Can You Blog It? Yes You Can!

Someone asked me about starting their own blog this morning, and asked specifically, "But isn't starting a blog cliche?" To save that poor person from having to read a barrage of Facebook messsages, this post is my response. 

Short version: No, it's not. If you want to do it, do it. It doesn't matter if a million other people are blogging, or none. If blogging means something to you, if you have things to say that you need to say, then just say them. Damn the man, damn the haters, and blog it anyway.

Long version: I feel like the question "Isn't it cliche?" is actually a couple of other questions in disguise. What you're really asking when you ask this is, "Isn't wanting to force my opinions on other people obnoxious?" and "Do I really have anything worth saying, when so many other people are talking already?"

The first question is easy to answer. No, it's not obnoxious to start a blog. It's just opening a Blogger or Wordpress account, typing in some words, and hitting publish. There's nothing inherently obnoxious about it, it's a neutral action. There are obnoxious ways to go about it - insisting everyone refer to you as "Blogger Extraordinaire", or refusing to talk about anything else with anyone for months at a time, for example. But the act of starting a blog, of carving out a little space for your voice, is not obnoxious. This fear of being obnoxious applies to men as well, but I've noticed it's particularly prevalent in women. Women are specifically taught by the patriarchal society we live in that their voices are less important, that their thoughts are less worthwhile, and that they should take up as little space as possible. 

As Chimananda Ngozi Adichie put it, "We teach girls to shrink themselves, to make themselves smaller. We say to girls, 'You can have ambition, but not too much. You should aim to be successful, but not too successful. Otherwise you will threaten the man." Putting our thoughts in a blog is audacious, and in direct opposition to this idea that we should be small. That's why it feels uncomfortable - but also why you should give it a shot.

Which brings me to the second question -"Do I really have anything worth saying, when so many other people are talking already?" Honestly, I don't know. Maybe you don't. Maybe everything you want to say is already being said in exactly the same way you would say it, by someone else. But somehow, given the variety of humanity, I doubt that.

You don't have to be an expert in whatever you want to write about - oftentimes writing about the journey of learning how to do what you want to do can be just as interesting as a flawless How To. You want to write a baking blog, but you can't bake? That's okay, write about your baking disasters! People love cake wrecks, they really do.

Maybe no one will read it. I can't promise you massive readership, or popularity, or huge mainstream success. But if you're blogging about what you want to see, expressing the things you feel you need to say, then I can promise you one thing: satisfaction.

If you're wanting to start a blog because it seems like the thing to do, but you don't have anything you really want to say, then my advice is don't. If you don't bring anything of yourself to your blog, then it will be boring, and it will be obnoxious. But if there's something you need to say, that you want to say, something you want to see in the world that you can't see out there yet, then go ahead and do it. Are you a plus sized person of colour with a physical disability who wishes there were more beauty blogs from your point of view? (Hell, considering how whitewashed beauty blogging is, you might feel this way just for being a person of colour) Then do it yourself! Start that thing, make what you want to see real. 

Can You Blog it? Yes You Can!

Self Esteem, Selfies, and Teenage Monsters

I was asked last week to weigh in on the apparently endless debate about selfies. This time it was a blessed change from the "are the selfies feminist" discussion; instead the issue at hand was The Children. "Selfies are ruining our children's self esteem" was the main gist of the discussion, and I'm sure you can probably guess where my opinion fell. But it got me wondering how differently I might have viewed myself if I'd had access to digital cameras, beauty apps, and Instagram when I was growing up. I can safely say these things didn't effect my pubescent self esteem because I simply didn't have access to them. But what if I had?

I was an enormously self conscious teenager - I'm sure this is hardly a shock. I've met very, VERY few people who didn't feel like some sort of hideous monster for most of puberty. Being self conscious and concerned with your appearance is just something that comes with being a teenager for a lot of people - I don't think technology created that, and personally I don't think technology is necessarily making it much more prevalent. I've meet teenagers now who insist on wearing makeup all the time so they'll look "acceptable" on Instagram - but there were plenty of girls in school with me who insisted on wearing makeup all the time to be "acceptable" just for showing up to school. I don't have children, so I wouldn't presume to tell anyone how to raise theirs. But I can offer my own experience as someone who grew up during the transition from film, offline photography to the digital, share everything age. I'm sure there are some people who have been adversely effected by the increased availability and focus on selfies. But speaking for myself, as photography became more flexible, dynamic, and all pervasive, I found my acceptance of my own image evolving right alongside the technology. Far from making me more self conscious or self loathing, taking a metric shitload of selfies has made me more comfortable in my skin than I've ever been.

