A colleague brought this in to work for me, knowing how much I’d go crazy for it. And she was right – I’m nuts about this stuff.

The Successful Wife’s Pocketbook is a handy little pamphlet by Woman’s Journal from 1962 that offers kind, sisterly guidance on how to satisfy your husband – and to do it all with a sweet, pleasing smile. You wouldn’t want to annoy him by not having dinner ready on time, or not having your hair styled properly when he gets home, or by accidentally letting slip that you experience feelings like boredom and tiredness and frustration and sadness every once in a while. So take notes! (more…)

One of the oddest things I find about “being a feminist” is the amount of difficulty and debate such a label tends to conjure up. There are thousands of variations, but three key problems seem to always rear their spiky heads:

1. Many women are reluctant to identify as feminists, even though if you ask them their thoughts on specific issues they’ll respond with feminist ideas. There’s a certain ugliness associated with the label that a lot of us grow up learning to be wary of. Take this Maxim “cure a feminist” feature as exhibit A. This article from Mama Mia a few days ago also captures some of the frustrations of this situation.

2.Some feminists believe there should be a core set of bullet-points that a person must subscribe to in order to call themselves feminists. A lot of us do this even subconsciously, because it’s hard to understand how someone who agrees with us on one point could offend us so much on another. We question whether Cosmopolitan should be allowed to call itself feminist, whether Melinda Tankard Reist should be allowed to call herself a feminist.

3. The flipside of the point above is that many women feel like they’re not allowed to be part of the discussion, because they don’t meet the criteria they believe has been set out.

My thoughts keep going back to something Julia Kristeva wrote about in Women’s Time. Okay, I know it might be a bit naff or maybe just pretentious to reference Kristeva, but listen for a minute: in Women’s Time, she makes a case for a new generation of feminism (where ‘generation’ refers not necessarily to a period in linear time, but rather a signifying mental, emotional and intellectual space) that focuses on the multiplicity of individual experience. That means not only accepting that everyone will have different views and ideas, but that within each person exist myriad possible identifications, some of which might seem contradictory.

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Gatsby is the cutest kitten in the world

Just so everyone knows, I’m now one of those people who refers to her cat as her boyfriend and sings him What’s New Pussycat and blogs about all the cute things he does. I know, I know, but I can’t help it! He’s just so ridiculously cute – you’d be madly in love with him too. His name is Gatsby and he’s just a tiny black ball of fluff. He was a street kitty, so he’s kind of a tough little guy – he’s got that scruffy, bad boy thing going on, and I can’t help but fall for that. He’s so cute that I just watch him adoringly while he wrecks all my stuff (which might give some clue about me and my romantic life, but you know, whatever.)

So, anyone who knows me knows I’m a dog person. At some point someone decided you have to choose between one or the other. (Unless you’re neither, and well, then I just don’t understand you. NOT EVEN PUPPIES?) Which is stupid, but I guess it does make sense in a lot of ways. I’ve always thought the key difference is how much love and affection you want or need from a pet. You get a pet because you have love inside you that’s bursting to be given to someone. Having a pet instantly gives you someone you can love and dote without ever having to play it cool, and you’ll keep loving them forever, because an animal isn’t going to lie to you or refuse to call you back or compare you to their ex-girlfriend at the worst possible moments. (more…)

Image from lostateminor.com

All the single ladies: a fascinating reflection on marriage in the modern world. Long, but worth it!

A pretty convincing argument for why Miley Cyrus is hipper and more liberal than you.

“There was always something a little weird about uncle Joey to me.”A nostalgic look back at the crazy world of Full House.

Remember girls! “A man expects you to keep your dignity all evening.” Tips for single women from 1938.

How to market “girly” products to men.

New obsession: I’m CAPTIVATED by the beautiful fashion photography of Krzysztof Wyzynski.

A super cute baby polar bear. Is there anything else to say really? (more…)

Sometimes I think I can kind of trick people into thinking I’m cool. I try to impress people with my ability to sing along to Rage Against the Machine and my love for Fight Club, and sometimes I even convince myself that I’m a little bit rock and roll. But other times, I just come right out with it: I wish Taylor Swift was my best friend.

Listen for a minute. It’s easy to dismiss her and think she’s all sugary sweet and stupid. I mean, a) she’s a young female pop singer, b) she hangs around with that whole Disney Channel crowd, c) she sings about boys and high school, and d) she’s so pretty, with her long blonde curls and a wardrobe full of sweetly romantic dresses. But seriously? She’s just about the coolest girl in the world. She’s smart, she’s hilarious, she has class, and she has guts. And yeah, she’s so nice – but she also has just the right amount of bitchiness that I think we’d get along just perfectly. (more…)

I just haven’t been able to stop watching this video. It’s completely brilliant and beautiful – a young girl called Riley paces angrily around a sickly pinkified toy aisle and rants to her father about the toy industry’s narrow view of gender roles. She seems so exasperated: “Some girls like superheroes, some girls like princesses! Some boys like superheroes, some boys like princesses! So why do all the girls have to buy pink stuff and all the boys have to buy different color stuff?”

