Link About It #5: Goat Portraits, Women's Work, and an Ode to Anne Shirley

This is the fifth instalment in a series now known as Link About It, previously called My Favourite Internet Things, in which I compile interesting/amusing things I've seen on the internet this week.

Remember last week, when I threatened to come up with a terrible pun-based name for this series if nobody suggested anything better? Well, I've made good on my promise, and this series is now going to be known as "Link About It" from this point onwards. Personally I think this title works better, but if you disagree.... all I can say is that you had your chance.

Women's work

This week I've somehow ended up stumbling across several excellent articles on the topic of women and labour, particularly the kind of domestic labour that is often invisible and expected from us.

• At The Cut, Lisa Miller considers how women tend to carry more things with them than men do, and what that says about our society. Miller looks at a number of issues, from the lack of pockets in women's clothes to who cleans up messes in public spaces, and ties them all together in a brilliant thesis on women and the baggage (literal and metaphorical) we carry.
• A new study says that the idea that men in general are "dirt blind" is a myth - they just aren't judged for being untidy or unclean in the same way women are. This made me think about the shared memory so many of us have of our mothers panicking over the state of the house when guests are coming over. Perhaps this is because women subconsciously know the house's condition reflects on them, rather than their male partners or children?
•  A lack of time is a woman's greatest enemy, writes Brigid Schulte at The Guardian. Her essay makes a compelling argument that the thing holding so many women back from creative or career success is the fact that they just don't have as much time as their male counterparts, due to the unseen domestic labour expected of them.

Articles on wanting and asking too much

• It's from 2017, but this ode to Anne of Green Gables at Lit Hub is so beautiful that I'd still wholeheartedly recommend it to anyone who loves L. M. Montgomery's precocious heroine. I didn't read any of the Anne books until I was an adult, but once I did I related to Anne so strongly that I wish I'd read them many years before. 
• This personal essay at Autostraddle explores desire, being "thirsty", and the radical act of openly claiming what you want. It's excellent, but I will warn that it's a bit NSFW.

Stories and pictures

• "The Crane Wife", by CJ Hauser, also explores desire and emotional needs. It's a beautiful story of a woman recovering from the collapse of a relationship, and how studying cranes in the wild helps her survive the aftermath. I originally thought that it was a piece of short fiction, but now I think it might actually be autobiographical. 
• These portraits of goats, taken by photographer Kevin Horan, are surprisingly striking. I never would have thought of goats as being particularly pretty animals before, but their uniqueness and personality really shine through in this series. 

If you've finished reading this post and are surprised that I haven't shared anything to do with the UK's new PM, I would just like to say that the omission was deliberate. Between the recent heatwave and being ill, I don't have the energy to confront the horror of our current political situation right now. There is a time for action and a time for distraction, and right now I'm strongly in need of the latter.

What I've Learned About Twitter, by Someone Who Joined a Few Months Ago

I've been on Twitter for a couple of months now, and to say it's been an enlightening experience would be one way to put it. Another way to put it would be that I, along with Twitter's other 330 million or so users, have been exposed to a yawning great hellmouth of confusion and internet culture that I just can't seem to look away from. 

Still, entering said hellmouth has provided numerous learning opportunities for me, some of which I was more thankful for than others. So that you too can acquire this knowledge without having to suffer as I have, and in honour of Twitter's recent (controversial) layout change, I have compiled a list of seven of the most important things I've learned here:

When drama or discourse is about to break on the internet, it will surface on Twitter first. There are a lot of criticisms you can make of Twitter, but the website's claim that "it's what's happening" is generally pretty accurate. It only took a little while of me being on Twitter to realise that conversations might have been happening on there for several days (an eternity in internet time) before they reach the likes of Facebook or other social media websites. As a result:

If you don't understand something you've seen on Twitter, there's no guarantee that Google will be able to help you. I'm sure most of us have been through this experience before: you see something online, it doesn't make sense to you, you Google it, and (often with the help of Urban Dictionary or a Buzzfeed article) you eventually learn what it's all about. This process doesn't work with Twitter. I spent a day or so utterly confused by everyone's mention of "cliff wife" on my feed before the story broke in other areas of the internet, at which point I finally learned what everyone was talking about. Before that, Googling or even searching within Twitter was no help at all. 