As with pretty much any rapidly changing technology, the "rise of selfies" has been trumped as something to panic about in recent years. The fact is though that selfies are not a new thing. At all.  Even assuming we're limiting the definition of "selfies" to photographs rather than paintings, the very first one was taken in 1839, by an amateur photographer named Robert Cornelius.

Turns out Mr. Cornelius was kind of a fox.

By the time I was attempting to navigate the twisted morass of "growing up", photo technology had come a fair way since Mr. Cornelius ducked awkwardly in front of his camera. There were technically digital cameras around, but I didn't have access to one until I was well into my 20's. There were, however, plenty of film cameras around. Disposable cameras were available everywhere, and relatively cheap, so I had a fair few opportunities to fool around with these as a teenager.

I still have at least one of these hanging around undeveloped..

Something about film photography that's hard to explain to people who've never done it is just how  painfully slow, rigid, and unforgiving it is. You only get 24 chances on a roll to get a picture right, and there's no way to preview the results before it's developed. You'd just have to wait and see. Assuming you take the roll to a photo shop to be developed the very instant you finish taking the pictures, it would be a 2 hour wait to see your results at the VERY least. More likely you'd be waiting a couple of days, even a week to see how any of the photos came out.

Once the picture was developed, for the average photographer, there was no changing it. Photo manipulation is, technically, as old as photography itself, and there have always been certain techniques available to alter photographs after developing.

An example of tools used for these early photo manipulations

However, very few amateur photographers would have been getting out the gouache and charcoal sticks. Most people using film cameras, especially to take selfies,  just took a picture, crossed their fingers, and hoped for the best. This process didn't exactly encourage a great deal of experimentation, especially if you didn't have a lot of money to spend on developing endless rolls of unusable pictures. However, the rigidity of film photos did give them an air of undeniable truth - if it was in a photo, it was assumed to be true. There was a perception that cameras don't lie (even though there are actually hundreds of examples of film photographs being complete bunkum), an idea that they could only capture what's really there. The physicality, the difficulty for the average photographer to change a photo once it was taken, gave film photos a certain authority.

The authoritarian perception and extraordinarily slow process of film photography, could be pretty unhelpful for a developing young teenage ego. Any photographer will tell you that the same person can look VASTLY different depending on poses, lighting, expressions, outfits and makeup. The camera might not lie outright, but it only ever shows part of the whole, and sometimes not the part you'd prefer it to show. It takes time and experimentation to figure out how to take a photo that highlights the parts of you that you like best. As a teenager, I would sometimes only get my picture taken once or twice a year, because it was a pain in the backside to pull out the camera, get the film developed, get the pictures back.  It was also super awkward to try and take them of myself, when I couldn't even tell if it was in focus or not until I got it developed. Taking photos was largely something saved for "occasions", and I only played around with photos of myself for fun every now and then. As a result, there are maybe 20, 30 pictures in existence of me between 14 and 18. How could I possibly figure out what poses, what lighting, what expressions worked for me with a data pool that tiny? I had no idea what suited me, so naturally the majority of the photos taken when I was a teenager were dreadfully unflattering. To my malleable teenage mind, this meant that OBVIOUSLY I was hideous. I mean, there was undeniable proof, in those photos, right there! The camera doesn't lie! I believed that film photos showed the "real" me, and the "real" me was ugly.

Good grief, that was appalling hair. Lookit my wittle button nose tho!

The arrival of digital photography changed so much about how people take photos in general, and definitely changed the whole way I personally viewed photography.  As someone who began taking photos with film and later moved to digital, I can tell you that simply being able to see the photo immediately completely changed the way I approached photography. Not sure if that shot came out in focus? No worries, check it out, delete if need be, and take another. There's always another shot available, you can always try one more time. The pressure to make every frame count is completely dissipated, and  suddenly I felt free to experiment, try new things, to play around. The rate at which you learn what does and doesn't work for you in a selfie is sped up exponentially when using a digital camera. Instead of having to wait a couple of days to learn new things (positive or negative), you can see the results and adapt immediately. The ever expanding storage capacity of each new generation of digital cameras encouraged me to take more and more photos, and with every photo I learned more.

Hmm, if I tilt my head to the side, it makes my cheekbones really stand out...

Whoops, that's too far. Less tilt needed!

