Super interesting and very well done. It took some effort for me to readjust to reading serious academic writing, but once I was in, I was in. I may hSuper interesting and very well done. It took some effort for me to readjust to reading serious academic writing, but once I was in, I was in. I may have to actually buy a copy.
- "Counseled to be passive in relation to men, women were allowed to act with initiative and spontaneity toward female friends, and friendship enabled women to exercise powers of choice and expression that they could not display in relation to parents or prospective husbands." p. 56. - "In Victorian lifewriting, passionate references to hearts on fire and burning with love are a sure sign that a woman is about to discuss Jesus." p. 63. - "In Victorian fiction, it is only the woman who has no bosom friend who risks becoming, like Lucy Snowe, one whom no man will ever clasp to his heart in marriage, a friendless woman who remains perpetually outside the bosom of the family." - p.108, ref. Villette. - "Victorian commodity culture incited an erotic appetite for femininity in women, framed spectacular images of women for a female gaze, and prompted women's fantasies about dominating a woman or submitting to one. Victorian society accepted female homoeroticism as a component of respectable womanhood and encouraged women and girls to desire, scrutinize, and handle simulacra of alluring femininity." p. 112. - "Fashion, often associated with a sexually charged inconstancy, becomes a respectable form of promiscuity for women, a form of female cruising, in which strangers who inspect each other in passing can establish an immediate intimacy because they participate in a common public culture whose medium is clothing." p. 121. - Corporal punishment is where pornography, usually considered a masculine affair, intersects with fashion magazines targeted at women. [...] Other pornographic publications actually reprinted verbatim material first published in fashion magazines." p. 140. - "Like a mythical figure, the doll simultaneously embodied opposed states: adult and child, husband and wife, slave and mistress, adoring and adored, punisher and punished, subject and object." p. 165. - "Having acquired a girl of her own without submitting to a father or husband, Miss Havisham turns that girl into a phallus. [...] Another way to put this is that Miss Havisham turns Estella into a dildo, a surrogate appendage 'mould[ed[ into the form that her wild resentment, spurned affection, and wounded pride, found vengeance in' (394). [...] Like a dildo, Estella is endowed with the power of the woman who wields her but has no sensation of her own. [...] Put differently, Estella is Miss Havisham's fashion plate and doll, trained to toy with men." p. 174-5, ref. Great Expectations. - "Forced by necessity to construct ad hoc legal frameworks for their relationships, nineteenth-century women in female marriages not only were precursors of late twentieth-century 'same-sex domestic partners,' but also anticipated forms of marriage between men and women that were only institutionalized decades after their deaths." p. 206. - "For marriage between men and women to be equal, feminists argued, single women had to be able to lead practicable and pleasurable lives. The demand to reform marriage began as a quest to make it more equal and more flexible, then evolved into a demand to make it less obligatory. To change the quality of life for the unmarried would alter marriage itself." p. 208. - "If nineteenth-century Europeans did not uniformly assume that the union of man and woman was the only civilized form of marriage it was due in part to the antic heterogeneity of public opinion about what form the institution should take. The 1850s and 1860s were defined by arguments, not agreement, over what constituted marriage and family, and same-sex marriage informed those debates." p. 225. - "Like most middle-class Victorians, Trollope valued intimacy between women as a component of normative femininity and hence as a basis for marriage. Female marriage perturbed Trollope because of its links to a troubling innovation in marriage between men and women -- the feminist reform of marriage into a dissoluble and egalitarian contract. [...] To narrate the triumph of hierarchical marriage and female amity, however, Trollope must acknowledge the existence and attractions of contractual and female marriage as viable social forms legible within the realist novel's social order." p. 228 , ref Can You Forgive Her?...more
The main thing I took away here is that violence is more complicated than it seems, suffuses our lives a lot more than is obvious, and requires activeThe main thing I took away here is that violence is more complicated than it seems, suffuses our lives a lot more than is obvious, and requires active awareness. ...more
I found the original 1998 edition at the bag sale portion of the library book sale, and I had some space in my bag, so it came home with me. I am a liI found the original 1998 edition at the bag sale portion of the library book sale, and I had some space in my bag, so it came home with me. I am a little surprised that I liked it so much. I'm thinking I may have been operating under the more standard social expectations generated by living in a male-dominant society. That seems likely.
