This morning I woke up at four in the morning and caught three trains and walked and ate on the move and spent another ten hours working my tuchus off at the Room 801 Smuttapalooza, where creative people sold cheesecake and swapped stories about the boys and girls they wanna see doing it to other boys and other girls and so on. I heard a literal honest to god ‘squeak’ out of someone when they opened up Kittyhawk’s book. I watched a girl in a wheelchair and a girl in a headscarf talk about their favourite pairings in mecha shows. I did a lot of things today that mostly have me fucking exhausted so forgive me if this lacks in my normal prose because today is also the day that Lionhead showed they can’t even get tits right.
So Lionhead were a pack of tits, and showed a picture without context that flaunted tits, and then doubled down by showing a dude’s ass in a different context and whatever. Whatever, whatever, whatever. I don’t care about Lionhead’s actions, I’m not informed about the specifics and I’m not going to speak for the people who were upset for it. They are all smart people, go listen to their arguments.
Then I came home and a friend had shared a picture of her boobs with me and that was quite something and I felt embarassed and Puritanical and guilty because that’s what I fucking do. But then, I thought about it.
Today, what I mostly saw, were women taking control of things that had been commodotised, and using them for themselves. For their own pleasure, for their own joy, for their own self-exploration. Mostly women, not to undersell the non-women involved in this day, but mostly, women.
I sometimes jokingly try to remangle the words of ‘Do you wanna build a snowman’ to ‘do you wanna take a selfie’ with a line about how a selfie is a way women claim identity in the face of being commodity: that women are told they are pretty as it pertains to men’s perceptions.
Today’s best points were about women rejecting that narrative. Why did I get shown a friends’ boobs? It wasn’t for my sake.
She said: “I liked how the picture turned out.”