I could see in these photos proof that my image was fluid, changeable. With film photos I always seemed to make the same face, and stand in the same way, probably because I had so little practice I just automatically snapped into "photo mode". But when playing with a digital camera of my own, I had the flexibility to try a million different things, to see just how different I could make myself look. Sometimes my experiments went well, and I thought I looked good in the results. Sometimes I thought I looked awful, and deleted the pictures just as fast as I could. Sometimes my selfies turned out not "pretty" as such, but interesting all the same.

At this stage though, my selfies were still relatively isolated. I was one of those people that refused to get a mobile with a camera in it until the very last possible moment, because I didn't see the point in discarding my trusty Nokia 2210 until it was literally falling apart. This meant my selfies were all taken on my stand alone camera, and had to be transferred to my desktop for resizing and possibly a little tinkering before I could share them. It also meant my online presence was relatively small - it was kind of a pain to have to sit down and specifically "be online", so I mostly hung around small, sheltered online spaces where I already knew everyone.

Then I got a net capable phone, with a camera, and seemingly in the blink of an eye - well, a blink of my ancient, slow eyes anyway - my social world exploded. Taking the leap from a stand alone digital camera to a net enabled mobile phone camera meant my self portraits could now be taken literally anywhere, at any time, with no forward planning required. With a tap of the screen, I take a picture of my lunch, share it across five different social networks, and see people's responses without putting my sandwich down. With the explosion of photo manipulation apps available now, I often don't even have to stop walking to touch up or resize a photo anymore, let alone transfer it to a desktop computer. I can take a photo, review it, manipulate it and share it all in a couple of minutes from the one device. Some of you probably think that's totally normal, but I'm sure at least some of you are old enough to understand what a staggering development this is.

Back in my day, we could "run out of film"!

Naturally, since it's so ludicrously easy to take selfies and share them now, lots of people are doing it, and some are doing it quite a lot. Self portrait photography is no longer a specific activity requiring specific equipment for a lot of people - it's just a part of their everyday lives, as is the inevitable feedback that comes from sharing anything in a public place. About here is where a lot of concerned parents groups start getting a bit panicked. Phrases like "camera ready generation" start getting thrown around, and people fret that now they're taking photos of everything all the time teenagers will be obsessed with always looking as attractive as possible. Parents (understandably) freak out that their teenagers are posting pictures and being told they're ugly, and that this will ruin their self esteem forever.

I can't honestly say that I think parents are wrong to worry. There is some nasty fucking shit, and some dreadful fucking people out there, who love nothing better than pissing on other people's self esteem. Bullies and assholes are not a new phenomenon, and being picked on as a teenager is hardly new either, but sharing selfies online does open you up to an extraordinary volume of assholes. It used to be you only had to worry about the bully at your school - now you can be attacked by someone on the other side of the world without even leaving your room. It can be enormously dangerous, and very possibly harmful to squishy little teenage minds and their baby soft self esteem.

It's not all assholes and nasty comments out there on the Big Wide Internet though, and I think the positives of sharing selfies are often brushed over in favour of focusing on the potential negatives.
Since getting a net capable phone with a camera, and especially since starting this blog, I've shared approximately a million pictures of myself online. I'll often take five or six pictures of myself before I even get to work at the moment - although to be fair that's largely so I can capture my makeup before I forget I'm wearing it and rub it all over my face.  I've taken so many photos of myself, both for fun and for this blog, that I know what I look like from pretty much every angle, under every light - and some of these angles are not pretty.

Ack, I'm all forehead!

Wait, now I'm all chin

Agghh, ENORMOUS cheekbones!

In addition to learning my bad sides though, I also know now there are angles from which I look rather pretty indeed. I've even practiced enough that I can recreate the most flattering ones at will. I've played around with the so-called beauty apps, and had a glimpse of what I would look like with airbrushed skin, or ludicrous manga size eyes.

I gotta tell you, the size of my eyes in this picture kind of creeps me out

Do I have flawless skin, or is the saturation so blown out you can't see anything?
You'll never know the truth!

Playing with apps, and Photoshop in general, has given me a much clearer understanding of what's behind the curtain of the airbrushed photos I see in the media around me. We all know intellectually that they're retouched and altered - but there's always a little part of you that wonders how much. If you don't know what sort of enormous changes can be achieved with photo manipulation, it's hard to really visualise how models can look before retouching. There are a lot of before and after demonstrations around on the net, but speaking for myself, doing it to my own face was so much more compelling than seeing it demonstrated on a stranger. I would like to think that running their selfies through a beauty app could demonstrate the same thing for a teenager.

