kristin toussaint

“I am interested in language because it wounds or seduces me.” — Roland Barthes

[guardian]

Don’t get too high and mighty, ladies. Don’t step out of line. Don’t do anything to upset or disappoint men who feel entitled to your time, bodies, affection or attention. Your bared body can always be used as a weapon against you. You bared body can always be used to shame and humiliate you. Your bared body is at once desired and loathed.

Roxane Gay: The Great Naked Celebrity Photo Leak of 2014 is just the beginning (via guardian)

I wrote this

(via roxanegay)

[smashfizzle]

5 Things (7/20/14)

[kristintoussaint]

smashfizzle:

5. The way back is never linear or paved for your comfort. There are potholes long and wide. There are valleys and canyons. There is the invisible gaping hole on the left side of you. You’re not entirely sure you’re entitled to it, but it’s there. You think things like, “this isn’t the worst thing that’s ever happened to me”, but that just makes you sadder. You think, “I bet this happens to women all the time, so I’m not special”, but that doesn’t do the trick either. You think, “if you don;t get your shit together, Ashley Ford, everyone is going to think you’re a freak”, but you can’t bring yourself to truly fear what other people think, because you can’t make anything else matter.

[kristintoussaint]

Tabs

It's officially summer, and that tends to make us all a little less productive. When its too nice to spend my free time on my computer, I opt for reading magazines or paperbacks that I can sit with on my back porch or take along a walk. But I'm always trying to process some of all that's being published and posted daily, and I've saved a few stories:

+ Scientists monitored the brain activity of writers , and the images from those considered professionals were similar to people who are skilled at other complex actions, like music or sports.

+ Speaking of brain functions - our own is altered whenever we step through the gates of an amusement park. Every design is a mind trick to access our senses, and more complex than anything you did with Roller Coaster Tycoon.

+ David Sedaris became addicted to his fitbit.

+ This piece is a nice reminder of the lottery of birth, and how traveling the world can imbibe us with the compassion to tackle issues both home and abroad.

+ One rampant problem too close to home lies within the world of minimum wage workers trying to get by. Sarah Kendzior hits on a terrible truth with the observation that "The paradox of poverty is that tomorrow is unpredictable but the future never changes."

+ Another paradox: when women try to play the game and negotiate, they face an even higher chance of backlash and bias.

+ Ending on a positive note, I saw Salt-n-Pepa last Friday and they were fantastic. They looked damn good, performed with an insane amount of energy and fun and expressed so much gratitude to their fans and the fact that they've been around for over 20 years. Here's a little history on the hip hop queens. 

[annfriedman]

It said, “10 reasons why a handgun is better than a woman.” When I read that list over my landlord’s shoulder, it was years before George Sodini mass-murdered women in a fitness center in 2009. Before Elliot Rodger went on a killing spree to teach women a lesson. Before social media helped us catalogue dozens of disparate murders every month in which women were killed by men they knew and, at one point in time, loved. The headlines have come to reflect the message of the list in a way that is chillingly consistent: These men control guns. These men wish they controlled women. These men use guns to control women. What was once perceived as the stuff of women’s-studies classes has become routine news analysis.

The Scary Reason Some Men Like Guns Better Than Women - NYmag.com (via annfriedman)

[katespencer-deactivated20200614]

Some men I've known

[This is something I’ve had saved in my drafts for a couple of months. In light of #YesAllWomen I am just going to post it, even though it gives me heart palpitations to do so. I’d only told two people about the guy who sexually harassed me at work before tweeting about it the other day. I go into a little more detail about it below. I don’t know. I am so tired of living in fear, and so tired knowing that’s how I will have to live my whole life. My daughters too. I encourage everyone to read #YesAllWomen, #YesAllWhiteWomen and #CisGaze on twitter. Lots of illuminating, informative and heartbreaking commentary there.]

*******

When I was in my early 20s I was sexually harassed by a co-worker. I was a feminist and a women’s studies major and had volunteered for a sexual assault response line, and yet when my co-worker commented on my breasts, when he started touching my back inappropriately at work and offering massages and talking about my breasts again and how they looked good in that shirt I was wearing and how I could pull off one of those pointy Madonna bras, I completely shut down. I didn’t report it to HR, even though I knew and liked our kind, quiet generalist. I didn’t tell my boss, who was a woman I admired. I didn’t tell my boyfriend, not for two years, not until we were two bottles deep at a wine bar and it all came up hot and fast like vomit.

I quit that job. It’s been almost ten years. I think about the harassment almost every day, and the shame I still feel over not telling anyone.