The memes, by and large, just aren't as good. Don't get me wrong: there are some good memes on Twitter. Nevertheless, the hard truth is that they're generally just not as good as the ones on Facebook. Maybe I'm following the wrong people, or maybe FB's algorithm is just better suited to showing its users the crème of the meme crop, but that's what I've found. There is also another problem with the memes/jokes on Twitter, and that is:

For every funny tweet you see, there is a 50% chance it was stolen. I'm not going to get deep into the issues with internet culture and the commodification of memes and how with the prevalence of screenshotting much of what you see on social media is "stolen" in some sense anyway, but I will say this: at least on Facebook, a screenshotted meme (or tweet or tumblr post) at least normally retains the creator's username and is obviously not being claimed as original. On Twitter, where people regularly copy-paste other people's tweets and then send them from their own account as though they were the creator of the joke all along, this is not the case. Thankfully, you can normally rely on Twitter's dedicated userbase to expose the fraud in the tweet's replies, normally with screenshots and (another) meme about stealing jokes.

Academics love Twitter. This is actually one of the main reasons why I first joined the site, after I was at a conference and realised the majority of the people there were either live-tweeting the talks, introducing themselves to people they'd previously only known via their Twitter accounts, or just discussing the apparently self-contained sphere of "academic Twitter". To be honest, I don't know exactly why academics love Twitter so much. Perhaps it's the focus on text-based posts rather than images or videos, something which appeals to people who work in a field based largely upon reading and writing. Maybe it's the way the website's format lends itself to discussion and debate. Or, possibly, people who work in an increasingly fragile industry are keen to use any opportunity for networking and self-promotion. Either way, academic Twitter is definitely one of the brighter spots of the website and one of the few aspects of it that I don't regret introducing myself to. That said, even if academics love it, it is still true that:

Everybody hates Twitter, including and especially everyone who uses it on a regular basis. If you go on any random Twitter account, I would bet there's a 95% chance that at some point they have tweeted about how terrible the website is, how they hate the new update, or how they absolutely have to take a break from tweeting for a month or so because this website is just not good for their mental health. Having been on Twitter myself now, I completely understand. I've heard it referred to as "the blue hell site" a few times, but I feel Twitter is more like the toxic f*ckboy that the entire internet shares a history with. We know he's no good for us, but we just can't stop going back. And speaking of toxic men:

Men will appear out of nowhere to offer their opinion, even if you didn't ask for it. I will say that I am writing this based on my own experience as a visible woman on the internet, so it's quite possible that people whose gender appears differently on Twitter would have a different experience, but this does seem to be a common occurrence for women on the website. More than once, I have had men jump into my mentions to tell me things that I certainly didn't ask for their views on, everything from the history of Welsh nationalism to my crush on Megan Rapinoe. Topic, context, and whether or not you follow each other - nothing so trivial as these will prevent a Twitter man from giving his two cents, whether you like it or not. The problem is so severe that even as I write this I am convinced that, should a Twitter man read this post, they will suddenly emerge on here or the hellsite to contest what I've written. Such is the life of a woman on the internet. 

In conclusion, Twitter is a strange and terrible place and also probably my favourite social media website at the moment. No doubt I will continue to learn much more in my time on there, unless of course I end up getting banned or leaving as so many have done before me. I'd like to know the thoughts of other people who are on Twitter - even if you are a man, who in this case I am giving permission to share their opinions with me, except on the subject of women's experience on social media. Other women tweeters (twitterers? Twitter users?): I'd love to hear what you think (either on here or elsewhere) and if you've had any similar encounters to the ones I've mentioned. Being a woman on the internet is always a trial, but as ever, Twitter remains uniquely challenging.

My Favourite Internet Things (This Week) #4

This is the fourth instalment in what I've now decided is going to be a series: My Favourite Internet Things, in which I compile interesting/amusing things I've seen on the internet this week.

This post is going up about a week later than I originally intended, because I just got kind of overwhelmed with things and wasn't able to get it up last Sunday/Monday, and I thought it would be better to just wait a whole week after that than to put it up mid-week. But here it is! I am currently writing this with a headache that I haven't been able to shift all day, so please excuse me if this post seems a bit off. I was tempted to just leave this post again, but I really want to get into the habit of posting regularly on here and this series is a good source of encouragement for me. 

On another note, I'm trying to think of a new name for this series. I'm not particularly keen on the current name, nor am I sure it really fits with the theme of many of the links, so if you have any suggestions for alternative names, please let me know! I will be glad to steal them. Now, on to the links:

Important articles

• At Wear Your Voice, eight non-binary people share what they want society to learn about gender. I originally meant to share this around Non-Binary Day (14th July), but it's always a good time to analyse our preconceptions about gender and learn how to better support our non-binary siblings.
• This article details the history of Quentin Tarantino's mistreatment of the women he works with. On top of Tarantino's failure to do anything when he knew about Harvey Weinstein's abuse of women, learning what actresses like Uma Thurman and Diane Kruger have to say about Tarantino's actions on set is very disturbing.
• reCAPTCHA is possibly (probably) exploiting us all. I've been wondering about the "I'm not a robot" things lately as I noticed many of them were no longer requiring me to pass any obvious checks before they confirmed my humanity. After reading this article, I feel uneasy about the change.