I've taken photos from every angle, good, bad, and indifferent. I've tinkered with my image until it's unrecognisable, then put it back together again. Digital photography and selfies have allowed me to collect such a huge pool of data that it's became impossible for me to define myself as truly "ugly" anymore - I no longer believe believe that photos show the "real" me, because I've captured so much variation I don't think there is such a thing as a definite, "real" me. There's only how I look right now, and I find that enormously comforting and reassuring. If I don't like how I look right at this second, it's okay because in five minutes I'll probably look different. If I don't like how I look then either, I can tinker with the photo until I do like it. I can create my own image, exactly how I want it, and that sort of control is absolutely thrilling.

Sharing my selfies has also been enormously comforting and reassuring, for me. I know that not everyone is so lucky, and as I mentioned previously, there is a big wide pool of assholes out there who are all too ready to put in their two cents. As much as they would hate to admit though, the assholes are not the whole of the internet. There is enormous good that can be done, and comfort that can be shared by sharing images that counter popular media. The way people, especially women, are depicted in mass media doesn't look like any person I've ever seen, but sharing selfies is a way for everyone to help fill the gaps left by advertising and movies. This is particularly relevant for teenagers trying to get a sense of who they are and how they fit in the world.

 

As I said previously, I thought I was a grotesque monster when I was a teenager. Comparing yourself to people as they're portrayed in mass media is always a losing game, but I did it anyway. I didn't look like any of them, and I thought I was the one that was wrong. Comparing myself to the people I knew in meatspace didn't help either. There were only 40 kids in my year, so let's say there were about 20 girls my age in my town that I could compare myself to. Unsurprisingly, given the enormous variety humans are capable of, I didn't look like any of them either. I thought I MUST be the one who was misshaped, malformed, because I couldn't see anyone who looked like me. But now I can open Tumblr and see 20 people who look just like me go scrolling past, in outfit posts or makeup shots or just plain "I feel cute" selfies. I know it's not just me who's made like this, and that makes me feel so much better about this funny squishy body I'm in. Having access to so much more data has changed the way I view myself for the better - I don't feel like a monster anymore.

An enormous dork, for sure. But not a monster.

This potential effect of sharing selfies is one of the reasons I make a point of sharing unflattering photos of myself every now and then, especially if they're funny. I don't want people looking at my blog or my Twitter and thinking I look perfectly poised all the time - because I most certainly don't, and neither does anyone else. Just because you haven't brushed your hair today is no reason you That  can't join in the sharing too! I was inspired to share unflattering pictures by other (braver) people who did it first, and I hope that by joining in, I can help inspire other people to keep the cycle going and see just how much of the wstaggering variety that is human beings we can capture.

Keep in mind when I talk about how much sharing selfies has done for my self esteem that I'm white, cisgender, and have no major physical disabilities. I did essentially look like everyone else in my town as a teenager, as much I didn't think so at the time. I was essentially playing the self esteem game on one of the easier settings. If being exposed to the diversity of images that widespread selfies offers changed my life so much, imagine what it could do for teenagers growing up in places where they don't essentially look like everyone else - for teenagers playing on a much harder setting than I did.

So are the positives worth the negatives for teenagers trying to navigate puberty and come out the other side with some sort of self esteem? I can't speak for every teenager, but speaking for myself, I wish I'd had access to the net and selfies and all the good that comes from sharing and viewing them as a teenager. I think it would have taken a lot less time for me to realise that I'm not a monster, and that I never really was.

What do you think? Would you, or do you approve of your children sharing selfies on social media? Do you wish you'd been able to do all this yourself as a teenager? Are you a teenager currently wishing photos were much less easily shareable? Do you think the good outweighs the potential negatives?

Indie Feminism

Last Sunday, an amazing hashtag sprung up on Twitter, in the wake of the horrific killings in Santa Barbara (allegedly) committed by loud and proud misogynist Elliot Rogers. One brave woman (who's now predictably had to go into hiding) started an online conversation talking about how widespread male violence and harassment of women really is, using the hastag #YesAllWomen. Stories poured in, much faster than anyone could possibly read them all. @RahRah wrote a deeply moving piece that I think captures the sheer overwhelming volume of this outpouring, and naturally, I got good and involved.

