St. Valentina

Well, well, well. My Valentine's Day was all that I could wish for and more. Ian and I got up at 4:30, didn't escape LA until 5:30 because of the fucking Los Angeles Marathon, and got to Joshua Tree by 8. We had breakfast at Crossroads Cafe, which is delicious so if you are ever heading J Tree way, I would highly recommend it. (We had Natural Sisters Cafe for lunch and it was equally amazing.) My favorite thing about Joshua Tree is that while there are very cool trails to hike on, you can park your car anywhere in the whole park and set off walking in any direction. Ian and I shot a few sets of photos yesterday: some for a magazine, some for another blog post, and these. These felt really good. I feel like Ian and I are at this magnificent place where I trust him enough to help me make the things I want to make. It takes me a long time to warm up to people taking my picture and I am so happy that I feel secure enough to let him and that he enjoys it and I'm not constantly barking orders at him hehe. I really love him and he makes me feel so calm.

So yeah, I thought about not taking this bodysuit to Joshua Tree. Number one, I had to change into it while we were there--but that is usually totally fine because, like I said, you can wander in this park for miles and see like two people. But number two, I was like "what will I actually do with these pictures?" This is a fairly sheer piece and I never really post things like this. So many of the women I admire are so down to post photos of their body and I have always been a little apprehensive to. But then I was like who caaaaaaaares. Whatever misgivings I had about the way I look or about privacy or whatever are gone. This is how yesterday felt: free and beautiful and natural and I think these photos show that. So I'm really excited to post these. 

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musings on the word "bitch"

This is the result of "shower thoughts". I just bought some soap I haven't used since I was 15 because they discontinued it until now. The smell brings me back to the time of the story that follows because I was in fact 15 then. This story is about a cousin of a friend of mine. I don't think my friend is particularly close with him but I still apologize to her in advance, it's a little weird that I am writing this. But I want to write more--in general, and about real things that happen in my life. For as much as I like to express myself, I really don't share very much. I would like for that to change. 

This started with a camping trip that I never really forgot. It was the camping trip where I talked to a new friend about the boy I liked for hours, the trip where I tried my first taste of alcohol (Mike's Hard Lemonade--god, I hate Mike's Hard), the trip where I was first called a bitch. We were camping for three nights, the showers were incredibly cold. I decided, well, no hope for my hair, I will just put it up. So I had had my hair up for most of the trip. My friend's cousin was there. He was a man of about 30, he had a little girl who I think joined us for a while but I don't really remember now. So anyways we were just sitting at the picnic table when I took my hair down. It was probably greasy and knotty and huge, like it gets. But the cousin looks at me and says, "You are actually pretty with your hair down. You looked like a bitch before." Apparently seeing my face with my hair pulled back was unappealing? I don't know, I haven't thought much about what made him see me as a bitch. I just knew that he did. All my friends kind of laughed. I sat there, not knowing what to say. One part of my 15-year-old self was like wow someone thinks I'm pretty! Another part of me was like that's a shitty thing for a grown man to say. Am I really a bitch? Or at least, do I look like one? 

I think from that day on, I pretty much accepted that I either looked like a "bitch" or was a "bitch" throughout the rest of my high school career, and some of college. I kind of threw the word around to describe myself and other girls. I used it when talking about a moment when I was particularly loud or outspoken. Or when I would confess my ambitions or confidence in myself. "Yeah well, I'm a bitch, so..."

Number one: how does me simply speaking make me a bitch? How does dressing so that I maybe look a little more intimidating (not that I mean to, I just always liked wearing tall shoes and black) make me look like a bitch? And why did I believe that I was? Number two: Why did one dude telling me I looked like a bitch make me feel like I could call myself and other girls that same name? Why did I think his word had authority? I mean, I'm sure we all know the answer. I was a young female who was being told many things about the way my body and my appearance represented me. I was feeling the pressures of being attractive. And then to suddenly hear I did not come off as attractive, but instead as a "bitch" was hurtful and worrying. After that, I took on a persona of both trying to be very friendly, alluring, attractive; as well as accepting that I was unappealing. It's just amazing what the words of a man I cared very little for could suddenly change the way I saw myself and the way I made the world see me. 

Sometimes I think about how on Parks and Rec Leslie never uses the word "bitch". For a long time I thought that was very silly. I don't like the word when men use it; it always sounds super aggressive when they say it. But I thought it was just fine for women to. It's a reclaiming of the word. But lately I've thought, no, it's not okay. I am not trying to speak of or for all women, of course. But don't I think using the word "bitch" to describe myself or other women is cause for a very positive environment for women to be in. It's not supportive, and even when joked about it's a cruel sounding word. It cuts across the tongue in a way that just doesn't taste good to me. It insults and demeans. I don't think I want to use the word any longer. 

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Obscura

Okay, I think I'm finally here. I knew I was moving toward not being interested in "fashion blogging" and well here I am. You know--fast fashion, vanity, blahhhhh. I'm just bored of it. I guess I haven't been fashion blogging for a long time now, with all my travel posts lately. But I'm definitely excited to make this a full-on art/photography/travel/life blog. That doesn't mean no more fashion. But it does mean no more H&M and Zara. I'll feature brands I believe in if I think they are producing something awesome. I still love clothes and jewelry--well-made clothes and jewelry that is. I think clothing can absolutely be pieces of art and I have always believed in that. But I want to celebrate those things, not just post pictures of me in a dress I got from Forever 21. I want to focus on bettering my photography and spending time thinking about making art, not outfits to share. 

