(no subject)

“I like the new model of the reader I see online: the girl as ecstatic and promiscuous reader, both craving the radical thrust and the sentiment. And their authorship has as its dominating ethos homage and plagiarism (how Kathy Acker would have loved these Tumblrs).
And in this subsubcommunity of literary blogs I’ve come into contact with through [my own blog], many of us also read and write like girls. It is perhaps not ‘serious’ criticism, but intensely personal and emotional. A new sort of subjectivity is developing online - vulnerable, desirous, well-versed in both pop culture and contemporary writing and our literary ancestors. We write in public (our blogs, on our Tumblrs, in comments sections on other’s blogs, on Facebook) a new glib, casual, entirely feminine form of criticism that takes the form at times of heroine-worship. A fan fiction. We read, intensely and emotionally, like Emma Bovaries. We read like girls, often prone to passion and superlatives - passing around books like love letters in the mail. These spaces operate as safe havens to be all sorts of identities at once, to be excessive, to feel and desire deeply.“

- Kate Zambreno, Heroines, 2012

(no subject)

"We talk about sexual assault on campus, and I feel like one underlying idea there is that somehow it’s unseemly to talk about sex as having emotional weight, and that that’s become a struggle that we are not supposed to voice, and yet, it’s there, it exists. So people end up using other words like, ‘abused,’ or they feel bad in some way, but you can’t talk about it in an emotionally weighty sense"

—Hanna Rosin, Double X Gabfest, Slate 4/16/2015

Why do I listen to the Double X Gabfest? Everything Rosin says about campus sexual assault (or more generally, youth sexual assault, since she also talks about the military) just makes my blood boil.

If I am understanding her correctly here, she is basically saying that women (always women, because men are apparently never sexually assaulted) who have had their feelings hurt in a hook up then cry “Abuse!” because they don’t have the language to explain their feels.