At first it was thrilling to be a part of a conversation so huge, to know that there were so many other women out there with experiences just like mine. But then the trolls arrived, and it quickly turned from exciting to frustrating, to stressful, to distressing. By Friday I was just DONE. I couldn't handle one more man telling me how I should do feminism better, one more asshole calling Mr.Reluctant Femme names for defending feminism, one more cowardly deadshit telling my friends who've been assaulted that they deserved it. I usually put a great deal of effort into remaining reasonable when I talk about feminism. I don't actually think saying things like "Kill All Men" is all that helpful. But I was burned out, angry, hurt, and just DONE. I was really starting to feel like killing all men. So I made this, because it made me laugh and I needed a laugh.

In case you can't read it, the little label says "Male Tears"

Season of the Coven

It's been a while since I've done one of my patented Polish+ posts, but at last I've got a polish and topic that are plenty exciting to fill up a post - today we're talking about witches!

I picked up Crow's Toes Season of The Witch quite a while ago, and while it's a really lovely polish, I didn't have much to say about it until the most recent season of American Horror Story rolled around. I've been a fan of American Horror Story from the first episode, and while the last season tried to jam about three times as many plots as would actually fit into it, I thoroughly enjoyed the most recent season, Coven. If you haven't finished it yet, maybe jump off after the pretty nail pictures because there will be spoilers aplenty!

Before you go though, be sure to stop and take a look at this beautiful polish, Season of The Witch. Crow's Toes Nail Color are known for their wide variety of stunning duochromes and multichromes, and Season of The Witch is no exception to the excellent I expect from this brand.

It's My Party And I'll Make You Dress Up If I Want To

After putting so much effort into my meandering thoughts-on-a-birthday post, I wanted to follow it up by sharing one of the much happier aspects of being so obsessed with my birthday - the kick ass party.

This year, I decreed the party was to be fancy dress, and made my guests interpret the delightfully vague theme "Imagined Futures". I suggested a couple of ways they might like to interpret this - they could come as what they really wanted to be when they grew up, what their parents imagined they would be, or just part of how they thought the future in general would be. Because my friends are awesome, clever, and love an excuse to dress up, there were some fantastic outfits on the night. One person came dressed as Lois Lane (in an amazingly gorgeous purple pencil skirt), her partner came as a starving artist complete with a sign saying "Will Art For Food", and someone else came as Huntress. Unfortunately, I didn't get photos of everyone because I was kind of flat out partying, but I did get a few, and my ridiculously photo happy friend Lucas got a few of his own. Because I'm a ginormous nerd I'm going to go ahead and put people's Twitter handles in with their names, so you can go and follow them if you like. Which you probably should, because my friends are great.

Learning to Mend A Patchwork Heart

By the time you’re reading this, it will be two days after my birthday. The presents will all have been unwrapped, played with, set up, and the paper possibly thrown away. It might still be wafting around my lounge room, I’m kind of a slob. Some people get excited about Christmas, or Hannukah, or Thanksgiving – my yearly calendar revolves around my birthday, so by the time you read this I will probably be in the middle of a serious sulk that it’s over.

My birthday is only one day, but Write Your Own Snark Spock
will be awesome all year around.

In Defence of Twitter Feminism

This is something I've been wanting to talk about for a while, but a recent flurry of derisive articles decrying "twitter feminism" and online activism in general have brought it back to the front of my mind. I'd rebut these articles directly, but plenty of much smarter people have already got that under control. What I want to talk about is this whole perception that what happens on Twitter doesn't really matters in the scheme of things, the idea that Twitter in particular is just a bunch of spoiled brats complaining to empty air. I want to talk about this idea that "twitter feminism" doesn't matter, that all the discussions and movements are without substance because it's not happening in the "real world."

I think this is total, utter, bullshit.

Shameless Crosspromotion

Just a quick little note to let you all know that the lovely people at Kiki and Tea have graciously published a rather serious, sad, and personal piece of mine about loss, regret, and painting.

If you want to trundle over and take a look, it's right here: All That You Can't Get Back

The Balancing Act of Ethical Choices

You might have noticed from reading this blog that I have some pretty strong opinions about a lot of things. I have things I am very much For, and things I am Against, and I like to uphold my opinions in the form of action through ethical choices wherever possible. I'm very much For independent small businesses, and so I like to buy from them wherever possible. I'm very against fur for fashion, so I avoid buying clothes that involve fur. But these are very simple, straight forward examples. When it comes to buying cosmetics the idea of ethical choices can become an almost impossible quagmire.