I know now why I didn’t tell anyone: I thought people would not believe me. I thought they’d be mad at me. We were all friends, my co-workers and I and him and I thought they’d think I was making it all up, misreading things, imagining stuff that wasn’t really there. He use to come up to me at my desk, in plain view of everyone, and do these things. I use to think I was crazy. How was no one else seeing this? And how was he not doing this to anyone else (or maybe he was?)? Why did he pick me?

And even worse: Why was I letting him? Why didn’t I tell?

When I was in fifth grade my best friend and I wrote a letter to our elementary school principal because we felt our gym teacher was sexist. He only ever picked boys to demonstrate athletic moves, treating them like experts when the girls were just as physically gifted. We delivered it to the principal, who promised not to name us to the gym teacher. But then a few days later the teacher ranted furiously about our letter in class and pulled us aside after, and was offended and rude and belittling. So maybe that is why I kept my mouth shut again, years later. Because we learn at a young age that when girls tell, we get in trouble.

I did say something to that guy at work once. He came over to my desk, and put his hands on my back like he always did. It would make my entire body burn and my stomach would rocket around my insides and my heart would pound. God I fucking hated it. It made me sick to my stomach. And so that time I said “Stop it. I don’t like that.” And boy, did that scare the shit out of him. He immediately began apologizing and talking about how he had kids and a wife, like that somehow meant that his actions weren’t completely creepy and wrong. That was the moment I realized my harasser was a coward.

When I was in college there was a 3-mile loop everyone would run along the road, and every time I was out there huffing along I would get honked at and cat-called, even in the dead of winter in Maine. My male friends looked at me with open-mouthed disbelief when I told them about it. They ran the same route and never heard a peep.

Yesterday the same thing happened while I ran around the Silver Lake reservoir.

Recently my husband forwarded me an email from an elderly neighbor. It was one of those list of safety tips that 80-year-old alarmists send - don’t park next to vans at the mall, etc etc. My husband thought it was hilarious and insane, which it was, I guess. “But,” I said to him, “I do a lot of these things all the time.”

I wrote a list on my phone recently, of all the times I’ve been touched, followed, hollered at, screamed at, threatened and chased by men. All the penises I’ve been shown without giving permission. It is overwhelming to look at. One woman’s life, as told through sexual harassment. I thought about listing it all out here; I saw Maureen Johnson do something similar recently and it felt empowering and depressing to read. I thought about writing out each experience in detail, but honestly I don’t know if I have the energy.

Just know that one time a man followed me on a beautiful sunny morning and tried to pull me behind a building on the University of Cape Town campus while I was carrying a bunch of library books, and so I dropped the books and ran. One time I was kayaking with my friend Susan on the Charles River and we paddled under a pantless man standing on a bridge above us jerking off and shouting. One time I took a walk through New York City a few months before we moved to LA and guys in a giant SUV circled by me a few times yelling and then followed me down a side street before they drove away. Once in high school a guy I met in DC at a National Young Leaders Conference starting sending me harassing emails and would call my house relentlessly and kept threatening to come over to where I lived so I called the cops and they looked at me like I was crazy. Once a man screamed “cunt” at me over and again at a subway station and followed me and the other people on the platform just stood around and watched. Once a guy sitting next to me on the subway groped my thigh while covering his body/my leg with a giant coat and pretending to sleep. Once a man flashed his balls at me through his shorts and then got off the train hiding a huge erection behind a gym bag. Once a guy said “smile” to me on 7th Avenue and when I told him to fuck off he followed me down the street, screaming at me and calling me a bitch.

One time in college my best friend and I were walking to our dorm at night, and a car kept circling by us over and over again. Terrified and certain that something bad was about to happen to us, we took off sprinting. We made it to our dorm out of breath and terrified, and the car pulled up next to us. I felt a wave of vomit spill over me. This was it. The bad thing I’d feared and dreaded my whole life was finally here.

The car door opened, and a delivery guy got out with a couple of pizzas.

[kristintoussaint]

Tabs

My feminism is never not on my mind - it is so crucial to my well-being and happiness, and I use the qualifier of "my" because feminism carries a different weight for every person in relation to their specific struggles or opportunities in life, though there is still an overarching "feminism" that is important for the entire world - but these past weeks especially so. With more than a month passing since the kidnapped school girls to just this week's extensive coverage of Jill Abramson, the need for change, and the wide-reaching platform to discuss it, is highlighted. 

I've been thinking recently about the types of stories I am most passionate about telling, and how I want to be able to speak for those who can't while covering issues important to my life. But there seems to be something limiting in expressing interest to cover "women's issues," though, something pushing back on us, and serendipitously I saw an Ann Friedman post that perfectly addressed this, and starts this roundup:

+ Ann Friedman addresses women writers who focus on gender in the perfect response to an Alice Gregory essay on Nelly Bly where Gregory says that women can fall into "the trap of writing only about so-called women's issues." But Friedman is also feeling limited as a writer now, which really comments on the state of journalism as a profession that still needs to pay rent.