Bookish stuff (i.e. most of these links are related to books or reading even though I didn't plan it this way)

• The New York Public Library has book recommendations for Game of Thrones characters, who I guess need something to do now their series has ended. I found the suggestion for Joffrey particularly amusing.
• Also at NYPL, literary cats! Cats! In books! Read this and try to forget the horror that is the new trailer for the Cats film (no, I'm not linking it here - Google at your own risk).
• BookRiot has a list of non-fiction essays you can read for free online, by writers including Ta-Nehisi Coates, Joan Didion, and Roxane Gay. Go forth and read.
• 'Our Last Guest', a short story by Rowan Hisayo Buchanan, is beautifully eerie and poignant. Now I can't wait to read her latest novel, Starling Days, as soon as I find the money.

Miscellaneous interesting things

• It's a few years old, but this Japan Times article on 'an “art collective” of “ultra-technologists”' is still worth a look. (Full disclosure: I haven't actually read the whole article yet, but I thought the photos of teamLab's 'A Forest Where Gods Live' exhibition were too striking to not share.) 
• The Smithsonian website has a short history of gendered kids' clothing, which shows how the idea of pink as a girls' colour is only relatively recent. I'd also like to see a more in-depth look at how gendered clothing was marketed though, since the article moves over that part a bit too quickly for me.

That's all for this week. Don't forget to let me know if you have any suggestions of alternative names for this series (column? category?). If I don't receive any suggestions, I will most likely end up going with a terrible 'link'-based pun. You have been warned.

Book Review: American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis

TW: discussion of violence and sexual assault

In the evening light of a July sunset, this is how I spend a few hours: I read my paperback copy of American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis, published by Picador. I have a cup of tea made from Earl Grey teabags from Twinings, which I drink out of a white mug I bought from Sainsbury's. If it's late in the evening I would usually drink Clipper's organic white tea, but it is still early now so I am drinking Earl Grey instead. I use some cushions from Asda to prop myself up and put a fleece blanket from Primark over my legs. Primark is a good place for blankets because the fleece they use-

Okay, I can't do this anymore. How did you feel, reading the passage above? Vaguely amused? Confused? Bored?  If you felt any of those emotions, then you have some idea how I felt while reading American Psycho. To spoil the end of this post: I didn't like it.

You might be familiar with the plot of American Psycho from the rather famous 2000 film adaptation, which starred Christian Bale. Fun fact: Christian Bale's stepmother is Gloria Steinem, who apparently opposed the book based on its graphic depictions of violence against women. To be fair to Steinem, there is a lot of violence in the novel, which follows Patrick Bateman - Wall Street yuppie and titular, self-declared "psychopath" - as he alternates between living a life of extreme materialism and decadence among his other young, wealthy friends, and brutally torturing and murdering innocent people. Ellis writes all of this in what has become an iconic style: a coldly detached, stream-of-consciousness narrative littered with brand names and 80s references. I have made a poor attempt to satirise it in the italicised paragraph at the top of this post, but to get a real taste for it you only need to find a copy of the book, open it, and read a page at random. One good thing I can say about Ellis is that it must have taken a fair amount of dedication and focus to maintain that narrative voice for the entirety of this almost-400-page novel.

Unfortunately, it's that same commitment to one particular gimmick that ultimately costs American Psycho its appeal. When I first started to read the book, I was rather charmed by its style. I thought it was a great example of "Show, Don't Tell", very clearly showing the reader how extreme Bateman's obsession with material goods was without explicitly stating it. Ellis is quite good at depicting the world Bateman inhabits, of shallow fixations and excess, which he is able to render humorously yet believably. It's not the sort of lifestyle I have any experience with, so I can't say how accurate Ellis's version of Wall Street's yuppie world is, but I know that Bateman's interactions with his peers were some of the most entertaining parts of the novel for me. I enjoyed reading the original "business card scene", in which Bateman and his colleagues exchange cards and obsess over minor differences in font and background colour, that I had previously only been aware of through the film adaptation. A prolonged section of dialogue in which Bateman and his friends make a futile attempt to decide where to eat one evening was also amusing. Episodes like these are where Ellis is at his best, depicting a world where the characters' preoccupation with absurdly trivial details, like the font of a business card or which restaurant to have dinner at (taking into account where is considered trendy or where they have been seen recently, rather than something less important, like the food). It's funny and clever enough to be a relatively good satire, and it is scenes like this which give me some idea of what Ellis might have been aiming to achieve in writing American Psycho.

