#sometimes sweet

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Diana of Our City Lights showing off her favorite book on Sometimes Sweet.

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Katie from Skunkboy Creatures discusses her tattoos. Swooning.

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Check out this week's tattoo tuesday at sometimes sweet! So good!s

[tussled]

ADVANCED STYLE

The other day a friend told me about this wonderful blog called Sometimes Sweet (you should probably check it out, it is lovely). We were all talking about how much we adore fashion and people in fashion, and my friend Teresa informed me of this fabulous new documentary that she saw on sometime sweets blog. 

I can not wait to see Advanced Style. The entire film is dedicated to women who are so truly dedicated to fashion and all of them are as old as your grand mother which is divine! 

Stay fabulous and look to these women for inspiration. 

[thelongbonds]

A tired argument; hardly a lesson to be learned.

The Spectrum editors must have been feeling pretty plucky running Why Put a Bumper Sticker on a Ferrari next to the above photo of the author, Lisa Khoury. The absurdity is almost brilliant.

I live in Portland. Tattoos are as commonplace here as beards and raindrops. I don’t even see them anymore, really, unless they’re extraordinary in some way. So having read in the past about Danielle Hampton’s (Sometimes Sweet) issues with being totally, verbally hated on in her small Arizona town for her visible tattoos, it’s still difficult for me to imagine that there are people walking this earth chastising other people for the art they’ve chosen to permanently display on their skin. Just as there are still people who aren’t comfortable with gay marriage – really?

Again, tattooing seems like an old argument to me, but that’s because of where I live. That’s because I exist in a culture where tattooing is actually quite mainstream. I live in a city where it’s odd to be young and tattoo-less. I’m not tattoo-less myself. And most importantly, I live in a bit of a bubble where subcultures flourish.

So, after being linked to Lisa Khoury’s article, Why Put a Bumper Sticker on a Ferrari, yesterday, I was a little taken aback. People are still talking about this? Assistant News Editors no less? And a bumper sticker on a Ferrari – that’s the analogy she chooses? I knew it wasn’t a joke because I’d read Danielle’s response, but had I just run across it myself, I’d have thought someone was seriously messing with us. That, or we have a young Ann Coulter on our hands.

This was all before I realized that The Spectrum is a college paper and the very young Ms. Khoury is a journalist-in-training simply trying to earn her stripes.

What’s more interesting than the article itself is, obviously, the reaction, and the fact that Khoury’s poorly written initial piece was followed up with a provocative, articulate (for the most part) response written by the very same girl.

What it looks like to me is that a young, very green, (for now) weak writer from her desk at The University at Buffalo unwittingly stung a VERY large subculture in America, using a forum that is HEAVILY populated by said subculture, and we all know that a subculture loves a good fight – deserves a good fight.

Anyway, what can we all learn from this? Well, we already knew that the Internet was dangerous, viral ground where you can’t publish just anything, that it doesn’t release into a vacuum – that people will answer back, doggedly, when provoked. But now we also know that a co-ed from Buffalo, NY can write an unscrupulous, juvenile, 500-word piece completely contradicting herself and totally dissing women, men, and tattooed folk alike, and we’ll all read it and treat it like something has been said. Nothing was said here. This girl is no writer, at least not until she mustered the gusto to write that response, and she is obviously dealing with some past body/appearance issues that have caused her to identify with mainstream culture – a hearty case of reverse-sexism if you ask me.

While I applaud Danielle for taking a stance, and understand why she did, she didn’t really need to in this instance. This is just a case of a lost girl in way over her head who will probably be censoring herself, quite rigorously, from now on.  All this backlash did was point out, yet again, how volatile a place the Internet can be, how likening women to automobiles is still not an okay thing to do, and how people all over the place will be Googling Lisa Khoury for quite some time.

You’ve got some work to do, Lisa. The Internet is watching.

[icecreamingfemales]

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A response from Danielle to a very insulting and stereotyping article..