Choosing cosmetics is a complex proposition at the best of times. Before I buy something, I will always consider quite a few different factors - does it REALLY work the way it says it will? Will I actually use it? Do I REALLY like it? Can I afford it? This last question in particular can be a real make or break one for a lot of people, and honestly, I think that if you're in that sort of financial situation you can go ahead and have a pass on fussing about whether your choices are as ethical as they could be. If you have to wear lipstick to your minimum wage job or you'll get fired, and the only one you can afford it tested on animals? Then you just go ahead and buy whatever you have to, you'll get no shade or shame from me. Ethical considerations are essentially a middle class issue, something that only becomes relevant when you have some sort of disposable income that you can spend as you please. Luckily, I'm in a situation where I can afford (most of) what I want, so the other two points are the main factors for me.

Why are Women the Marshalls of Fun?

This post is going to be one big long rant about heterosexual people problems, so if that's not something you're interested in, consider yourself warned.

The marketing team behind Xbox have been working their little butts off lately, attempting to completely blanket all and every media with the glorious news that the new console is nearly here, OMG, let's set off fireworks etc etc. At first, the only thing I found annoying about the campaign was how totally comprehensive it was - I am perfectly aware the new console is coming out, and would really like it if I could stop reading out it now. However, considering this is from a company that are pretty notorious for making sexism related PR bungles, over saturation is a pretty small niggle. I actually even saw an ad for the new Xbox that I liked! They released a cute little ad called "His and Hers" that depicts a hot girl demanding her boyfriend turn off the soccer so she can kill some zombies, and while it's a little pandering, it's also pretty fun.

I don't think my hair has ever been this perfectly styled, but otherwise this is a pretty
accurate depiction of a girl gaming.

Then I came this charming little customisable letter put out by Xbox (and very swiftly redacted) as part of the promotional effort for their new console. If you click on this to view it full size you should be able to read the text.

DC Comics: Accidental Feminists?

Today I've got another special guest post for you! Please extend a warm welcome to my guest blogger Mr. Reluctant Femme - otherwise known as Alex Hardison. He normally writes excellent sci-fi,and has been published in noted webzine Flurb, but today he's agreed to tread unfamiliar ground and put together a non-fiction work for the first time since he escaped Uni on two subjects extremely close to his heart - Batman and feminism.

  I've often thought that the ongoing theme of surrogate family was one of the most interesting elements of the whole Batman world . The Bat Story begins when Bruce Wayne, playboy millionaire, loses his parents to random violent crime. He naturally then takes a sacred vow to fight against the criminals who plague his city for the rest of his days, and takes up the cape and cowl to become our beloved Batman. This is of course, too great a task for any one man, even one completely awesome as Batman, so he recruits a range of companions and protégés over the course of his crusade. In return for their help in his ongoing crusade against crime, Wayne attempts to raise, teach, and nurture his team in a way that his parents were never able to raise him. Mind you, how WELL he raises them is a matter of some debate. He’s not exactly the warm, light hearted father figure most children would hope for.

Serious Bat Business is Serious.

 Batgirl: Year One, Scott Beatty, Chuck Dixon, Marcos Martin and Alvaro Lopez

10 Random Things About Me

I'm really fascinated by this post of 10 Random Things over on The Militant Baker - partially because I am a curious kitten and I like knowing random stuff about people I think are cool. But what intrigues me the most about this post is how much people are sharing in the comments. It really illustrates (IMHO) just how much people are willing to share if they're only asked. If you've ever seen the stuff that comes out on Post Secret, then you know just how much people can sometimes keep inside, for fear of judgement. But I don't think people's silence is always about judgement, necessarily. People sit on potentially dangerous or shameful secrets because they're afraid of consequences, but I also think people sit on small, mundane secrets all the time because they don't think anyone wants to hear them. A lot of us have been taught to keep our business to ourselves, to not impose, and I think that's a really harmful thing. I hate the idea of people sitting on all these things they want to talk about, waiting for permission, waiting to be asked.

So my dear readers, I'm giving you permission, and I'm asking you to join in sharing. Of course, I'll share my 10 Random Things first to get the ball rolling, because I can't expect you guys to spill if I don't share first. You can either share your 10 Random Things in the comments, or do as I did and take the idea off to your own blog. If you do, be sure to share the link here and at the original Militant Baker post, so Jes can see how far her lovely idea has travelled! As always, anonymous comments will be enabled for the next fortnight, so you don't have to put your name to your sharing if you don't want to.

10 Random Things About Me

Bloggers+Indie Brands = OTP Part 2: The OKCupid Principle

Welcome back to the second part of my Bloggers+Indie Brands= OTP Series!