That said, the aforementioned scenes only come to maybe a dozen pages in a book that is nearly 400 pages long. I have referenced the length of the novel before, and I stress this point because it is the root of many of the problems with American Psycho. I was entertained by the first few chapters when reading, but the charm started to wear a little thin by around the 50 page mark. Ellis does well to skewer a particular brand of 80s consumerism in those first 50 pages - the problem is that he then continues to stab at it for the next 330. This brings me to the other infamous aspect of the book: the violence. The problem I have with American Psycho's violence is more or less the same issue I have with its attempt at satire: after a while, it's just a bit boring. The only difference is that where Ellis's yuppie meet-ups are unsettling insofar as they depict a group of nauseatingly privileged people, whose hobbies include tormenting the homeless and cutting lines with their American Express cards until the coke stops them working, the murder scenes are disturbing because of their explicit and sadistically creative brutality. Different, but ultimately the same; they're both unpleasant, and they're both fairly uninteresting.

Since it has been the subject of feminist criticism in the past, I'd like to take a slight detour from the body of this review to address the nature of the violence in American Psycho. First of all, I fully agree with claims that the various scenes of murder, torture, and sexual assault have an unmistakably misogynistic angle to them. Most of Bateman's victims are women and much of the violence in the book is heavily sexualised. This is not to say that misogyny is the only type of hatred driving these crimes - Bateman gets his fair share of racism and homophobia in as well - but violence against women is by far the most frequently and explicitly depicted. The descriptions of Bateman's murders are disturbing enough in their own right, but they would be even more horrifying if I felt that Ellis had written them purely as filler scenes for the readers to get some sort of enjoyment out of. ("Oh, he's torturing that woman with a live rat? How delightful!"). Thankfully, I don't think this is what Ellis intended - although a quick scan of reviews for the book on Google will show that many people do in fact get some kind of perverse pleasure out of these scenes. Rather, I think he wrote them to prove a point, which most likely goes something along the lines of: consumerism is so bad that an incredibly wealthy man like Bateman has become so emotionally numb that he's actually become a serial killer. Something like that. Wikipedia has a whole section devoted to themes and interpretation of the book, but it all comes down to a similar argument. 

To clarify: I'm fine with violence in media, but it has to serve a purpose. Broadly speaking, that purpose can either be: 1. to entertain and/or amuse (as in Tarantino's over-the-top, comic violence in his films), or 2. to prove an ethical or thematic point (as in most media which chooses to graphically portray aspects of the Holocaust). The cardinal sin of American Psycho, in my opinion, is that it fails to do either particularly well. I'm willing to admit that the more gruesome parts of the book made me feel nauseous, as I imagine and hope they were supposed to. I have read plenty of other books which disturbed and horrified me, but they usually felt like it was in service of something. When I finished reading this novel, I just felt that I'd repeatedly put myself off my dinner for no real reason. Maybe I am being too shallow, but it seemed to me that any point Ellis was trying to make could easily have been achieved in a short story, and it needn't have been dragged out and flogged to death over the course of an entire novel.

In short, I didn't like American Psycho. Although there are a few examples of wit that shine through, most of the book alternates between being tedious, gross, or both. I might have been able to understand the violent misogyny and general hatred depicted if it had been done well or for a good reason, but it comes across as the half-baked attempt of a young writer using sensationalism to establish himself as his generation's literary enfant terrible - an attempt which, by many accounts, was bizarrely successful. Sadly, reading the result of this attempt feels like being forced to watch torture porn narrated by Ronald Reagan, while simultaneously being whacked over the head with a copy of The Great Gatsby - not fun, not subtle, and not particularly clever.

Verdict: 2/5 stars

My Favourite Internet Things (This Week) #3

This is the third instalment in what I've now decided is going to be a series: My Favourite Internet Things, in which I compile interesting/amusing things I've seen on the internet this week.

This week's instalment is going to be relatively brief, because I sort of forgot that I was meant to be doing these until a day or so ago. Anyway, here are the links!

