Anatomy of Hell

I sat down to write the review for this movie and it felt strangely familiar to me and then I remembered why I never posted on it. I had written the entire review but my internet was out so blogger didn't save it and then my computer died and the post didn't get saved. I was totally bummed and gave up for a while, hence why I'm a little backlogged with movie reviews. Well, here it goes and hopefully I'll get quite a few done this time before I get fed up with the Internet.

It took getting a lot of distance between me and the film before I could actually produce this review. The French film by director Catherine Breillat was disturbing in a most real and visceral way and my first few days after having watched it I couldn't get it off of my mind. It purposefully reaches into the not-so-innocent pasts we all had and attempts to show the ways in which they have affected our sexual developments. It is literally written, at times, with menstrual blood with its provoking dialogue about the sexual relationship between a man and woman. It also really raises questions about the politics of looking and the fine boundary between looking and touching. My one complaint was that the film, while doing a great job about turning this woman's consumptive sexual and emotional crisis into a discussion of the psychological reasons for her sexual fears and compulsions, it completely simplified homosexuality into a condition of being repulsed by women. Obviously, it's far more than that and many men just prefer men and don't have a particular dislike of women. In all, though, this film prompted me to really do a long of soul searching about my own sexuality and relationship to my childhood so I would have to say that it is definitely worth watching.

You can see edited versions of this post on imdb, Netflix, and Amazon.

Back from Break

So, I am back from spring break now, and did a good bit of reading and thinking over the course of the week but was away from the Internet. One of the things I have been having a hard time with is posting regularly and in a timely manner. With weblogs, one of the important things is to post when things are happening, not weeks and weeks later, but I sometimes feel like I need a bit longer to really let my thoughts stew before I'm prepared to post about them. Basically, this is why I never ended up posting about the Sex Workers Art Show and I Love Female Orgasm, both really important, relevant things going on on campus that I had a lot to say about. I realized in retrospect that it wasn't necessarily as important for me to say everything exactly right as it was just to say something and get it out there while people were still thinking and talking about the event, so in light of this and in light of my recent return to campus, I am going to make an effort to post at least three times a week for the rest of the semester. I have a couple of drafted posts that will hopefully go up soon, but in addition to these, I'm going to try to have intermittent posts that summarize everything that I've been doing by way of my project.

This past week I led a service trip of a small group of W&M students and most of the reading material I took with me involved my independent study. Because of that, I ended up getting a chance to discuss a lot of the things I've been reading about and thinking about which was really wonderful for me. I've realized that I do actually have a lot to teach people when it comes to women's bodies and sexuality, especially since these are really sensitive topics and I am really comfortable discussing them, so hopefully I'll be able to continue formulating a conversation from my studies long after I'm done with the official independent study part of things. I know I'm already planning to maintain this weblog through my graduate work.

I've been watching at least two films every week on the broad theme of women's sexuality and bodies, and I have a lot of these I haven't written on yet and I've also been reading some poetry and a few books on the topic, so look for responses to these soon. Also, I would really like for my webpage to show up in searches, but I don't really even know how to go about getting it to show up on search engines, so if anyone has any suggestions, let me know!

Techno-Ethics

I get concerned, sometimes, about the proper way to cite ideas coming from readings in the technical world. I just posted on my goals site, What I Will, a post entitled "some realizations." In this post I am drawing on some of my own ideas and experiences about everyday life and linking them to things I have learned recently, specifically from my Management Skills for Public Service Seminar I am taking through W&M's Career Center. On my goals post, I do not specifically cite where I am drawing the idea from, namely because in the presentation we had the man demonstrated two primary sources that use this same idea and since he was a secondary source, I don't feel the need to actually attach a bibliography. At the same time, I did feel the need to come here to this blog, linked under the same common blogger.com identity, to comment on my concerns about technical ethics. See, this section could just count as the bibliography. I also thought, then, that I should probably somewhere have a list of everything I am reading at any given time posted. There is a Facebook application that does that, but I generally don't add my textbooks, but maybe it would be worthwhile. And, then, would that count? I'm not sure.

