender generalisations, mostly about de wimenz.
The really comforting advice is that you don’t need to write all that much at all. Continue reading ‘“The bitch from Prada”’
In breaking news, marketing drones continue to lack imagination, sticking to the apparently conventional wisdom that if you want women to buy things that both men and women tend to use and want, just run up a version in pink and do a fluffy/flowery/frilly ad campaign. Butterflies are good. In June last year (in an essay provoked by the launch of a special shopping flight from London to Paris named Fly Pink) the Guardian’s Vicky Frost summed up the extension of pinkification from childhood to adult women as follows:
It is now possible for women to experience their entire day in pink. You can work out with a pink yoga mat and weights; adorn your windscreen wipers with pink wiper wings; cook dinner on a pink George Foreman grill and style your hair with hot-pink hair straighteners. You can even see off would-be attackers with a powder-pink Taser gun.
My response to the whole Fly Pink concept was this photo-essay, Puking Up Pink. Documentations of the pink consumer ghetto on feminist blogs abound, especially the Pink Alley in toy departments, but it is the continued extension of pinkified marketing into the adult world which is being most keenly examined. Twisty anayses the latest version she’s found: women’s vodka.
Continue reading ‘Creeping pinkification: “the persistent feminization of unisex commodities”’
Following on from the revival of the condemnation feature, here’s a resurrection of another irregular feature we haven’t done for a long time - the Casuistry Challenge. This post from Lindsay at Majikthise just popped up in my google reader:
Young goth couple wins attention sweepstakes
In the age of the Internet, something as simple as getting kicked off the bus in costume can attract global attention. Well played, kids.
Now, I wouldn’t have bothered linking if the story was just one about some intolerant bus driver not liking gothy kids. But I looked a bit more closely at the photo, and noticed that they were chained together - which is something that I haven’t seen. Though, as I later discovered, they’re not chained together as I thought, he’s holding a leash and she’s wearing a collar.
So I clicked through to Lindsay’s source and found this at Jezebel:
A young British woman, Tasha Maltby, identifies as the “human pet” of her 25-year-old fiance, even allowing him to lead her around on a leash (which is more of a chain, but yeah). But the “real” reason that Maltby, 19, is in the news is because she and her intended, Dani Graves (a 25-year-old guy) were kicked off a bus by a freaked out driver. Says Maltby: “I am a pet. I generally act animal-like and I lead a really easy life. I don’t cook or clean and I don’t go anywhere without Dani. It might seem strange but it makes us both happy. It’s my culture and my choice. It isn’t hurting anyone.” True ‘dat?
Discuss.
Read all about it over at PollieGraph!
Crossposted at LP in exile, where readers may leave comments during LP’s server woes!
Mel at Footpath Zeitgeist* has a post up about the ethics of fashion:
There has been more and more mainstream media coverage lately about issues of ethics in fashion, which is giving consumers this kind of knowledge. Sue Thomas’s opinion piece lays out most of the main things that consumers should consider, and there was a recent Sunday lifestyle story (which I can’t seem to find online) directly comparing the environmental footprint of various fabrics (taking into account the water and energy needed to grow and/or process them into fabrics, the energy to transport them to factories and retail outlets, their durability (hence how often they’d need to be replaced) and the energy, water and detergents needed to launder them. I remember taking from this article that organic cotton used extravagant amounts of water and that polyester was surprisingly environmentally friendly because of its durability and the fact that old garments can be broken down and recycled into new synthetic fabric.
It’s an interesting post that argues that the ethics of fashion are not straightforward.
Adding to this complexity, in addition to couture, ready-to-wear, knockoffs and vintage we need now consider the ethics of online fashion.
Continue reading ‘Ready to download?’
According to Yen Magazine, the 90s are back. Or something. (Actually from a bit of shopping recently, I think the 80s are back - skinny knit ties or puffy sleeved dresses, anyone?)… Anyway, since the last time we had a federal Labor government it was very unashamedly 90s (coz it was in the 90s…), how was the world different? Was Australia another country? What were you doing? What was the zeitgeist?
Continue reading ‘Free your inner Winona’
Never thought I’d be writing a post here based on a conversation with my hairdresser (but then I never thought I’d live to see the Immigration minister openly avowing that African refugees are less welcome here than other kinds or that we’d be making prospective citizens sit an embarrassingly banal and pompous citizenship test, either.)
