The latest Rolling Stone has an offensive retrospective on Madonna. Although Madonna’s iconic look is always the subject of dispute, lately, the media has treated her like a clown. The only explanation is that she’s over 50. Fifty year old women, they say, shouldn’t prance around on a stage and spread their legs. It’s unbecoming. Rolling Stone frequently participates in this mistreatment even though they’ve helped turn Madonna into an icon.  Many of their pictures deliberately show her in an unflattering light. In this retrospective, they do put a handful of pictures of her in her 50s, but they fill the pages with the youthful,Read More →

1. I still play on text-based games (muds, mux, etc.). Most of the gaming world has moved onto MMORPGs. 2. My cellphone is the one they sell to senior citizens. Big digit buttons, no keyboard for texting. I don’t text, surf, or download ringtones. In fact, I don’t even keep my cellphone on. I just turn it on to call out. 3. Until my new computer this week, I didn’t have the capacity to play DVDs on my computer. 4. Until this week, I was using HTML frames instead of CSS for my website. 5. I would rather play D&D 3.5 than move to 4.0.Read More →

I’ve never heard of Generation Jones — the generation between the Boomers and Gen X — until recently. Generation Jones is presumably named such because they (we) are a generation of Jonesers. We yearn for things. This, I identify with. We were too young to participate in the summer of love, the Vietnam War, or any of the defining events of the Baby Boom generation. I’m not sure how I feel about the very existence of a Generation Jones. I’ve identified as a Gen-Xer ever since I read the book Generation X by Douglas Coupland. Some accounts of generations have me dated as a Boomer,Read More →

I can’t believe it’s been fifteen years since Liz Phair’s “Exile in Guyville.” I’ve been listening to the CD a lot lately for some reason and then FLOW posted a brief commentary on its impact fifteen years later. I really loved this album, but I didn’t find it as much of a feminist anthem as might have. But it’s fifteenth anniversary re-release reminds me that back in ’93 I was busy listening to Indigo Girls and Melissa Etheridge. There was a brief spike in popularity for women musicians in the late 90s with the Lilith Fair crew, but today the scene for me is bleak.Read More →

Several people have asked me about “Shoot the Messenger”‘s interview with Jezebel.com‘s Moe and Tracie. Part of me doesn’t want to give this ‘tempest in a teapot’ any more of the blogosphere’s energy. But frankly, after enough people asked, I watched the train wreck of an interview, went to Jezebel.com, to Tracie “Slut Machine”‘s website, and even read Jezebel.com’s response post along with their reader comments to it. My first “profound” observation is I just don’t get it. I don’t get why anyone would see these two women as role models (which is what Shoot the Messenger claims), even in the most pedestrian sense. TheirRead More →

I read about a woman who used to be a punk rocker and now is a 44 year old mother. Boy, did I identify with that article, especially when I listen to the kid playing her music, which is music I used to listen to when I was younger. Admittedly, she has some rather eclectic tastes, but my point still stands, as evidenced by her desire to copy my Sahara Soundtrack, which contains classic rock from my high school days. The comments on the article are great. One specifically says that old punk rockers are the new old hippies. …Not that I was ever aRead More →

On another note, turning 40 made me reflect once again on grrl stuff disappearing on the web. It’s yet another example of Gen X getting choked out by Boomers on one side of the demographic hump, and Gen Y kids on the other. True, Britney Spears is no longer popular, but that’s just because the 8 year olds of the world are now 13, and buying Pink and Avril Lavigne instead. Consequently, Third Wave feminism, which is not your mother’s feminism, is commodified (like all feminism is, I suppose) into Lara Croftism. What prompted this rant is a dead-end quest for chickclick graphics. Instead, IRead More →