It's dated a bit, which is no surprise considering it's 15 years old. The menstrual section talks about several alternatives to the standard give-the-man-your-money-every-month-forever tampons and pads, but cups are never mentioned, even though the keeper at least has been around since the 70s. The rape section concentrates entirely on violent attacks by strangers, although now it's well-known that most rape is perpetrated by someone the victim knows. Way to make this super-distant through phrasing, me. Hey, how about this? When I was raped, the rapist was my current boyfriend. That's a lot clearer, right? And I would be totally unsurprised to hear that other people's rape experiences were very much like mine. Confirmation bias? Maybe. But maybe it's just that it's socially unacceptable to talk about your own rape. It's Not Done. So no one really knows exactly how many people are raped, and by whom, and in what circumstance, because we're all conditioned not to talk about it at all, except perhaps to our most intimate friends and partners, and maybe not even then. So the main type of rape in the discourse in 1998 was the violent stranger type, possibly because news coverage of violent crime was practically the only place you ever heard about actual occurrences of rape.
Hey, how about that breaking the silence thing? That.
It's nice to actually have some evidence that perception of/knowledge about rape has changed in the past 15 years, right? Especially considering the utter shit that has been coming to light re rape over the past year or so.
Anyway, I was pleasantly surprised. I don't agree with everything in the book, of course, but that's ok. It's important just to bring up all the questions and question the assumptions and actually discuss what is not normally discussed. It's important to actually speak.
The recommended reading list is pretty great. I've read a decent chunk of it already, but there's plenty more to go. In fact, the whole resources of all types section must have been amazing in 1998. The main thing is that 15 years on we can find so much of this info on the internet, so we don't have to write away for things so much as to search for them. The resources themselves are still good though....more
I reserved this at the library because I saw a couple snippets of Susan Kim speaking with Sarah Haskins. Advertising+feminism+humor=great, right? PretI reserved this at the library because I saw a couple snippets of Susan Kim speaking with Sarah Haskins. Advertising+feminism+humor=great, right? Pretty much, yes.
Although I knew a good amount of the information in this book before I read it--dioxin in tampons, clitoral orgasm as historical cure for hysteria, condescending faux-medical femcare advertising, etc.--I also learned a reasonable amount of new info. For those less knowledgeable about the contemporary western cultural history of menstruation, the information here would be critical.
A few caveats, however:
The book is styled in a very pink, girly, retro-kitsch way, plastered with midcentury ads and curlicued chapter headings. Ordinarily this would piss me off to no end; in this case, however, half the point of the book is exploring the historical marketing of femcare, so my reaction is more complex. On one hand, the design could be an overtly ironic statement, aware of its relation with the book's content. On the other hand, it's unfortunately also plausible that the publishing company wanted that design specifically as a marketing device--in short, they may be using the same strategy that a significant chunk of the book dissects. As much as I'd like to attribute the design solely to the first motive, I think it's much more likely to be a combination of the two. So, ok. At least the advertising strategy is being used to actually inform people, as opposed to, for instance, selling Lysol as a douche. The ends are superior, but the means are...more difficult.
The tone, as well, is poised between girlfriendy gossip and scientific data analysis. This does make the information presented easily available to all, with little effort required for understanding, but again, what does this say about marketing to women? Are women too stupid to comprehend a more seriously toned volume, or are they uninterested in anything too complex? The information communicated here is valuable, but by putting literature aimed at women in this problematic tone, it seems to some extent that the authors and their editors are falling into the same trap that they seek to expose.
All things considered, it's definitely worth getting your hands on a copy of Flow. Substantial amounts of the information here is absent from the mainstream presentation of menstruation, and while it's possible to find bits and pieces of said info elsewhere, I haven't seen such a comprehensive volume anywhere else. As long as you consider the book with a critical eye, it's valuable....more
I wanted to like this a lot more than I do. Essentially, it's written for a lay audience, so it doesn't contain anywhere near as much info as I want. I wanted to like this a lot more than I do. Essentially, it's written for a lay audience, so it doesn't contain anywhere near as much info as I want. It's a skimming history.
For one thing, I want more and longer reprints of comics to go along with the commentary. Reprinted pages would be far more effective than her text synopses of comics; how can you fully discuss comics as an art without plenty of them? Robbins obviously knows that most of these comics are rare, since 1. duh, older comics Are rare and 2. she spends some time discussing how few women even know contemporary independent comics even exist; why isn't she presenting them far more obviously? Probably there were rights issues, plus financial negotiations concerning how many pages of color they could afford to print. So, realistically, this may have been a difficult task, but it's still a flaw.
Then I want the commentary to be more in-depth, discussing political implications in more detail and making more connections to other groundbreaking feminist arts. The info Robbins presents is good, but there just isn't enough of it....more
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