Anyway, the day before yesterday I went to have my hair cut and coloured at the campus hairdressers, and was very surprised to find out that the woman who had owned and run the salon for fifteen years had sold it last week, and the new owner was doing my hair. While I was in there four different people came in wanting to use the solarium, and to my initial surprise, all were turned away. Because they’d paid in advance for lots of sessions, one or two went off a bit disgruntled, even though the new owner took their details to send them refund cheques. She told me that she’s getting rid of the tanning bed as soon as she can, and she won’t be replacing it with a spray-tan booth either. “I don’t think it sends a good message to the students,” she explained. She went on to say that since the death of Clare Oliver last month a huge grass roots change has begun to take place in the salon industry in Victoria in terms of its attitude to solarium tanning. The small to medium operators are getting out of the business. She thought it would be next to impossible for her to dispose of the salon’s tanning bed by selling it, and she added that even if she’d wanted to continue offering tanning sessions, she wouldn’t have been able to justify paying the massive increase in the salon’s insurance premium which sunbeds are now attracting.
In Victoria, South Australia, and I understand federally, there are indications that bills will soon be put forward to regulate the solarium industry, but, happily, it almost looks as if sunbed numbers and usage might be declining under the more enduring influence of market forces and public opinion anyway.
So, since we don’t live by politix alone (I sincerely hope), what did people get up to this weekend? Join in, share some tales, regulars and lurkers all! Mine was much less frenetic than last weekend, and I enjoyed a wander round some of Paddington’s vintage clothing/antique shops yesterday. I hadn’t realised before seeing this hat box at the Paddington Antique Centre that it was apparently obligatory for the well dressed man about town of the 1920s to wear lots of blush and lippie to the races as well as his Henderson hat.
Continue reading ‘Lazy Sunday’
If you need further proof that the decade about to be mentioned was the worst ever, have a look at Super Bodies: Heroic Fashion of the 1980s. Showing at the National Gallery of Victoria until 3 February 2008, the small exhibition is a reminder of how male fashion designers like Jean Paul Gaultier have a fetish for masculinising the female form. About the only reprieve from the sharp-shouldered suits with lapels is a black corset dress that gives the observer the impression they are stuck in Madonna’s closet circa “Vogue”.
Continue reading ‘What’s going down in Melbourne town’
I’m sure by now you’ve all read about the young model chosen for the Gold Coast Fashion Week, how could you miss the headlines? Yep, just about everyone was out there trying to save the young lady from a life of salad leaves, ciggies, coke, rock and roll boyfriends, Karl Lagerfeld and Ian Thorpe.
Even John Howard and Kevin Rudd were asked to opine on this great matter of state.
But the Prime Minister, John Howard, told Melbourne radio: “I think that is way too young and I don’t think it should happen.” Mr Howard said introducing a ban on models younger than 16 in fashion shows, as some European countries have done, “would make a lot of sense”, adding: “There should be age limits … We do have to preserve some notion of innocence in our society, surely. Catapulting girls as young as 12 into something like that is quite outrageous and I am totally opposed to it.”
Yes for a week poor Maddison became the sum of everyones fears and Howard and Rudd were happy to oblige a few quotes in this climate of moral panic. But now the parents have struck back with a veiled threat and a great punch line.
“Without knowing us, how dare they make those comments,” Mrs Gabriel said. “I would suggest both of them contact my family before they make any more defamatory remarks about us. We as a family deserve an apology from both of them.
“As politicians, you would expect that they would know how things would be misrepresented and maybe they should have known what our side of the story is before they made those types of comments.
“I believe the Prime Minister is getting very doddery. He does not know exactly what 13- and 14-year-old girls are like. I used to vote for him.”
Boom Tish! Anyway, Maddison did a turn on the catwalk last night, that of course is as it should be given the obvious parental involvement and supervision.
Having just finished invigilating an exam at Bjelke-Petersen Memorial University of Suburban South-East Queensland, I am reminded of an anecdote told by a colleague who invigilated a mid-year exam at the same university.
Said colleague observed a female student sitting the exam, wearing a medium-length skirt, and intermittently hitching up the skirt and looking at her thigh. At one point the colleague glimpsed what were presumably crib notes written on the students’ thigh. Being a gentleman of reasonably senior years and great circumspection in his conduct towards students, he was at a loss as to what to do. The student was almost certainly cheating, yet he was unable to think of a non-offensive way to ask her to show him the crib notes. And if he had, this would still have left the problem of finding a non-offensive way to secure the evidence in a form usable by the Course Convenors and other University decision-makers.
A form of cheating such as this clearly defeats all attempts at detection and penalisation. The only remedy would seem to be prevention, namely the imposition of an exam dress code which requires the wearing of long trousers for students of both genders. At University level this should be unproblematic.
Continue reading ‘Striking an oblique blow against the patriarchy’
And you thought Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee was only running because, like Bill Clinton, he’s a former Governor of Arkansas?
Think again - Rachel Maddow from Air America has the good oil.
Continue reading ‘Do American women need a national dress code?’
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