Simon, at Savidge Reads, is setting up a new project that hopes to unite bibliophiles all over the world with the lost art of pen pal-ing. If you’re interested, simply head over to register and you will be sent a registration form.
I’m quite excited about this. It was pretty difficult in the past to get pen pals but the net, a blessing and a curse, made it much easier. I should also probably point out that my pen pals and I largely communicated via email, and very rarely through hand written letters although we did occasionally send each other small parcels which was so exciting. I’m still somewhat in touch with two pen pals with the help of Facebook and it’s pretty interesting to see how the idea of privacy have changed so dramatically.
Review: “Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture” by Ariel Levy [2005]
There is no denying that raunch is everywhere in our culture today. Music videos, advertisements and even children products are more often than not targeted as ’sexy’ because, let’s face it, sex sells. In Female Chauvinist Pigs, Ariel Levy explores and discusses how this culture has risen and how the second-wave feminist struggle has appropriated into the war cry that sex and stripping now means liberalisation for women. Levy writes:
This new raunch culture didn’t mark the death of feminism, they told me; it was evidence that the feminist project had already been achieved. We’d earned the right to look at Playboy; we were empowered enough to get Brazilian bikini waxes. – p. 4
But have women actually come so far as to not be objectified? Levy asks herself:
And how is imitating a stripper or a porn star – a woman whose job is to imitate arousal in the first place – going to render us sexually liberated? – p. 4
[Strippers] are merely sexual personae, erotic dollies from the land of make-believe. In their performances, which is the only capacity in which we see these women we so fetishize, they don’t even speak … they have no ideas, no feelings, no political beliefs, no relationships, no past, no future, no humanity. – p. 196
How has stripping, imitating sexually explicit poses and flashing their breasts in public or for the camera render women ’sexually liberated’? Are they still not being objectified as sexual objects by men? Levy sets out to ascertain why the raunch culture is so appealing to women, particularly young, educated women and more concerning, young teenage girls, some as young as twelve, who strive to embody the raunch culture by wearing make-up and snapping g-strings at boys. Levy discovers that raunch and sexual appeal have become separated from the act of sex itself. These young girls understand acting and dressing sexily is what gets attention from boys but they do not understand the act of sex and its pleasures.
Raunch culture, then, isn’t an entertainment option, it’s a litmus test of female uptightness. – p. 40
In the book, Levy also details the history and battles of the second-wave feminist movement and key activists. Women have finally broken through the barriers and have presumably gained gender equality. The problem is, as Levy suggests, that women are still not free to act as ‘women’ or as themselves but they are now pressured to act as ‘men’ so they will be included and considered as one of the boys. Levy discusses women like Christie Hefner, Hugh Hefner’s daughter and the CEO of Playboy, and Sheila Nevins, a high profile and formidable veteran producer for HBO. They see no problems with producing media that promotes and encourages female raunch. Women either have to ‘get with the program’ or risk looking prudish and uptight to both other men and women.
… the Female Chauvinist Pig (FCP) has risen to a kind of exalted status. She is post-feminist. She is funny. She gets it. She doesn’t mind cartoonish stereotypes of female sexuality, and she doesn’t mind a cartoonishly macho response to them. The FCP asks: Why throw your boyfriend’s Playboy in a freedom trash can when you could be partying at the Mansion? Why worry about disgusting or degrading when you could be giving – or getting – a lap dance yourself? Why try to beat them when you can join them? – p. 93
The female chauvinist pigs are women who consider themselves apart from their less raunchy sisters,
a new sort of loophole woman who is ‘not like other women’, who is instead ‘like a man’. – p. 96
And there lies the problem. Who is this invisible, ideal man that everybody strives to emulate? And are women actually liberated when all it seems is that they are still struggling to be accepted as themselves? Why aren’t the men concerning themselves that if they don’t flash their genitals, women might not find them sexy and think them prudish? The FCP is not limited to heterosexual women and Levy discusses how the lesbian community have appeared to have taken similar heterosexual gender roles such as butches, femmes and bois.
Female Chauvinist Pigs is a slim but thorough and interesting volume and Levy ties in the current, past and alternative cultures nicely although it is very American-centric. The raunch culture have appeared to stabilised since the book was published in 2005 but, having said that, strippers, gyrating dancers, porn stars and Paris Hilton are still figures that many young girls and women look up to. Women still find it hard to find their own independent voice, particularly if they work in male dominated and cut-throat worlds. To succeed, they ultimately have to become ‘one of the boys’ or otherwise come across as uptight.
Elena, at With Extra Pulp, has started up a new meme which debuted yesterday (Sunday). I’ve decided to join in a day late but it’s better late than never, right?
The rules are pretty simple: Must be a character that appears in a book, comic or graphic novel (because, let’s face it, superheroes are hawt).
