March 2012
I am coming into school next week Friday dressed as a suffragette for ‘dress as an inspiration woman’ as a part of our week with grrrl power themed activities.
I don’t think I am going to chain myself to the school railings or anything BUT I am going to make a ‘Votes For Women’ sash to wear.
I am a little bit in love with Anna’s dad’s flatmate Laurie Penny who is a super-cool feminist journalist that writes glorious articles for the New Statesman.
It would probably be weird if I sent her a message declaring my love, right?
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My friend told me that in her physics class, these two boys kept on making dumb comments about women and feminism - supposedly a ‘joke’, but I don’t doubt that they actually hold some of those opinions - after which they apparently said ‘oh I hate it when feminists are all angry at us’.
Perhaps the reason that people are ANGRY AT YOU has something to do with the...
February 2012
Instead of going to school today, I discovered that the mother of one of my classmates writes a right-wing column for the Daily Mail (oh dear) and said that our healthcare system should be more like America (oh dear).
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valleywashtub asked: the west's attitude towards iran is bizarre, so uninformed... culturally it's the most interesting nation in the world (well i think so anyway)
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tigermilk01 asked: I hope I don't sound ignorant but does Iran have one national language, like brazil has portuguese?
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This summer, I am going to teach myself to read and write in Farsi (I can speak and understand it fluently, but I read at the level of a primary school child) so my mother can lend me great works of Iranian literature and history because I feel like I know woefully little about my own cultural background.
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“At this time, many young Iranians all over this world are watching us, and I...”
– Iranian film director ASGHAR FARHADI, on accepting his Academy Award for Best Foreign Film, a Separation (via inothernews)
(O.K. so this is a piece I wrote on women in the media, and I know it doesn’t cover everything I’d like to say on the issue but it’s meant to be quite short and for the school newspaper, so I’ll probably write about it in more detail on my grown-up girl blog whenever I have time.)
The Bechdel test is a simple way of looking at the representation of women in the film...
Anonymous asked: Are you still going to do your Zine for Dreamers?
I wore my vomit pink blouse to school today and my darling history teacher called me a princess (we talk about the Shangri-Las and discuss politics together).
Nothing else remotely interesting occurred today.
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“In August of 1990 I found myself laying on my stomach in the woods with a pair...”
– Kathleen Hanna, Our Hit Parade
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I am a bit worried about ‘International Women’s Day’ thing and our feminism inspired issue of the school newspaper.
Even though one of the main reasons we’re doing it is to say ‘identifying as a feminist ≠ an evil, fun loathing man-hater’, I am not looking forward to hearing things like when that guy said on twitter ’start a feminist club at our sixth...
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Anonymous asked: what foods can't you eat? I can't eat loads of different foods. It's really hard to cope with and what makes it worse is every time i have lunch everyone saying 'why can't you eat?', 'what's your problem', 'eugh that's so annoying just eat it!'
My horrible uncle and his equally horrible girlfriend have invited themselves round and in the first five minutes of their arrival, they managed to mock my interest in philosophy and journalism as well as criticise my mother so I have just given up on being polite to them.
I don’t think sitting in my room blasting Bikini Kill is helping the whole situation though, whatever.
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(I already have most of my playlist done, but) what are your ultimate grrrl power songs?
What’s worse is that I look at photographs of myself from when I was twelve and even though I know that I was extremely underweight from you know, not eating very much, I am sometimes sickeningly envious of my figure then.
I think all the effects of that still linger, especially because I still have quite a restrictive diet - it’s like deeply uncomfortable when people bring it up in...
I want to not care about my weight because I know that I am “o.k” and I know that this expectation to be very thin is one placed by the media, but I cannot help it again.
I have been having this horrible relationship with my body since I was eleven and I’m terrified that I am going to lapse into old bad habits.
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pauljulian asked: what is it like to live in london?
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beirutmoon:
People that make “jokes” about women and how they’re only useful for sandwiches
Oh yeah that’s so hilarious, think of that all by yourself did you? Oh no wait, of course you didn’t, because it’s been said a million times before and is just another syptom of a society that routinely oppresses and demeans the female gender
But hey, you started the joke by saying “I’m not sexist but…”...
A beautiful sunny day to stay indoors listening to Belle and Sebastian whilst forcing yourself to study for mocks.
There’s a second hand bookshop by school that pretty much devours all of my money because I cannot help myself from wandering in during lunch breaks. I bought volumes one and two of a history of women in Europe from prehistory until the present, along with a glorious leather backed edition of Rupert Brooke’s complete poems with a memoir from 1925. I also wanted to buy a book called...
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On the tube home from Camden, this horribly creepy man sat down next to me and put his hand on my thigh to clutch it and leer at me.
