Mid-Week Reads: Racism in "Heart of Darkness" and Vacuity in the "Great Gatsby"

I read Heart of Darkness a long time ago. I'm not sure if I recognized the racism: I do remember being very bored. Eh, okay, white man angst, move on. Why is nothing happening? I remember feeling glad I wasn't studying English literature and didn't have to read this. (I'd borrowed it from a friend who did.)

@jayaprakash_s shared this essay by Chinua Achebe (whose novels I haven't read yet but plan to start soon) criticizing Heart of Darkness for its racism. Consider these paragraphs from the book:

Mid-Week Read: Angelina Jolie's Masectomy

If you haven't read Angelina Jolie's op-ed in the New York Times, read it now. How can one woman be so beautiful, talented, strong, and all-around amazing?

Sorry for being almost absent from this blog lately: there's been a lot going on. We're off to Bangalore on Thursday (and then Chennai), but I'll be more regular once I'm back. Really.

Mid-Week Reads: Stop Picking on Childless Women

I loved this piece titled It's Very Condescending to Tell a Childless Woman She'd Be a Great Mom.

It's like telling a friend who you know has a paralyzing fear of wild animals that she would make a great game warden. Seriously, she should just shake off her deep-seated anxiety about being around rhinos and lions and just go out there and guide some poor innocent family on a safari. I'm sure you'll do fine!

Did you know Shakuntala Devi wrote a book advocating gay rights?

Why is the feminist movement in an identity crisis? Just look at the back of your jeans.

Bangalore and Chennai in May

Hello, there.

I'll be in Bangalore and Chennai later this month to conduct online marketing workshops for Women's Web. If any of you are in either city, I'd love to meet you.

I'm excited about these workshops for a number of reasons. For one, it will be great to meet some of the members of Women's Web's vibrant community.

Two, I've been planning a visit to Bangalore for a while, because the startup scene there is so active and we want to check it out.

Third, I've visited both cities several times before, and it will be wonderful to go back. I wish we weren't going in the peak of summer, and that my foot had healed enough to let me be more active, but that can't be helped.

And also, it's been a while since I went anywhere. There was Guwahati last May, and nothing after that. I usually hate long train or bus journeys, but it's been a couple of years since the last one, so I'm hoping the novelty will help. (Rather, trains hate me. The most punctual of trains will run late if I'm to travel in them.)

Anyway, if you're in Bangalore or Chennai and would like to meet up, send me an email at unmanaswords at gmail.

Mid-Week Reads: Love and Aging in Hollywood

I loved these two articles about leading men of Hollywood and their usually much younger leading women. I was surprised at some of these -- partly because I don't watch many movies -- but also, I realized my perceptions of many male stars' ages were off by a decade or so. I had thought that Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie were roughly the same age, for instance.

Anyway. Read:

• The Crappy Age Gap Between Leading Men and Female Love Interests
• Leading Men Age, But Their Love Interests Don’t

While on Hollywood, do you have any fun movies to recommend? My movie-watching has gone down even further, just because I'm so sick of bad movies. I did watch Kahani finally and wished I had watched it in a theatre -- it was pretty damn good. What new movies should I go to the theatre for?

Also, did you hear of Hilary Clinton's speech about women's rights being a security issue?

Speaking of the young woman raped and disemboweled on a bus in New Delhi, Clinton said, "If her life embodied the aspirations of a rising nation, her death and her murder, pointed to the many challenges still holding it back. The culture of rape is tied up with a broader set of problems: official corruption, illiteracy, inadequate education, laws and traditions, customs, culture, that prevent women from being seen as equal human beings." Clinton continued, "India will rise or fall with its women. It's had a tradition of strong women leaders, but those women leaders like women leaders around the world like those who become presidents or prime ministers or foreign ministers or heads of corporations cannot be seen as tokens that give everyone else in society the chance to say we've taken care of our women." 

"Seeing Like a Feminist" and Other Books I've Been Reading

If you haven't read Seeing Like a Feminist yet, you totally should. Here's what I say on Women's Web:

Does this qualify as a review: read this, read this, read this? 

Seriously, Nivedita Menon’s Seeing Like a Feminist is an excellent book that we all ought to read. I’d read much praise of this book and was hoping it would live up to the hype, and it totally did. I’m a hardcore feminist; it had me nodding along and gave me something to think about. If you aren’t one, but are perturbed at the recent spate of violence against women, this book has answers to questions like...