She also shows a pretty astute awareness of marketing. She knows that the stores are “trying to trick girls into buying the pink stuff instead of stuff that boys want to buy,” but she seems so baffled as to why. My favourite part is probably her dad’s resigned sigh at the end: “That’s a good question, Riley.” Sometimes the way children see the world is the most logical, and this is a great example of how sometimes we need to take a step back to see how absurd something really is. (more…)

If I did decide to be a bride, a black wedding dress would so be the way to do it

I’ve never been the sort of girl to daydream about my wedding. For me, the idea of a wedding carries the excitement of being able to dress up in a cute cocktail dress and swill free champagne, but I’ve never really thought about me being the bride. I know a lot of girls my age are already halfway down the aisle, and just take it as a given that that’s how life is supposed to work out at some point in the next ten years – but I’m not so fussed about it all. Maybe that bridal gene will kick in one day, but for now, the idea of bridesmaids and bonbonniere and bouquets and all of that is just so utterly boring I feel sick even thinking about it now.

And yet, a few months back when I saw Vera Wang’s black wedding dresses for her Fall 2012 collection, my heart just leapt, and I immediately printed them all out and blutacked them to my wall. Finally, there it was, the perfect antidote to all this Kate Middleton-style primness: if I did decide to be a bride, this would so be the way to do it. (more…)

Andrej Pejic modelling bras for Hema, and why I think he is just the coolest

Okay, so anyone who has spent any time with me in the past six months or so will know that I’m completely enthralled by Andrej Pejic. I think he’s an absolute genius, and he inspires me in a lot of ways. Firstly, in the obvious sense – he inspires me because of his utterly captivating, otherworldly beauty, the way he challenges boundary after boundary, the way he continues to take everyone’s breath away with every new outfit, every new runway show, every fashion editorial.

But maybe more than that, he inspires me because he just seems so completely serene while he does it all. Obviously I have no idea how he really feels inside – but you get the sense that he’s genuinely just really comfortable with who he is, that he actually doesn’t care what anyone thinks. He just does his own thing, and he does it without being all defensive and “hey fuck you man!” about it. He’s only just turned 20, but there’s something really mature about they way he seems to really know himself.

Anyway. So this week he’s making headlines for one of his latest gigs - modelling push-up bras for Hema lingerie. Which is pure genius,  and with Andrej’s sassy, sardonic sense of humour you can just tell he loves the whole idea of it. A lot of the things he says or does, it’s like he’s secretly laughing, and you can just tell he kind of thinks this is a scream. It’s kind of on the same wavelength as the incredibly clever Dermablend concealer ad Rico Genest (better known as Zombie Boy) starred in, and I think it’s very cool. (more…)

Here are a few articles I read this week that got me thinking, and I’d implore you to click on through.

We’re all real women … what do men or size have to do with it? by Clementine Ford on The Drum

One major problem with the whole “real women have curves” thing is that it still places female body types in adversity with one another. Instead of saying it’s okay to be any size, it just reverses the typical preference for super-skinny types and disparages those women. Saying that having curves is “better” or “more real” and “more womanly” than being skinny doesn’t help anyone. This is such an interesting and complex issue, and Clementine Ford expresses all these ideas quite eloquently. Importantly, she points out something that is easy to miss, but that’s pretty salient to the whole issue: the “men prefer curves anyway” argument that always comes up just reinforces the idea that male desire should be integral to the way we feel about our bodies.

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In my ‘Flotsam and Feminism’ column for Farrago magazine, I talked about Sweet Valley High and my other literary friends…

I spent most of my childhood reading books instead of connecting with real people. I don’t mean that in a self-pitying way—I guess in hindsight I might have been a bit lonely, but I loved reading so much that I don’t think I really noticed. As a kid the best part of my week was when my sister was at ballet classes and my mum would take me to Albert Park library. I’d pick out a small mountain of books to take home and devour. So, I guess that might explain a bit about the way I am—why I’m comfortable spending time alone, why I have friends but not really any super-close BFF-type girlfriends, girls I would just call up in the middle of the night. But it’s never even mattered, because if I needed someone, I’ve always had the girlfriends in my books.

Like many girls growing up in the ‘90s, The Baby-Sitters Club, and their younger version, Baby Sitters Little Sister, made up the bulk of my reading. Then there was Sweet Valley High, and the spin-offs, Sweet Valley Twins, Sweet Valley University, and countless other versions of the same thing. Probably more than anyone else, it was those perfect blonde twins, Elizabeth and Jessica Wakefield, who saw me through tough times, and who I had the most fun with. I loved both girls, but Elizabeth was (predictably) my clear favourite. She was exactly the type of girl I wanted to be when I was older—studious, super-smart, editor of the school newspaper… but you know, also completely gorgeous and popular with a cute, basketball-playing boyfriend.

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