Gabby Bess's Blog, page 6

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"The “welfare queen” of the Reagan era was the dominant archetype of a female drug user...."

“The “welfare queen” of the Reagan era was the dominant archetype of a female drug user. Now, the culture, or at least a wider swath of it, is a bit more comfortable with varied portraits of women who like to get high. We’ve made micro-celebrities of writer-blogger hybrids for whom substances of all sorts are professional fodder. Prozac Nation author Elizabeth Wurtzel; Cat Marnell, who gained notoriety for writing about sex, crack, and make-up tips online; and Megan Boyle, whose drug-fueled memoir Liveblog comes out this year, immediately come to mind. But that doesn’t mean the preface for Sisters of the Extreme is irrelevant. “Since 1960, more than a dozen anthologies of drug literature have been published in English,” the editors write. “Almost everything in these collections was written by men.” Thinking back to what I’ve had to endure in school from Kerouac, Burroughs, Kesey, and their fanboy disciples (too many of whom I’ve dated), Sisters appeared as a relief when I discovered it (Especially in the summer, when a mushroom trip just seems to be the logical way to spend a Saturday afternoon). In Sisters, Palmer and Horowitz’s thesis is simple: Doing drugs and writing about the experience is a woman’s game as much as it is a man’s, dating back to ancient myth.”

- Winona Ryder’s Mom Explains the History of Women, Drugs, and Literature

Alternatives to Alternatives: the Black Grrrls Riot Ignored

Alternatives to Alternatives: the Black Grrrls Riot Ignored

durgapolashi:More from Ongoings

durgapolashi:

More from Ongoings

teens

if you are a teen girl that watches gay (male) porn and wants to discuss it for an article (anonymous or not) please email me!! 

gabriella.bess@vice.com

"… if we have to cultivate our narrative tradition, as women, that doesn’t mean we should renounce..."

“… if we have to cultivate our narrative tradition, as women, that doesn’t mean we should renounce the entire stock of techniques we have behind us. We have to show that we can construct worlds that are not only as wide and powerful and rich as those constructed by men but more so. We have to be well equipped, we have to dig deep into our difference, using advanced tools. Above all, we have to insist on the greatest freedom. Writers should be concerned only with narrating what they know and feel—beautiful, ugly, or contradictory—without succumbing to ideological conformity or blind adherence to a canon. Writing requires maximum ambition, maximum audacity, and programmatic disobedience.”

- Elena Ferrante, Art of Fiction No. 228, theparisreview.org (via kitduckworth)

henarbengale:Así fue la fiesta del Post Coño.Editora: Luna...

henarbengale:

Así fue la fiesta del Post Coño.

Editora: Luna Miguel (El Gaviero Ediciones).
Recitando: Elena Barrio, Ana Llurba, María Mercromina, Lola Nieto, Guillermina Torresi, María Yuste.
Imágenes proyectadas: Laia Arqueros, Kai Corvus y Mai Oltra, Henar Bengale, Patrisick.
Ilustraciones (coño galáctico): Hanako Mimiko

My book had a nice time in Spain. 

"Everyone’s always like, “Be your best self!” And that drives me bananas, because when you’re not, it..."

“

Everyone’s always like, “Be your best self!” And that drives me bananas, because when you’re not, it makes you feel really bad. And so someone asked me the other day, “When are you your best self?” and I said, “When I make space for my worst self.” Like if you ask yourself, “How long will it take to do this particular thing?” and you’re freaking out like, “I don’t know! It’s going to take me so long! I don’t know! Ten years?!” Well … what if you give yourself ten years? “Oh. Okay.” And then somehow, the thing you thought would take ten years only takes a week. Give yourself permission to actually let something take as long as it takes.

My standard of perfection often paralyzes me, or makes me terrified, or makes me feel ashamed. Instead, if I can make space for the idea that the goal is not to be perfect, but the goal is to be me, then I get to revel in the mixed bag of what it is to be a human. Some moments are good, some are bad. Some days are good, some days are bad. We live in a culture where people are constantly telling us how to get what we want, and within that message is, You need to be something other than you are. So my antidote to that has been, What if the goal is not to get what I want, but to discover who I am, be who I am, and accept that? Because strangely, that takes courage!

”

- Tracee Ellis Ross (via arabellesicardi)

Kathy Acker Interviews the Spice Girls for Vogue in 1997

creaturesofcomfort:

All Girls Together by Kathy Acker

The Spice Girls are the biggest, brashest girlie group ever to have hit the British mainstream. Kathy Acker is an avant-garde American writer and academic. They met up in New York to swap notes - on boys, girls, politics. And what they really, really want.

Fifty-second street. West Side, New York City. Hell’s Kitchen - one of those areas into which no one would once have walked unless loaded. Guns or drugs or both. But now it has been gentrified: the beautiful people have won. A man in middle-aged-rocker uniform, tight black jeans and nondescript T-shirt, lets Nigel, the photographer, and me through the studio doorway; then a chipmunk-sort-of-guy in shorts, with a Buddha tattooed on one of his arms, greets us warmly. This is Muff, the band’s publicity officer. We’re about to meet the Girls …

They are here to rehearse for an appearance on Saturday Night Live. Not only is this their first live TV performance, it’s also the first time they’ll be playing with what Mel C calls a ‘real band’. If the Girls are to have any longevity in the music industry, they will have to break into the American market; and for this they will need the American media. Both the Girls and their record company believe that their appearance here tonight might do the trick. There is a refusal among America’s music critics to take the Spice Girls seriously. The Rolling Stone review of Spice, their first album, refers to them as ‘attractive young things … brought together by a manager with a marketing concept’. The main complaint, or explanation for disregard, is that they are a 'manufactured band’. What can this mean in a society of McDonald’s, Coca-Cola and En Vogue? However, an e-mail from a Spice fan mentions that, even though he loves the girls, he detects a 'couple of stereotypes surrounding women in the band’s general image. The brunette is the woman every man wants to date. Perfect for an adventure on a midnight train, or to hire as your mistress-secretary. The blonde is the woman you take home to mother, whereas the redhead is the wild woman, the woman-with-lots-of -evil-powers.’ So who are these Girls? And how political is their notorious 'Girl Power’? 

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I made this zine a year ago and it has work in it by a bunch of...

I made this zine a year ago and it has work in it by a bunch of women that I love and respect. Mira Gonzalez, LK Shaw, Kate Durbin, Arvida Byström, Ana Cecilia Alvarez, and Genevieve Belleveau, to name a few. I still have some copies left if anyone wants one. I’ve been meaning to put the whole thing online anyway, so hopefully I’ll get it together (a year later!) and do that soon. But yeah, if you want to buy the last copies available you can do so here. Who knows, maybe IGG Vol. 5 will happen in the future…