One of my long lasting literary crushes has to be Laurie from Little Women. I was devastated, still am actually, when Jo continued to reject Laurie and he ended up marrying Amy. Despite everything turning out well for both Jo and Laurie and their respective partners, you can’t deny the chemistry that was there oozing through the pages and across endless times and oceans. Maybe a slight exaggeration there but you get the idea. 
Here’s a clip of Laurie proposing to Jo with Winona Ryder as Jo and a very young and delicious Christian Bale as Laurie.
“We’d kill each other!”
We can never know what to want, because, living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come. – p. 7
Where to begin with this story? On the outset, the story follows four main characters who are attempting to separate love from sex and love from lust. Narrated by an anonymous character who watches the lives of the protagonists, we follow these characters as they struggle with love, fate and the meaning of life against the backdrop of the Russian invasion into Czechoslovakia in 1968.
Tomas and Tereza is the main couple. Tomas, a surgeon, has managed to separate love and sex. He has many, many lovers and cannot, or do not, refrain from infidelities when he couples up with Tereza who shows up on his doorstep unannounced one day. There is no doubt that he loves her and cares for he but he also periodically resents Tereza, comparing her to the baby Moses who floats down the river in a basket and is rescued. Despite the love, he cannot justify why he should stop having sex, and only sex, with other women.
Tereza is a complicated character. She is not jealous of Tomas’ infidelities in the typical way. Coming from a traumatic childhood, where she was hated by her mother, who laughed at Tereza’s modesty about her body, and was sexually abused by her step-father, Tereza believes that her body is special and unique despite having had it abused so by her parents and betrayed by Tomas who seeks other bodies.
Sabina is an artist and also one of Tomas’ long-time lovers. During the invasion, she escapes to Geneva where she later begins an affair with Franz, an unhappily married academic. Sabina admits to herself that she has almost a fetish, an insatiable lust, for betraying everybody and everything.
Betrayal. From tender youth we are told by father and teacher that betrayal is the most heinous offence imaginable. But what is betrayal? Betrayal means breaking ranks. Betrayal means breaking ranks and going off into the unknown. Sabina knew of nothing more magnificent than going off into the unknown. – p. 89
While many people feel burdened by the weight of worries and actions, Sabina presents an anomaly and is burdened by the feeling of incredible lightness.
Her drama was a drama not of heaviness but of lightness. What fell to her lot was not the burden but the unbearable lightness of being. – p. 121
After betraying her lovers, her country, her friends and even within her art work – Sabina has nothing left to betray and feels entirely empty, ironically burdened by her emptiness.
The weight of responsibility and of duty weigh down heavily on these characters. They cannot make a right decision and it is impossible to know if they do because this is the life they will ever lead.
Lightness of Being is an enthralling read. This review doesn’t cover all aspects of the story – the layers of love and sex, abuse, philosophy, metaphysics, society and its issues and more contemporary problems like the invasion of countries – Czechoslovakia, Vietnam, Cambodia – and the history of the Cold War, secret police and the Soviet Union. The characters are filled with depth, although I didn’t like Tomas so much, and there are some lovely bookish bits here. However, I think my most favourite character of all in Karenin, Tomas and Tereza’s dog, and who is named after Anna Karenina. Her presence is just so heartwarming and lovable.
I rarely read novels set in a dystopian future with the only other I can remember being George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. I find many inaccessible and, quite frankly, I’m not all too interested in reading about bleak futures. We’ll get there eventually. There’s no need to rush it forward.
Things We Didn’t See Coming is a series of vignettes set in the not too distant future. We follow an anonymous male from childhood where the world as we know it is on the brink of some catastrophic collapse on New Year’s Eve/New Year’s Day. This is not dissimilar from all the hype that surrounded the Y2K bug when everybody thought that everything would collapse due to computers being unable to recognise the year 2000. The narrator’s father packs up the family and heads to the relative safety of the country at the boy’s grandparent’s property. The boy’s father warns and apologises for the bleak future the boy is facing.
We are arrogant, stupid – we lack humility in the face of centuries and centuries of time before us. What we call knowledge, what you learn in school about fossils and dinosaurs, it’s all hunches. What we know now is that we didn’t think enough. We didn’t worry about the right things.
The future is a hospital, packed with sick people, packed with hurt people, people on stretchers in the halls, and suddenly the lights go out, the water shuts off, and you know in your heart that they’re never coming back on. That’s the future. – p. 22
We follow the boy through to the future as he grows up. As a teenager, it is clear the boy has lost his innocence, being a small time thief, and living in a fractured world. There is deep division between the city and country communities, both with advantages and disadvantages such as medicine and food. The boy’s parents have disappeared and he is being looked after, or rather looks after, his grandparents and attempts to escape back out into the country.
