The first feminist gesture is to say: “Ok. They’re looking at me. But I’m looking at them.” The act of deciding to look, of deciding that the world is not defined by how people see me, but by how I see them.” -Agnès Varda
This is the antidote to that Margaret Atwood quote
1. refuse - if you don’t need it, refuse it. say no to flyers, plastic bags, straws, plastic cutlery etc. invest in a reusable water bottle, slow down and eat in to avoid takeaway containers, make your daily tea or coffee at home and take bags with you when you go shopping
2. reduce - can you cut down on how much you are using? buy food in bulk, eat less meat, don’t buy clothes just because they’re on sale. finding lots of little ways to reduce what you are consuming can have a big impact
3. reuse - can you reuse the product or parts of the product for another purpose? reuse empty glass jars to store food or turn old clothes into cleaning rags
4. repair - if it’s broken try and fix it before you throw it away and buy a new one
5. rot - if you can’t reuse or repair something made of natural materials, compost it. don’t send it to landfill because it can’t decompose buried under other rubbish, the greenhouse gases will just collect
6. recycle - send materials like cardboard and glass off to be chemically repurposed into new products. this process is resource intensive so it is best to reduce your recycling as much as possible, but recycling is always better than sending things to landfill.
7. rethink - if you can’t do any of the above then it’s time to rethink whether you actually need the product. find sustainable alternatives
something that stands out to me about Gillian Flynn’s writing is she’s the only author I can think of who presents fucked-up women as her protagonists take them or leave them, and doesn’t try to make them “likeable”. Gone Girl is a thorough deconstruction of the male author self-insert, and I think the reason the reception to Amy was so polarized is because she’s treated the same way characters like Nick are treated by male-penned literature - her flaws are vital to the meaning of the story and therefore will not be grown out of. Sharp Objects was the first time I had ever read a female protagonist who was allowed to be self-loathing without wanting a “cure” for her trauma. Gillian Flynn’s women aren’t tailored to the male gaze idea that damaged women have to be alluring or sympathetic or desiring to be “fixed” - if men can have a thousand Holden Caulfields, why can’t women have one Camille Preaker or Amy Elliott?
EDIT: this post is making its way around terf circles and I have to laugh. yall literally have the same politics as the gop, none of you get to call yourselves allies of women.
Richard Siken, “Snow and Dirty Rain,” Crush (2005) // Ocean Vuong, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (2019)
[”We have not touched the stars, / nor are we forgiven, which brings us back / to the hero’s shoulders and the gentleness that comes, / not from the absence of violence, but despite / the abundance of it.”
“All this time I told myself we were born from war—but I was wrong, Ma. We were born from beauty. Let no one mistake us for the fruit of violence—but that violence, having passed through the fruit, failed to spoil it.”]
“not from the absence of violence, but despite / the abundance of it.”
Yessss I remember these lines, there was a time I wanted them tattooed
“In films, we are voyeurs, but in novels, we have the experience of being someone else: knowing another person’s soul from the inside. No other art form does that. And this is why sometimes, when we put down a book, we find ourselves slightly altered as human beings. Novels change us from within.”
To the hearts of heretics, lusty women, madmen and poets.
via shiiimmer
