Sophie lives in BK, works, writes, plays music, puts on shows and uses twitter.
A few blogs I run or help run:
flavorpill.tumblr.com
thepermanentwave.tumblr.com
sadjams.tumblr.com
spiralringnotebook.tumblr.com
pseudoprofoundelectronicartists.tumblr.com
silentdraperunners.tumblr.com
Quote reblogged from Garland Grey with 33 notes
Most modern television shows display their enlightenment by unleashing paper sexists at their heroine and allowing us to take the clobbering of these shadows as a triumph over sexism. Which, in the unscripted world, is too often not a douchebag saying “You can’t cuz you’re a girl” but is instead someone internalizing that belief and using their power to punish you for it. This scenario creates a false image in the culture of “What Sexism Looks Like” which men use to calibrate their understanding of misogyny. Which means anything less blatant than THAT is just the moaning of people who can’t compete AND once the show has labeled itself NOT SEXIST, it is free to deal in subtler, more insidious forms of sexism.
Source: garlandgrey
Quote with 25 notes
More to the point, television viewers were submitted to ad after ad that likened women—negatively—to sofas, cars, and candy. Mr. Winter didn’t have anything to say about that, so I’d like to raise both of my middle fingers to him and anyone who thinks profanity is somehow more harmful to our children than images of violence and misogyny. (My two sons, fourteen and eleven, thought the Fiat ad was corny, so I guess they will be safe without Mr. Winter’s intervention.) I say we get out of The Pretending To Be Moral game altogether and use the Internet for important things like posting pictures of cats looking at croissants and PDFs of sensitive government documents.
Post with 21 notes
It’s you, it’s you, it’s all for you.
In the last 24 hours I got pretty angry about two things. First, the ongoing Lana Del Rey fiasco, which was probably my own fault for reading her lyrics for about an hour last night, but which was reinforced by walking to into my office and hearing her album on the speakers this morning. It sounded nice - I’m pretty sure it’s going to get some decent reviews. But the memory of what I’d read made me sad and angry all over again.
The other inciting incident from was the Chuck Klosterman essay in which he strangely and unsuccessful posits that tUnE-yArDs is a flavor-of-the-week indie artist who, along with her gender ambiguity, will fade into the buzzy ether soon enough. This bothered me on a pretty personal level. Merril is an inspiration and hero to me, as someone who is also a woman, musician, ukulele player, singer and believes in questioning gender norms, and her records and live performances have had a huge impact on me over the last few years.
Talking to a friend about our growing desperation in the face of the unending success of the LDR meme, I thought of a piece another friend wrote about her - one of the few that stuck out from the onslaught over the past few months:
What I didn’t understand was why [she] bothered me. But then I watched the videos and realized that for me, the problem was that I simply am not the intended audience.
…in Del Rey’s thus-far oeuvre, the intended audience is a lover who constantly needs to be re-engaged, re-compelled with forever fulfillment, reassured: “You can be the boss, daddy.” The lover/observer, not the artist, is creating the rules, but both are watching so very very closely. To love these songs, I think, requires an exhausting level of interest.
Though these observations were directed towards LDR, I think they can be applied to the Klosterman “controversy” as well. He simply isn’t tUnE-yArDs intended audience. Instead of recognizing that, coming to terms with it, or trying to understand what makes that so (hint: being a professionally grumpy white straight dude might have something to do with it), he assumes that because one minute piece of culture is not all for him, the artist in question must have a limited relevance, and the people who care about her must be suffering from some sort of temporary delusion.
We all make this mistake on occasion, assuming that because we don’t fit in an artists audience their music is bad or of little consequence (and sometimes it’s true, too). What bothers me is that in both of these cases, the parties involved (Chuck Klosterman and LDR’s audience) represent a demographic that is CONSTANTLY pandered to. For the concerns of those outside that group to be treated as silly or delusional (a stereotypical accusation), is all the more proof that sexism is alive and well, and even a distanced nostalgia for a time when it was socially acceptable (which LDR’s music displays) is worse than reversing what marginalized people have been working towards since the days of Ellen Willis, it’s spinning car around and flooring it in the opposite direction.
Quote reblogged from Fluxtumblr with 114 notes
BrooklynVegan is the worst, it just becomes like a rating board for guys to have at it. They’ll be like, “I wanna cum in her ear” or “fucking 1 out of 10.” They’re all sexist. It’s hard to say whether the blog carries any responsibility for that— clearly they see that [going on], you know? No one goes to BrooklynVegan to read about content, they just go for drama. It’s a tabloid, the scum of indie.
Caroline Polachek of Chairlift, interviewed by Pitchfork’s Larry Fitzmaurice.
I’m glad she said this. I think more people need to talk about this, to call it out, because I think there’s this assumption that the indie world is full of nice guys who have evolved beyond sexism, which is anything but true. I realized a long time ago that any indie-centric show I went to in NYC, any bar, whatever, was likely to have these very same anonymous commenters lurking around somewhere. You can pretend they’re not, but these creeps are everyone and need to be shamed.
