Monday 26 May 2014

Good stuff

With the weather this month so nice, and not much interesting on at the cinemas, it looks like for the second months running I won't manage a proper Seen... post.  So I'll use this forum to tell you that you absolutely must try to see We Are The Best.  Set in Stockholm in 1982, this story of 13 year-old wannabe punks Bobo, Karla and Hedvig is just wonderful.  Incredibly funny and heart-warming, I don't think I've ever seen anything that quite so perfectly captures girls friendships and what it's like to be in a gang of outsiders.  I just loved it, to the extent that I almost cried when it was over... purely because it had finished.  After a quick Twitter poll, I think I've also established that every girl spends their life wanting to be a Karla, but feels like a Bobo.

I'm a huge fan of Sarra Manning's YA fiction, so I loved this from her blog (is it bad that - at the age of almost 36 - pretty much every one applies to me, especially numbers 11 & 13?), and also her recent article in defence of teenage girls.

Have you seen the Feminist Frank meme yet? So funny.

Although I tend to eye-roll at anything that begins, "Why women do x" (the answer generally being, for the exact same bloody reason men do x), I really liked this article, by novelist Jenn Ashworth, about women and tattoos.  I particularly loved this:
"When a woman makes her own mark on it, she isn't quite as available to receive whatever fantasies you might want to project on to her. If skin is a screen, and a woman writes on it, she is telling the world (or even just herself) that her own standards of attractiveness are more important to her than the standards of anyone else who might cross her path. She is taking ownership."

This, from The Guardian, about how the pro-choice movement has to accept the mundane reality of many women's abortions.

Finally, this from Ladybird Likes is a must for all Instagram fans: a guide to the best places online to print your photos.

4 comments:

  1. Hey Janet, I have a (massive) poster from work for We Are the Best, let me know if you'd like it? If so I'll try and bring it to Leicester when we meet! I would keep it but don't really have the wall room! x

    ReplyDelete
  2. I enjoyed all of these links but particularly the abortion one - I was so disgusted by the response to Josie Cunningham, with so many people who claim to support a woman's right to choose up in arms because they thought she was choosing badly; it was refreshing to see somebody say so.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Absolutely - and ask any of those purportedly pro-choice people whether they support a woman's right to prioritise her career over having a child, they would undoubtably say yes. It seemed to me snobbery of the highest order, that because the career in question was one involving a quest for celebrity, it was somehow less valid.

      Delete
  3. Good links! I hadn't seen the Feminist Frank meme yet - love it. Will have to check out We Are The Best, it sounds right up my street.

    ReplyDelete