In another flash, the boy is grown up and working as a government official. The weather is a constant downpour of unrelenting rain and food is extremely scarce. Bark, rats and cushion stuffing make up some meals. Struggle for survival and struggles against the government officials is on-going for those who are still independent. Strange diseases are rife and part of the boy’s bargain for working as a government official is that he gets medicine.
In further flashes, the environment stabilises somewhat although disease is still prevalent. The boy experiences love but loses her somewhere along the line. At one stage, he works as a speech writer while embroiled in a menage-a-trois with his girlfriend and the politician he works for. Children and medication are particular scarce although medical treatment is readily available for those who have the right amount of money. Sound familiar?
Things We Didn’t See Coming is a very accessible and rather sad read. It shows the possible, and not so unrecognisable, future and leads us from our current environment into what might be. While the novel appears in a series of vignettes, this works especially well as we follow the boy from an innocent and recognisable childhood to a future filled with sickness and corruption. The ideas of our heavy reliance on industrialisation and unsustainable mass consumption, health care, heavy medication of the human body and climate and environmental change are some of the issues that underlies the stories.
You’ll have a clean slate, a world of opportunity, you’ll never look back. But nothing heals because, if you lose everything once, running becomes part of you and you’re always looking back. – p. 91
This week’s BTT:
The northern hemisphere, at least, is socked in by winter right now… So, on a cold, wintry day, when you want nothing more than to curl up with a good book on the couch … what kind of reading do you want to do?
Well, it’s actually in the middle of summer right now where I am but when it is winter (even though our winters are quite mild), I like nothing more than to tackle the thick and classics tomes -Dickens and the russians are particularly good. I also like cozy mysteries like Agatha Christie. She’s a total comfort read for me while snuggled under my blankets and hearing the rain outside.
I found some goodies from the library recently. I try not to borrow many since I want to read my own TBRs but I can’t help myself. Instead, I try to make it equal and alternate between library books and my own.
The titles are:
- The Unbearable Lightness of Being – Milan Kundera
- I Dream of Magda – Stefan Laszczuk
- The Beauty Myth – Naomi Wolf
- The Well – Elizabeth Jolley
- Tropic of Cancer – Henry Miller
- Female Chauvinist Pigs – Ariel Levy
- To Room Nineteen and other collected stories – Doris Lessing
There’s a bit of a feminist and gender theory theme going on here. An excellent article I read recently has re-sparked my interest and reminded me that it’s been awhile since I read some work on feminist issues. It’s an area I’m hugely interested in and I’ve always leaned towards the feminist stream while doing my arts degree which culminated in a rather feminist theme for my honours thesis where I wrote about female performance, Simone de Beauvoir, Sensation fiction and the idea of the female villain. Oh, it was such fun!
Well, it’s been a marathon and after several stop-start attempts last year (and sadly languishing by my bedside for most of the year), I finally dived right into Vanity Fair and I’m on the home stretch. It’s a mammoth of a book so here are some of my impressions:
- It’s epic. I don’t mean the size of the book but the story. We follow the two lead characters, Becky Sharp and Amelia Sedley, from the moment of their graduation from Miss Pinkerton’s finishing school and their rise and fall through life and society.
- William Thackeray really meant it when he subtitled the novel with “a novel without a hero”. There really isn’t one, no matter how virtuous a character may seem. While this doesn’t mean that every character is a villain, it means that no character merits the label of ‘hero’ (or ‘heroine’, I suppose). Well, not yet. That might change yet at the end of the novel.
- Vanity Fair resides in us all – we blind ourselves with our own pain, troubles, trial and tribulations. That is not a bad thing – it is simply human nature, our means of survival, which are all exaggerated (slightly) in the novel.
- The soldiers featured in the novel actually do have to go and fight! I’ve read some regency novels where soldiers feature (such as Pride and Prejudice), having purchased their places by their rich fathers, but who then simply lie around chasing girls. Imagine my surprise when they are called to arms and commanded to go off to Waterloo for battle.
- I adore Becky Sharp.
Already, I think this is going to be one of my most favourite places in the city and it hasn’t even opened yet. The Wheeler Centre (named after Tony and Maureen Wheeler of Lonely Planet) has been under development for the last two years ever since Melbourne was announced as the second City of Literature by UNESCO in 2008 (the first being Edinburgh).
The crux of the centre is to provide a melting pot of ‘books, writing and ideas’ and it is situated beside the State Library of Victoria (also a most lovely place). Everything literary is going to housed under the same roof such as the various writing organisations. What I am most excited about are the ongoing events that are to run from the centre. I think the events are innovative, fun and most importantly of all, allows people from all walks of life and background to enjoy, and be introduced to, quality literature and discover new writers as the majority of events are free.