(via perpetua)
It’s a hard call, whether to just ignore it or to confront it. The point of trolling is to get attention, and the more attention you give them the more motivation they’ll have to keep going. But it is also really upsetting and exposes the underlying sexism that still exists in every community, even in indie music (duh). I had a converstaion with my brother when I was home about insults/trolling in video gaming, and how I felt it probably negatively affected women and LGBTQ people more severely than other groups. He felt everyone was berated equally, but eventually I convinced him that that wasn’t the case - if you have had someone yell “whore” at you while walking down the street and experienced real fear, having similar insults hurled at you on the internet is going to have more of an affect than on someone who has never experienced that. It’s already harder for women to get publicity and respect as musicians, gender-specific trolling just makes it worse. Honestly though, I think it’s better for us to recognize that it sucks and move on - these people don’t deserve our consideration. It’d be great if BV would stop allowing anonymous commenting, but I suspect they keep allowing it for the pageviews that outrage in every direction brings, and the cult of dumb trolls it has created.
That being said I think this interview is pretty dumb especially the part about how things are easier for hip hop artists.
Source: pitchfork.com
I think it speaks to something larger in the culture,” Sacks said. “Where the man’s always wrong the woman’s behavior is never examined. I always found ‘Womanizer’ to be ironic because Britney had been married and divorced multiple times and is nobody to be pointing fingers about womanizing or being promiscuous or whatever.
Quote reblogged from flavorpill with 55 notes
For women, frump isn’t funny any longer. The new female comedian has to be the sexual aggressor, sexually provocative, dominant and successful,” says entertainment expert Patrick Wanis. “Hollywood is now portraying women as the dominant force – the boss, the rescuer, the heroine, the hunter. Now women are being sexually provocative and sexually aggressive, rude and funny without the femininity or the class. Lucille Ball would never have played the aggressive, domineering nymphomaniac that Jennifer Aniston portrayed in ‘Horrible Bosses.’”
Wanis also says funny women who aren’t all that sexy may struggle in the new comedy landscape.
“Rosie O’Donnell and Janeane Garofalo will be relegated to playing the female versions of Chris Farley. Hollywood doesn’t want a woman that is not sexually enticing like Rosie; it wants the sexual alpha female,” he said. “The same trend is being seen on reality TV [with] Snooki and all the ‘Housewives.’
—says Patrick Wanis, “entertainment expert” and “celebrity life coach” and “person who only has 45 followers on twitter despite ‘being famous’ “ (via flavorpill)
He also sells weight loss pills, so it makes sense that he’d have a vested interest in making women feel like shit about themselves.
Source: foxnews.com
Quote reblogged from Blessing All the Birds with 36 notes
In a weird instance of art imitating art, [Bjork] begins by sinking to Joanna Newsom’s level. After all, she damn near invented alt-preciousness, why let some new little harp-playing harpie run the place?
SF WEEKLY on Moon
THIS MAKES ME SO FUCKING ANGRY
(via spookywitch)
Yeah…it makes us angry, too. Here again we see rampant misogynistic language against and the trivialization of two grand female musicians. And honestly, Bjork and Joanna Newsom are not similar artists. They are just both damn good artists. Comparing them is so specious and facile, it makes my blood boil. For example, if Joanna Newsom starts using iPads to make her music, I’ll drop dead. As I have said time and time again, we need to break the gender-binary in music journalism and make people realize that it’s OK to compare a female musician to a male musician. We need to make people realize that people always compare other female musicians to erroneously similar female musicians because there are so few influential female artists to even discuss and we need to encourage women to create. We need to make people realize that the harp is super-gendered as an instrument. And we most importantly need to make people realize that it’s not OK to demean music by female artists simply because they are female and you’re a sexist jerk.
(via allthebirds)
Source: tubularmouthpart
Post reblogged from The Red M&Ms with 4 notes
So apparently Tumblr is totally cool with rape jokes as long as Das Racist is making them?
Ok. I’m already iffy on the whole “you should never joke about ____ subject” thing. But the reason this joke was funny is that it’s comparing something really terrible (which is implicitly acknowledging/agreeing that said thing is terrible/happened/is somewhat important) with something totally placid and nonthreatening. Yes, when I read it I found it in questionable taste. But it is quite less outwardly offensive/worrisome than the kind of stuff that OFWGKTA says all the time… they don’t seem to acknowledge that the stuff they’re saying is inherently bad. When Tyler calls people faggots you don’t see any self-aware irony hanging around (as annoying as that can be).
Source: mothsinamoshpit
Church experts said it was surprising that 157 priests would sign a statement in support of the American priest, the Rev. Roy Bourgeois, because he did much more than speak out: he gave the homily and blessed a woman in an illicit ordination ceremony conducted by the group, Roman Catholic Womenpriests. That group claims to have ordained 120 female priests and five bishops worldwide. The Vatican does not recognize the ordinations and has declared the women automatically excommunicated.
…
In a 1994 declaration seen as intended to end the debate, Pope John Paul II issued an apostolic letter, Ordinatio Sacerdotalis, saying that the church “has no authority whatsoever” to ordain women. Among the reasons the church gives is that the apostles of Jesus Christ were all men, and that that has been the church’s practice all along.
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