Miscellaneous interesting stuff

• Old article, but let us never forget Hannibal the killer swan, AKA the best creature to ever come out of Pembrokeshire.
• Speaking of Welsh greats, Art Fund did a list of sixteen Welsh artists (including Gwen John, another Pembrokeshire icon).
• This article at Medium looks at algorithms and how they impact our everyday lives, even more than we realise. This is something I think about a lot and this piece left me suitably freaked out, which probably shows it's worth reading.
• Lit Hub will tell you what your favourite beach read says about you. Tag yourself, I'm Gone Girl.
• The world of Thomas the Tank Engine is a dominated by a totalitarian regime. Stay vigilant, comrades.
• This map marks out the lands of different native groups around the world. I think this could be a useful resource for people trying to learn more about the history of indigenous peoples.
• Finally, this group of Chinese women living together in a huge, beautiful house are my new life goals. 

That's all for this week. In my defence, I was distracted by some rather entertaining Twitter drama today, so I wasn't able to fish through my browser history for links like I normally do. Still, I regret nothing.

My Favourite Internet Things (This Week) #2

This is the second installment in what I've now decided is going to be a series: My Favourite Internet Things, in which I compile interesting/amusing things I've seen on the internet this week.

Corsetry and Feminism
Since seeing the comments made about Kim Kardashian's Met Gala outfit (which I honestly liked), I've been trying to find out more about corsets and how feminists and fashion historians are responding to the current revival of interest in corsetry.

• This article at the Guardian generally has a negative view on corsets, although it does suggest that corsets and "waist trainers" are different products which appeal for different reasons.
• Marianne Faulkner, a corsetiere, argues that corsets can indeed be feminist when viewed through lens of self-expression and individual choice.
• Not analysis, but this corset made by a group of corsetmakers (directed by the aforementioned Faulkner) is really beautiful. The Underpinnings Museum website is also a good source in general if you're interested in fashion history.
• The New York Times published this article which seems to include a history of corsetry and thoughts on its feminist credentials - unfortunately I can't seem to read it. Still, I wanted to include it here as it looks good and I am hoping to find some way to look at it someday.

Interesting Articles
An assortment of random links I thought were worth sharing:

• A giant squid has been caught on film in US waters! I think this was mistakenly shared with the suggestion that it was the first time a giant squid was ever caught on camera, which I believe is incorrect, but sightings of giant squids are still definitely rare (and very exciting, if you ask me).
• The Cut published a sort of behind-the-scenes look at Babe.net, the now-defunct website that published the infamous Aziz Ansari article. Very relevant to the subjects of workplace harassment and how socially progressive, sex-positive culture can be co-opted by predatory men to take advantage of women.
• Fast fashion is actually bad for workers and the environment, according to a Guardian article. I'm sure that a lot of us already had our suspicions about this, but it's good to have the facts. Still, I was disappointed to see the Guardian end on a ethical consumerist slant, rather than a call to action against the companies which have real power in this situation.
• One of the newer entries in the Dictionary of Welsh Biography focuses on Rhiannon Davies Jones, an author and academic. I was ashamed I hadn't heard of her before seeing this biography, but then if this project is bringing attention to lesser-known Welsh historical figures then they are doing their job well.
• Ruth Hunt, the outgoing Chief Executive of Stonewall, did an interview with Buzzfeed in which she talks about a variety of topics from growing up gay to dealing with TERFs trying to co-opt the butch lesbian struggle to justify their transphobia. She seems like a brilliant woman and it's hard to read about all the harassment she's been receiving just for standing up for our trans sisters.

Websites and Resources

• My friend Sandra introduced me to this website, Radio Garden, which lets you listen to radio stations from all around the world. Useful if you want to know, for example, what people are listening to in Mexico City these days.
• Europeana: Rise of Literacy is a new digital exhibition at the National Library of Wales, focusing on the growth of literacy in Europe over the years. It's a pretty extensive collection, and I could see it being useful to those interested in either literature or history.

Fun Stuff

• Six is "a pop-opera style musical giving the wives of Henry VIII a historical revisionist feminism makeover", according to The Mary Sue, which frankly sounds amazing.
• It's an old article, but this series of photos which basically makes films into impressionist art is pretty cool.
• Miyako Ihara's photo series showing the relationship between her grandmother Misao and her cat Fukumaru is beautiful and made me want to cry. 10/10 would recommend.
• There are quite a few "Democratic Party candidates as..."  going around at the moment, but I found this one of the candidates as members of a university history department particularly amusing.
• Someone linked to these bloopers from Young Frankenstein on Twitter. I can't remember who shared it, but Gene Wilder's laugh brightened my day and for that I am thankful to them.
• I have been going on about the similarities between Lewis Capaldi's "Someone You Loved" and O-Zone's "Dragostea Din Tei" for weeks now but nobody seemed to take it seriously (and it really is serious). Thankfully I found this mash-up of the two songs on YouTube, and now I feel peace knowing that at least one other person saw the connection.