quote

i want this george orwell quote on a t-shirt.

In a time of deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act.

sexism on the internet

i found this comic on facebook through bitch magazine. i don't know who writer/drawer gabby is, but this comic is the most awesome one i've seen! i love it. it's so true.

i tried different ways to post it here, but either it took over the entire page or it wasn't readable, so you'll just have to trust me and click the link. please click the link!

link (this is where i found it).

update: aaaaand, some context.

kathleen hanna tv

this clip with an interview of kathleen hanna (via her blog) actually made me shed a tear or two at one point. you have to guess where yourself. watch it! it's great, and kathleen hanna is great!

the brave new world

so, you might have heard that ridley scott is interested in doing a movie of huxley's brave new world. ridley, the old man - a sir now apparently, who has produced and directed two of my favorite movies, blade runner and alien, and several other quite good ones - thelma & louise, 1492. i know, that was years ago, but still, couldn't be too bad, could it?

i wrote a piece here on what i think of the novel in question and since it came up again, i'm curious, how do you, my readers, feel about it? so i put up a poll here to the right. please click! thanks.

quoting without context

i regularly read the i blame the patriarchy blog, as seen linked to the right. today i obviously stuck gold with a post from last week. i like this following part so much i simply have to quote it, but i'm far too tired to write something about it (the post i'm linking to, not the story behind it) myself, so, by all means, read it yourselves. you won't regret it, i promise.

That’s the thing about patriarchy. It does the defining, not you. That’s what makes it the dominant paradigm. You can abstain from sex, you can fuck your way across the universe, you can be a stone butch dyke with a utility belt, you can get your boobs amputated and your uterus ripped out, you can be sex-neutral in your own crackpot mind, you can be ugly or hawt, you can be the Democrats’ presidential nominee, you can even age out of desirability, but you will always be defined in terms of, and used according to, that which the dominant culture describes as your essence: sex. Or, as you are alternately defined: a receptacle for the perpetuation of male supremacy.

everybody's not happy now

i found a piece about dystopias, mainly brave new world and 1984, called "everybody is happy now", written in the guardian (unlimited books) recently, by margret atwood. the title comes from brave new world, for those of you who hasn't read it. i think the piece is good, as it compares the novels with what we're seeing in todays world, to see if they "measure up" and to see which one of them says more about today's society. (so read it!)

just like atwood writes, both have points. orwell with the control and surveillance us citizens have to endure from the governments in more countries than not it seems and, post-9-11, thoughcrime; and huxley with the überconsumption and promiscuity we're indulging in as well as the issue of genetic engineering and prescribed drugs.

i've read them both. i read 1984 when i was 17 and i loved it. i am a bit reluctant to re-read it cos i know that i will find things i don't like in it now, and don't want to destroy what the novel has meant to me for more than 10 years in terms of political awakenings. after all, i have since then embraced feminism and i have read a lot of things since then that i've had problems with because i see gender everywhere. this is the case with brave new world.

i wrote a review of brave new world earlier this year. here it is.

the idea behind this novel is such a great one - really one of the best sci-fi ideas i know of - that it really depresses me that huxley made a novel out of it. being a sci-fi fan and having heard so much praise over this novel, it made me disappointed reading it, to say the least. the characters are flat and uninteresting with few exceptions, and the plot is awful! the only thing next to the idea - that is the society he creates and what it stands for - that i like is the conversations that some of the characters have about that society. stereotypically, only the male characters have those conversations. but then huxley is not the first, nor the last sci-fi author to create great new societies and conditions for humans and others but totally look pass gender injustices.

in my opinion, huxley should have taken his great idea and made it something other than a novel, or he should have asked someone else, who could actually write novels, to help him write the characters. i'm sorry to be hard on a classic, but there it is.

perspectives

i just read in a comment on a blog i sometimes read someone, american i assume, calling hillary clinton far left. it's funny how different we see things depending on what we're used to or how our society works. no one in sweden would call her anything other than right. politicians here who agrees with her belong to the right, not far right, but the right. according to swedish standards democrats and republicans are right and right +, respectively. no wonder some think of sweden as a communist country. of course they are heavily misguided, but still.

_i_ am far left. hillary is not even close. :)