Love Letters to Laudable Ladies

[helloladies]

In ‘Love Letters to Laudable Ladies’ Renay, Ana and I will each spotlight a lady who we simply adore every three months. Celebrities, friends, historical figures…any woman we really, really like could end up as the subject of our quiet (or CAPSLOCKED) adoration. As we put up more of these posts, we hope to highlight lots of women, who are great in different ways, proving that there really is no right and no wrong way to be a girl. Let the gushing commence.

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I considered the question of who to talk about in this post, but in the end I think I was always going to be super predictable and talk about justira. No one tell her, though! Last thing I need is to send her into a full on "OH GOD THEY'RE TALKING ABOUT MY SUPPOSED BRILLIANCE!" hermitastic meltdown. Cue immediate defriendings and phone number changes and Gtalk blockings.

So, who is Ira and why do I admire her? She's a writer of many things I have loved quite a bit in the fandoms I called home for many years. She wrote my favorite Final Fantasy XII fic, These Unending Alchemies of Honour. She wrote Clarion, a vast and epic Final Fantasy X prequel that will probably always be part of my headcanon for the series. She also writes thoughtful essays about communication, and incisive commentary about The Organization for Transformative Works in the context of her work as a Board member there. She also sometimes talks about storytelling! On a scale of one to ten when asked "How terrified are you to let her see the first draft of your manuscript?" the answer is ;Ljd;alsdj;o2uiijfkdfjsfa;lsdadjsasdjaskjasd

She's also an accomplished artist. She once undertook a project to draw every day and share it with the world and from it, produced some of my favorite pieces of hers, such as fanart from The Last Unicorn, fanart from the Compilation of Final Fantasy VII that's NSFW and super hot and from Kingdom Hearts, also possibly NSFW.

She regularly produced things that knocked my socks off, like Franky's First Cola (One Piece), After Entirely Too Much Deliberation on the Matter (Phoenix Wright, NSFW), Tucked Together (Final Fantasy X), and Blind Bandit (Avatar: The Last Airbender). She also does pretty kickass webdesign; she designed the website for DOINK! Final Fantasy Exchange.

Also, ever been to An Archive of Our Own and seen the favicon there?

renay: man I wish AO3's logo had the \o/ in it instead of a house
justira: I can try making a tiny version
justira: I draw icons at work allllll dayyyyy sometimes
justira: it is my job.

It was a CHALLENGE ACCEPTED situation...and then she regretted everything, because pixels are hard, but she eventually (by which I mean in a few days) transformed the original logo created by (I think, someone knowledgeable correct me if I'm wrong) bingeling into that favicon that sits in the address bar. And it's awesome. Transformative works = rad.

These are several reasons (but not all) why I adore Ira. She is well-spoken, thoughtful, talented and creative and who I want to be when I grow up. I feel lucky to call her a friend. :D

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It’s almost impossible to find an article on Joanna Newsom that doesn’t make some sort of reference to her looks or her supposedly fey persona. Shortly after her first album, The Milk-Eyed Mender, came out in 2004, Dave Eggers famously wrote a piece for Spin Magazine where he announced that he hoped Newsom was unattractive – if she were beautiful, people would probably explain away her eccentricity, but if she “looked like Emily Dickinson”, they’d be forced to confront it head on.

Eggers may very well have meant for his piece to confront sexist assumptions about women musicians, but unfortunately in the end he still buys into them. Instead of wishing for people to stop basing their reactions to a woman’s music on what she looks like, he wishes for her looks not to fit into traditional definitions of beauty, as if this were the only part of the equation that could possibly be changed. Not only that, but he discounts the huge condescension that plays into people’s acceptance of Newsom’s supposed quirkiness because she’s beautiful.

There are particular ways in which a woman who looks the way she does is not taken seriously, and unfortunately Joanna Newsom seems to have experienced them all. The very smart ladies from First Aid Kit, who I imagine deal with this kind of thing pretty often themselves, touch on this in an interview for Rookie Magazine:

KLARA: I’ve been reading this Tumblr blog; it’s called All the Birds or something like that. It’s about Joanna Newsom and how she’s portrayed in the media, through a feminist view. They were writing about things that people have written [about Newsom] and being critical of it. And I kind of realized that it’s crazy, like [people] always write about her like she’s an elf or a fairy. You’d never hear someone say “Robin Pecknold is such an elf.” And she’s always compared to someone like Björk or Kate Bush. Just women who do stranger things with music. If they were men, they probably wouldn’t be compared the same way.
JOHANNA: It’s hard for people to take us seriously. When we started, we were 14 and 16. Half the questions were about how young we were and how we weren’t like other girls. You just felt like [people thought] girls of that age weren’t capable of writing lyrics about anything other than boys and partying. It was really terrible, the view people have about teenagers—really generalizing.