+ "What's So Scary About Smart Girls?" made me want to scream Kristof's words right in everyone's face. A heartbreaking op-ed on how in attacking educated girls, the terrorist organization halted the entire demographic of Nigeria. 

+ There is a surplus of articles re: Jill Abramson being fired, but this New Yorker piece is a quick read that touches on the history of her pay disparity.

+ And relevant to this issue is Susan B. Glasser's story about being a female editor, blending her own personal experiences with what is being said about Abramson. 

+ There's a glass ceiling in Statehouses (surprise). This article still perpetuates the idea that you have to be "one of the boys" to be taken seriously, but is it worse to be excluded, or play the game by dated rules?

+ I just want to include this throwback Friedman article on her "shine theory" for girl-loving vibes. 

+ I've always loved "Jolene," and this article touches on the power of Dolly Parton's hit and what its like to identify with the "role of the desperately discarded." 

+ The Rumpus's Funny Women column has been a favorite of mine for a while, and this piece aimed at Lady Writers is a poignant commentary on sexism in the literary world. 

+ Artist Annie Kevans has been painting portraits of successful women who have been "smudged out of the history of art," like Dorothea Tanning (above), Giulia Lama and Angelica Kauffman. 

[ankurthakkar]

Times are bad. Children no longer obey their parents and everyone is writing a book.

— Cicero, 43 BCE (via ankurthakkar)

[intamunu-blog-blog]

[fotojournalismus]

Juba, South Sudan, Camille Lepage

[annfriedman]

"I want the viewers to feel what the people are going through. I’d like them to empathize with them as human beings, rather than seeing them as another bunch of Africans suffering from war somewhere in this dark continent." -French photojournalist Camille Lepage, who was killed this week on assignment in Bangui, C.A.R.

[theparisreview]

In the late seventeenth century, long before the age of Sherwin Williams and Pantone, a Dutch artist known as A. Boogert compiled Traité des couleurs servant à la peinture à l’eau, an eight-hundred-page compendium of paint and color.

[guardian]

Western feminists should speak up for the kidnapped Nigerian girls

Boko’s Haram’s atrocities against girls and young women are horrifying and we must overcome our lingering reluctance to interfere, writes Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett » (via guardian)

[kristintoussaint]

READERS REPORT: MISSED CONNECTIONS

BY SUSAN CLEMENTS

May 2nd, 2014

A collection of short pieces written by Rumpus readers pertaining to the subject of “Missed Connections.”

Edited by Susan Clements.

***

We are in the desert; a deep canyon; a forest with trees so tall we get lost in their shadows. Everything we say gets stuck in the air around us; nothing bounces back. But even an echo loses some truth in translation. We are nodding to each other under covers, under the abrasive overhead light of your car. We are in our own heads.

That first night we stayed up until the sun started to yawn and stretch and peek its head out to see the fire escape we sat on. Talking, all night. We held on to each other and our words, as if they were stones we could throw down the alley to hear the satisfying contact of rock and pavement, of my world and your own. We held on to the necks of empty beer bottles.

We whispered things that mean so much. Things that weighed heavy in our throats so we felt like we couldn’t breathe. We were afraid to make them real, make them heavy in our laps instead and tip us tumbling down the building’s sleeping facade. But if we don’t speak, we stay solitary. We are not solitary creatures. We are not sure we even exist when we are left alone. In the dead of night my eyes can’t tell the difference between being open or shut. Without your breath rhythmic next to me my ears strain for something in the silence and I think this must be death. 

But if I say words and you say them back then yes there is something here yes there is a light and I’m not alone in the dark anymore. We are trying, desperately, to make ourselves real in relation to each other. If there is no bulb that turns on with the flick of a switch, then how do we know if there is anything running through the wires?

How do I know that you hear all the same words I hear? How do I know you understand? There is no code for this. Thoughts fly around my head colliding like atoms and I have to string them together into neat little sentences because we only have this one language. But we are trying to make another, with the tapping of your fingers along my spine and the way your lips press so earnestly against mine.

At night I still open my eyes in the dark but you don’t see that.

—  Kristin Toussaint

[kristintoussaint]

Tabs

This week has felt like spring in more than one way; it isn't just the warm weather, but the pace of everything, the energy overall. Like a flower opening to the sun, this week has unfolded slowly, then all at once. It's done before you notice, but then you can sit back and take it all in. I have been reading so many things - some just entertaining, others heavy with importance, all something new.

The most important thing in reading to me is the act of discovery: a beautiful combination of words I would have never created, a perspective I had not yet thought of, and in just exploring Virginia Woolf for the first time, I've encountered these both. Whatever book I'm currently reading seems to affect the other types of content I seek out, so this post is influenced with the feminism of A Room of One's Own (though feminism affecting my reading choices is not a rarity or new experience at all).