Absurdist Livejournal Poem

Second Coming

Confidence

I realized tonight that I have gotten into a habit of thinking that I am the "ugly girl." You know how you are casually dating or sleeping with someone and he and his friends are always talking about the other sweet parties they go to? Sometimes it starts to feel like the girls at all these other parties that they bring home are smoking hot and you're just the one they feel ashamed to mention to people. The interesting thing, though, is that when you are actually around them, for whatever reason, often enough to find out about the other girls they're bringing home, or if you were to randomly stumble into an awkward situation one night, sometimes you realize that you're not the ugly one. In fact, you're pretty smart, funny, laid back, cool, and assured, comparatively. It made me wonder about why sometimes powerful women have a hard time finding happiness in romantic relationships. I think it has to do with what a man (or another woman) can handle at any given time. A strong, worthwhile woman is a lot harder to play games with than someone equally attractive but a little less headstrong both because she can see what's going on and because strong women do command a decent amount of respect. Thinking about all of these good things made me realize that I have been forgetting about the power of positivity over the past semester or so. I had been forgetting that worry about things makes them true instead of just believing in yourself, wanting certain things, and waiting to see what happens, which generally brings out the best of all circumstances.

I'm going to breathe now, for a while, and remind myself of all of the good that is life and of all of the good ways of looking at things. That's it, for now, but I'll probably have more to say on it later.

Sitting in a booth

Last few times I've gone out with my girlfriends and met up with a couple of guys, I've noticed the tendency men have of squishing me and my girlfriends on the inside of booths. I had gotten pretty frustrated. To me it seemed like a type of control. They were between us and the rest of the restaurant, bar, or world. They could determine who we did or didn't talk to just because they were blocking access to us. I felt significantly trapped, at times, and definitely felt like it wasn't an ideal situation. But then I went out to dinner last night with a few of my girlfriends. Instead of sitting on the inside of the booth, I sat on the aisle side. I expected to feel more freedom and, in some ways, I did, but I also noticed an enormous downside to sitting on the outside.

Particularly, depending on what type of atmosphere you are in, sitting on the outside of the booth can be limiting. As you sit and talk to the other people at your table, you have to turn in towards the wall to be able to address everyone. As you do this, you shut out the outside world and are left only with the option of looking at the other people at your table. On the other hand, the person sitting on the inside of the booth can turn their back to the wall and look at at everything happening in the rest of the room. Certainly there is a person between them and everything else going on, but at least the inside person has visual access to everything. In some ways, this ability to see what else is out there is empowering because if the person on the outside of the booth isn't being interesting enough, you don't have to pay attention.

Relationships

I just realized last night that I might have been too busy idolizing the past to enjoy the present. I'm relating this to my independent study because I think that relationships and dating are a women's issue. A central one. And they have a lot to do with body image and sexuality because so much of how our ideas about these things are shaped have to do with our past experiences with men and women in dating situations. I realized that I talk about one of my exes an awful lot. Like all the time. Granted, he was a good friend and I dated him for two years, so that's a pretty significant amount of time I shared with him. And I talk about past relationships because we learn a lot from the things we did during them and mistakes we made. But I also am becoming aware that in remembering the relationship as a whole and in looking for similar qualities in someone new, I'm not allowing myself to be happy with the beginning phases of new relationships because I am so eager for them to become something else. I am not content just to date someone occasionally or to run into them around campus and have something happen after a few weeks or months, I am much more interested in making it all happen at once, and I think that is a false hope. I definitely believe in the power of being present in the moment, so I'm going to try to revise the way I'm handling things, and I would tell anyone else who has hit some relationship bumps to do the same. You can't look for your old partners positive qualities without ultimately ignoring all of the good things in your new interests. Sure, you can have certain things you know you like in a person, but you need to separate them from being possessed by any one person and instead let them become simply adjectives and character traits.

I'll let you know how it goes for me. You let me know how it goes for you.