Judy Berman: Please submit to my fun/painful zine/book project, and also reblog.
CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS
It’s Complicated: Feminists Write About the Misogynist Art We Love
ed. Judy Berman and Niina Pollari
“Listening to the Sex Pistols, trying to figure out if ‘Bodies’ was really an antiabortion song, I discovered that it was something even worse. It was an outburst of loathing…Reblogging this a second time because I think this is a really exciting idea, and also because, if you will indulge me for just a moment here, I have some very specific hopes for it. This topic, being drawn to things that we, on some level, find repellent, is very interesting to me. Something I feel is rarely done well is to engage with those feelings in an honest way, even if it means embarrassing yourself or admitting something painful. All of us who are writing about art and ideas in a personal way inevitably insert ourselves into the story. And it’s almost impossible to do so without trying to make ourselves look good. I speak from experience here. Even when we’re being self-deprecating, in almost all cases, deep down, we want to be liked. But grappling with art that we find repellent, it seems to me, inevitably involves finding something unlikable in ourselves. And that’s where things start to get interesting. It’s a spin on that idea from Tolstoy: the likable qualities we project are all the same, but when you take into account our most loathsome desires, that’s when we start to feel the differences. And I think that, for writers, there’s real power in finding and exploring places we’re afraid to go. The fact that these places frighten most writers away gives them extra power.
I think we’re on a similar wavelength. My piece (which exists only in my mind at this point) has a lot to do with the person I was as a teenager and so to some extent will always be, so I’ve already resigned myself to having to reveal some ugly stuff. I’m trying to be aware of my inclination to whitewash it, because that would render the essay totally meaningless.
The other challenge, when we get into this dark, personal terrain, is to avoid making the piece into an exercise in therapeutic confession — to claim that everything’s all better because we’re older and smarter and cooler now. I think the real insight will come in the space between “Wasn’t I awesome?” and “Wasn’t I terrible?”
Then there’s the part of it that actually involves detaching ourselves from art we love so much that we’ve never admitted to also finding it hateful or, at least, alienating. We have to take responsibility for our relationship to it, but first we have to step outside it and see something we’ve ignored out of self-protection.