So with that, here are some photos I feel very strongly about. They are a series that took about 3 months to finish. I didn't really have much of a plan for them, they just feel very much like me. My boyfriend and I spent a long time discussing why we thought I style my photos the way I do and why I often obscure my models' faces and use veils. We came to the conclusion that I am very concerned with personal sexuality in that I believe in the beauty and power (sexual or otherwise) of women, but I like it to belong to them only. There is always some allure or draw to the women in my photographs, but their sexuality is blocked from or unavailable to the viewer. Basically, I am always trying to squash the male gaze while simultaneously encouraging female confidence and power. 

So, I don't know. This series just feels important and it feels like the direction I want to move in. That's a nice thing to know and work from.

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Art History: Renaissance Witches

As promised, I want to write about the art I love. Northern Renaissance art was the first era of art history I learned about as a college student. It's really what made me fall in love with the subject. I signed up for the class because I ignored the "Northern" part and thought I would be learning the basics of the Italian Renaissance. So wrong I was, and thank god. Northern (referring to pretty much everywhere in Europe but Italy) Renaissance art is so much weirder and I love it so much. 

My sophomore year of college, I took on a quarter-long photography project where I explored the archetypes of women in Renaissance art. There are basically two categories: those modeled after the Virgin and those modeled after Eve. Obviously, those after the Virgin are wholesome, pure, exist to serve their husbands (or even better, become nuns and serve only Christ). Contrarily, those after Eve (who performed the original sin) are deceptive, sinful, trick men into lusting after them. Realizing this binary actually gave me a huge insight to the roots of misogyny as a whole and became a huge part of learning about feminism for me. My photography project focused on giving Renaissance women agency. My subjects were taken straight from actual artwork from the period and celebrated for being just who they wanted to be: devoted worshippers, witches, mother, sinful temptresses. There was no heirarchy--just women being who they wanted to be. 

I have found a lot of empowering ladies in Renaissance art. Male Renaissance artists portrayed the "sinful women"  as evil because they tempted men into sinning. The general public believed that women were inherently evil and men were basically good and so if a man performed a lustful sin, it could be blamed on the woman's powers of sexual persuasion. Sound familiar? That's right! Just like how Eve made Adam take a bite of the Forbidden Fruit! It's all women's fault all the time.  And so, naturally, I became a lot more interested in the imagery and stories of the temptresses. There are some hilarious woodcuts of women riding on men like horses and tricking them into cages, thus signifying their evil reign over men who give into their lusty ways. But my favorites are the witches. 

All of these pieces are woodcuts by the famous Renaissance artist Albrecht Durer. Since they were woodcuts, they were sort of the first mass production of art to be made. These images were passed around Northern Europe and warned against the sinful women. Witches are really just nude women. They can be shown doing some pretty crazy things but, like in the piece above called Four Witches, they are just women. A nude women was shocking the Renaissance people, of course. This was really before women were being seen through the ever-terrible male gaze like you see in art after this time. Men were still terrified of even images of women tricking them into sinning and then being sent to Hell because this is what the church was preaching. So their nudity would have been seen as only disgusting.

 People in the Renaissance were trying to elevate themselves from their natural, carnal state to be closer to God. So then it follows that they don't favor nudity. But I think this link goes further in saying that they thought of women as animals, as part of the nature they feared. Witches are usually shown in natural surroundings, close to animals, twisting themselves in impolite ways.  The church was  trying to form an ordered, god-fearing world, and what women stood for just wouldn't fit into it. I, as a nature-loving, wild woman love this idea, but to the Renaissance people this was not cool.  It should be noted, of course, that most women weren't out flying backwards on goats. They probably weren't even trying to tempt men into sinning, although I bet some bad bitches were, just to spite them. For the most part, the witch archetype is the embodiment of the male fear of their own sins. They just want to blame women for it.

Witches were usually nude, suggesting their relationship to the 

original temptress, Eve, who was also nude until she felt shame about her body. And now you see kids, where so much of our society's misogyny comes from! Body-shaming, slut-shaming, women-shaming. Isn't it fun to learn about art?!

I received all of this knowledge over the few days we took in class to discuss witches and then started connecting the dots. Witches were just women in charge of themselves that men still to this day fear. They are the strong sexy ladies I look up to.  And they are fucking rad.

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Taking Up Space

There is something that I have been thinking about recently that keeps surfacing in different ways. Taking up space. It started with this video going around Tumblr a while ago:

My GOD, if that didn't stick with me. Growing up, I never really had body image issues to the extent of them being a problem. But it is things like this that bring my attention to the extent to which our patriarchal society tries to control women. Even if I never had an eating disorder or worried too much about my weight, the ideas in this video were always laid heavily within the standards to which I held myself. We are told to be smaller and take up less space because we have been told that that is what femininity is. But really, this is just another damaging attempt to control us. The exploration of this idea continued when I found the article Wide Stance on Bitch Media. It included the quote:

From Emily Dickinson (who once wrote to a male friend that “I have a little shape…. It would not crowd your desk, nor make much racket as the mouse that dens your galleries”) to the beauty culture that has nearly always deemed the thinnest, smallest, and, frequently, palest, women to be its most desirable and valuable, the message is that the measure of a lady can be taken by how little of the world she takes up.

The article documents the difference between men's allowance of space (being comfortable to spread out on public transportation, their general body language, etc.) and women's (who shrink into themselves and allow others more space while in public settings). This observation has really caught my attention because even something so small as the way we sit on a subway can say so much about the standards to which we are held. It's so terrifying to me that all these ideas of what a woman "should be"are almost inescapable. I find myself thinking about this when just standing at work or laying down at home or shopping or whatever--I have been conditioned to feel that  I should take up less space. Because we are not worthy of the space. This reflects in how we hold ourselves around others and how we treat our bodies: always wishing for them to be smaller. It scares me, but it empowers me to take back my space.

Photo credit.

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