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Here is the news: a woman in a dress

Here is the news: a woman in a dress

Here is the news: a woman in a dress

There are plenty of women in pop culture and quite a few who I specifically respect for the way they've carved their career; but it's depressing what a large proportion of them fall back on the lad-mag shoots and related strategies for their celebrity. No-one should deny a woman's right to pose for lads' mags etc, but when it's the overwhelming trend for women in pop culture you should start to worry.

There are people who I thought were cool but then unexpectedly got their tits out for some mag or advert. Gail Porter and Nicole Kidman are the two that come to mind, both of whom seemed as though they were getting on fine without selling their skin. They have every right to do it - but famous people are role-models as well as gossip-fodder, and it shouldn't be so common for a woman to have shown off her bits in the course of celebrity, because it's on the way towards being compulsory. The only two young female celebrities I can think of who haven't been near that are artists like Björk and Tori Amos, and coincidentally enough they're both commonly referred to as weirdos in the media.

I was prompted to write this after stumbling into a supermarket. The first aisle was magazines, and it was really weird how uniform the covers of the mags were - a load of blonde, white, straight-haired pouting women - and I'm including the lads' mags as well as the women's mags here. Does anyone else find it weird how similar the covers for lads' mags and women's mags are? Fewer clothes in one variety of course, but still. And the uniformity! The women on the front of Loaded magazine look exactly the same, month in, month out, unless of course I'm mistaken and it really is the same woman every month.

Scarlett Johansson was the only woman in this row of faces that seemed to have something to say, although it was something about fashion and ethics - one of those subjects that comes round every 5 years or so.

Carnival of Feminists, issue 3 is out, and there's lots of tempting things to read. I'm at a conference at the moment so no time to read them, but I'll download them to my computer and maybe read them on the train or something. The author refers to one of my Ladyfest articles which is very kind - thanks!

I've been reading some articles about riot-grrrl related subjects. The absolute best one I've read so far is Congregating Women: Reading 3rd Wave Feminist Practices in Subcultural Production by Doreen Piano (what a name!) - a really well-written article which places zine-writing and riot-grrrl in the contexts of feminism, punk, consumerism, and so on. It explains the zine phenomenon really well, as the creation of alternative distribution networks which retain the means of production and stay (largely) clean of mainstream cultural influence such as paid advertising, and it spells out some of the realities really well.

I wasn't convinced by the article "A Little Too Ironic": The Appropriation and Packaging of Riot Grrrl Politics by Mainstream Female Musicians. It didn't seem to have enough evidence for its central point. Alanis Morisette might have been female and "angry" but that doesn't necessarily mean she was stealing ideas from riot grrrls. Does it?

What fucked version of hello kitty are you? was an interesting article, not least because I just bought myself a Hello Kitty bag. After reading this article, my girlfriend realised that she only ever wore Hello Kitty stuff in combination with big stompy boots - and now we know why: because of the subcultural semiology of course.

There's a lot of interesting writing about zines. I never realised that there were people keeping tabs on all this - universities keeping little libraries of zines, "annuals" being produced, etc. Wow! I wonder if any copies of my sister's wonderful zine (now sadly defunct) are archived on dusty shelves somewhere?

It's an interesting question to what extent the practices of zine-writing, distros, etc, can/should/are moving into the internet world. A lot of zines and such don't have any kind of obvious web presence, which might well be on purpose. I really like electronic media but I recognise it has built-in problems such as the cost of internet access, cost of hosting a website, the intrusion of commercial interests, and the differential access according to country/race/gender (boys still have better internet access than girls, e.g. although many families in the UK have internet-enabled computers, boys more often than girls have computer access in their own room). It also loses the person-to-person interaction of selling/swapping zines which is really good. (Piano addresses some of these issues in her article.)

Still, despite that, there's some really interesting stuff happening on the web. The rise of blogging is an excellent development, and the quasi-word-of-mouth connections between blogs allows for some kind of "subcultural spaces" to evolve. One really nice idea is The Carnival of Feminists, which is a collective enterprise in which bloggers take turns to compile an article discussing and linking to interesting feminist blog articles. It's a very good way to find some really interesting stuff to read! But note also the non-hierarchical, non-owned way it's organised. It's an excellent way of keeping a multiplicity of voices, and keeping the perspectives fresh.

I'll be doing more reading in this area. There's so much stuff to navigate, and so many interesting topics. I haven't even touched on the book recommendations I've had (and have yet to fulfil).