Read the rest of my review here, and then go buy the book!

On Women and Unconventional Careers

I was thinking of all the amazing women I know who do interesting things: my friends who are freelance writers, a few who work for non-profit organizations, some of the entrepreneurs I've met since I started my own business... And so I wrote this.

By opting out of the system, are you eliminating the chance of changing it? If women allow themselves to be pushed off the conventional career path, are we making change less likely, making it more difficult for other women?

Or are we changing the system anyway, by building alternatives to traditional, sexist work environments? Successful women entrepreneurs and freelancers demonstrate that there are other ways. Women business heads can set up more fair practices and have better workplaces. These would be bigger, better changes, in my opinion, than trying to change sexist policies or habits ingrained in conservative workplaces (and changes on the outside will then influence these as well). 

The traditional workplace – large organizations, usually with men at leading positions – is aligned with the patriarchal system. We need change both from within and without. New ways of working and new career avenues can help shift the balance of power.

I struggled a lot with this. I wanted to highlight how wonderful this is that so many women are seeking out work they love or building something new, without being condescending or sexist about it ("women don't need money, so they work for love"). I'm not sure I achieved it, but at least my support of doing work you love comes through, I think.

(And I think this is true for men as well as women: you should find something you really want to do, even if it makes you less money.)

Here's the link again: tell me what you think.

Mid-Week Reads: Stories of Motherhood

Would you believe me if I said I was sorry? I didn't mean to neglect you, it's just that I was so busy I didn't realize it had been two weeks. I know, you don't care. I'm sorry.

(But if you do want to know what I've been doing, there's this. And Nilesh wrote here about what we've been doing for the past eight months or so.)

On to the stories I promised in the title. Blankets in the Sky was my favorite story in the excellent book, Of Mothers and Others. I wrote this in my review:

[It is] a heart-rending account by a mother of her two little adopted daughters, sisters by biology as well as relationship, who cling to each other as they eye the world around them, including their adoptive parents, with mistrust. Bag packed so that they could run away, they presented a united front against the world. The story of how they slowly somewhat loosened their ties to each other as they dug in their roots in their new home made me tear up.

Read the story here for free.

Also read this beautiful, beautiful account of Maya Angelou's relationship with her mother.

Maybe you'll also like Scarlet's letter to her daughter.

Mid-Week Reads: On Women Changing Their Names After Marriage

I read this, and found myself nodding along.

Your name is your identity. The term for you is what situates you in the world. The cultural assumption that women will change their names upon marriage – the assumption that we'll even think about it, and be in a position where we make a "choice" of whether to keep our names or take our husbands' – cannot be without consequence. Part of how our brains function and make sense of a vast and confusing universe is by naming and categorizing. When women see our names as temporary or not really ours, and when we understand that part of being a woman is subsuming your own identity into our husband's, that impacts our perception of ourselves and our role in the world. It lessens the belief that our existence is valuable unto itself, and that as individuals we are already whole. It disassociates us from ourselves, and feeds into a female understanding of self as relational – we are not simply who we are, we are defined by our role as someone's wife or mother or daughter or sister.

Mid-Week Read: on Rape in Fiction

I'll leave you just one thing to read today, and it's a long one. Sophia McDougall writes about sexual assault in popular culture, referencing A Song of Fire and Ice (which I haven't read, and don't intend to, given all I've read about it), Batman, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, and James Bond.

She asks this interesting question:

So where are they, all the raped male characters? People say, it would be unrealistic if she wasn’t raped, but take it for granted that of course he wasn’t.

And:

My go-to example for this used to be James Bond. “Is it realistic that James Bond has never been raped?” I would say. How many times has he found himself utterly at the mercy of men who want to hurt, degrade and humiliate him before killing him?

Also:

 My first point is not that I am arguing for all this rape; it’s that if you are going to argue in favour of the current level of fictional rape of women and girls, you should be. You, if you care so much about realism, must demand the rape of Batman and James Bond. In fact, given not only that so many male fictional characters find themselves in such high-risk environments but that male fictional characters outnumber female ones about 2 to 1,   we should be seeing nearly as many raped men in fiction as raped women.

Read the whole thing: it's great food for thought.