So, as it happens, I haven’t been blogging in a vacuum. And, as Bilbo Baggins says best, I’ve put off crediting my inspirations for far too long. I know now the Word is a short and dull little commentless blog, but one day maybe it will be like these fine publications!
and last but not least,
Thank you ladies! Because at the end of the day I know I can sit down to my pork chops and asparagus covered in a delightful-but-shoot-shouldn’t-have-put-so-much-cayenne-pepper-in-it maple syrup sauce and laugh, cry or generally feel intellectually challenged and respected.
Damn, did I mention there was too much cayenne in that sauce?
Oh no! Little kitten, DON'T do it! There is too much cayenne in that sauce!
I shall direct you particularly to this post by Historiann which features a piece of short fiction by Jonathan Franzen. Historiann says:
“In addition to a thoughtful exploration of how the girl would have experienced the rape and its aftermath, it is also a perfect illustration of how class works to suppress the reporting and prosecution of crimes by privileged men.”
I once decided to write a paper on the privilege of masculinity for a gender class (which I never had to do but one day this paper will happen) and I read a small stack of rape studies for it, including Anna Clark’s Women’s Silence, Men’s Violence and was stuck by the similar dialogues surround rape today and rape in the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-centuries. The idea that women are only as good as their reputation is still so pervasive today…
Speaking of rape and gender, I always liked Denise Riley’s argument that women are women biologically but not necessarily cognitively but I remember saying so once to my super and hir sad and tired reply was that that’s true until you are walking down a dark street at night and you hear footsteps behind you.
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