Art I’ve Consumed and Loved Recently
MUSIC
I am in my Riot Grrrl era. I’m honestly surprised it’s taken me this long to dive into the Riot Grrrl genre as for years I have been a huge fan of The Runaways and Joan Jett, who are often thought of as the precursors to Riot Grrrl music.
Lately though I’ve been listening to a lot of Le Tigre. My favourite album right now being their self titled debut album from 1999. I have specifically had “Dude Yr so Crazy!” on repeat. “Gimme Brains” by Bratmobile has also been a song on high rotation.
ESSAYS
I recently re-read The Double Standard of Aging by Susan Sontag and ugh, it hit so good. It’s available online in pdf format and it’s a good little one sitting read that really packs a punch. One of my favourite passages, which I have quoted in previous essays is:
“[For women, o]nly one standard of female beauty is sanctioned: the girl.
The great advantage men have is that our culture allows two standards of male beauty: the boy and the man. The beauty of a boy resembles the beauty of a girl. In both sexes it is a fragile kind of beauty and flourishes naturally only in the early part of the life-cycle. Happily, men are able to accept themselves under another standard of good looks — heavier, rougher, more thickly built. A man does not grieve when he loses the smooth, unlined, hairless skin of a boy. For he has only exchanged one form of attractiveness for another: the darker skin of a man’s face, roughened by daily shaving, showing the marks of emotion and the normal lines of age.
There is no equivalent of this second standard for women. The single standard of beauty for women dictates that they must go on having clear skin. Every wrinkle, every line, every gray hair, is a defeat. No wonder that no boy minds becoming a man, while even the passage from girlhood to early womanhood is experienced by many women as their downfall, for all women are trained to continue wanting to look like girls.”
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