90sWoman.com

Girl Talk: The Pilot

Ada Calhoun — Sun, 04 Dec 2011 01:18:42 +0000

So. Awkward. But note proto-’90s attempt to deconstruct the lyrics to “Electric Youth.”

There Have So Been Books About Female Sexuality in the Past 35 Years

Ada Calhoun — Sun, 07 Aug 2011 01:45:25 +0000

In a recent piece in The Guardian, “Feminism in the 21st Century,” Zoe Williams claims that no one has talked seriously about female sexuality since the ’70s: “The last person to make any serious noise about female sexuality was Shere Hite; that was nearly 35 years ago.”

This is a claim I see all the time, and it’s starting to make me feel like I’m delusional.

But unless it’s a mirage, I am staring at a shelf full of zines and books from the last 35 years that address women’s sexuality seriously, whether in fiction or theory. Williams also says she’s never read an account of a woman’s period starting. An anthology completely devoted to first-period stories, My Little Red Book, just came out in 2009. And what about Judy Blume with her famous period scene? She’s still in print. I have long suspected there was a law that every anthology about women or feminism had to include at least a couple of those, so I find this dubious.

Here’s a short list of books of various sorts (novels, theory books, memoirs) that are all related in some way to questions of female sexuality and that I can see from where I’m sitting…

Yes Means Yes: Visions of Female Sexual Power and a World Without Rape

Full Frontal Feminism

One of the Guys

He’s a Stud/She’s a Slut

Manifesta

Female Chauvinist Pigs

The Female Thing

Sexual State of the Union

A Girl’s Guide to Taking Over the World

Angry Women (also Angry Women in Rock)

The Sexual State of the Union

No Means No

Pornified

I Love Dick

Milk

The Surrender

What You Really Really Want

S.E.X

The Lisa Diaries

One of the Guys

Live Nude Elf

Prude

Catching a Wave

Sex, Art and American Culture

Growing Up Female

Feminism and Pop Culture

Defending Pornography

Ecological Feminism

Gender Outlaw

Promiscuities

No Turning Back

We Don’t Need Another Wave

Look Both Ways

Embroideries

The Hearts of Men

And I throw away books all the time!

J’Accuse, ’90s Pop Culture, for Making Me Forget the Good Times

Ada Calhoun — Sat, 30 Jul 2011 20:54:21 +0000

Here’s a New York Times Magazine Lives piece I wrote about ’90s culture and junior high bullying: “Geekdom Revisited.” And here’s a mortifying page from the unearthed 1990 diary I mention in the piece:

Oh, Those Ladies With Their “Cool, Systematic Ambition.”

Ada Calhoun — Wed, 27 Jul 2011 18:11:11 +0000

This Jon Pareles on Taylor Swift review suggests her fans are duped by her “clockwork professionalism,” and keep squealing even though she’s obviously playing them. As if ambition and professionalism are unbecoming in a musician and make her suspicious somehow. And as if smugness and insincerity have not been hallmarks of pretty much every pop star in the history of the world.

Rebecca Traister is So Smart

Ada Calhoun — Mon, 25 Jul 2011 01:19:51 +0000

Her nuanced essay on SlutWalks in today’s New York Times Magazine puts all the “she asked for it” editorializing on recent news stories into perspective. She puts the Walks in context and points out something that has dawned on many ’90s women this year while reading about Rape Cops, D.S.K., etc.: “There is still no way for women to tell stories of sexual injustice that allows them to bypass character assassination.” Every time an accusation is made, the woman in question is ruthlessly scrutinized, just like Anita Hill was in the ’90s. And, of course, no human woman is ever pure enough to be believed. She’s always too drunk, too sexy, too weird, too flashy, too something.

For the most part, I think women are so much better off now compared to twenty years ago, but sometimes it feels like our culture will always veer depressingly toward the lecherous cluelessness epitomized by Bill Napoli (he of the “sodomized religious virgin” abortion ban exception). It makes a lady want to break out her “I Believe Anita Hill” button. Or, if she’s younger, I guess go on a SlutWalk.

P.S. Hats off to Jessica Valenti, too. When questioned about SlutWalks on Morning Joe, she quipped, ”Do you think I’d be sitting here if they were called Empowerment Walks?”

“For the Last Time I Did Not Lose My Virginity to Evan Dando”

Ada Calhoun — Mon, 18 Jul 2011 14:37:45 +0000

I just came across this kind of awsome 2006 rant by Juliana Hatfield. An excerpt:

I’ve always been kind of proud of the fact that I didn’t succumb to any outside pressure, ever, to indulge in sexual intercourse, or blowjobs or anything—with the handsome, charming Evan Dando, or anyone else—until I was good and ready. You can’t take that away from me, Kevin Dean. And that is why I am setting the record straight: so you and all the other sorry-ass, lie-spreading, rumour- and hatemongering, Dig-reading shit-for-brains out there will shut up about all the stuff you know nothing about.

“To Whom It Concerns” by Darlene Connor

Ada Calhoun — Fri, 15 Jul 2011 16:46:58 +0000

A great moment in ’90s womanhood. Via TeenageFilm.com.

Start Choppin’ by Dinosaur Jr.

Ada Calhoun — Wed, 13 Jul 2011 16:10:26 +0000

This song is inseparable for me from an early-’90s weekend I housesat on East Fifth Street between A and B for Daniel Fidler, who I worked with at SPIN magazine. (I was a 17-year-old intern, he was in his twenties and worked in research).