The three month programme is out and I’ve already booked myself in for around six events, including the opening Story Telling Gala night and ‘In Conversation with Helen Garner’, and marked out many others that I want to go to. I’m most excited about the Lunchbox/Soapbox event with Kate Holden, who is one of my most favourite writers and columnists. The beauty of many of these events is that you can simply wander in and find yourself a place where your mind can be stimulated. With all the writing centres situated under one roof, debuting and established writers, artists, thinkers now have a centralised headquarter. Bibliophiles can also now indulge in literary delights throughout the year rather than the few major events.
(And no, I don’t work for the centre.)
Review: “Nana” by Emile Zola [1880]; translated from French by Douglas Parmee [1992]
Nana begins during the 1862 World Fair in Paris. The theatre world has been heavily awashed in hype about the latest actress, Nana, who is due to make her debut in the stage production ‘The Blonde Venus’ with Nana playing Venus herself. What follows is a rather delicious anti-climax.
She had barely reached the second line before the audience started exchanging glances. Was this a joke, one of Bordenave’s calculated risks? They’d never heard a worse-trained voice, nor one singing more out of tune … and she didn’t even know how to hold herself on the stage – she was flinging her arms about in front of herself and swaying in a way that seemed both graceless and inappropriate. – p. 14.
However, all of Nana’s lack of talent is soon forgiven as Nana is shown to be good natured, charismatic and even laughs along with the audience. She finally wins all the male audience’s hearts when she appears nude in the finale.
What follows is the chasing of Nana by the many men who are in love with her. A beautiful, young woman, Nana is captivating and knows how to please and is certainly not at all prudish. And despite being constantly depicted as living precariously between poverty and wealth, Nana is never shown to care for money, flinging and spending wildly. While wearing dresses that costs thousands of francs, she is constantly always wondering where her money has gone and frequently borrows from her own maid, Zoe.
Nana is a difficult character to articulate. She is a prostitute and blatant fortune hunter, seeking fame and wealth but not quite stability. The idea of marriage disgusts her and she turns down all proposals, no matter how rich the man is. She is shown to be ruthless with her lovers – she spends away her lovers’ fortunes without hesitation or a second thought and, when the money runs out, she cuts them off and throws them out. But she is also not without heart. There is a certain endearment to her. She has a little son, who was borne out of wedlock, and spoils him whenever she has the money, whenever she has time and whenever she remembers his existence. What Nana lacks is empathy.
As the novel progresses, Nana’s hedonism grows so large and overbearing, it feels like there is a gaping black vortex surrounding her, sucking everything in indiscriminately. The centre of this is the ordering of a solid, gold bed with her naked portrait carved into the bedhead. At one point, she consumes all men who happen to fall by her way and sleeps with different men and women each night. Great fortunes, some spanning back centuries, are wilted after a few weeks with Nana and great men are brought down to their knees.
This was an interesting and intense read, largely due to the ambiguous nature of Nana. She wants nothing more than respect, to be a woman of high society but it is something she will never achieve. She is always on the brink of poverty even when surrounded by such splendor and living in a palace and, yet, Nana is never seemed to be worried about it. Things are so easily given to her and, again, easily taken away and this occurs to the extreme.
The chapters are long so it is not a book you can simply pick up and put down. I would have loved to read this in French though, because I suspect my translation may be slightly off. At times, it sounded far too British and modern. Nana also appears in a prior book, L’Assommoir, where her childhood, lived in poverty and under alcoholic parents, was depicted.
Australian author Tara Moss started a fantastic little blogging series where she got other writers to send in pictures of their writing desk or where ever they worked. I’m as fascinated in seeing other people’s desk, especially if they’re writers, as I am in seeing other people’s shelves. It’s great inspiration – to write and to clean up my desk.
This week’s MM.
When is it inappropriate to read in front of others? Is it ever appropriate?
To be honest, this is something I’d never even thought of. I usually read whenever I’m waiting for something or somebody or when I’m on transport. If there’s too much noise, I stick in my iPod. I used to be able to block out other sounds when reading but I’m more easily distracted these days. Obviously, if I’m waiting or travelling on transport with a friend, I don’t read since I have somebody to amuse me. I also used to do a lot of reading in the lounge room while the rest of the family watched T.V. Of course, I can’t do that anymore since the noise distracts me but that habit really made me feel more like Roald Dahl’s Matilda.
I don’t really think there’s a time when it’s inappropriate to read unless you pull out a book in the middle of a conversation with a friend! I remember one time, a long, long time ago when I was…15, a friend remarked what a large book I was carrying around with me at the shopping centre and I slipped out it was in case I got bored. Ooops! :-p I’d meant while I was waiting for the bus.
Here is a link to an excellent article by Rachel Cusk discussing women’s writing, what it was, and what it means today and the effects from the two defining feminist works – A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf and The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir. I found it highly fascinating and relevant.