If you missed the first part, you can find it here

 

Part 2. The OKCupid Principle

Telling you to be respectful and play nice in order to succeed is all well and good, but what does that actually look like? What should you say? What shouldn't you say? Do you need different approaches for different people? Perhaps the most succinct way to explain how to communicate for both sides is that for maximum success, you should approach brand/blogger collaborations with the same basic principles as successful online dating. If you've never done online dating, you might not know this, but there's a real art to navigating it successfully, and almost all these principles can be applied to getting a successful relationship between bloggers and indie brands off the ground.

You Can't Take My Selfies from Me

I usually don't blog about internet activism events, but there was a hashtag going around this morning that gave me way too many thoughts to confine it to Twitter, where I usually do my most impassioned ranting.  Basically, Jezebel published an article condemning selfies on feminist grounds, and a large portion of Twitter reacted by posting endless selfies with the hashtag #feministselfie. Personally, I love this kind of immediate, groundswell response - it's one of my favourite things about being on Twitter. The way ideas bounce from one person to the next, to the next, and on in ever expanding ripples is something I find deeply fascinating, and I always love watching an idea sprout into a "thing", spreading seeds across the wilds of the internet.

ANYWAY, I have a lot of thoughts about this particular event, and for once I decided to jump on the bandwagon and dash something off before the zeitgeist rushes past. So let's talk about this Jezebel article. I don't actually read Jezebel a lot these days, because a lot of the articles they post make me really angry and I just don't need extra angry making things most days. However, a lot of people do read it, and a lot of people are influenced by it, so I feel like it's worth examining at least some of the problematic things they publish.

I'm going to start with this little gem here;

"Selfies aren't empowering; they're a high tech reflection of the fucked up way society teaches women that their most important quality is their physical attractiveness" 

Bloggers+Indie Brands = OTP Part 1:R.E.S.P.E.C.T

I've only been blogging for just over a year, so I'm hardly what you'd call an expert on the subject. However, for a good ten years before I started blogging I was in Marketing and PR for various different firms, across a wide variety of industries.  While I'm still not an expert in marketing per se, I do have a ton of experience about how to get the most out of interactions between small media and small brands. Most of my career was spent convincing regional papers to cover things like Stamp Collecting Month, so if I know anything, it's how small media and small brands can help each other.

Just imagine customers are the crab - sorry customers.
Picture from National Geographic

Indie cosmetics brands and beauty/nail bloggers, in ideal circumstances, have an amazingly symbiotic relationship that I find absolutely fascinating from a marketing point of view. Indie brands don't have a lot of money to advertise their products (usually), and in a happy co-incidence, bloggers tend to be a pretty cheap form of marketing. Indie brands can't afford blanket awareness campaigns for their products, and so the vast majority of their sales are made through positive buzz, word of mouth, and reputation. It just so happens that these are the things that bloggers rely on for their audience, and also the primary thing they have to offer indie brands. Without a positive reputation, positive buzz, and word of mouth recommendations, both bloggers and indie brands are likely to severely limit their audience - but by working together well, both parties can gain a ton of what they need. Indie brands that work with bloggers get their products in front of eyeballs that might otherwise never see them, and bloggers who work with indie brands get a great deal of goodwill and "cool" status from covering products other people don't.  Indie brands and bloggers are truly what fandom calls OTP - one true pairing, an ideal pair of perfectly suited parties. When it works smoothly, everyone wins - but I've noticed it doesn't always work as smoothly as it could.

Community College

I know I said I was going to continue this the day after my last post, but..well...I say a lot of things.

As I said in my last post, for a long time I was without a community, as such. I had friends, of varying numbers and degrees, but after exiting the Goth community in my great Interstate Flounce and returning to Sydney a couple of years later, I never really found anything to replace it. 
At one stage, I dabbled in the local Sydney poly scene, but never really got properly involved. I met a few nice people, and one or two great people, but an awful lot of dickheads as well. I had some really interesting conversations, but also had WAY too many arguments with people about why polyamory isn't actually the One True Way of the world - to be honest, I just had way too many conversations about polyamory full stop. The poly people were (on the whole) lovely, and fun, but I was going to tear my eyes out if I got into another round table discussion of how best to negotiate sleepovers.After a while it started feeling really....well, small. And not just because there are only about 50 people in the Sydney poly scene. The types of people in it are also very likeminded, and not just about relationship configurations. I think this is what made the scene start to feel stale and small so quickly - we were all of a similar age, similar financial circumstances, mostly cis, almost entirely white. A lot of the guys had beards, and a lot of the girls had long hair and a fondness for corsets. There's nothing wrong with any of these things on their own - but the sameness of the community left me feeling uninspired.