Usually, I would ignore things like that because I am worried that confrontation will just provoke them even more, but I was in a horrible mood thanks to transport issues already and the tube was coming into the station as well, so I just stood up and told him to...
Anonymous asked: Seriously you are so inspiring, I wish people at my sixthform were like you!
Anonymous asked: you'd be so pissed off if a boyzzz united club was set off though
I AM SO EXCITED, LUCY AND I ARE SETTING UP OUR FEMINISM COMMITTEE!
It is currently called GRRRLS UNITED, but it is for everyone including the small number of boys in our sixth form - and we are going to have so much fun running a Women’s Week in March!
So far we are: creating a special dedicated issue of the school newspaper about it and I am writing about women in media + cool grrrl role...
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Despite the fact that Louis Theroux and lots of brilliant people signed a petition, More4 says that it will continue showing the Daily Show in the annoying ‘Global Edition’. I JUST WANT TO WATCH ENTIRE EPISODES OF THE DAILY SHOW ON TELEVISION AND THEN BE ABLE TO TALK ABOUT JON STEWART AT SCHOOL THE NEXT DAY WITH PEOPLE KNOWING WHAT IT IS.
The problem about living in the U.K. is that...
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My ambition is to be a kick ass journalist who writes columns calling David Cameron a lizard and recites poems pointing out the hypocrisy of the Sun on live television (and maybe marry a former Blue Peter presenter too).
Once I announce that we’re planning to do something for International Women’s Day at school, I am just going to wait for someone to say ‘what about men’s day, huh?’ sigh.
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I had the very surreal experience of fulfilling the childhood dream of pretty much every student ever by going into the staff room at school.
It wasn’t that glorious, but I am going to make lots of people envious by creating outlandish rumours about it i.e. they have a bar in and spend all their free periods doing drinking games to people’s dumb essays, they have secret cameras around...
I am missing a super fun double philosophy lesson to attend a long church service.
I mean, we have ours at the gloriously famous Westminster Abbey and it’s stunningly beautiful to look at the church, but the services just drag on and the sermons are either dull or offensive (like the one where the woman said ‘ALL GIRLS JUST STARE IN THE MIRROR, WHICH DISPLEASES GOD’) and I give...
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Anonymous asked: do you like the way you look?
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I have seriously become known as the dreary misery chick at school.
Once, this girl that I hardly know just walked up to me, stared deep into my eyes in an awkwardly intense manner and said ‘when I look at you, I just see Sylvia Plath’.
I have been in a dreary, dreamy sort of sleep deprived state today but the debate after school today (on ‘are the London Olympics are a drain?’, and ‘should a fat tax be imposed?’) was just exhilarating and I spoke fairly well and coherently.
There was this guy on my team from another school that was just prancing across the hall as he made his speech,...
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I’ve still only done about an eight of my philosophy research project that I have now left until the day it’s due, but I am remarkably calm.
I am more worried about what’s going to happen at the end of this episode of Grey’s Anatomy than I am about not finishing this horrible and complex presentation.
Just because you do A-Levels does not mean that you are allowed to be superior and smug and condescending, making stupid remarks like ‘oh you think GCSEs are hard? wait until A-Levels you silly year elevens!’
A-Levels are obviously harder than GCSEs in terms of the complexity of the course and the workload, etc. - like duh, that’s the point of them, but that doesn’t mean...
There is a girl in my year that I strongly dislike (the same person who said that Ian McEwan was a sex addict) who just described Plath like ‘well, sylvia plath innit, so basically some crazy woman…’ and made lots of callous remarks about her mental state.
I don’t understand why she’s taking English if she cannot at least appreciate brilliant authors, even if she...
I will do literally anything to get out of doing this work.
I just allowed my sister to spend twenty minutes outlining the precise reasons why she’s meant to be with Justin Bieber.
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“He [Rick Santorum] is a staunch opponent of abortion, even in the case of rape....”
– John Oliver on Rick Santorum, The Bugle 183
(Personally, my favourite part was when John Oliver sang ‘Independent Women’.)
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Lucy and I are going to organise something rad at school for International Women’s Day (8 March)! It’s more fun planning out assemblies and projects for that than it is doing my actual coursework - like we want to talk about the Suffragettes, as the students at lower will have studied them, to link to the issues that women face in the UK and around the world.
Also, we’ll have a...
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I don’t want to be a feminist anymore. Like a five-year-old, I want to close my eyes, stick my fingers in my ears, stomp my feet on the floor and scream “No! No, you cannot make me, I won’t, leave me alone!” I am, simply put, too tired. So very, very tired.
I am tired of fighting with my friends. I am tired of arguing that someone groping and slapping my butt isn’t “what I have to expect”, just...
I don’t want to go back to school, this week was nice because I wasn’t around people that cause me to lose faith in humanity with their ignorance and intolerance.