+ "The future is dark, which is the best thing for the future to be, I think." Rebecca Solnit writes about Woolf's (and society's in general) fear of the unknown. 

+ Tavi also tackles the unknown, and writes a wise-beyond-her-years (at least, wiser than I could have written at 18) Rookie Editor's Letter about her recent break up. 

+ Another thing to add to the pile of bad-news-for-women: Mississippi might lose it's last abortion clinic, becoming the first state without that resource.

+ Another thing to add to the pile of bad-news-for-people: Ann Friedman talks about journalism's hiring troubles. Editor's are hesitant to post job openings publicly, choosing instead to ask for personal recommendations - but what if you aren't best friends with an already-employed editor when looking for a job? 

+ On a lighter note, Dan Abramson perfectly captures the fears of being on a conference call (or just the fears of life in general). You'll laugh, but also be hesitant to call your boss again.

+ Heartbreakingly truthful: teenagers lean so heavily on technology for human interaction because they have "less freedom to wander than any previous generation."

+ Google celebrated what would have been Audrey Hepburn's 85th Birthday yesterday (above). There's something undeniably appealing about Hepburn, eternally linking her with descriptors like "elegant" and "timeless." That google logo led me to find two interesting articles; one discussing the hidden feminism of Hepburn and another that calls out the issues with her glorification. 

+ Lastly, congrats to John Jeremiah Sullivan for winning the James Beard Foundation award for his essay "I Placed a Jar in Tennessee" in the winter 2013 issue of Lucky Peach. 

[therumpus]

The Rumblr’s in-house astrologer, Madame Clairevoyant, presents her latest dispatch from the stars:

Cancer: This week, the world’s going to press in around you, maybe, like there’s not always enough room to breathe, like there’s not enough room for the love and generosity that you want. Try to push back, this week; try to work on making space. You can make the world more open and you can make the air easier to breathe and you can build space to breathe, space to move, space to live so well. Spend your days in museums, spend your days in libraries, spend your days wandering all dreamy and safe and free.

Today’s image was made specially for Madame Clairevoyant by Jen May.

[newyorker]

I guess part of this story stems from witnessing how, with some of the increasing vagueness in job definitions, people have come to rely on storytelling or the idea of creating narratives as a catchall. My dentist is a storyteller, weaving a narrative from my bloody gums. My accountant uses numbers to tell a story about my debts and the threat of ruin. Sadly, my barber doesn’t say squat. I’d welcome a story from him.

Sam Lipsyte discusses his story in this week’s issue, and the idea that everyone is a storyteller: http://nyr.kr/1lq9tM9 (via newyorker)

[kristintoussaint]

I never posted a Tabs this week because I had been at my parent's house for a few days. I went home for the first Easter since I moved to Boston, and although I've had the fortune of joining my best friend for Easter brunches or dinners with her family, it's never the same as being home. Every year, my grandmother make these chicken-shaped cookies from the same dough as the Italian cookie "tadals" (which she also makes for us around Christmas). I can't even find anything online about these cookies, or their proper name, but I know that my grandfather's mom, who emigrated from Bari, Italy, taught her how to make them. When I was young, she used to make a "pocket" of dough on the front of the chicken to sit a hard-boiled egg in, but since we never ate the eggs she stopped that addition. It is such an interesting family tradition to me, and a hint at my family's past.

I am fascinated by the lives my family members have led before my own. I repeat the stories of my mom meeting my dad while in the Army, of my (maternal) grandmother moving from rural Ohio to New York City at 17 years old, of my (paternal) grandfather living in Germany during World War II as if they were fascinating books I just finished; I want everyone to know about them. I want to know all I can.

I don't get to go home as often as I'd like, so I spent as much time as I could just talking to my family. (Except for when I did a Segway Tour of Philadelphia, which was a Christmas gift from my grandmother for all of us to do together and the first reason for the trip home - it was hilarious). Here are a few pictures I poorly took with my phone while I was going through photo albums with my grandmother:

My grandmother (labeled "me") in high school, ~1940s

My grandfather, who joined the Navy when he was 16 (1944)

They met when my grandmother moved to NYC at 17 years old. My grandfather remembers first meeting her (when she and her mom were staying in a room at my grandfather's mom's house) and asking her out to see the movie Christopher Columbus (1949). They've been married 63 years. 

[vanityfair]

Everyone has three lives: a public life, a private life, and a secret life.

Gabriel García Márquez (via vanityfair)

[theparisreview]

“Of course, there is always lemon.” 

Sadie Stein on the Great Lime Shortage of 2014.

[kristintoussaint]

Or, as my friend said when talking about this issue, "Lemons: the poor man's lime"