Disentangling

I.

I realised I was probably in love with you. It was that day we were all building things at my rambling junk-strewn house, hammering and sanding and painting the chassis of the old trailer that we wanted to fill with tools and use as a mobile bike workshop. Do you remember trying to pry up the splintered lino with a chisel while the sun beat down outside? Later we retired to the porch, cracked tinnies, and watched the chickens mow the front lawn while the gums across the street pinkened in fading light.

The gender-bending party

I went to a ‘gender-bending’ party last night. I wore a white shirt with suspenders, and a black bowler hat. My friend Jemma, whose party it was, said I looked like one of the 1920s gangsters in her favourite video game. She told me the name of the game three times but I’ve already forgotten it because I was quite drunk when she said it. I also have a very poor memory generally when it comes to remembering facts.

This Is Kind Of About You And Kind Of About Some Things I Read On the Internet

Part I: I Wish You Would Call Me

I am feverish in my apartment. Getting myself off with one hand and holding a cup of Fantastic noodles in the other. I’m not sure what “Oriental” is supposed to taste like but it is not the taste you want in your mouth when you finally squirt during the opening sequence of Today Tonight.

Wanda the Sand Woman

I don’t know – you ever get the feeling that your life is fucked up beyond repair? I’m only 24, but I already kind of think mine might be. And this isn’t just something that’s occurred to me in the last couple of weeks – I’ve known and I’ve known as early as high school, because me and my friends…we were weird kids.

Anna Goldsworthy, gender, feminism and misogyny

I have just finished reading Anna Goldsworthy’s Quarterly Essay: Unfinished Business. It is an intelligent and exhaustive look at women, power, misogyny and feminism in today’s Australia. The essay begins with Julia Gillard’s now famous misogyny speech and from there it twists and turns into so many areas of female representation and female silence in today’s society. One of the central questions of the essay is: will young girls and women sitting at home, watching our Prime Minister being beaten and shouted down because she is a woman—will these young girls and women want to stand up and attempt to take power for themselves one day?

On Sexual Debuts

I was sixteen years old. I cried. Not with pain, not with pleasure – certainly not with desire. I cried with the sheer relief at having sloughed off the weight of my clunky, ungainly virginity, which I had carried with me everywhere I went. I was free to turn away from the boy in whose bed I had divested myself of something I no longer had any use for.

It was gone.

Be My Jay

A lesson learnt about romanticising the loser/stoner:

I have this distinct memory of being 15 years old and watching Mallrats for the first time. I soon became obsessed. I’d watch the Jay and Silent Bob films almost daily. It wasn’t the college humour or over-used stereotypical stoner jokes that pulled at the strings of my young heart; it was the talkative Jay’s sweet golden tresses. Something about his permanently reddened half-baked eyes, raspy voice, adorably rosy lips and the blonde hair poking out under his black beanie was extremely appealing to me. I became infatuated. I would plaster pictures of a Led Zeppelin-era Robert Plant around my room, watch Dazed and Confused and Lords of Dog Town almost religiously, and try to get my little suburban teen hands on the green substance (which, often times, did not lead to very positive experiences).

Why I Love Sluts: the Influence of Sexually Promiscuous Female Identities within Media Culture

I’ve always loved sluts.

I’m not sure if this is nature or nurture, as I was raised with a plethora of female role models whose ‘empowerment’ was predominantly derived from their sexuality. Being born in the early 90s, I experienced the world post-sexual revolution, mid third-wave feminism, all in full-colour through a somewhat grainy television screen.