Guilty Pleasures: It’s not Onely, but you can’t help it! August 18, 2008
Posted by Onely in music review, Pop Culture: Scourge of the Onelys, Reviews.Tags: feministing.com, guilty pleasures, lovin, scourge of the Onelies, trick pony
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One of Lisa’s and my favorite blogs, feministing.com, solicits Guilty Pleasures from its readers. According to feministing blogger Miriam, guilty pleasures are “those pop culture things that you love, even though deep down inside you know that they might conflict with your feminist values”.
I got to thinking about this while writing our recent post about Trick Pony’s song “Just what I do when I can’t get no lovin'”. I have it in my Ipod and think it’s a catchy tune and, yes, when I first heard it I laughed. Yet I found the premise disturbing enough to post on it–
Who else has pop culture things that conflict with their Onely values, but which they can’t help liking?
–CC
Scourge of the Onelies, part 56.9-c: “What I do when I can’t get no lovin'” August 18, 2008
Posted by Onely in As If!, music review, Pop Culture: Scourge of the Onelys, Reviews.Tags: heteronormative, lovin, masterpiece, scourge of the Onelies, single, trick pony
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Today my Ipod turned up this song by Trick Pony, in which Jesse James, Orville Wright, and Picasso each say they excelled in their field because “it’s just what I do when I can’t get no lovin'”. As if painting masterpieces or inventing the airplane is all well and good, but what those guys really wanted–and, by implication, should have been pursuing–is lovin’ (read: heteronormative relationship). (more…)
REVIEW: SINGLED OUT, by Bella DePaulo–Why are matrimaniacs matrimaniacs? August 5, 2008
Posted by Onely in book review, Reviews, Singled Out, We like. . ..Tags: bella depaulo, discrimination, heteronormative, marriage mythology, prejudice, single mythology, Singled Out, singlism
4 comments
DePaulo, Bella. Singled Out, How Singles Are Stereotyped, Stigmatized, and Ignored, and Still Live Happily Ever After. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2006
(This is an ongoing, serial review, continued from an earlier post)
In Singled Out, DePaulo theorizes that “matrimaniacs” (people who fixate on the importance of marriage and coupling) belittle single people for the following reason:
Onely as Feminist Resistance July 26, 2008
Posted by Onely in "Against Love"...?, Essay review, Food for Thought, Heteronormativity, Reviews, Singled Out.Tags: adrienne rich, being single, capitalism, compulsory heterosexuality, feminism, friendships between women, lesbian existence, male control, resistance, single and happy
2 comments
I recently finished an essay by Adrienne Rich entitled “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence,” which is old in terms of publication date (1980) but new – brand new – to me. Rich’s primary argument is directed against feminist scholars who deny, ignore and/or marginalize the fact of lesbian existence, but she also mentions other “facts” of female existence – such as living alone and/or single – that have also been ignored in the face of what she calls “compulsory heterosexuality.” (more…)
Book Review: Singled Out, by Bella DePaulo July 21, 2008
Posted by Onely in book review, Reviews, Singled Out, We like. . ..Tags: bella depaulo, discrimination, heteronormative, marriage mythology, prejudice, single mythology, Singled Out, singlism
34 comments
DePaulo, Bella. Singled Out, How Singles Are Stereotyped, Stigmatized, and Ignored, and Still Live Happily Ever After. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2006.
From Singled Out:
“Some components of singlism are built right into American laws and institutions, which means that neither coupled nor single people have any say about sustaining them. Take Social Security, for example. If you are a married person covered by Social Security and you die, your spouse can recieve your benefits. But if you are a single person who worked side by side with the married person at the same job for the same number of years and you die, no other adult can receive your benefits. Your money goes back into the system.”
How could I have never asked myself: Why? DePaulo explores why few people question our culture’s ingrained bias toward coupledom, and why we should start. (more…)
BOOK REVIEW: Full Frontal Feminism, by Jessica Valenti July 11, 2008
Posted by Onely in book review, Reviews.Tags: Books, feminism, feministing, full frontal feminism, jessica valenti
9 comments
Valenti, Jessica. Full Frontal Feminism: A Young Woman’s Guide to Why Feminism Matters. Seal Press, 2007:
“Value yourself for what the media doesn’t–your intelligence, your street smarts, your ability to play a kick-ass game of pool, whatever. So long as it’s not just valuing yourself for your ability to look hot in a bikini and be available to men, it’s an improvement.”
Full Frontal Feminism‘s text skips along while it imparts knowledge–a rare enough combination. The book condenses the contents of a thirteen-page bibliography into colloquial prose, presenting vivid example after vivid example of why we all (women *and* men) need to identify as feminists and buck the ridiculous stereotype that feminists are always hairy-legged man-haters. (Not that it isn’t sometimes delightful to forego shaving for weeks on end during the winter.) (more…)
Pop Music, Scourge of the Onelys (Part 1 of 8,593): Measuring time in relationship units July 2, 2008
Posted by Onely in Food for Thought, Pop Culture: Scourge of the Onelys, Reviews.Tags: being single, measuring time, Pop Songs, relationship, single and happy
4 comments
For our first installment of “Pop Music: Scourge of the Onelys”, I would like to highlight Kenny Chesney’s “Don’t Blink”. Now, don’t get me wrong, I would marry Kenny if he asked me (any day now), but I have to comment on these lyrics, which I heard for the eighty-twelfth time during my commute today:
“Don’t blink
Just like that you’re six years old and you take a nap and you
Wake up and you’re twenty-five and your high school sweetheart becomes your wife
Don’t blink
You just might miss your babies growing like mine did”
And I was thinking about how so often we measure the passage of time in units of relationships, marriages, and children. (more…)
Book Review: Against Love June 29, 2008
Posted by Onely in "Against Love"...?, book review, Food for Thought, Reviews.Tags: jerry maguire, Laura Kipnis, love, polemic, subversive thinking
41 comments
Kipnis, Laura. Against Love: A Polemic. New York: Pantheon, 2003.
As the title suggests, the book Against Love is meant to piss readers off, raise their hackles, question the previously unquestionable; Kipnis daringly tackles what she believes is the problem of our modern conceptions and (perhaps more importantly) expectations of love. In the pre-prologue (humorously entitled “Reader Advisory”), Kipnis asks, “To begin with, who would dream of being against love?” (3). (more…)
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Food for Thought! SINGLED OUT: Beware! Your Work Won’t Love You Back (An Academic’s Take) August 13, 2008
Posted by Onely in book review, Food for Thought, Reviews, Singled Out.Tags: academia, academic work, being married in academia, being single, bella depaulo, career choices, childless, reader comments, single in academia, your work won't love you back
2 comments
DePaulo, Bella. Singled Out, How Singles Are Stereotyped, Stigmatized, and Ignored, and Still Live Happily Ever After. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2006
(This is an ongoing exploration of Singled Out, continued from an earlier post)
In Chapter 7 of Singled Out, DePaulo debunks the myth that if single women spend too much time focused on a career and/or in school, they will miss out on all the ‘good’ partners out there, and that being career-minded means “slogging through ‘the trenches of corporate solitude'” instead of “gleefully and triumphantly crashing through the glass ceiling” (136). (more…)
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