In defense of the sanctimonious women's studies set || First feminist blog on the internet

How not to make a feminist music video

Childish Gambino (known to his parents as Donald Glover) broke the Internet May 5 with the release of his music video, “This Is America.” It’s a nuanced and incredibly layered commentary about the experiences black people face in the U.S., from gun violence to police brutalization to commercialization of culture. YouTube… person Nicole Arbour jumped on that video and created the “Women’s Edit” that no one has been asking for.

Because We Need It: Sorry, can’t pun at the moment

It almost feels too self-indulgent to enjoy even tiny lighthearted pleasures while people are dying and people are being attacked for protesting people dying. Almost. It could be argued that We Need It even more. And We Need It to double up on awesome women.

A reluctantly written note to white people: “Formation” isn’t about us. You don’t have to get it.

I wasn’t going to say something, but I’ve seen enough things being Said that I kind of had to say something, which I hate, because it puts me in the category of people who have said stuff. But here goes, and I’m sorry.

White people writing analyses and critiques of “Formation”: “Formation” isn’t about us, for us, or at us. At all.

Oh No It’s Award Season Again Thread

Share your thumbs-ups and thumbs-downs here, for whatever production and whoever’s performance, and feel free to go to town with subtext and meta-commentary. Just please be spoiler-aware for those readers who haven’t managed to catch up with various books/movies/TV yet.

I’ll get you started. Consider going to see The Dressmaker.

Monday morning mood lifter: The best defense

It’s a gray, drizzly Monday morning in Birmingham, Alabama, and I’m grumpy because I stayed up last night reading a book because I was hoping it would get better, and it never did, and I’m perfectly happy to accept a degree of sleep deprivation if it’s for a book that’s actually good, but this is just out of line, but you know what? This weekend, a kid in St. Andrews, Scotland, took down a bigoted street preacher in “the most Scottish way possible.”

Today in the No Shit, Sherlock Files

Shorter Pogo: I said some awful things, and now my Twitter is full of people are telling me they were awful, and I may have just alienated my core fanbase. So NOT FAIR, because it was all just an experiment anyway, you bratty feminist hyenas!

Apropos of nothing: Shake It Off

Feeling the need to shake it off at the end of a long week? Sure you are. Want to do it without watching Taylor Swift? You might. Like people with huge hair in shiny Spandex? Yeah you do.

Using so many words to say so little…

What is the famous song “Strange Fruit,” by Abel Meeropol, a New York Jewish communist schoolteacher, and most famously performed by Billie Holiday, the immensely influential and important black singer, about?

Lynching.  It’s about lynching.  It’s about whites lynching black people in the US South.

See how easy that was?  Very few words.

Here’s what Annie Lennox thinks it’s about:

“Strange Fruit” is a protest song and it was written before the Civil Rights movement actually got on its feet, got established. And because of what I’ve seen around the world, I know that this theme, this subject of violence and bigotry, hatred, violent acts of mankind against ourselves. This is a theme. It’s a human theme that has gone on for time immemorial. It’s expressed in all kinds of different ways, whether it be racism, whether it be domestic violence, whether it be warfare, or a terrorist act, or simply one person attacking another person in a separate incident. This is something that we as human beings have to deal with, it’s just going on 24/7. And as an observer of this violence, even as a child, I thought, why is this happening? So I’ve always had that sense of empathy and kind of outrage that we behave in this way. So a song like this, if I were to do a version of “Strange Fruit,” I’d give the song honor and respect and I try to bring it back out into the world again and get an opportunity to talk about the subjects behind the songs as well.

Yeah, you can vague that up as much as you like, Lennox, but at some point you might want to mention lynching.  Because it’s not about “one person attacking another person in a separate incident.”  It’s about a very specific expression of a very specific violent racism.  It’s not about domestic violence; it’s not about warfare; and if you want an opportunity to talk about “the subjects behind the songs,” you might want to mention lynching.  Because that’s what it’s about.  Because the suffering and struggle endured by black people in the US isn’t some vague “theme” that can be lifted lock, stock, and barrel and emptied of specificity.  At least not ethically.

You can tell it’s about lynching because of subtle hints like, well, the lyrics:

Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze
Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees

Pastoral scene of the gallant south
The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth

This is not a subtle thing.  It’s not an interpretation.  It’s very specifically, very vividly, about lynching.  So stop fucking around, Lennox, and say so.