Daniel was really nice, loved Fugazi, and had a mother cat and a bunch of kittens nesting under his sink. I took care of them while he was in Israel. I also listened to the above song over and over at his apartment, and it made me feel better about a recent breakup with my first serious boyfriend. I liked staying there, listening to all his albums, reading his magazines, and pretending his studio was my own. I drank a lot of coffee. I did some light snooping.

I found my first Bikini Kill fanzine at his apartment, and it changed my life. I immediately took it to Kinko’s on Astor Place to make copies. I called Daniel when his bike got stolen from the hallway. He asked me to describe the scene of the crime. I told him the tire was the only thing chained to the railing. There was a pause. “Shit,” he said somewhere in Israel. “I put the chain on the wrong part of the bike.” He was a little bit of a mess. I found it very charming.

Another week I was supposed to housesit for him, in spring 1994, he changed his mind and decided to stay in town. I’d been really looking forward to hanging out there, so I was disappointed.

Later I learned he was found dead there soon after of an apparent overdose. There was, in retrospect kind of a heroin epidemic going on in that crowd back then, which I was oblivious to at the time because I was pretty burnt out by the time I was fifteen, when thankfully the hardest stuff that was kicking around was acid.

The writer / former member of Guided By Voices, James Greer—who I just Google-stalked and am now kind of obsessed with—mentioned Daniel’s death twice in ’90s articles for SPIN. It was only recently that I realized Daniel died within days of Kurt Cobain. Daniel was really lovely. I’m so sorry he’s not around now.

“I Love Dick” by Chris Kraus

Ada Calhoun — Tue, 12 Jul 2011 02:37:52 +0000

How had I never read this book before?

Chris Kraus’s 1997 book I Love Dick is part epistolary novel, part exegesis of itself. It’s basically feminist theory masquerading as a doomed rom-com.

The quasi-plot: Chris and her husband have dinner with a colleague of his, Dick. She gets a crush on Dick and she and her husband together start writing him letters expressing–and stoking–her feelings.

As Dick maintains a bemused silence, Chris gets more and more obsessed with him. She travels around the country pining for him and writing him long love letters from grimy motels. Somewhere in all this she leaves her husband. She goes and sleeps with Dick, who isn’t really into her but is doing some kind of very passive-aggressive “not saying no” thing. But then he gets mad and freaks out on her for turning him into an object and invading his privacy. Then she does a whole exegesis of the first part of the book.

It’s the strangest book I’ve read at least since last week’s Fat: a Love Story. (Both were recommended by my weird-book-connoisseur friend Asia.) I agree with nearly every review on Amazon, both 1-star and 5-star ones. It’s both enthralling and repellant. She’s both cool and intolerable. But I am so glad to have read it and wish my friends had too, because it’s relevant to a lot of different conversations, including:

1. Crushes, especially on other people when married, and what to do about them (and what to really, really not do about them).

2. Women in male-dominated worlds feeling invisible / marginalized / patronized / too sexy / not sexy enough.

3. Weird social-anxiety feelings, especially humiliation at cocktail parties and in elevators.

4. Entitlement, male and female.

5. Academia vs. Art. Personal vs. Political. Analysis vs. Creation. Making real life into a project. Party games.

6. Projection / objectification / male gaze / female gaze / womanizing / man-izing.

7. Total failure, wallowing in. Being a woman no one likes, freedom thereof.

The author and her husband were on This American Life’s Monogamy segment. And she was interviewed by ArtNet. But I still don’t know exactly what I think about her and this whole thing.

She is pretty shrewd, though, about the utterly self-referential nature of most crushes. She writes of her character/herself:

“…She is a lover of certain kinds of bad art, art which offers a transparency into the hopes and desires of the person who made it. Bad art makes the viewer much more active. (Years later Chris would realize that her fondness for bad art is exactly like Jane Eyre’s attraction to Rochester, a mean horse-faced junky: bad characters invite invention.)”

Craziest YA Book of All Time–OF ALL TIME

Ada Calhoun — Thu, 23 Jun 2011 15:35:09 +0000

The 1987 book Fat: a Love Story was recommended to me by my friend Asia. It had somehow eluded my voracious consumption of circa 1990 YA novels. “It’s, uh, pre-Afterschool Specials morality,” Asia said. “Like, you wonder how she got away with that ending.”

Intrigued, I read it immediately, and wow, is she not kidding. This Barbara Wersba is some kind of rebel. Also, she’s a great writer, and she sounds nice. The book is strange and funny and totally, completely, dramatically unconventional. That fourth Twilight book might be perverse, but somehow even with all the supernatural insanity it’s less shocking than Fat: a Love Story.

The book has a definite cult, but shockingly, there are some dismissive reviews out there. Here’s the non-spoiler part of one, from 1987′s School Library Journal: Grade 10-12 Sixteen-year-old Rita Formica, a 200-pound compulsive eater, takes a job as a bicycle messenger. Her employer is a 32-year-old eccentric loner, Arnold Bromberg, who operates a flagging cheesecake business. Rita falls in love at first glimpse with aristocratic fitness fanatic Robert Swann, a shallow Adonis who ignores her existence. Desperate to capture Robert’s attention, she accepts her friend Nicole’s offer to act as bait…

Anything else would be a spoiler, but I will say that Rita Formica is super charming, and anyone attacking the end of the book as “unrealistic” is a) wrong, and b) missing the point of YA novels, which is to warp reality in satisfying ways, which this does, and how.