One of the symbols used to indicate polyamory: while I
have infinite love, it turns out I do not have infinite patience

 .

Thnks Fr The Mmrs

I've been thinking a lot about my past recently. A couple of things have brought this turn of thought around - the end of the year always involves at least a little soul searching and taking stock for me. It doesn't help that my birthday is in early January, so the whole Christmas/New Year period has a real turn of the page feel for me, which naturally involves re-reading the page before I turn it. I also went to a FANTASTIC concert by Fall Out Boy the other night, which brought back a ton of memories of being twenty something, furious with everything, and firmly believing more eyeliner was ALWAYS better.

I went to the concert by myself, which was a little odd because I don't go out on the town without Mr. Reluctant Femme that often these days. I used to travel to parties, clubs, and concerts by myself all the time, so being on the train alone, in an outfit that my 20 year old self would have LOVED, to see a band that are the very definition of teenage angst really got me thinking. I found myself wondering what that angry little girl would think of my life as it is now. Would she be happy? Would she be proud? Or would she be disappointed?

I've been thinking about it for almost a week now, and I don't have anything like an answer. Perhaps there isn't an answer, really. There are so many ways my life could have gone from there - so many conversations I could have had or skipped, so many decisions I could have made differently. Or maybe I was always going to end up here, now, exactly how I am. Just like the great Captain Janeway, pondering the ramifications of theoretical consequences of altering time gives me a headache.

I'm on the far right - my cohorts shall remain nameless.

Knowing your Nose

I've got something a little bit different for you today - my very first ever guest post! The author of today's post is Sam, a fascinating lady who's been globe trotting as long as I've known her, and really should write more often than she does. I've been prodding her to write something for me for a little while, and after having surgery on her nose for sinus issues, she's very kindly put some thoughts together on what her new nose means to her.


Two weeks ago I had surgery on my sinuses and my nose.  As a result I was adorably helpless, and this made me miserable. 

I have never aspired to be a quirky supporting character in the story of a man's life, but rather a walking, breathing person of my own.  But I happen to have been a long-term relationship with a 'real-adult' so while I resent the idea, the quirky supporting character descriptor  may not actually be that far off.  I often feel as if I am not a 'real adult' and that I am faking it.   It's hard to feel fiercely independent when you lived with someone who is so ridiculously capable.  I sometimes think that if I was going to write about my experiences in our relationship I would call it 'Being Lois Lane'. This fear of being a supporting character is something I carry with me most of the time in my everyday life.

It's Time To Squash The Bug

(Because a lot of outside material I've used for this post will be triggering in terms of trans phobia, hate speech, and violent threats, I've linked them instead of putting in screenshots. Please don't click through if you feel these links might be harmful to you)

I'm going to get into some pretty heavy feminist politics today, so while I know some of you are tempted to flick past this entry, I'd ask that you stay and hear me out, at least for a little while. This is super important stuff, and the whole point of this post is to try and spread information about some of the heinous shit going on out there in the name of feminism to people who might not be aware.

A lot of my readers will already know a lot of what I'll be writing out here, so consider this a primer that you can link to people who ask what the hell you're on about when you talk about TERF's. But if you're one of those people who tries to stay out of politics, to stay out of "Capital F" Feminism, I'd ask that just this once, you listen for a minute. I promise there will be more pretty pictures later - but today I want to get serious.

Space Oddity

I've been reading The Beheld again, which means inevitably, I have far too many thoughts running around in response to Autumn's most recent post to fit in a comment field - which means you guys get them all, you lucky things!

(Incidentally, if you're not reading The Beheld, you really should. It doesn't update as often as it used to because the author is in the middle of writing a book, but it's always worth a look. I don't always agree with Autumn's point of view, but she has the most delicious brains and over thinks everything in the most delightful way)

Autumn's most recent post was about her experiences moving in with a partner; how that's effected her perception of public and private space, and how that in turn has effected her beauty regime. You can read all her thoughts over at the blog, but my thoughts and experiences are so different I felt like they really deserved their own post. I totally agree with her observations that the amount of primping and "beauty work" women do in various spaces is very closely connected to how public or private we consider that space to be. If you're headed somewhere you consider to be public, you're much more likely to, for example, stop and put your hair up or change your shirt. If you're somewhere you consider private, you're less likely to be concerned about how what you're wearing looks, and just go with what's most comfortable.

Of course all women look this cute just bumming around at home.