Joanna Newsom’s music in general and her voice in particular are often "dismissed as pretentiously twee.” Because she fits into the patriarchal mould of a beautiful woman, and because her style of dress is very traditionally feminine, she’s been accused of deliberately fashioning herself into a manic pixie dream girl, much in the same way Zooey Deschanel has. While I think discussions of how this kind of mould is imposed on women are always pertinent, I much prefer it when said discussions take their agency into account; when they give them the benefit of the doubt and don’t assume that whatever people happen to project on them is the result of affectation on their part, or of a performative effort to fit into gendered expectations and become a male fantasy.

What people often miss about Newsom is that she’s smart, self-aware, and an absolutely brilliant writer. It should go without saying that an artist who has produced a body of work as complex and accomplished as hers is all of these things, but people discuss her intelligence and talent, when they do it at all, as if they were discussing a dog walking on its hind legs. Everything I could possibly say about how critical responses to Newsom's work often fail to truly engage with it has already been said in this amazing post, which includes a quote from an interview with her that I wanted to highlight:

I know you have to remain open to people getting whatever they’ll get out of your music, but it was sort of exhausting and disheartening to know that a certain portion of my audience was attracted to the music because they thought it was a fairy tale or ‘whimsical’ or ‘childlike’. I would hear these words so often, it was like, ‘are you listening? Like, I’m really proud of this part I wrote, it’s really good, it’s fucking hard to play, and I’ve spent hours a day practicing. I’ve spent so long refining this, I think it’s really good. Will you please listen to the songs?’

This is why I love her: because her music is amazingly skilled, because all the deliberation she puts into it really, really shows, and because she demands to be taken as seriously as she deserves. From a feminist perspective, I also love how gender became more and more prominent in her work as it progressed. I’ll leave you with "Go Long", one of my favourite of her songs:

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As I tried to write my section of this post, I suddenly realised how stupid it was for me to suggest this project. Writing about people who are excellent automatically makes my brain freeze up, just like standing in front of them makes all my words disappear. So, I fear my part of this post will generally come out as some version of ‘OMG she is so smart and pretty and cool’. On I go though, because goodness knows the internet could use some more love for the ladies.

This time around I want to spotlight Jessa Crispin, the founder/editor of Bookslut. I have a huge brain crush on Jessa. She founded the Bookslut blog, later expanding the site into an online literary publication in 2002, which means the blog has been going for roughly 10 years. I think anyone who has started any kind of internet project knows what an achievement it is to keep a site like this alive for that long. Making it a huge success and a taste making publication is also a huge accomplishment.

The blog’s main function is to pass on current information about the literary world, but that news is always wrapped up in Jessa’s voice and she’s never shy about expressing her personal politics, which makes what could just be a news aggregator site extra fun and sharp. It’s her voice that I enjoy so much, when I read her other writing, like the essays at ‘Smart Set’ and her new ‘Kind Reader’ column at Barnes and Noble. There is something so penetrating and true about the way she writes that the tone and the strength of her pieces always resonate with me. Explaining better is hard, but I’ve been reading her work at various places for 5/6 years now and I still look forward to seeing what new perspective she’ll bring to a book and how she’ll expand her examination of a book out into wider commentary of the world. Her way with words staves in my heart sometimes.

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Note: The positive nature of these posts in no way seek to obscure any sexist/racist/transphobic/homophobic or ableist views that the women we spotlight may hold, so if you ever do have any concerns along these lines we hope you feel comfortable raising these in the comments. However, we’re obviously lady positive and so if anyone feels it is necessary to talk about a problematic issue with anything a lady we adore has been involved with, we would ask that they please discuss what they dislike about the ideas expressed by a particular women, rather than making personal comments about any of the women in our posts.

Comments

[radish]

Seconding Justira and Joanna, please and thanks.

[chaila]

Loved reading this! Love this as an idea for a series!

[myfriendamy]

I reallllly love this idea! I don't really know any of these ladies, but I enjoyed getting to know more about them.